Settling in

Today everything is working at last (including Mark).

After another series of phonecalls and visits yesterday, the heating in the apartment is finally on, and all's well with the world. I'm not a natural at phonecalls at the best of times, so phoning someone when I speak none of their language and they speak a fractured version of mine is not usually high on my list of fun things to do.
      Allo.
     Hello, is that Emily?
     OK.
     It's Alison here, from the apartment.
     OK.
     ...

After another visit from the caretaker I talked to her again, and we had the magic words:
     In one hour the man will come and fixit everything.

One hour turned into three, and the fixit man turned out to be two men, and it took them half an hour of poking around and shouting into their phones, but at last we can be properly warm.

It helps that today the sun came out again. On Friday our part of Amman got more rain in 24 hours than Hamilton usually gets in a whole month. I didn't get any photos of the rain, because what kind of idiot would go outside if they didn't have to in that weather? (Actually we did go out, because one of Mark's new colleagues bravely drove over to pick us up for a meal at their place, but it was definitely not camera-waving weather.)

While Mark works I've been exploring our neighbourhood. We're in 7th Circle, a pretty cosmopolitan and diverse district. Some features of the area are pretty much what I expected - especially the crazy traffic and dust and feral cats. But there are some surprises. There are far more trees than I was expecting. Most of them are planted in the middle of the footpaths, which can make the footpaths less useful than they might be for anyone taller than a hobbit (wide footpaths without trees planted in them get used for car parking, which makes them even less useful as footpaths).

Another surprise is the huge number of mobile phone stores and bottle stores within walking distance. (More Hamilton East than Middle East, right?) Also in walking distance are at least six shopping malls - all of them multi-storey outfits with flash European and American brand stores and playgrounds upstairs for kids. "Walking distance" doesn't appear to be a very Jordanian concept though; it seems the only reason for walking is to get to your taxi. My walks are punctuated by taxi drivers honking at me, not in a creepy guy kind of way or a "get out of my way you crazy woman" kind of way; more like "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" (There is plenty of the "out of my way" type of honking, just not usually directed at me. Jordanian drivers are confident communicators.)

 

Patience

Settling into our new home is taking a fair dose of patience - mostly from us, but also from the people we interact with.

On our first day here we headed to the nearest mobile phone shop to set up our phones. (There seem to be more phone shops in our part of town than any other kind of business. I haven't yet seen anyone actually buying a phone in one of them, but they can't all be fronts for more interesting merchandise.) We set my phone up easily enough, but then discovered that Mark's phone was still locked to 2 Degrees in NZ. After doing some other shopping we figured out how to unlock it so headed back to the shop to set it up, but the shop had closed for the day. Next morning we headed back to the shop at 9 a.m. - not open yet. We tried again at 10 a.m. - still not open. And ditto at 10.30. By then some of the other phone shops nearby were open, so we abandoned our loyalty to the first shop and moved on, but it wasn't to be that easy. One shop didn't sell top-ups for the brand of sim card that we have; the next shop sold them but not for the amount we wanted ... and so on.

The king asked the queen and the queen asked the dairymaid ...

The building our apartment is in has a resident caretaker. He speaks not a single word of English. Mark and I between us have three words in Arabic, and I'm not 100% convinced about one of them. Emily, our landlady, who lives a couple of buildings further up the road, speaks a bit of English, but not a lot. So when we discovered that the fridge was gently heating food rather than cooling it, Mark rang his bilingual contact at the school, who rang Emily, who rang the caretaker, who came up and poked around a bit then rang her back to tell her that we weren't actually idiots and the fridge was indeed not working.

Behind our front door there are two sets of switches (yes, they are very grubby). The guy who showed us around the flat and the caretaker both demonstrated the use of the switches to us. They turned the switches on, then made serious faces and turned them off again. If we came from a culture without any switches at all that might have been helpful, but since neither of them could explain to us what the switches actually do we were a bit mystified. It's clear the people we deal with are convinced we are imbeciles, and I guess they're not far wrong.

It turns out that the single switch on the right is for pumping water up to our tank on the roof. Mains water is intermittent here, so each apartment has a tank of its own, and it's up to us to remember to pump enough water up to it so that we don't run out. We can check how much water we have by going up to the roof and peering into the tank. What we can't do, as far as I can tell, is know when the city is going to turn on the mains water, and the serious looks from the caretaker et al have made me worry about what will happen if we attempt to pump water when there isn't any to be pumped. (Update: it turns out I was wrong about that. The water pump works automatically. The switch is to boost the heat in the solar hot water tank on the roof. At least I think that's the story.)

And the two switches on the left control the diesel-fuelled boiler in the basement and the pump that circulates the hot water from it to our radiators. This joyful discovery means we might finally be able to heat the apartment to a suitably Waikato temperature and not spend our time huddled in front of the fan heater we dashed out and bought the other day. Fingers crossed!

Welcome to Amman

I'm pretty sure I've had jobs that lasted less long than our flight from Auckland to Dubai, but at least the A380 experience was pleasant enough (to the extent that spending 18 hours buckled up in economy class can be said to be pleasant).

The transit at Dubai went smoothly. It's a shame the efficiency of Dubai airport didn't extend to having clear skies for me to admire the scenery as we took off, but I did get to see some of the Saudi coastline ...

... and then lots of alien crop circles agriculture.

Time more or less stopped when we landed in Amman. The entry processing staff were cheerful but easily distracted - constantly leaping up out from their desks to greet colleagues they hadn't seen for a few hours, as far as I could tell - and we'd obviously arrived at the end of a shift, but we made it through with no actual hassles and were greeted by Mark's new HOD, the school's travel agent, and a driver.  The driver was clearly a man in a hurry, so we were given a very swift introduction to Jordanian driving and road etiquette, and then deposited at our new home ...

... where another chap who also seemed to have something urgent to dash off to showed us the kitchen and bedrooms, then muttered something about us needing diesel for heating and scurried off before we could do anything awkward like ask him how to make hot water come out of the showers, leaving us to settle in.

Far fom the modest 2-bedroom flat we were expecting, our new home boasts 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms and 2.5 bathrooms. I don't see us using the formal living room very often:

Even the everyday lounge is quite grand. 

There are a few things that don't quite work, including a frost-free fridge that maintains its frost-free status by keeping the food inside it warmer than the surrounding room. But everything will be okay, because we have a balcony.