My Classroom

So this the room I have taught in for the last three months. The stuff on the walls is obviously not mine.

On the plus sides,

• It is quite sound-proof to the corridor and outside, so there are few outside distractions; 
• There are windows along the whole back wall, so there’s a decent natural light component; which comes from behind the students;
• There are two air-conditioners, which means it can be cooled or heated rapidly;
• The desks and chairs are sturdy;
• There’s a large storage room attached. 

Things that don’t bother me, but might others,

• The teacher’s desk is tiny. Luckily I am used to keeping a clear desk anyway.
• It is small (literally half the size of my previous classrooms -- 32 sq m compared to 64 sq m), which isn’t that bad as the class sizes are small. 
• The Smartboard wasn’t working, but I never wanted it anyway and I just used it for my PowerPoints. 

On the downsides,

• It is noisy, as a result of the lack of soft surfaces and the small size. One loud student is far more dominant here than in my NZ classrooms. Posting the distracting ones at the back doesn’t work, as the back is so close to the front.. 
• I can’t lock the door. This means I can’t keep late students from entering at their leisure. 
• The absolute killer though, for me, is the lack of whiteboard space. I am used to well over four times as much, and even then I run out. I have found this very limiting, as I can’t have a couple of worked examples on show as I run up a list of practice exercises. 
• Notes have to be done via the projector and PowerPoint, so the class has to move at the pace of the slowest note-taker (which is very slow indeed when you have a limited autistic boy in the class).

Those who know me will wonder why the desks are in groups. It’s not my choice! I was told that I could have them any way I wanted, except I wasn’t allowed to put them in rows. At that point I thought I might as well see how groups worked, and to minimise the change between teachers I just left them the way they were.

It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it certainly wasn’t a success. The small size of the room negated some of the issues about them sneaking out phones etc -- I could see what they were doing as they were so close. But I had to have quite rigid seating plans because I had to keep the excessively chatty people separated from each other. Having group seating and then seating them in groups deliberately chosen to avoid them talking to each other seems twisted to me. I will be going back to rows in pairs.

Religion

Jordan is slightly over 90% Muslim and it doesn't take long to spot it.

There are mosques everywhere. In the cities they are often quite large, with towering minarets. However there are many smaller ones scattered about, with only a hint of a tower. The call to prayer goes up everywhere from loudspeakers, and they don't keep it quiet -- we hear our local one easily through the double glazing despite it being quite a distance away. If you stand in the right place you can hear two or three simultaneously, battling it out.

The big central mosque in Amman.

Friday morning is deserted, and very little is open. At midday you see significant numbers of men going to the mosques for Friday prayers. And then the afternoon is family time, with picnics if the weather is nice.

Schools and government offices take Friday and Saturday off in Jordan, but Saturday is just an ordinary work day for most shops etc.

However most Jordanians do not seem particularly fanatical in their observance. Few stop for prayers during the day – you see them sometimes in a quiet corner, generally older men, but only once or twice have we have seen families or women sitting quietly in prayer. My school pays no attention to the midday prayer time, although the more devout students and staff go to a classroom to pray during the 12:40 lunch break to make up for it.

Alcohol is freely available in bottle stores and some inner city restaurants. Beer is quite expensive, because of the tax rate, so they mostly drink spirits. There are few, if any bars serving alcohol, but the locals go to the equivalent where they smoke shisha (hookahs) which are extremely common.

Pork is available, but is not common at all. Similarly you don't see much shellfish or other haram (forbidden) food.

Most women wear a hijab. The current style is for quite tight fitting stretch fabric ones, often with a white layer underneath tight to the head. Generally they are coloured, often quite strongly, sometimes patterned. It seems many rural Christians wear the hijab too (certainly there weren't many people in Ajloun bare headed and that town is significantly Christian) although ones in Amman do not.

Some examples of some of the common two layer hijab worn in Jordan

Chadors are quite rare, as are niqabs, but you see them about. I suspect most of the people wearing them are not natural Jordanians, being visiting Saudis, Iraqis or Syrian refugees etc.

A lot of younger and wealthier Muslim women go bare headed. The queen, for example, does not cover her head (except at a mosque) and at my school's parent-teacher night there were few women with covered heads, although one was wearing a black chador. Only a couple of girls at my school are covered.

What you don't see hardly at all is women wearing a loose scarf, Iranian style, since you might as well go without as do that. In our suburb about half the women are uncovered, but in the poorer areas and out in the country it drops off to only the odd one or two.

A few women wear the old-style black flowing robes, generally older and poorer ones. Mostly women wear trousers, often with a very long coat over if it is cold, or a fairly long top otherwise. The younger ones generally wear the same tight jeans as NZ kids wear. Necklines are generally high, and sleeves almost universally long.

You see men wearing robes too, again generally older guys, though it is quite common to see younger men wearing them on Friday. A few men wear the keffiyah headscarf.

The seems to be very little of the chaperoning the Saudis go for. You often see young women wandering by themselves around town. This isn't to say that the society isn't sexist, but it does seem to be that Jordan is liberalising slowly. There are some female police officers etc.

About 6% of Jordan in Christian, largely Orthodox, concentrated in the northwest. You certainly see churches about, and they have towers and visible crosses. The state takes the opposite view of most Arab countries in not stressing an Islamic nature. The Christian community know that keeping the monarchy is in their best interest as a bulwark against factionalism, and the King likes loyal subjects regardless of their faith. That helps prevent a slide into the sort of sectarian divisions that Lebanon and Syria have struggled with.

It may not look much, but this is supposedly the site of the
the oldest purpose built Christian church known, in Aqaba.

Catholicism is less common, except oddly in the schools. Traditionally Islamic schooling was via the madrassas attached to the mosques, and they had a well-earned reputation for being more focused on rote learning of "correct" answers than the modern world needs. Islamic parents have long sent their children to Christian schools, who had a reputation for learning before religion – and here that often meant ones run by Catholic nuns and fathers. So you find in Amman a De La Salle College, a Rosary Sisters school, a Franciscan Sisters school and so on. The students at these schools are largely Muslim, although obviously the Christian kids tend to go there too.

(The more recent private schools are secular taking advantage of a huge market, as getting on towards half of the students in Amman go to a fee-paying school. Many teach in English or French.)

Vowels are hard!

One of the more surprising features of Jordan is how much there is in English around the streets. In the  richer parts of Amman most shops have signage in English, although as you get to the less well off the ratio drops.

However because Arabic is very vague about vowels, with different dialects having different vowels for the same words, the Jordanians seem to find English vowels very difficult. The result is a lot of signs that are hard not to find funny.

A personal favourite is the Condles Hatel in Petra. Their other material is spelled correctly, but someone should definitely have been supervising the person hanging up the sign out front!

The other common error is getting the consonant order reversed. Because they read right to left, so I can imagine a person going "d" before "r" only to get the wrong because "before" has a different direction.

Meanwhile, of course, we recognise one word in Arabic, which is Amman  عمّان  -- so that we get on the right bus.

It looks hard, but that only goes part of the way, because the Arabs are huge on calligraphy, so they have an enormous number of different scripts in use. They are often quite stylish and beautiful, but do not make it easy for non-Arabic readers.

Different buses will have the name in very different fonts, so it's not just a matter of matching letters with the same shapes. These all say Amman.

But at least it is alphabetic.

Day-trippin' and getting stoned

Weeks and weeks ago now, before the excitement of big-name tourist destinations and transport mini-disasters we made our first day trip out of town.

Salt (or As-Salt, or Al-Salt) is only 25 km from home, a perfect distance for a taxi ride in Jordan. It's a hilly town - so hilly it makes Amman look flat - and was once the most important settlement between the Eastern Desert and the Jordan Valley. It was used as an administrative centre by the Ottomans around the end of the 19th century, and still has many buildings from that time, in distinctive Ottoman style (if you know what you're looking for). The only way to explore most of the old town centre is on foot; no need to designate the alleyways as pedestrian zones as cars simply don't cope well with staircases.

As well as several mosques (including one built on top of an old fortress), there are a couple of old Christian churches in Salt. We were walking past the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church just as the church warden was unlocking it to show a local and her two overseas visitors around, and they very kindly invited us to join them. We were shown around the main part of the church and then taken up a very narrow spiral staircase onto the roof to admire the view.

There wasn't a "please save our church" box, or we'd have gladly donated some money as a thank you. Instead we clambered around Salt some more then had an astonishingly cheap lunch (the look of incomprehension on Mark's face when he saw the bill had me worried for a moment), and taxied home.

We are tougher travellers now, and have learnt to use the local buses. Well, one of them, which runs from downtown Amman along the main road near home and out to Wadi al Seer, a small town just to the west of Amman. So a couple of weekends ago we caught this bus, and then another from there (a local taxi driver generously showed us which bus we needed, which just goes to show that not all taxi drivers in Jordan are terrible people) out to Qasr Al Abd, a ruined palace built in approx 200 BC. It mostly fell down in an earthquake in 362, but parts of it have been restored just enough to give an idea of its scale and style.

After exploring the ruins we walked a couple of km to some burial caves by the side of the road. Next to the path that led up from the road to the caves was an old chap with a walking stick minding his goats, and a few boys who might have been his grandsons or might just have been local kids.

The smallest of the boys attempted to sell us a large bunch of spring onions as we walked past, perhaps not having really thought through what tourists might want to carry around on their walks. When we declined to buy the onions he and his brothers followed us to the top of the path and appared to be suggesting we could just give them money instead.

We weren't enthusiastic.

Then one of the boys tapped Mark quite vigorously on the back of the head so we decided it was time to leave, and set off down the path towards the road. When we were about halfway I felt something bounce off my shoulder: the lovely lads were expressing their disappointment by throwing pebbles at us. Some of the pebbles found their mark, though most missed, and then they moved on to bigger stones. The old chap noticed what was happening and told them to stop, but in such a gentle way that he clearly didn't expect them to take any notice and they were naturally happy to meet his expectations. Luckily none of those larger stones actually hit us, and we made it back to the village to catch our bus unharmed. (The next kids we met that day wanted to take selfies with us, funny-looking foreigners that we are - altogether more civilised!)

The Tank Museum

Amman has just opened a tank museum and we took one Friday morning (being the first day of the weekend) to wander along and have a look.

It was surprisingly good. Alison survived over an hour, which was a bit of a surprise. The building is very big and modern, with plenty of space to see the vehicles from most angles.

While focused on tanks, there's also armoured cars and artillery etc, but fortunately for me very little by way of hand weapons etc -- I have a minor interest in vehicles, but basically zero interest in most other military hardware.

The collection was very comprehensive, I felt, with pretty much every vehicle between 1939 and 1980 that you might want the see. The only WWII item it seemed to miss was a US M4 halftrack. I would have been in heaven seeing all those famous vehicles and guns when I was a kid, and a real aficionado could spend hours in the place

The immediate post-WWII was good too, because all sides supplied either the Israeli or the Arabs, so the kit is all there.

The museum had a section about their brief scuffles with Israel, and a map of their success at the Battle of Karameh. What was mentioned only in passing was Jordan's ejection of the PLO after they started trying to take over their host -- although the repulse of a Syrian army coming to the PLO's aid was noted. All in all it wasn't too laudatory though.

After that period it thins out. There are T54s, T55s, a BMP (surprisingly small), BDRM etc, and Challenger Is, but not a lot of other stuff -- because people are still using it.

All in all a good place to visit if you have any interest at all in military hardware. 

A rose red city, half as old as time

Tastes in poetry have definitely changed since John Burgon wrote his 370 rhyming lines about Petra. I won’t even pretend to have read the whole thing (has anyone?), but he does seem to have compensated for pages and pages of overblown description with that famously quotable last line, though the "half as old as time" bit wasn't even his own.

To see Petra in full rose red glory you’d need to be there at the crack of dawn or at sunset, neither of which we achieved in our two days exploring. We were awake enough to see the sunset, but visitors are expected to clear out by 5 pm in the off-season so being law-abiding tourists that’s what we did. (Camping inside Petra is strictly forbidden, but there are so many caves and hollows a person probably could hide somewhere for the night, though you’d risk having goats nibble you or Bedouins sell you things.)

Photos really can’t convey the sheer scale of Petra (see, by way of evidence, the shots below). According to the official Petra website (www.visitpetra.jo) the cliffs that line the famously narrow entrance Siq are up to 80 metres tall in some places, which is high enough to make a person feel very ant-like, and that's just the beginning. My expectations about what we would see had been (ahem) somewhat coloured by Indiana Jones; the famous Treasury is dramatic and iconic, and it’s also the first thing you see when you reach the end of the Siq. Some people turn around and go home after that (which is a crazy waste of the entry fee, and makes about as much sense as going to Paris and only seeing the Eiffel Tower), but as the wise people on the ginsu knife commercials say, wait, there’s more.

Around the corner from the Treasury everything opens up. You can walk along the bottom of the valley admiring all the Nabatean tombs and other ruins – including an amphitheatre carved out of the cliff, various temples and other buildings, and a Roman road. There are also paths up the sides of the valleys to sacrificial sites, grand views, and more tombs. The paths are steep. Very steep. If you’re feeling lazy or very puffed you can take a donkey ride up instead of walking – but the paths are quite narrow in some spots, with steep cliffs to the side, and I’d rather be puffed than terrified. The combination of heights, depths and antiquity made my head spin.

 

The Nabateans really knew how to carve rock (it’s tempting to say that was their only building technique). Apparently they were also very good at stashing water in secret spots throughout the desert, , and some of their water-directing and storing was put to work at Petra irrigating gardens in front of the tombs. There are records of plans and contracts for tombs – you couldn’t just turn up and expect something to be prepared overnight – and some tombs were clearly started and not finished, possibly because the owner stopped paying the instalments.

In our two days (with a day off in between to do lazier things), we walked all of the trails we could. Up to the High Place of Sacrifice, out to the Monastery, up and around to a viewpoint looking down on the Treasury, all along the main path ... To go further we'd probably have needed to hire camels and guides, which isn't really our style. It was good to get away from the crowds on the main trail, and even better to get to stretches that were empty enough of tourists that there were also no locals trying to sell us souvenirs. (It's 10 a.m. and we're intending to walk around all day ... do you really think we want to buy a bronze camel?) Some of them forgave us a bit when they found out we were from New Zealand. Not because they're rugby fans, but because of Marguerite van Geldermalsen, a New Zealander who came to Petra in 1978 and married a Bedouin and is still the only Western woman to have lived in the caves. She's made of tougher stuff than I am, but it sounds as if her husband has plenty of cousins ...

The bus to work, and other frightening events

The school has a fleet of buses. They number up to at least 33, although I think that they might only have about 24. This is a view of the back of the school, showing about half of them.

I get picked up each morning in one of the two staff buses. There is an early bus, half an hour after school finishes, and a later one for those doing sport, with meetings etc.

On the plus side it is free and reliable. It's also often quite sociable, because it is a good time to talk to staff from other departments.

On the downside it is slow and uncomfortable. Slow because it weaves across Amman picking up/dropping off other staff, and they are quite scattered. Uncomfortable because the roads are badly maintained and the drivers weave around like crazy. The hilly terrain doesn't help.

All the schools and universities have similar fleets. All the same sort of buses -- much smaller than NZ buses to fit the narrow spaces (the roads are wide enough, but the dodgy parking makes them narrow) -- and all in the same shade of yellow as ours. I see dozens as I wait for mine in the morning ferrying people across town. A lot of businesses have them too if they are sited away from public transport, as cars are expensive here.

I sit quite a long way back, partly because I get on late and partly to give the staff children the better seats at the front. It has the huge advantage that I don't get to see the mayhem going on out front. The school drivers are all the same in that they have got the "following" part of driving pretty much nailed, but apparently think that the "distance" part is intended to be as small as possible. Not every Jordanian drives like that, although it is quite common. The school drivers don't drive particularly fast, fortunately, but they still scare me.

Traffic flow is something to watch. The number of lanes is determined by the width of the road, not how many are marked. Traffic weaves in and out merrily. A particular favourite is turning from a centre lane despite the lane inside you going straight ahead. Pedestrians will wander across at any point -- the traffic in the photo above is not stationary. Vehicles travel from very slow to very fast in accordance with the impatience of the driver.

The give-way laws are a mystery, even to people who drive here. If traffic is going slow then everyone just pushes in however they can. If traffic is fast then it is essentially a game of chicken and it is rare to see a car stop to give way -- they merely slow down a bit and try to both fit. Our bus will not slow down on the entrance to roundabouts just because another car is already going round it, and at the last second one of them will slow slightly to allow the other in front.

Indicators can be used for indicating your intentions -- but only if what you are about to attempt is particularly awful. Putting down your cigarette, coffee or phone to use the indicator is regarded as stupid. That's what your horn is for! A short blast on the horn indicates "Watch out, I'm coming through in a vaguely illegal or stupid manner", "out of the way please, I wish to go faster than you", "the light turned green 50 milliseconds ago and you are still in my way" and "I'm a taxi, do you wish to be picked up?". You could easily hear a dozen blasts of the horn in a minute at an intersection. I've more or less stopped noticing them unless they are close. Oddly, you have to commit a particularly heinous act off cutting off or similar to get a horn blast because you have annoyed them.

I have it on good authority, however, that Jordan is not a patch on Egypt. People who have been there are consistent it is much worse. It almost makes me want to go there!