Great name for a pedestrianized street / outdoor mall. The car traffic is horrendous in Amman, and just walking short disances you take your life into your hands. Evencrossing the street is a challenge because there are almost no traffic lights and no crosswalks, so the traffic moves continously. Clearly cars have priority, drive as fast as they can, swervin around the ” lanes” and honking constantly; pedestrains sprint between them to get around. Given our fatigue at battling to walk, going to a walking oriented area seemed like a good idea. Turns out it was a bit of a bust. None of the shops were open, and there were few people to watch. I think we were early, but mostly I think the problem was that the stores were closed or only open limited hours because of Ramadan. That coupled with the difficulty of eating or drinking in public, and the closed cafes, meant that after hitting up another mostly closed mall we bought some food in a grocery store, always interesting, and headed back to the hotel. We were tired and so napped much of theafternoon. Between the early morning wake ups (the 4/4:30 call to prayers), the high heat midday, and the lack of access to cafes during daylight hours, we are getting into a pattern of naps in the afternoons – which I find slightly disorienting.
We asked one of the hotel staff for a local dinner suggestion, and he recommeded a fast food place, so went, sat outside in the cool evening air and had decent burger and salad (on real plates). We then found a totally cool cafe district with lots of men, and a few women, sitting in a couple blocks worth of outdoor cafes, drinking (coffee, tea and sodas, I think) chatting, smoking hookahs, playing backgammon and cards. It was set up with twinkly hanging lights and had a jovial atmosphere, very nice.
Although it was nice, they still don’t quite get the walking thing down, as the cafes extend across the entire sidewalk and one is forced to walk back and forth into the street. I get the impression each business builds its own sidewalk – a few are truly lovely, then you step around the construction ruble, then an ok sidewalk, then more rubble, then a nice one.
It appears that half of Amman is under construction, including both new buildings and new roads, on ramps, etc, so that its very dusty and one is constantly walking around rubble. I understand that the US is investing heavily in Jordan, 4th highest US investment I’ve heard, and that we are trying to build its tourist economy. I think they could benefit from more attention to the quality of place rather than just massive construction of new hotels everywhere. They could use sidewalks, trees, crosswalks to improve the tourist experience, as well as better signage, traffic lights and stopsigns, information/publicity about sites – we could easily missed the local cafe district since its so hard to walk anywhere we tend to go to a place we can name in a taxi.
Oh, we also came across a small linear park that I swear is a train station, set up for underground trains with benches and signs (empty though), but no train. Maybe its been built in anticipation of a future rail system or extension. Anyway the kids were using it for rollerskating, so that was fun to see.