The next day we started with the usual breakfast choices of little hots dogs andcorn, eggs and tomatoes, yogurt, soft boiled eggs in their shells and salt, olives, cucumbers, bread and various muffins, cereal flakes, pita, hummus, tang like drink, tea and nescafe. I like the yougurt, tomatoes and tea, and the rest is fine, although I’d like some fresh fruit (we bought some at a market now). Calvin is eating toast and cereral and muffins mostly, and hankering for bacon – which he will likely be doing for a long time now. The dining room supervisor/waitress is a young women who always wears a white headscarf, a white tunic, jeans and sandals, and lots of makeup.
We decided to visit the University of Jordan where Calvin will be studying. We took a cab, as we most commonly do anywhere except to the local cafe district. (There are buses, but no bus stops, and its really hard to figure out where they are going (since all the signs are in Arabic and going by quickly, and they are very crowded, and you ae supposed to call out something to get off but we don’t know what, so while maybe Calvin will learn one particular route from his family house to school, we haven’t ventured on the buses.) As often is the case its hard to know if the cab driver understands where we would like to go -they start driving and then sometimes try to ask us in Arabic. Maps sometimes help but not always, as we were soon to demonstrate. We got in the cab but got to where the driver pulled over and there was a sign of sorts, but the cab tab was half what the guys at the hotel had thought so we thought it was the wrong location, maybe a branch. So we pulled out the map and showed him. He agreed and restarted the car, and drove us to the opposite side of the huge highway. He was sure so we got out to look around – and realized that he had been right the first time and now had driven us to a Burger King – which was indicated with an icon where the Univesrsity is on the cutsey map that we showed him! He left, we laughed about it and thankfully in this case there was an underground passage so we did not have to do a death defying crossing of the highway!
University of Jordan has more trees than the entire rest of Amman, or at least it seems so, and it was a very refreshing break from dusty car-oriented city life. The campus has a clock tower with radiating walkways for pedestrians and lots of trees shading the walkers. Farther from the center it sprawls a little more with buildings oriented around the roads leading into campus, but all in all a nice campus. Classes are not yet is session, so while there were some people walking around, we didn’t see how crowded it is normally. Some of the walkers looked like moms and their college bound kids, but almost all in headscarves and neck to ankle to wrist coverings – I felt a connection but still its funny to me. I was thinking that the college students and maybe even their parents would be in more western clothes – I was surprised how much covering we’ve seen – we still don’t know if its more because of Ramadan – will have more of a guage on that after Ramadan is over. Walking around the University was a very nice calm break from traffic, we went in the library and sat and looked at books and out the window at the trees, found the language school where we think Calvin might be taking classes, bought sodas and found a hidden location to drink them, overall a good visit. Oh, and we found restrooms in the library – the first “turkish” toilets (holes in the floor) that I’ve seen on this trip. Not my preference, rather smelly, but still useful for the need.
In the afternoon after retruning to our hotel we tried to walk to a destination that we were told was not far, but got totally flumoxed by the need to run across busy highways – yes, that is expected, but outside our comfort zone. After getting totally lost we eventually resigned ourselves and got a cab to place a few blocks away but on the other side of the intersection/circle. Yikes do these folks ever need some major traffic calming! That and pedestrian amentities, and bicycle amentities – we didn’t see even one bike rack on the Univesity campus, where biking would appear to be a good option! And dedicated transit lanes so the buses are stuck in the same awful traffic that the cars are in.
They could really use a rail system – heavy, light, trolley or something! There is a huge waste of people’s time just getting through town or to their jobs. Plus on the outskirts of Amman there are a large number of Arab style suburbs under construction – large multi-family residential buildings, I think, but it looks like without space for shops, schools or anything else except a big gas station at the freeway. If my interpretation of the construction projects is correct it looks like when these are inhabitated and all totally dependent on driving, traffic is going to go from truly dreadful to Chinese style traffic jams. Seems like an awful lot could be done that would cost less than the massive construction projects going on.
Valerie
Glad to hear that you and Calvin made it OK and are having a good time. Sounds very interesting. I would like to know too if there is more covering of the body at Ramadan than at other times. I never thought about how rude it might be to eat or drink during the day during Ramadan!
Keep up the blog and thanks for letting me know. Hope the heat isn’t killing you. Deidre
Hey Deidre,
So good to hear from you. I hadn’t quite realized how difficult Ramadan would be for us either, and Calvin is being vey cautious and I’m following his lead. There are places we could go – the tourist sites, to eat or drink midday, but often that is not want we want to be visiting. We are making it work out fine, though, we are now in a pattern that works for us of a big breakfast, then usually drink discretely during the day, and eat dinner after dark.
I won’t pretend that it isn’t hot, but we have had good air conditioning in the hotels (we picked for that), and I wear my hat and sunglasses everywhere, and we are kind of getting used to having sweat dripping down our backs! (Sorry, TMI) We try to stay out of the midday day sun. Its really kind of like Phoenix where I used to visit my Grandma, but with huge amazing historic sites since before the time of Christ.
Talk with you later.