Amman - 2 weeks in - Transport tribulations and secret corners
- Sep 9, 2016
- 3 min read
2 weeks into a 4 month sojourn in the land of Lawrence and I'd say that at least some of the things that started off as difficult and puzzling have become much easier. These are things as simple as:
1. Taking a bus - you couldn't dream up their system
2. How to avoid too much spice being put into your falafel
3. How to order an iced coffee and not get freezing-turkish-caffeine-rocket-sludge (see picture below for unfrozen example).
Let's begin with buses. We all have that underlying fear of public transport in foreign countries, it always seems far more complex than our own system and thus inspires trepidation throughout all journeys. However, I was hardly going to take a taxi every morning to school and walking would have been a good 45 minutes along a busy road. Fortunately, here in Amman I am blessed with two partners in crime - fellow Durham Arabists Clara and Lydia who have made the whole process of settling into a new country much easier. This was particularly helpful in the first (and very much joint) attempt at a bus ride.
The bus system is very much a proactive one on the part of the prospective passenger. There are a few larger single deck buses that occasionally turn up. Presumably not wanting to be shackled to anything as constraining as a timetable (official, or otherwise), these are not to be relied upon. One therefore turns to the smaller minibus-like contraptions that whizz up and down the major roads of Amman's outlying districts (outside the dakhlilyya ring road which is something similar to north/south circulars in London). These buses are fantastically cheap (about 40p) and are usually extremely frequent. They do not have any official stops but rather a myriad of possible stopping places along the main roads. If one is forceful enough, you can persuade them to stop pretty much anywhere. You simply state the 'stop' name at which you intend to disembark to the conductor (who is usually hanging out of the door, shouting the final destinations of the bus in some strange kind of geographical Tourettes/bingo). "But how do you find out the name of where you want to go?" I hear you cry. You ask someone who has been before or listen very carefully and follow yourself on GPS until you get to the stop closest to where you want to go - needless to say, a risky business.
Sometimes the buses don't stop where you've asked e.g. if you're not proactive enough about getting up and semi-throwing yourself off. In Amman you (as a westerner) are deemed to be ajnabi and therefore not to be trusted/believed when you say where you want to go. Such a classification must be embraced with good grace since a limited knowledge of colloquial Jordanian Arabic is unlikely to stand up to a shouting match with an offended bus conductor.
Learning the word شوَي was an important discovery very early on in my time in Amman. Since it is mostly employed to convince Arabs to speak more slowly it is fairly integral to the whole learning experience. It can also be used to imply a small amount of something - milk in coffee or in this case, spicy sauce in your lunchtime falafel. Life has improved markedly after this learning experience.
I have become (much to my surprise) a minor devotee of the iced coffee here in Amman. What with today being the 14th consecutive day of 30+°C temperatures, water is an absolute must and cold drinks in general, come a close second. Thus instead of facilitating one's next vocabulary drive (I'm fairly sure that the number of new words that we have officially encountered in class this week has exceeded 300) with a piping hot form of caffeine, it is preferable (or at least it is for me) to do so by means of a more chilly version.
I have included a few photos from a walk around jebel al-weibdeh last week and one from our 10k walk to Araq al-Amir exactly a week ago. Rather peculiarly, today marks the beginning of a 9 day holiday for eid al-AdhHa (the celebration at the end of pilgrimage). The perfect way to round of the first week of school...
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