Amman, Jordan

Whew...just finished a whirlwind of a day. Got jipped again last night in the taxi from the bus station to the hotel-paid 5 JD for a 15 min ride and it should have been closer to 2, but as they say, "welcome to Jordan:)" Grabbed some fuul/hummus and fresh pita bread at a street vendor for under a buck. The hotel is decent...a better way of putting it is that the large living room area with couches makes up for what the rooms/showers lack. Did some laundry in the morning as it was cloudy and raining and then hit the streets to get mightily lost on our way to Hashemite sq. We are staying in downtown Amman, where there are lots of rundown shops and its a bit grungy, and has a dearth of street signs. Stopped to ask some police the way which didn't help much. Finally wandered back and took some turns and low and behold we ended up on the right street and made our way there alright. Its a cute little park with an ancient Roman amphitheater built into the hillside and is supposed to be a good place to people watch, but it was pretty empy probably due to the fact that it was around noon on a thursday.

Pretty much as soon as we got there it started to downpoor again and we took a cab over to a nicer part of Amman (jebel amman) to Abdoun circle, which is pretty classy and completely different from downtown and where they restaurants have decided to tack on a pretty hefty 26% tax/service charge to everything. Despite this, it's still fairly cheap (coffee is delightedly a mere couple of dollars;). Stores are more spread out, cleaner and more expensive. The people are dressed in european fashions and you hardly see any women in hijab. Comparatively, downtown there are more men, and the women are pretty much covered, many wearing chadors and some even with their faces covered. Grabbed some lunch in Tche Tche cafe wear there were lots of women in 20-30s and practically everyone was constantly smoking either cigarettes or shisha. It continued to rain so we decided to treat ourselves to a nice valentine's day sans hommes and headed across the street to Cafe Moka where we grabbed some dessert and some tasty drinks. I had an espresso with milk, orange juice and cinnamon with blended ice and Louise had a mint lemonade that tasted a bit like a mojito. Very yummy. We then continued our fun-filled day and headed across the street again to the Galleria Cinema where we watched an Egyptian film all in Arabic. It was a light romantic comedy and despite my lack of Arabic knowledge, wasn't too difficult to figure out what was going on, although it would be interesting to see what the actual story line is.

After the movie, we took a taxi to the Blue Fig Cafe for dinner. The taxi guy got lost for a bit (he thought it was someplace but it didn't look right, so we continued to drive in circles for a good 5-10 minutes until he finally asked another cabby and turned out he was right in the beginning;) but he was super nice about it and apologized even though it wasn't really his fault. The place was uber cool and reminded me a lot of Chino Latinos. There were lots of young Jordanian couples out for Valentine's day, but my date was best of all (yes, you louise;) It's a chic bar type restaurant that often has live music and kick-ass menu with food from all over the world (organized into similar food categories like ravioli, manti, and spanish/indian/chinese versions of the same dishes). It was really cool and we ended up getting some tasty Jordanian pizza with sauteed tomatoes, onions, peppers covered with mozarella and pine nuts. Afterwards we headed back to the hotel after convincing a taxi driver to take us there.....the bum was trying to rip us off and claimed that given the weather no taxis were driving into downtown tonight (a bunch of bs, it was merely drizzling and we're in a car for crying out loud...people drive in much worse). He wanted 4 YTL but I refused and told him only 3...in the end he was like "what about 4" and I replied with no way, I told you 3 and you drove.

Got back to the hotel and I called Uncle Emad's brother who came over immediately and much to our surprise took us back to his house. We met his family and spent a good couple of hours chatting with them. They were extremey hospitable and we had a valentine's day cake (I told you, our day just kept getting better;) There were some awesome folks and really into traveling themselves (the little girl Noor is in 5th grade and her favorite things are art and traveling and I'm trying to convince her to come along with us;) Pretty fun kids and it seems like their life is identical to ours back home. They told us that since the war in Iraq, they have a lot of Iraqis coming into Jordan and consequently prices have doubled to tripled in the past few years. On the drive back to our hotel, the dad got into a road rage argument with a crazy cab driver. It turned into a few minutes of yelling back and forth, stopped in the middle of the street downtown. The best part was when Noor turned to me and said, "I love it when he does that!" lol, she cracked us up. Anyhoo, that was probably hands down the best valentines day ever.