JORDAN

Scene: posh, uptown internet cafe... upstairs, view over street, fancy & comfy leather chairs with space-look round tables for the wifi-connected laptops.
Even table service for drinks and food.



Good news: very fast connection and comfy seats



Bad, but not unusual news: while I am playing with my 'embedded' webcam to make experimental 'photobooth' photography, a guy right in my field of vision is experiencing a very bad rash in the area of his crotch, while his eyes are firmly fixed on the screen...

Worse still: through the mirror-window effect that I used for my photos, I can also see what he is watching...
A month or so ago I saw a guy in a less up-market internet cafe, who came in, sat down, opened a few porn pages, pulled a few dozen images and videos onto his memory stick and left again in an excited rush. I think that's fairly decent in comparison.


Anyway, change of topic.
I realised that I haven't actually put anything about Jordan on here so far... nor have I had many photos lately, except 'the Wall'...

So here's a few photos and two stories:

- - -

It is now half past midnight and I just came back home to my little souterrain flat in the predominantly residential area of Basman, a few kilometres north of central Amman. Just as I was walking up the wide street that I live in, there was still people out… a group of guys sitting with plastic chairs on the street, a tea pot and glasses at their feet, and a family sitting in their front ‘garden’ (i.e. the space between fence-wall and house-wall). My neighbours usually come home between 2 and 3 in the morning, with their little daughter (she can’t be more than 5 years old) screaming because she doesn’t want to go to bed yet. Even a lot of the shops in the nearby main street of Tabarboor are open till after midnight and I’m talking about anything from plumbing-supply shops to mini-markets to dry cleaners.
Funnily enough, in Tabarboor’s main street, every 5th store (and this is really NOT exaggerated, in fact, it’s probably an underestimate) is a mobile-shop selling nothing but mobile phones, respective cards, cables and phone ‘accessories’. EVERYBODY here has a phone! Only a few days ago, I met a Bedouin in a deteriorating agricultural area in the middle of the eastern desert, who came to speak to me once I had stopped my car near his tent; and after we exchanged a few words, anxiously observed from the safe distance of the tent by a large number of family members, all of a sudden one of what appeared to be his offspring came running towards us in great hurry, only to hand his father a grubby, rubber-coated mobile phone that was ringing to some shrill tune.

- - -

I was sitting in a comfortable, American-style coffee & donut place in the long strip of shops and cafés opposite the university, totally absorbed in a book of stories from the ‘Holy Land’. I’d almost forgotten where I was, when I noticed someone approaching me from the left. I looked up and straight into the gleaming eyes of a round face smiling at me. It was a man with Down’s syndrome whose stretched-out hand was about to swing down to greet me. This pure gesture of friendship and affection, which I was just able to meet in time, was immediately followed – once he had my hand firmly in his – by his face coming alarmingly close to mine. Again, it took me a second to realise what was going on, but when his eyes closed and his lips – now only centimetres from my own – started forming into a cone I got it: we’re in an Arab country, so men kiss each other upon shaking hands. I was puzzled by the incredible similarity of people with Down’s syndrome anywhere in the world – their round faces, hands and bodies and that unadulterated kindness which seems to come straight from their heart and emanates from their radiant expressions. And this similarity that cuts across all ethnic divisions made my reaction ‘culturally independent’, by which I mean that the part of my consciousness which adjusts any action or reaction of mine to the cultural, religious or traditional context in which it takes place, was temporarily out of action. It wasn’t until after I had kissed both his bulging cheeks that I noticed the context and became aware of my surroundings: there was a group of pretty Jordanian girls sitting near me drinking coffee and chatting and a group of guys outside, on the other side of the café’s glass front doing the same thing. They had noticed these two strangers – a foreigner and a disabled man – kissing, and they were now exchanging glances of amusement.

And I remembered: Jordan is still a very traditional society, although Amman in particular is so deceivingly 'western' and 'liberal'... there's MacDonalds [the ultimate sign of Liberalism! (-; ], KFC and other big US chains everywhere and a lot of the students in university might very well just have walked out of an American high school, especially if you see them standing in front of their lockers in the corridors, which, instead of maybe Brad Pitt, have pictures of King Abdallah II stuck to them. Almost half of the girls don't wear Hejabs and dress very western and look almost stereotypically (to the point of boredom on the part of the beholder) like a "pretty American college girl". Not surprisingly, I guess, over 95% of them and pretty much ALL of the guys wear jeans.

There's one particular section of the campus, where the coolest of these hang out in what seems like EVERY MINUTE of their non-lecture time. There's a good 50 of them hanging out, chatting, parading and prancing about and just 'being cool' at any given time during the week. The girls here usually cultivate more than just your average cute college-girl-look, with considerably increased investment in hair-products, expensive-sunglass-replicas and morning-mirror-time. Not only the girls, though, oh no...!! Young Arab men are known to be quite vain, I guess, but here it gets taken to to the point where some of them seem to be not much more than their pretty, trimmed and toned outer shell, with attention-intensive hair-styles and immaculately clean and new-looking, stylish clothing.
In this area guys and girls mix quite easily, though with a certain air of vastly down-played awkwardness about them, although I'm sometimes not sure whether I superimpose this on them when I observe... either way, there's a lot of glancing and staring, checking-out and seizing-up going on in this 'playground'. In every part of the university one will mostly find small groups of either guys or girls sitting or walking around (which seems to be more popular than anything else here) and it is rare to see guys and girls together, except if you walk off the main 'conveyor belts', into the forested areas between the different departments spread over the vast campus, where you will find couples talking softly, sitting shyly side by side, but with a little distance, though sometimes holding hands or barely touching. Officially there IS NO SUCH THING AS DATING, of course, but the Grauziffer is obviously quite high (Grauziffer = "number of unrecorded cases" my dictionary tells me... I love it when one German world translates into half a sentence in English!!), though mostly among those from moderate, rich and westernised backgrounds. For the majority of young people here, dating is something in American movies and the reality is a marriage, where such factors as family background, wealth, level of education and (for guys) career opportunities of the potential partner is what matters and where the decision is largely taken by one's family members.
As much as from a Western perspective this might bring up such concepts as 'oppression', 'backwardness', or a lack of 'freedom', this sometimes leads to the most hilarious situations... like this one for example:
A German colleague of mine is in something remotely equivalent to our Western concept of a 'relationship' with a very cute and clever Jordanian girl of moderate, though Islamic, middle-class background. She is a little younger than him and though she initially resisted the idea of their relationship having to involve any physical contact at all, when she later agreed to a moderate and acceptable level of physical interaction, she realised that she was on a much lower experience-level than her German 'boyfriend' and was going to have to some serious catching-up if she didn't want to make a complete fool of herself. Today, as we were sitting in the late afternoon sunshine on a set of marble stairs to an administration building on campus somewhere, she told me, how she went about this... she read a good dozen articles on the issue of kissing (!!!) with some explanatory graphs, and consulted a website called howtodothings.com She had to read the articles a few times to make sure she remembered all the steps intuitively...
"...imagine I would have to stop and think what to do next!"