hooray for american coffee! i got some in a care package a couple weeks ago. the day after i got it i drank about a pot of it. started with a couple of cups in the morning. after five months of instant it tasted like heaven. that afternoon i made a cup for my counterpart and one for her husband. but, she wasnt home so rather than let it go to waste i drank it myself. i just about made myself sick. but at least i was rarin to go for housework.
so here comes christmas. to look around my village you would never know it. it is a holiday here because jesus is recognized as a prophet, but there is not a lot of pomp and circumstance around it. obviously you arent gonna see a giant santa in the middle of town. ludicrous. i suppose there are decorations in the big cities and christian areas, but here it is life as usual. it is better that way - you cant really miss what you arent constantly reminded of. it is also refreshing to be left out of that massive consumer frenzy that comes with the season. and i am not sure that a religious holiday taht is used to boost sales makes much sense here, as opposed to say, praying more.
ok, so space. i cant even believe i didnt think to say something about it. amman is arranged around the seven hills of the city. somewhat like rome. i suppose this is unsurprising due to the past presence of rome here. there is even a huge roman amphitheatre in the middle of town (in ruins of course). street planning in the city centers around seven circles (roundabouts). roundabouts seem rather predominant in the roads here, and districts relate to th ordinal placement of the cirles. streets come into them from all angles, so the city doesnt seem to follow a grid like a lot of cities in the us. there are key streets in the misx, but it seems kind of like city planning was an after thought. there is an old part of town which i suppose was there first and the streets sort of took shape secondarily. and from there, the city expanded outward. the newer part of town is dominated by a mall and a lot of really expensive houseing for bigwigs and foreign statespeople and the like. oh, and the american embassy too. amman is really big, but to me, and this could just be my view as an outsider, it doesnt feel cohesive as a city. it just feels like a really big, more liberal place where a lot of people live.
my own town is on a mountainside and its layout is dictated by the landscape of the area. the streets wrap around the mountainside, preventing any real order. there are also a lot of footpaths and goat trails that people use to get around. my city, and to an even greater extent the neigboring village have traditionally consisted of farmers and bedouins. and thus their development as villages is fairly recent - within the last 40 or so years. there are still little old women who walk around bent at the waist because they have spent most of their lives in bedouin tents. and tehre are still tents, but these days few of them are used nomadically. more often than not there is a small concrete structure next to the tent - a house or a shed or something, i am not too sure. so, towns here just kind of sprang up wherever people set down. i think this may have been a more predominant pattern in the sount, but i am not too well traveled within jordan yhet, so i could be totally wrong. but from my limited experience...
so far as "public space", i dont think there is an awful lot of it. my town has a public park but i think that is mostly due to its proximity to a big tourist spot. it looks like a lot of going out consists of groups of men on the sidewalks with hookahs (i found out, by the way, that to call it a sheesha is a big no no. it implies drugs. and hookah isnt preferred either. they call it argila or hubbly bubbly). a lot of public interaction happens at the mosque, which is a key point in any village here. they all have at least one, if not more. my village of 5000 people has at least four. so, the men gather at mosques, and all the rest in done through visiting homes or workplaces, leaving very little need for public space. also, public spaces tend to require water, which is a very scarce resource here. so, very few public parks. games and stuff tend to happen in the streets. as for zoning, in most villages there seems to be no differentiation between business and residential. most stores are underneath apartments. and storefronts are rather nondescript. you pretty much have to know what each store is. not a lot of advertising space. in the old part of amman this mix of business and residential exists, but the newer parts of town are very much western. i should say, that irbid, the big city in the north has the same general pattern of streets, but business and residential are really separate. i guess what i am trying to say is that every city is a bit different. and there are rich parts of town and poor parts of town. im not sure if i have figured it out entirely yet. it feel like in jordan as a whole, the poorest communities tend to be in the jordan valley because that is the least hospitable part of the country. hot like the blazes of hell. and in cities the newer parts of town tend to have all the money. like in my training village the people with money built on the top of the hill. and then there was a big hill to divide them. in my own town there are sort of three levels of town. here i think all the money is concentrated in the middle with the developed areas and the poorest people live far away from all the developmetn at the top of the hill. it is inconvenient to go so far uphill and as you go up you move towards more rural country. the money issue is one that i am keeping my eye on because i am hoping to maybe develop a secondary project that addresses poverty. one strong trend in my area is that bedouins seem to be the social group at highest risk for poverty. but moving back to space...
i have noticed that some of the way people use space here, especially indoors is largely for show. a couple examples: sidewalks - they exist, but people tend to walk in the streets instead. so why have them? i mean, sometimes when i walk with people i feel really awkward if i am not in the street with them. and bedrooms - in a lot of homes there area really nice bedrooms, but people are likely to keep them just for show and sleep on farshas (cushions) on the living room floor. and as for living rooms, i have often been shown the guest living room, usually fancier than the every day living room, but rarely have i used one. there seems to be something important about everything looking as it should be, but to me it seems like a waste of space. like that extra fancy sitting room with plastic on the couches, or a desk that no one needs, but is there because an office should have a desk.
so there ya have it, my take on my surroundings. let me know if i left out anything that you want to hear about in this area. this was a severely unplanned post. so i am out, have a good holiday y'all. oh and "jesusy christ-christ", fight the war on christmas. ha!

sometimes life seems to give you a boost just when you need it most. when you feel likeyou cant spend another day of solitude with tv as your only aompanion you have a good day like i did the day before yesterday. i wont lie, i have a really hard time throwing myself into social situations, even with shared language. but sunday i had my first social visit since mid-ramadan. i ate lunch with a girl from my exercise class and her family. it was a blast! she let me help cook and i burnt the peanuts. i mean, i am not really used to frying peanuts and apparently there is about a milisecond between delightfully golden brown and "blackened", or severely blackened i should say. but everyone was gracious and said "some people like them that way" and choked them down anyway. it was a really relaxed lunch because it was just women and children. i have got to admit that the presence of men just adds a whole level of stress for me here. none of the internal monologue that says "do i roll up my sleeve like a shameless hussy or just drag my sleeve through everyones food? oh no, did my arm just show? are the soles of my feet pointed at him? oh god i just called him a girl... damned conjugation!" at least it helps keep my extended silences exciting for me. anyway, i just chased the kids and chatted. it was fun. there is something i really like about watching young girls act all sassy here. because i know that in just a few years they will "outgrow it". women are not all that spunky here, i think it is bad form. anyway, in the conversation i found out that my friend had been engaged and had broken it off because she wasnt in love with him. it really kind of shattered my perception of love and marriage here. i always thought that marriages were mostly arranged between families and that love was something that people grew into. i suppose i dont know that much because i am very hesitant to start that conversation. it has implications. like am i looking to get married here being the main one. the other is that then people become much more interested in what sort of love life i may have had in the states. i just prefer to avoid it mostly. anyway, the whole thing felt like a successful five hours of visiting.
then i came home and went to pay my rent. and again an invitation to sit and drink coffee. and we talked about everything. politics, birthdays, conceptions of jordan from afar and perceptions of america from afar, we even talked about aids. it was a really engaging conversation - in arabish. a little bit of both english and arabic. a good week.
the weather is unseasonably warm now. all of a sudden it turned into spring. the warm weather is harder, it makes me miss home more. and all the things i could be doing. everyone here is talking about global warming. i guess this is really unusual. and of course, to my great delight, the warmth means my good friends the mosquitos are back. so i chase them around for a bit before i plug in my mosquito poison thingy that will probably be very bad for me in the long run. but i just cant stand those bugs! perhaps i am lucky not to have gone to africa. i would be a malaria nightmare.
anyway, that about does it for my interest level today. maybe i will write some more later this week, assuming something really interesting happens. dont hold your breath.