Downtown girl ...

So let me explain ... Amman seems to be pretty much split in two - there is the western half that I live in, I guess you could call it the richer half, which is a seemingly endless sprawl of very large houses on soulless streets, interspersed with modern shopping malls (pizza, Mango, La Senza, Nike etc) - sometimes I wonder if I'm in the Middle East or some wierd area of Birmingham.

And then there is downtown - the eastern half of the city is very different, I'm told it's the poorer area and certainly the houses are much smaller and closer together. The main shopping area is in the bit they call "Wast El Balad" or "centre of the country", what we might call "downtown", and it is by far my favourite bit of Amman so far! As well as being where the old ruins are (citadel, roman amphitheatre etc), it's where the little shops and markets are, so I can finally escape the horrible sterility of my local Carrefour and Safeways (I kid you not).
I really like the higgledy-piggledy houses downtown, and even though its not ye olde city like Damascus or Jerusalem (apart from the ruins, Amman is a 20th century town), downtown has the lively loud feel to it that you find in other bigs cities - the bad driving (but nothing near as bad as, say, India), the noise, the open-fronted shops, the people carrying sacks of stuff ... but all amazingly clean if a bit rundown, puts large parts of London to shame ...


I haven't really taken many pictures of downtown at street level, mainly because there are women around and people seem to be pretty conservative about that kind of thing here - although some women are more liberal, and there are plenty of non-Muslims too who don't cover up, at least a headscarf seems to be pretty normal and I don't want to offend anyone ... having said that, maybe I'm being oversensitive, but I'll suss it out and maybe get braver! Just look at these photos though, and imagine the soundtrack - cars revving and beeping, guys shouting, Arabic music from tinny stereos ...


And one last photo especially for you Mike - one of the many spice shops in town with a typically surly-looking owner (what does it take to get someone to smile around here!)