Sorry ...

I have heard a wild rumour that it is tad nippy in the UK (is it really -9 in Yorkshire? officially brassic ...), so I can only apologise for the following blog - it is not meant to make my beloved UK-bound friends and family feel rubbish and I so so wish they were all here with me ...

Anyway, I'll jump straight in with a photo of the hard life down in Aqaba this weekend, on the coast of the Red Sea ...


As you can see, bit of a change from Amman - in fact I spent most of the weekend feeling like I was somewhere with shades of Indonesia (coral reefs, palm trees) and the Cote d'Azur (luxury hotels, private beaches and the mountains tumbling into the seas like they do around Nice and Monaco). It does have a few remnants of older culture, like the Ummayid fort (in the background on the right) which is about 1300 years old, and they are currently digging up the remains of a 3rd century church (possibly the first purpose-built one?). But unfortunately the lure of tourist cash has taken hold, and there seems to be endless construction outwards and upwards, mainly consisting of massive ugly luxury hotels and (really, do they need more?) malls selling really rather expensive stuff apparently 'duty free' ...

But there are nice sides of the town and the area, especially the coral reefs down the coast at Tala, and of course the sea ... spent an evening sipping wine by the marina at the Royal Yacht Club (am investigating boating options with them for the future, sailor friends!) and ate some reeeeeeeeally good fish ... I fear I may be heading down to Aqaba fairly frequently over the winter, at least until Amman warms up again - boating, swimming in the sea, fish and sunshine, what's not to like?


Oh, and did I mention it was 27 Celcius there? OK, OK, I'll stop now ....

Now that's what I call Roman ruins ...

Haven't had time to tell you yet about all the adventures in Syria during the Eid holidays - where does the time go? - so here are a some tales and photos from Palmyra in Eastern Syria (miss the turning and you're in Iraq before you know it).



So, we arrived at night and then managed to get up at silly o'clock in the morning to watch the sun rise over the ruins. I climbed to the top of a (dangerously uncordoned off) tower and sat absolutely gobsmacked - the place is vast, and we had it to ourselves until a few Bedouin and their camels turned up to bring some bouncey Spanish tourists to our spot - at which point we slunk off for some well-needed coffee ...






Reinvigorated, we booked a tour of some of the funeral towers, which are located in the valleys leading away from the main site, and which were beautiful in their own spooky way - towers with shelves for all the bodies from a family and stone busts of the 'inhabitants'. And as with everything else, superbly preserved by the desert ...



And after the funeral towers, the city itself - there is soooooooooo much to see here, with large parts of the city having been reconstructed by archeologists in the last century and yet so much more yet to rebuild or even discover. There's certainly enough already to make it easy to imagine Palmyra in it's heydey as a bustling trading city in the middle of the desert, there to make sure that the rich Romans got their hit of Eastern delights - incense, spices and prostitutes among other things ...

View of the central crossroads in town

The theatre (useful fact of the day:
apparently it's not an amphitheatre if it doesn't go all the way around)

The ENORMOUS Temple of Bel,
the largest of the many temples they've discovered so far

I could go on forever (if you want to be subjected to the full photo and commentary one day, just ask when I'm back!), so let me finish by telling you a few of my favourite things about Palmyra;



1. Realising how much more there is to uncover from all the fascinating bits and pieces just lying around ...










2. The oddness of some of the reconstruction work (look closely) ...


3. The recycling of Roman ruins by Arab tribes to build a fortress around the Temple of Bel - here, old column sections being used to make the wall on the right ...










4. Some of the gruesome details - like here, the sacrificing table outside the Temple of Bel complete with dips to collect the flowing blood ...







5. The Arab fortress perched up on high above the city, almost as if it's gloating about the fallen civilisation before it ...

Battle of the sterotypes

Before leaving the UK, I was often asked by friends and family about whether I was apprehensive about the prospect of being a single woman in the Middle East. Being the wishy-washy liberal that I am, I decided to give the whole experience time and really do some digging before coming to any conclusions on the matter, rather than charging in with engrained preconceptions or jumping to early conclusions.

So, after nearly two months I don't feel like I'm any closer to finding out anything about the kind of life that Jordanian woman are living, mainly because I'm not meeting many. So, all I've got to go on instead are my own experiences and those of other expats who I've talked to since arriving. And what a series of mixed messages it has been ... people who love the country and feel happy and comfortable here, but also expat women who ended up actually refusing to go to certain parts of town because of the harassment, and various shades in between.


For an idea of the kind of issues and the complexity of it all, do have at look at this article in the local English-language magazine JO about expat women on the prowl, and then at the reactions to this JO article. The arguments about stereotypes and counter-stereotypes are always important, but I think that they don't really go far enough into the point that we cannot help but use our personal experiences as a basis for developing our general feelings about a place and the people in it - and if you've been harassed not once or twice but many times, it becomes harder and harder to stop this colouring your feelings, even when you know that this harassment comes from a minority.

I don't say this because I am in this position myself (yet?), but I know several expats who have just reached the end of their tether and I can sympathise enormously with occasional feelings of victimisation and just being fed up at sometimes being regarded as a 'loose woman' or a 'sure thing' - as an example, have a look at this article that talks about these complexities and frustrations from an expat who tried the hijab to make life easier.

On the other hand, I can equally sympathise with the very valid outrage of the many Jordanians who strongly condemn both treating any woman with disrespect and the stereotyping of 'Arab men' or 'Jordanian men' as unfeeling, macho or predatory.

So far from just treating each other with respect as fellow human beings ...

Tell us a story ...

My first video - this is a traditional Arabic storyteller or 'Hekawati' doing his thing, you don't need to understand what he's saying (I didn't!) to imagine what's going on ... in fact it's almost more fun to invent your own story! This was in a cafe in downtown Damascus, full to the brim of people of all ages sucking on a nargileh and enjoying the fun ... and the odd tourist to see the man who is apparently the last of his kind in the region ...

Food Pt 4

OK, so here is my current favourite thing to eat - infortunately seems to be more of a Syrian thing than a Jordanian thing, but have seen it on menus here and had some my first day back.

It's called 'mouhammara', which basically means something along the lines of 'the red stuff', and while every version seems to be slightly different, the main ingredients seem to be pomegranate, sesame oil, walnuts, chilli and onion. And as with so many things here, what can usually be classed as 'a good dose' of olive oil over the top ...

Damascus

Damascus is a city that combines old and new in a way I've never really seen before, in that the Old City is still where everyday life happens in the same way I can imagine it did 2,000 years ago - people live and work there, wander around in the evenings and fill the restaurants and cafes until the early hours - a fabulous atmosphere!


Much of the Old City is taken up with markets (of which more later), and you can literally walk around for days, seeking out little nooks and crannies, popping into buildings and even accidentally wandering into people's houses - which they don't mind! So here are a few of my favourite little views (and I know that there is so much more to discover ...)

One of the many covered market streets -
the holes in the roof are from bullets during the uprising against the French (alledgedly ...)

Part of one of the old Roman arches, framing one of the three minarets of the Ummayid mosque ... and of course, electricity and telephone wires randomly crosscutting everything else
(entirely safe, I'm sure ...)

One of the many many small streets - always full of shoppers, tourists and students bunking off!

Arches, alleyways and tunnels ...

(and plastic chairs, the scourge of the planet)
















While the Old City is still defined by the walls built in Roman times, Damascus has spread out around it in a hodge-podge of Ottoman domes, European apartment blocks and the inevitable cement monstrosities ... but even this manages to retain some charm (among the ongoing noise, traffic and smells of the city, hmmmm...)

Sometimes it's hard to be ...

So, been offline wandering the mountains, driving the deserts and and ducking through the dark alleyways of Syria for the Eid holidays, and absolutely loved the place - so much to tell you all.

I have a strange kind of heaviness now that I'm back though, almost a feeling of dread, which I've been trying to understand, and I think it's this - after really working to settle into Amman life and build up a support nwtwork and community around me, a few days out of the country has given me a different perspective on how things are here for me. In fact, I'm amazed two neighbouring countries can be so different. I've talked to a couple of people about this and I know not everyone feels that same way about the two countries, but after this last couple of weeks Amman feels quite reserved and conservative, and definately male dominated, while Syria and in particular Damascus felt so much more Mediterranean and diverse, and so a much easier place for me to be ....

For example, there were many things that I saw in just a few days in Damascus that would be perfectly normal in Brighton or Marseille, but that made me do a double take because I haven't seen them since arriving in Amman ...

- lots of women on the streets, and plenty of them with no head covering and even some quite foxy outfits (although Damascus has a large Christian community, they were certainly not all Christian ...)


- lots of families with their children out in the Old Town's markets and restaurants into the small hours, with children tucking in while Mum and Dad share into a nargileh (water pipe)

- men and women holding hands in the street (not common, but saw this three or four times)

- lots of women smoking, especially nargilehs

- women flirting with men in the street for fun on a girls night out

- bars with men and women, gay and straight, funky music and a relaxed atmosphere ...


More generally, I wandered for days and didn't feel like I was attracting any attention - either as a foreigner or as a woman. And yes, I know this may be partly because they're more used to tourists and travellers in Damascus, but it still was a stark contrast to wandering around downtown Amman where all their tourist attractions are, which is fine if you just ignore the stares and don't understand the occasional rude comments from the men (almost all men) in the street. Many times a day people said 'welcome' and smiled at me as they walked past in Syria, which has never happened to me in Amman. And while people in Amman have been kind when I have asked them for help or been introduced to them in some way, it's certainly been quite rare for someone to strike up a conversation or just smile for no reason, seeming to prefer to keep a (polite?) distance.

The upshot of it all is that I'm finding it really hard to meet people in Amman. Jordanian men seem to prefer to keep their distance from women outside their family circle, unless they have some acceptable reason to interact with them such as working together or while shopping in a market. And as for the women here, the only ones I've been able to sit and talk to have been the women who work at the Embassy and female teachers at my school - and outside of Amman, I've barely even seen any women at all.

I don't know what to make of it all really, and I don't want to jump to any conclusions - I know it's early days, my colloquial Arabic is still holding me back, and it might just be a case of not having found the right way to go about finding a space for myself in Amman society that isn't limited to the (welcoming and supportive) expat community. But compared to places I've lived in before, and even to the country next door, I know that I don't feel as comfortable and am not as optimistic about one day feeling like I 'fit in' or at least have a place in society here that I'm happy with. Never have I missed my friends soooooooooooo much ...