My Rainbow

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. - Maya Angelou

Here's a herd of bicyclists that passed by my taxi one day to a lecture. I don't see too many of them around the traffic-crazed streets of Amman!

Things are changing. The night mist chills my house into a deep, damp cold until the sun rises and lifts the icy haze away, leaving only the inside of our house chilly. The rains slowly roll over Amman, signaling the beginning of winter. My roommates and I are debating how we should heat our apartment for the winter, so while we stall, we also freeze at night and early in the morning when I roll out of bed, getting ready for school. Buildings here are built of stone and concrete, so summer creates an inferno indoors while winter turns your home into an icebox. It always feels better outside than it does inside, so I take advantage of that frustrating phenomenon by going on walks around town.

The chill temperatures have chased the crowds away from Rainbow Street, the main stretch of road where my neighborhood’s social scene thrives. Now, the weekend nights feel more subdued, giving you a calm environment for a nice evening walk.

I went out last night with my friend from Jordan to walk around Rainbow. We enjoyed the slight breeze and the sights. The families slowly processing down the sidewalks, the young men congregating in the squares, the ice cream man making an upbeat percussion instrument out of his ice cream maker as he churns furiously.

Rainbow Street has become my street. I know it so well. At the beginning of the street, cars whir around al-Door al-Owel, the First Circle, from the traffic-clogged road that comes from the Second Circle. All this traffic slowly winds and honks its way into the narrow single-lane, cobblestone pavement that is Rainbow Street.

The traffic is an obvious indicator of the street’s popularity in the city. Cafés and boutique shops line both sides, indicating material wealth and prosperity, but the smaller joints highlighting local artwork and posters for alternative concerts show that this tiny thoroughfare shares a connection to the hip, underground art world that quietly thrives in Amman.

My favorite café is Turtle Green, which is quick walk to my place. Besides having addictive lemonade with mint, their calming atmosphere makes it a perfect place to relax after a stressful day. Farther down the street, I go to Café de Artistes for a quiet evening where I can have a candid conversation with someone and check out the latest happenings and concerts in the area. By the Café, Souk Jaraa opens seasonally on sunny Fridays and Saturdays as an arts-and-crafts market. I enjoyed many weekend excursions to the Souk, admiring the handiwork, tasting the vendors’ different delicacies, and watching the kids run around.

At the end of Rainbow, the street curves suddenly to avoid plunging down the hill’s steep drop-off. Stairs instead meet you at the curve and guide you, after several hundred steps, down to Downtown, the Balad, the busy hub of the city where East and West Amman converge into an action-packed center of commerce. I often take these stairs to meet friends for tea or to pick up a package from my Mom or to check out the many different stores that the Balad has to offer. You can find almost anything in the Balad.

More often, however, I’ll follow Rainbow’s curve to the Royal Film Commission, which houses a wide array of film screenings every week. Foreign films and independent documentaries throughout the world find their way to this small compound nestled on the hillside. During warmer months, the RFC will feature films outside in the perfectly quiet night air. The screen sits in front of a stunning view of East Amman, and the audience often finds it difficult to focus on the film itself with such a view, especially if fireworks go off. And then, at least once during every screening, the obligatory random cat will come strolling in front of the screen and make a shadow. But no one shews it away.

But more often, I pass the RFC to instead have brunch at Books @ Café, my preferred weekend morning hangout. Its spacious views grace the diners, who can relax on lounge couches and smoke shisha. The place has a nice, relaxed atmosphere, providing an open environment to chill with friends.

But tonight, my friend takes me to a different place. She takes me to “Wazzup Dog,” a trendy hotdog place with a creative list of condiments and splashes of graffiti covering the walls. As a former 10-year vegetarian, I’m embarrassed to admit how much I like this place. My friend smiles at my satisfaction and walks me home.

The shopkeepers whose shops line my street are gradually getting to recognize my face. They nod and smile their greetings, sometimes muttering a kind “salaam aleikum” as my friend and I pass. I feel that, slowly but surely, I am making a place for myself here, in hearts of friends and the pleasant greetings of my neighbors.

Now I’m home. I’m singing along to Disney songs with my roommates, writing this post and thinking about the heating situation. It’s all good.

Adventure

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Bertrand Russell

Many apologies for not posting for so long. I’ve been on many adventures that I’ve neglected to tell you about, and it’s about time that I tell you all about them.

During my first four weekends in Jordan, I traveled outside of the city and went on adventures.

On my first weekend, I traveled with a group called the Zikra Initiative (http://www.zikrainitiative.org/), which is an organization that focuses on connecting the socio-economically advantaged people in the city to the relatively disadvantaged country people. To nurture this exchange, the organization sponsors trips out to the countryside, where city dwellers learn the artistic traditions of basket weaving and bread making from the local villagers. Though this program is mainly meant for Jordanians, the language institute where I study has a connection with Zikra. Qasid thus encourages its language students, who primarily experience city life while in Jordan, to venture out with Zikra on day trips.

I decided to go, and I was so glad that I did. Besides learning how to weave baskets and make flat bread, I had engaging conversation with my teachers, who taught me Arabic words and smiled at my curiosity. After the lessons, we went to one of the teachers’ house for an amazingly delicious lunch of the flat bread we had just made along with a traditional tomato stew. We sat on plush cushions on the floor of the living room, ladling the tasty stew into our mouths with the flat bread.

Our guide then took us on a hike, asking us, “Is anyone afraid of heights?” We all shook our heads and followed him into the mouth of a wadi, which is a whimsically winding desert valley cut deep and narrow by a river. We soon realized that his question referred to a narrow stone staircase with a drop off each side and no railing. I’m afraid of death, I thought. I refused to look down and wobbled up the stairs. We followed the water path until the wadi terminated at a cascading waterfall, where a bunch of us ran under to cool ourselves off from the intense heat.

On my next weekend, I went with Jo Hiking (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSRBNabUsvw) to another wadi, Wadi Numeirah. I tagged along with a group from Nadi al-Shabab, or the Boys’ Club, which is kind of the Amman equivalent of the Boy Scouts. The boys had a lot of shenanigans up their sleeves, and oh goodness did they like to sing. They spent most of the ride to and from the wadi dancing and singing in the aisles of the bus. We sang while we hiked, we sang while our tour guides stopped for smoking breaks, we sang while we ate lunch. When they told me that the 3 kilometer hike would take all day, I was struggling to understand exactly how the most challenging of terrain could take that long. I didn’t realize that they had planned a 5-hour break in the middle of the hike to relax along the riverside and play games. Somehow, a portable stove, teapots, and a hookah set were produced. We had ourselves an outdoor café!

During my third weekend, my next and most intense wadi hike was Wadi Hassa. They told me to bring nothing that I would want to risk getting waterlogged. Small wonder, since the first act we had to do to actually get into the ­wadi was to jump off of a 5-meter-high waterfall and into raging waters. I closed my eyes, jumped, and screamed. There were no banks along this river, no place to rest our legs. All we had to keep us afloat were the lifejackets that the tour guide handed to us. The walls of the wadi were so steep that I began to wonder how we would ever get back out. I clung to my lifejacket until I got used to the challenges of the “hike,” which was more of an all-day swim. At some points, the stony river floor off the wadi would steeply drop or rise up, causing me to scrape my knees and run into the underwater boulders that invisibly lurked beneath me. At one point, we had to squeeze ourselves through a long and narrow cave, so claustrophobic that I had to wriggle through it. Exasperated tiredness soon replaced the exhilaration that I felt whenever the currents from suddenly appearing waterfalls sucked me away from the group and forced me to swim with all my might to keep myself from getting sucked off a cliff. I kept wondering how a medical team could actually evacuate me from this place if I broke a leg. Finally, the steep walls fell away, and the wadi calmed down into a gentle river. Along the riverside, we ended the hike by soaking our shaking legs in a natural hot springs.

By my fourth weekend, I was quite tired of hiking. So my roommates and I went with another friend to Umm Qais, the ancient Roman ruins of the town known back in Biblical times as Gadara. Based on descriptions in the Bible, this place was the setting for the story of where Jesus casts demons out of people and sends them into pigs. The pigs then went mad and ran themselves into the Sea of Galilee, which is now known as Lake Tiberias. You can see the lake on the hill of Umm Qais, nestled in the countryside among the expansive Northward views. If the pigs were to have run from Umm Qais to Lake Tiberius today, they would have crossed several contested borders and probably would have been shot by border guards before the end of their run. Umm Qais is about as northwest as you can go in Jordan because it lies at the borders of Israel and the Golan Heights. We had to keep asking people, we just could not believe that the Golan Heights were right there, the next hill over, less than a five minute walk down the valley and across the Yarmouk River. This place has become a popular pilgrimage sight for Palestinian refugees because of the symbolism of this place. So close, and yet so far.

So, this is what I did for the first four weekends of my time in Jordan. The last three have been more Amman-centered, but still fun and exciting, of course. More on that later.