Yeah, you read that right.

One thing I insisted on finding upon arrival in Amman was a place we could call our local. Somewhere cheap, pleasant and not too far out of the way. As spit-and-sawdust as possible, preferably. The Doors Cafe doesn’t exactly tick all of those boxes, but somehow it’s become our local anyway. A glamorous clientele, decent music and more shisha varieties than an acid-trip rendition of Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat. I’m no shisha fiend – a bad reaction to my first attempt in Essaouira has left me cautious – but I’m not averse to trying. But last night’s offering was just as bonkers as Andrew’s green egg surprise: pigeon shisha. It had to be one of the only ones that wasn’t translated, which I guess is why Andrew went for it. The waiter looked bemused and asked him if he was sure about the zaghlul, before sighing and walking off. I don’t know all that much about hookah culture, but I thought there was an emphasis on sweetness, right? Instead I got a lungful of what can only be described as barbecued bird. I could have saved myself a dinar and inhaled grill smoke. Jordan just keeps throwing these curveballs at me. I’m regretting being forced into this position less and less.

As for there being nothing to do in Amman, well, I’m beginning to see why people say that. Based where we are, up in the wealthier residential parts of the city, there isn’t exactly much in the way of entertainment outside of the cafe scene, especially during Ramadan. But bother what people say. As usual, I’m determined to ignore well-meaning advice and blunder into the future, living each day as it comes. Fortunately, Amman isn’t short on like-minded souls. I found myself talking Spain, Childish Gambino and American politics with a star of a Texan girl whilst listening to Antonio Banderas back in his early singing days. One of the things I enjoy most about travel is the music scene; not just the local stuff, but sharing music with fellow travelers I meet along the way. Music’s just such a wonderful way to meet people. It’s a next-level boon that takes you straight to the soul of the person you’ve just met. There’s simply no other way of putting it: it’s magical. Even as I write, I can hear Andrew playing his flute in the room next door. I kind of wish I’d brought my violin with me, and I haven’t thought that in a while.

Apologies for the depth there. That could very well be the shisha talking. Until the next time. BB x

My housemates will vouch for me when I say that my cooking last year was sporadic, if improvisational at best. But I genuinely never thought I’d see the day when I sat down to dine on a dish of green scrambled eggs. 

Of all the little aspects of day-to-day life in the Middle East, it surprises me that groceries that are some of the most fiddly things to come by. Not for want of availability – there’s plenty of fruit shops – but compared to other amenities, fruit and vegetables are annoyingly expensive. So far the only good deal we’ve come across are the watermelons: £1 a throw for a mammoth refresher that has kept at least five of us going for days. Oranges, quite unlike Morocco, are pricey and bitter. I guess it’s a seasonal thing, and it’s an established fact that Jordan has a serious water shortage crisis on its hands. So why the watermelons…? On the plus side, bread and hummus are cheap, and a falafel wrap at the local falafel joint is about 45p; a neat filler in the hours between iftar and suhuur when we would-be fasters are struggling to stay focused on the Arabic homework we’ve been set. Fasting and then studying for four hours in a row is intense: how these folks manage it is beyond me. I’d do it too, but I have the same issue with it as I do with going up for communion; that is, it’s little more than a gesture if I don’t really believe, and aping others without any heart strikes me as more than a little insincere. But what do I know?

Back to the green eggs and ham. So in the absence of fairly priced fruit and vegetables, our foodstuffs are a little lean for the time being. After last night’s almost tasteless scrambled egg attempt, Andrew had an unusual brainwave and threw in not just an overzealous garnish of salt but also the contents of two thyme tea bags. The salt levels may have been enough to give the Dead Sea a run for its money, but the thyme was a good move. At least it tasted of something this time around. The cutlery looks like it was last used to fish something out of the gutter, so we stuck to using the bread as a primitive fork. Between that, the kettle that turns itself on and off every five seconds and the building site next door, it’s hard to say we’ve got a good deal. But rolling out of bed in the morning to class in the building next door is pretty jammy, I’ll give you that.

Another hour of techno-assisted vocab busting and it’ll be time for suhuur. At half a dinar a throw, I’m game for another falafel wrap. Between them and the utter majesty that is Habiiba Confectionary, it’ll be a bitter war between my stomach and my teeth. The vegetable relief force better not be too long in coming. BB x

(Spoiler Alert: the meal below, scrambled eggs and okra, was our suhuur version and infinitely better. The aforementioned dish was literally green)

The Iftar party’s over in Doors. The tabla drummers and the Sufi dervish in his suit of lights – a very literal take on the toreador’s kit – did their show at half past ten, cavorting through the tables for half an hour, handing out three of four birthday cakes before wrapping up. The clientele, Amman’s glamorous mid-20s, are sat around tables bubbling away at shisha. Moodlit by strategically placed dimmer bulbs and fairy lights, it’s really rather magical. And talk about glamorous! These profiles are to die for. My Semitic nose obsession is on red alert. As for all these dark eyes and black tumbling locks… Somebody lock me up before I break my one year abroad rule.

Ok, ok, I was only kidding. I’m not about to declare my undying love for one of these Jordanian beauties tonight. Not when we’re still struggling to get to grips with the local dialect, which is supposed to be similar to Classical Arabic, but falls depressingly short of what I’d call a family resemblance. We made it out to a night at Doors on Eloise’s suggestion in order to try to practice that complex ‘Amia, and here we are watching Andrew sink further and further into a state of shisha-induced nirvana. There’s this glazed look of bemused superiority in his eyes as he takes another puff from the pipe. ‘Which one would you eat first?’ he asks, twirling the pipe nonchalantly between his fingers. He’s talking, of course, about the potions in Alice in Wonderland. Of course. I think I’ll give the shisha a miss tonight. 

Eloise turned up at ours earlier just five minutes after we’d got back to the apartment with our shopping. She’s had a rough time of it on the homestay front: she got lost on the way home and had to find her way back to the house in the dark alone, only to find her family on their way out for the night, without the dinner they’d promised her. Between that and their attempts to either speak to her in English or batter her with lightspeed ‘amia, she’s drawn the short straw. It could just be teething problems, of course, but that’s still an expensive dental bill at the end of the day. Scrambled eggs, kunafa and a couple of teas later and we’re on the road to recovery, but a conversation with a local is still proving hard to come by. We tried asking one of the waiters for the wifi password in Arabic. He just shot us an exasperated look and told us to speak English. He clearly didn’t have the time to deal with time-wasting travelers like us. Ila liqaa! BB x

I doubt I’ve ever felt so relieved by the prospect of a cold shower as I did when I half strode, half stumbled in beleaguered triumph over the threshold of my apartment last night. Over the course of twenty-four hours I think Andrew and I clocked about twenty-five kilometres of wandering, at least ten of which on the return journey from Amman’s infinitely busier town centre. The taxi ride in cost five dinar and took five minutes. Walking back was free – and it took just over two hours, dodging some of the most reckless drivers I’ve ever seen. The rule of the road seems to be one of ‘who dares wins’; naturally, this applies to both the cabbie and the pedestrian, an endangered species in its own right. Sometimes you’ve simply got to throw caution to the wind and run for it at the nearest opening, or else you’ll be waiting at the curb all night. Nobody’s about to stop for you unless you walk out in front of them.
Amman is, by all accounts, enormous. Unfathomably so for a country bumpkin like me. It sprawls across the hills for mile after dusty mile, a myriad identical sandy high rise blocks giving it height. Each street looks uncannily alike, and you can’t even use the minarets, lit up in green neon and rising above the chaos like radio masts, for landmarks, as there’s so many of them. Apparently there are post offices everywhere, but in the twenty five kilometres we covered today, we never saw so much a sign of one. The city folk were singularly unhelpful on that front, neither knowing nor caring where a post office could be found, let alone the quasi-mythical Ali Baba language school. After nearly four hours of burning alive under the midday sun in search of the place we sought refuge in an Internet cafe on the northern edge of town, only to find, to our disbelief, that a post office, market and Ali Baba itself were all within a stone’s throw of our apartment. Sod’s Law.

So, not exactly a stellar first impression of Amman. A handful of smiles amidst the faceless tide, but not quite as friendly as, say, Taroudant. Still, orientation today was a breeze and we have our first class tomorrow – together. Team Durham forever. At last, some structure in the chaos of city life. I never thought I’d see the day. BB x