Project GO Jordan 2017

This week we did our excursion to the southern areas of Jordan to wrap up the Northeastern Dialogue part of the trip. Our first destination was to Dana Nature Preserve. On the way we stopped at a rest stop/gift shop/restaurant to eat lunch. It's always strange thinking about businesses that thrive entirely from people in transit stopping to eat, use the bathroom, and whatnot. In a sense, a lot of towns in this region only exist because of the Hajj to Mecca and the Silk Road, such as Ma'an in the south of Jordan. So it almost seems like a continuation of an existing tradition. It was a big place too, so there must be a fair number of travelers on this route to sustain such a business. It's also strange to think about gift shops in the middle of Jordan having souvenirs for places that are dozens to hundreds of kilometers away, like souvenirs for Petra, Jerash, Aqaba, etc. I'm imagining having a snow globe of Petra or something in your living room, actually from a rand

1) Ramadan hours for restaurants get strange. Our local Avocado, which sells burgers and various kinds of juices and shakes, is open at first from 3PM-8PM. Iftar is usually around 7:45PM, so Avocado closes shortly after Iftar. It then closes for three hours, until it opens again from 11PM to 2AM, presumably after the employees eat Iftar and pray Taraweeh. Fortunately, most businesses on their storefronts have signs that explain their Ramadan hours. 2) We have a cafe right across the street called Al Shareef Cafe. Every other night, after around 10 or 11PM, we can hear occasional cheers from the men in the cafe from a soccer game. Even across our apartment, we can hear the cheers as if we were in the cafe. 3) There have been lots of fireworks set off since Ramadan started not too far from our apartments. Almost every night we hear fireworks going off. The fireworks are the small kind meant for private use on the streets, the kind that they sell in the United States coming up to J

I've never been to a Jordanian church before. So today I visited a Catholic church in Amman for Mass with other members of the Project GO program. The church we visited was كنيسة الفرير (Church of the Brother/frère? Something like that), a Catholic Church in the middle of Amman. This church was a short walk from Firas Circle (دوار فيراس) which seems to be a commercial area with plenty of shops, both cheap and bougie. Mass was actually quite similar to those that I've attended in America. Since all Catholic churches abide by the regulations and traditions of the Catholic Church, it's not entirely surprising. The priest gave the service in English and spoke with an American accent. The attendees largely looked of foreign origin, either American/British/Western European or Southeast Asian. The church items were in Arabic, including the depiction of the Passion. In a sense it felt like a bubble of English in the Arabic-speaking country outside. The sculpture and artwork visua

Today was our excursion to see the ruins of Jerash and Ajloun. We first arrived at Jerash, an ancient city built by the Greeks and later rebuilt by the Romans. It remains one of the better preserved Roman cities, especially in the region. As a result, the ruins of Jerash are pretty extensive and feature many of the key features of ancient Roman cities, such as the Amphitheater, Nymphonium, baths, hippodrome, etc. As a result, our tour around Jerash was quite a hike. Throughout the Roman city, we could still see remains of the Greek presence before the Romans. For example, certain columns in the city center were built in a Greek style. Lunch was at the Green Valley (الوادي الأخضر) a restaurant in the nearby area in the modern town of Jerash. Jerash the ruins was a large city, part of the Roman Decapolis, with about 25,000 residents. However, from any point in the ruins we could see the expanse of the modern town of Jerash, that stretched on far greater than the ruins. We then ar