A few hours in Amman

Before heading to Jerash I had about two hours to kill and the largest Mosque in Amman just happened to be half a block down the street from my hotel. So... I did what anyone in my situation would do. I went to the convenience store down the opposite way and bought some bottles of water.

...And then I went to the Mosque. It was my first Mosque and the experience was quite interesting. I went to the side gate and paid an entrance fee to a man who seemed a bit peeved at life and grilled me about whether or not I believed in God. "All MUST believe!" (Yes man, I believe in God. Calm down.)

Once I passed the raving inspection I was told to go downstairs to put on a robe and that when I entered the mosque I was not to remove my headscarf under any circumstances.

So I did. I put on the long, black, shapeless mumu, wrapped my head in a headscarf and wandered through the series of gift and craft shops on the lower level all the way back to the upper level, where I removed my shoes and entered the King Abdullah mosque.

Those aren't my shoes...

You know how when you think about Mosques in the Middle East - how they're crazy ornate and intricate and covered in gold and gorgeousness? Well. You should know. Jordan is not the country you should go to if you want to find Mosques like that.

Jordan is a very young country. And they don't have oil. So they're not dripping in wealth. So the King Abdullah Mosque is, as Mosques go, quite plain. Very interesting, but plain. So I wandered a bit in the big, empty room and then made my way back downstairs to remove my robe.

The robe thing was interesting to me, being a woman raised in California - a very liberal, women-empowered state, ya know. Part of me protested it. As any woman really ought to do. But both the traveler and sane part of me went with the "when in Rome..." part of traveling. The part that doesn't get you imprisoned or killed for breaking laws and traditions engrained in a people since the dawn of time. So yes, I wore a burqua. And a headscarf. The headscarf I wore nearly every day. Because I'm blonde. And I don't like being stared at by EVERYONE and their donkey.

Anyway, enough of the tangent.

Mosque. Check.

Gift shops and one cup of very, very strong, very bitter chamomile tea and one chain-smoking store clerk (this was to be my re-indoctrination into the smoke-filled world outside of California... It's brutal every time!).

Later in the day... Jerash (See previous post). Check.

That evening - meeting with my tour group, got to meet everyone. Everyone seemed cool... Check.

So we all went to dinner at a traditional Jordanian restaurant. A great, cheap place that offered up my first taste of Falafel (YUM!) along with great hummus, flatbread, gorgeous tomatos and cucumbers and french fries (yes, french fries). It was hearty and surprisingly tasty for being so monochromatic. The best part, I was to discover over the next few days, of Middle Eastern food is that it's SALTED. Americans don't bloody salt their food. It's bland. Jordanians and Egyptians use salt. Liberally. And its SO GOOD. Yum.

I like salt.