Jordan: Amman

We only spent 1 day touring around Amman, really more like a half day, but we used it as our home base for 3 days and spent maybe another half day just sitting in traffic around the city during those 3 days. Some of the traffic lights in Amman never change, I swear.

The main thing we did was take a guided tour of the Citadel in Amman. It sits on top of one of the original 7 hills of Amman - now Amman has grown so much that it encompasses 23 hills (so our driver said - I never counted but looking at Amman I believe it). The Citadel is surrounded by a 1700-meter long wall and was, at different times in history, a fortress and/or an open space for commerce and politics.

The Citadel is old. Excavations have uncovered evidence that it was inhabited as early as 1650BCE. Also, the museum at the site, the Jordan Archaeological Museum, has well-preserved objects from 3,000-6,000 years BCE. Seriously. There is some really old stuff in Jordan, and a lot of the Citadel (along with many other areas) hasn't even been excavated yet.



The Citadel has been occupied by many different civilizations throughout history. One of the most notable occupations was by the Greeks in 331 BCE because they named the city Philadelphia. It was the first Philadelphia.

The major buildings at the Citadel are the Temple of Hercules, a Byzantine church, and the Umayyad Palace. The Temple of Hercules is pretty impressive - pictures below with Martin in the first one for perspective. The second picture shows the remains of a hand and elbow from a 13-meter tall statue of Hercules that used to stand there.







The church was built over with a domed audience hall when the palace was built in the 8th century (the roof of the audience hall was recently redone):





Some ruins of the palace with the domed hall in the background. It was built around 720CE and demolished by an earthquake around 750CE so it didn't last long.



Some of the most impressive things about the Citadel are the views of Amman you get from it.











Martin was obsessed with the huge flags in Jordan.  There was one in Aqaba, and then this one (below) in Amman.  The flagpole is 130 meters tall and the flag itself is 30 meters long.  It's the 7th tallest free-standing flagpole in the world, currently.  The tallest stands at 170 meters and is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

 

The Amman amphitheater is also visible from the Citadel:

We headed down there next on our tour.

Martin waiting for a show to start:

After hanging out at the Amphitheater for a bit and checking out the Folklore museum there (a bunch of dolls showing traditional Jordanian life and dress, I felt we had already learned most things we saw in there so I wasn't super impressed), we got to wander around downtown Amman on our own for a bit.  The shopping area of an Arab city is called the "souk", so we were wandering in the souk.  There were shops lining both sides of the street, and side streets were also filled with stalls.  Locals were wandering around the shops and buying whatever they needed.  Families tend to be big in Jordan so people shop at the cheap shops where everything is made in China in order to be able to afford everything they need.  These are the shops that are in the souk in Amman.  The shop owners actually play recordings nonstop that yell at people in Arabic about the deals in their stores.

Due to tourism being almost nonexistent in Jordan right now, we were the only tourists wandering around the shops of downtown Amman at this time.  We happened upon a big produce market filled with fresh fruits and vegetables and got several surprised looks from the vendors but most importantly all we heard while we walked through there was "Welcome!"  or "You are welcome", which is what every Jordanian said to us everywhere in Jordan and it really makes you feel like you're welcome and appreciated.  I can't describe how nice it was to talk to random people on the streets, people would just stop and ask us where we were from, we'd respond "America", and they'd respond "You are welcome" or "Welcome to Jordan", always in a warm and heartfelt way.  Even when I was wandering around the Amman airport right when we arrived trying to figure out how to transfer to our flight to Aqaba, which was rocket science by the way, I asked a security guard where to go and he told me then he smiled and said "Is this your first time here?  Welcome to Jordan."  Loved it.

Anyway, I only took one picture in the souk and it doesn't really capture anything about it, but here it is:

After our wander we stopped for some tea and coffee at Jafra, which was a nice coffee-and-shisha shop.  Since about 85% of Jordanians are Muslims who don't drink alcohol, they smoke instead and cafes are filled with people drinking coffee or smoothies while they smoke shisha.

After tea/coffee, our driver Firas drove us by some hole in the wall that he said served the best Shawarma where he bought us lunch (it was pretty good):

Then we went wine tasting at The Winemaker.  There are two wineries in Jordan - Zumot and Haddad, which make the Saint George and Mt Nebo labels, respectively.  The Winemaker, owned by Zumot, only carried Saint George, but it was enough.  Saint George has a TON of different wines.  We weren't impressed with any of the white wines but liked the Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon and would have bought a case or two but the winery doesn't ship so we could only buy what we could carry home with us in our luggage.

It's possible that the wine drunk at the last supper came from northern Jordan, but any ancient grape varieties have been lost and many of the grapes used for wine today have been imported from France.



Wine tasting made us hungry, so we headed back to our hotel, the Al Qasr Metropole Hotel, for dinner.  At the top of the hotel is the Vinaigrette restaurant, which has a great view and serves sushi.  So we helped ourselves to some of that.  And some more St George merlot.  :)




That was the end of our sightseeing day in Amman.

The Al Qasr was a great hotel to use as our home base but there weren't many restaurants in the area and we never felt like taking a cab downtown after sightseeing all day.  Vinaigrette, in the hotel, is a little pricey to eat at every night but it certainly had good food.  There was also a lounge on the first floor where you could order some simpler foods like pizzas and we ate there one night as well.

One night we didn't even need dinner because Firas bought us so much food throughout the afternoon.  We had happened to drive through his hometown (Ajlun) and he stopped and bought us flat bread fresh out of the oven - burning hot - and labaneh, which is a yogurt made from sheep's milk.  Then we spent the rest of our car ride back to Amman eating that (the best comparison I can make is that it was like a fresh bagel with cream cheese, but minus the sugar in the cream cheese).  He also stopped at a roadside stand and bought us some fruit to try - green cherries and some orange fruit I don't remember the name of.  The green cherries are fully ripe - they never turn red.  They were still crunchy and sour though.  Firas said they eat them with salt.  The orange fruit was soft and sweet and good.

After eating too much bread and labaneh, we went to the Royal Automobile Museum in Amman.  This museum is where the late King Hussein's car collection is showcased, to share his love of cars with the public.  Below are a few pictures from that.  I'm not a car person so this wasn't super impressive to me but there were a lot of cars in there.

 

Then, of course, we ate again!  Firas took us to a falafel place where he made me get not only a falafel-in-a-pita sandwich, but also a box with 10 falafel balls in it, fresh out of the vat of oil they were deep fried in.  I couldn't even finish half the sandwich and only ate half of the falafel balls as well.  But it was all SO. GOOD.  I would go back to Jordan just for the food.