What is this little Jordanian mannequin trying to tell you?
“If you wear this outfit, the school bully will steal your lunch money and give you a beatin’ you will never forget!!”
(btw, I’m not sure if the store owner caught me taking this picture or not, but the next time I went, there was a big black moustache glued over the damaged parts!)
Posted in Jordan, Uncategorized
Drivers use their horns a lot here. Sometimes the horn-blowing is directed to other drivers, and sometimes it’s directed to pedestrians (or animals) who are in the road, or look like they might be about to walk onto the road. Or sometimes a taxi driver without a passenger will honk at pedestrians to alert them that he is available to pick them up.
Well, the other day I was walking and a passing car started honking loudly. At a pedestrian? No. Another driver? No. A cat? No. He was honking at a large empty water jug, moments before he ran it over! A bunch of construction workers who also witnessed the scene burst out laughing.
Posted in Jordan, Uncategorized
I have a ladder that came with the apartment. I was climbing it to change a light bulb and noticed it said “made in Jordan” all the way on the top, where it usually says “this is not a step.” I wonder why it’s on the top. They didn’t think I’d want that little tidbit of information BEFORE I made the big climb?
Usually, when the calendar changes over to February, I start salivating. That’s because I know that Cadbury eggs will be in the stores soon. I wasn’t sure I’d get them here, but I found some in Safeway yesterday. Of course I picked up a bunch of them! Lo and behold, when I got to the cash register, they said the bar code was incorrect and took them from me. I didn’t even get to keep one of them! Maybe I can get some later after they fix the bar codes. That’s a lot of little bar codes.
Posted in Jordan
Does anybody besides me think that’s funny? Actually, a funnier picture would have been the three full-grown men having a snowball fight in the street in front of the shops. Or the forty-something year-old man asking my opinion of the snowman he’d just made. But I guess taking a picture of that would have been kind of rude!
Posted in Jordan, Just for Fun
There have been two or more cats fighting outside my window for at least a week now. Sometimes they sound like kids, but then they make distinctly cat-like yowls. If I catch another mouse, I’m going to throw it out the window to add some fun to their party!
Oh, I start teaching English tomorrow! I hope I can do a good job.
Speaking of cats…
“At the beginning of her introduction to Lorraine Chittock’s book Cats of Cairo, Annemarie Schimmel wrote: “When the British orientalist E. W. Lane lived in Cairo in the 1830’s, he was quite amazed to see, every afternoon, a great number of cats gathering in the garden of the High Court, where people would bring baskets full of food for them. He was told that in this way, the qadi (judge) fulfilled obligations dating back to the 13th-century rule of the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars. That cat-loving monarch had endowed a “cats’ garden” where the cats of Cairo would find everything they needed and liked. In the course of time, the place had been sold and resold, changed and rebuilt; yet the law required that the sultan’s endowment should be honoured, and who better than the qadi to carry out the king’s will and take care of the cats?” Continue reading “Cats in Islamic Culture…”
Posted in Animals, Jordan, Just for Fun
When your gas heater runs out of gas, have any of you ever continued sitting in front of it with your hands outstretched, as if it would do any good?
Posted in Jordan, Just for Fun
There’s GRASS in Amman! Nice GREEN grass! Must be from all the nice rain we’ve been getting. I’m shocked!
Posted in Jordan
In Jordan. The trip was short and busy! I passed my defense and exam, so that’s done! I still have to have it bound and shipped to IU. It was nice to see grass after so long, and all the autumn leaves. And some birds besides sparrows and pigeons. And my family. And Hersheys chocolate! I did make it to Bloomington Bagel Company for breakfast before my exam, but decided not to go to Jiffy Treet (for them, I’ll suppress my annoyance regarding intentionally misspelled words) afterward since it was cold. Now I’m back in cold Jordan, trying to force myself to leave the study (the heater’s in here right now) and go clean the kitchen.
Posted in Jordan, research and writing, Travel
…I got cornmeal at Safeway Shmeisani today! It’s Aunt Jemima brand, and it’s with the baking supplies. Of course, it’s priced way more than what we’d pay in the US, because they know that we suckers corn-loving Americans will buy it. I’ve gotta have my polenta! Now I just have to get some decent halal sausage to go in it that doesn’t taste like bologna!
There’s not too much birdwatching in Amman. Mostly we see a lot of sparrows and doves, both the grey and brown varieties. I guess you need either a lot of trees and/or a lot of water to have a lot of bird varieties. But yesterday I did see this beautiful bird (like the one above) outside my window, in the pine trees. It’s a bee eater (a European one), which makes sense because there are a lot of bees swarming in that tree all the time.
I identified the bird by going to this page. This guy has a lot of great bird pictures (that’s where these pics are from). By using his site, I was also able to identify a bulbul (like the one below) outside my window last month. Unfortunately, neither the bulbul nor the bee eater has returned. I hope they do.
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