Our journey really begins 3 days before our flight to Amman, as we worked feverishly to clean our apartment in preparation for leaving it behind for our return to voluntary homelessness. We scrubbed to the very minute our landlord came for the walkthrough, finally stepping into our next life at 3:30 in the afternoon with just enough time to grab a fast lunch and a few small errands before making the bus for NYC and then the train to Queens. Most of it went quite well – save for the need to prune through about a third of the things we brought along in order to meet airline carryon requirements. We pride ourselves on being light travelers, but with so many other things to worry about prior to departure, we had loosely thrown together our travel gear knowing we’d have to make some hard choices before leaving.

An 11 hour flight is never something to look forward to – but in the case of our Qatar airline trip via Doha, it was actually a breeze. It helped that we had booked a weird magic seat that didn’t have a seat in front of it, so my long, ungainly legs could stretch, unfold and resituate continuously. Plus, it was easy access to the restroom for both of us. We’re also pretty big fans of airline food. I don’t mean to say we think it tastes great, though it’s not always terrible, but there’s always something really fun and magic about it. You never quite know what you’re going to get. Lucy had chosen ahead of time Vegetarian Oriental (Hindi) Meals. The first arriving as some kind of stewed vegetables and rice, pesto pasta salad, a standard bread roll with cold/hard butter and strawberry jam, a block of tillamook cheddar, a cup of cheesecake pudding, a plastic foil-top cup of water, and a Twix and a cup of white wine. The middle meal, I guess you’d call it the midnight snack, was a chilled vegetable sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a small tub of Haagen Dazs strawberry ice cream. For the final meal, which would be breakfast, Chana masala with rice, a croissant, orange juice, yogurt, fruit salad, a wedge of laughing cow cheese, strawberry jam, hard butter, and another Twix.

We’re probably the only people in the world that care about airline food… and I can go on and on about the advances in in-flight entertainment, but ENOUGH! On with the program…

Landing in Doha for the layover… well, I guess you kind of expect things to be vastly different arriving in the Middle East.. and for many it probably would have been a little bit of a cultural adjustment. Women in head to toe fabric, men in long thawb gowns and what have you. Thing is, living in West Philly for the past 4 years, we’d gotten really used to a very large black Muslim population, and it was entirely unremarkable to see a woman shopping for groceries with nothing but her eyes showing.

After a short 3 hour jump from Doha, we finally arrived in Jordan’s hilly capital, Amman.

Amman is not what anybody would call a pretty city. Most every house, whether new or a century old, is a simple sand colored pillbox, and they roll across the city, hill after hill, for as far as you can see. Small signs of comparative affluence and global aspiration arrive in the form of a large Starbucks and IKEA… though even on the quick ride from the airport, tent living goat and camel herders could be spotted.

Our Amman Airbnb was ridiculously well located – within walking distance to city center, and to the handful of attractions that Amman is noted for. That said, Amman is so incredibly hilly with crisscrossing roads that are almost impossible to untangle, even with a gps instructions, we would constantly find ourselves pointed in the wrong direction, climbing the wrong hill, or altogether clueless in general.

Getting lost, however, is probably the best way to show off Amman’s most remarkable feature. The people here are ridiculously friendly and inviting! While being lost in any city in the “developing world” would be a very unwise situation to find yourself in, Amman is a remarkably friendly town. We felt welcomed constantly… hell, we didn’t just feel welcomed, we were literally constantly welcomed. Wherever we went, strangers with nothing to sell and with no reason to say anything welcomed us to Jordan, asked where we were from, and seemed to honestly be glad we were visiting. We found Ammanis to be winking practical jokers, and always ready to return a smile. (Note that English is widely spoken throughout Jordan, though often at a very, very basic level.)

The big attraction around here is “The Citadel” – a complex of archeological remnants that are a little difficult to sum up because history in the Middle East is a really complicated series of conquests and conquests and conquests and forgetting and rediscovering. In the case of Amman and The Citadel, there was Bronze Age occupation, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian occupation. Eventually the Greeks took it up in 331 BC and renamed it from the original Rabboth-Ammon to… wait for it…. Philadelphia. Rome took it up in 30 BC and way later it came under Muslim rule in 661 AD. Eventually it took a nose dive and was kind of occasionally used for another several centuries by Bedouins and nomadic farmers until it was “rediscovered” in 1878. So the key idea here is that Amman’s citadel is considered to be one of the worlds oldest continuously inhabited places.

Currently observable on the site is the Roman Temple of Hercules (featuring a few standing pillars and a very rad couple of fingers from the big man himself), a Byzantine church and the Umayyad Palace. The citadel was also just a fantastic place to gaze across the many echoing hills of Amman.

Speaking of echoing, one of the famously distinctive things about the Muslim world is, of course, the broadcasting of the calls to prayers 5 times a day. The internet tells me it’s 5 times a day, however looking up a list of the official prayer times (it moves daily based on the sun’s location), it looks like there’s 7 slots. Amman is my introduction to this experience, and I find it absolutely breathtaking. (Note – I’m writing this about a week later, and I’ll confirm that I have still yet to experience anything as beautiful and otherworldly as the prayer in Amman). The loudspeakers attached to buildings and perched on minarets, scatter through the city and over its hills for miles and miles. Timing is not really a science – An Imam begins to sing some miles away, the sound moves in waves through the valleys, as other minarets fire up in combinations of delayed unity or call-and-response harmony. Eventually one near you launches its voice, and dominates your awareness, and then others close by, and other distantly. It pours around you and over you, and freezes time for several minutes. Eventually straggling voices with their own way of judging the position of the sun or the time of the night show up to the choir, some several minutes later. Research has not told me much about these events and I don’t know if each voice is unique, from a unique singer. If they are, they are keenly aware of the voices of each other and work together to weave a delicious and complex tapestry of sonic devotion. As the times for prayer are throughout the day and the night, the most beautiful and striking moments to catch these events are in the absolute still of late, late night or the pre-dawn morning.

Amman’s other attractions include a well preserved Roman theater, a lively city center, and the hip and cosmopolitan “Rainbow Street” with its eateries and hookah lounges.

Though we had a few nice meals, including a massive feast of the old classics at the best spot in town with hummus, baba-g, falafel, pita, and tons of tabbouleh, the standout culinary experiences for us were the ubiquitous and incredible Arabic coffee (Turkish coffee with cardamom) served damned near everywhere and the very special Kunifeh dessert, of which there is nothing like it. A fresh hot and crisp cake of find semolina, drenched in a steaming syrup with melted cheese on the bottom layer. I’ve had nothing else quite like it and we were lucky enough to find a group of people standing around with paper plates of the stuff at what turned out to be the best place in town to have it.