Amman, Jordan

Amman sparkles at night. Millions of lights wink from the soft white-stone block-homes that crowd the tall hills and narrow valleys that make Jordan’s capital city.

Tonight snow will fall, and the roads up those hills will be slick with slush.

I am at Books @ Café, an English bookstore and Internet café in the district Jebel Amman, “Amman Mountain.” I avoid expatriate hang-outs when I travel, but here the Internet is fast and cheap, and I can video-chat with my family.

Psychedelic red retro-flowers float on the bright blue walls of this hip haven for ex-pats and “Westernized” Jordanians. I’ve been told police know this place as a den for homosexuals and Satanists. Thankfully, the pancakes are fantastic, and the Latin music in the background has a good beat.

I am here as a cultural researcher, and I think the toughest thing about Jordan is to not over-analyze it. Jordanians know exactly who they are and how they live. Naturally. If I tie my brain in knots trying to understand life here, I’ve already missed the meaning.

Actually, the most deceptive thing about my host family’s lifestyle is its casual familiarity.

My host family clearly did not write the “Rough Guide to Jordan,” which describes very strict and gender-segregated customs.

My host brother, 20-year-old Muhammad, and host sister, 18-year-old Batoul, read the customs section and laughed. Those very traditional social rules exist only in the villages now, they told me.

But some households here are stricter than mine. An American guy I know was not allowed into the women’s section of his host home until they trusted him. But in my manor-like house, I’m allowed anywhere. I can even hang out with my host sister without supervision — something I never expected to do after reading the guidebook.

Maybe I subconsciously expected more desert and more veils, because I am always fighting the urge to label things part of the “Real Jordan” or “fake” imitations of “Western” ways.

Jordan is a poor country with a rich, powerful minority. Half the country’s five million people identify as Palestinian refugees, even if they were born here.

The country is growing because of foreign aid and Gulf money. Many Jordanians work in the wealthy Persian Gulf — known here as the Arab Gulf. The money flows back to build things like Mecca Mall — nicer than the complexes near my Georgia home.

In Mecca Mall you’ll find an occasional headscarf, but generally the traditional clothing of Jordan appears to have been shed by the shoppers. Many of the young women walk in groups wearing the latest fashion — tight-fitting and dark — and smile at passersby with dark eyes.

But if you take your eyes off the sparkle of new growth, you’ll see another side of Jordan through the taxi window.

One cold morning, I drove past a mother wrinkled and wrapped tightly in shawls washing her hands in a puddle, while her two small sons held the trash bags in which they put their scavenged goods.

Another day, I walked through the crowded street-markets of Old Amman, browsing over the fabrics, fruit and Syrian woodwork. Men brushed by exchanging rapid, gruff Arabic. Scarved women strode past, speaking soft Arabic like water rushing over the rocks of a low creek. Another woman walked nearby covered from head to toe.

Old tradition and poverty are here especially in the crowded eastern half of the capitol, but they seem hard to find in my new elite world of booming Western Amman. And as I try to accept all I see and hear as parts of a complex whole, I struggle too to understand what I thought I’d find.