Amman, Jordan

One weird thing about Jordan is the money. The currency is the dinar, but everybody when speaking English, locals and expats alike, calls it the "JD." It's weird because it's divided into "fils" like the dollar is divided into cents, but it's not divided into 100 fils, it's divided into 1000 fils! However, must prices under 1 dinar are quoted in "piasters," a unit of curreny equaling 10 fils. Most coins are denominated in piasters, but there is both a 5 piaster and a 50 fil coin. Taxi meters display the entire fare in fils. I'm staying in East Amman, the bad part of town, but West Amman is beautiful. The rumors are true: big mansions, everybody speaks very polished, flawless English and there's not a headscarf in site. There are, however, a *few* clues that you're still in the Middle East:
1)people smoking inside McDonalds
2)quiet, residential streets patrolled by commando-like soldiers with automatic weapons
3)posters of wounded children in Gaza
4)mosque on wheels - this one's a little hard to explain so bear with me. The streets were completely deserted when suddenly this truck comes rolling through covered with banners in angry looking Arabic writing. The only words I recognized were "Islamic" and "Gaza." They had a big loudspeaker broadcasting some fire and brimstone message that was recorded, but occasionally an actual preacher in the car would take the microphone and broadcast his own message. I really wanted to take a picture, but the Ayatollah Khomeini looking guy was staring right at me so I wasn't really sure it'd be a good idea.
Although in both Egypt and Jordan I've seen a few people walking dogs, both Arabs and expats, the majority of Muslims hate dogs. Apparently Mohammed said they were minions of Satan or something. I observed a guy walking past a stray dog who kept following him and barking. He was obviously very afraid of it and kept trying to scare it away. Finally he threw a rock at it and started running like crazy. I then passed by this furry little minion of Satan without incident. One of my priorities right now is to get a visa for Kazakhstan. This is hard because Kazakhstan only has a few embassies abroad. At first glance, there was no Kazakh embassy in Jordan. But I digged a little further and managed to come up with the name of the street and two telephone numbers of the supposed Kazakh Embassy. Both phone numbers were disconnected (you do not call them because they do not have telephone!) and nobody had ever heard of the street. Later I did find an online listing from the Kazakh government of all their embassies. Each country where they had an embassy was listed followed by the address and telephone number. Except one country, which just said "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" and no other information. I get the feeling that this embassy used to exist but was closed down. At the end of the day I found a hip cafe with lots of cute Jordanian girls smoking "argila" as it's called here. So which country has better looking women? I'm gonna go ahead and say that Egypt and Jordan are about equal, but that in Egypt about 90% of women wear the scarf, as opposed to about 50% in Jordan. If anybody studying Arabic is reading my blog (I doubt it, but I'm gonna write this anyway) the Jordanian dialect is baffling. Not because it's hard to understand, but because it's a mix of other dialects. In Aqaba and Petra I heard interdentals pronounced quite a bit, but everybody says that in Amman they are not pronounced. Well, I've heard them pronounced here, even by people who claim to be Palestinian. I suppose some of the others pronouncing them could have been Iraqis, but I doubt it. I haven't even been able to tell how they pronounce the "qaf," except that Omar told me in his town, Madaba, it was pronounced in the traditional manner. Both marhaba (always pronounced without the tanwin) and ahlan wa sahlan technically mean welcome, but the way they're used here is that marhaba is more like hello and ahlan wa sahlan is more like welcome in the English sense of the word. The thing is that most Arabs use the welcoming phrase a hell of a lot more than Americans would. For instance, when entering a shop or restaurant, you are always told "Welcome" here where as it would usually be "Hello" in the US. The result is that "ahlan wa sahlan" is definitely the prefered greeting and used whenever it makes sense. I've heard "ya hala" quite a bit and it seems to be a response to a greeting. I've also heard "salam" used a few times as a greeting, but I get the feeling this is more colloquial and folksy, but I could be completely wrong. Both ma3 as-salamah and a simple "salam" are used for goodbye. The response to marhaba is ahlan. Tomorrow I'm gonna try to get to Damascus insha'allah. I hope to have a full post written in Damascus tomorrow, but if Bashar doesn't want this then there's nothing I can do. So I'll check in hopefully tomorrow, if not, who knows when?