Amman: I Grew to Love You, But You Didn’t Make it Easy

Amman is Jordan’s capital and largest city, and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. On first impressions it’s all over the place, but after finding your ground, all the pieces of the city seem to come together.

Arriving into Amman at around 8:00pm, we hopped into a taxi outside the airport after much squabbling and bartering with the driver for the reduction of our fare. He was taking us to our hotel for the next two nights, located in Amman’s downtown district.

Within five minutes of our taxi journey, mayhem began. In all my life, I have never witnessed so much traffic and congestion. The sounds of thousands of horns, the flashing of lights, people shouting to one another, people sitting on top of their vehicles waving flags, taxi drivers spitting too and fro. Football! Apparently the Jordinians go crazy for it, and their recent victory against Australia was the sole cause of the pandemonium that prevailed.

Eventually, as we passed on and the traffic died down, we arrived in downtown Amman; hungry, tired and relieved we had all made it through relatively unscathed.

Upon arriving at our ‘supposed’ hotel, we soon came to realise that it was the wrong hotel, and what followed was at least an hour and a half of tedious searching, being told in broken English that it was only two minutes away, ‘’Oh yes!” “I ask my friend” “We show you” “Welcome” (the latter you hear constantly in Jordan). 

Unfortunately, the majority of the time they took us right back to the wrong hotel.  About to give up, and deliberating with each other as to whether or not we should just book another hotel, out of the shadows of one of the many café’s in downtown Amman, appeared the silhouetted figure of a young, British university exchange student who kindly pointed us in the right direction – only two minutes away.

Down dark, unlit back streets away from the noise of pollution, we found the homes to arrays of stray cats and their kittens, feasting on the market’s leftovers and any other morsel of meat they could find. (I think the sanitation services are on strike because bin bags full of waste are part of Amman’s landscape!) Tucked away behind leftover market stands and bins, we found a roadside café and ate the most fantastic meal of chicken, humus, soup and salad for less than £3.50 each (looks can be deceiving!).

During the day, Amman becomes alive once again as hundreds of shops open their doors and welcome you inside to view their Aladdin’s cave of antiquities, rugs and carpets and taxidermy. The smell of spices flows through each street to the next, the scent steadily weaving itself amongst the flow of people and cars. “Please come and look”, “we have the best tea in the whole of Jordan!” provides a well needed break from the sun above, as the rays fall down and the heat glistens upon your brow.