Amman, Jordan

We've spent the last couple days of our trip in Amman. There's not that much tourist stuff to see here.

Did the walking tour from the Lonely Planet, which took about two hours. Took a taxi to the top of the Citadel (the Roman ruins at the top of a hill overlooking Amman). It was okay, not as impressive because we were at Jerash the day before. There's good views of the Roman Theatre along the walking tour, so we didn't bother to go inside.

Wandered through the fruit and vegetable souq and some other markets.

Had lunch at Hashem Restaurant, a local legendary falafel place. It was okay, and I suppose you have to eat there once if you visit Amman. There were more locals than tourists.

Had dessert (kunafa) at a little place in an alley with a huge lineup. It was excellent, a honey cake on top of cream cheese smothered in a sweet sauce, sprinkled with crushed pistacios.

We had plans for 6pm to meet a friend of Brendan's (Mohammad) who now lives in Amman, so we got home and cleaned up.

Mohammad met us at our hotel, and we drove out to Rainbow St, a trendy street with lots of cafés and restaurants and galleries.

Mohammed grew up in the area, and actually wrote a book Old Houses of Amman, based on the history of the houses on and around Rainbow St. He gave us a walking tour (much better than the Lonely Planet), and then we had some tea at one of the cafés and chatted away. It was cool to get a local's view, it's otherwise a bit risky to talk about some subjects like politics with strangers while traveling.

The next day was Friday, so we planned the day around things that were open on Fridays (lots is closed). Unfortunately even though the hours said it should be open, the National Gallery of Fine Arts was closed. So we walked up to Rainbow St, had an excellent lunch at La Calle (an Italian place), and Turkish coffees at another place.

We returned to the area for dinner at Cantaloupe, a new restaurant on the 4th floor of some building. The appetizers were pretty interesting, we shared cantaloupe and feta cheese with pesto, and bresaola with roca leaves (tastes a bit like arugula). Bresaola is cured beef, there's no pork served anywhere in Jordan.

Today we had plans to visit the Art Gallery again, except it rained for the first time on our trip. Before the rain, we did get to Darat al-Funun, a privately funded art gallery. It took a bit of searching for the place. We ran into some other tourists walking around lost with guide book in hand who were also looking for the place, the Lonely Planet maps are terrible.

(The Lonely Planets have been getting progressively worse since they were bought by the BBC. The best thing I could say about the Jordan edition is that it had some blank pages for notes. We only bought it because the Rough Guide's updated edition for Jordan was published two days after we left Canada).

We're now back at the hotel, catching up on reading. Our flight is at 5am (all Europe departures are around this time) so we have a taxi arranged for 2am. It's sort of a waste of a hotel room, but really the only option.