Saturday life

Fridays are sacred in Muslim countries, shops are closed, people have the day off and it is the time to visit your relatives, have dinner with your family and so on…after the sacred friday, it is time to go out, shop around and enjoy the summer. In Amman things does not work exactly like that since on friday quite a lot of things are open, and modern Jordanians rather than visit their relatives go out to have a beer with some friends. Nevertheless, Saturday is still the shopping-day so I spent the day doing as Jordanians do. Around King Hussein Mosque, right downtown Amman are the best streets to get lost and wander for hours, watching Jordanians buying everything and having food and tea. Several things worth a sight. Tea-boys are everywhere serving, of course, tea, and sometimes food to the shop-keepers. They don’t use to be older than 14 and are extremely skilled to carry plates with ten boiling-temperature glasses. Another interesting thing are the shops, you can find anything you can imagine, they sell the stick that crown the dome of the mosques (I saw two shops dedicated to that), old-style tapes with middle eastern music hits, a shop that only sells pray-rugs or clothes for (conservative) Muslim women….everything that you could imagine is there. However, Amman lacks a proper Medina. The shops are along the street, with the cars passing by and without the shadow provided by the medina-roof. It is the problem of new cities, any attempt to reproduce a middle-ages medina are useless, so better keep it as it is and avoid any embarrassing  creation

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