Amman and Around

Yesterday morning, Dan and I were picked up at the Cleopetra door by a minibus to Amman. The ride was a bit cramped, but it was only 5 JD and was quick and clean. The bus was actually the same model as our team bus from Egypt, although I can assure you it has a much more suitable horn. We took a cab from the bus station to the Abbasi Palace, where we have been staying for the past couple days. It is run by a friendly and welcoming woman named Nejma, who also happens to be an honest businesswoman—she was furious when our cab driver accompanied us to the front desk, because he was hoping for a commission and she refuses to participate in such shady dealings. (It is common for cab drivers to be affiliated with certain hotels that give them kickbacks for bringing in customers.) This establishment isn't perfect—the overhead light in the room flickers on and off, and the bathroom is faintly redolent of sewer water. But our sheets are clean, our stuff is safe, we have free access to wireless internet, and we can hire cars for reasonable prices through Nejma and her network of trusted drivers. The other travelers here are interesting and friendly. Yesterday I met a guy who has been on the road for nine years, cycling across the world. Another Abbasi denizen had been traveling for four.

After cooling our heels for a couple of hours, Dan and I walked around downtown Amman. The Abbasi is only a short walk away from the ruins of a Roman theater, where we spent a good while climbing stairs, playing games with the theater's acoustics, and pretending to declaim before admiring Roman crowds. Sometimes I wish I had been around for the Second Sophistic, a time in the second century or so when rarefied language and well-crafted rhetorical smackdowns were the currency of brilliance.



Attached to the theater are two museums, one of which contains pieces of mosaics from Madaba and Jerash, ancient cities whose churches featured mind-blowingly cool mosaics on their floors. They weren't the most fascinating museums on the planet—one was closed, and the other was pretty small. But the mosaic fragments were a great warmup for what we did today.

This morning we left Amman for the day with a driver hired through the Abbasi. We also brought along Antony, a British traveler who had randomly been asked at the front desk if he wanted to go on "the tour." When he spontaneously accepted the offer, he ended up looking at churches with Dan and me all day. He was a great sport about it, and had all kinds of amazing travel stories to tell. It's surprising how many people live or partially live a travel lifestyle and spend months, even years, on the road.

Our first stop was Madaba, home of the famous map church. Most tour groups stop by the map mosaic and then bail in favor of other sites. This is apparently so common that our driver was shocked when we wanted to stick around in Madaba for more than about ten minutes. But in addition to the gorgeous Church of St. George (keeper of the map), there is also the Archaeological Park, which features more impressive mosaics, as well as the Church of the Apostles. We even stopped by the Catholic church for good measure, so we got to see some wild modern icons, too.



The mosaics we saw were fascinating. In addition to the map, which features multiple pilgrimage sites of relevance to ancient Christians, we saw some from another church that actually depicted other churches in a sort of keeping-up-with-the-neighbors display. The Church of the Apostles, despite its name, most prominently featured a mosaic of Ocean accompanied by fearsome sea monsters. I guess these artists knew what people actually wanted to look at!

Our next official stop was Mt. Nebo, the mountain from which Moses viewed the Promised Land that he could never enter. But in a classic moneymaking move, our driver insisted we stop off at a mosaic workshop. We walked in to see women in wheelchairs laboring away at mosaics in the tradition of those at Madaba, snapping stones into tiny pieces and gluing them in place with expert precision. Some mosaics are done in a new way with patterns and chemically-enhanced glue, but it is also possible to acquire mosaics assembled in the old style. Apparently a church in Miami commissioned a mosaic of the Last Supper, which will be shipped to them shortly. After a brief tour, we were of course led into a showroom and heavily encouraged to buy things. Even the small mosaics were monstrously expensive, so while it felt somewhat awkward to make no purchases after accepting a tour and praising the work of the handicapped women this business supports, we left empty-handed. Our driver was probably pretty ticked off, since no money spent meant no kickbacks for him.

Mt. Nebo was kind of disappointing, mainly because the primary attraction, a memorial for Moses crammed with more mosaics, was under renovation and inaccessible to the public. We fought with a tour group for access to the slim pickings that remained, then rushed out to look over the Holy Land before being overtaken by the crowd. There is a handy map to point the way to places in Israel like Bethlehem and Qumran, although it was foggy and I actually couldn't see much of anything. We did, however, make it up to the Church of Lot and Propertius, where Dan got to see a mosaic he cited for a paper this year.



Our last stop, Bethany, was the highlight of my day. There wasn't much ancient stuff there, at least not that we were allowed to see—the tour was instead a finely mechanized process designed to march us to the baptism site and then away again as efficiently as possible. No straying from the group was allowed, although Dan and I proved to be chronic stragglers. The whole area is packed with churches under construction, since many different denominations want to make their presence known in this area. Bethany has commonly been thought of as Jesus' baptism site since Late Antiquity, so the place has been spiritually significant for quite some time.

At the "official" baptism pool, we were allowed to go down to the nasty, stagnant water and splash it all over ourselves—and we promptly did. Dan and I let the more aggressive pilgrims go first, then took our own sweet time. People were splashing the water all over their faces and heads, and some were dipping necklaces and clothing in as though the water could confer extra blessings on the immersed objects. There was a moment of total hilarity when one of the men in our group tried to step into the pool and then lost his sandal to the muck at the bottom. He got it back, but by then his leg looked like something straight out of Swamp Thing.



When we got back to Amman, Dan and I had a relaxed evening filled with hummus, falafel, foul, and pirated DVDs. Tomorrow we're going to Jerash.