Jan 28, 2005 10:49
Alex’s apartment cracks me up. Apparently it is virtually impossible to find a single-bedroom dwelling because the only reason the locals would move out of their family home would be due to marriage and child-rearing. This means that all the foreigners studying in Amman have ridiculously roomy apartments. Alex’s is in one of the posher parts of town and has amenities that other places might not. Take, for example, the bidet. I love it! I’m totally going to install a bidet when I have my own place. It even has an extendable squirter like those on kitchen sinks. The whole apartment has a pink theme that pervades the place. All the fixtures, wallpaper, paint, and tiles are pink, often with darker pink bows decorating them.
We are kind of in the penthouse at the top of the building but I am not sure if this is good or bad. We have a great view but when it’s windy it feels like the apartment is going to be ripped off the top of the building. All the windows make the uninsulated cinder-block construction even more difficult to heat, though they let in a lot of sunshine on nice days. There are two bedrooms, Alex’s with a queen bed and mine with a twin and both have enormous armoires for clothes. There is a washing machine in the kitchen, which is super convenient, but because there is no porch or roof access we have to dry the clothes by draping them across the radiators and in front of sunny windows.
Although we are almost in the burbs there are still many conveniences: a small grocery/market in front of the house adjoining a dry cleaner and small restaurant. When I’m in the US I miss these myriad corner markets with shop keepers who know your name and totally random assortments of goods. This neighborhood is primarily inhabited by military personnel and their family. In this prestige-oriented society serving in the military and ascending (via personal connections) to positions of power is probably the best way to insure a prosperous future for your family. We can see the intelligence headquarters and military hospital from the living-room windows (as well as Mecca Mall, but that’s another story). Dr. Ahmed has some kind of NCO position in the army and loves to expound on the many connections (“wastah”) he relied on to secure us this apartment in his own neighborhood.
The main forms of entertainment in Alex’s apartment are cooking, checking e-mail on the extremely dodgy dial-up internet, and watching satellite TV. Lately we’ve been watching the English-language movie channel, which plays some surprisingly good movies. Or rather, it’s not that the movies are so good but that they are so much better than some of the day-time drek you often encounter in the States, particularly in the heat of summer when it’s just too hot to move. Last night we watched “Bend it like Beckham” and “A Civil Action” and the other night my favorite movie EVER was on, “Raising Arizona”. This morning I awoke to “Aliens”, but things declined when “FatherHood”, starring Patrick Swayze, came on.
Most of the time, though, we watch Arabic music videos-there are at least six channels that show them all day. I am developing a fondness for Arabic music and can even recognize some of the more popular singers now. The videos do contribute to my state of constant confusion about the culture here. On TV there are all these blonde, button-nosed, scantily-clad singers gyrating and throwing themselves on male dancers, while outside life resembles that not at all. TV typically doesn’t reflect life accurately, but here the contrast is even more pronounced. It’s also strange when they show videos with all guys wearing white, floor-length robes and keffiyehs, where the dancing consists of twenty guys standing in a circle, putting a bamboo cane on each of their shoulders, and nodding their heads to the beat. Those songs are also like 15 minutes long. Of the pop singers, Alex’s favorite is Miriam in terms of looks. She is one of the few who does not seem to have undergone massive amounts of plastic surgery. Nancy is superlatively popular but her sculpted face is just plain freaky as it has been made to conform to Western standards of beauty. Most of the women are lovely to behold, regardless of how many times they’ve gone under the knife. The male pop stars, on the other hand, seem to be uniformly unattractive. Maybe it’s just different cultural ideas of beauty, but to me they’re all just overweight and greasy looking for the most part. Some aren’t too bad and my favorite song/video right now features Raghib singing “Tensini ad-Aduni” (“Desirous One”). I think this place is making me more romantic or something because I swoon every time I see the maudlin video.
Well, I’m off to have lunch at Abdullah’s (Dr. Ahmed's much younger brother). More later…