Friday, October 26, 2007

Ann in Amman in na

Trying to make a palindrome out of the title.

We went from Dar to Zanzibar to meet my parents and Mimi, who had just come off of a Safari in the Ngorongoro Crater and places. They had a great time, saw cool stuff like hyena's feasting on bloated hippos and a lion in a tree.





In Zanzibar, I pretty much saw every dawn and took video of every one except the last one, the spectacular one. Then me and Dad would go on a run followed by a hop in the pool.





We also took a quick tour of stonetown one day.




From there, Ann and I went to Amman stopping in Dubai enroute. It struck me, as it has many times while traveling, that my American perception of other countries is so wrong. I remember going to Kuala Lumpur, and having this perception of Malaysia as a jungly place, which it is, but the two tallest buildings in the world are there. That city is ultra modern and ordered and there are certainly things they have figured out about running a civilized city that the US can't get together. This same realization dawned on me as we walked through Dubai airport. It had a 5 star hotel that you could spend your layover in (hourly rates) and was a bustling supermall with a health club and everything. Walking around in there, I was surprised at my surprise, because I've seen pictures of Dubai. But my American lens clouded the fact of Dubai's ultra modern character, as it had Kuala Lumpur, until I actually saw it.

I wonder if there is a way for people to get this without going there.

From Dubai, we went to Amman, Jordan.








A big sprawler of a city, with all kinds of topographic extremes.

Looking east from our hotel room. Full moon.





Seems like all the buildings are made of white or cream colored stone, or stone-like concrete blocks. Makes it look cool at dawn and twilight. So far, we haven't seen much, took a taxi downtown and to some of the ruins. I walked around for an hour near the hotel, without coming to a single stoplight or crosswalk.

A lot of the buildings look like mausoleums.

Here's Ann in front of her office.




We managed to go out once before both of us got some weird flu that had us both waking up in the middle of the night with intense rib cage pain. Here's a shot looking west from a rof top coffee shop: