Swanky Weekend

After two consecutive weekends without any plans at all, I decided to break the mold a little bit last night. My roommate Susan and I burned through some of the cash I had been slowly saving with a swanky night out in Downtown Amman.

The impetus for this came in the middle of last week, when Susan and I took a trip into Abdoun Circle. Technically, I live in Abdoun, which is a very ritzy area. But my apartment is on the fringes, and I had never gone into the commercial heart of the area. So after one too many meals of pesto pasta and PB+J, we decided to splurge on Thai food at a restaurant called NoodAsia (no snickering, please). The food was great, especially considering the price, and we also happened to bump into two Americans I had met earlier in the summer. We had a nice time, and so the four of us promised to meet up again over the weekend for a similar dining experience.

We settled on Cantaloupe, a "Gastro Pub" off of Rainbow Street in Downtown Amman. I'd been to Rainbow Street several times before - it is a nicely maintained, affluent couple of blocks lined with hip restaurants and such. But I'd always been during the day, when it is quiet and empty. When we returned last night (effectively Saturday night, since the Arab weekend is Fri-Sat), it was packed with cars, people, and tables overflowing into the sidewalk. The nightlife was hopping.

Cantaloupe itself was on the fifth floor of a tower with a massive outdoor deck. We ate far removed from the hustle and bustle below, but from the deck we had outstanding views of East Amman and the Citadel. Every few minutes we were treated to an impromptu fireworks show, as people in the neighborhoods set off fireworks to celebrate weddings and the like. The decor and the music was super swanky, and while the service left much to be desired, it was still probably the best I've encountered in an Amman restaurant.

Normally, these types of restaurants intimidate me. They're way too expensive for my budget, they're filled with people who are hipper and cooler than I am, and the food on the menu is far too grown-up for my palate (which tends to prefer a good Kraft mac-and-cheese over filet mignon and a bottle of wine). But on all three counts I was pleasantly surprised. The menu was quite reasonable, with almost all entrees under $12 US (mine was around $10). We ate early enough that we were out before the swanky Jordanians showed up at 9:30 or so. And despite options like the Thai Teriyaki Spinach Salad and Beef Bresaola, the menu still made room for Fish and Chips, Fettucini Alfredo, and Chicken Parmesan (I ended up with the last option). A "Cantaloupe Iced Tea," based closely on its Long Island cousin, topped off the meal.

We finished the evening with ice cream from Gerard's, down the street, and a showing of Quantum of Solace back at a friend's house. While it wasnt exactly a night of immersion in genuine Jordanian culture, it was certainly a nice change of pace (and a considerable step up from my normal dinner options when I am cooking). I'm trying to make a road trip to Jerash next weekend, which might spoil any plans for a repeat evening. But you can bet that if travel plans fall through, I'll be spending my bus fare and hotel money on another evening out...

HGC Venues

Glee Club has decided on several venues in Amman that they would like to use for their performances next year, so they asked me to check them out in person while I am here. Zaid Al-Rifai made some calls and arranged tours of three venues - the Royal Cultural Center, the Hussein Cultural Center, and the King Hussein Club. His driver and I traveled around town last Wednesday to check things out. 

Our first stop was the Royal Cultural Center. I met with the managing director who, I soon found out, did not speak great English. So we switched to Arabic, which was a bit scary, but it turns out that the meeting went a lot more smoothly in that language. I got a tour of the entire facility, including recording studios, conference rooms, the dance studios, and other places, even though I was really only interested in the Main Hall and rehearsal rooms. But since I was in no real rush, I was happy to see the entire place. 

The Main Hall at the RCC is a theater, not a concert hall. It wasnt designed with acoustics in mind - the entire hall is carpeted, so there's no reverb, and the flyspace above the stage will likely eat up lots of sound. And, while there are lots of dressing rooms backstage, there was also no real backstage warmup room large enough for the entire group. We'll probably just hang out next door, in an exhibition hall with a piano. There were also a few problems with communication - I wasnt sure how to ask about "choral risers" or "orchestral shells," so I'm not sure if that equipment will be available. 

Overall, though, I'm sure it will be a fine place for a concert. The hospitality was incredible - I felt very welcome, and I'm sure HGC will get the same treatment next year. It's also one of the most prestigious venues in the city. Finally, the managing director offered the use of the facilities for free, which is a pretty incredible offer. Hard to argue with that. 

We headed next to the Hussein Cultural Center, which seemed more of a community arts facility than the RCC. The director spoke excellent English, so I was out of the woods. We toured the HCC, which I personally liked a lot more than the RCC. The HCC director also gave me two free tickets to the Amman Symphony Orchestra's performance at the HCC that evening. A Jordanian woman played a Chopin piano concerto, and a Lebanese/Armenian tenor sang a selection of arias and art songs. I had performed many of the songs myself during my eight years of voice lessons. The concert gave me a chance to listen to the acoustics of the space. The Main Hall was once again a theater, without much acoustical treatment, rather than a concert hall. There was no reverb at all - even loud blasts from the orchestra disappeared quickly into the carpet. They used microphones during there performance, so we might see if there is a way to create some reverb through amplification or something. 

Finally, we swung by the King Hussein Club (pictured), a swanky club downtown. This will be the site of an Alumni event organized by Mr. Al-Rifai, rather than a big concert. HGC's 12-person sub group, HGC Lite, will sing during the event, but it wont be a formal concert. 

Aside from these venues, I need to get up to Irbid in the north of the country, where we are expecting to have a joint concert with Yarmouk University. I'd also like to get to the King's Academy, an elite prep school in Amman, where Lite may have another performance. Overall, though, it was a very productive afternoon and a great introduction to the performing arts in Amman. 

Halfway!

Today is the exact halfway mark of my time in Jordan. Hard to believe it's been over a month. We've plowed through 4 1/2 chapters our Arabic textbook, so I assume we still have 4 1/2 left in front of us. For comparison, we got through about 7 1/2 chapters during all of last year at Harvard. So, if we knock off another 4 1/2 before leaving, Qasid will have more than surpassed its promise to squeeze an entire academic year of instruction into a summer.

Our midterm is Thursday - and Saturday marks four weeks until my flight home!

Newspaper Arabic

Today was my second session of Newspaper Arabic, the 2hr/week supplementary class that Qasid is providing for free.

It's a nice change of pace from my normal classes, which focus on grammar and vocab for 4 hours a day. The class is bigger and so I get to meet more students than I would otherwise. Also, we're using real Arabic sources in the class, which is a bit of a morale booster. In regular class, we use texts and materials designed for Arabic students, so they have been massaged quite a bit and purged of anything too challenging. In newspaper Arabic, we're attacking actual articles designed for actual Arabic speakers, so making progress in that class is a bit more exciting.

Of course, that progress is quite slow in my case. Two examples hopefully show my current predicament; I'm getting the details just fine, but the overall picture breezes by. Last Wednesday, we read an article reporting that, according to a recent study, Egypt is the #1 country in the world for wife-on-husband domestic violence. I understood that we were reading the results of a sociological study dealing with domestic violence between couples. I understood that Egypt placed first, followed by the U.S. and India. What I couldn't tell was whether the article was describing wife-on-husband violence, or husband-on-wife. This, obviously, is a pretty central aspect of the story, but I couldn't be sure without confirmation from a classmate.

Today, the article was from the BBC Arabic, describing divorce in Japanese society. Something - I didn't know the word - was causing divorce rates to rise. This force was making people stay at home, where they got into fights with spouses, instead of going to the office and spending hours hard at work like they were used to. I assumed we were talking about unemployment, but the article was actually discussing retirement. So again, I was close, but still oh so far. It'll be a long time before I'm reporting for Al-Jazeera or CNN Arabic.

I'm also hoping our next class discusses an article unrelated to marital problems. Not sure why we have such a focus on failing marriages, but something more upbeat might be nice. Maybe our teacher is just having trouble finding good news out of the Middle East?

Rifai and I, Part II

Another day, another meeting with former Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifai.

Like last time, we met to discuss planning for the Harvard Glee Club's tour to the Middle East in 2011-2012. Much was the same - I met the same driver, rode in the same swanky car to his home, where we sat on the same beautiful patio and drank the same tea. But I noticed a few changes - the exterior furniture had been newly upgraded, for example. I also noticed he was reading a copy of Robert Lacey's book on Saudi Arabia, Inside the Kingdom, so I got to sound smart for a few brief minutes while we chatted about that.

The content of the meeting was not particularly unusual. We spoke about possible venues for the Glee Club concerts, and he volunteered to put me in touch with people at said venues to arrange to see them myself in person. I'll be making those trips in the next few weeks, I assume.

Towards the end of the meeting, I followed Mr. al-Rifai into an interior room for a few minutes while he looked for a book. The room was filled with amazing mementos. On the wall and the shelves, he had pictures and souvenirs from visits with foreign dignitaries from across the world. I saw signed photos from Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, an engraved clock from Richard Nixon, and photos with Sultan Qaboos of Oman and Hafez al-Asad of Syria. Across the room, I saw a five-shelf case filled with medals and other honors from two separate terms as Prime Minister. I was only in the room for thirty seconds, but was amazed with what I saw. I would have loved the time to examine everything more fully. This guy has been a central figure in the history of the Middle East for decades, and so heaven only knows what kinds of other mementos are lining his walls.

Al-Rifai's grandson will be a freshman at Harvard this fall, and so Mr. al-Rifai mentioned that he would be in Cambridge in late August to see him off. We promised to try to get together then if our schedules meet up. I would invite him over to show him my extensive collection of medals and presidential memorabilia, but I'm afraid it will all be packed for my impending move on September 1st.

Spoke Too Soon?

Immediately on the heels of yesterday's post praising the UAE's urban planning efforts, I turned to GulfNews.com's home page to see this harrowing picture and headline:

For all of my gushing about the UAE's planning advances, clearly there's still work to be done. 

It's not just infrastructural problems, according to the article. Clearly, there aren't enough crosswalks or safe crossing zones in the city, or else this guy wouldn't be diving over a concrete median in the first place. The article also indicates that planners aren't thinking the right way about pedestrian safety. The focus is on bridges to carry peds over traffic, and more walls and barriers to keep pedestrians from jaywalking. All this does is make roads less and less hospitable to pedestrians, since cars can drive faster and be less attentive to their surroundings. 

Amman has tried this strategy. Pedestrians are largely relegated to overhead bridges, which are often inconvenient, and are impossible for the handicapped. Even ordinary roads are divided with medians, encouraging speeding and recklessness. Ordinary intersections have been turned into onramps and offramps, and, as a result, no one bothers to look out for pedestrians - even at marked crosswalks. By relegating peds to bridges and incomplete sidewalks, Amman has effectively told drivers that they don't need to look out for them, and so I see the same types of harrowing close-calls in Amman's streets every day. Because of this outdated pedestrian planning mindset and the danger of walking anywhere, I get stuck shelling out money for a cab to go even a short distance, instead of walking and getting exercise. 

Note to the UAE - look around you and see what has failed in Amman. Don't try the exact same thing in your cities. 

Urbanism in the Gulf

Once upon a time, I planned to go into a career in urban planning and architecture. I read treatises on New Urbanism and Smart Growth like it was my job. I interned at a DC-area planning agency in the summer of 2008. I even wrote my senior thesis at Amherst on architecture and urbanism in Cairo and Dubai. The 2008 recession led me to reevaluate my career goals, but I'm still very interested in this sort of stuff, especially when it overlaps with my current studies in the Middle East. So I've been very happy over the past few days, as I've read a number of articles about urban planning developments in Dubai and the UAE.

I visited Dubai in March of 2008 to do research for my thesis, which focused extensively on how Dubai had imported the car-dependent model of the US.  My trip certainly reinforced that view; Dubai was a pedestrian hell. My grant wasn't large enough to cover car rental or taxi fare, so I got around either on foot or by bus. But sidewalks were incomplete, intersections were not safe, and the average weather made me sweat after just a few minutes of walking. Buses were crowded, slow, and unpredictable; I remember waiting 45 minutes in the sun for a bus to the Burj al-Arab, only to watch it whiz past the station without stopping because it was too full to fit any more passengers. Everyone needed a car, and so traffic was horrible at many hours of the day. The metro was under construction at the time of my visit, but it did nothing to alleviate the pain of traveling yet.

I havent been back since that trip, but the articles I've seen certainly suggest that the situation has changed considerably. The Red Line line of the Dubai Metro is up and running, with a second (Green) line expected to open soon. Total ridership of the system, which opened less than a year ago, recently surpassed 23 million people. Daily ridership has reached as high as 130,000, out of a population of about 2.2 million. This number will almost certainly rise as additional stations and lines are completed.

It's not just about ridership, though. Gulf news sources are reporting on the more subjective aspects of the Metro system as well. GulfNews published an extensive article about the trendiness of the new system, and how it is successfully enticing people to leave their cars behind. Dubai residents, including the affluent, are choosing to ride rather than drive - the Metro is becoming a part of Dubai's urban culture. The stations are gorgeous - and considering the beautiful DC Metro is my home system, my standards are pretty high. I also saw a very interesting report on the rigorous maintenance, cleaning, and inspection that goes on behind the scenes. DC's metro has seen nothing but maintenance problems, service cutbacks, and several tragic fatalities in recent months, but it seems Dubai is seriously trying to turn the tide against auto dependency. There's much left to do - don't get me wrong. There are shortcomings with regard to pedestrian connections, network redundancy, sustainability, and other issues. Dubai is a linear city, so it's much easier to design an effective rail system there. Gulf newspapers are far more hesitant to publish criticism of a government project such as the metro. I don't want to sound like I believe Dubai has vanquished its problems forever - it hasn't. But it is making great progress in the right direction.

There is also good news beyond the Metro. Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, is implementing a plan to curb speeding, reduce illegal parking, and undertake significant improvements for pedestrian safety. The UAE as a whole recently increased the price of gasoline, in part to reduce the appeal of driving and the negative environmental consequences that accompany it. Cheap oil might seem like a birthright in the world's 3rd largest oil exporter, and one might expect a lot of grumbling to accompany the increase. But this article takes a look at the long-term benefits of the price hike, instead of simply complaining about the additional cost. Conversely, the United States, with a crippling oil addiction and declining domestic sources of fuel, hasn't raised fuel taxes since 1993. With inflation factored in, the gasoline tax is at its lowest level since 1929. The UAE is schooling America in forward-thinking transportation policy.

Finally, though no ground has been broken yet, the GulfRail has been making some noise in the papers as well. This 1,205-mile proposed system would link Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and Oman, with a possible link to Yemen. The system would be high-speed, using Europe's rail network as a guide. America refuses to invest enough in its own rail system to do better than the "high-speed" Acela service in the Northeast. Kuwait, Mecca, Medina, and other cities are also planning rail systems.

Despite this flurry of funding and building activity, you wont see US companies winning any contracts. America doesnt have any companies with enough experience in this industry. The multi-billion dollar projects are being completed by Asian and European firms, whose countries have invested significantly in rail domestically and thus given their companies a significant technical edge in the world market. Even the biggest oil exporters in the world are getting behind mass transit, better urban planning, and inter-city rail networks as they realize that gasoline, petroleum, and auto-dependency are unsustainable in the long term. It's immensely frustrating that America can't seem to get its act together.

However, on the bright side, I now know I will have a much easier time getting around during my next trip to Dubai.

NB: All images lovingly stolen from http://dubaimetro.eu/ - I just can't get them to link back to the site.