Writing an urban guide to Amman has always been on the list of things I want to do one day. In the meantime though, I’ve had the opportunity to write about my three favorite areas in Amman for Gulf Life magazine. So as to not bombard you with a gazillion words, I will publish each area separately, starting with Jabal Amman.

1 CITY, 3 NEIGHBOURHOODS

(click to enlarge)

Not the most historic of cities, and often overshadowed by its neighbours Damascus and Cairo, Amman has plenty to offer the visitor. Roba Al-Assi, a native Ammani and vocal city cheerleader, sheds light on the places she loves.

JABAL AMMAN.
It’s the most popular hill in the city, and with good reason: there’s plenty to offer in this Jordanian gem.

In any other Middle Eastern city, Jabal Amman would probably be regarded as the modern quarter. But in Amman, one of the region’s newest capitals, the Jabal is the nearest thing the city has to a historic heart. It boasts none of the colourful souqs or old pasha’s residences of places like Cairo or Damascus, and it’s easier to find an espresso than an Arabic coffee or a rooftop bar than a Mamluk mausoleum, but don’t take that to mean that it’s lacking in character.

A good place to take the pulse of the neighbourhood is along cobblestone-clad Rainbow Street – the road signs used to say Abu Bakr Al-Sideeq Street, until the residents voted to change the official name to match the one everyone calls it by, after the Rainbow Cinema.

On a corner along here is a modest bakery, easy to miss if it wasn’t for the enticing aroma of freshly baked bread that wafts out of the doorway. It’s known as Abu Ghosh  (Rainbow St, near First Circle), after the owner, who works his red-brick furnace from early morning until he closes in the late afternoon, taking raw dough from stacks of wood racks and turning it into thick, baguette-like kaak, which is baked to order only. On a battered wooden table are DIY fillings: a plastic bag of thyme, a box of cream-cheese triangles and the bakery’s speciality, grilled eggs. There is no better breakfast in Amman.

A little way down the road, peaceful Viewpoint Park  is the ideal location in which to eat your sandwich. The view takes in the downtown chaos in the valley below and the Roman Citadel on the hill opposite. If it’s chilly, you can always warm up with a hot cup of cinnamon caramella from the nearby branch of Cups & Kilos (Rainbow St), which is Amman’s most popular homegrown coffee chain.

While not everybody is interested in buying the organic herbs and hand-crafted jewellery it sells, the Wild Jordan Centre  (Othman Bin Affan St, +962 6 463 3542), designed by local star architect Ammar Khammash, is a stunning structure and definitely worth seeing. It has a basement café with terraces that offer more fine views, not to mention one of Jordan’s only organic restaurants.

The centre is the home in Amman of the Royal Society of Conservation for Nature, one of a number of worthy organisations that have headquarters locally. A short walk away, the Film House (5 Mango St, +962 6 464 2266) is home to the Royal Film Commission, which has turned an attractive 1930s villa into a hub for audio-visual arts, with regular movie screenings. The films are shown in an outdoor amphitheatre against a mountainous backdrop.

If there is one element that definitively characterises Jabal Amman, it’s the stairs. A snakes-and-ladders-like profusion of staircases connects the neighbourhood to the lower districts of Amman. There is a beautifully crumbling flight of stairs next to Wild Jordan. Don’t be concerned that it appears to lead to a private home – many do, crossing backyards, passing front doors and descending beneath washing lines, but these are public paths. The Wild Jordan stairway passes Masrah Al-Balad, an old theatre recently renovated and now used for concerts and other cultural events. At the bottom you find yourself in the busy traffic of downtown, to which the only sensible response is to flag down a taxi and ride back up to Rainbow Street again.

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Here’s a PDF with the pictures and stuff:

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Tags: Amman travel guide, Amman urban guide, city guide for Amman, traveling to Amman, Middle East, places in Amman, what to do in Amman, things to do in Amman, traveling to the Middle East, where to go in the Middle East.

As you can see, it was a busy month at Syntax :)

Can you really archive time?

2007: On March | On April | On May | On June | On July | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2008: On January | On February | On March | On April | On May | On June | On August On September | On October | On November

2009: On July  | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

The last time I did was sometime in university, when we were not allowed to use websources for a certain paper. I did get most of my sources online anyway (from articles that came sourced), but I found it really lame.

That’s why I cracked up when I saw this image:

When was the last time you used an encyclopedia?

One of the days I’ve been looking forward to all damn year is February 3rd.

I’ve been waiting for that morning where I wake up to find the premiere of Lost, my favorite show ever, come and gone. That day that marks the beginning of the few months where I can barely wait to be sitting on my desk at the office on Thursday mornings.

My guilty please, my Lost episode reading, is back.

I think I started my habit of reading television episodes around 2005, with Lost.  The Wikipedia page of the episode takes five beautiful minutes to read. I even let go of my skim-and-scan reading technique to hang on to every word, so as to elongate my Lost episode experience further.

The funny thing is… I’ve been waiting for this day for a year. Today, I was so busy at work I didn’t even have the five minutes it takes me to read a Wikipedia page. So today… I’m 16 hours too late to doing what I’ve been anxious to do for months. Funny.

Hello! It’s my favorite part of the year, you know, the part when it’s not freezing to death yet for me to start worrying about losing my fingers and there ’s that anticipation that it might snow.

Check Jordan Weather’s message. Our snow-starved population is obviously quite excited (I am too, I wish it snows, then I don’t have to go to Il-Ghor on Friday. I strongly dislike farms. Hear that, mama?)

I think that Jordan Weather became popular after the 2006 snow storm.

A rundown on Jordan’s national freaking out throughout the past few years:
Photoessay of the 2008 Snow Day
Photoessay of Amman the Day After
To Snow or Not to Snow 2008
Hot Chocolate Amidst Ice
Slush
Talj Talj

[Originally posted in Venture, January 2009]

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, he almost gave the Internet a heart attack.

Twitter was abuzz before news outlets had time to scratch their heads, with thousands of new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson. Facebook feeds were littered with eulogies about the King of Pop, sans links. Wikipedia was brought to a halt by the number of contributors posting conflicting reports of his condition. Google, on the other hand, mistook the sudden interest in MJ as a malicious attack, and went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTACHAs and malware alerts. Similarly, Yahoo and other search engines had no idea what hit them, showing results for ‘top beer expert Michael Jackson’ who died in 2007.

Has the world gone crazy again?

The “old” Internet giants such as Yahoo and Google certainly did go crazy. With their reactions to Michael’s death arriving hours too late, the hungry audience flocked to the instantaneous new Internet, aptly named the “Real-Time Web”, to get a live timeline of the event. Suddenly, the Internet was not about carefully crafted algorithms and page rankings, it was about what individuals deemed as “important”.

Naturally, search engines have no intention of falling behind. A few months after the Michael Jackson incident, Microsoft and Google signed deals with Twitter to put its content into their search indexes, almost as soon as it shows up on Twitter. Their move has not only empowered the Real-Time Web even further, it has also raised the question as to whether this new trend is the new million-dollar opportunity.

It’s no wonder then, with such reactions, that Internet pundits and investors are already drooling over the creation, architecting, and curation of this new, turbo Web, the long-awaited child of Web 2.0. While Web 2.0 worked with the power of sharing pictures, videos, and information, the Real-Time Web is about sharing this information in real-time for immediate awareness, collaboration and contribution.

Businesses could gain a lot by being on the leading edge of this movement. Winning customer loyalty with real-time corporate communication is an easy win. The Real-Time Web facilitates engagement in ways that were not available two years ago, and companies are already using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to “be themselves”.

A few weeks ago, IKEA was one of the first companies to go all-out with Real-Time Web marketing. They created a Facebook profile for the store manager of a new branch in Sweden. Over a two-week period, images of IKEA showrooms were uploaded to his Facebook photoalbum, and then IKEA put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in any picture will win it. With the way tagging works on Facebook, the moment the users tagged anything, everyone in their network instantly knew that there was something up for grabs. Subsequently, thousands and thousands of people flooded to the IKEA Facebook page in search of freebies. The photo tagging campaign took off like wildfire, becoming one of the most popular stories around the Web. With that, IKEA had another million potential customers looking at images of their catalogs.

Yet, improved communication is almost elementary when compared to the potential of the Real-Time Web in other fields. It is already playing a major role in collaboration, with Google Wave testifying to that. As the world becomes more globalized, businesses are finding it more important to work more efficiently with their Indian IT-solution providers, East Asian suppliers, or Saudi Arabian clients. The Real-Time Web will soon be playing a huge role in real-time pricing and inventory management, which the advent of can give retailers the possibility of efficient price equilibrium adjustments. Mobile ad networks, with time and location-based advertising, are also in a great position to capitalize on real-time ad opportunities.

It’s time to fasten your seatbelt, the Web is about to evolve again. Now.

Previous Hyperlink articles:
Hyperlink: It’s Time to Learn How to Surf.

We bought canvases and acrylic colors, unearthed the long-buried brushes and palettes, and set up our painting space outside —— complete with a “Man2al” (coal-box), hot tea, and pop-corn. It was my brother Hisham’s idea to put Friday off for a family painting event.

Omar and Hisham decided to replicate Edward Munch’s “The Scream”, and Kasimir Malevich’s “Red House”. I painted a portray of my parents, my mother made a sketch of my father, and Gus, um, improvised.

Hisham’s buddy Ahed documented the event, and Ayah experimented with watercolors. Musa played PlayStation inside with buddies Alaa’ and Fouad :)

(Special thanks to the awesome Ahed Hijjawi for the daylight pictures)

I have always believed that a sense of art is something you learn, rather than something you are born with. It’s a craft, a technique. You learn how to hold a brush, how to look, how to think, how to feel. Of course, you do need to have the patience for that sort of thing, it’s really very much an inclination the same way that playing video games is an inclination.

I think my brother Omar has shaken that belief.

You see, while Hisham and I have shown an interest in art since we were very young, and then we went ahead to get an education in architecture and fine arts respectively, Omar has never, ever shown an interest. I do not remember Omar sitting with Hisham and I as we sketched as kids, I do not remember Omar saying anything about painting unless it had to do with making fun of me and Hisham, “Idiots, come play XBox with me!”

After taking a few off-hand pointers from me (I felt like he was wasting my time, I mean seriously, how could he do anything?), Omar concentrated on doing a good job with replicating Edward Munch’s “The Scream”. Understand: Before that minute, Omar has never held a brush in his life, let alone mixed colors, or saw the details in a painting.

With that said, I present you with the final results of our art day:

(Hisham got bored, so this is only half-way done, but look at how pretty the sky is!)

This is how it should look when it’s done:

And finally, Omar’s:

As compared to:

What do you think? Is art taught or inherent?

Not in order of preference, but in order of my current mood :)

1. Ritter Sport’s Marzipan Squares

man br

2. Ferrero Rocher

man br

3. Nutella

man br
4. Curly Wurly

man br
5. Reese’s Buttercups

man br

6. Ras Il Abed

man br

7. Chocolate-dipped Dates

man br
8. Oreos

man br

9. Kit Kat

10. Crunchie

What are your favorite chocolate bars? :)

Did I mention that the highlight of my week is always the moments when Fast Company update their site?

I AM OBSESSED WITH FAST COMPANY. I can’t help it. It’s even more brilliant a magazine than Wired (though Wired wins when it comes to the actual design).

Anyway…

Fast Company have a slideshow entitled “Rendering Fear: The Graphic Design of Al-Qaeda”.

It is quite interesting, with some background info and critiques.

Check it out here.