Rose and Kate get kulcha part 2

Actually, Rose and Kate and Paula and Carrie and Niki Get Cheap Shirts and a bit of Kulcha part 2.

Paula Kouki is a Finnish researcher who was here for a few weeks (the Jabal Haroun project got sideswiped by an unexpected refusal from the al-Waqf new Minister, even though the team has never worked near the weli (shrine/mosque) and has been working for over a decade without any issues ....), Carrie you have met before in an earlier blog, and Niki is an Aussie teacher who Rose and I met at the Australian Embassy social club scrum in September. So, Carrie, Rose and I having none of us packed sensibly, all needed more shirts, in the respectable but cheap line. So Friday down at Abdalil is now an enormous second hand clothes and shoes market, with a smaller fruit and vege section at the downtown end.
But going 2nd-hand clothes shopping never really works well in a group when it is stinking hot, so after an hour we gave up - I'd bought 3 shirts, one of which doesn't fit around the hips (damn, you'd think with several bouts of Syrian belly I'd have lost enough weight to notice) and another with long sleeves, which isn't much use when it was still in the high 30s - Rose managed to buy a denim skirt that might have fitted a very small girl of about 7 years old - and Carrie was umming and ahhing about paying 1.5JD per shirt at a stall when everyone else was only charging 500 fils per item.
So we headed off to Rainbow Street and the Souq Jara, which is on every Friday during the warmer months. This is a pretty fancy market of souvenirs, jewellry and some interesting stuff, so I might go again this Friday which is the last for 2010. We were just scoping this time through. At the end of the Souq laneway (for those of you familiar with Rainbow Street, Souq Jara is held in the road running beside the Jordan River Foundation) the stairs go down to Wild Jordan, the RSCN cafe and shop in a rather nice building given as a gift to Jordan from the People of the United States. See, they can be nice sometimes. Photo op at the top of the stairs of the Qala'a Amman, with RSCN building in foreground:

After eating a nice largely organic, vegetarian meal entirely surrounded by ajanaab (foreigners), we taxi'd back to the Zara Centre, a shopping complex down hill from the Hilton near 3rd Circle. We were heading for the roof though, as there was the first-ever Zara Center Amman Street Art Fair. We paid the rather outrageous sum of 4JD to get in (got a cotton bag for the price, but then discovered you had to buy vouchers for food and drink, so we didn't) and looked quickly around the stalls. Look, I'm all for supporting the arts, and every movement has to start somewhere, but most of the exhibitors had skill levels roughly equivalent to Napoleon Dynamite. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to see the eponymous movie.

Paula, Carrie & Niki - Rose was off looking at Art

One stand out was this triptych of Um Kulthoum (click on the picture to enlarge) which the artist, a young woman Ala'a Baghdadi sold quickly as a set:

Then we taxi'd back down Rainbow Street - the taxi driver complaining all the time about the new Rami Daher designed cobblestone effect on the street which destroys taxis apparently - to Books@Cafe. This is my favourite hangout, upstairs from a very good multilingual bookshop, where there are indoor and outdoor terraces, where the sophisticated set come. I would like to take it home to Australia. Plenty of people go there and don't feel the need for alcohol, and in the late evening, like most places in Amman, it is full of groups of girls smoking naghila. Plus no blaring music, no mosquitoes, no rowdy drunks. However, it has been drawn to my attention that young men do not go there very often if they have regard for their reputation. The owner is rumoured to be gay, and so people talk ....
We being girls of course didn't have to worry about this, and discovered that rather than pay 7JD for a large draught beer each, we took a jug of beer for 12JD, which was exactly 4 decent sized glasses, which is exactly what you want after a hard day buying old clothes and looking at crap art.