"This is Jordan" & Mortgages

"This is Jordan" is a statement of knowing that you learn. Today our bus broke down on the way home and we spent an hour on the shoulder of the motorway that is used as an extra lane in rush hour that was all happening. Lot's of different sounding horns in Jordan, some of the big rigs speeding past had musical tune horns that were very loud. It's a modern Mercedes bus with tones of grunt that wisks us up the 1000m from the dig site in the rift valley of the Jordan to our hotel in Amman. The problem? It blew a radiator hose. Well, in actual fact the hose had blown before. It was the duck tape that gave way. This is Jordan!

As you will have heard on the news Jordan has been shocked by the killing of their airforce pilot who was captured by Daeish (that's kind of a swear word in arabic that ISIS is called in the media here) in such an inhumane way. We read about it in the Jordan Times as breaking news last night, and by the time we had breakfast the authorities had executed two terrorists already on death row in revenge. The Americans in our group received emails from their government telling them to carry all their travel documents with them incase they had to make a dash to the airport. We have heard nothing from NZ nor have the Aussies with us. We did notice new graffiti on the Mosque at the Tall and on the motorway retaining walls and groups of people waving Jordainian flags on the side of the road. The vast majority seem to support the stand being taken by the Jordanian government and it in itself is very unified across the board in its condemnation of Daeish. The "earth shattering response in retaliation" is something worth pondering. Helen is freaked a bit but I still feel safe.

It was hot today, upper 20's on the Tall with not a cloud in the shy. The haze across the valley is still there and we haven't seen the Judean hills yet after all this time. It took Helen and her team almost the whole day to scrub the buckets of pottery that came in. Today she found out that all the Americans she's with are Republicans and hate Obama so it was an interesting insight into the Republican side of things. For me it was a slow day exercising great feats of balance and bending as we dug probe holes beside the jumble of wall foundations without disloging stones or damaging anything, even though we will eventually be demoloshing it all to get to the next layer down. All to see how deep the foundations go and whether they cut through one another or were on top of each other. In the #2 photo from yesterday, the cobbles have gone to fill between walls back to cobbles, and we think we have three buildings from different periods all in the same spot. As Josh the archeologist keeps saying - "This is doing my head in!"

Todays picture is of a typical Jordanian house. Concrete block, small windows and flat roof. The quality of the concrete block varies from very good to shocking, as does the block laying and general construction methods even though Jordan can have big earthquakes. There will be carnage here if there is a big one. By the way, all the major archeological sites we are going to see were destroyed by earthquakes, and some of the layers at the Tall are earhquake rubble.

We couldn't make out why about 1 in 3 wasn't finished although people lived in them. In Jordan when buying a house you can take out a mortgage like we do or use one of three different kinds of mortgages that fit with Sharia Law. When taking out any Sharia Mortgage the main difference is that the lending institution buys the house and it becomes a rent to own deal. No interest is paid on the loan, but as they carefully explain, the rent covers repayment of the loan and "profit" for the home owner, but its not interest which is against Sharia Law. When building a brand new house on one of the schemes, which seems popular, you borrow to build your house, but according to Sharia you are not required to pay the owner (the lending institution) any profit on the borrowed money until you have finished the house. So everywhere you look in Amman and in the towns you see houses like this with columns sticking out of the roof ready for the next floor, which even to the untrained eye means the house isn't finished yet so all the rent goes to repaying the loan. I am not sure how it all works out for the lender in the end, but how would that go in NZ?

Tomorrow is the last day of the week for us, with Friday being the Islamic holy day. On Friday we are doing the big trip to Petra way down south Jordan, and on Saturday it's way up north Jordan overlooking the Sea of Gallilee to the ancient Roman City of Jerash.

Right now there is a huge demonstration just started in the street just down from the hotel with loud chanting and car horns blaring with hundreds of people. The police are there. We have decided not to go to the supermarket tonight. Helen is a bit freaked out. All the security men from the hotel are outside behind the barricades in front of the hotel. Exciting!