Snow Day in Amman

When you come to one of the most water deprived countries in the world where the temperature gets up to 50C in the summer, you don't really expect this. About 300mm of snow fell over night and has continued off and on during the day. The city has literally closed down for the day with usually bustling streets empty. Needless to say we have stuck pretty close to the hotel with a couple of excursions out into the blizzard. Some of the team went to the airport at 7pm last night with flights going at 9.30pm through to 3am. One guy flying home to Aussie and Cyclone Marcia got out, as did another two flying home to the States via Frankfurt. But Gary from Baltimore who was to fly via Istanbul at 3am was still waiting at lunch time today. Istanbul airport is/was closed by heavier snow than we have here. The snow comes with claps of thunder which we have never experiened before.

It has been good to have two days off for me as it is allowing my body to catch up. Helen is knittiing and getting a bit stir crazy looking forward to the next leg of our journey in a weeks time. I suspect we will have tomorrow off as well, and hopefully we can get out visa extended.

Today I watched and helped a little with the pottery reading down stairs doing the stuff our square has dug up. We were pleased that a lot of it seems to be Late Bronze early Iron Age which means we are sitting right on top of our target of the Middle Bronze Age.

In the square next to us they found four bronze objects and one iron object fused together and wrapped up in cloth that is still visible thanks to the chemistry of the soil. Finding bronze objects is rare, and finding fabric is almost unheard of. The objects could be armour plates used in a kind of chain mail arrangment. Hope we find the rest of the armour in our square.

As we are beginning our last week in Jordan we are reflecting on the contrasts. They are many. We are in an affluent suburb where the cars include Jags, BMW's, big Chryslers, humvees, Dodge's, Audi's, lots of new Japanese and Korean cars, to people riding donkeys in the countryside or just walking. We drive past mansions, apartment blocks by the hundreds, refugee tents in parks, and the Bedouin tents with the shepherds leading their sheep across the rocky hills to find pasture. We are beginning to pick up differences and tensions. Jordan, in fact the whole Middle East, is very tribal in outlook and I think fragmentation along tribal lines is the rythm of the whole area, added to by religious differences. The Jordanians in Amman and the cities and the high country are descended from Ammorites, Jews, Parthians, Greeks, Romans and Ottoman Turks, and kind of form one grouping although within that group tribal affliations come before national ones. Then there are the Bedouin who are still largely nomadic believe it or not, and often run a household in the city and a tent in the hills. Added to this is a large population of Palestinians who were/are refugees from the West Bank after the 1967 war with Israel. Sultan, our bus driver, is Palestinian. There are also thousands of Iraqi and Iranian's who fled their countries in the 1980's during the Iran/Iraq war. More came from Iraqi during the American war in Iraq, as they call it here, in the 1990's. Now there are the hundreds of thousands coming from Syria. About 3 million people in Jordan out of a population swelled to almost 7 million are of refugee origin, and there seem to be particular tensions caused by this.

We are picking up that there has been some wide support for ISIS among some groupings, but the killing of the airforce pilot seems to have pulled the country together. ISIS is hated and we were surprised to see in the Jordan Times pictures showing people in Mosque's praying for the 21 Coptic Christians killed last week in Egypt by ISIS. No one can remeber this kind of thing happening before. So its all very complex, and while Jordan has been a safe place for us the potential for trouble is always here.

We have team members who live in Israel. They are telling us that Jordan is very safe and peaceful, and to be ready for the culture shock of Israel that is tense, full of hazards, and a hard place to live in for any length of time. So I suppose we are beginning to feel the nerves we did when we thought about coming to Jordan now being directed towards our border crossing into Israel next Friday.