On our first evening in Amman, I ventured to a supermarket with a few others. One was a middle-aged lady, who was shopping for a notebook. The store reminded me greatly of time spent in China. The first floor was a supermarket, the second was everything else. Upstairs, every little section had a man at a desk. If you wanted an item from his section, he filled out a bill for you. You then walked to a cashier who manned all the money on the floor. Once he was paid, you were set free with your goods.
So my companion, having never been in this place, approaches the till with her purchase.
“Two and half dinars,” he totals.
“Two and a half dollars,” she muses to herself, more repeating the total with her familiar currency attached than actually trying to adjust the price.
Disdain-filled face and wounding voice, he replied flatly, “Dinars, not dollars. This is Jordan, not America.”
Without even looking up, he made change and handed it to her.
The whole encounter happened quickly enough to snap our heads back and make us wonder.
I’ve never known anything but exceptional hospitality in Jordan, but this moment showed something else: Maybe a Jordanian tired of tourists, maybe a cashier in need of a holiday, maybe little more than a crusty fellow, or maybe something altogether different.
Whatever the case, he’s locked himself into a few bytes of my mind’s memory, in less-than-flattering fashion.
On our way out of Amman, we were bus-toured through the newest and wealthiest part of the city. Many of the homes in that area are worth over $1 000 000 US. Mingled among the homes are a number of embassies from around the globe. The American embassy is especially large, and especially guarded as well. Several blocks away, an even larger embassy is being constructed by Saudi Arabia. Then it was highway time. An hour south on the King’s Highway, the world’s oldest and most continuously used communication route (first mentioned in Genesis 14), would deliver us to Mount Nebo.
