All types everywhere wait for buses.

I took 108 pictures of Amman, Petra, and some other things in Jordan. 

On film. 

Weird, I know. 

This is just above the jewelry district in the Suk (sook). A place where you can pay not so much money and get your mother’s name in english, or arabic, cut out of silver and made into a custom necklace. Where Gold still costs more than Silver, and where banks don’t look all that different, they just have different times. Like, well, Arab Bank. 

It’s a joy to be in the Suk. It’s a place with it’s fair share of tourism (overpriced kafeas [arabic male headscarfs], chinsey gold aladdin genie lamps, belly-dancer outfits in pink, purple, green, yellow. orange…teal…puce….and software for a dollar [like adobe photoshop CS3...that kind of software]), but by and large, people from many walks of life come here, it’s the downtown shopping mall of amman. On the outskirts there is Mecca Mall for the high-so’s or the girls who want to get away from their parents and out of their burkhas and into some tube tops and gucci shades, and in Abdoun there’s a starbucks for the non-turkish coffee drinkers, but here there are just tons and tons of people, with everything you (or more importantly, any Jordanian) could ever want to buy: Steeples for mosque minaret’s (where the call to prayer is piped out of a circle of loudspeakers) can be bought, or maybe welded and repaired here.  Hookah’s (something that will require a whole separate essay) come in small, medium, large, and “let’s smoke out of a pipe organ” large. 

Fresh fruit smoothies can be bought from competing vendors who lean over their pharmacy stands (a full foot about your head) like overbearing parents and point at mangos, bananas hanging from backets above their heads. (When they do, I search through my pockets for piastras, or fils, coins worth more than their american equivalents that still feel like disney money on the first few days just because, well, they aren’t quarters.)

Underwear and lingerie can be bought. Blue-jeans and english-print t-shirts can be bought. Perfumes (never the brands on the boxes they are put in) can be bought-Playing cards issued by the CIA with the faces of Saddam and his best men can be bought-toy guns, gun shaped lighters, wallets, fabrics, spices, music, (madonna and haifa wehbe scarvesfalafels iraqiflags schwarma can be bought.

All from men with mustaches or slick backed hair or women with pink and green prints or black robes, from blond haired blue-eyed arab surfer bums who speak great english, from old seated women on cel-phones who look like street beggars. From young arab men in white uniforms and green aprons- to old salt-and pepper curmudgeons who shout “one dinar one dinar onedinar oned’nar” like kansas auctioneers.

These are the people at the Suk.

The sounds? Voices, of course. Cars. Kids with ice cream on their upper lip, vendors, tinny radios.

Like any good city.