Culture shock

Just returned from seeing Hancock at the theater in Amman's largest mall, Mecca Mall. The Middle East weirds me out more and more. It really is impossible to know what the ME is like until you visit; you will never watch enough Al-Jazeera or see enough YouTube clips or read enough books to get it. Stories from friends can't do it justice, nor can photographs of exotic locations or abject poverty.

Amman, particularly the western (direction and imitation), "developing" part of the city, has what appears visually as an enormous identity crises. Within a 10 square foot radius, you will walk by a group of burka-clad women toting Baby Gap-ed out toddlers and brush shoulders with a group of Amman-ian high school girls from an episode of "My Sweet Sixteen" gawking at a college student in H&M attire on his Blackberry checking updates on the Euro Cup with his girlfriend wearing Diesel jeans and hijab. Behind them will be two older men in kuffieyahs and thobs (full body white robe-types) handling prayer beads from Bahrain whose wives are reading People magazine outside of a Starbucks playing Nora Jones and Nickelback. Most of the brands are totally unrecognized, though I have seen a few familiar labels, yet prices are outrageously more expensive here than in the States, on top of the weak dollar-influenced exchange rate.

I would have loved to be alive during the American transition from the Victorian era to the roaring Twenties, because that's about the only thing I can think to compare Amman to today. Fashion designs from the West intended to highlight the female figure are transplanted in a traditionally conservative, religiously-infused society and culture. Media forms in the West who make money by appealing to and exploiting sexual fascination that are wildly popular among even the most "traditional" segments of the population (e.g. soaps in the Badia). Religion really does permeate society here moreso than it does in the States, so reconciling these two seemingly incongruous disjuncts, particularly given what I "know" about Islam, is hard to do as an outsider. It's a society, not unlike its American counterpart, whose participants daily live with what seem to be contradictions and get by nonetheless, all the while with various sources telling them how they ought or ought not to resolve those things for themselves.

It's not that I don't like it here, I very much do. It's just a very different society with very different social fabrics underlying it, and not being from the culture, very difficult to understand, even categorize, the multiplicity of ways that people live their lives.

But I did have a Hardees thick-burger for lunch. Sans bacon, of course.