Weekend in Amman 9/5 -6

An interesting difference in Jordan is that because Friday is the main day of worship in Islam, the weekend is Friday and Saturday, not Saturday/Sunday. Thursday evening, Tamara and I decided to go out to dinner. Her friend suggested Paris Square, so we took at Uber there. So far an Uber has cost around 2-4 JOD (Jordanian Dinar) with the exchange rate at 1 JOD to 1.4 USD. We walked along the streets, and there were lots of restaurants, coffee shops, vape shops, and other boutiques. We found a board game/anime shop and as the owner spoke English, he and Tamara talked about board gaming. We also found a beautiful souvernir shop with Middle Eastern pottery, lanterns, jewelry, handbagsv- miraculoulsly I held off from buying something. We stopped at a restaurant with a nice patio area. I ordered fried pieces of halloumi cheese and per the menu "meat pottery" which was a creamy meat stew with broccoli, onions, and carrots with rice to serve it over. Afterwards, we smoked a hookah which goes by different names depending on which country you are in. Here it looks like they call in shisha or argilah. The next day we relaxed in the apartment most of the day. In the evening, we met some of the other Boren scholar/fellows here in Amman for dinner at Beb El-Yemen. Many of them I had met at the orientation in DC in May, some I hadn't. There were about 7 of us, (4 of us studying at Qasid) along with my roomate and a Belgian friend of ours we met at Qasid. The restaurant was really busy with people waiting everywhere for a table while servers wound their way through to take food to people. We ordered several different dishes to share with everyone, accompanied by huge flat bread. We ended our meal with spiced tea with milk, very similar to masala chai in India, and we also ordered several deserts. It was a fun night, and it's nice to have more people you know here!