“Ta’aal,” he said, calling me to him. I had seen this same man only 30 seconds earlier. He was the man in the red kaffiyeh who had been attempting to cross the main road carrying what appeared to be two enormous and extremely heavy black plastic bags filled with vegetables.
Since then I had given up on waiting and had turned up a sided street, starting to walk and trying to catch cabs while on the move. He had seen me and decided to help me out.
He called me to him and asked me what direction I was going. He had a thin white beard that to clung the side of his his red/white head covering and he pointed with bulbous fingers as he talked, slouching slightly over his plump midsection. I told him where I was headed and he said he was going the same way. He then said that we should go together. I told him that the problem was that all the taxis were full and he kept walking next to me, leading me toward what I thought was a vehicle and telling me that it wasn’t a problem.
Once he got to the next corner, we stopped and then we proceeded to wait on the curb.
At this point I got a little confused.
“Do you have a car?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
Hmm… Interesting… I thought for a second and a few more occupied taxis zoomed by. I told him that it seemed like it might be hard to get a cab because they were all full. Maybe I should just walk home? I started to walk away, but he called me back and said something to me that I didn’t understand.
“I’m not from here,” I tried to explain.
“I know,” he said, telling me to wait and that things would be OK.
He saw a man leaving a shop and heading toward his car. The old man began to approach him, but then stopped, as the man seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
“Oooohhh,” I said. “It’s because you’re old! And because of culture and respect.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling sympathetically. Clearly I was coming off as a pathetic foreign kid.
Another man was moving toward his nearby car and the old man approached this one and barely said anything before the guy was telling us both to get in the car.
I tried to help the old man with his bags, which were REALLY heavy, but he picked them up swiftly, shooing me away to get in the other side of the car.
While we were in the car the old man told the driver the whole story, laughing and referring to me as “the poor thing.”
***
Before I ran into the old man, I was on my way to start cooking for a potluck dinner on that same night.
There was a small “Tacky Christmas Sweater” party that night and I had volunteered to contribute a dish to the dinner, since, over the last month I somehow have learned to cook. And I’m not talking about pasta, salad or brownies. I’m talking about Aloo Gobi and Bhuna Chicken, with the gharam masala, et al.
Yes, I’ve made gharam masala from scratch, roasting all the ingredients before using a mortar and pestle to grind them all into a distinct powder. I’ve hunted down specific spices and vegetables, going through entire souqs and bazaars and being disappointed until I discovered a tiny desi spice shack in the corner of a produce bazaar that was hidden in an alley off of the bustling downtown marketplace. I even hunted through all of Amman for small, potent chilies, anything that was smaller than the incredibly bland and hand-length chilies that are ubiquitous here, finally finding ones that the shopkeeper referred to as “fire” and which were half the length of my pinkie (oh yes, they do the job).
How did all of this start? To be honest, I have no idea. I’d like to think that it would have happened during my college years if I had had the time, but alas, sleep was even hard to come by between my bhangra, writing, skitting, blah, blah, blah. These days, I’m still fairly busy and my daily routine doesn’t leave me a lot of room for cooking (a reason why I usually only cook once or twice a week—on my off days—in the hopes that it’ll hold me over until my next opportunity). Also, there aren’t too many options if I want to try to continue being a healthy eater. I mean, they’re there, but I’m hoping not to blow my scholarship on healthy restaurants.
It began with a call to my mom. She excitedly gave me a recipe for Aloo Palak, not explaining how to do a lot of the simple things that a newbie cook would need to learn. I know that it seems simple, but I had never cooked, or even tried dicing a tomato or an onion for cooking, for example. There are smart ways to approach both of these tasks, but I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with these vegetables. There was only one place I could think of turning to in my confusion: Youtube.
Yes, my mom and Youtube taught me how to cook (special shout-out to Youtube’s/ABC’s Chef Jean Pierre).
Since my mom has been using skype to coach me through her recipes, I’ve been able to master a variety of vegetable dishes, offering a Vegetable Pulao at our Fulbright Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks ago, before venturing into the meat world, first with a simple chicken soup, then with the aforementioned chicken salan.
This time I was putting together some Aloo Gobi, having prepared the necessary cauliflower beforehand and timing things out so that I could hop in the shower while it was all cooking.
When it was done, me and my friend Riaan (who ended up leaving that same night to head back to Cleveland) grabbed the food and headed to the party (It’d be wrong if I didn’t say that Riaan was one of my cooking inspirations as he had been cooking for some time and had impressed me with his skills and his food. He didn’t cook that night because of his flight, but two days prior he’d made some tandoori chicken for another potluck in our neighborhood… baller).
We found a taxi as soon as we walked out of my building and Riaan told the driver where we were headed. Halfway there, the driver pulled over and asked to see Riaan’s directions, which he had luckily written in Arabic. He looked at them for a couple minutes and I asked if he understood. He gave me and emphatic nod, then he opened the door and got out of the car.
We were on an empty side street and there was nothing but trees on either side of the road.
“Where is he going?” Riaan said, as we watched the driver walk across the street.
“Taking a leak?” I said.
The driver promptly reached the other side of the road, spaced his feet shoulder-distance apart and, well… you get the point.
***
I needed some cheap goods, including an Oxford English-Arabic dictionary, so I went to the balad (downtown).
On the day before I had been trying to write an essay for my Arabic class (on Graham Crackers) and, as I didn’t know a lot of the necessary words (wheat, healthy, cereal, -flavored, sweetened, etc.) I went to Safeway and tried to read them off of various food packages. It was fun, but my friend Albert suggested that an English-Arabic dictionary might be easier.
Another friend had told me that she had previously special ordered one from the University of Jordan bookstore, but seeing as we were able to find basically anything in the balad, including a copy of the film American Gangster during its opening week in the US, I figured I’d give the dictionary a try.
As I was walking down the street, I stopped at the first bookseller I could find: a guy sitting against a wall with a small book shack and a table. I asked if he had the Oxford Wordpower English-to-Arabic dictionary. He asked me to give him a minute, and then he walked away, presumably to his book dealer.
He came back with a perfect copy.
“How much?” I said.
“Four dinars,” he said.
I tried to look for something wrong with it, to leverage the price lower. I looked for the publishing date. A 1999 edition, printed in 2003. Damn, it wasn’t that old.
“It’s old,” I said.
“It’s not old,” he said.
“It’s old,” I said. “Three dinars.”
“It’s not old,” he said.
Since four dinars is $5.65 and three is $4.23, I really wasn’t arguing for much. Especially since I would probably have to pay at least $25 for this book in the U.S. But it was about the principal.
“It’s old,” I said again.
I ended up paying three and a half.
***
Here's a brief glimpse at a portion of the dowtown marketplace area:
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