que maestro

happy birthday

being jorge quiroz

OBGYN's office

For real?

addresses

It has been a target of some jokes that in Amman we do not have street addresses. Mail is not delivered home, but to a post office. Bills may be delivered to your door and folded into the space between the doorknob and the door frame like a take-out menu. People refer to places based on landmarks and on major street or neighborhood names.

So, it was with some surprise that this visit to Amman, I saw street signs. Houses and buildings now have a big blue street number, probably placed there by the city because they are all in the same style.

I pointed this out to my dad when I arrived- there are street signs. He said, yeah, they put up these numbers on the houses a while ago. I said, no, the street signs on the corners. He said- oh, those, I never noticed those.

Street signs and nobody even noticed!

It's just not part of the culture. And it's not useful if there is no map that captures all the names- I could tell you the address, but there are no city maps for you to figure out where that street is! (Even Google maps of Amman include only the main streets.)

Well, mail delivered to your doorstep is out-of-fashion (all we get is junk!)- Amman just skipped that step. Just like I never owned a VCR player and went from nothing to a DVD player...