The formal tour doesn’t start until tonight, Jordan time. But most of our people are already here, so we joined together for a relatively brief city tour.
We drove through several of the districts of the city, which has changed dramatically since I first visited it in 1978. (For one thing, the population has more than quadrupled, to somewhere between four and four and a half million.) We passed by the King Abdullah I Mosque:
Most of our time was spent at the Citadel, the historic heart of the city.
We won’t really do justice to Jordan on this trip. It’s a very historic place, with lots of sites worth visiting. The name of Amman itself recalls the fact that it was, in biblical times, the capital of the ancient Ammonites, who called it “Rabbath Ammon.” Later, Ptolemy II Philadelphus rechristened it “Philadelphia,” from which comes the name of an American town in the state of Pennsylvania.
We visited the Roman theater shown above, walked briefly through a small (but nice) museum of folkloric Bedouin costumes directly adjacent to it, had a good traditional lunch at a restaurant called “Hashem,” and then returned to our hotel. People are still jet-lagged, and tired.
The real festivities begin tomorrow.
Posted from Amman, Jordan
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