Category: Analogue life

  • Ghost in the theatre

    Ghost in the theatre

    How many ghosts of yourself have you left lingering in this city? Can you remember where you left them?

  • Nouveauté

    Nouveauté

    I once dreamt that I was transported back in time and drove through the streets of Amman, maybe in the 1960s. Who were those people who built these handsome houses? Who opened the shops with neatly calligraphed signs.

  • Beauty & tragedy

    Beauty & tragedy

    Tread carefully as you walk the streets of your city. Your eyes might be catching a glimpse of great beauty, but your feet may be touching a site of great tragedy.

  • Tawjihi high school blues

    Tawjihi high school blues

    Kattu’a bookshop evokes a very specific memory in me: Tawjihi. That end-of-high-school-examination monster of the Jordanian education system that refuses to die.

  • 600 mornings

    600 mornings

    For 600 mornings I stood here. Dressed in beige, exactly like the other 1000 teenage boys, standing in a formation of straight columns on the concrete tarmac.

  • Jabal Al-Hussein. Revisited.

    Jabal Al-Hussein. Revisited.

    Amman. Hard to explain. Temporary permanence. Self denial. False starts and fruitless hopes. A story forgotten before it can be remembered.

  • The 80′s refusing to leave: Shmeisani and the death of Ammani human-scale urban modernity

    Occasional visits to my dentist in Shmeisani sometimes end with a walk retracing the footsteps of my teenage days in Amman, spent studying for exams or getting introduced to newspapers like The Guardian at Abdulhameed Shoman public library, meeting computer geek friends upstairs in the computer lab in same building, eating Shawerma at a corner…

  • Taj Mall opens: the (still dusty) crown of Jordan’s shopping?

       The opening of a major mall in Jordan in this post-financial-crisis era is certainly an event to watch. We live in very different times compared to, say, 2005, when we were awash in Gulf money and grand real estate dreams. Can developers and retailers pull off another mall in a market were people are…

  • Shopkeepers from hell: How Amman takes out the fun from shopping (and what this says about us)

    Shopping in Amman often can be an unhappy experience. In many shopping situations, one has to deal with one of the following traits (or a combination of them): unfriendliness, ignorance, rip-off, lack of empowerment, arrogance and sheer stupidity. Take, for example, the latest shopping incident my wife had to endure. Around a week ago she…

  • A universal logo for human rights: vote for your favorite now

    A few months ago I was appointed as a jury member of an amazing global design competition. The aim: to create a universally accepted logo for human rights. Peace has its symbol. Religions have their symbols. Global non profits and corporations also have their all-present symbols. But universal human rights, which have become part of…

  • A nuclear Jordan? From outdated logic to inspiring possibilities

    I will freely admit that I am an opponent of nuclear energy. For me this is a moral stance. But I know full well that the issue of nuclear energy can also be discussed on other levels, not just from a moral point of view. I am also not an energy expert. But there are…

  • Seriously GAM.. What on earth is going in King Faisal Street?

    Why does a promising urban rehabilitation project like the one GAM is doing come with so much agony, dirt, carelessness. This fiasco has been going on for too long. Every reasonable person knows that a major rehabilitation of a street will result in disruptions. But the way the construction work in Faisal Street has been…