Procrastinet

Amman Jordan - 2/18/05: A Walk Through the City of Dead Cats

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

[Editor's Note: Today we have what Nick rightly calls "something special" - a guest despatch in the form of a photo essay, revealing why Nick titled his second-ever despatch from Jordan "The Sweet Smell of Dead Cat." For those who believe Nick is prone to exagerration... well, maybe, but clearly not about the dead cats.]

You find you get blasé about some things, living in the middle east. Fire. Electricity.

My washing machine is this ancient contraption that looks like an undersized oil drum; the sides are half rusted out, most the cord’s insulation is long gone, and irregularly replaced with electrical tape. To fill it, you have to run a hose into the side from the sink -- and when the hose seal breaks and you find yourself standing ankle deep in water in your kitchen, fiddling with the cord of a major appliance as sparks flicker mildly from the outlet, you ask yourself, “would I ever do this in the States?”

We all have these gas heaters, called soba, to get us through the winter, and every one of my friends has at some point set themselves on fire standing in front of the damned things trying to get warm. There’s theoretically a safety valve in ‘em, so that when the pilot light goes out because you’ve burned up all the oxygen in the room, the gas flow at least stops – so you don’t die twice. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because you just get a candle and keep re-lighting the thing. One freezing night last week I ran out of candles, and I had to light my toothbrush to keep the pilot light going.

Firearms going off at all hours of the night. Secret police informers. Drivers who use three lanes at once. Wild dogs. We make accommodations with these things.

There’s civil war on three borders now. A month ago, on Metran Street, I saw a kid get hit by a service. There’s death, of course, of human and animal varieties. Around the Eid al Adha, goat bits litter the streets from hundreds of sacrifices. The deranged strays that haunt your steps hide under trash cans on streets covered with shattered glass, and chew on the corpses of their deceased buddies. That’s friendship, right to the end. After all, does the death of a cat somehow mean less than that of a person, or a friend, or the former prime minister of Lebanon?

This week, our guest despatcher Charlotte Watts (email) brings you a walk through the city of dead cats.

(Click pictures for larger images)

- Nicholas Seeley, 2/12/05

Posted by rjt at February 18, 2005 09:00 AM