Finding feet

I think I've found a couple of toes on one of my feet after these last two days, which is mostly due to having met some lovely can-do and happy ladies who've lived here for a few years, are entrenched in the local culture, and are looking well on it. They both have interesting jobs, and children, so I'm hopeful this could also be me in a few months.

The other thing is, that after a week of partially intentional and partially situation-enforced drying out, J and I tripped over a 'liquor store' round the corner from our house. This means we have within walking distance, a corner shop, a cake/ice cream parlour, a bottle shop, the Bird Garden and a paediatrician. Which means that while we're here, we'll be fat, happy and healthy. There's a lot to be thankful for. And why was I thinking you could get to know all this in the first hour? I'm unrealistic at times.

The dwarves earn their keep

The wind and rain began in the middle of the night and continued well into today, which is Thursday, which also means we've been here for a week and it's my day on my own with the boys. We're in a bit of limbo as none of our stuff has arrived, we can't use our car which is at the Embassy until all the paperwork and ID has been cleared, internet will be another couple of weeks, so…what to do in an empty house with two boys of 1 and 3 and J at Arabic classes most of the day.

We started by making a den with one of the fitted sheets we were loaned from the embassy and attaching it to the sofa. This was fun for about an hour as it could be a boat, a car or a bath. We thought we'd found a cleaner, but she came once and we haven't seen her since, so I thought I'd rope the dwarves into a bit of bathroom cleaning and floor mopping. We had fun at first, with L mopping, and Rashimi playing in the bidet and dangling his fingers into the loo bowl, but then they both started wiping out on the wet floor, Rashimi like a dog on ice, and the howling began. Everywhere I went, Rashimi screamed. And if he went near L, he got pushed away backwards - head smacking onto marble floor.

Sayyad came by to collect the rubbish and I could hear him outside our door calling: 'Umm Laurence!' which means 'Laurence's mother'. Here you are called Father or Mother of...and the name of your oldest child. So J is known as, Abou Laurence about the block. Sayyad came in and grabbed Rashimi's cheeks asking why he'd been awake so early and threw L in the air. His twinkly eyes and broad smile made us all feel better and miraculously after a bit of car racing in the empty sitting room it was lunchtime and the moment to get the olives out.

As we picked the stones out of the olives with greasy fingers, I asked myself, what are these Syrian ladies doing with their children in the refugee camps on the Jordanian border, with a lot more to worry about than no toys and no car? It's frustrating not to be able to go there and talk about where they've come from and how they manage. We have the easy ride as ever. Perhaps at some stage we'll get to go and maybe even be able to do something useful.

Beginnings

Often, Mothers get it exactly right. Even when they're far away. And this piece of prose popped into my inbox from Mum which I thought I'd share, since I hope I'm not the only one who finds beginnings a little un-nerving.

When we arrive into the world, we enter into an ancient sequence.
All our beginnings happen within this continuity.
Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown.
Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated.
We seem to think that beginning is a setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case.
Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced.
Goethe says that once the commitment is made, destiny conspires with us to support and realise it.
We are never as alone in our beginnings as might seem at the time.
A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open towards the gifts and growth that are stored up for us.
To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

by John O’Donohue

And with that, a Juicy Lucy calendar she gave me at Christmas, which luckily made it into the bags that did arrive with us. In January the message is: 'A new year brings new adventures! Skip forth and be bold. Anything is possible.'

Just what I needed. Thank you, Mum.

Rubber jungles and real beans

It's hard not to notice a certain Dubai-ification in the Middle East these days, and the shopping malls and other mirrored and shiny developments are a sign of progress for people here. And in this respect they shouldn't be belittled. But it can grate when you're looking for the local heart of a city that never used to be a city anyway. Since Trans Jordan was only created in the 1920's, Amman the capital where we are, was a tiny village back then, and has grown to become a sprawling metropolis built on 7 hills.  The hills are covered from bottom to top with pale grey box-shaped houses. Limestone Lego, as someone once described them to me.  I find the city scape appealing on the whole and it reminds me a little of how Kabul was built, which I also came to love as a city. The minarets and the occasional church spire are the only things which punctuate the cubic carpet, and then on the outskirts, the shiny Malls sit smugly with Starbucks and fast food joints tacked on the bottom. I wonder if Starbucks have to pay corporation tax here?

One of the main results of globalisation is you recognise every chain store everywhere in the world now. When I first went to Spain in 1992, Zara was really exotic and all the clothes you saw there were different from the ones you could buy in the UK. But now I'm sounding like a Granny, and I'm sure I'll be grateful for the H&M at some point in our time here. Huge congested roads slice up the city into sections and the main road running through West Amman has about 8 roundabouts known as circles which most people use as their bearings as the streets were only named and labelled 3 years ago, and no one uses maps.

The boys and I were whisked off in the Glammy's Merc this week to one such mall - a place where I could feel my heart and soul buzz under the strip lights and die like a fly on a blue kitchen fly-zapper. There was a light drizzle and fog outside which is the equivalent here to a foot of snow. People go very carefully indeed and we were in search of an indoor kids play area in the mall. It was closed, so we ended up in another place called the Jungle Bungle, essentially a huge netted climbing frame indoors with rubber mats - the kind you get all around the world.

All was well for about five minutes, until both L and R, neither of whom had slept well, started to wail and shriek if I moved an inch away from either of them, clinging to my legs like two oversized mussels on a rock. So there I was, in a right tangle wangle in the Jungle Bungle, up at the top of the climbing frame in the netting area, which was so low it was like being on the 9-and-a-half-th floor in Being John Malkovitch, only lower, with one leg twisted round a piece of rubber liana and the other being gnawed by a wailing Rashimi, and listening to a screeching Lozenge 30 feet down below…'I waaaaant my Mummmmmmmeeeeey!!!' 'Soooooo doooo I! I thought.' No one knew what to do, not even the expert (which isn't me). This, I thought again, is really not what I've come to Jordan for. But the same hobbled camel hobbles on…and the perceptive Glammy decided it would be best if I disappeared in the afternoon and left L and R in her capable hands so she could get to know them a bit better.

As luck would have it, J walked through the door at about 1pm so we left a happier looking L and R with their digits in the hummus, and disappeared together in search of….anything, just anything, that wasn't plastic or loud.

This was when we came across Jamal, from Palestine, who runs the elegantly 1970s Coffee House El Farouki, on a road not far from our flat, opposite the Jordan Kuwait bank where we've just opened accounts. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and through it you could just make out walls lined with jars and jars of coffee beans, and men in leather jackets sipping on cardamom laced Bedouin coffee. Bunn means coffee beans in Arabic, and it being only one syllable and using two of the first letters you learn in Arabic (b and n), it figures in the first chapter of the text book I used in London. So I could even say something to Jamal, other than hello, which was very exciting. 'Bunn' I said enthusiastically. And then he replied in Icelandic. This is always the risk of saying you were brought up in Scotland. People often get it confused with Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and anywhere else that's relatively small and northern, such as Iceland. But he was charming, had actually visited Glasgow in 1976, and we drank lots of coffee, and returned to our pet Lilliputians stinking of cigarette smoke which is probably a bit more of a novel smell for them than booze these days.

We'll definitely be going back to see Jamal, particularly when the container arrives with the coffee bean grinder in it.

The arrival of the Virgin Mary

I find myself alone in our apartment for the first time, and everything that's happened over the last week is drizzling into the air pockets in my head. Is it a coincidence that the Scottish word for child, bairn, is made of the same letters as brain? A poor woman from Clan Macdonald back in the day perhaps had the realisation that once the r had moved two letters forward, her head would be a different place. Not better, not worse. Just different.

My brain is at ease and ticking happily having just watched the bairns from two floors up, skipping along the road towards the Bird Garden with a ball of wholesome Jordanian goodness in the form of our very new part time nanny who has filled our lives with fun, energy and crucial local knowledge.

When we were planning our lives here, everyone told us we'd never find a Jordanian willing to help with children - it was only Egyptians, Philippinas or Sri Lankans who did that job. But it appears we've found the only one who does. And amazingly she also feels the stars were aligned in her favour.

Her last job was with an Arab royal family, where she was used to being shuttled around with the children in a helicopter. She drives a Mercedes (also beige) and a 4 x 4 and LV is her Topshop. I'd been concerned she'd be more Glammy than Nanny. But as an unmarried Jordanian with a tattoo, a clandestine boyfriend, and a job that she doesn't tell anyone she does - she errs enough on the wild side to hang out with our two dwarves and she won their hearts in a matter of hours. She also says everything in English and then in Arabic, so our days are all about 'yala yala' (let's go) and 'shwai shwai' (gently gently/slowly slowly). Inshallah, Alhamd'u l'illah and Mashallah. No day is complete without heavy use of all these.

L keeps forgetting her name and asks me, 'Where's that little lady gone?' as she's about half my height and when holding Rashimi his toes reach her mid thigh. But she can shift, as I discovered when L was hurtling towards a busy road, and she disappeared as lightning to scoop him up, her sleek plait, as black as a squaw's, flying straight out behind her. She is just what we needed, not least becuase she laughed when I explained about all the imported food and told me that supermarket was where you go if you want foreign stuff. Now we have a fridge full of Jordanian veg. No surprise her name means Virgin Mary in Arabic. I hadn't realised The V.M. featured in the Koran. But she is proving herself to be that, and more.

We had to buy a first pair of shoes (Chinese) for Rashimi as he's out and about a lot, and he's walking like a small John Wayne wading through mud. In the playground yesterday he was found face down in the downward dog position eating sand most of the morning, which is either a mineral deficiency or a demonstration of his humility for a new land. To everyone's amusement, I was also accosted by gangs of Egyptian and Jordanian ladies wanting to take my photograph. Perhaps this is payback time for all those pictures I've taken of other people in my life.

I just met our landlord's mother who came to show me how to work our oven. They are a Palestinian family and I had the chance to talk to her about when they left Palestine and came to Jordan. Her side of the family arrived here in the mid 30's, and her husband's came in 1948, during the Nakba, which means disaster, when Palestinians were forced out from their homes, their towns, their country, in so many cases, never to return. She said they used to return to Jerusalem every weekend before 1967, but after that date, they couldn't really go back at all. These dates are etched in the history here, as 1066 and 1789 in Europe. I'm looking forward to understanding more about it. It's particularly appropriate that we should understand it being British, since Britain played such a big role in the turmoil. The Middle East was divided up by Europeans, particularly the British and the French, and we've been living the manifestations of it ever since. It's something we don't get to look into nearly deep enough in our history classes at school.

Noticing the cracks

The air up here is dry and crackly and we all woke up looking like pompoms with static hair. Our hands are dry and our lips crack when we smile. The Lozenge says 'I want to go home' every hour or so, so we went to a place up the road called the Prince Hashem Gardens, otherwise known as the Bird Park because of all the caged birds there - from peacocks and pheasants to red hens and ducks. There's even a monkey and a baboon. It was full of Jordanian families as it's a Friday and it seemed to take the Lozenge's mind off going home.

It took us about an hour and a half to walk to the park, to the supermarket and back and all he could say was, 'Look at the crackth, Mummy! Look at the crackth!' The road is covered in cracks, like our lips and hands, and he was fixated.

It's true. And you notice the cracks everywhere. Despite there being all the obvious signs of modernity each way we look out of our second floor windows - satellite dishes, cranes, mirrored glass buildings and Mercedes Sports, you can't ignore the basis of arid poverty. There's a chronic water shortage and the country is almost entirely dependent on aid. The cityscape is bland, and as beige as the interior of our flat. On top of this flaking canvas, the modern stuff seems stuck on top like a band aid - and fails to cover up what's below.

We finally made it to the Supermarket  and tried hard to buy Jordanian food but the only garlic on offer was from China and about 70 per cent of the stuff on the shelves was imported, with a little red sticker saying just that. 60 per cent of the population here is also imported, since this country didn't even exist until the 1920s when Churchill drew a few straight lines on the map and created Trans-Jordan after the Arab revolt. This place only begins to make sense when you start reading all about this relative recent history - and it really brings it all to life.

What big curbs you have

The supermarket doesn't, however - as anywhere else in the world. And after trawling around for 40 minutes we emerged, the boys with pink cheeks from having been pinched and stroked by many hands in the aisles, with a motley mixture of stuff. I only realised when we got home that we didn't get any salt so everything tastes like baby food.

The Lozenge has been taking off all his clothes most of the day long and getting into bed with his teddies, the laudry basket, my belt and the sandbag to hold the door open. Saeed found it most amusing to see a naked Lozenge cavorting around when he popped in to look at the electrics.

I know about first days in strange places. It's when your eyes and soul are at their most keen and most judgemental and yet you're also at your most vulnerable and exhausted. This day is no different but I know I'll look back after months and think what a funny little day that was. You can't cut corners - you just have to go straight through it and wade on.

I once read an interview with the actress Salma Hayek who when asked if she was going to feel like a fish out of water in her new life in Paris, she said, 'I'll make my own water'. This, I guess is what we're aiming for.

Hobbled camels

There's perhaps a reason why Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark didn't have children, or at least didn't travel with any.

An adventure is something you make. You have to look for one, and make it one. It doesn't just happen to you. But when travelling with children, the normality or domesticity you might try to escape when adventuring, follows you around. Had either lady done it, they might have felt it was like riding a hobbled camel into the unknown - forced to go slower and to stop in places they hadn't chosen. In a strange way, this can either make you feel trapped, or grounded. You can feel hindered by it, yet sometimes even grateful for it. But you never travel in the same way again. Until they grow up and leave.

I managed to salvage a few minutes gazing out the window as the Mediterranean ended and we flew over Israel/Palestine and I saw the mountainous desert begin as we swooped down towards Jordan. The sky was a clear icy blue which merged with pale orange as it met the desert and the border with Syria was visible. The border that hundreds of Syrian refugees are flooding over every hour, like so many other nationalities before them - Palestinians then Iraqis, now Syrians. Who next?

We were spat out from the Orange Purgatory into a humid arrivals section where we hung around for about an hour in a queue. Rashimi had spent most of the flight being squeezed and taken off our hands for cuddles in ample Jordanian bosoms, and continued to be plumped and kneaded by a gang of Bangladeshi girls who looked about 16. The mini van from the embassy was nowhere to be seen when we came through arrivals so we spent a sweaty half hour with about 25 taxi drivers in leather jackets and our pile of as many bags, and jumped in 2 cabs to the centre of Amman - Lozenge and J in one, a ravenous Rashimi and I in the other with a pack of Pringles. One pop, he ate the lot and unlike many other international junk, they really do taste the same everywhere in the world, unlike a KitKat or a Twix.

We all arrived at our flat at the same time, which was astonishing really, considering neither driver knew where we were going, and street names in Amman were added only five years ago. Our landlord greeted us, a slim man in his forties with a gym habit. LA meets Amman. J informed me he spends most of his time in the Power House around the corner. He was with Saeed, a charming Egyptian man in a shell suit with eyes as shiny, who's the caretaker. He gave us a whistlestop tour of every lightswitch with accompaniment of a bored-fatigued Lozenge cutting in every 30 seconds with 'CanIwatchCharlieandLolaontheIpadMummy' until our landlord, who seemed like he'd done one too many diet cokes that afternoon, finally whisked out again and left us in Apartment 2, No 3 Allal al Fasi Street, Amman which is our new home. It majors on beige, gold and marble with a twist of Louis XV, and is so much bigger than our London house we keep losing each other.

Then we found ourselves having dinner in Mirabelle, a 4 storey ice cream parlour and cafe which is so sweet and sickly you feel like you've landed in Disney. It's not somewhere J and I would have chosen to stop, but our travelling dwarves were delighted and I guess until we settle in here, their moods will be the barometer for all four of us.