One down, eleven to go...

After a week in Amman, I’m finally starting to get a sense of the place. Superficially, it appears quite modern, and in many ways it is – good roads, big shiny shopping malls, and lots of restaurants and cafes. Scratch below the surface, though, and a lot of the varnish comes off. Things are older and dustier than they look, and often built to a standard that can charitably be described as ‘lousy’. Take my apartment: visually impressive, but the water pressure sucks, the windows don’t close properly, and everything with a water pipe – faucets, radiators, washing machine – leaks.

Virtually the entire city is built from the same off-white stone. The window of my hotel room (where I was staying until recently) overlooked a vista of round, steep hills plunging into narrow valleys. With the white stone everywhere, it looks like a set of giant molars. Without the hills, the landscape would be dull indeed. With them, I can’t help thinking about earthquakes. Some may recall that back in November 2007, when I visited Port-au-Prince, I made the following (tragically prescient) observation on this very blog:

Speaking of precarious perches, many of the houses – thousands of them – are built on the steep slopes of the mountains, the more convenient spaces already being full. This would be a feat of engineering for an engineer. These folks aren’t engineers – not credited ones, anyway. I actually get weak-kneed looking at them, staggered like benches in the nosebleed section of a stadium. In addition to torrential rains and landslides (remember, no trees), Haiti is prone to earthquakes. Even a small shaker would be enough to reduce these neighbourhoods to dust. It’s not a question of if, but of when.

I’m sorry to say I had much the same thought looking out over Amman. Jordan is in a seismically active area, and stone buildings on steep slopes are not ideally suited to such environments. I hope I’m wrong, but Amman looks pretty vulnerable to me. (Not PauP vulnerable, but still…)

Not a great thought to close a post with, but I can't deny it's on my mind...