Afternoon in the Balad

People in Amman fondly refer to the small downtown area as "the Balad." This is short for "Wusit al-Balad," which literally means "center of the country." I spent a few hours there this weekend, eating famous falafel and buying pirated DVD's from one of the most legitimate Jordanian businesses I have yet seen.

We began with brunch at Hashem restaurant, which has been in the same place for decades. They serve only hummus, foul (a type of beans mixed with olive oil and spices), falafel, and fabulous mint tea that contains enough sugar to warrant an extra shot of insulin. (And of course, there are the seemingly unavoidable french fries.)

Hashem is possibly the most famous restaurant in Jordan (even though it doesn't serve mansaf, the national dish!), and if you mention it to a Jordanian, he or she will immediately tell you that HRH King Abdullah comes there with his family (which is as much a compliment to Hashem as it is to the King's good taste). It also shows that he is a "man of the people" since Hashem is generally filled with average Jordanians.

You can find the restaurant in a nook of the curving streets of the Balad. Once there, you can follow your nose into a partially covered outdoor area alive with cooks sizzling falafel in giant vats, waiters stirring ten teas on a tray all at once, and others yelling orders taken from patrons sitting at plastic tables and chairs with plates of fresh mint leaves and raw onions as either centerpieces or afterthoughts - it's not clear which. The servers are fast and they always get the orders right. They're there all day and all night - Hashem never closes.

Guys come around with giant bowls of falafel and set them down in counts of four or eight on the pieces of thin construction paper serving as placemats. Legend has it that if your bowl of hummus runs out before your bread does, they will top it off at no additional cost. Although it's generally only about $2 to leave Hashem stuffed with hummus and falafel, on a hallucinogenic sugar high from your tea.

Falafel, by the way for anyone who isn't familiar, is ground up chick peas spiced, breaded and fried. Hashem makes two varieties - small ones about the size of a ping pong ball, and large tennis ball-sized ones infused with sauteed onions in the center. These latter are to die for, and I've never seen them anywhere besides Hashem.

We finally rolled ourselves out of the restaurant to check out what might be the second-best known element of the Balad: the ubiquitous pirated DVDs. For a dinar per DVD you can get anything from the whole series of FRIENDS to the newest Brad Pitt movie to the smurfs in Arabic. I would estimate that about 85% of the movies for sale were Hollywood films - there were only a few Arabic movies - which really shows how much American pop culture dominates around here. (These stores are not for the tourists. At least not primarily.)

These are not your average street vendors sitting on the sidewalk selling old movies. There is one store called Hamoudeh, which occupies four or five store-fronts downtown. They have every movie you could possibly want, and if they don't have it, they can get it for you in a few days. They even have them before they come out in theaters in the States. (Intellectual property law is not very big around here.)

The store impressed me with its organization and efficiency; I even left with my DVDs packed in bags that had a beautifully scripted "Hamoudeh" insignia on the side. I love the irony that one of the best Jordanian businesses that I have seen here operates on what is essentially a copyright crime industry. I'm not complaining though; I love being able to afford movies. And if occasionally the pirated copies are from a guy sitting in the theatre with his camera (complete with people getting up to go to the bathroom and walking in front of the shot), what more can I ask for one JD?