Spend the morning mooching through the markets enjoying ourselves. A complete absence of any chain shops at all. Each one is just a small market stall, although they do seem to sell a lot of the same stuff, like markets anywhere in the world.
A late morning tea at a local cafe where I had turkish coffee and Kenafeh - a popular cheese pastry soaked in sweet sugar-based syrup. OK, I know, I spend half my life trying to give up strong coffee and sugar, and then pig out on both. I'll have bad withdrawal symptoms by the time I get home.
After lunch we headed off on foot to see two sights in Amman. The first was Rainbow Street, which is meant to be the tourist strip in town. Very underwhelming. Being the middle of Winter here, there aren't that many tourists, so it was really a street of western style restaurants with hideously inflated prices, with most other types of shops being in various states of disrepair. I guess that it's meant to be the 'high end' of town, as there were a few embassies dotted around.
Then it was via a very circuitous route (read - I got lost) to the second sight being the old Roman Theatre. When we finally got there, we found that they'd done a terrific job of building a new plaza area adjacent to it where everybody was relaxing and playing, so you had a great combination of the old and the new. The parts of the theatre that were still standing were well preserved and in good condition, probably because they had been built into the side of the hill, but the stage end and all of the columns at the entrance were all gone, or recently rebuilt.
Dinner was at Hashem's, the same felafel and hummus restaurant that we visited with the group last week. Again, we had more than we could handle for a princely $3 each.
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