Winter wonderland in Amman

For those of you who may be following these posts, I mentioned last week that we were expected to get a snowstorm last week in Amman, one that threatened to shut the city down for days and merited a massive Safeway run to stock up on basic foods and plenty of water.

Well, the storm didn’t happen then, but this past weekend when we were significantly less prepared — we actually ran out of water on Saturday — we were greeted with three days of wind, snow and ice.

We got about five inches of snow, which is pretty catastrophic for Amman, and haven’t had school since Thursday! Snow completely debilitates the city because they don’t have many snow plows, and because of that the area in our neighborhood was never cleared, we just had to wait for the snow to melt. Blizzards are pretty uncommon here, to say the least; snow covered palm trees was something I never I expected to see in my lifetime.

Walking around the empty streets on Friday once again felt post-apocalyptic, absolutely nobody was out and the roads were blanketed in snow. We joked that we felt like the first explorers of Amman, stomping the first bootprints into the fresh powder, that is, until we turned a corner and saw a bunch of children singing Frozen and building a snowman and we happily joined in. So given that nothing in our area was cleared of snow, we couldn’t really go anywhere most of the weekend. But after three years spent in sunny, weatherless Southern California, a snow day (or three) was much appreciated. I spent most of the weekend snowed in, watching Parks and Recreation, eating frozen pizza in bed and playing cards with my roommates — and it was perfect.

Five days later, the city is still recovering, and we’re still not back to a normal school schedule. But this weekend promises 70-degree weather and sun, a true transformation from the blizzard of the past weekend, and the snow will quickly melt, inshallah.