360east

Category: Family stuff

  • Taj Mall opens: the (still dusty) crown of Jordan’s shopping?

       The opening of a major mall in Jordan in this post-financial-crisis era is certainly an event to watch. We live in very different times compared to, say, 2005, when we were awash in Gulf money and grand real estate dreams. Can developers and retailers pull off another mall in a market were people are…

  • Shopkeepers from hell: How Amman takes out the fun from shopping (and what this says about us)

    Shopping in Amman often can be an unhappy experience. In many shopping situations, one has to deal with one of the following traits (or a combination of them): unfriendliness, ignorance, rip-off, lack of empowerment, arrogance and sheer stupidity. Take, for example, the latest shopping incident my wife had to endure. Around a week ago she…

  • Egypt’s Revolution. My Revolution.

    I’ve been glued to Twitter for the past 16 days. Too many thought racing through my head to think clearly. A total emotional roller-coaster. My generation’s first revolution! All that I can think of right now is that everything in this region, in our lives, need to be rethought. I am part of the 1989…

  • Amman memories: a teenager and a bookstore

    I’ve been noticing that as I grow older, I’ve been generally thinking more about the people, places and events that made me who I am today. Maybe its the nostalgia that comes with age, although I do not consider myself nostalgic at all. I am also aware that looking at these things in retrospect might…

  • Arabic children books (again): force feeding your kids trash

    Back to one of my favorite things to rant about. Arabic children books. I’ve been helping out a little with teaching my 2nd grade kid with Arabic reading. Now don’t get me started about the official curriculum for Jordanian second graders. But I will say this much: the design is horrible. And I’ve been comparing…

  • Jordan’s Universities: watching as we destroy our future

    I am the product of the Jordanian educational system in the late 1970s, 80’s and early 1990s. Not everything I learned came from the schools I attended, of course. There is family, friends, private reading and travel. But I can still can confidently say that I got an adequate education, with moments of great education.…

  • Agave blooms after 18 years in Jordanian village

    In 1992, my mother planted a little Agave Americana in my parent’s farm in the Jordanian village Aluk, 25 km north of Amman. Over the years, this agave grew and grew to a degree where my parents started thinking of removing it. Agaves have very sharp spikes that can give you nasty pain and can…

  • Say Happy New 2010 on Amman’s 1st Cricle tomorrow

    Welcome the the new year in the open air.. on Amman’s 1st Circle! We want to celebrate the new year the Ammani way Everyone is welcome. Be creative. When: Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 11:30pm to Friday, January 1, 2010 at 12:30am Details on Facebook (there aren’t really more details We just want to celebrate…

  • Amman’s most colorful day: a city no longer ashamed of itself!

    For the past two years, the subject of Amman has been unavoidable for me. Not only do I live in this city, but I’ve also been, with my company SYNTAX, involved in the first big branding effort this city has undertaken. I am overdosed on Amman! The branding project has been completed but writing about…

  • The longevity of content: Iftah Ya Simsim, the Sesame Street of Arabia

    I have three kids, aged 11, 6 and 3. So its obvious that a lot of children TV and content is consumed in our household. Kids today have an amazing array of media targeted at them: from Bluray quality Pixar movies in vivid detail, color and surround sound, to online Flash games and YouTube videos…

  • Grendizer creator Go Nagai coming to Amman!

    A flying robot.. An his creator.. ..are coming to Amman!! Go Nagai, the man behind Grendizer is coming to Amman and giving two lectures. 7 October at 11 am at the Princess Sumaya University 8 October at the Royal Film Commission. This is fantastic. Details here. When I blogged about Grendizer five years ago, the…

  • Living without the dish: our family’s video-on-demand experiment

    Two months ago, my family moved house. Our satellite dish was left on the roof of the old house. Since the move, we’ve been living without a dish, resulting in a purely video-on-demand lifestyle. So how important is TV for you and your kids? And what happens when conventional satellite TV is absent? Every family…