The Strangest Thing That Happened Last Year

I almost wrote "one of" but then thought, no, really, The.

I stood on the roof of my friends' apartment, near Mango Street in Amman. It was mid-morning; we were going to make pancakes, but needed baking soda. We were waiting for the snow to stop before we headed out to the corner store.

Snow?

Snow.

The snow fell in Amman. In March. N took pictures, just to prove it. Apparently, it's not terribly uncommon for snow to fall in Jordan, in the hills north of Amman. But in Amman? Once every few years, maybe. My friends, teachers, had been given a snow day. Thus, the pancakes.

But that's not even the strangest thing. The strangest thing was standing on the roof, listening to the call to prayer sounding through the white falling snow. From loudspeakers all around us, came the long, brassy, minor-key calls. I think it would have seemed strange to me even if it weren't snowing: that public, un-ignorable stopping of the day for prayer. But it was even stranger, standing in the snow, hearing the calls from hidden minarets.

(So, to reflect on this experience--I felt like I was trapped, even as it was happening, in a parody of orientalism. So I'm trying not to exoticize. Yet--it was strange, eerie, unforgettable, like I imagine the exotic is supposed to be.)