Amman- After much delay the first part of my Jordan series is finally online with the rest hopefully being uploaded in quick succession. I lost almost my entire first week here after my phone was crushed leaving Beirut which sent me down a tech rabbit hole it was hard to burrow out of. I haven’t finished the learning curve of filming and editing this series either so there’s still that.
I’ve also learned that I apparently will need a higher end MacBook with way more storage space if I’m to continue this. I’ve only brought one 1TB Lacie Rugged drive with me and after each episode is fully safely online I have to trash all the original files. (I also didn’t buy enough Sandisk cards for the GoPro to boot). So things are really tight tech wise. But I’m totally making it all work somehow.
As I go over in the episode, I first came here 25 years ago in the midst of a summer long backpacking adventure and was last here 20 years ago going to and from Baghdad and so it’s a whole deal to be back here and for weeks at that. On the surface there isn’t all that much happening in Amman as compared to Beirut where everything is happening right in front of you. You step out of your hotel there and it’s happening. Here things are going on but you have to be clued on. Or really dig into Arabic twitter. Like the Israeli ambassador is getting the boot from Amman, for instance.
I was going to make this episode very differently than it ended up partly because I streamlined the narrative and partly cause of storage limitations on my laptop that mean can’t make super long videos. It just overwhelms this laptop. Like it physically gets crazy overheated which concerns me. So I just decided to make this one mostly about ancient Amman and keep things lite. I’ll do a separate one-off video later on Amman during the terror wars. I’m going to make occasional non-numeric episodes where the topic doesn’t quite fit what I’m doing overall.
Another thing I’m figuring out as I go it what i want this series to be. It’s taking some time to figure out. And I’m loving the process. Challenges everyday.