Exploring Amman and Jerash Jordan | FOOD CULTURE HISTORY

Welcome back to Jordan. In the last episode I took you from the mosaic city of Madaba to the ancient ruins of Petra and right into the heart of the Wadi Rum desert. Today we venture to both the capital city of Amman and the ancient Roman city of Jerash, trying local foods and learning about some ancient history too. Welcome to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Here we're going to discover food, culture, customs, and even a little ancient history. Let's get exploring. The first place I'm taking you is to see some of Amman's ancient roots. This is the Amman Citadel. It sits at a hill, the highest point in the city, and it goes all the way back past the Bronze Age. Tons of history here. Even a familiar name, Marcus Aurelius and Mark Anthony, have ties to this ancient city which a thousand years ago was actually called Philadelphia. It was named after the Egyptian king and used the Greek name. Amman is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world with a history spanning nine millennia. The citadel is in the ancient heart of old Amman and has several ruins of old castles, temples, and living structures that any history buff will want to explore. One of the most prominent features here is the Temple of Hercules. This was built in the first century for the ruler of the Roman Empire at the time, Marcus Aurelius. Now there used to be part of a hand and an elbow that historians believe was actually Hercules, hence the name of this temple. No one knows what happened to the rest of the ancient statue believed to be Hercules, but from what remains of the Roman times, I'm sure it was quite the piece of art. The Romans built the Temple of Hercules and they ruled here for a few hundred years, but they weren't the only ones that ruled this land. Later on the Umayyad Arabs came here and they built what's behind me here. This is a cistern built around 730 and over to my left is one of the mosques that they built. There's just so much history embedded here, so many different people that came through here from the Bronze Age and before. If you're interested in history, you will find this place so fascinating. One of the most impressive ruins of the citadel is the ancient castle from the Umayyad Arabs. All that remains today is an outer shell, but use your imagination and you can just picture what it would have been like walking the halls of this ancient building. The most well-preserved piece of architecture from the time of Philadelphia is the Roman Theater. It seats up to 6,000 and is still used today, located right here in the heart of Amman. There's nothing quite like going to have a meal at your grandmother's house, right? Well, right now we're at a restaurant called Biet City and it means my grandmother's house. We're going to be taking a cooking class here. Now, this restaurant was voted one of the 10 best vegetarian restaurants in the world back in 2014 and I cannot wait to get in there and try some of the traditional Jordanian dishes. And so what we do is out of her grandmother's house, out of our grandmother's house, out of her house, we decided we wanted to empower women. So we bring women here to get them to teach you how to cook these dishes that she used to teach us and we try to empower them in that way. Today, we have Om Malik and she's going to be teaching us how to make one of my favorite dishes. Today, we're going to learn how to make matlubeh. Have you ever heard of it? I have not. Okay, amazing. I love it. You've been here 10 days and you haven't? Okay, good. Today, you're going to learn how to make this dish. This is made with eggplant, cauliflower, chicken and rice. Okay. And we're going to flip it upside down. We call it matlubeh because matlubeh literally translated means flipped upside down. A lot of the dishes in Arabic cuisine and these are homemade dishes. These are dishes that you can't really find in restaurants. So they're referred to or they're named after the way they're cooked. So if you know Galay Bandura, which you will be trying, it's tomatoes with onions but they're cooked in a pan. So we call it pan. This is the name in Arabic, Galay. All right, so today we're making matlubeh. I would be making several dishes and the first was the upside down dish known as matlubeh, which starts with oil and some rice to cover the bottom of the pot. Then I add some already cooked chicken and line the pan with sliced cooked eggplant. Then cauliflower and more rice are added with some local Arabic spices that they call seven spices. Follow this with some chicken stock and then put the whole pot on the stove to simmer. The next thing we're doing is roasting this eggplant over an open fire. I left my eggplant to char on the open stove and you actually see a lot of this vegetable in dishes in Jordan because it grows in abundance and fall is actually harvest time for eggplant. So they use a lot of seasonal ingredients, which I was really excited to see. As this was cooking, I got some of the next dishes prepared by cutting some vegetables for a fattoush salad and making a pan of roasted Arabic vegetables. We're gonna throw this in the oven and then I better go check that eggplant. Once the skin on the eggplant was very well charred, it was skinned, finely chopped and combined with tahin and mixed to create baba ghanoush. After that, I whipped up some Arabic bread, which is a very simple recipe of flour, yeast and a little bit of sugar and salt, making it into small pancakes and placing it in a pan to bake after letting it rise for a few minutes. So we've got our feast here, but the last step is for our matlouba, which is upside down dish. So we've put a plate on top. I am going to put my plate under this pot and we're gonna flip. Wow, beautiful. Let's eat. Look at this feast we prepared of Arabic bread, what we call in America baba ghanoush. We've got this fantastic salad, vegetables and the upside down dish. And we've got that coconut cake cooking. So, so many fantastic local Arabic and Jordanian dishes and I cannot wait to dig in. Thank you so much for teaching me. That was delicious home cooking here in Jordan. I loved that they used so many spices, all those fresh ingredients. This was such a great way to just indulge in the local culture here and it's making me so much more excited to go see more of Amman. To burn off a few calories, I headed downtown to the souks with a first stop at the gold souks. Now gold in Jordan is typically a higher quality than in the US. So if you're looking for jewelry, this is a great place to look. And much of the city has entire blocks dedicated to this or that. And I loved looking around for gifts, scarves and local spices and treats too. But these gold souks are definitely something to stop in even if just to look in the windows. Right now I'm walking down Rainbow Street. This is one of the more touristy areas. Lots of shops, lots of cafes and restaurants. I've already gone into a few stores as you can see. Got a nice scarf, got some souvenirs to take home if you're coming here. Definitely check this street out. There's lots to see. Street food is also incredibly good and incredibly cheap in Amman. So don't be afraid to try a few things, namely nafeh and falafel. All right, I've got a falafel here. You can get it spicy or non-spicy. I got it non-spicy and this costs less than a dinar. So you can definitely eat here on budget. This is super good. Falafel, tomatoes and tzatziki in there. Love this nice toasted bread. Super delicious. What a great snack any time of day here. So this is nafeh, one of the traditional dishes here. It was only 75 cents dinars. It's kind of like baklava on top and cheese on the bottom. Okay. Cheesy on the bottom, honey in the middle, kind of crunchy on top with pistachio. Strange, but actually really delicious. I can't eat too much of this because it's very sweet, but if you're here, definitely try it. From Amman, I've headed north to one of the largest and most well-preserved sites of ancient Roman architecture in the world. This is Jerash. It's some 6,500 years old. It was one of the 10 great cities of the Roman Decapolis era and it's nicknamed the Pompeii of the Middle East. Unlike Petra, Jerash was built by the Romans. It was one of the 10 great capital cities that helped spread their rule and their oftentimes barbaric tradition and culture far abroad from Rome itself. Some of the most impressive sites in Jerash are Hadrian's Arch, which was constructed in the second century, the Corinthian columns of the Temple of Artemis, and the huge Forum's oval colonnade, which had me turning my head in wonder. This place has been inhabited since the Bronze Age at the crossroads of civilizations like the Romans, the Greek, the Byzantine, and the Omeid. It was actually lost to the sand for centuries and over the last 70 years, they've actually been slowly excavating and unearthing this massive Roman city. Roman chariot races are something we've seen in many a movie and this next place called the Hippodrome is exactly where they took place. Let's go check it out. Where we're standing now would have been ground zero for the chariot races. There are stands over to my right for spectators and what I believe would maybe be the referees over on the left, although I'm not sure. Now for hundreds of years this was used for chariot races, but later it was actually transformed into an arena for gladiators. Now many history lessons can only ever be read about in books, but this place is a living history lesson and with things like war and religious destruction and even city expansions destroying so much of our ancient history around the world, being able to walk through a place so intact from so long ago really inspires me to learn and to wonder about what this place must have once been like. One of the most fascinating parts of this city is this roadway. Banked by columns on both sides, this would have been the ancient pathway to Amman, which back then was actually called Philadelphia. Now I've been to other ancient Roman cities around the world and the roadways that are intact are always some of the best things to see because these have been around for thousands of years and it's still intact. Chariots drove down these horses, lots of people over thousands of years and now we're getting to walk on it too. Just a really special place to be. It's said that Jerash was absorbed into the Roman province of Arabia around the second half of the first century, which at the time included the cities of Philadelphia, Petra and Bostra, which was in modern-day Syria. The Romans ensured security and peace so that people could devote their time to economic development and Jerash is said to have been one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the ancient Near East at the time. There is so much history here in Jordan from the Greco-Romans all the way down to the Bronze Age and there's also a lot of religious history, even the birthplace of Christianity and I'm going to talk more about that coming up. In next week's episode, our Jordanian adventures continue as I head south towards the Dead Sea, visiting some of the biblical sites, hiking through the narrows of the Middle East, and even going down to the Red Sea for some scuba diving. If you liked this episode, don't forget to drop a comment, give this video a thumbs up, and if you're new here, hit that subscribe button.