Omar Maani is an impressive man. As the mayor of a city of over two million people he has the confidence, vision and charm of a person who is leading his people towards a better existence. A modern day Moses who has a name that recalls our greatest and earliest poet, Homer, and the city pride of Pericles (of Classical Athens).Mayor Maani has vision, and is at the forefront of city government in the 21st century. He is also a man within a kingdom and traditions. His office has a man who offers coffee to visitors bedouin style as they wait. His office also just reaffirmed their loyalty of King Abdullah. Although operating within a kingdom, Mayor Omar Maani is a thorougly modern man who could easily be the mayor of a Seattle or a Chicago. He understands the need for planned development and the need for social justice alongside of making Amman one of the best places in the world for foreign investment. It seems as if a lot of the economic boom in Amman comes from Gulf Arab investment. Maani and the City Council have tapped part of the foreign investment coming into the city and channeled it into programs to help the poorer neighborhoods in the city. He called it their Robin Hood strategy. The city's website is worth looking at if you have time. Greater Amman Municipality Website.
We didn't get an opportunity for a formal picture with the mayor because he is a busy man and rushed out exactly at 1:00 after offering all of us a gift bag of coffee table quality books about Amman, Amman's growth plan, and the flora/fauna of Jordan. He also directed us to an exhibit of political cartoons by one of Jordan's most famous journalists/critics.
The exhibit captured the spirit of true citizenship--the ability to criticize the things that are wrong in society with the underlying message that we can do better as a society. Unfortunately for us as visiting Americans the cartoons are a reminder that a lot of what is wrong with society has to do with U.S. foreign policy and the American lifestyle of television, individuality, and crude behavior.... 
Then we made our way to lunch, shopping and a movie at Mecca Mall. After lunch I thought I was being so clever by taking photographs of the listed movie times so that we could decide what movie to see and have more time to wander the mall (and shop). Well, it turns out that the listed times are not the actual times. The actual times are on a photocopied piece of paper by the cash register. 
The end result was that we missed out on seeing The Mummy 3 or even an Egyptian comedy with Omar Sharif, and we saw Wanted with Angelina Jolie instead.The movie was incredibly violent and disturbing, but I found the underlying archetypes to be fascinating. Here in Jordan we watched a film that followed the Western tradition in young hero's stories (heroic bildungsroman) on every single major point. The hero was baptized three times in achieving his heroic stature--this only about 50 km away from the River Jordan. There were Christ wounds, father-son issues, the crossing of a river, night/day symbolic moments, fire as the devil imagery at a critical moment, going into mother earth/cave imagery to discover the past, tapestry of fate imagery, choices of the young man vs. choices of the young woman hero, asymmetry of Fox's face showing that she is not good imagery,and et cetera. In thinking about the movie, I should have confirmed my suspicions about the characters based on the imagery. The young man is asked at the beginning to shoot the wings off of flies, and then he is handed the flies and wings. In retrospect this was an explicit warning that the head of the Fraternity of Weavers is a Beelzebub figure--a lord of flies. The young man is being offered a Faustian bargain from a suave and confident Satan figure...and it was all in the flies. If I get a chance I will elaborate, but please don't see the movie--it really was too violent...especially the gratuitous blowing up of a swarm of rats and the killing of innocent train passengers.
