Stuff you need backpacking around Jordan

The national language of Jordan is Arabic. Most Jordanians speak English, especially in urban area such as Amman. French and German are the second and third most popular languages after English. You might encounter some Cauacasian and Armenian languages because of the vast amount of Caucasian immigrants that arrived during the early 1900s.

Jordanian cuisine is quite similar to fare served elsewhere in the region. The daily staple being khobez, a large, flat bread sold in bakeries across the country for a few hundred fils. Delicious when freshly baked. For breakfast, the traditional breakfast is usually fried eggs,labaneh,cheese ,zaatar,olive oil along with bread and a cup of tea. Falafel and Homos are eaten on the weekends. This is the most popular breakfast. Manousheh and pastries come in as the second most popular breakfast item.All of the hotels offer american breakfast. The national dish of Jordan is the mansaf. Prepared with jameed, a sun-dried yogurt. Grumpygourmet.com describes the mansaf as "an enormous platter layered with crêpe-like traditional "shraak" bread, mounds of glistening rice and chunks of lamb that have been cooked in a unique sauce made from reconstituted jameed and spices, sprinkled with golden pine nuts." In actuality more people use fried almonds instead of pine nuts because of the cheaper price tag. While mansaf is the national dish, most people in urban areas eat it on special occasions and not every day. Other popular dishes include Maklouba, stuffed vegetables, freekeh. The most popular place to eat cheap Mansaf is the Jerusalem restaurant in down town Amman. Levantie style mezza are served in "Lebanese style" restaurants around the country, and you can easily find international fast food chains including McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Burger King. In addition to chains well-known in Europe and North America, there are some local businesses such as:

• Abu Jbarah: one of the famous falafel's restaurant in Jordan.
• Al kalha: famous falafel and homous restaurant in Jordan.
• Al-Daya'a and Al-Fares: Famous places to get Shawerma sandwiches and dishes.

As for foreign style restaurants, there is no shortage of them. The best ones are usually found in 5 star hotels, but the price tag is high. Italian restaurants and pizza places are somewhat abundant in Amman, Madaba, and Aqaba, but are very hard to find in other cities. More and more cafes now serve food. There is an abundance of middle eastern style cafes serving Argeelleh in addition to the full complement of western and middle eastern coffee drinks. There is also a good number of western style cafes which usually serve western style desserts, salads and sandwiches.

While Jordan is a Muslim country, locally brewed Amstel beer is available at better restaurants throughout the country. Guinness and Heineken can also be found in most western style restaurants. The local Petra Beer is good and hold 8% alcohol. Jordanian wine is also very high quality. Try the Mnt Nebo wine. It is not too hard to find liquor stores in the western parts of Amman and in the Christian areas. Some of these liquor stores have a rather large selection of hardcore drinks. Taxes on imported alcohol are very high, so anything other than Jordanian wine (much of it quite decent) and the locally brewed Amstel is typically 1,5x to 2x more expensive than European prices. Visitors may purchase very reasonably priced duty free beer, wine and spirits on arrival at the airport, at most land crossings into Jordan, in the Aqaba Free Zone, and within two weeks of arrival at the duty free shop between 3rd and 4th circles in Amman.

The currency is the Jordanian dinar (JD), divided into 1000 fils. The currency rate is effectively fixed at 0.71 JD per dollar, an unnaturally high rate that makes Jordan poorer value than it would otherwise be. Most upper scale restaurants and shops at shopping malls would also accept US dollars.

Costs

A subsistence budget would be around JD 10 per day, but this means you'll be eating falafel every day. JD 20 will allow slightly better accommodations, restaurant meals and even the occasional beer. JD 15 gets you average accommodation.

Mobile Service

Most of country has mobile coverage. There are four mobile operators:

• Zain (The first & largest mobile provider)
• Orange
• Umniah
• XPress

Card-based temporary numbers can be purchased at the airport or any mobile shop for 10 JDs. These numbers can be subsequently recharged with a prepaid card starting at only one JD.