IDEA VS REALITY VS INSANITY

I blogged a few weeks ago about the beauty of the past when things were done by hand. Here is another example of a beautiful watercolor rendering done by Ammar Khammash. I've been meaning to photograph the building in this painting for over a month, but haven't been able to motivate to get up at sunrise and do it...until today. The building is the headquarters for the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN). They are the Jordanian equivalent to the National Park Service. It is a terrific space built on the edge of a hill overlooking downtown Amman. Another interesting fact about this building is that I helped pay for it, and if you're reading this in the US, so did you. It was funded entirely by US tax dollars. US AID in Jordan is the topic of a much longer piece, but know in the meantime that our government gives Jordan almost a billion dollars a year! We can't afford to pay our teachers, but we can build Jordan a posh nature center (which is by no means the most ridiculous of the US AID projects). US AID also has several billboards in Amman to advertise the fact that we give Jordan money. So much for American humility.