#189: World Cup City - Jordan 🇯🇴
Day 23: I chose wisely
Welcome to an ongoing Brussels Notes series exploring the 48 participating countries of the 2026 World Cup, without leaving Brussels. Read the explainer, check out the other entries, and then subscribe.
JORDAN v Algeria
M & Mme Falfoul, Rue de la Violette 32، 1000 Bruxelles
At M & Mme Falfoul, there are two booklets on my table that I first mistake for menus - one for food, the other for wine and alcoholic drinks. They are neither, though; the smaller one is a fold-out map of Jordan, and the larger one a visitor’s guide to the country.
Jordan is not a country I know much about, save for its precarious geographical location, its royal family and the mediating role it plays in the wider region, and that its capital is Amman. Despite this ignorance, the country occupied an outsized place in my childhood imagination, though I was not aware of it at the time. I have such a clear memory of sitting in our front room in Carrigaline watching the TV as my parents flicked over between news reports of the fall of the Berlin Wall and a broadcast - the TV premiere? - of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is such a vivid memory I have no doubt that it is a fabrication, a confluence of disparate occasions my brain has fused together into one, touchstone event.
Either way, I became, like most of my generation, obsessed with Indiana Jones, with archeology, and most of all with the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, and the temple city carved into solid rock where the film’s climax takes place. Of course, I know now that the actual name of this place in Petra, and that it is not in the fictional country of the Republic of Hatay, the very real Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The idea that this wonder of Nabatean architecture was a real place would have been too fanciful for my childhood brain to comprehend, but when I grew up (and remained obsessed with what remains the best Indiana Jones film of the original trilogy) I was determined to eventually visit the last resting place of the Holy Grail.
A lack of time when I might have had the money, and a lack of money when I might have had the time - combined with the prolonged geopolitical turbulence in the region meant that I never have been able to fulfil that childhood dream. I do not have time to investigate the guide book on my table because am jolted out of this reverie when a waitress comes to my table to inform me, first in French and then English when we both realise that the latter is our stronger shared language, of their menu, the specials, and what she might recommend.
I mention my vegetarianism and we both agree it would be best to settle on the lunchtime salad with hot-and-cold meat-free mezze. I order a tamarind juice fait maison, but they’re out she says and instead recommends their lemon juice, freshly made just before the lunch service. She knew what she was talking about; the juice was citric alright, almost sherbert-y, but also with a familiar kick of something floral, the source of which I couldn’t quite identify - rosewater or orange blossom?
My food arrived, and I dove in. The fatoush, large triangular pastries stuffed with spinach, sumac and pine nuts, were the standout, but it was a close run thing with the tangy labneh and the rich Mhamara, which stained my fingers and thumbs red as I attempted to scoop it and some hummus into a disc of flatbread. There was something on the plate, maybe the stuffed vine leaves or the rakakat, made with dill (or perhaps tarragon) which reaffirmed my view that that particular herb is better left in the fields, where it belongs.
Sitting there with the strong midday sun bearing down on me through the window, I fold out the map on the table, making sure not to let the corners come into contact with the falafel, and the first image I see is of the astonishing sandstone facade of the Treasury at Petra. And sitting there, the map to one side of my plate and I mopping up the remaining hummus and moutabal with the last of my bread and draining my glass of lemon juice and taking in the aquamarine walls with their camel illustrations and traditional weaves and the phalanx of Jordanian reds on the bar, I imagined for a moment that I could be sitting in the restaurant lobby of an international hotel in Amman, waiting for my local fixer to arrive to take me on an adventure to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon.
Tomorrow, we’re sticking around this part of the world...
Thanks for reading - I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!