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Amman a city of street sofas.

The best thing about Amman is that it offers you the freedom to look at it in whatever way you want. It gives you an infinite bouquet of its variants. You don't get to do this in a lot of other cities.



One thing that gained my curiosity when I visited the city (for the second time) was the sofas. Its a beautiful city with very hospitable people. And sofas randomly spread in the by-lanes. It interested me so much that I started searching about the history of the sofas.



In the book Illustrated History of Furniture: From the Earliest to the Present Time  by Frederick Litchfield Frederick Litchfield - page 166 , it says that the word "sofa" is of Arab derivation, the word "suffah" meaning "a couch or place for reclining before the door of Eastern houses." In Skeat's Dictionary the word is said to have first occurred in the "Guardian," in the year 1713, and the phrase is quoted from No. 167 of that old periodical of the day—"He leapt off from the sofa on which he sat". From the same source the word "ottoman," which Webster defines as "a stuffed seat without a back, first used in Turkey,"



So sofas originated from the same region!


Ola, who was showing me around sensed my curiosity and said that earlier she also used to notice them and then slowly they got censored out. Much like the fading out of grey noise and regular honking for someone who comes from Delhi.



What makes people keep the sofas out in the open, is it the declining trend of the stuffed seats or is it the lack of street furniture? or is it because of less rainfall? I am not sure.


A sofa being taken somewhere.

 A gentleman relaxing on a bright day at the flee market near the Old railway station.


 A heap of sofas people wanted to get rid of.

Sofa as a nice street furniture.


 A good plastic chair to rest next to a door, much like the chaukhats of India and Nepal.

 A candid shot of my stuffed friend!


Good Day!

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