Special Places

As a child in Amman, Jordan you had two day to day activities; watch TV or play football in the street, but like all children we had special places. Whereas you might have grown up with an arcade or cinema we grew up with a water park an umm playplace... thing, they were both ridiculously fun to our little minds.

The water park "Amman Waves" was a mind blowing place; and by mind blowing I mean extremely unsanitary and hilariously dangerous. Amman Waves was a pretty small water park with four rusted, cruddy slides, a doctor who barely showed up and a suspiciously yellow wave pool.

Other attractions included a few near toxic restaurants and one monkey in a 1 x 1 circular cage. That monkey (affectionately named Fatass) was the main attraction of the park.

Nobody went to ride shitty slides or sit in the diseased yellow pool. You went to look at that chronically depressed, ill treated Fatass sitting in the crappy cage. Everyone got a turn playing with Fatass, feeding him popcorn (until you leaned too close and he snatched the whole box). Hell, I once shared a slush with Fatass. (You don't want to know, it was very disgusting, involved only one straw and a lot of licking. My parents pretended they didn't know me.)

The playplace was the happy place of every Jordanian child. It was called Jungle Bungle. Say that out loud, go on say it. See even the name is fun, and ooh Jungle Bungle was. Jungle Bungle was composed of two parts; the outside garden (the loser area) and the inner area. The inner area was divided into a snack bar with the kind of snacks that look good but taste like cardboard

and an enormous jungle gym. The play area was a floor covered by dirty old balls and a platform that had a rope. The platform led to some suspended floors with ripped safety nets. One floor led to what we referred to as The Black Room,

a room with all black walls  that would somehow show terrifying things when you closed your eyes (it completely traumatized me, I completely blocked it out of my memory) and one of them led to the most terrifying slide ever created by mankind which deposited you into the dirty ball pit.

Using some like kind of secret ninja technique with the suspended floors you could get to a derelict extra activity that was never finished, It had faces painted on the walls that haunt my nightmares till now.
It was crazy fun.