Jordan.
Or more correctly, the Hashmonite Kingdom of Jordan. We left at 9 and trucked along fine on the Israeli side, but had a little trouble trying to get across the border. Not serious trouble – don’t worry – it just took a couple hours and most of the time we were sitting on the bus without our passports. Luckily my brother the salesman kicked in and got us playing some games over the loudspeaker.
The hotel booked us all in as Mr. and Mrs., regardless of whether that was true or not. For my aunt and I it was not so much of a bother to have the King size bed, but several of the guy roommates were not interested in that arrangement. ;) Actually, we switched rooms because you could see a cloud of smoke when we walked in the door, so now we have twin beds again and slightly cleaner lungs come morning.
We did one tourist thing on our way from the border to the hotel – we stopped at an old amphitheatre or coliseum from the 6th century I think. My brother and I climbed all the way to the top and I was pretty much out of breath, but it afforded a nice view. Near the ruins was a lovely park with fountains and tables set in the grass. The hookah was much in presence. Actually, I wouldn’t have known what a hookah was except I saw hookah bars in Vegas – it’s a tall kind of water pipe and you choose whatever flavored tobacco you want to smoke. The Jordanian guide told us one hour of smoking the hookah is like smoking a pack of cigarettes.
Our guide is named Jafar so one of the group started singing the song the bird sings to villain Jafar in Aladdin. He didn’t hear it so I don’t know if he would have got the reference or not. ;) He gave us an interesting explanation of the Hashmonite dynasty from the first King who declared the rebellion against the Turks.
The weirdest thing for me was driving by what he called the American Fortress. It was the American Embassy and it really did look like a fortress, including the fact that there was a tank sitting in front. I’ve seen a number of American Embassies around the world and I’ve always seen Marines guarding from outside, but I’ve never seen one sitting in a rather nasty looking tank.
Another interesting thing is that, in addition to a driver and guide, we also have an armed tourist police officer with us. The Israeli guide that came to help us cross the border told us that would be the case in both Jordan and Egypt. We joked with her that in Israel the guides are trained in karate to defend us. We also found out today that the valet guys at the hotels in Israel are armed – a police car was coming around this morning and checking all the hotels, if the valet guy wasn’t armed the hotel would get a big fine. So when I called them the kosher police the other day…I was partly right. ;) Funny thing is, I felt perfectly safe in Israel. The only time I felt a bit weird was when we were in Palestinian territory when we visited Bethlehem.
Most everyone is having dinner at the home of a friend of my parents tonight, Arab food catered in. Speaking for myself, I’m pretty excited to be out of kosher-land. We haven’t had real bread in several days because of Passover and, no offense, but the Israeli margarine that they serve with dinner because they can’t serve meat and dairy together tastes like Crisco. :)
Tomorrow we will see Jerash which, if I understand correctly, is the best preserved Roman city in the world. Then we see Mt. Nebo and somewhere else I can’t remember before taking a long drive down to Petra.
