Adventures in the Hashemite Kingdom

I'm back from a week in Jordan. Feels like I was gone much, much longer than a week, and to be honest, I'm a little sad to be back.

Jordan was everything I like about the Middle East, and very few of the things I have a hard time with. I realize that my experience is colored by the fact that I started off in a five-star hotel (for a regional flu surveillance conference) and spent the rest of the week hitting the high spots. I feel incredibly petty comparing Jordan's strengths with Egypt's weakness, but I'll say this without shame - it felt pretty damn good to do everything I can't in Cairo: 1) wear short sleeves, 2) drive a car, 3) eat consistently good food, 4) swim in a bathing suit, 5) look males in the eye without inviting crude sexual harassment. BTW, Jordanian men, on the whole, are ridiculously handsome (more on this later). I reiterate, it was a good week.

  I started out at the very posh Intercontinental Amman (conference). The low point of this week was the rambling presentation I gave to a large group of bored Ministry of Health representatives from around the Middle East and Central Asia. The high point was the food. Oh my god the food. This could be another post in and of itself. I still have dreams about the buffets for breakfast/lunch. I actually have them memorized, as it was pointed out by someone later in the week when I was recounting the spread in great detail.

  Amman is a pretty little city, not all that much to see, but very clean and orderly and welcoming. The city is actually on the same site as Greek Philadelphia - how it came to be Amman, I'm not sure. As boring as the conference was at times, I had an exciting adventure to look forward to at the end. For about a month, I'd been planning to travel around with one of our epis, B, who is stationed in Accra, Ghana. She was in town for the conference and wanted to make the trip well worth the time spent on the plane.

Amman at night

The hills of Amman

The conference ended on Tuesday, and that night B and I hit the road in our rental Nissan Sunny.

Wahooooooo!

Jordan is really small, so nothing is very far away from anything else. We only drove about 3 hours (on gorgeous, beautifully paved highways) south to Petra and crashed for the night.

 Now I have a secret to share with you. My first career aspiration was to be an archaeologist. Specifically Indiana Jones. Or, at the very least, his ruggedly beautiful, adventurous, well-traveled girlfriend. This tells you a little bit about how excited I was to see Petra.

My posse

  Words cannot begin to describe the beauty and immensity of Petra. Its still thought that a large percentage of the ruins haven't even been discovered yet. Petra is not just the Treasury (the most famous of the structures, seen in the picture above), its an entire city spread over miles and miles. The pictures don't do it justice, but I'll try. 

It was at Petra that we met A.

A. had been on vacation in Dahab and decided to pop over to see Jordan for a few days, where we found her hiking Petra in short shorts, gold gladiator sandals and without water. She talked more than B and I combined, swore like a sailor, and couldn't give a shit about propriety in the Middle East. Naturally, we invited her to travel the rest of the week with us.

I've got to leave the 2nd part for another post - work has been pretty crazy. Hopefully, I finish the Jordan edition before I leave for Georgia (the country) next week.