Well, I am now sitting in the Bahrain airport with another 9 hour layover and am very greedily using their free wi-fi to update all the world that cares to know about my trip to Jordan. Overall, it was awesome and honestly a lot cooler than I really expected it to be. Part of that is because I really had no idea what I was going to see, so the things I saw far exceeded what I thought I might see.
My first day in Jordan was spent being an American. We went to the mall, drank some Starbuck’s, shopped at H&M and American Eagle – didn’t buy anything though thankfully. I even went to a grocery store and purchased some really “special” items like sugar and cake mixes. Does it sound lame that I went to Jordan and my first stop was a mall? Yeah, it does to me too, but it was literally the first time in a year that I had seen American stores and American restaurants. Kenya was cool, but none of the stores or restaurants were American chains. There is something strangely comforting about seeing things that remind you of home, even if they are in a mall.
Day two was spent seeing some of the nearby Jordan sites. First stop was the mosaic map of the Holy Land found in a Byzantine church. Wish I could give you an accurate history, but I can’t. All I can say is they found this mosaic underneath the floor of a church and it is supposedly a very accurate representation of the Holy Land from the 6th century. This part of Jordan is known for its mosaics of various things that have been found over the years, but I thought the Holy Land map was the coolest one that we saw.
After that we headed up to Mt. Nebo to see the view Moses had of the Promised Land. Hope his view was a little better than ours or it might have really taken away from the moment for him. Because of the haze we weren’t able to see much, but we still got the idea.
We went from there to the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea. I don’t know what I was expecting for the Dead Sea, but apparently I wasn’t expecting much. For some reason, I had it in my head that it was just a dirty body of water full of salt and you were supposed to float in it just to say you had done it. Well, it far exceeded my expectations and was absolutely beautiful. If I had known, I would have just planned to spend the day there. Floating in it was such a weird experience. If you got in deep enough you could be absolutely vertical in the water without your feet touching the ground, just suspended in the water between the sky and the ground….so cool! Definitely one of the highlights of the trip! #gallery-642-3 { margin: auto; } #gallery-642-3 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-642-3 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-642-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
