My bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

So thıs post was should have been wrıtten a week ago on my last nıght ın Amman, but ıt wasn't, so I'm wrıtıng ıt now from Istanbul. Therefor all of my lower case i's wıll be ı's because turkısh keyboards are wıerd and ıts a hassle to type a real one.

So. After Egypt we had 16 days ın Amman before Nate and I left for Turkey. A lot of thıs tıme was fınals and paper wrıtıng and such, whıch was borıng. There was some cool stuff though. We had a goodbye dınner for all of the bost famılıes and host kıds, whıch was cool. Also, the day after our last day of exams was campus electıon day, so for the week leadıng up to that there were campaıgns, whıch was absurd. There were more posters on campus than I have seen anywhere ın my entıre lıfe, almost every candıdate also had several larger than lıfe, lıke 20 feet by 40 feet, posters of themselves. I forgot to brıng my camera to take pıctures, but some other kıds dıd so I'll steal those at some poınt so you can see how rıdıculous ıt was.

The coolest parts by far of the last two weeks were our dınners at the apartment. After we had so much fun cookıng at thanksgıvıng we decıded to cook more. We ended up doıng ıt 2 more tımes, the fırst one Mıra dırected us ın cookıng rıdıculously good, real, ındıan food, and the second tıme was the last nıght and we made breakfast, whıch was omlettes and banana chocolate chıp apple (who knows what else) pancakes. It was a lot of fun, I chopped a lot of vegetables but unfortunately dıd not pıck up any great cookıng skılls...I'll have to get recıpes for the Indıan food from Mıra though.

After dınner we all stıll had to get home for curfews, so ıt ended rather abruptly whıch ıs a bummer. When I got home I jammed everythıng ınto my bags ın about half an hour and then made sure everythıng was ın order to go to Turkey the next mornıng. So thus ended my cıee actıvıtıes ın Jordan for the semester.

On that midnight train to....

I have returned from Egypt, so I have just one more adventure remaining, though before that adventure I have the annoyances of finals and papers to deal with, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Egypt was really cool. I went into it trying to keep an open mind, but sort of expecting to hate it because it is supposed to be very crowded, hot, dirty, and full of people trying to haggle you and demanding backsheesh (tips) for things like giving you directions that you didn't ask for. But it ended up being pretty cool. Definitely dirtier and noisier and more crowded than Amman, but it felt alive and energetic, which Amman does not at times. It was a bit hotter, but our strategy of waiting until the end of november to go worked out pretty well on that front, and I didn't pay backsheesh at all, and as far as I can tell didn't get ripped off either. So Egypt.

We left Amman at 5 on the bus to the airport, our flight was delayed, and we still are pretty conservative and U.S. airport habituated with respect to when we arrive at airports, so we had about 3 hours of sitting around and reading economists articles about and an 87 year old woman from Euclid, Ohio who was fined $500 dollars and has to do 80 hours of community service for beating a baby deer to death with a shovel. Apparently Bambi is taking over suburbia. After that we had our hour long flight to Cairo (with food...I would really like someone to explain the economics of airlines to me, because all of the US ones are going bankrupt, but they offer significantly less services then all of the foreign airlines that I have been one). After we landed, we met Daniella's friend Sarah, who is studying in Cairo. Our hostel pickup was stuck in traffic, so we ended up taking a cab, and getting to our hostel at about 11:30, so we just went to sleep. The hostel was sweet though.

Friday morning we went to the train station to try to get ourselves on the sold out night train to luxor. We got tickets, and we are pretty sure that they were the ones that the train company isn't supposed to sell to tourists. After that we headed to Giza to see the pyramids. We spent most of the day there, it was pretty cool. Obviously crawling with tourists. Notable observations other than the presences of several large piles of rock: The pyramids are on a sand plateau that is basically in the middle of the city of Giza, which is a little strange, the sphinx is kinda small, egyptian kids like to get their pictures taken, you can crawl up the light shaft in the biggest pyramid. Crawling around in this shaft was the coolest part, but we also did some dips/pushups in the sarcophagus in the room at the top of the pyramid, and Daniella and I sang house at pooh corner.

After the pyramids, Joe, Nate, Drew and I went to see Coptic Cairo, which is some christian religious area, but everything was closed, so we just walked around. Then we met up with Daniella and Sarah again for dinner and then headed back to the train station to journey to Luxor. I though the train ride was fun, we had our own cabin, and I slept pretty well on the floor, but apparently no one else got a great night of sleep. Luxor was very cool. We started out at the valley of the kings. The tombs, were alright, climbing up on the hill above them and looking out at the nile and the landscape around it was cooler. After that we headed to some other ancient tomb thing that Lonely planet said was really cool. It was alright. Then we stopped quickly at the Colossi of Memnon before heading to Karnak. I had not heard of Karnak before going to Egypt, but apparently it is the largest single religious building in the world and the best sight in all of Egypt. It was really cool, there was a room with 134 massive stone pillars and stone pieces going across the tops that must have made a full roof when it was built, and if it hasn't been restored, it is amazingly impressive that those stones are still up there.

After Karnak we ate dinner overlooking the temple of Luxor. After dinner Sarah and Daniella decided that they wanted to go in, but Nate, Drew, Joe and I decided that looking at it was good enough, so we went and sat by the nile. Then back to the train station to head back to Cairo. We didn't have out own compartment this time and several Egyptians were convinced that we were in their seats ( we weren't) so we didn't get great sleep. When we got back to Cairo, Joe and and decided to get right back on a train to Alexandria, and the others went to breakfast and then garbage city in Cairo. Alexandria was kinda of cool. It would have been way cooler before all of the old stuff fell into the sea, but I like port cities and it was nice to see and smell the mediterranean. After about 2 hours in Alexandria, we got on a bus back to Cairo and headed to the Khan Al Khalali souq, where we ran into the other four again, I bought some christmas presents, and then we wandered around back to the hotel.

This morning we just woke up and headed to the airport to get out flight back. So on the whole Egypt was cool. I imagine that I would not like it as much when it is ridiculously hot though. Photo's are going up on picassa, we'll see how good the internet is today.

'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs From ten thousand lightning bugs

This weekend Nate, Brianna, and I decided to return to Wadi Rum. We had planned on doing this a couple weekends ago, but then Joe got sick and a four day weekend seemed to be too good of an opportunity to pass up, so instead we went to Israel, but that may have been a mistake, because going back to Wadi Rum was awesome.

After buying food for the weekend (a jar of peanut butter, several pieces of fruit, and some bread each) thursday afternoon, we met early Friday morning and headed to the bus station. We took a bus to Wadi Musa (just outside of Petra) and from there we got a ride to the visitors center. It was in this truck that we heard the title song, which is apparently the #1 song in both the US and Canada right now, and the number 1 seller on itunes too....none of us knew this at the time and we just starting cracking up, because the lyrics are nuts.

After eating lunch while looking at the 5 pillars of wisdom, we started walking down the road to Rum village. About half way we got a ride from a nice guy who told us to make sure that we were back from our walk by 5, because the sun sets at 5:30. We clearly had no intention of doing this, but we also weren't quite sure if we were allowed to just walk out into the desert and camp, so we didn't tell him our plans. After he dropped us of, we did just that. Walking in the desert is hard, so I'm not sure how far we got, but we hiked for about 2.5 hours before we found a rock formation that looked promising and then we scrambled up and started looking for flat spots to camp. We found a couple okay ones, spent some time throwing sandstone rocks off of cliffs (they explode and make ridiculous amounts of noise), and watched a really fast sunset. Then Nate found a sweet camping spot that was much better than our other ones, and we started collecting firewood. We were all ready to fall asleep at about 7, but managed to keep ourselves awake until 9 looking at stars and sitting around the fire.

This morning we woke up and climbed around on the rocks around our campsite and watched the sunrise before walking back to rum village. After an impromptu soccer game with some kids there, we started walking back to the visitor center. Again, we got a ride about halfway which was nice because it's an annoying 2 mile walk on a road...Once we got back to village we found a truck that would drive us out to kings highway where we were supposed to be able to get busses back to Amman. Our friendly truck drivers dropped us off at a gas station, where we waited for a bus for about 10 minutes until Nate made friends with another truck driver who said he would take us back to Amman for free. Which he did. It was pretty cool to ride in the cab of one of those big trucks, and he dropped us off about 5 km south of amman, where we got a city bus back to down town and then taxi's home. So all in all, less than 20 jd's a piece for food and transportation for a camping trip to arguably the coolest place in the country. Sweet.

http://picasaweb.google.com/cbehrer/WadiRum#

It has been more than a month since I posted something, which is pretty bad. Sorry.

I'm going to divide what has happened in the intervening months into two sections. Weeks and weekends. Weeks are pretty boring, because I have school. Notable exceptions to the wake up, go to class, come home routine include the following. 1) On my birthday we went out for dinner. It was sweet. I got a chocolate milkshake and split margarita pizza and a mexican chicken sandwich with Brianna. I also got apple pie and ice cream, which was shared. 2). Two days later it was Nate and Mira's birthday, so we went out to dinner again. It was cool. 3). I go to an orphanage on Sunday afternoons and 'teach kids english' which is less than efficient, but I suppose it is still meaningful/helpful, and it's something to do. 4). We went to see some documentary on Peace One Day about this british dude who for good reason failed in his attempt to be an actor, so he decided to film himself for 10 years trying to implement an international ceasefire day. In the end, he got Jude Law to do some speeches and they ended up in Afghanistan, where they got both the US and the Taliban forces to ceasefire for a day so that they could vaccinate kids against polio in areas that would normally be inaccessible because of violence. So that's a pretty phenomenal thing to have done, but it sucks that it takes 10+ years of effort to get something like that done. 5). I've started going to the gym. 6) Joe from minnesota got swine flu, but he's better now and so far no one else has gotten sick.

Weekend stuff was as always more interesting and fun. One weekend involved a CIEE trip to Wadi Hassa, which was really cool. I don't have pictures because it was a hike/swim down a canyon/river. It was pretty sweet. Our guide runs an outdoor adventure company and has climbing holds drilled onto the wall of his building. I have yet to go, which is bad. I think this was also the weekend that I went to Ajloun and Jerash with Joe. Jerash was pretty cool. Some sweet Roman ruins, including a theater where the is bagpipe player who plays about every 10 minutes to demonstrate the acoustics of the theater. We went to Ajloun to see the nature reserve which was a bit of a disappointment.

Another weekend was Wadi Mujib and Dana Nature Reserve. Both of these were really cool.

I went to Dana with Drew (from BC) and Christina, who goes to Miami Ohio, but went to Western Reserve in high school, and apparently played against Sewickley's girls soccer team...

So we met at the bus station at 8 and after figuring out what was going on and waiting for a bus to fill up we ended up in Tafilla at about 12:40. Here we hired a car to drive us to Dana and arranged for him to pick us up at 6 and take us back to Amman. It was sort of expensive, but there really aren't great transportation options on Fridays. We ended up in Dana village, which is on the North Western corner of the nature reserve. The entrance is technically on the South East side, but driving all the way around is 120 km because of the way the roads are designed. There is a trail that cuts through the whole reserve and ends at this town. So after talking to a hotel owner, we decided to just hike down this trail for 2.5 hours and then stop and turn around. It was awesome. The town is at the top of a canyon, so we walked down into the canyon for about 30 minutes and then just walked through the canyon for 2 more hours. We got back to Dana town a little early so we had hummus, which wasn't great, and then headed back to Amman.

The next day was Wadi Mujib, which is supposed to be the grand canyon of Jordan, but only in the sense that it is the natural thing that everyone goes to see. I was going with Brianna (Tufts) Maura (Gtown) and Daniella (GW) and Brianna's host brother and friends because they have cars. After planning to meet and be ready to leave at 8, we spent about 2 hours sitting on Brianna's porch waiting for her host brother to get going. They had been out at a wedding until like 6 am, so I suppose that this is understandable. We eventually got there and had a good time walking/wading/swimming up the canyon. Notable occurrences include meeting a '72 graduate of Lowell House and his daughter who plays ultimate, and attempts to push start a car that eventually resulted in pull starting it, by tying it to a truck. Which isn't all that special, except that they were pulling the car that was pull started backwards, which I thought was pretty cool.

Last weekend was a long weekend since Joe had swine flu and CIEE wanted to avoid an outbreak that could potentially result in us being asked to leave the university/country. So we had 4 days. Maura, Nate, Daniella and I went to Israel. It was cool, but we didn't plan it incredibly well because it was such short notice. But we left Thursday morning, got through the border much faster than Nate did last time (no stamps) and got to Jerusalem around 1. We dumped our stuff in a hostel and met Daniella's mom, aunt and step dad. We chatted for a bit, and then split up, the four of us heading to the wailing wall and temple mount. We saw the wailing wall, but we weren't allowed into the temple mount, which was a bummer. We walked around a bit and eventually ended up at a restaurant for dinner. Daniella was worried about what we were going to eat because she "wasn't sure if food was in your [Nate and me] traveling budget." I'm definitely proud that I travel in such a way as to get such a reputation. After dinner (I had tomato onion pizza). Nate, Maura, and I went back to the hostel, and Daniella went to stay with her family (her mom was just visiting, but there are some family members who actually live in Israel). We met a British guy who said that he was in the department of defense, but I hope not, because he was pretty a) dumb for telling us that and b). close minded about the middle east.

The next day we decided to go to Tel Aviv because it was Friday and we had no shot of getting into the temple mount on the weekend. After getting on a (clean) bus through a transportation infrastructure that worked, but was more expensive than places with dirty busses that leave whenever they are full, we ended up in Tel Aviv, to be welcomed by rain. After deciding to stay here rather than try to get to the north, we found a hostel and then went for a walk down the beach. It was still raining, so we ended up in a restaurant for about 4 hours eating a ton of food that Maura's mom paid for (apparently she just told Maura that she would pay for a nice dinner...) Then Daniella headed off to family shabat and Nate, Maura and I went back to the hotel and crashed. We got up the next morning, Nate and Maura went running, but I just went swimming because my stomach was not really happy with me (it really wasn't happy the whole time we were in Israel...) Then we went to Haifa, where we walked around, saw some Bahai gardens and ran into Maura friend from GW who is studying in Israel. Then we went back to tel Aviv and met Daniella and he family friend, a probably 60 something lady who was born in the US but moved to Israel 30 years ago and lives in Jerusalem. So she drove us back to Jerusalem and let us stay in her house. That night was halloween and we spent it eating fake M&M's jellybeans and gummy worms. The next day we went back to the old city, which is like the ones in Damascus and Allepo, but I think a little bigger. Here we ran into another group of CIEE'rs. After we talked for a little they headed to the bus station, which was a mistake, because the four of us + Drew (who decided to join us) went back to the wailing wall and got into the temple mount. It's pretty cool. Dome of the rock (the gold dome that's always on TV) was cool and there is a whole complex with a nice big courtyard and a couple mosques. I didn't really feel anything special there, but it is weird to have actually been to the place that so many people have died fighting over.

After the dome of the rock we just headed back to Amman.

I decided to try picassa for pictures this time since flickr took so long to upload before.

http://picasaweb.google.com/cbehrer/

Note: pictures of this trip and from petra, wadi rum and aqaba are on flickr. Vietnam pictures will stay on photobucket, but I decided to try something different this time. I just put up a select few (72) pictures instead of the hundreds of repeats and boring ones that I normally put up. I don't know if I will stick with flickr or not, but hopefully this link will hold a slideshow for your viewing pleasure...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43226336@N08/sets/72157622501715286/show/

So our adventure continued to Damascus on Sunday. We left Baalback on Sunday morning with the general idea that we would take a minibus to Zahle or some other bigger town farther south were we would get a service taxi to Damascus. First we found food for the day...we had bananas that we bought the night before, so we just had to pick up some freshly baked pita bread and a few snickers bars to create the greatest backpacking meal ever (adding peanut-butter, honey or nutella is a good idea if you have them). One of the guys that we met on our food quest spoke very good english (he had been to australia for an unknown amount of time long enough to make him basically fluent) and he told us that we wanted to go to Chtura to get our taxi. Other than sounding like it should be somewhere in Russia I'm not really sure what Chtura has going for it. We got dropped off by a group of maybe 15 cars/minibuses and a couple drivers. After we negotiated a price to take us all the way to Damascus we had ourselves a cab. This cab turned out to be the biggest hassle of our whole trip. We used our limited arabic and the limited english that was communally available to convey to our cab driver that we would pay him 100,000 LL (60 ish dollars) to drive us to Damascus. The critical part of the translation that we are convinced our driver understood (but later pretended that he didn't) was that we were Americans without a visa and we would probably get stopped at the border for about 5 hours. He said this was fine.

So we drive to the border to get out of lebanon, with two other syrians in the front seat and the three of us in the back, with curtained windows and the beer that he was smuggling in. Getting out of Lebanon went fine. We then drove the syrian border station (which was about a mile away) and here stuff got stupid. As expected it would take us about 5 hours to get in because the border guys had to fax our information to Damascus who then had to fax back permission for us to enter the country. We sort of knew that this would happen so we were fine with that, but our cab driver was not. He pretended that he thought we would get through in an hour, and when he realized that this wouldn't happen he wanted to leave us there (which we were fine with) but still wanted all the money (which we were not fine with). So an hour of cross language 'negotiations' occurred, involving us, some kurdish dudes, our syrian driver and his really annoying syrian friends, some lebanese guys who spoke some english, the money exchange guy who also seemed to serve as the translator and visa salesman, and just about the whole border place. Sticking points were: no we aren't going to pay you 60$ for driving us 15 minutes...you knew that we would get stuck...La, la arif, mumkin wahid sa'a, lakin la sa'a wa sa'a was sa'a wa sa'a (No, I didn't know maybe 1 hour, but not hours and hours and hours)...Na'am, nechnu natakellam sa'a wa sa'a wa sa'a (yes, we said it would be hours and hours and hours)...la (no)...well guys this is going nowhere, but he's still got our bags locked in his trunk...at one point we had an us speaking in english to a kurdish guy who spoke kurdish and english, who would then speak in kurdish to his friend who spoke kurdish and arabic, who would speak to our taxi driver who spoke arabic. It would them come back around. We got nothing done. Eventually we got our stuff out of the trunk and had to pay him about 40$ which is still highway robbery, but we did the best we could.

After all that our visa's started to get processed, which took about 4 hours, during which we ate our banana snickers bar sandwiches, listened to music, and read about our upcoming trips to egypt and turkey.

After our visa's went through everyone got really nice and friendly, which turned out to be a recurring event in Syria. We then walked across the border, which was pretty cool, and got in a bus to Damascus. This was a nice drive, and after a quick cab ride from the station we ended up at our hotel with plenty of time to spare. We stayed at Al-Rabie hotel and if you are ever in Damascus you must stay there. We slept on the roof , which was covered with a big piece of canvas, and they served nice breakfasts every morning and the staff was awesome and very helpful.

I'm not going to do Syria chronologically because I don't want to. But we ate a lot of falafel sandwiches and lemon italian ice ish stuff because it was really cheap. The old city is awesome. The mosque is amazing. The souqs are really cool. The ice cream was really good (if you'll ever go to Damascus, you know what ice cream I mean). Azez Palace is cool. Kids shot us with airsoft guns. I bought patrick and grandma presents. At one point I just put my camera on a table and recorded about 7 minutes of people just walking by on the street, which is one of the really cool aspects of Damascus that is hard to explain, but cool to experience.

We took two day trips from Damascus. One was to Palmyra, Nate, Drew and I (the general trio of the trip) were accompanied by an Australian girl that we met in our hotel. We left Damascus at about 6:30 after almost being taken to Homs because we got on the wrong bus (it was pulling out of the parking lot and everyone said it was going to Palmyra, which it was, eventually, but we were saved by a nice guy who then took us to the bus that went directly to Palmyra). There are roman ruins in Palmyra, they are pretty cool. They are the second set of pictures of ruins on the flickr site, the first being Baalback. We hiked up a hill with a castle on it that overlooked the ruins, the view was pretty sweet, and the castle was cool too.

We got a ride from some guy in a van with his kid back to the bus station and got a 2 pm bus (nicest bus I have even been on) back to Damascus. That night I think we went out to dinner with some of the cohort of 25 ciee students in Damascus at the time.

The other excursion was to Allepo. Drew decided to do a different trip, so this time it was Nate, me, Alicia and Helena. We took the night train (we couldn't really get much sleep) up to Allepo, and walked to the old city. We saw the citadel, which was cool, and walked through the souq which was awesome. Much more traditionally Syrian than the ones in Damascus. Nate and I found a great hummus place that we went to twice, but that probably made us really, really sick (later) and I bought mom and really nice christmas present. I want to keep it, but I'm not really at the point in my life where I can use it yet( how's that for a cryptic clue?), so I suppose I will have to hand it over when I get home. We spent a while just sort of sitting around in the mosque and not really doing much before deciding that we were ditching the original plan of taking the night train back and left. We wanted to get on the 3:30 train, but it was full, so we took a bus instead. When we got back to Damascus we didn't do much.

The next morning we were leaving. I met a guy who graduated from Harvard and had lived in Winthrop house, and got one of the traveling fellowships, so he had been in Tanzania and stuff for 14 months. After a bit of confusion dealing with meeting up with Daniella and getting money to pay for exit visas etc. We went to the bus station, where we were told we could get taxi's to amman. We ended up with a taxi to Irbid, where we were handed off to another taxi that took us to amman. We ate banana's and listened to music on the way back. Daniella has heard of john butler trio, which was exciting. You should listen to them if you haven't. Youtube the federation square concert, especially Ocean.

Crossing the border out of syria was a non-issue. And we got back to amman safe and sound. Just in time for me (and as I would find out later, Nate as well) to succumb to about 30 hours of uncontrollable diarrhea and a fever that was probably around 104. My host family and Jordan were semi-freaking out trying to help me however they could. Offering all sorts of remedies which I refused, advocating sleep, fluids, and ibuprofin. After 24 hours mom (the real one, not the jordanian one) told me to go to the hospital. So I went. I had a stomach parasite probably from the hummus. They gave me antibiotics. I'm all better now.

After that I had a week of school which was boring. Last night Joe (from minnesota, he's really cool) we to dinner with Joe's jordanian friend Khaled. It was cool. I had hummus, it wasn't as good as the stuff from Allepo, but I'm not sick yet, so I guess its a pretty even trade. I bought myself a folding chess/checkers/backgammon board.

Today I didn't really do anything interesting. I ran this morning, I'm really, really, really out of shape, then I spent the day reading/sort of studying/sort of wasting time/uploading photo and writing this.

It has been far too long since I posted anything, sorry. My first month in Amman was a strange time in which it felt like nothing was really happening, but it was impossible to really get anything substantive done...perhaps this is the effect of Ramadan, but it (and infrequent access to the internet) is the root cause of my having only managed a half-hearted post thus far. I will try to make up for that here, but I don't really remember what I wrote in the last post, so I may repeat myself quite a bit.

I'm living with a family in Derg Bahr (spelling?) which is a pretty well off neighborhood in south western amman. I share a bedroom with another CIEE student, Jourdan, who is from Indonesia, but goes to Wesleyan. My host parents divorced, so I live with the mother, two bothers, and a sister. Rami is the older brother (26) and he works at HSBC. Yazzan is the younger brother (22), he just graduated from music school and started work at a new job today, I'm not sure exactly what it is. While it would be weird for men that old to still be living with their parents in the US, it is pretty much how things are done here...children generally live with their parents until the get married. Leal is my host sister and she is 16.

Classes don't really feel like they have gotten going yet, perhaps because I just had a nine day break (expanded upon below), but I am taking a middle eastern studies class called america and the arabs, an international relations class about diplomacy, and two arabic classes, one fus-ha (modern standard) and one amia (how people actually talk).

The university is pretty nice, our classrooms aren't all that nice (compared to harvard, which is probably unfair) but there are trees lining the walkways and stuff.

I haven't seen a ton of Amman yet, but if you are looking for some great enlightening description of how it is different than cities in the US or europe or where ever, sorry, I don't have one. Perhaps this is because cities really aren't as different as people think they are, or perhaps I'm not very good at noticing that sort of thing. The people speak arabic, and there are signs in arabic, but there is also a ton of english and western restaurants and stuff (McDonalds and Burger king and those that you would expect, but also places like hardees and popeyes chicken). There aren't many poor people on the streets selling junk like there were in Vietnam, and there is not as much racial diversity as there is in U.S. cities so there are some differences...but mostly people drive their cars, there are stores, people seem to live mostly in apartments. It is generally hilly city that is organized around 8 circles...which would make perfect sense if they were concentric circles of increasing diameter, but they are not. They are just 8 roundabouts that happen to be on the same road (that doesn't actually go in a straight line) that runs east to west across the city.

Food has been good so far. Flavors are much stronger here than in the US...

I suppose that that's about it in terms of general summary so now I'll turn to my trip over the Eid el Fitr (end of ramadan) break. We had nine days off, but since the holiday is based on the moon, we didn't know how many days we would have off until about a week before the break, which is a bummer because I would rather have spent nine days going to Turkey so I could see everything there, but flights were ridiculously expensive, so we (me, Nate (George Washington ) and Drew (BC)) decided to go to Lebanon and syria.

We left after class on thursday and flew to Beirut. Immigration and customs were a non-issue, and we ended up at our hotel at about 10:30. After checking in we just went to a store around the corner to get water and then went to bed early. The next day we got up pretty early and went looking for a restaurant that the guy from the hotel recommended. We didn't find it, but we found a little bakery where we could get egg cheese and tomato wraps. They said that we were the first people to ever order egg and cheese together, and thought that it was a pretty strange combination. But there were a kid working there who was probably 15 or 16 and spoke some english and was helpful and fun to talk to. After breakfast we went to see the mosque, which was sweet, and then we went to Jeita grotto. You should google that to see pictures and stuff because you aren't allowed to take them while you are there, so I don't have any, but it is this huge cave that is pretty sweet, but has been turned into a pretty touristy place. We spent about an hour going through the program there, and then headed back to beirut. We had our cab drop us off across the city from our hotel and made our way leisurely back, taking in the sights (Pigeon rocks, AUB, etc) as we went. We spent a while trying to find the Roman baths, and never did, but ended up wandering through a pretty up-scale shopping district for a while. Two general notes about Beirut. 1) people have really nice cars and 2) The city is kind of strange in that there are really nice buildings and really awful buildings (while is normal), but it Beirut, there are right next to each other. They weren't segregated into nice areas and run down areas like in other major cities.

After our walk we relaxed in our hotel with a group of other CIEE students who had come, and some other travelers. Then we went out for dinner, we played backgammon and sort of drew dinner out for a while, and then just came back and went to sleep.

The next day Nate, Drew, and I went to Baalbeck. This transit was a bit of an experience. Our hotel guy said that we could catch a couple busses to get us there and drew us a little map. This led us to walk a couple blocks from our hotel and get to where we were supposed to get the first bus right as it was pulling up, so after we hurriedly made sure it was the right one, we all jumped in and headed off to meet our next bus. This transfer apparently happens under a highway overpass in who knows where Beirut, but I supposed that that is how things work in Lebanon, and everyone assured us that we were, in fact, headed to Baalback. On the way some bridge was closed so we had to take a pretty windy narrow road that back up traffic a lot because there was often barely enough room for two cars to pass each other going opposite directions.

But end up in Baalback we did, and after checking into our hotel and decided that this place was definitely real and that we should pretend that we were Canadian, we headed to the Roman ruins, which are supposed to be some of the best preserved in the world. They were pretty sweet, but also pretty hard to comprehend what we were seeing...we lazed about there for a while (Nate took a nap) before going back to our hotel and figure out dinner. We ended up going to a restaurant on the 6th floor of some building with a nice view of the ruins and had a pretty good dinner.

Then we wandered through the streets and bought some pastries at a bakery, and just took in the end of ramadan festivities, which as far as we could tell involved everyone in the tiny little town getting in their cars and driving around in circles, causing terrible traffic and a whole lot of horn blowing.

The next day we decided to go to Damascus, but I'm tired of writing right now, so I'll come back and finish this later.

I've walked down by the sea

Note: I'm now in Amman, but wrote some of this while I was still in Vietnam...the title really works for both, so it's going to be a really long post.

The previously mentioned collection of buses, trains, and boats took brought me from Sapa to Cat Ba Town in almost exactly 24 hours with only a could things worth noting.

First, my train-car-mates were much more interesting this time. One was an old vietnamese man who just went to sleep and another was a vietnamese teenager who did the same, but the other three were travelers from germany and austria. Two were beginning a 7 week trip around vietnam/cambodia/loas and the third had just joined them for Sapa and was about to head home.
We talked for a little bit, but after about 10 minutes they started talking in german, so I was lost. Then they decided that since they weren't tired, they wanted to play drinking games. At this point, I decided to go to sleep. The train pulled into Hanoi at the completely logical hour of 4 am and I started to make my way back to the backpacker alley in the old quarter. This didn't work at all. After asking four or five different people who didn't speak english for directions and being told (show/gestured etc) that non of them could even tell me where on my map I was, and also being told to go in basically completely opposite directions, I decided to give up and take a cab. I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't find my way back until the cab driver dropped me off and the street sign had a completely different name than my map did, and the absolutely huge 4 lane road that I had been walking along was nowhere on my map. Whatever. This may be a good point to make an observation about Vietnamese street names. They are all the same. Not quite literally all, but almost. According to Laura, there are only about 10 surnames in Vietnamese, and all streets are names after revolutionaries. So in every city there is a Le Loi, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Vo Thi Sau, Dien Bien Phu, Hai Ba Trung, Tran Quo Thao etc. I'm all for honoring national heroes, but a little creativity wouldn't hurt.

After booking my hostel room for Thursday I sat around waiting for my 8 am bus. After a couple hours this put me on a boat in Ha Long Bay. I had decided to use a tour company for transportation so I could see the bay, which is the premier tourist site in Vietnam and I think a world heritage sight. It's really beautiful, but it was all foggy, so I didn't take many pictures, google it. We stopped at a huge cave that was way touristed out, but still amazingly enormous.

Then back on the boat, switch to a bus, and I ended up in Cat Ba Town.
[This is as far as I got in Vietnam, I don't really have the patience to do a detailed account of the rest now, so it'll be a summary]

The next day I went deep water soloing....or climbing on the islands that come out of the sea with out ropes or anything, if you fall you land in the water. It was really hard. Most of the time I was basically just scared out of my mind. Maybe because I hadn't climbed in a while, maybe because I hadn't climbed outside a ton, probably because I'm just not that good of a climber, I didn't really do all that well and fell a lot. I think that not having climbed outside much was a big hindrance, because even while I was scared of doing moves and stuff I was totally conscious of the fact that the footholds and hand holds that I was scared of trusting were laughable good and safe compared to what I climb on in the gym at school, but I guess that's the difference that falling 30 feet into water versus falling 5 feet onto a mat will make. Whatever, it was an experience.

Then I took various boats, buses, taxi's, planes etc. back to Hanoi, then HCMC to pack everything up and then back to the states.

Two weeks at Bama's, T-creek, home and boston were spent absorbing as much of home as possible and convincing myself that going to jordan for 4.5 months was a good idea, and now I'm here.

The first few days were orientation which were unremarkable except that the first day of orientation was at the dead sea. Yes you float. The water also burned your face because its so salty. This weekend was spent in my homestay getting to know my family. A mom, 26 year old brother Rami, 20 year old other brother and 16 year old sister, and roommate from wesleyan. Nice house, nice area of town. Today was the first day of arabic class....just a get to know you sort of day.

This is becoming less and less of a nice polished entry (not that I ever write those) and more a random collection of thoughts...so I'll continue with that.

I haven't really experienced a ton yet, but mostly it seems pretty similar to the US...except the arabic language part and then ramadan fasting....There is a lot of english and a lot of american stuff....obviously McDonalds and Burger King and Starbucks....but also Popeyes and Hardees...really? Popeyes?....

It's not unbearable hot, low 80's but it's hard to be outside since we aren't allowed to eat or drink in public.

Food is different, but good so far. Very strong flavors.

Tons of American TV. We watched an old CSI episode last night.

It's weird what aspects of american culture have come here...my 20 (?) year old host brother knows all about x-hibit and pimp my ride....

Being in a foreign country makes you wonder how american's (me included) can be so ignorant of some aspects of their surroundings....the specific example I'm thinking of came when one of my host brothers asked about internet in the US. He knew exactly how fast his internet was like kb/sec. I had no clue...it's fast...I don't know the numbers....This happened with population in Vietnam....

My family has a silver toyota echo, just like yours, Beth, but it's not a stick shift.

I've been reading a lot of the fountainhead. It's really good.