Jordan, continued

Leora and I walked the colonnaded street, stopping at the Great Temple that Brown University has been excavating (and flying their flag over, as if Dartmouth or Princeton is going to show up any day now and try to take over) and the large Qasr al-Bint, the only free-standing Nabatean building that survives and which is still being excavated and examined. All around it there are old blocks and capitals lying on the ground, some intricately carved and some even with Greek writing on them. The last place of note was the Ad-Deir Monastery, loacted at the top of one of the mountains. About 800 stairs carved into the rock lead up to this place, with Bedouin jewelry sellers set up in intervals the whole way up. The climb offers some amazing views, but turning the corner and seeing the monastery was really amazing. It's a lot like Al-Khazneh, amazingly tall and intricately carved, with a Bedouin cafe type place set up opposite to it so that tired climbers can sit down and look at the place.

Once Leora and I had had a close-up look, we sat down there and watched a modern-dressed Bedouin guy playing a lute (he called it an ud) nearby. Eventually he turned and directly said to me: "you look like a guitar player." I was kind of shocked for a moment, turned to Leora like "he is talking to me, right?" and then told the guy he was right. It's probably a line they use sometimes, but it was still kind of crazy to be directly picked out as the guitar player in the crowd. So he goes "come, come, try this." Leora and I moved to their table and he gave me the lute, showing me how to use the pick, which is not like a guitar's, and demonstrating some simple techniques. It was a beautiful instrument, and made a much more haunting sound than a normal guitar, so it was a lot of fun to play with. Then the guy (whose name I can't remember for the life of me, I'll call him Saheed) gets up, finds a flute, and says, "come, we'll go play in the Monastery."

Thoroughly bemused, Leora and I followed Saheed up to the entrance to the small room carved into the rock inside the Monastery. From the pictures, you can tell it's a bit off of the ground, which is why we hadn't gone in before, but this guy was way taller than we were and hauled himself up, then gave me a hand to follow up the smooth vertical face of the rock. Leora was afraid of heights and didn't follow until later, after a couple other people hopped in too. So Saheed started playing his flute while I examined the inside room, and Leora waited outside listening. Then some of Saheed's friends came with the lute, and started jamming in a circle at the large entrance to the cave, where Leora was still sitting, and a few other people came up. I actually have some video on my camera of one of the guys composing a lute song about Canadian girls and singing it to Leora, which is absolutely hilarious. Definitely the best part of the trip. Eventually we got tired, knowing it'd be a long walk back, so we lied and said we'd be back the next day, and started the trip down the mountain and back through to Wadi Musa.

We got back to our hotel tired and disgustingly dirty, met up with Samantha, and camped out with our blankets in the hotel's "restaurant," which had a tiny TV on which we tried to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which has Petra in it, but the DVD was too screwed up. We went out into the town for dinner, then holed up in our room to read and then go to sleep.

Wake-up time was 6:30 the next day, and after hunting down some pita in the town for breakfast, we got picked up by our taxi at 7 for the 2-hour drive back down to Aqaba, stopping in Wadi Rum/Disser for a few hours before crossing the border. This area is one of the main hangouts of TE Lawrence, he wrote about the Wadi Rum, and I think at least some of Lawrence of Arabia was filmed there. We hired a Bedouin driver to take us around the place for two hours with our Jordanian taxi drivers, who were not the same as the annoying hotel managers, they were pretty cool. We took some amazing pictures of desert, mountains, and rock carvings. There were a few Bedouin encampments, and tire tracks from other jeeps, but by and large the place was pretty much untouched.

When we got to Aqaba we met up with the same guards at the Jordanian crossing, who were pretty funny. Leora once again ran into major problems in Israeli passport control because she didn't have a student visa (I'm so, so, so glad I took the time to get one, it's saved me a load of hassle) and the guard came this close to not letting her through. Since it was Shabbat, there weren't any buses to Jerusalem until 4:30, which gave us three hours to kill in Eilat. Samantha and I went down to the beach area on the Gulf, where there's a large open-air market of beach-y trinkets and clothes, and poked around for a while, also walking to a small jetty where Sam could take pictures. I had to resist the urge to buy stuff that looked cool but is probably available in every surf shop up and down the Calfornia coast.

The bus ride back was much more eventful than the first one. One Israeli guy chose to sit next to Sam, and it turned out he was a photographer himself, lived on a kibbutz, and was a generally cool guy. I came within inches of beating the crap out of two little boys that sat behind Leora and me and kicked each other and our seats, and when Leora moved to another empty row so we could both stretch out, started full-out harassing me. Telling me to be quiet in Hebrew, thinking I didn't know what they were saying, making faces and noises at me through the seats when I was trying to read, pushed stuff through them, and kicking my seat. I yelled at them several times, even though I knew they didn't understand English, and the Israeli photographer tried to tell them to calm down before he got off at his stop. Sam then said that he'd told her he'd seen those boys on the bus down to Eilat the week before, that their parents were divorced, father in Eilat and mother in Jerusalem, and that they often shuttled the kids back and forth. I was still mad, but you can't help feeling a little sympathy, even though I still wanted to throttle them. The weirdest thing was, once we started talking to them in our limited Hebrew, they did a complete one-eighty. They almost seemed remorseful for having done that to someone who could understand them (not entirely surprising given some of the names these 9-13 kids had called me in Hebrew), which still ticked me off, since they should feel bad for doing it to anyone, but Sam made a big effort to talk to them, and I did my part. The little boy who'd been the worst suddenly started asking me questions about where I was from, how old I was, whether Sam and I were sisters. Completely bizarre.

Stepping off the bus in Jerusalem I remembered how cold it had gotten. I prefer Eilat weather, although without the locusts. Altogether I think the whole trip cost me a little under $90. My dinar-shekel-dollar conversions may not be quite right. This was an awesome break, but it's back to the school grind now.