jerash

today amanda, ali, katie and i took a day trip to jerash, a huge site of roman ruins about an hour north of amman. i am no sort of expert on ancient ruins, but i'm pretty sure this site was incredible both in size and in how well preserved the structures are- i for one was very impressed. we spent hours walking through the ancient city, imagining how quadruply incredible it must have been at its peak.





the journey back to amman was almost as exciting (and much more comical) than the ruins themselves- we knew we wanted to take another minibus (same way we came), we just didn't know where to catch one. logically, we asked the man at the visitor's center ticket booth, who's directions to us were "go out of here, cross the street, wait at gas station, bus come there." so we did just that, and proceeded to stand on the side of the road in front of the "gas station" which was in fact an auto repair shop and await the minibus. we attracted more honks, hellos, and various other salutations in five minutes than i ever experienced in chile, and we seemed to provide a great deal of entertainment to the growing crowd of men at the auto repair shop. eventually a few of them got the nerve to approach us and inquire what we were trying to do; we explained we wanted to catch a minibus to amman. in broken english/arabic they got us to understand that the buses to amman stopped further down the street. one individual offered to drive us to the aforementioned other bus stop, which the do-not-get-into-car-with-strangers rule made necessary to refuse, and then another took the initiative to walk us down the street to the bus (he + the four of us = even more honks/yells). we thanked our helpful friend, then proceeded to ward off several taxi drivers who thought we had walked over there in search of them, then followed the bus driver to his bus (as he received some choice words from the taxi drivers who seemed to think they had first dibs on our business). success at long last, and a nice laugh over how extremely amusing/ridiculous the last fifteen minutes had been. the minibus turned out to be an even greater success when we realized it would drop us off at the university instead of the far-away bus depot. hooray! great end to a great day.