Le Deuxième Jour, Mercredi. (The second day, Wednesday)

These are a few random pictures from the bus ride to Petra:

These prices are in dinars...$1 = .75 dinars. Do the math :)

Crazy scorpion-like bulldozer thing!

 On Wednesday, we went to see Petra, which was named the second wonder of the world in 2007. Yea, I guess it’s a pretty big deal. For me, it involved getting incredibly sunburned. Fuuuun. But really, Petra was cool. It took us about three hours to get there from Amman, it is an area that just fully survives on the tourism industry there. In fact, tourism is the third biggest industry that Jordan has, and they think that in a few years it will be number one.

Petra is this old Edomite city, then Nabatean city and eventually Roman as well. I’m not really sure of the significance of it, other than it’s like all mostly intact down there… It was pretty awesome. It took like an hour and a half to walk into the main part, and then I didn’t even go in as far as I possibly could have. I went up instead, and didn’t even make it all the way up the cliff thing that I was climbing. But it was far enough. Because I was totally exhausted by the time I got back. I did get to ride a horse some of the way back, which actually wasn’t even faster than walking, because a man was walking me along anyway. But that’s okay, at least it was a change of…something other than pace, anyway.

An altar for making sacrifices from

The temple, the first thing you reach in Petra.

A greyhound at our lunch location :)

After Petra, we went to a Bedouin camp for the night in Wadi Rum. It was a long ride into the middle of nowhere and it seemed a little bit strange. Not to mention I guzzled a ton of water after getting back to the bus in Petra, so I had to pee on the stinking bus!! It was dirty and dark and gross and there was a cheetah print fabric seat cover in there—talk about germs! Ew. But I did it because it was that desperate of a situation. 

This wasn't actually taken on the mountain though.

When we got to the camp, Jabal Rum, we got there just in time to climb up and watch the sunset. Except I really kinda missed the sun setting part…. Oh well, the colors were really pretty anyway. That night we ate dinner that had been cooked in a way that was sort of an underground barbeque pit, which was interesting, and then we had an imitation of a wedding. I’m pretty sure that we were worshipping Allah at some point during that ceremony, but I really have no idea what was going on, so I can’t be sure. 

Jordann, Carina, and I had put on skirts for the evening, and I was wearing a scarf tucked over my head and shoulders so that I could keep my sunburn from getting cold, and when I got pulled into the middle of the dancing circle, the man plucked it off of my head and wrapped it around in the traditional Muslim way so that my face was properly covered. It was simultaneously fun and weird/embarrassing. After that, we went to bed in our little tents with our three beds and barely enough room for our suitcases. It was actually pretty good sleeping, but just really bad heat and light that woke me up in the morning.