Roman Ruins Galore

Today was a pretty long day, but I've finally made it to Petra. It's a 2,000 year old city that's been carved into the surrounding cliffs. It's one of those life list-type destinations for me, so I hope it lives up to the billing.

Since my last post, I've been pretty busy. Yesterday was a very long day as I hired a taxi to head up to the far north of the country. Saturday was a day filled with castles, yesterday was all Roman ruins.

Our first stop was Umm Qais, which is situated on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee and has views into Israel, Lebanon and Syria. It was definitely an interesting place, filled with old columns standing over 25' tall and brick streets running hundreds of yards long. They even restored a roughly 3000 seat theater.

I had a lot of fun roaming around, but had a pretty, well, pathetic scam pulled on me. I was at the ticket booth to pay the 3JD fare, but all I had was a 5JD note. The attendant said he didn't have change, but a guy dressed up in traditional costume tried to offer me Euros. I told him I didn't use Euros, so they told me to come back. As I walked out, the costume guy asked me where I was from. I told him, and all he kept repeating was "Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Las Vegas!" He welcomed me to Jordan and asked how my visit was going, then offered me a drink of tea. He also told me to get my camera out for a picture of him, so I took it.

Then, miraculously, change appeared. He told me since I was an American he would help me out, so I took the Dinars from him. Dinars he promptly demanded them back - one dinar for the tea, one dinar for the picture. He then snatched them out of my hand. I thought it was odd, being that he took the money he had just given me, but I thought "whatever," and walked off.

The funny part came later when I went back to the ticket booth, asked for and received my change. I laughed as this had to be the least profitable scam I've ever heard of. If I had only given him one dinar back, it would have been really funny.

But anway, after that we headed to Pella, which is another set of ruins, but set on ground that has been occupied by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. They were excavating part of it when we came up and I got yelled at for taking a picture. The ruins were very small there, but still interesting.

After that it was off to Jerash, which was an incredible place to visit. The old city was amazing, not to mention huge. It took about 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other down the main collannaded street. It was an absolutely spectacular place and you could just feel like you were still in ancient Rome. I spent about 2 hours wandering around and taking pictures, I just hope I did it justice.

Today I joined up with 7 others and we did the trip down here to Petra. We stopped along the way at Wadi Mujib, which is Jordan's Grand Canyon, as well as the Dana Nature Reserve. Both looked impressive, but it was very hazy and difficult to take it all in.

Our middle stop was at Karak Castle, which is leftover from the Crusades. It was a huge hilltop castle that was far bigger than the ones I saw on Saturday. The really fun part was wandering around the underground corridors to the different living areas and even the dungeon.

All in all, it's been an incredible trip. I'll try to post some pictures after today or tomorrow, but with the slow internet speeds, we'll see how that goes.