Perhaps it's time for another update

I've been busy with Arabic and a few other things, so I've been neglecting this blog. With a push from an avid reader (I'm looking at you, mom), I decided to spent a few minutes recalling some of the things that have happened recently.

Two Saturdays ago (7/24), we visited Petra. I knew nothing about the city (and still know nothing besides what the tourist brochure taught me) except that it was featured in the third Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. We got through the ticket booth and began walking down a hot and dusty road, through the outer part of the city. Robert and Craig saw a small stable/cave that they wanted to see closer, and once we all got that far off the road, we decided to keep going, resulting in Robert and me rediscovering our love of rock-climbing. We climbed the highest point outside of the inner city and took some beautiful pictures after we spent 20 minutes or so lying shirtless in the midday sun.

Once we finally decided to leave that wonderful little piece of God's earth, we kept trekking to the Siq, literally "the shaft", a nice geographic feature that served as a military defense when the city was still populated. It's a couple-mile-long canyon, often 15 feet wide, with a few interesting features like a mini-aquaduct that collects rainwater from the canyon walls in bathtub-sized pools located every hundred meters or so.

When we made it through the Siq, we were met by a dramatic reveal of the most famous building face in Petra: the treasury. It's every bit as fantastic as the pictures you can find online and the images captured in the movie. Moving past that, we went into the city proper, where we saw on every side small cave-dwellings for families who lived there millenia ago, and we climbed around a bit and saw a few other beautiful buildings. The city is most notable for its impressive architecture, as Wikipedia will tell you, and it truly is spectacular. The angles are precise, the lines exact, even so long after its creation.

We continued walking and climbed about 800 stairs to get to the Monastery, which is a huge building carved, like the rest of the huge buildings, in a sheer rock face. We rested in the shade for a while (the sun is oppressively hot in the middle of the day) before heading back to the bus. We spent about 6 hours roaming around the city, and I drank 5 liters of water and sweated most of it out. We were all exhausted by the time we got back to Amman, but it was a day well spent and I'm very glad of the trip.

Since then we've been going to classes and hanging out at the coffee shop, talking to people back home and spending our last couple of weeks with the other students in the program. I can't wait to get back home, but a part of me will always miss this place, since I've grown accustomed to it. Especially the ice cream, which is leagues better than anything I've ever had in the States. As a matter of fact, I just finished a big bowl of mango ice cream and my tastebuds are still in heaven. I'm off to make some eggs and sit outside for a while. Tomorrow I'll study for the final exam and relax a bit. Come Thursday afternoon, I'll be a free man and even more excited about coming home.

Salaam