…on planet earth was a few weeks ago when Mike and I spent a three day weekend at the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the world’s lowest point of land as you learned in school, and technically is a hyper-saline lake. My mood was definitely elevated – and it is usually pretty high – to get to spend time away with Mike in a place that I have been so curious about for most of my life.
What I’ve been doing: Mostly exploring.
Dead Sea: is about 45 minutes from where we live so now that we have our car (it was delivered to us today!!) we can visit for the day and enjoy the warmer temperatures, higher levels of oxygen, splatter on some of the restorative mud and take a nice float.
While we were at the resort, Finn got to enjoy some time with new dog pals and pet sitters Kerry and Ameen. Since it was a long weekend for the embassy peeps it meant a busy weekend for pet sitters! Finn made lots of new furry friends but became best friends with Champ. The first morning report was that Finn and Champ were up all night playing – like a real sleepover!! Turns out that Mike knows Champs parents so hopefully there will be some more play time soon.
Jabal Amman – Rainbow Street: while teaching our class on Tuesday last week we learned that the next two classes (Thursday and Tuesday) were cancelled to accommodate medical visits at the community center. Lareena wanted to check out a restaurant she discovered one night when she followed an outdoor walkway that ended at an elevator which she got into, rode it down where it opened up into a cool space that turned out to be Zajal restaurant.
We used our day off to visit a few other places in this area – Wild Jordan Center, Trinitae Soap House, Books@Cafe, and Al-Pasha Turkish Bath. The neighborhood is one of the seven hills of Amman which means lots of walking up and down flights of stairs and steep streets – think San Francisco.
We walked over to the building in the photo above to see if there were more stairs to take us to the street below and the man outside the building invited us in, turns out we were at the MMAG Foundation’s Amman campus. He showed us through so we could see them setting up for a gallery opening for that evening – so we got a sneak peek of Primacy of Plot.
If you plan to check out this neighborhood be aware, sometimes your GPS will tell you to go up a long flight of steps only to reach the top and it is closed off! So make sure you are in good walking shape, my iPhone health app clocked me at 3.7 miles/8,400 steps/27 flights!
Abu Al Soos: the day of urban hiking prepared me for a hike in the wilderness the next day. According to this article; a year ago a local journalist had enough of encountering so much trash while he was out hiking and decided to do something about it! He co-founded EcoHikers and lucky for me, Lareena reached out to see when the next hike was. Turns out it was Friday so we signed up, met the buses at the pick up point and headed south west of Amman. The ride there was great, lots of enthusiasm, chatter and getting to know each other. I’d estimate that there were about 40 of us from all around the world. When we arrived we put on gloves and with three garbage bags each – hit the ground and picked up trash. We all know that single use plastics are suffocating our planet and not every person disposes their plastics appropriately and in the case of the trash we picked up at Abu Al Soos – disposes of it at all aside from leaving it behind. I only wish for the words of Swami Satchidananda to reach those who need encouragement to be mindful of small changes that could one day have a global impact. “Begin with little things daily and one day you will be doing things that months back you would have thought impossible.”
After picking up we hiked to a beautiful location to unpack and eat our lunches and talk, it was a gorgeous spot with wildflowers everywhere!
Once to the overlook we hiked down the rocks to the road and traveled down, down, down to the valley below; zig zagging and sharing the road with cars and motorcycles.
The buses were waiting for us at the end of our hike and drove us back into Amman by around 4:30. My seat partner on the bus is a Jordanian who is studying for his GRE’s so he can attend graduate school for Civil Engineering in the States. He asked me how I liked Jordan and I told him how much I’ve loved it so far, he asked me what my favorite part was and I told him “the people”. I said “what I notice about the Jordanians I’ve met is that they are interested in others, in the US we don’t talk to strangers but here it feels like you can have a short, meaningful conversation with someone” and he said “Good observation – Jordanians like talking to strangers so you are in the right place”.
The yoga class on Sunday night was very much needed because my legs were so sore and now thanks to yoga, the rest of me is sore too! It feels so good, though. I am finally signed up for official Beginner Arabic Classes, my first one starts in 50 minutes so I better wrap this up.
I hope everyone has a great week, thank you so much for reading. bye for now!
DiForYou 