Wadi Rum
Turns out I stopped updating this for even longer than I thought. Oops. We started travelling on weekends more and I started spending my computer time avoiding homework instead of blogging. Alas.
We went to Wadi Rum about three weeks ago. It's the largest valley in Jordan, and it's often called the Valley of the Moon. You've probably seen it in movies.
It's one of the most beautiful and by far the most remote place I've ever been.
We did a lot of climbing. Turns out climbing up sand dunes is really hot and really hard.
After spending all that time out in the incredibly hot desert sun, I suddenly understood kuffiyehs completely.
We stayed overnight at a Bedouin camp for tourists, where they made us food and played music. Apparently a traditional Bedouin method of cooking involves sticking all of the food in a hole in the ground and burying it.
The night sky at Wadi Ram is gorgeous. You can see the milky way! There is nothing around, so no light pollution. They even turn off the power in the camp at night.
The next morning we left to go to Petra, but before we did, I rode a camel.
In other life news, the program is really really close to over. As in Thursday is the last day of classes and we all leave the country on Saturday. I've become somewhat disillusioned and demotivated as the program went on, but it was still definitely a worthwhile experience.
Our Jordanian dialect class, for example, was almost entirely worthless. This is a huge disappointment, because I was really looking to improve there.
Our MSA class is okay, but I feel like I've learned more from sheer hours spent in class than from the quality of the class, and we definitely didn't do much work to improve our grammar or how we express our thoughts, especially in writing.
Media started okay, got really boring because our textbook was terrible, and then became much more fun when we talked the professor into abandoning the textbook. The new format became read an article, watch a video, and discuss it. Much better and much more interesting.
So that's that. I leave Jordan Saturday for an undisclosed location and then I'm in Lebanon from the 16th to the 22nd. Wooooo!
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