Where am I now?

Let’s start where the last post left off… That was June, I’d been to the U.S. and back — twice in two months — and I needed my zombie time. But we’ll skip forward a bit, as zombie time is boring.

Messy fun vacations, on the other hand, are NOT boring. And we got one.

In July it was back to Amman, Jordan, where I taught a class on evaluation. The thirty students were readying final reports and presentations to clients. We had a crazy week! Ramon happened to be in town at the same time for his own work, which allowed for a wild Indiana-Jones-style escape to Petra.

The ancient Arab kingdom of Nabatea built this frontispiece – about seventy feet tall, I’d say. It’s called the Treasury, and that’s what it looks like – except it’s just the facade, and it’s in orange-pink sandstone instead of white marble. It comes by its Greek heritage honestly.

Petra is a big monument to the dead. There are acres and acres of these monuments, in service of passing folks on to the next world. There are rich people tombs like this one, then the middle class sepulchers which are much more demure, then a group that hang from a cliffside like they were lowered there by the gods, then some Roman ruins including a coliseum, and finally the Monastery (pic below). It’s a miserable hike in this heat but what is truly amazing is that these carvings have survived that heat – for centuries.
The Monastery. At the top of the hike – all downhill from here.
These lovelies were dressed up for the photo shoot. 

I would say it was the hottest day ever, because it was murderous – by the end I was hiding under my chapeau, head down, motoring as fast as my wobbly legs would carry me, from tiny shady outcropping to tiny shady outcropping. 

But it was actually hotter the day before, at the Dead Sea:

So of course we covered ourselves with mud.
We found a place to cool off, though. After de-mudding.
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