My last sunglasses were snapped beyond resuscitation in an unfortunate, but fairly mundane, incident where I failed to look where I was sitting. This meant at 2pm on our first day in Jordan I was scanning the shelves of a bric-a-brac shop in one of the many shapeless Jordanian towns we had driven through. This shop had everything you never knew you needed, stationary, bug spray, car seats, and a vast selection of children's toys.
Just as I find what I'm looking for Edd appears from outside, brandishing a plastic sword, which he proceeds to pretend to stab me with. The shop keeper finds this rather funny,
"Daesh," he shouts laughing and repeats "Daesh."
I've always preferred the name daesh to Isis, its fails to perjure an Oxford river, and most importantly Islamic state hate it, as it is a pun in Arabic meaning trodden underfoot.
"Where you from asks the shopkeeper."
"Somerset" Edd replies, shopkeeper looks confused
"London, I add"
"Ah English- I love the English. I'm Haman I'm a history teacher. English much better than the Americans, the Americans snip snip your empire."
At this point he summoned two of his children, Edd tried to play with them (with sword) they quite rightly looked terrified.
I asked how much the sunglasses were.
"For you friends they are free, please join me for coffee." Despite much pleading he wouldn't let me pay for them, and instead we ended up having a cup of coffee with him, whilst his daughter who was shy but spoke very good English recited the English alphabet.
It had been a day of surprising encounters. It was wonderful waking up at dawn to the sound of the call for prayer in Madaba, before driving to mount nebo. This was a church on top of a mountain surrounded by olive groves, where God had shown Moses the holy land, and Moses had eventually died. We then began the long drive to Petra. There was great excitement when we spotted a donkey being ridden along the side of the road, but this paled into insignificance compared to when we spotted a camel. Edd even deigned to slow down the car so that I could take a picture. At this point the boy riding the camel signalled for us to stop. We hopped out of the car, and we were both allowed to ride the camel. Luckily the doctor who saw my finger last week only said I shouldn't ride horses...
We then drove along the dead sea, spotting the hotel where the wedding will be held later in the week. We picked up a local hitchhiker, and his bag of rice, which turned out to be quite helpful driving through the mountains, as he ensured we didn't get lost. Turns out Leila was right, I shouldn't have been to rude about her getting me lost all the time, the app maps.me is very tricky to operate. The hitchhiker invited us to his house for lunch, but sadly our response that we would love to got lost in translation.
It was then onwards to the sunglasses shop before finally arriving in Petra late in the afternoon. Supper was fairly inedible, and eaten whilst watching cars play chicken at a busy junction in Petra city. We finished the day by going to see Petra at night. This involved a very long candlelit walk through a gorge into Petra, the moon was almost full and lit up the carvings in the rock. We walked out of the gorge in front of the treasury, which was lit up with lots of candles. It was beautiful, and they played some traditional Jordanian music on a flute and string instrument, whilst feeding us very sweet tea. It would have been very romantic, apart from the hundreds of other people, and the strange quasi religious speech a man gave at the end. The treasury was then lit up with multicoloured light, and we were free to trudge back up hill to the hotel.
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