Welcome to Jordan! :Week 1

It took only about 24 hours in total to get from the Salt Lake City airport to our beds in the Amman Airport Hotel.  It only took one day to transverse half of the globe, something Magellan would be pretty impressed by.  The thing that I am impressed by about the world I’ve learned through traveling is that every airport looks alike.  The Amman Airport, while no JFK, could definitely pass for a lower end airport somewhere in the middle of nowhere in America, minus all the Arabic written above the English words on signs.  The poster for McDonalds looked pretty much like American advertising and the hotel had the distinct feel of most motels I had stayed in on our family trips, including the inclusion of a continental breakfast.

When we woke up the next morning and road in trucks and buses to Petra, the World Heritage Site where we are now digging up, I finally got to find out what the term “Third World Country” meant.  It wasn’t so much the armed military men lining the streets, shantytowns with run-down buildings housing fifty people, and bad smells that I had expected.  The only buildings that could pass as “First World” where the beautifully green domed mosques and the gas stations.  If you thought Vegas was a desert, the landscape surrounding the highway we took was Mars.  No wonder they filmed a lot of The Martian around here.  Barren of trees, lined with various abandoned houses and cars every few miles, and home to a couple of small towns with cheaply constructed light tan bricks, the side of the highway was not backwards but simply just lacking needed funds.

The Ad-Deir Monument.  Here I am standing with my
traditional Jordanian Kaffiyeh on.  Our site is right next
to it so we get to see it everyday.

As far as safety goes, the only guns I have seen were the speed guns Jordanian police held out the window of their cars.  We heard a bunch of guns being fired across the street during a wedding party but that is tradition.  I don’t feel in harm’s way although I may stick out as a blonde white guy.  I can’t speak any Arabic so the only way I could offend anybody would be by my prescense.  I have almost broke out into Japanese a couple of times, wanting to communicate such simple phrases as “I’m alright” or “No thank you”.  Most people actually speak English that we interact with because to survive in the tourist industry at least the ability to carry a simple conversation is a must.  That doesn’t really affect my want to learn some Arabic.  I downloaded a couple of Arabic apps in the airport and am going through the alphabet at the moment.  It feels just like the MTC all over again.  Luckily through personal experience that the gift of tongues is real and that if I work at it no language is out of my reach, even if I come into the country with no understanding of reading these squiggles or of a single word.

Learning a new language isn’t the only similarity to a mission, the schedule and rules are quite similar as well.  Up at six for breakfast, down to the vans at seven, and work on the site until two when we come back to base for lunch.  Two hours of rest later and we find ourselves sifting through pottery and the day’s finds until seven is dinner, followed by two hours of study and reading textbooks and back to bed by ten.  Days kind of lose meaning after awhile.  Sunday isn’t the Sabbath here but instead the first day of the work week.  Fridays is when we hold sacrament meeting here in the three-story house provided by our polygamist host.  I think he gets the group of us Mormon archaeologists the best.  When me and my de facto companion and “roommate” arrived at the house earlier than the rest of the group, instead of offering us the tea he was drinking with his son, he gave a couple of Jordanian dinars to his son to buy us a soda.

The view from the top of the roof.

His house lies halfway up a hill and is mere meters from the gate to the Petra Archaeological Park which not only houses the capital of the ancient Nabataeans but also the two sites we will be working at over the course of our stay.  Once in the park, we climb 852 steps that stretch out a little over a mile to atop the Ad-Deir plateau where the dig I will be working on for the first two weeks lies.  The way up has hundreds of crevices cut into the rock by years of water erosion and just as many caves and features in the rock carved by the ancient Nabataeans or those after them.  The real prize of it all is the towering monastery at the end of the ascent.  Man is it breathtaking.  I’ve never seen anything like it before it.  You don’t see 2,000 year old buildings in America.

That is why I am here, only in a place like Petra can one find something as breathtaking and mysterious as this.  These buildings and the artifacts we dig up have a story to tell.  Not just of some people called the Nabataeans that lived 2,000 years ago but of us as humans.  Often we think of ancient civilizations as idiots who thought the world was flat and pagans that were too stupid to discern between a tree and a god.  I think our ancestors get shortchanged quite a bit.  There were more like us than I think we like to admit.  They didn’t have modern technology and couldn’t build skyscrapers but the way they used the limited resources they had were amazing.  The Nabataeans managed to have a flourishing civilization in a barren wasteland and managed to save every drop of water and put it to use.  There is a lot to be learned and a lot to be found.

So, in summary, I’m safe, enjoying my time, and haven’t contracted any diseases yet!  Wish you all the best of a week wherever you are!  I’ll update you all on what we are finding and my activities here in the coming weeks.

Just some more tombs for you.

El-Khazneh.  a.k.a. the final resting place of the Holy Grail according to the third Indiana Jones movie.