Jordan: Week 1 Jerash

On our first weekend in Jordan, we decided to spend Friday evening in Jerash. We heard that there was a big festival going on, so we took the bus up to Jerash and stayed there for a couple of hours.

Of course, the bus let us out right in front of souvenir shops. Typical Jordanian souvenir shops have a good variety of head scarves, bottles filled with sand (with your name, a camel, Petra,...), wooden boxes with mother of pearl, handbags, a few oriental clothes, and postcards.

Jerash (Gerasa) is supposedly the 2nd most famous tourist attraction in Jordan. It used to be a Greco-Roman city so there are tons of ancient ruins from the 2nd century AD. That's why the city is also called the "Pompeii of the Middle East".
It was pretty awe-inspiring to see all these ruins. The buildings and columns are soooo tall and so many stones still had so much detail carved in them.

There is an old hippodrome where horse races took place. Today, visitors can ride on horses or these wheel things around the hippodrome.

Crazy to think that all these columns were carved out. I love how you can see the detail of every hammer blow.

There were some music groups that played traditional music and danced. It was interesting to see how people could resist dancing to the beat, but people here don't just stand up and dance at concerts like Europeans/Americans do.

Holding hands with people of the same gender is pretty common here. But unfortunately not holding hands with your spouse :-(

We had read and heard good things about this Lebanese restaurant, so we decided to go there for dinner. The restaurant looked pretty fancy (and the people that went there, too), but the food was pretty affordable....and yummy! I think my favorite was the freshly baked pita bread with hummus and the lemon-mint drink that I'm now addicted to....hmmmmmm!

The best drink in the world!!! It's soooo refreshing after a long, hot day.

I was sooo tired, but so excited to try some traditional dishes. I think this was my first time eating Jordanian food.

Because we had no clue what we wanted and what was good, the waiter just ordered a couple of dishes for us. Luckily, we liked everything...except the traditional Lebanese salad "Tabbouleh", which is made of A LOT of chopped parsley and some tomatoes, mint, onions, bulgur wheat and some kind of dressing. That was just a little bit too parsley-y for us.

Anthon is always happy when he gets food :-)

After dinner, I walked around the restaurant and found the place where they bake the bread. The baker even let me come into the kitchen.

On our way back to the bus, we walked buy a souvenir shop area. Of course, everybody welcomed us there and told us that they would give us a "special price" :-)
We had some time to waste, so we went to one of the shops. I was very interested in their scarves, so the person showed us how to use them.

I'm probably not going to walk around DC like that, but I'm gonna use it in winter as a scarf...so we bought it *yeah*. I'm sooo proud of Anthon being such a great bargainer!

Anthon and I became a great bargaining team during our time there. When he bargained and I thought that something was still too much of a rip off (and the sales person would be stubborn), I started to shake my head and pretend to walk away. And there you go, they always gave in! :-D

We really enjoyed our evening walking around Jerash- what a beautiful city!
Visiting Jerash is definitely a must when you're in Jordan! ;-)