I'm too tired to blog, but I'll try

From now until Saturday I have nothing to do.
Saturday I will meet my advisor for the second time (Inshallah) and he'll take me around to meet with all these people that I should know of for my ISP. While this has the promise to be really cool, it also is a terrible plan of research. I've sent him an email asking for other contacts and looked briefly at the civil engineers listed on google. But really I have no other leads other than Ali.
Arabic finished today. Rachel and I taught the class how to play Settlers of Catan in Arabic. It was a success because it's hard to explain it in English and the professors got it pretty well. Rachel and I both have the bad habit of saying a word, then correcting it saying it again, then correcting it again, then moving on to the next word and repeating. But like I said, the point got across.

Last week we spent doing the whirlwind tour of all the tourist sights that we had missed so far. I took something in the neighborhood of 200 pictures. Rachel took 500. It was great.
The first day we went to Nebo, Madaba, Kerak, Shobak, and finished up in Dana. Nebo, for those biblically inclined is where Moses saw the Promised Land. Madaba is the Christian town next to it. There were some cool churches there I guess. Kerak and Shobak are both Crusader castles that were built to guard the east of Palestine (I may be ignorant of medieval war strategies, but wouldn't it make sense to just bypass the castles if you had superior numbers?) Both of them are built on hilltops and are in pretty good state for being close to 1000 years old. They were both converted to Muslim fortresses after the Crusaders were pushed out and so you can kind of see where the new stone is in relation to the older stone, but really you need a guide, which we had. The guide in Kerak was drunk and was annoyed at us until he realized that basically we just wanted to run around and get our ya-yas out like little kids. The one at Shobak was better, his brother was apparently born in one of the rooms while the Bedo still lived in the castle back in the 40's. there was a tunnel in Shobak going down 365 steps into the mountain to get water, there was another one that was an escape hatch. It was awesome.
We spent that night in Dana, after a brief stop in the "Dangerous Valley" that was basically like a very beige canyon that had a dam and lake at one end. It was windy. Dana was mostly obscured that first day from the Khamseeneen winds which are basically like hurricane winds only with dust instead of water. It basically made everythng look a very unflattering shade of greyish brown and reduced visability to maybe a mile if not less. I soon discovered that black and white is the best photo option in that muck.
The morning after though was pretty incredible. I defied the laws of probability and went for a morning hike. Dana is a nature preserve that encompasses a freak valley that opened up south of Nebo. We were standing at one end and we could see down the entire length of the valley with the visible trail going off and on for the entire length. The village of Dana is one of the many small villages that were abandoned in the 60s during the resettlement of the rural areas and the new village is about a kilometer down the road where the roads and infrastructure is. Some of the houses were restored by a womens' group in Amman but most of them are used for sheep corralls now. The old village is on an outcropping of rock that has a spectacular view of the valley as well as being pretty picturesque itself. It also had a cloud forest effect going where the top of the valley as well as the village was shrouded in cloud but the valley was very clear and wet and green and it was what I needed to see on Easter. I took lots of pictures of flowers.
After that we went to Petra. It was great to be turned loose to explore. Little Petra, which is older, was actually more fun because we were running up the staircases carved into the sandstone, arguing over whos niche was cooler and heckling the people at the bottom.
Petra was Petra, the rocks were the prettiest part. That and that they'd carved water catchment and canals into the rock face all over the place. The landmarks of Petra, the treasury and the monastary in particular were actually both tombs for Nabatean kings originally. There's not really any rooms behind them, or rather the rooms behind them are pretty small. The ascetic is more in "how in the world did they do that" rather than "let's make this the most functional building ever". Same with the pyramids though I think that the Nabateans picked a better spot than Giza. There were many many many smaller homesteads though. I think there are 33,000 individual caves around Petra though I might be making that number up.
It was neat though this was by far the most touristy thing we've done in Jordan. People seemed surprised when we spoke Arabic.