Our new home is Amman, Jordan. While Jeff and I have both been to the Middle East before, this was our first time in Jordan. Unfortunately, our house wasn't ready yet, so the embassy put us in an apartment hotel. We got a very nice two bedroom apartment with a full buffet breakfast spread in the main hotel included, so it definitely could have been worse, but after being homeless for several months, it was a little rough. Still, we knew we would be moving into a second floor apartment with no view, so we decided to enjoy the high floor and big balcony while we had it.
Our hotel was also closer to the older, downtown area of Amman than where we were going to live, so I went on Viator and booked us a driver/guide for the day to take us to the most famous parts of Amman. We started with the King Abdullah I Mosque which was built in the 1980s. I knew that we would need to dress modestly, but they also gave me and Vivian full robes to wear. Jeff said it made us look like Jedis, but I was mostly worried about tripping on the stairs, because it was a very long robe. Vivian, of course, was fine.
It wasn't prayer time, so the mosque itself was empty, and we could look around inside.
There's actually an Eastern Orthodox church right across the street. Jordan has quite a sizeable Christian population.
The gift shop had a lot of lovely things, and the sales lady tried to get us to buy a scarf for Elena.
There are some well preserved Roman ruins in Jordan as well. We started with the smaller Roman amphitheater.
We had it pretty much to ourselves, so the girls had fun playing with the acoustics.
Then, we went to the big Roman amphitheater. It's good we started with the small one, so we could fully appreciate the scale of the big one.
Jeff and the girls climbed all the way to the top. I stayed at the bottom and took pictures of them, but it was hard to capture both them and the scale of the amphitheater.
Amman is full of hills, so our driver took us to one with a good look out spot for a picture of the big amphitheater from above.
We started with the most iconic part, the ruins of the Temple of Hercules. Elena was thrilled by this, because she has been on a Disney Hercules kick lately.
There are seven major hills in Amman, and our final stop for the day was on one of them, The Amman Citadel. It's a really interesting archeological site, with artifacts from the Bronze Age, the Romans, and Umayyad Dynasty. Clearly, everyone like to be up high looking over the rest of the city.
Jeff had fun with photography.
It was very hot in the sun though, so the rest of us looked for spots in the shade.
We had gotten a specialist guide to take us around, and he was a character. He knew all kinds of things about the history of the area, but he also had some strong opinions on present day culture and politics. It was a great introduction to living in Jordan.
He said that a lot of people mistake one building on the hill for a mosque because of its domed roof, but it's actually a palace.
The dome is even more impressive on the inside, and there are still lots of carvings in the walls.
By that point, Elena was pretty much done.
We got one more family picture though.
We took some time to look around the archeological museum. They had lots of interesting things. The organization was somewhat haphazard, but the air conditioning was lovely. We finished by giving Hercules a virtual fist bump. This is what's left of his statue.
While summer is not the ideal time to do this kind of sight seeing, I'm glad we took advantage of the opportunity we had. After a couple weeks, we were able to move into our actual apartment, and it was good to feel like we had gotten to know our new home a bit.
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