My roommate Kirsten went to Germany this weekend to visit
her sister, so I impulsively decided I wanted to go somewhere, too. I originally looked at tickets to either Cairo
or Beirut, but I started looking last Thursday.
Poor planning on my part, I know.
So when Matt suggested we go somewhere within Jordan, I changed my
plans. We decided on going to Umm Qais
and Jerash which are located north of Amman.
Umm Qais is an ancient Roman city, located in the very tip of Jordan’s
most northern border. From the city, you
can see the Sea of Galilee, Palestine, Israel, Syria, the Golan Heights, the
Jordan Valley, and Lebanon. Jerash is located just 40 km north of Amman
and I would describe it as the Jordanian equivalent of Rome. The tiny (ok, Rome isn’t tiny) city of Jerash
is built around the ancient Roman ruins.
Right beside a marble column built in 86 BC or earlier stands a traffic
light.
Matt and I left from the university right after class on
Thursday afternoon. We took a bus from
campus to the North Bus Station in Amman, and from there we took another bus to
Irbid. The ride was only about 1 and ½ hours
total, and only cost $3.00 for the trip. The bus to Irbid took us to the new
bus station, but the minibus to Umm Qais left from the North Bus Station, so we
took another bus to that station, only to get on another one to Umm Qais. So after 4 bus transits, we made it to Umm
Qais.
Since there aren’t technically any bus stops (as a knock on
the window constitutes a bus stop), Matt and I had no idea where we should get
off. All of a sudden, I saw a huge sign in the middle of the road that said “Umm
Qais Hotel,” so I knocked on the window.
We got off, but the hotel sign was literally in the middle of the
road. After a couple minutes of standing
on the street corner trying to find the hotel, we asked somebody who pointed us
up an alley where hotel was written on the wall. Classy.
We walked in the door, expecting a reception desk, but the so
–called “reception desk” was simply a guy sitting in front of a tv. He had to put on his shoes, and then walked
over to us to show us to our room. We
walked up three floors to get to room 119 (how that makes sense, I’m not quite sure),
which was ours for the night. Describing
the room as modest would be generous, but I guess it would do for the
night. After seeing our room, it wasn’t
hard to understand why the guidebook said most people made a day trip out of
Umm Qais, instead of staying the night. Oh well. We learned the hard way.
The one bed in the room was probably as comfortable as a
park bench, and the pillow was pretty much as thin as the sheets. The screen had a hole in it, which was “patched”
by putting a paper towel in it. Apparently, it was still permeable as Matt and
I woke up itching. Hopefully they were just mosquitoes, and not bed bugs.
Either way, I’d rather not know where the itching came from. The bathroom had
no toilet paper and the shower had no door or curtain, so it flooded the
bathroom when used. There was one towel. (I took a shower first...sorry Matt.)
By the time we had settled in, and by settled in I mean
stopped complaining and come to terms with the fact that we had to stay there
for the night, we decided to walk down to the ruins and eat dinner at the Umm
Qais Resthouse that is famous for its views. On our way to the ruins, we stopped at a
little grocery store to buy toilet paper for our hotel room (a little
illogical, huh?). We asked the cashier how
to get to the Resthouse, and all of a sudden a guy comes out of nowhere and offers
to show us the way.
The resthouse was literally 5 minutes down the road, but our
new friend Khalid decided to be our guide for the evening. He walked with us all the way, and he tried
to get us a table at the Resthouse Restaurant, but it was booked for the night. So I guess plan B was for Khalid to give us a
tour of the ruins. He was a fantastic
tour guide, and he only spoke in Arabic, so I was very proud of myself that I
understood the majority of what he said.
The view was absolutely gorgeous. We could literally see all the way to Syria,
Palestine, and Israel. Khalid explained
what everything was and pointed out all the different countries. And after about an hour of walking around the
ruins and looking at the view, he asked what we wanted for dinner. We said we didn’t have any plans since the
Resthouse was full, so he took us to a local restaurant for hummos and
falafel. It was some of the best falafel
I have had in Jordan! And of course the meal was washed down with a cup of hot
Jordanian tea. After dinner, Khalid
invited us to go to a party in Irbid with him, but Matt and I decided to go back
to the hotel room instead. So Khalid
said he would meet us in front of our hotel at 10 am the next morning
(inshallah—God willing), so he could be our guide for the day and then drive us
to Irbid so we could take a bus to Jerash.
Matt and I went back to the hotel to get some sleep, since
it had been an exhausting day. But the
hotel offered us little comfort. The bed
was impossible to sleep on, it was very hot, and the ceiling fan sounded like
it was about to fall off the ceiling and onto the bed in the middle of the
night. After about 2 hours of trying to sleep, I somehow managed to drift off,
only to wake up every couple hours.
Eventually, Matt and I both woke up at 6 am…so much for our
plan to sleep in. But at that point, I was surprised I had even ‘slept in’
until 6! I got up and showered and was ready to go, but Matt took his sweet
little time getting ready, and somehow managed to get himself together by
10:15. We walked downstairs, and “checked
out,” which pretty much meant that we told the guy we were leaving and paid him
our 20 JD rate. We left our stuff in the
front room of the hotel while we spent a couple hours at the ruins.
I guess God didn’t will Khalid to meet us at 10 am that
morning, so we just went to the ruins ourselves. We remembered enough of his tour last night
to avoid needing a guide. We walked
around the old Roman city and took in the views, and eventually made our way to
the Resthouse for lunch. The food was
incredible and that coupled with the views is an experience words cannot
describe.
I know this is going to sound really lame, but sitting there
looking at Syria almost made me cry. It has
been my dream to visit Syria, and coming so close but not being able to enter
was heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I was a stone’s throw away from the country
of “my people” and I have come to terms with the fact that it’s the closest I’ll
come to Syria…for now.
After lunch, we went back to the hotel to pick up our
backpacks and walked to the main street to catch a bus back to Irbid. The entire city had shut down, shops and
restaurants closed, because it was Friday prayer. The mosque let out as we were waiting on the corner,
and all the men filed out, opening their shops, or stopping to buy bread before
returning home. I had not seen another
woman on the street on Thursday night or Friday, which was a very shocking
experience for me. I definitely felt like a spectacle walking down the street,
not only because I was a foreigner, but also a woman! Not to mention that I was
wearing a bright pink shirt. Probably not the best idea. Oops.
Anyway, we stood on the corner of the main street for about
10 minutes and didn’t see a single bus come.
Some guy shouted “Irbid?” out the window of his empty van, but Matt and
I looked at each other and decided to go with our gut instinct on this one and ignore
him. Eventually a black bus going to
Irbid drove by, and we flagged it down and were Irbid bound…until a guy on the
other side of the road flagged down the bus and asked the driver to go back to the
city center. So we went back to Umm Qais and started all over again. This time
we made it back to Irbid and got on another bus to the other bus station.
All of a sudden out of nowhere, it started pouring rain.
Like torrential downpour. I soon came to
figure out that a desert rainstorm is very similar to a Tampa thunderstorm because
they both last for maybe 10 minutes, and then it’s back to being sunny and a
million degrees again. So by the time we
were at the south bus station in Irbid, the storm had already cleared up.
We walked around trying to find a bus to Jerash, but the
station was rather empty. It was a
Friday afternoon, afterall, so buses only run sporadically. We found out that we had to take a service
since the last bus to Jerash had already left for the day, so some guy (not an actual
service) said he would drive us for 5 JD.
I was skeptical to get in his car, but Matt seemed ok with it, so I gave
in and went. The trip was only about
half an hour and when we got to Jerash, the driver asked where we we
staying. I told him the Olive Branch
Resort, which is about 7 km out of town, and he pitched a fit. He said in order to take us there it would be
another 5 JD, making the total 10 JD. I argued back with him because that amount
was absolutely ridiculous. He was
doubling the price for another 7 km! I don’t think so. I tried arguing with him, but I couldn’t do
it coherently in Arabic, and his English was worse than my Arabic, so eventually
I gave in. We paid the 10 JD. They know that us Americans are easy
targets. But at least we got to the
hotel, and taxis in Jerash are hard to come by, so it was worth it in the long
run.
This hotel was considerably nicer than the one in Umm Qais,
but it was definitely a Jordanian version of a resort. Matt and I walked into the room and plopped
down onto the bed and slept for about 3 hours before venturing out to the city
for dinner. The front desk called a cab
for us, and he took us right to the restaurant and waited while we ate. What service! When we were back at the hotel,
he only charged us for what the route would have cost, not for his wait, so we
gave him a little tip. He deserved it,
the other guy, not so much.
Matt and I decided to get up early the next morning to go to
the ruins, so we could 1) miss the heat and 2) get back to Amman with enough
time to get ready for the week. We woke
up at 6:50 and fell back asleep until 8 (which was when we were planning on
leaving). We eventually made it to the city by about 9:15 walked around the
ruins until 11. At 11:15 we wanted to go
see a Chariot Race reenactment, so we bought our tickets and waited for the
show to start. We agreed to meet our
driver at 11:45 to go back to Amman, but we figured staying for half an hour
was worth it. By 11:35 the show had yet
to start. We decided to go back to the
ticket man and ask for a refund, since it had already been 20 minutes and
nothing had happened. He said the show
was about to start and it was only 5 minutes late anyway. We looked at the sign, and they had sneakily
changed the show time to 11:30. We
finally talked him into giving us a full refund for our tickets and met our
driver to go back to Amman.
We got back to Amman at about 1:00 or so, and he took us right
to our separate houses, which was very convenient. We debated whether we should take a bus or a
cab because the prices were staggeringly different, but paying the extra 10 JD
for the cab was definitely worth it.
Overall, it was a long and tiring weekend, but I had an
absolutely amazing time this weekend.
Jerash had incredibly beautiful ruins, and Umm Qais was worth the longer
trip and terrible hotel room for its spectacular views, especially of the “homeland”
Syria. Seeing that meant more to me than
anything we saw this weekend. It will be hard to beat that because of sentimental
reasons, but next weekend we are going to Petra, so we will see how that
compares!
