Eilat and Petra

This blog will be another one of only words, as I have too many pictures to put up. I'm going to try to add a slideshow blog post for yall to see all my pictures, so stay tuned for that one. I spent this last weekend in Eilat, the southern-most city in Israel, and also in Petra, Jordan....such a beautiful city. Side note: For those of you who don't know, part of the movie Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade was filmed here at Petra, and if you saw the movie, you'll recognize some of my pictures.

February 19- After my last ulpan class finished, I hopped onto a bus, along with several of my friends here, and rode 4 hours down to Eilat. Once we got there, around 9 pm, we walked to our hostel which was called Arava, dropped our stuff down, and decided to go find dinner and explore the boardwalk near the beach where we were staying. The boardwalk in Eilat is called the Tayelet, which is essentially the Hebrew word for walkway/promenade. We got a delicious burger dinner from a burger stand called Yam Burger (in Hebrew, it means ocean burger), ate on the beach and continued along our merry way on the tayelet. We didn't stay out too late because most of us were getting up early to start our journey across the border to Petra.

February 20- The morning began around 7 am with a taxi to the Israel/Jordan border in attempts to jump ahead of the tourist groups that would be arriving when the border opened at 8 am. We actually beat the border guards to the border, but we wanted to get there early so we'd be first to cross. If you think security in Israel is extremely tight, you should see the security/crossing process to go into one of her neighboring Arab countries. It took about 2 hours to get 13 people across into Jordan, going through security, customs, passport check, ticket check, and paying for tickets to get into and out of the country. Finally, our group was through and then we took a 2 hr van ride to Petra. The group then split up into 3 smaller groups of people, depending on how fast you walked/how much you complained. I spent most of my trip with 2 of my closest friends here (Josh and Larissa) and we began a faster walk through the park to get to the sites we wanted to see. We were offered free horse rides down the beginning path if we would exchange these guys' Israeli Shekels for either American money or Jordan Dinar (which we were able to do) and so got to horseback ride down the path in Jordan (not quite like Indiana Jones). Then we walked through the Siq, which is an approximately 1 km long gorge/valley that opens up onto what's the Treasury in English and Al Khazneh in Arabic. This is Petra's most famous monument, mostly thanks to Indiana Jones. This monument is basically a temple-like carving out of rock. It's gigantic and carved out of the canyon walls...and it's absolutely beautiful. Sidenote: One of Petra's nicknames is the Rose Red City because all of the stone/rock in Petra is a very beautiful red, especially when the sun hits it just right. We didn't linger at the Treasury too long because we wanted to go visit the Monastery (aka al-Deir in Arabic), which we heard takes a long time to get to. There are 800+ steps to get up to this Monastery (yes, I did in fact say 800+, that wasn't a typo) so in order to save ourselves and to save time, we took the ever popular donkey up to the Monastery. It was absolutely worth paying a few Dinar to ride up, as we passed by many a hiker nearly passed out. Plus, it was really fun to ride these donkeys. Our guide was a 20-something young Jordanian whose English was quite good actually, and along with his younger brother maybe, led me and my 2 friends up to the Monastery on our donkeys. He said he did that hike about 3-5 times a day, which impressed us endlessly as he kept up with the donkeys the whole time. I rode a donkey named Bob Marley, who was a little "uncontrollable." He ran me into a sharp bush and sliced open my pants' leg along a piece of wood with nails on it along a jewelry table. However, it was still a memorable experience as our guide was shouting to all the hikers ahead of us "EXCUSE ME! DONKEYS OUT OF CONTROL! NO CONTROL, WATCH OUT!" and kept us highly entertained all the way up. We had to climb the last 100ish steps on our own because the donkeys couldn't really make it, but it was not a problem. So basically the Monastery is very similar looking to the Treasury... a temple-like structure carved out of the rock. But there were lots of small hikes to be done around here, and we hiked around to different views the Jordanians had labelled "End of the World/Top of the World” which were breathtaking. After that, we hiked all the way back down and took another 2 hr van ride back to go through the extremely long border crossing, which was actually complicated by the fact that in our group of people was a 20 year old guy whose father was Israel, which technically made him eligible for Army service (if you didn't know, all Israeli men/women are required to go into the army right out of high school for 3/2 years respectively). So our friend was getting harassed as to why he wasn't in the army and took us awhile to get through. After we got through, we went back to the boardwalk to find food because we were absolutely starving at this point. So we got food at a place Café Optimi and after cleaning up, decided to do nothing but relax on the beach, and drink some wine.

February 21- We woke up late, got lunch at Yam Burger again because it was cheap, and laid around on the beach relaxing in the warm sun. After a couple hours, Larissa and I decided to explore the boardwalk shops a little more, and to get this yummy food called a Fro-Yo. It's like frozen yogurt with a bunch of fruit blended into it, similar to a smoothie, but more ice-cream-ish. I got a really yummy one of kiwi, strawberry, melon, peach, and mango. That night we ate dinner at Russian restaurant called Gulf Restaurant for a friend's 21st birthday, and since most of us were still exhausted, we just hung out on the beach. One of the popular things to do in Israel, but especially on the beach, is smoke Hookah, which many of our group did...but I'm not a fan of it, I just like the way the pipe or contraption or whatever it's called looks(very middle eastern and pretty).

February 22- I took the 10 am bus back here, and unpacked just in time for my first class to start! I have only one class on Sundays (and even then it's every other Sunday). The class itself was very boring, but I'm hoping that the internship, which should be with an organization called StandWithUs, will be really worth it and a lot of fun.

Ok, I think that's all for now. Let's see how good my slideshow creating skills are and hopefully soon I will post lots of pictures.

-Talia