Trips to Safeway, Madaba and the Dead Sea
Something generally lacking in the Middle East has been grocery stores. Fresh produce is readily available, and there are many “supermarkets” that sell chips, chocolate bars, water, pop and maybe two or three other products. But there’s still been a bit lacking.
So conveniently, in Amman there is actually a Safeway. Our visit there was a generally uneventful occasion, in which we stocked up on things like cereal bars, cookies, and other non-chip snack supplies. But the real surprise was the candy store, where they were selling chocolate coins. Canadian chocolate coins, just like we’d get at home. We actually didn’t get any because they were expensive, but it was kind of odd nonetheless.
And then today, at our first stop in Madaba, we went into a coffee shop, as realy coffee is something that Kathy has been missing – they only serve Nescafe here, or in Egypt they also had the option of Turkish coffee – and we got chatting to the owner about the Canadian flag on his wall (he only had the flags of Canada and Jordan). Turns out the during the summer months, he lives in Edmonton, specifically Castledowns. One of those weird, small-world type experiences. It was a little less of a surprise running into Canadians at tourist sites (though they are a bit rare), but owners of local businesses, you don’t really expect it.
The rest of our day was spent sightseeing. In Madaba, we stopped at a Greek orthodox church where they have a mosaic of a map showing all the biblical sites in the Middle East. The mosaic was created in 560 AD, but unfortunately only about 1/3 still survives. The church itself seemed otherwise quite newish.
Mt Nebo was kind of interesting. It’s supposedly where Moses died, and there’s a 6th century church there that was excavated starting in 1933, and which has a new roof over it, with the outer wall rebuilt, and is now an active monastic church, run by Franciscans. Most of the inside is original, complete with broken columns and all.
Our last stop was the Dead Sea. It wasn’t exactly the greatest experience. First, it cost 5 JD each to get onto the beach, and then pay extra to use the change room. Pay more if you want chairs. Then once we were actually in the water, we both discovered something that hadn’t previously been mentioned – if you have any sores or raw skin, it really stings. While it was kind of neat to float that easily. Even standing straight up, feet not touching the bottom, you don’t have to tread water or anything, but I’m not sure it was worth the effort of getting there.
Anyway, we’re heading for Jerash tomorrow, and are planning to catch the bus to Damascus on Thursday.
– Neil.
Tags: amman, Cairo to Budapest and Beyond, dead sea, Jordan, madaba
Neil & Kathy
i hope you swallowed lots of water to get the full experience of your swim 🙂 or the stinging in the eyes?
nope, no water ingested. it would be really gross – it’s saltier than the actual oceans, by a long shot. the water is kind of oily/slimy, it feels a little bit like glycerin. once it starts to dry on you, then it gets really slimy. and the dead sea mud was a bit of a task to find and grab – there seem to be just pockets of it, at least where we were. most of the bottom on that beach seemed to be rock and sand.