The first order of business is to get a decent guidebook in English. We went right out of the hotel and paused before getting into just any old taxi. We wanted to make sure that the driver spoke English well. That moment of caution paid off enormously. We passed over a cabbie who smiled a lot but couldn’t converse with us. The next cabbie was a charm. Moussa spoke excellent English and took us to an English bookstore. We bought a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. Of the $45 investment in the book, only 65 pages were relevant to Jordan. Precious pages, though, because we are crippled if we don’t have a good guidebook to help figure out what the scavenges mean, and then to map them out to make a plan.
As we sat in Moussa’s cab and strategized, Moussa whisked us right to Jerash, to see the Roman ruins. We had three things to do (walk the Oval Plaza and the Triumphant Arch, and pay respects at the Temple of Artemis). Unfortunately, in our haste to get going, we failed to realize that one of the scavenges was supposed to be done at Jerash – to play out a scene at the Roman Amphitheater by making a video. Oh well. Haste makes waste. No time to go back.
Next was Madaba, a town south of Amman, to see a 19th century world map made of mosaics on the floor of a Greek Orthodox church. We had a mandatory snack at the coffee shop Ayola across the street from the church. It was a delicious chicken sandwich – but then again, things are more delicious when you are starving. To finish the last piece of that scavenge, we had to go to Mount Nebo and take in the view at the top. Our taxi driver raced us up to the gate just in time before they closed for the evening.
We rode down to the Dead Sea to float while reading a newspaper. After a detour to the hotel to get bathing suits, we arrived just as the sun was setting. Not surprisingly, the experience was much like it is on the Israeli side. You take a newspaper and pose for a picture while floating in the salty water. We paid to enter a beach club. We chose an inexpensive one used by locals, rather than trying to navigate the more expensive hotels loaded with amenities we were not going to use. All we needed was a changing area, access to the sea, and a fresh water shower. It was just about dusk. The air was a balmy high 70s – a perfect soft breeze wafted as the sun set and a peaceful feeling settled. We changed into our bathing suits and walked down the soft sand to the shoreline. Along the way, we passed small groups of people sitting in plastic beach chairs, some picnicking, one or two gathered around a small fire. Almost all of the women were fully dressed, with heads covered. A few teenagers wore western bathing suits. As the sky darkened, we could see the lights begin twinkling on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea. For the newspaper prop required for the float, we removed from our travelling “evidence” book the Hong Kong Sunday paper we had collected during the first leg of our trip.
We did two more things – both mandatory food scavenges -- before returning to the hotel for the 10:30 curfew. We found and ate mansaf, a meat dish in a delicious soupy yogurt sauce, with rice. The absolute highlight was kunafa – a sweet dessert served hot. It is a base of melted cheese with a hard caramel topping. Our taxi driver took us to Habibah, which he said is the best place to eat kunafa. It was 9:30 at night and the store was packed with male customers, buying up kunafa. It is served out of round pans that look like pizza pans. The store is a beautiful chandeliered upscale place, with abundances of decorative pastries stacked in intricate designs. But, the main event is the kunafa. All the attention and bustle focused on the kunafa counter. It was like an elegant pizza-by-the-slice emporium. We took our servings outside and became instant kunafa lovers.