Spring in Amman!

All the vacant lots have become beautiful green fields of mustard, weeds and grass.
Everywhere we go,we are surprised by shepherds crossing streets, even the freeway, in search of pasture for their flocks of sheep and goats.   I caught this little flock a few hours ago.

Here are some of the floral displays to be seen around our house.  I always think of Mary walking to the sepulcher, probably oblivious of all this beauty, as she went with heavy heart to the tomb of her beloved Savior.  All the flowers seem to be shouting in brilliant color..."He Lives! Rejoice! New life is coming!"

 This is the mosque across the street that sings to us at least 5 times each day.  The field is brown, barren dirt for much of the year.  It's nice to see green.

People's gardens are running over the walls in gorgeous displays

 One of the gorgeous garden displays lining Airport Road!  Sorry, I don't see the function to turn it upright.

Pansies...with the "Modern American School in the background

Welcome Spring!

a few more Karak Photo's and the surrounding country

Here is a photo of the dry moat

This is looking north towards Madaba and Amman.  There is a fairly sizable Christian population in this area.  They raise hogs for slaughter.

another view... I can't remember if this is looking east or west.  Very hilly country, isn't it?

an underground chamber with a skylight.  Each of the archways lead to a room

This is a chapel... also underground.  It was amazing to see that they basically had a whole city under the ground!  

This a a pretty good long shot of  about a quarter of the above ground land area of the castle.  You can not tell how much of a system is hidden under the ground.  The structure you see is one of only a few that are left above the ground.  The darkened area in the foreground of the photo is the top of one of the entrances leading to the underground maze.  From the top it looks like just a bunch of rubble, but the bottom structures are actually quite sound.  Perhaps there were originally many more above ground structures.  

Another close up shot of the imposing Glace`

Karak

This is Karak.  Anciently it was the capitol of Moab and was called Kir in the Old Testament.  The first reference to Kir is in Numbers 22 when King Balak of Kir calls for Balaam, a Midianite prophet (the one whose donkey talked to him) to come curse Israel.  The site of this city is near the southern end of the Dead Sea.  Balaam stood here, and saw Israelites camped in the valleys.  He went about 30 miles north to Madaba and saw more Israelites and then another 30 miles north about to Amman, where he exclaimed "What hath God wrought?"  What you see in the following photos is the crusader installment built starting in about 1140 a.d.   The castle complex covers an area of 9 million square feet with another 23 million square feet of underground halls, rooms, chapels, storage rooms and granaries.

 The castle is surrounded on three sides by what the French call a "Glace`" (pronounced Gla-say).  That is the smooth brick covering the hill going up to the castle.  It made it impossible for man or beast to scale when attacking the castle.  The only side the castle could be attacked from was the town side.  A huge dry moat separates the the castle from the town, but even so the crusaders were only able to hold on to the castle for about 46 years when the castle was overthrown by the Muslims under Saledin in about 1200 a.d.  Examples of both crusader and Muslim architecture are evident throughout the castle.

I am actually standing on the roof of the longest hall...undoubtably the judgement hall of the local ruler.  On the right side of the photo you can see the castle ramparts.  The arches were where the archers stood to shoot arrows

This is the LONG hall.  I am not a very good judge of distance, but a modest estimate would be at least 2 hundred feet long and about 30 feet wide.  The room is lit by a system of skylights.  It stays quite cool in the summer and is probably ridiculously cold in the winter.

Jeremy is showing us how the archers might have stood to protect the castle from attack.  Frankly it seems a redundant system as any attacker would have had to scale literally hundreds, perhaps nearly a thousand feet in order to attack this north side of the castle.  

Here is Jared looking over the Glace` on the South side of the castle.  It is a LONG way down to the road below!  

Here is a small example leading into the maze of rooms below the ground level of the castle.  It was absolutely mind boggling how much room they utilized below the ground.  You can also see one of the few remaining remnants of a building  that was above the ground.  My guess is that much of the above ground level of the castle may have been used for gardens.

Wanna See the DATT House??

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 This is where we live in Amman, Jordan.  This house is for the Defense Attache.  The owner/builder lives upstairs and we have the ground floor. Most all the houses in Amman are built of white limestone.  It is the same in Jerusalem.  It is plentiful in this area.  It makes it a little difficult to find people's houses sometimes because everything looks the same.  Notice the front sidewalk.  The Jordanians go to extravagant lengths to put sidewalks in front of their houses.... and then plant BIG trees, right smack dab in the middle, so they are unusable.

This is the formal living room or representational room as it is called in the attache world.  It is about 30ft x 30 ft... almost a perfect square, with an 8 ft bump out on one side and a 4 ft bump out on the other side.  I can seat 20-35 comfortably.  There are actually 3 complete living room sets.  It's quite an elegant room, as you can see.  I bought Lane the room divider for Christmas.  He has been wanting one for quite a while.  This is one view of our large Kitchen.  There are times when I use every square inch of the abundant counter space.  This room is about 17 x 20.  I'm glad we have a maid who daily washes all the white tile floors!   There is a guest bathroom and powder room through the door to the left.  The back door is in the recessed area in the shadows.  The sliding door goes to the pool area where much of the entertaining is done, especially in nice weather.

 This is the room we actually live in... the office.  It LOOKS lived in, huh!  School, computers, sewing machine, books are all in this room.  It's the heart of the house.

 This is dad's closet.  The section on the right holds his attache clothes, the section next to it is his military wardrobe and to the far left are his civilian clothes.

 This is the LONNGG hall going from the Master BR to the office.  It is 60 feet to get out of bed and dash to the phone. Sometimes I don't make it.  All the closets on the left are my closets.  The top portions hold extra food and flower arrangements. Lane is standing at the door of the master bedroom looking down towards the office.  There are 2 more bedrooms on the right side for Jeremy and Jared.   I guess there is a limit as to how many photo's you can do at once.  I'll have to complete the tour next time.  

Jordan is beautiful and GREEN in the late winter and spring!

 About this time of the year, Jordan is green and lush.... especially compared with the rest of the year when everything is dry and brown.  Hopefully you can see the wide variety of flowers in the foreground of the photo to the left.  If you click on the photo, it will enlarge, so that you can see better.

 Here we are descending out of Amman towards Israel and into Wadi Seer or Seir as the locals spell it.  In fact it is Israel that can be seen in the far background.  If it were a clearer day and we had good binoculars we would be able to see the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem!  A lot of food is grown in the winter and early spring, in the valleys and wadi's of Jordan when no water is needed to nurture the crops.  It is a wonderful time to go exploring!

 Here are the ruins of the castle of Hyrcanus in Wadi Seer.  This castle was built about 200 B.C. by Hyrcanus who was the youngest son of his father Joseph Tobiah (related to the Maccabee family).  He was born in Jerusalem.  He started out as a tax collector and became the governor of the Amman district.  During this period there were terrible conflicts going on between the Ptolemy's of Egypt and the Seleucids coming out of Greece.  Hyrcanus is said to have hid out in his castle for the last 7 years of his life and committed suicide when  he was about to be overrun by the Seleucids, rather than face death at the hands enemies.

 Originally the castle was surrounded by moat and large gardens fed by the near by wadi.... one of the few in Jordan that runs year round.

 This is looking into the interior of the castle, where you can still see where some of the internal walls were.  Looks like he had a big reception room in the front.  The exterior was quite beautiful with all sorts of carved animals, principally lions.. representative of the tribe of Judah, no doubt.

 Hmmm..... looks like Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum are contemplating if they could get any good flying shots from this height.  Too much rubble boys.  It would probably be a pretty rough landing.

Here come the children of a family herding the families' goats and sheep.  I thought we had gotten a closer shot.  I wanted to show you how they tie sacks over the ewe's teats so that the kids (baby goats) can not nurse.  The ewe's look comical with bright red bags hanging nearly to the ground and swinging back and forth between their legs, as they walk/run down the road.

Um Qais - Gedara...possible location of Jesus and the Swine

One of the fun trips we took was up to the Northern boundary of Jordan with Syria and Israel.  These are the ruins of the ancient Roman City of Gadara.  As you can see it is built largely of black basalt.  Capernaum was also built of black basalt.  Capernaum is only about 10-15 miles away.  All of this black basalt is a volcanic phenomenon resulting from the creation of the Jordan Valley rift.  This black volcanic rock was forced up as the valley went down.  Gedara is built of the brow of a very steep hill.  Either the Sea of Galilee was larger in Jesus' day or else there is another location closer to the sea.  This city is a good mile or more from the Sea of Galilee.    The Israeli's have identified
another town about 5 miles north of this city, that
is a more likely site for the story of the
story of the Gadarene Swine.

The picture above shows the entrance into the town with its majestic columns.  This was the entrance into the main business section of the city.  To the right you can see the coliseum built entirely of black basalt.  The first known records show that Gadara had people as early as the 7th century BC.  It fell into ruin after the Muslim conquest about 650AD.

 Here are Twiddle Dum and Tiddle Dee at the top of the coliseum, trying to find fun poses

 This was a row of shops.  This part of the city was in good enough condition that they could have used it!

 From the shops we took a left turn to another business and residential area.  There were ruins of Christian churches,  Roman temple and some pretty palatial mansions.  We had a great time exploring some of the various digs.  

 You can see the ruts of the chariot wheels.  This road was heavily used.

 Now we are at the brow of the hill, looking at an Israeli town and the Golan Heights.  The light colored hill on the right of the photo is Syria.  The cloud shadowed hill next to the sky are the Golan Heights.  If you look carefully you can see a tiny bit of the Sea of Galilee on the left.  The green trees in the foreground is being watered by the Yarmouk River.

 Here is a good view of the Sea of Galilee.  The hills on the far side are the hills that go to Cana and Nazareth.    The right of the photo goes up to Capernaum, Magdala and all the little towns of Galilee were the bulk of Jesus' time was spent.

So, finally we left Gadara by going down into the Yarmouk River valley.   There was a tremendous battle fought here between the Byzantine's and the Muslims in 636 AD and the city was pretty much vacated and left to disintegrate into the dust of antiquity.

A Funny Christmas Story

This particular gift brought the most laughter.  Jeremy and Jared didn't go shopping until just a couple of days before Christmas.  They hemmed and hawed all afternoon about where they should go.  They finally decided to try Mecca Mall... the biggest mall in town.  On our way into the mall we happened to notice that a brand new Ace Hardware store had opened at the far end of the mall.  We found parking and they spent about 30-45 minutes wandering aimlessly around the mall, while I looked at A-bye-yahs (the local dress).  As I came out of the mall they were standing there all forlorn without a single gift in hand.  I suggested that they should go to Ace... after all they have all kinds of guy things for dad, camping stuff, tool stuff, car stuff etc.

I went to the car while they went to Ace.  After a number of minutes I began to worry that they weren't finding anything and decided to go in (plus I wanted to see what the store was like).  I wandered around the store for a couple of minutes and then spied them cashing out at the register.  They had this HUGE red rose.  Jared whipped it around his back, while I insisted that I had only seen a flash of red, turned around and immediately headed back to the car.  I was thinking "Oh, my goodness!  What in the world am I going to do with THAT?!?".... and then it hit me.

I made are rather sizable investment in silk flowers before we came here.  For the cost of 4-5 fresh arrangements I could have pre-made bouquets for every season and every color scheme.... and besides that, I am my mother's daughter! I have not made an exact count but I have probably 30 or more silk and dry floral arrangements. They occupy the space in 6 very large cupboards.   A few days before our maid, Viji, had walked in with a Christmas gift for me and with great flourish she whipped out 2 bouquets of gaudy red and purple flowers.  I guess SHE had gotten the message that I like silk flowers.

I could just "see" Jeremy and Jared shopping.  I could imagine them saying "Oh, mom will really like this!" and then I started to fantasize about what I would say Christmas morning..."O, boys, I'm speechless.", "this must be the Mother of all roses!",  "ahh, maybe I could make a single flower centerpiece?".    I got to giggling.  I suppressed it long enough to take the boys to another nearby mall and then just about wet my pants in the 20 minutes I had alone, while I laughed and laughed.   I had to climb in the back seat to get a better look at it.

Anyways, I laughed my way to Christmas morning.  The "flower" occupies a place of honor by the front door.

Makawir - One of Herod's Hilltop Fortresses

I thought that since so many of you have not visited Jordan and may not get the chance, that I would use this blog to take you on some mini tours of some of the sites, history, people and lifestyles of Jordan.  

A couple of times in the last 6 weeks, dad and the boys have hiked from Makawir to the Dead Sea and back up.... a drop/accent  of 3,000 ft.  Makawir was one of King Herod's hilltop retreats.  Others include Masada and Herodium where Herod was buried.  Makawir was made famous as the site where John the Baptist was beheaded in about 30-31 A.D.  This site is not as well preserved as Masada, which some of you have visited.  

 Hopefully you can see how steep the decent is in places.  Jordan has not had much rain so far this year.  Usually it would be a little greener by December.  Jordan is the 4th driest country in the world and water is always a concern.  For instance there is NO water infrastructure, even in the modern city of Amman.  All houses, and buildings have water storage tanks that are filled on a monthly basis.  Short showers is the order of the day in Jordan!

 2 tired hikers...I think it was at about this site that they all lay down for a rest and saw buzzards hovering overhead hoping for lunch.  They had a good time joking about what the buzzards must be thinking..."Ummm, Hey, Hank... how about you take the one on the right."  The flies were incredibly annoying.  Maybe you can see a few on Jeremy.  Somehow they didn't like Jared as well.  Maybe Jeremy was wearing cologne?

 Here you can see what little remains on the hilltop... Just a few Roman columns.  The wall is mostly gone.  Herod had a commanding view of the Dead Sea. The fortress would have nearly impossible to assault.

This was the first hike with fellow scout hiking merit badge counselor Harold and his son.  Once again you can see that it is a very steep decent in places.  The guys are anxious to find a route that requires rappelling!

 They made it!   I think it took dad a couple of days to recover...but by the next week he was ready to go again.