jordan 3: Jerash

We had the opportunity to go to Jerash and visit some ancient Roman Ruins. They were gorgeous! And so remarkable!! It was a ton of fun to just walk around and imagine what the city used to look like in its prime!!

Afterwards we went to this AMAZING restaurant!! They had the most amazing pitas that were bigger than the size of our plates!! Fresh out of the oven too!! MMM.... what will I do when I don't get a pita everyday!?! :X 

Our third stop was an overlook of the Jabbok River, which is where Jacob wrestled an angel and had his name changed to Israel. This was a gorgeous view!! 

Our final stop was to where the branch in Jordan met (the Mormon members in Jordan). It was a simple little room, but it was fun. The Branch President then talked with us for a while about his experiences there. He shared some great thoughts about how we can use our experience and studies of the middle east that we've had this summer for good and to help others.  

That night we had some free time, so we decided to go to the Automobile Museum!! It was pretty fun! But the best part came afterwards when we went to the Mecca mall!! It was SO much fun!! We went up the escalator where they had a food court full of American restaurants (just like KFC, Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, quiznos etc) but you should have seen the look on our faces!! I don't think our eyes have ever been so big! We didn't even know what to do with ourselves, it was heaven to have some regular food! lol

Okay, the funniest story of them all was our taxi ride home. We were running out of Dinars (Jordanian currency), but usually everyone/everywhere takes American dollars, well this cab driver wanted more money than most of the other cab drivers had previously, and wouldn't accept American dollars So we had to pull together everything we had, including the coins that we couldn't read because they had arabic numbers. So we handed him 2 dinars and whatever coins we had, not knowing how much it was (we had a rough estimate that it was JUST short of another dinar). So Elise hands him the bills, adn then held out the coins in her 2 hands in front of her, making the BEST puppy dog face ever!! He said it wasn't enough so she tried to give him US dollars but he wouldn't take it. So then I find another coin in the dark and she hands it to him, he looks at it, laughs, and tells us to get out. I got thinking about it, and I realize I think I handed him some Israeli shekels. HAHA Us Dumb Americans!! Perhaps you had to be there, but we all killed over laughing for the rest of the night!! It was GREAT!!