Serbia, Jordan and Sharjah

I'm a couple of weeks behind so I'll run through these pictures pretty quickly without a lot of explanation.  We start the blog update in Serbia ...

An Orthodox church that is beautiful and colorful.

Love the pink taxi to get you from place to place.

Or you can always hitch a ride on the back of a tractor ...

Or walk in stiletto heels, like my friend Kristen  :-)

Okay, so there really aren't too many pictures from Serbia.  It was one of those trips that we spent mostly with families, not sightseeing, so I don't have a lot of photos to share with you.  Besides, we've been to Serbia 3 or 4 times already so you've seen it a few times.

After a week in Budapest, we flew to Jordan to visit with one of our member care couples for a few days.  I was amazed at the scenery from the airport out to their house, seeing things I'd never seen before ...

... like camels!  We realized that both of the previous times we'd been to Jordan, our plane arrived at 4:00 AM, and there just isn't a lot to see when it is pitch black outside!

We saw Bedouin tents pitched on the side of the road in some of the most random places, along with Gypsy tents.  How could we tell the difference?  Guess to which people group these tents belong?  Yes, the colorful ones belong to the Gypsies and the brown ones belong to the Bedouin (they are brown because they are made out of camel hair!)

Overlooking a hillside on the way into Amman, the capital city.

Olive groves are very common, growing easily in the rocky soil.

Roadside stand selling beans and dried fruit such as apricots and dates.

As you get closer and closer to town, you see more and more communities built on the hillsides.

I never tired of the beautiful, starched, light-colored buildings climbing the hillsides.

One day we took a short road trip to Jerash, and ancient city mentioned in the Bible, but on the way we had a picnic lunch beside the Jabok River.  This is the river where Elijah was fed by the ravens when he was depressed, after he'd had his run-in with Jezebel and was fearing for his life.  We saw ravens flying over our heads all along the river!  So cool!

We went to visit Jerash, an ancient city that had a tremendously large amount of ruins from the Roman period.

Hadrians's Gate at the entrance to the old city.  The detail on the gate was beautiful!

Glenn overlooks a small portion of the ancient city.   The city goes for a mile or more!

This photo only shows about half of the columns still standing.

One of several stone streets in the old city.  Glenn teasingly told our friends that the circle was a manhole.  Little did Glenn realize how right he was!  Our illegal guide (a young man who is related somehow to the folks who are managing the site but who is not a licensed guide for the ancient city) confirmed that it was a manhole, and even showed us another manhole where you could see the aqueduct below the stone cap!

The largest existing street in the ancient city.  I'm standing in the city center, and there are four roads that lead off in the four directions from this point.  Originally, there were 263 columns lining the street but there was an earthquake at some point in history, leaving only about 150 columns still standing.

This is a view further down that street, and shows only a portion of the ruins in the distance, going up the hillside.  It was a complete city with an amphitheater, sporting arena (horse and camel racing), library, and so on.

This is a Bedouin tent pitched right in the middle of the ancient ruins!  You can see some of the original columns off to the right, and the "new"city of Jerash in the background.

We talked with a Bedouin man decked out in his red & white head scarf and long robe who told us a bit about the history of the ruins where he was standing, and he showed us this ancient Roman coin!  I don't know how old it was, but he was telling us that it is genuine.   Have no idea what it would be worth if it was real.  Just the idea that it really may be truly a coin from the Roman period is awesome.  

And as we were exiting the ruins, we saw this sign.  I've no idea what it says, but I was hoping I wasn't doing it!

After a few days in Jordan, we flew to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and were picked up at the airport by another one of our couples on our Eurasia member care team.  They live in Sharjah, another one of the Emirates.

This is the view out their living room window on the 19th floor!  If you can enlarge the photo, you will notice that the traffic going to the left (toward Dubai) is bumper to bumper.  It's like this for 4-5 hours in the morning and in the reverse direction for 4-5 hours in the evening as folks are heading home!

However, on Friday's, their holy day, there is hardly any traffic at all, all day long!

I don't have a lot of photos to show you because we have stayed pretty close to "home", other than a daily walk out in the scorching heat to the mall about 500 yards away.  There's a Starbucks there!  The temperature was 102 degrees yesterday.  Fortunately, their apartment is air conditioned, as is everything in the U.A.E.!

I haven't been to the other Emirates, but I know Dubai and Sharjah are full of massively tall hotels and apartment buildings, with new ones being built every day.  This picture is taken off their balcony, but in a different direction.  This crane is so big that it can be used to build a 35 story apartment building a block away!

We leave tomorrow for another country in the Middle East, one to which we have never gone before.  I'm dressed appropriately for it.  Can you guess where we are headed?  I'll tell you in my next blog update!