Dinner with the Bedouins

Yes, it was a really exciting trip to Jordan!!! :)

Like Dad said we had dinner with them in our tent. A fire was made in the middle of the tent (for warmth and cooking) then they brought out chicken that had been soaking all afternoon in some yummy spices and began to grill it on the open fire. Soon after, the whole tent smelled of grilled chicken!! :D While the chicken cooked "chief" brought out a dish of wild rice, plates of Pitas and a bowl of camel yogurt. It kinda tasted like normal plain yogurt but thicker and more creamy. Since we hadn't eaten in 12 hours (we skipped lunch!) we ate it all up so fast!! We warmed up the pitas on the open fire and they were sooooo yummy!! I must have had 4 pitas myself!! :)

<----It was to dark when we ate to take a pictures of the table of the rest of the food but here's one of the chicken getting grilled :)



Thanks for reading!! :) Til our next exciting meal......-maggie :) 

Jordan II - Bedouin Camp

We knew we were only staying in Jordan one night and wanted to try and arrange to stay with a Bedouin family in a tent. We had heard this was possible and looked into it a bit online before we left, but didn't exactly have an email address when we left. And after a few phone calls with the taxi driver at the border, we were off to Wadi Rom, an area in the middle of the desert about an hour away. 

We learned that the Bedouin people are nomadic shepherds of sheep, goats and camels and throughout all the arab countries in the middle east, there are basically 3 large families of Bedouin who have been grazing these deserts for thousands of years. 

We were met on the road by a Bedouin man and his 'taxi', we threw our 3 backpacks in and were off across the desert. We made a pitstop in his house where we drank tea and met up with another group of 4 college students from the US who were going to the camp as well. Then all of us got back in the jeeps and headed out to

Trip to Jordan

Whew, it was a long week! Our visas for Israel were due to expire on February 1st and it was going to cost close to $400 to renew them 'over-the-counter' here in Israel, without having to leave the country. So we thought we'd kill two birds with one stone so to speak and take a trip into the neighboring country of Jordan, see Petra, and get new visas while we were at it. 

We had thought at one point to make the trip down to Egypt, but with the turmoil there, the border was basically closed to Americans. We'd heard the US Embassy was trying to fly Americans out of Cairo all week and thought that probably was not the safest choice at the moment. 

We left Sunday, around noon and spent the afternoon wandering along the Dead Sea, stopped for pictures, and  making our way to the beautiful seaside city of Eilat in Israel. It sits at the very peak of the Gulf of Aquaba, between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan/Saudi Arabia. We ended up staying in the van (long enough story for another blog) and 'camped' right next to the Red Sea. When we arrived