So I am in Amman on the first leg of the usual annual tour. Great to meet up with old trip buddies as always. On Thursday we went to Tafileh, a rural town a couple hour south (?) of Amman. Funny day. After the fair, they took us on this “tour” of the town. We went own to a valley that had some stone quarries. We stayed there for something like 5 minutes. Then we went to another place that overlooked the valley, maybe to look at it from another angle, then we had what seemed to be a never ending ride on a bus with almost no brakes on narrow winding roads to check out some hot springs in the desert, which were actually pretty cool. Thankfully, dinner was served there, and a pretty good one it was.

The second day was the Amman fair, usually one of the busiest. After 3 hours of continuous talking, sometimes yelling, I completely lost my voice. Drinking copious amounts of hot drinks with honey and whatnot didn’t seem to fix my screwed up vocal cords. Right now I sound like…well, I don’t even sound.

Today the group went to Petra, which I wanted to do but I decided to sit it out. I had loads of stuff to do. Email, papers, meeting with prospective students, etc. Productive day but I still regret not going to Petra. Oh well, at least its something to look forward to next time.

Tomorrow we’re leaving to Kuwait.