Roman Ruins and Ancient History? That was SO last month.

The only region in Jordan that is easily accessible by public transport is the north, and there are several sites with ruins and such just an hour or two outside of Amman. I decided to visit Jerash, 45 minutes north, one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the Middle East. Despite the hype about the city, I wasn’t particularly thrilled about visiting another Roman ruin (I know, I am spoiled), but it is the most accessible and the busride cost me less than a $1. If I had left early in the morning, I could have combined my trip with a visit to Ajlun’s Qal’at ar-Rabad (citadel with views) to the north, but by the time the bus was leaving the station it was already quarter to 11.

Back when Jerash was called Gerasa, Amman was Philadelphia and Damascus was Damascus, the cities were part of a collective of Roman commercial cities called the Decapolis; though the name suggests a group of ten, it actually included up to 18 cities across Jordan, Syria and Israel & Palestine.

So what does this best-preserved Roman city in the ME actually have? Generally the same things that other Roman sites have, they just all happen to be in the same place (except for the hippodrome [where you can watch chariot races!]—that was the first I’ve seen so far): arches, temples, plazas, a theater, colonnaded streets, baths, gates, and evidence from more recent centuries and empires including churches and houses. If I sound a little disinterested, that’s because I was. The main areas were overrun with school children, and though I was happy to see that local schools take their kids on such sweet field trips, it made photos difficult and meant that groups of giggling girls would walk around arm in arm going up to foreigners and saying “Hello! How are you?” and make comments on your appearance. It was actually the first time I saw girls harrassing tourists more than the boys—maybe it is the age group, but perhaps it proves that when teenage boys do it they aren’t necessarily trying to hit on you, only practice their English. Maybe.

Anyway. The real highlight of my trip to Jerash turned out to be the wildflowers. The ruins were set into small hills of purple, white and yellow flowers, which made walking around the site much more enjoyable, if you were able to tune out everything else. I didn’t have the patience for a tour guide, though one teenage boy who worked there followed me around for a while trying to give me an impromptu tour, and in the end I think I bypassed most of the significant buildings. I did enjoy a nice lunch buffet at the onsite restaurant, which I managed to bargain down to 4 JD from the manager’s offered “student discount.”

So my history/traveling-overload was the first sign that I should probably return back to Damascus. The second was reading The Savage Detectives, which I borrowed from Rachel, a Mexican novel about lost poets in the ‘70s and the bohemian lifestyle that they led, traveling with no money and perpetually mooching off of friends. When I started pushing back my departure date to accommodate my hosts’ social lives to go to this dinner or that performance or on this trip, I decided that while I’m not exactly on the verge of slipping into bohemianism (I still have my standards of hygiene, a good relationship with my family and haven’t yet joined an artistic/revolutionary movement), and my host had graciously invited me to stay indefinitely, I didn’t want to make a second home of their second living room. Plus, I reminded myself that I had been on the move for over three weeks now and it might be nice to back on my own schedule again, do some laundry, eat home-cooked meals, sleep regularly, maybe study, register for fall classes (!), find a summer subletter for my room in DC, think about my future, maybe even catch up on this, the blog. Really that was the main problem: falling into an unsustainable lifestyle of having too many adventures for weeks at a time and then trying to write about them all at once, with no time to reflect inbetween. So clearly I returned for your sake, blog-audience, because apparently my ability to keep up with the entries reflects my ability to maintain a healthy and balanced pace in life. Maybe.

The third thing was that remembering that Rachel had been in Amman for less than 2 weeks and probably would enjoy having time to figure things out on her own before having the responsibility of figuring it out for a guest as well.

But before I left, we went out that night to the Royal Cultural Center, which was hosting a performance festival. None of the events offered any kind of description as to whether it would be film, music, dance, or theater, so we picked one at random and hoped for the best. After a delicious dinner at another one of Amman’s hip café-restaurants, across the street from a Starbucks (we may as well have been in NYC), Rachel, Sonya and I headed to the RCC to buy tickets and figure out what exactly we were in for. The lobby offered no additional information so we bought our tickets anyway and went upstairs to where the event was just beginning. The room was already dark but I tried to tell if the audience was mostly foreigners, as I had seen in Damascus, or if Jordanians had more of an appreciation for cultural festivals. It soon became clear when the MC came on stage and introduced the performing group with a lot of Arabic that we couldn’t understand and then the words “stand-up comedy!” Of all the possible cultural performances it could have been, comedy was probably at the bottom of the list of things we could understand, particularly for Sonya, who had just begun studying Arabic, but really for any foreigner who wasn’t fluent in Jordanian dialect.

The group was called “Gaza Ramallah” or something along those lines, and obviously had a particular focus on Palestinian issues. We could figure out the general idea of each skit or stand-up routine based on a few keywords (a lot of talk about ard, “land”) and a lot of body language, though the most obvious one for us was when one of the performers made a phone call to the White House to speak to Obama, pleading for attention to the Palestinian cause, and ended the skit cursing at America (we were almost ready to go before the skit and then after that we decided it was really time to leave).

The next day I was in a shared taxi headed north, and made it back home without too much drama.