Lox - Archived Entries for 2009 / 8

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Jordan Holidays - PICTURES -: [8th - 19th August 2009]

So here there are, the pictures from the Jordan trip are ready to be viewed (just click on the picture of the Jordan Flag here). Enjoy and if you want to ask questions please use this post I will reply asap! :D
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Slow: [Sunday 23rd August 2009]

Slow, a very slow day. One of those days where it seems that nothing can spark things up, one of those days when it seems that you are waiting just for "that" event or thing to happen, and everything is channelled just for the wait.

Tomorrow I will be back at work, one week earlier than I should, I have been quite good and planned out all the evening of next week with things to do (more or less), and even today I had lunch with my mum and grandmother (together with Chiara and Renzo, my mum's partner). Then this evening we are off to my dad's house to see him and his partner Fiorella, for more holidays tales and pictures to show.

Frankly speaking the whole "let's show some pictures" it's quite boring, for two reasons.

The first is that I have seen these pictures through and through so it gets a bit boring after the third time to explain how the trip was.

The second is that Chiara has more than 1500 pictures taken with her camera, and since she did not have time to make a sensible selection going through the whole lot it's really boring even for us that went there. Having said that not that my 400 pictures are better, they are just "less".

This is one of the reasons why I tend not to like having holidays separated with the usual friends that we see all the time. Of course not always you can go together, but the big miss of having everything separated is the fact that you miss that "shared experience" extra value that is given by living certain moments together.

Last year the two of us, together with Gianfranco and Silvio, had a very good holiday (I think) and we still share jokes and memories about that trip.

Oh well, I guess that with the coming week all the "picture showing appointments" will be over with and life will tend to go back to normality.

I also have to worry to find myself a suitable sport to practice now that the knee recovery seems complete and I do not feel any more uncomfortable noises and little pangs of pain from my right leg.

Slow, 2 hours till we go to see my dad... Oh well I'll play some game on my Iphone!
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Holidays in Jordan: [8th August - 19th August 2009]

This year the holidays have been decided at the very last moment, and until the very last week they were not sure either for a problem that Chiara had at work and that was dealt with only at the very last.

Still we did manage to go on holiday which I guess it's a very positive thing, to Jordan to be more precise.

To me it was the very first time in the Middle East, and I must say that we have had a very good time, and everything went well, despite our worries before leaving.

I will post the pictures at a later stage, but the trip saw us going to several places with a rented car and then ending with 2 days spent in Aqaba just to relax.

We landed in Jordan on the 8th with a flight from Rome, at dusk. It wasn't too hard to find our car fortunately, and soon after collecting our baggages we were on the way to Madaba, a city near Amman (the capitol), where we established a sort of "base camp" for the next 3 days.

In the northern part of Jordan there are several things to see but we had to narrow down the selection to:

-Roman ruins in Jerash (the biggest in the middle east)
-Ajun Castle
-Bethany over the Jordan (Baptism site of Jesus Christ)
-The DEAD Sea (one of the greatest and funniest experiences of my life, water is TRULY salted, and you do float with hardly little chance to go underwater)
-Ma'in Hot springs (wow truly restoring site despite some pools being around 50 degrees Celsius!!)
-Madaba and all its mosaics and churches
-Karak and Shobak with its Crusader Castle and Mukavir that has the ruins of another castle that apparently belonged to Herod where Saint John the Baptist was beheaded.

Then we moved to Petra for 2 days, that was certainly the highlight of the holiday. The site is truly stunning and it deserves the 7th Wonder of the Modern World award. There is a lot to walk around Petra, we ended up walking up and down the mountains and hills for more than 12 kilometers every day that we were there.

The Wadi Rum, the desert, where we spent the whole day travelling around the desert with a Jeep and in the night we slept in a camp right in the middle of nothing, where we could see a marvellous sky at night. One of the things that I like best of the desert is the silence. You can almost touch it, smell it. It's great and sometimes I wish I had the chance of switching off all sounds and noises around me...

After the night in the desert we moved to Aqaba where we stayed at this resort just to chill out and rest, the whole trip has been pretty "heavy duty" stuff, we had a lot of early morning wake up calls and we drove almost 1000 kilometres around Jordan in 8 days.

The food has been marvellous, people are really welcoming and apart from Petra (where they try to sell something all the time) people were never a problem at all, much better than Morocco for example.
There is this thing that foreigners have to pay more than locals, it's right in your face, Jordanians have different tickets and different fares, but all in all it's something that we could live with.

Fortunately the small restaurants where we went to eat were too shocked at seeing some foreigners to remember to overcharge us, so at least some of the food was bought at "decent" prices.

All the trip was organized by the renown "Adventures with Lorenzo" company, and actually I was quite satisfied with the schedule that we made, there could have been a couple of sites worth checking out, but the important thing is that we had fun and that the holiday was good!

Jordan is certainly a place to go and see, I strongly recommend it!
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Preparations: [Friday 7th August 2009]

Last day at work today, the mood in the company is like if we all were on the beaches getting sun tanned, but still some of us are here wrapping up things before the usual August break.

Me and Chiara are going to Jordan for 10 days, it should be quite an interesting trip that will take us around the place with a rented car. The whole thing was planned at the last minute because we had some problems with Chiara's job and we got "clearance" only last Tuesday, but all in all it should be a nice trip.

Tonight packing and tomorrow morning we will be off to Rome to catch a plane to Amman.

It's a long time I haven't been to a Muslim country, if we save Indonesia which is 99% Muslim but based in Asia, I remember the trip we made in Morocco a long time ago, one of the best in my life.

Also this one has been organized in the same way, no tours or anything, all made on guides, internet and other people's experiences, I would call it an "adventure trip" in a way.

Well, according to my English teacher in high school in my past life I used to be a FEMALE British ship monger that used to sail all over the world, so I guess that adventure is in my blood! :)
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Lox, Lorenzo... ME!!: A little introduction about the author and the blog itself. Plus contacts and CVs... You never know!
Pictures: A Selection of the best pictures that I have taken all over the world during the years, all nicely indexed by year and geographical area. Jolly good!
History of this Blog: A collection of all the articles that I have wrote so far, divided by month/year.