It is settled. The McAdams siblings will be celebrating Christmas 2013 in Sri Lanka.

Colombo

Eid al Adha has come and gone, and so has Amy. She was in Jordan for just three short days over the break, but we fit in so much during that time.

After picking her up from the airport and feasting on Jordanian salads and BBQ chicken and beef, we woke up early on Monday to do the Wadi Mujib gorge hike with Hamza and Faris.

Beautiful Wadi Mujib is one of my favorite hikes in Jordan.

After the hike Amy and I checked into the Mujib chalets across the street and spend the rest of the day relaxing by the Dead Sea.

Our “hut hut”: think very comfortable camping.

We found some mud on the shore and slathered it on for smooth skin. It did not smell good.

Unlike when I went in hellish-hot July, the Dead Sea in October is absolutely lovely.

I can’t wait to go back.

The next day we woke with the sunrise, had a delicious breakfast provided by the chalets (boiled eggs! coffee! hummus! corn!) and headed off to see the site where Jesus was baptized on the Jordan river. Pricey at 12JDs but its one of those places we had heard about since birth, really, so it was pretty high on our to-do list.

Amy on the Jordanian bank, dipping her feet into the river where Jesus was baptized. The platform across the river is Israeli.

We headed back to Amman to see the Citadel, rest up, and have a simple falafel dinner at one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants.

Thursday we forced ourselves out of bed before dawn, met up with Hamza, and drove down to Wadi Mousa and Petra. I’ve been in Jordan for nearly 5 months now, but it was my first time into the site. With Hamza’s help and my work ID, I got into the park for the local price: 1JD. Amy’s ticket, being a foreigner, was 50JDs. We paid up and joined the crowds.

Petra really is worth navigating the ocean of tourists and the high entry fee. It is one of those sites I had seen in hundreds of photos, but they could never really capture the experience of taking it all in for myself. We packed a big picnic lunch and spent the day in the expansive town.

The Amphitheater

Tombs behind camels available as taxi service

Feeling energetic, we took the somewhat strenuous hike up to the Monestary.

Pretty Petra-pink sand

The hot trek up is worth the view as you round the corner and see this.

We scarfed down our picnic at the top of the world.

We drove back to Amman the same day. I dropped her off for her flight back to Kuwait early this morning.

I miss her already.

I’ve started looking forward to setting my alarm for early wakeup on Saturday mornings. For the past month and a half, the Scientific Cultural Society and I put on a 2 hour workshop every week for Syrian refugee kids in partnership with Syria Bright Future.

Syria Bright Future is an all-volunteer organization run by Syrian psychologists and psychiatrists to provide mental health services to Syrian refugees in Jordan. They bring in groups of 25-30 kids every Saturday morning for fun science stations with us.

This week, we had five stations: one where kids learned about batteries by creating their own with lemons, pennies and nails.

Batteries with lemons, iron nails and copper coins.

Kids learned about measurement (and theoretically, vibration) by creating their own pan pipe made out of drinking straws.

At one station, kids modeled the lifecycle of a butterfly with pasta.

At a fourth station, kids are challenged to build the tallest marshmallow tower possible and to have it withstand a jello earthquake.

And finally kids learn about fingerprints and investigate the patterns of their own fingerprints.

It is my dream to expand the program to include longer sessions and to have kids come back week after week. That way they could really explore in more depth the topics they are interested in, and develop important skills; particularly, the skills used to gather information about the world, the skills needed to make sense of the information they gather, and then the critical thinking skills to apply information in new situations and in solving problems.