If the tingle means it's working, what does the burning mean? 23 April 2009

Today we visited the Dead Sea. I've heard stories about it all my life, but was still surprised. The biggest surprise is that they still call this thing a sea. To me that implies water of some sort. This is more accurately described as the Dead Slurry.

You walk out into the sea until you can't touch, and then you just float. It's literally impossible to submerge yourself. The "water" is so dense that you can assume a skydiver's pose (belly on the water, arms and legs in the air) on it. There's some important advice, here, though:

Watre, indeed. That stuff burns!!! While assuming said skydiver pose I managed to get some slurry up my nose. And that's what we call an ender.

Interesting note: Along the way we passed this rock formation:

This is supposedly Lot's wife. Yep, this is the point where I start referring to our time in Egypt and Jordan as Vacation Bible School.

After the Dead Sea we visited Mount Nebo, also known as the mountain where Moses got his view of the promised land (but no entry, thanks to that pride issue). I'm intentionally not going to go into religion in this blog, but it's interesting to get our Muslim tour guide's perspective.

After Mount Nebo, it's time to shop. We're taken to a store where all of the goods are handcrafted by artisans - it doesn't take us long to figure out that we're not going to pay 200 Jordanian Dinar for a decorated ostrich egg. (I'll save you a trip to google - that's about $300 US). Stuff is so expensive that I just smirk at the salespeople. We've gone from Egypt, where everything is dirt cheap, to Jordan, where everything is more expensive than the US. At least it's good preparation for Europe.

Finally it's back to the hotel for yet another shower that floods the entire bathroom. Good times, good times...