Country spotting

The blogger's curse - either there's nothing happening, in which case I have plenty of time to write about it, or we're busy, in which case there's plenty to write about but no time to do it.

Last weekend we added to our collection of countries that we have looked at across a body of water but not actually set foot in. (Countries seen from planes don't count.)

We took a day tour organised by university students up to the north of Jordan, to visit Yarmouk, where in 636 the massively outnumbered Arab Muslim troops defeated the Byzantine Empire army, and then the ruins of Gadara (one of the cities of the Decapolis, as everybody knows) at Umm Qais. It was a small but diverse tour group - us, a few Canadians, an English guy, his Spanish wife, a group of Philippino women, a Chinese student and a few local-ish students. The trip was a little light on actual explanation of what we were seeing, and not all the explanations were totally correct, but it was a great day out and a chance to see part of Jordan that we otherwise might not have got to.  We also got to sample and buy some delicious local food produced by the tour guide’s extended family at quite reasonable prices (we were totally free to say no, but the labneh and pomegranate molasses were actually very tasty and we were happy to buy some).

It’s much greener up north than around Amman, and indeed this is the part of Jordan where most of the horticulture happens.

Young people would rather work in the city than on the farms though, so there are less crops being grown here than there used to be. The only crop that hasn't suffered is olives, as it only takes a few days a year to harvest them, and people take a few days' holiday and come home to help out.

From the Jordanian part of the Yarmouk site you can see Syria across the valley, and also Israel. You can see both of them without even glancing from side to side, because this is the Golan Heights, part of Syria occupied by Israel since 1981. We could see a set of buildings that our guide claimed was a methane gas plant in the distance, but its white dome looked remarkably like the Waihopai satellite communications station. There was also a very clear fence line, though I wasn’t sure whether it was keeping people out or in. (It does seem that if you want to make money in Israel, selling fence-building supplies would be a grand business to be in.)

It was the first weekend of sunshine for a few weeks, and the locals were making the most of it at both Yarmouk and Umm Qais and all points in between. Any spot of open land seemed to be fair game for lighting up the barbecue and shisha pipe (slightly fuzzy photo taken from the bus window as we were moving).

Did you know that Christians use the fish symbol because Jesus ate fish from the Jordan River on Fridays? That’s the local story, anyway. Less contentious was the guide’s claim that over the centuries local people recycled stone from the older parts of Umm Qais to make houses around the edges of the site, where they continued to live until the mid-1980s when the Ministry of Antiquities took over the site and rehoused the villagers down the road in town. 

From Umm Qais, as well as all the ruins and an impromptu dance by a group of lads ...

 ... there’s a view of Lake Tiberias, aka the Sea of Galilee ...

... and of course the sunset.

  Next instalment: Mark's take on teaching so far, and then our assault on As-Salt.