A "Trivial" Intermission

To those who have been praying for my luggage, THANK YOU! Apparently it has been found and the airline is delivering it to my hotel when we return to Jerusalem tomorrow.

Anyway, I wanted to reserve a whole post for our day in Petra, so here’s a little post just about some things I learned about Jordan. You can definitely skip this post if you don’t find it interesting, but I find these trivial tidbits so fascinating!

As soon as we got on the bus today, Rami proudly informed us that we got our numbers from his people, the Arabic people. Of course most of us knew that, but what we didn’t know was that the number system was based on the number of angles in each of the numerical symbols. I’ve posted a few numbers below with the angles marked.

Zero has no angles, 1 has one angle, and so on. What’s really ironic is that as the rest of the world caught onto the Arabic number system, the Arabic language switched to Indian numbers, which are based on the number of lines in each symbol. The Indian numbers were easier to write for the Arabic people since they never had to pick up their pens. Arabic writing is from right to left, but the numbers are always read from left to right.

Speaking of the Arabic language, Rami and the staff of my hotel has been patiently teaching me a little Arabic. I know use the following words:

Shukran  = Thank you

Marhaba = Hello

Ma’assalama = Goodbye

Salam = Peace

Yallah Yallah = Let’s go

Apparently, I have a pretty pathetic accent. I wondered why the hotel staff was always giggling at me when I greeted them in Arabic. As Rami was teaching me names of breakfast foods this morning, he literally choked on his food laughing at some of my pronunciations. I wish I had a little more time to spend in Jordan as we are headed back to Israel tomorrow where I will have to learn a new set of vocabulary in Hebrew.

Rami explained to us that Jordan was so easy to get into for us from Israel because it is one of the countries that actually recognizes Israel. At the same time, it is friendly with Iraq because it allows Iraq to trade in one of their ports on the Red Sea called Aqaba. As a result, Iraq would provide Jordan with free gasoline and free education to its citizens. I had posted that Rami got his education in Saudi Arabia. That was incorrect. He got his education for free from Iraq. Well, he was there until 2001 when the war started. Then he came back to Jordan.

I asked Rami why he chose to study French and English in school, and he explained that tourism was one of the biggest industries in Jordan. Studying languages was simply a good way to get into the tourism industry. Rami probably spent 9-10 hours on the road today, and he and the bus driver were not able to eat lunch until 4pm because of us. With the heat and with having to walk almost 4 miles through Petra in that heat, that is a great sacrifice! Because of the heat, it is now the slow season, but during peak tourist season, the tour guides work every day of the month with no vacation! I’m sure the money is good, but the work is hard! It’s not something I am sure I would put myself through, that’s for sure!