Desired Exodus


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December 16th 2005
Published: December 16th 2005
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So we meet once again,

Theres so much to write and so little time. So how are all of you? Doing well? Enough about you, lets talk about me for awhile.
Jerusalem was absolutely amazing. The old city has to be one of the best in the world with the sites and the people, oh the people, it was bizarre to see all the orthodox jews crossing paths with monks and coptic christians meanwhile arabs are shouting prices in the backround. And of course they're there for good reason. We walked the supposed path that jesus took with the cross in a procession led by a bunch of monks to the (again, supposed) place where Jesus was crucified and burried. Now, despite the obvious speculation that one feels, its still pretty amazing to walk on the approximate ground where so much history took place. We also woke up at sunrise one morning to watch the sun rise (how redundant) on the dome of the rock and the rest of the old city which was really beautiful. As for why I said i was feeling a little culture shocked in the last blog is just because of how western it is here. The streets are somewhat clean, there's lots of english and trendy clothing, etc. Which is ridiculous after spending the amount of time in greece, then turkey then syria where toilet paper has to be thrown in bins (stinky) and car drivers do the preventative honk a la china style where, in short, they basically honk all the time. It was really weird, and we all acknowledged it. Oh, and still in Israel we took a day trip to the dead sea which was an aweful beaching experience (cost 10bucks, fly's everwhere, construction 100yards away) but the floating was really cool! The idea is simple enough; its like the ocean in that theres lot of buoancy but its just more so which makes it so much fun.
From Jerusalem, we then embarked on the hardest day of our travels. The plan was to go to Eilat, cross the border to Taba in Egypt and then take a bus to Cairo, which we did, but oh, if it were that easy. We had to get up at 5 to catch our bus which was a bit of a rough start to the day and food was pathetic in portions which again, is a rough start, but we made it successfully to eilat and took a taxi to the border to save time, exited israel after much scrutinizing, walked to egypt border crossing, went through security checks in egypt got to the last check where the guy checks your visa and such and then:
"wheres your visa"
"we were told we could buy it here"
"no you cant, you have to buy it before you come here"รน
"where can you get one"
"in eilat"
"but...but..."
Now, not only does the egyptian embassy website say you can get it at the border but we also called and they said we could get it at the border, but could we, nope. So, put your thing down, flip it and reverse the steps 1 through a million twice which brings us back to egypt where we were finally able to cross through and catch our 7 hour long bus to cairo...sweet. So that sucked but we did in the end get to our destination without any real time lost and cairo turned out to be amazing. However, that will have to wait as i just realized i'm out of time.
I love you all immensely and I look foward to seeing you again,
Jordan



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17th December 2005

Lesson #1 in foreign travel....
...visa acquisition is NEVER as straightforward or easy as it sounds. I too have learned that one the hard way. PS -don't trust the people in embassies.They're really just shifty buggers who are jealous that you are travelling and they're not. And no, I'm not still bitter.

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