I've been swapping emails with several of my friends from my first trip to Jordan, so I guess that trip is just on my mind. It was part of a Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), State Department funded grant to study Middle Eastern and Islamic culture (and, as I said before, mosaics). The trip was amazing from beginning to end, but some days really stood out. The trip began in late December 2004 and then stretched up through the first three weeks of January 2005, which left my birthday, 7 January, right in the middle. Naturally contrary and introverted by nature I didn't tell anyone on the trip that it was my birthday. As it turns out we were heading down to Petra on the night of my birthday and the bus broke down in the desert, so we had nothing to do but wait around a few hours for help to arrive - in this case, another bus. Here's a picture of me and my two friends, Faith, who teaches at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, and Julie, who teaches at Thomas Moore University, outside Cincinnati, walking around while we waited for the bus. As you can tell, it was a pretty cold night out in the desert. After a while I left the bus and walked a couple hundred yards out into the desert, laid down, and looked up at the stars - I wanted to remember what the sky looked like (and it was spectacular), and also to remember that particular birthday. Of course, if I had any sense, and it's pretty well-documented that I don't, I wouldn't have been laying out on the cold sand anyway because I was already sick, and came back from Jordan with a pretty nasty bout of pneumonia, which beat me up for the rest of the spring semester. Again, a small price to pay for a life-altering experience.
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