and because life is suddenly eventful again, i expect that these posts will all be a bit long-winded. so, the great african adventure has officially begun. i'll start by telling you all (all 3 of you) about our exodus from jordan. once i closed my service and was free of peace corps, jenny and i moved ourselves and our loads and loads of crap to the cheapest part of amman. we immediately flung everything we had out of our bags and onto the floor to reorganize over the coming 4 days. these 4 days involved a lot of packing, unpacking, throwing away and packing again in an effort to lighten our loads. as of yet, we have still failed in our attempts to make our bags reasonable. meanwhile, my time in amman involved a visit to the hospital as well as massive daily doses of benadryl because everynight at our hostel i was eaten alive by bugs that apparently found no one else in the entire place appealing. even my face wasnt spared and my eye swelled almost shut and gave me an unfortunate resemblence to everyone's favorite pugilist (rocky of course). the bites have not yet entirely gone away, but at least i no longer look contagious. i somehow feel as though this was only a warm up to the insect misadventures to come in africa.
we applied, while still in amman, for visas through sudan. this led us to delaying our departure to egypt for a day and sitting all day Sunday at the sudanese embassy. the first half of the day was spent in creaky plastic chairs saying nothing. however, as i stood there in my short sleeves (the horror!) i was approached by a jordanian man who turned out to be from my village. jordan is too, too small. when the group of sudanese men waiting for work permits heard us speaking arabic they came to talk to us to see why exactly these girls were living in jordan. one man even bought us sandwiches and pepsis because we had been sitting there all day. they all told us that sudan is much more beautiful than jordan and that we should stay as long as possible. 6 months, they said, would be sufficient to see all the good stuff. in the end, we were told that khartoum was processing our applications and we could most likely pick them up in cairo. we got this news around 4 pm and decided that we needed to get south as soon as possible. we made a mad dash to wadi musa, and the following morning opted to take a taxi to the port in aqaba to catch that day's slow boat to egypt. basically, we'd had enough of jordan and wanted out.
when we got to the prot there was a big scramble because we thought we were about to miss the boat. also there was some confusion about our passports and why we had been in jordan for 2 years and did not have ids (pc took them). and we went back and forth for what seemed like an eternity on the issue. in retrospect, it seems like they just wanted to find out what we had been doing in jordan and take up a lot of our time. we bought our tickets and got on the bus to the boat. the driver called out for the slow boat passengers to get off the bus and we scrambled off, luggage in two. however, all the other foreigners stayed on the bus, having opted to pay minimally more for the fast boat. we boarded the slow boat with all the jordanians and egyptians at about noon. in the time we had before our departure we explored the boat. this time turned out to be about 3.5 hours. as we picked our way through the men sleeping in the aisles we figured out that the slow boat had been, in its glory days, a dutch ferry and had various signs along the halls with words that had too many vowels or consonants in a row to make much sense to us. the boat took about four hours to get to egypt. that night we took a taxi to dahab which is a cheap little beach resort on the sinai peninsula. we are hanging around, burning our skin in the sun and swimming in an attempt to get the jordan palor off our skin. we will be here for a while. i expect that my next post may have a phone number for you all and maybe some pics. but for now i will leave you with a picture of jenny in our jaunty little sea hut. with no bugs.