Jerash

We have been planning to visit Jordan since we decided to move to Abu Dhabi, and finally went during the five day National Day weekend.  Lots of our fellow UAE residents had the same idea -- we saw the same people all over the country during our trip.  This was made easier by the fact that tourism is down by half this year -- although Jordan hasn't had any incidents, tourists are scared off by the chaos in Syria and Palestine/Israel.  

Our first stop was to Jerash, site of the largest Roman ruins outside of Italy.  The big arch at the front was built in honor of Hadrian's visit in 129 AD.

 Jerash was leveled by an earthquake in 749AD (it sounds to us that Jordan has a catastrophic earthquake every few hundred years), and it hasn't been rebuilt as much as it would have been in the US and Europe.  That made it harder to guess what certain things were, but made us marvel that the Romans could build anything that was still left standing.

This is a huge stone wheel which was used to make olive oil.  Jordan has microclimates, just like our favorite City by the Bay -- within a few miles lush forest would turn into Abu Dhabi-like sand.  So while we didn't see any olive trees near Jerash it wasn't hard to imagine that they used to be there, or that they weren't far off.

The huge forum reminded us of the open space near St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

 Because there weren't demarcated paths, and tourists to the site were left alone, we did a lot of scrambling up old stones to look around.

Here is a "leaning column" -- if you stick a pin at the base of the column, you can see the pin going up and down by a few millimeters.  We think it is the same philosophy as the Inca stones in Peru: in an earthquake, you need to have a little give so that your structure doesn't crumble on top of you.  But we were glad that this wasn't tested out while we were at Jerash.  

It was striking to see "old Jerash" and "new Jerash" in contrast.  This is common all over Jordan -- extremely old, sometimes well-preserved and sometimes not, next to extremely new.