Al-Azraq Hotel & Resthouse

I leave in a couple hours for a three day FoEME conference in Lotan, Israel. The conference is being held in Kibbutz Lotan by the Center for Creative Ecology and is going to be focused on environmental issues including eco-tourism and sustainable development. I am pretty excited. We are passing through the border crossing in Aqaba and, inshallah, the crossing will be smooth and stampless.

Are you enjoying Jerusalem old town? Of course. I walk around and meet a lot of good people. Patricia who is working for Save the Children in Gaza tells me about her mission as we stroll along on the defense walls. We have a delicious lunch together, and exchange contacts, than she does the free tour and I get lost in the narrow market streets. I stop at one stand to talk to the shopowner because he asks me to translate "final sales" in German. He has to give up his shop because he ...

The feeling of being on the wayThen I listen to an audiobook by Bill Bryson on the quirks of the English language, that will probably always remain a strange tool in my hands. I have to find the right pace and power of hammering the words together to seem at least a little bit natural. As long as you understand me and I don't bore nor annoy you, there don't seem to be a problem. Yes, I will make heavy use of English since I have to document every project. I hope ...

An early start for the hour drive into Jerusalem from our port of Ashod. I was surprised at how green and hilly the countryside is with water systems everywhere. As we approached Jerusalum it became even more hilly whereas I thought it would be relatively flat with gentle hills but these were steep with sharp deep valleys. I was further surprised to find Jerusalem is a hilltown similar to what you find in Umbria except, now that the city sprawls ...

This is my first blog entry, and I was skimming through all my travel pictures since the past two years and have to sadly declare that they are all scattered throughout the USB Stick in the family's computer, in my brother's laptop's hard drive and in this laptop of mine that I'm currently using..

So, I'm going to post some pictures that are still recent and that I could still recall very well..

The last "real" travel trip that my family did was our trip to ...

After Jerash we headed west towards Azraq - a small truck-stop
town on the highway to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We followed our dubious map
towards the city of Zarqa with success, although making it out the other
side was a different matter entirely. An hour of futile circling through
unnamed, one-way streets left us frustrated and disoriented, but eventually we
found ourselves on a big road following the signs to Iraq. We made it to our
Azraq, Jordan stephspeirs

7-15-08 Tuesday 12:30 pm Hi everyone! I know I haven't been posting entries regularly, but maybe this week I'll be able to, In'sha'allah (it means "God willing" in Arabic, and it's a very popular saying here). As I write now, I just got back from my rural home stay in the Badia, or semi-desert of Jordan, and I have honestly never been so happy to take a shower in my life! What an experience! So much happened over the last few days that I really don't know where to begin, but I guess I'll ...

'Answer me these questions three' The classic Monty Python line, I don't know who said it, Eric Idle probably. You get used to every little kid and many adults running upto you shouting "What's your name, where you from?" And trust me saying "Ishmee steve" gets tiresome too. However, the accents do amuse, they really sound like the ...

... of the bike if I'd like to come. Syria was beckoning but another foray into the wastes was too good to refuse. We were enjoying each others' company and the adventure would do us both good. So off we went into the pale blue yonder, detouring around the capital and quickly leaving the greenness of the central plains behind to find ourselves in yet another ...

We left early the next day as we had a date with Petra. Now my earliest memories of Petra, in fact my only memories of Petra were from the movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Remember, spell Jehovah right and you can get further in !!!!!. First stop was downtown Aqabah as we had to load up on beers as we did not know when we would be able to load up again as the country is dry. Now the other thing I failed to mention was that if Iraq ever needed to find a body ...