Aqaba, the 4th of July, and everything gross in between

I personally think it was a nice change of pace for Brett to be doing the blog writing, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before he made me do it again. At any rate, here is what we've been up to lately...

A couple weekends ago we went to Aqaba...

We didn't actually take this picture. In fact, we only took one picture the whole time we were there and it wasn't even a picture at the beach. Sorry. (We just didn't want to take our camera down to the beach and leave it sitting there on the public beach.) We headed down there via the public bus on a Friday with a bunch of BYU kids. We had planned on staying at a place called the Bedouin Gardens. It came highly recommended by one of the people we were with, so we figured we would give it a shot. The original plan was to just pay to stay in a tent and then sleep on the beach. But, once we got there, Brett and I decided to get a room with air conditioning because sleeping in that heat would have been near impossible, even with the breeze. So while Brett and I slept in a room, the five other people we were with attempted to sleep outside. Around 3 a.m. something went awry for everyone in our group. Brett and I were awakened by some stomach problems with explosive results and the outside people were awakened by some uninvited guests. Gnats are apparently at their best in the middle of the night... So three of the people got a room around 4 a.m. and two of the other outside sleepers tried to win a loosing battle with the gnat-stys. We later found out that they had even tried sleeping in the pool to get away from the bugs, but it was to no avail.

The next morning all of us were tired and some were worse off than others. Brett and I felt like someone had poured acid in our stomachs and then proceeded to punch us over and over again and the two people that didn't sleep were pretty much delirious and on the verge of insanity. One of them even had intermittent fits of laughing/crying. It was funny, and yet oh so sad. Determined to try to enjoy some of our trip, we all rented snorkel gear and headed out to the beach. Of course, before actually getting the gear we had to convince the Arabs renting it to us that we had used snorkel gear before and knew what it was supposed to work like. (They thought that the leaky goggles were our misuse of them…) The water was a little cold for my liking, but most things are. The coral was really beautiful and we saw a lot of cool fish including a little puffer fish. After a good while of snorkeling, we decided to head into town because we didn't want to stay at the Bedouin Gardens again. (Brett has declared the Bedouin Gardens to be the worst gardens ever.) Here is that one and only picture I mentioned:

Saturday night we got a hotel in town and it was a much appreciated change of pace. From there on, we took it pretty easy and just tried to survive the stomach problems that plagued the rest of our trip. We headed back to Amman on Sunday and just when we thought our troubles were over, we found that they had just changed from internal to external...

You see, for a while now we've been dealing with this family of pigeons living in our ceiling. I don't know what they did up there, but it was super loud and kept us up at all hours of the night. We told our landlord about the problem and he went up there and took care of the problem by killing them. We thought that this was great and that our troubled sleep was no more. What we didn't count on was the pigeons coming at us from beyond the grave. With the pigeons gone, their little lice friends needed new hosts, so they came wandering into our apartment. We, or rather I, came home one day to find them all over our walls and all over my suitcase with all of my clothing. It was one of the grossest things I have ever seen. We quickly got some raid and went to work. Brett even went up into the attic/roof area to spray where the pigeons used to live. We haven't found any in a few days now, so I think we are in the clear.

The 4th of July was pretty mellow. We went to church then we went to Fuddruckers. (An American classic, right?) When we were at Fuddruckers Brett made us go around the table and read our favorite amendment from a pocket edition of the constitution and say what we love about America the most. After that we were invited over to a member's house where they fed us again (gluttony is also very American, right?) and Brett got to shed some guitar American style. Then we headed over to a small "married people" get together. This was the first time that Brett and I had ever hung out with just married people. It was interesting. We did get to see some fireworks on the way over, so that was good. I would have made Lee Greenwood proud with my singing of “I’m Proud to be an American” while we watched those few fireworks go off. So, that’s pretty much that. This last weekend we took it easy, but made sure to keep the American theme going. We watched the Hulk, Hancock, and ate at TGI Fridays. We're alive and doing well now and to try to make this blog a little more interesting, we've included a video of our living room... I'm not sure how that will make things more interesting, but just enjoy. Don't sass me.