Through Aqaba & To Amman| Jordan, Day 6

Day 6 - Saturday, October 7, 2023

Our morning began with a pick-up truck ride first thing to go back to the other camp and collect everyone.

We'd learned that we would be spending the morning driving to Aqaba today to drop off some people there, which added around two hours to an already long day of driving - and we barely got to see the Red Sea while there. The drive back to Amman definitely took a while.

We got checked in back at the Ibis where we would be staying for the remainder of our stay. We had actually emailed the tour group organizer to see if it would be possible to upgrade to a different hotel since our first stay here hadn't been great, but we were out of luck. Our room was better positioned for the second stay, so we didn't really have any issues. We didn't have an adjoining room this time, so there was less noise seeping in.

We had a couple hours before dinner would start, so we decided to walk around the neighborhood. We crossed the street to a mall with CTown supermarket. Francisco got very uncomfortable and kept noticing that everyone was staring at me, so we ended up not buying anything. All of the menus posted at the mall were primarily in Arabic, so we weren't feeling up for that challenge.

We ended up walking down the street and had a long talk in a parking lot. We were both feeling overwhelmed for a lot of this trip, so I think it helped to take a time out and vent some of our frustrations to each other. We had verified at the front desk what time dinner started, and the guy there told us twice that it was 7:30. We were impatiently waiting in our room until it was close to 7:30, but when we got down there, it was clear that it had definitely started sometime before then.

On October 7, Hamas militants invaded Israel from Gaza and killed more than 1,400 Israelis, which has now resulted in a larger war between Israel and Hamas. Khaled mentioned on the bus in the morning that the situation had gotten worse, but I hadn't realized that a full war had begun between Israel and the Palestinians. As if I wasn't anxious enough already, now a full-on war had started next door. I called my mom that night while we were in the hotel room since we had extra time to spare and one of her first questions was "how close are you to Israel?" I watched some of the news coverage on the war, but that was definitely further adding to my anxiety.