April 11

Dear People,

I remember that when I was little, Dad explained to me that the Dead Sea is so salty people walk in and just float. Since then I have always wanted to float in the Dead Sea, though I thought I might have to make do with the Great Salt Lake. But behold! Yesterday we drove down and swam in the Dead Sea. You really can just sit in the water. I sat and lay flat on my back and rolled around. Some people played cards or silly BYU games like "Bunny Bunny." The water felt like baby oil, and since nothing can grow in it it was clear and clean and blue. You had to be careful, though, not to get any in your eyes or mouth.

The week before, we went to Jordan for four days. I love Jordan. We spent an entire day at Petra, the place with all the beautiful rock-carving in the cliffs. You have probably seen part of it (The Treasury) in photos, but it's a huge complex, with cliffs and colored rocks like something out of Southern Utah, but filled with ancient carvings. Lazy Utes, not providing us with ancient carvings.

Jordanians seem generally very nice. We had to have a Jordanian guide by law, but he was cool. He spent twenty-eight years in the US, so he had perfect English, and he's Catholic. He explained to us why he likes the monarchy--because he feels a democracy would discriminate against the Christian minority.

On two nights we got to spend free time in Amman. Three friends and I wandered around the streets until we stumbled upon a zoo. The man at the gate told us it took 1 dinar to enter, but we didn't have any money on us. We had a pleasant conversation with him using his ten words of English and Ryan's ten words of Arabic. Everyone said their name and where they were from and smiled at each other, and then he waved for us to go in for free. The zoo had white peacocks and a parrot that spoke Arabic and squirrels. The sign on the squirrels' big cage said that their natural habitat was the mountains and they prefer to live in "ancient oak trees." We decided that if we had never seen a squirrel before, we would think it was adorable and coo over it.

Love,

Stella