Today I woke up a couple of times. Once around 4, 5, and 6. Guess I was worried that I’d miss my alarm clock, not get breakfast, and be late for our tour. All the usual things that don’t happen…Guess I was excited to start our tour and see what we came to see!!
We had a buffet style breakfast where I had eggs, hummus, cereal, pita, tomatoes, cucumbers, and some coffee. I made sure to eat my fill so I would have energy for the day.
After we finished we went up to the room to relax for a bit then we went downstairs and took off shortly after 8:40am. We drove about an hour to the Dead Sea. It wasn’t what I was expecting although I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were a bunch of resorts and the Dead Sea itself which was around 420m below sea level.
I took some pictures of Pat getting into the water and floating around then I went in myself. I think there was a sign saying something like don’t get the salt in your eyes and I was going to heed that warning but for some reason I wasn’t thinking when I got in. I dove head first into the water like I would at any other beach and when I came up I realized I made a big mistake…my eyes were burning so bad I could hardly see. I had to close my eyes and allow my tears to push out the salt water. Man that was painful…I eventually had to get out and rinse my eyes then I felt better. Talk about not paying attention…I went back in and floated around and man I gotta say the water salinity is so great that it feels like the water is pushing you up!! I also rubbed my arms and legs and it felt like I had lotion on but I’m sure I was just shedding skin. It was an interesting experience to say the least!!
We got out of the Dead Sea and swam in one of the two pools they had. They had an upper pool and a lower pool. We decided on the lower pool as there seemed to be more shaded areas. We waded around for another 20-30 minutes then showered off and changed. They had a shop there that sold Dead Sea products and Pat bought a lot of soaps and I purchased some lotions for my mom and sister.
After we finished up with our purchases we met up with Basel and the Chinese couple and went back to the hotel. On the way back I asked Basel what restaurants he recommended but all he told us is there are places to eat in the malls. I wasn’t getting a good sense that there were a lot of good places to eat. We went to one of the malls he directed us to and they had subway and some other fast food but nothing authentic like we were looking for. We were tired and hungry and decided to eat there. Pat had a shawarma and I had a mushroom burger. Nothing special.
We went back to the hotel and were so tired that we slept for almost 2-3 hours!! Pretty uncharacteristic but I guess we needed it.
That night we had dinner at the hotel and that consisted of French onion soup that wasn’t very good, Arabic salad which was decent, and kebab helabi which was not good at all. Overall I was not very impressed with dinner. That was pretty much it and we called it a night.