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Zaid's entry: Today I decided to go to a place called Ahl al-Kahf (Cave of the Seven Sleepers). The story behind the cave is that a group of Christian boys were evading the Romans who at that time were persecuting Christians. They ran into the cave, fell asleep, and the cave was incidentally sealed unbeknownst to the boys. The fell asleep for ~200 years and woke up to the region being converted to mostly Christian. So that's the story - I pretty sure that its not true...I tried to ask people their what its true function was but everyone kept telling me that story. I think it was probably just a family tomb...
Anyways, I headed out onto the main street near my house and hailed a taxi. I got one pretty quick today. I asked if he could take me to Ahl al-Kahf and he had no idea what I was talking about. I did my best to explain what it was to him but still he didn't understand. So I went back to my house, grabbed my Lonely Planet, and showed him the arabic script. The lightbulb went off - "Ahhhhhhh, Ahl al-Kahf". I was pronouncing the Ahl as "Awl" whereas it is pronounced "A-hel" - makes a big difference apparently :)
So we were off. Its was about a 15 km drive from Amman. There is a mosque at the site which is situated immediately beside the cave. I made my way toward the cave and was surprised by the number of people there. They didn't look like tourists to me - in fact, they seemed like locals. Inside the cave were situated two raised sarcophagus' on either side plus four more in a back "room" of the cave. There were some aramaic carvings in the walls as well as decorative carvings in the stone including a Roman star (which looks like a Star of David with eight points). One of the sarcophagus' had a small (8" diam.) window which allowed you to see inside it. I put my nose up to the glass but only saw black - shucks! Then I considered my iPhone - I downloaded a flashlight app. for it so pulled it out and put it up to the glass. Now I could see well inside the tomb and could see that it was littered with plenty of human bones - femurs, skulls, phalanges, etc. It was kind of creepy. I tried to get pictures but couldn't have my light on while taking pictures...one of them turned out ok (see album). In addition to the cave, there were ruins of some sort of building built overtop. There was no interpretation of the sort so I'm not sure what exactly it was.
The area that the caves were in was a suburb of sprawling Amman call Abu Allenda. It was a very industrialised area - lots of mechanics, tool, scrap shops lined the streets. It was also fairly dirty looking compared to the other areas of Amman I've seen. On the way home the cab driver asked if I wanted to stop for coffee so we stopped and had some arabic coffee together at a makhtab. He was extremely friendly.
The rest of the day was spent with more family having lunch (lunch is the big meal here and is eaten around 2:00-3:00pm). In the evening a cousin took me downtown to walk around but there were protests going on so the main streets were closed.
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