I love sports

I've realized something about myself while living in the Middle East: I love sports. Actually I love anything that involved physical activity, and the more strenuous it is the better. But the be honest, I already knew that about myself, I just realized how much I miss it, because I don't have the opportunity to play many sports over here.
However, since I came back from Alaska I decided that I was going to start exercising more and stop eating sugar. I've always exercised alot, but because of my back injury I had to stop. So for the last 3 or 4 months I've been going to the gym 2 or 3 times a week (usually two due to time constrains). But the times I don't go to the gym I do some sort of exercise in my apartment, or where ever I happen to be. All of the exercise, even in the gym, is based on a Cross-Fit philosophy, i.e. it's not about how long you exercise or how much you lift, its about how much your work the body as a whole and who dead tired you can make yourself.
Anyway, with the combination of the exercise and eating right (I've not had any soda now for 3 months) I've almost got up to long-saught-after 200 lbs (197), with no noticable fat, I feel stronger, and my back pain almost never surfaces. So, this is my tribute to Cross-Fit style exercise and health-conscience eating.

busy holidays

I knew I hadn't posted for a long time, but I didn't think that it had been a month...oh well, time flies when you don't have any of it.

Things here have been super busy. I've made a lot of new friends and aquaintances recently from one of the refugee camps here. Things are going well with them and they are happy to have me visit them in the camps, which is not always the case with foreigners. Some of their neighbors don't like me so much, so I quit driving my car into the camp, so as to avoid bringing un-needed attention to my self...you never know in this part of the world.
The Christmas holidays brought alot of activity at the orphanage. It seems for about 3 weeks a year the people here are willing to recgonize that there are lots of dis-infortuned children. We had universities come and make parties for the kids. We had politicians come, and we even had some famous actors and singers come. It was pretty funny, one of the singers, Mariam Faaris, came and there were cameras crews and reporters, and when she arrived every one started shouting "Mariam Faaris is here!". I've never heard of her, so I asked "who is Mariam Faaris? some news reporter?" You should have seen the looks I got, as to say, "do you live on Mars??". I could care less about some silly pop singer...
I just came back from a week-long trip to Jordan. I can't write much about the details of the trip, for one reason or another. It was nice to visit old friends again, as well as meeting new ones. I also had some meetings with the University people I used to work with. I even got to see some old friends from Alaska. Esam and Lena were in Amman visiting family. Esam is the first arab person I ever met. He works in the hospital in Fairbanks. It was really cool to see them in Jordan...the world can be very small at times.

Here are some pictures of Wadi Manshala, in the dead sea valley (it was a short, one-day trip with a couple friends). I can't go to Jordan without doing at least a little hiking, because as you can see, there are some amazing places.

The mouth of the Wadi (wadi = valley/ravine), which drains into the Dead Sea

One of the six waterfalls inside the wadi

The view from the top of the wadi: the Dead Sea and Israel. They say on a clear day you can see the mount of olives silhoutted on the horizon