This article will be printed in the May edition of Deerfield’s alumni magazine. It makes some assumptions about the audience—that they know something about Deerfield and that they understand the significance of a sit-down meal.

Sit-down Meals in Madaba

Fifty-one Arab teenagers stood behind their seats in the King’s Academy dining hall. This meal marked the end of a day that had seen each of them move into a dorm room where for two weeks they would—for many of them for the first time in their lives—live away from their families. Next to them stood the staff. Some had recently graduated from Deerfield and were fresh from supervising and participating in a spirited game of soccer and an equally spirited effort to get two dorm-fulls of teenagers bathed, dressed and to dinner on time. Others were older and more experienced; on summer break from other private schools in ‘Amman, they would teach English, computer skills, and art. At the front of the room stood Eric Widmer and Meera Viswanathan, the recently retired headmaster and first lady of Deerfield who now guide King’s Academy as Founding Headmaster and holder of the Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa Distinguished Chair in the Theory and Practice of Knowledge. All eyes looked to Dr. Eric expectantly. “Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service. Keep us ever mindful of the needs of others,” he boomed, his voice reverberating off the sparkling white walls. The scraping and thumping of chairs filled the vaulted dining hall as everyone sat down to dinner.

* * *

And so my time at the 2006 King’s Academy Summer Enrichment Program began. I had spent the last two days in meetings with my fellow staff getting ready for the program. Much of our time was devoted to learning about etiquette and customs in Jordan, and figuring out how our ideas for activities—mostly memories of favorite Deerfield or summer camp pastimes—could be adapted to use in Jordan. We had carefully gone over the tradition of sit-down meals, agreeing on a classic grace and adapting it to remove any references to a specific religion, deciding to have both a male and female teacher at each table, remembering to use our right hands to eat. So far, thanks to all of our planning, everything was going smoothly.

* * *

Quickly the sound of everyone sitting down to dinner faded away into silence as we began to eat the lamb and rice that had been laid out by the caterer. He now sat on a window sill in the corner next to his rolling stainless steel cart, drinking hot tea from a paper cup.

I looked across the bread basket at Leslie Hotchkiss ’06, my fellow table head. We both knew what came next: we should start a conversation. We had watched our teachers at Deerfield do it all the time—on the first day of a new rotation, or on days when everyone else was simply too tired or distracted to start a conversation themselves. A simple way to bring everyone out of their shell. My mind raced through topics we could discuss. There was no play coming up, no speaker who had been in the auditorium the night before, no football team. I looked at the middle school students arrayed around the table. They probably didn’t even know what American football was, I thought. I looked at them, hoping their might be clues on their faces about what they were thinking about, what they might like to talk about. They all just looked a little lost and confused. Maybe I had better start at the beginning.

“Do you all know why we are eating dinner like this—at small tables with teachers and students together?” My question was met with polite attention, but only one student replied with a shake of her head. I started to explain about eating as a community, making friends, living in a home-away-from-home. Students nodded, smiled, agreed that it was a good idea. From there, conversation came more easily. The students told us about their homes, they wanted to know if this was how we ate our meals at Deerfield. They asked what else we did at Deerfield, did we play football (by which they meant European football: soccer), had we watched the world cup, did we like Zidane (a popular French footballer).

As the meal came to a close, Leslie and I began to explain what it meant to be a waiter, how they were to take the dishes from the table, scrape the food into the trash can and pile the plates on the caterer’s cart. Our explanation done, the waiter from our table took a stack of plates to the corner, joining the waiters from the other tables. We returned to our conversation, but it soon became clear that over in the corner by the stainless-steel cart, the scraping and piling was not going according to plan. The waiters were having a large discussion in Arabic. After a few minutes the waiters reached a consensus, and the tables were cleared quite rapidly. We had announcements and the kids went off to their dorms, but a few of us stayed behind looking at the stainless-steel cart perplexed. The waiters had stacked the plates on the tray, and put all the extra food in the trash, save the bread. Every last crumb of bread was in two shopping bags they had found, sitting on the cart beside the plates. Had we missed something in adapting sit-down meals to Jordanian culture?

At staff meeting the next day, our curiosity burst over and before Dr. Meera could get on with her agenda, we had to know why the waiters had accorded the bread from our lunch special treatment. Miss Salwa, a Jordanian assistant teacher, smiled patiently and explained the special status that bread is given in Islamic culture, how it is considered more holy than other foods and so is never thrown in the trash. What had appeared to us to be an unruly mob of teenagers was in fact the waiters excitedly figuring out their own way of reconciling our Deerfield traditions of waiting on tables with their Arab traditions of showing respect for bread.

* * *

We learned, as the program went on, to be very flexible. Some activities worked well: capture the flag was an instant hit, and the only game other than football that the boys would even consider playing. Some ideas did not work so well: try as we might, two weeks was just not long enough to habituate the kids to walking only on the paths. The kids also had a few contributions of their own: Islamic graces at dinner, a creative approach to learning English, and boundless energy. It was not Deerfield, but at King’s Academy “we still study and work, play and sing, and pause to look up to the hills.”

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006, Writing
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The King decided that we needed a vacation, and so after camp was over, he sent us to ‘Aqaba, the resort town on the Red Sea, and the centre of Jordan’s 26 km of coastline. The Gulf of ‘Aqaba is surrounded by four countries. To the east of Jordan is Saudi Arabia, which extends nearly the whole length of the Red Sea on the east side. Just to the west of Jordan is 6 km of Israeli coastline, including the resort city of Eilat. Beyond Israel is the Sinai Peninsula, sporting Egypt’s resort city, Tabaa.

In ‘Aqaba, we stayed in what was probably the nicest hotel yet, the Intercontinental. The first day we went on a cruise on one of the Royal Court’s yachts. We sailed out into the Gulf, and for most of the trip we could easily see all four countries. We stopped at Pharaoh’s Island, which is just south of Tabaa in Egypt and which has both a crusader castle and a coral reef, which unfortunately has been damaged by quite a few anchors, but is still quite beautful. We snorkeled and had lunch at Pharaoh’s island, and then sailed around a bit more, stopping to swim and snorkel in a few other places along the Jordanian coast. The next we went water skiing, inner tubing and jetskiing, and then we went up to the naval base where they took us to a shooting range in the desert and taught us how to shoot pistols, rifles, and machine guns.

That night we left for the airport at about one in the morning, driving through the night to make it in time for our early morning flights back to the United States. Leslie was the only one who shared my itinerary, flying to New York by way of London. When we got onto the airplane in ‘Amman, they told us they’d be making an unscheduled stop in Damascus to pick up passengers whose plane had broken down, but they assured us that our flight would arrive on time in Heathrow anyway. Of course, it didn’t, and we were rebooked on a later transatlantic flight. Unfortunately our bags did not make it, and they got to New York two days later. The good news was that we were bumped up to business class for the transatlantic portion of the flight.

I stayed with my cousin Kelly in New York for a few days, visiting friends, and then headed home, where I have now been for just over a week.

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We returned to campus in time for a second staff meeting, and then we went straight over to the dining hall to greet the families who were arriving. As soon as the kids were there, days started to meld into one another, since we were constantly on the move, almost always on duty in one capacity or another. After several tries (the schedule was different for each of the first three or four days), here is what a typical day looked like:

04:30 Many of the kids woke up to pray. At first they would stay awake and watch TV until breakfast, but after a while we got them to go back to sleep.
07:00 Wake up
08:30 Breakfast
09:00 First Period
10:15 Second Period
11:30 Snack (usually watermelon and sweet melon, sometimes peaches, or yoghurt)
11:45 Third Period
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Fourth Period
15:15 Snack (same as before)
15:30 Activity time with Dr. Meera and Dr. Eric (we played games like pictionary and charades, learned the school song, danced with Ryuji and Ansley, etc.)
16:30 Swimming/Sport (if we weren’t swimming, we often played football (their favorite), capture the flag, four square, and one day Killian tried to teach them Spud)
19:00 Dinner
After dinner, they would just go back to their dorms and hang out and/or do homework
21:00 Often we had a short meeting
21:30 ‘Quiet time’ (yeah, right) but this was when we would start to go around, check in with everyone, encourage them to start going toward bed, etc.
22:00 Bedtime

There were 51 kids, 30 boys and 21 girls, and they were divided into two groups of sixth graders, seventh graders and eighth graders–the four groups were roughly of equal sizes. These groups would rotate among their classes, each taking two English classes and two computer classes each day.

The kids were from all over the country, and, since they had each been chosen by the head of their educational district, they each represented different levels of disadvantage. I was surprised how clear the correlation was between wealth and English ability, and I was also surprised at how universal the computer ability was–three-quarters of the kids had email addresses, and nearly all of them were comfortable typing papers and surfing the internet.

The one weekend that the kids were with us, we went to Ajloun castle, a castle built by the Muslims to defend against the crusaders; as well as to Jerash and Petra again. The kids were extremely enthusiastic, which meant that chaos quickly ensued:

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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In Petra, we found a camel. Ms. Bradley was quite taken with the camel. First she went over to pat it.

The tour guide distracted her then, and she went away for a while. While she was away, I learned that the camels have a special talent. They drink from bottles and cans.

(My Mom is convinced that I took this picture just for her.) A little later, Ms. Bradley came back to look at the camel again. She had all the things that tourists carry: a camera, a water bottle, a bag with her wallet and other necessities, etc. She decided to ride on the camel, and so she started handing some of these things off to her husband, Mr. T. She wasn’t paying attention to where she was holding her water bottle, and…

She climbed onto the camel anyway, and with a lurch, he stood up.

Quick Mr. T! Get that camera out! And soon, Ms. Bradley was riding the camel around Petra and enjoying every minute of it.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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The desert of Southern Jordan is the same desert which is called the Negev in Israel. It is where the Israelites wandered for forty years before arriving in Canaan and it is where T. E. Lawrence lived when he was in Arabia. There is sandstone formation that we passed that bears the name ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. We arrived at a tourist station where we all piled into twenty different jeeps, driven by bedouin drivers. Our driver explained to us in a combination of broken English and Arabic interpreted by the Royal Court photographer who was with us that he was the biggest (meaning oldest) and best of all the drivers.

The desert around Wadi Rum is covered in red sand and is dotted with sandstone hills which are each several hundred feet high. There is light breeze blowing constantly, scouring the surface of the hills with sand and slowly wearing them down. There is almost no life–the occasional camel or jeep, and we were told that if we were quiet enough and waiting long enough, we might see an ibex. In general, though, the only sounds is the wind, and one’s own breath.

Driving in sand is a lot like driving in snow. Our driver called it swimming. We shot across the sand, sometimes at over 80 km/h, racing all of the other drivers. We came to a stop at one rock formation that faced west, so that we could watch the sunset, and each driver, whipped around and slid into a parking place, each trying to make a bigger cloud of sand than his colleagues. We clambered to the top of the rock and watched the sunset, and then climbed down the other side to find a fake bedouin camp that had been constructed for our dinner. I had dinner with two of Deerfield’s favorite English teachers, Mr. Palmer and Ms. Hannay. In the tradition of Michael, I took a picture when they weren’t really paying attention:

After our meal, there was more light and music and dancing. I walked away from the camp a bit, and the stars were amazing. I can only imagine what they would have been like if the technicians had taken my suggestion and turned the lights off for star-gazing (they turned them down at the end, but not all the way off).

We returned to the hotel in Wadi Musa (the town outside Petra) late that night. The next morning, the fellows returned to King’s Academy and the faculty continued on to ‘Aqaba.

Click to make bigger:

Yes, those little white dots in the background are jeeps.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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Petra is situated in the middle of the desert south of Madaba. There is both a Little Petra, situated in a half-mile long canyon, and Petra, a canyon complex which would take four days to explore fully on foot. Both are small cities carved into the sandstone walls of the canyons. Little Petra was used as a place to house caravans passing through on their routes between the Hejaz (Mecca, Medina, and other points to the Southwest), Egypt, and the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria). Petra was a city. The sites were originally built by the Nabateans, a native group who happened upon the natural canyons and began carving. The Greeks, under Alexander the Great conquered the Nabateans, and then the Romans in turn conquered the Greeks. After the Roman Empire fell, Petra was lost to the West, and was inhabited by a tribe of bedouins. The city was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century and in 1986, the Jordanian government expelled the bedouins, maintaining the areas exclusively as archeological and tourist sites. Here is a very good panorama of one of the more famous building in Petra, to give you a sense of what it is like. The panorama comes from gregdowning.com. Any relation to Dan?

We arrived in Wadi Musa, the modern town outside of Petra late Thursday afternoon. After unpacking and napping a bit, we got back on the buses to Little Petra. We arrived just as night had fallen, and we were lead through the canyon along a path of persian rugs, lined with luminaries. At the end of the path, at the far end of the canyon, we came upon a wider area, also covered with more carpets and cocktail tables. Once we all arrived, the canyon was lit up in a light and music show that lasted for a few minutes, while waiters passed drinks. We then made our way back down the canyon to see that dinner tables had been set up for us. I befriended the nephews of the chairman of the board, and I told them jokes all evening. (They were rapt throughout the monk joke, which only lead to greater indignation when they got to the end.) Clearly during dinner Mr. Reese had been eyeing the steps of one of the buildings, thinking that it looked an awful lot like a theatrical light, and so as dessert was being served, he climbed up and started reciting Shakespeare’s seven ages of man speech:

however, he forgot his lines halfway through. After we had all finished laughing at him, the dinner party turned into a dance party.

(To preserve the faculty’s collective dignity, pictures will not be made available here.)

The next morning we were off to Petra, where we hiked through the site for the morning. It seems as though I’ve pretty much already described it, so I won’t go over it again. Pictures really do not do the site justice. If Petra had been known to the West at the time the seven wonders of the world were designated, I am sure that it would have numbered amongst them.

The entrance to Petra:

We returned to the hotel for lunch, and then set off for the Wadi Rum desert.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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Wednesday morning we were up early and on the bus to King’s Academy. We took the Airport Road (actually a major highway) north, and then turned west onto the King’s (or Kings’—we’re not sure) Road, which is a smaller two-lane divided highway. The King’s Road rolls over hills on its way to Madaba. From the top of one rise, you can see across a small valley the belltower on campus.

We pulled in and were greeted by Mr. Widmer and Ms. Vis (whom we soon learned are now called Dr. Eric and Dr. Meera, according to the Middle Eastern convention). Our schedule was full: a tour, morning and afternoon discussion sections, speeches by Dr. Eric, Dr. Meera, and Dr. Safwan, the chairman of the board, lunch, and several coffee breaks. I decided that I would just focus on the discussions then and that I could take pictures later, since I’d spend another two weeks on campus. This turned out to be a bad decision because much of the talking was boring, and after almost two weeks of camp, I haven’t taken nearly as many pictures as I had planned. I’ll get on that. In the mean time, let me try to offer a picture with words.

King’s Academy is built completely of white stone and plaster, with red tile roofs and lots of balconies and roof overhangs held by unpainted wooden posts. Many buildings have courtyards, and the weather is such that one barely notices when passing from indoors to outdoors. The floors are all grey tile, which is kind of unfortunate because nearly every space is echo-y. They will hopefully invest in some rugs. The entire campus is set on a hillside and is set into four terraces. The highest holds the Academy Building, which houses all of the classrooms in a single elongated sprawling complex, as well as the auditorium and the bell tower, which is four stories tall on a campus where no other building is more than two. The second terrace holds the dining hall, student union (housing a snack bar and a day student lounge), the beit al-mudir (Arabic for director’s house) and guesthouse, and administration buidling. The third terrace is entirely dorms and faculty houses, and the fourth terrace houses a few more dorms (including the ones where we are staying) and the athletic building. On or below the fourth terrace are 14 (I think) tennis courts, a turf football (soccer) pitch, and what we are told will be a football stadium. The entire complex is surrounded by a wall, also of white stone. There is a main gate (also called Madaba Gate, after the Roman convention which names gates after the cities they lead toward) with a guardhouse, and a second gate near the construction offices which we quickly christened “Camel Gate” after the camel who lives in the field outside. Camel Gate will probably be closed up after construction is finished (I think that will be this fall). The site has been cleverly graded such that the wall cannot be seen from most of the buildings. This is also nice because it does not restrict the breeze which blows down the hill, day and night. If one looks downhill one can see that the campus is ringed by hills to the west, north, and east (the slope on which the campus is build faces north) which are dotted with houses and villages. At night the campus is lit up by knee-level lights along all the walkways and by huge lights that illuminate the belltower and a few other large buildings.

The discussion sessions that day were kind of boring—many of the discussions we had were continuations of the ones that are constantly being had at Deerfield: the role of technology, how to fit community service and the arts into a curriculum which is even fuller than Deerfield’s, how to set up curfew and how many sit-down meals to have.

That night, King Abdullah II arrived for a ceremony making Dr. Eric headmaster. They also honored the architect and a number of board members who had participated in the planning but would now be moving on. The ceremony was followed by a banquet in the dining hall. The network here is being annoying, so I will post pictures later.

We fellows spent the night on campus, while the Deerfield faculty went back to the Dead Sea resort. In the morning, we had a meeting with the summer program faculty and staff, while the Deerfielders went to the spa, Bethany-beyond-Jordan (the site where Jesus is believed to have been baptised), and to Mt. Nebo, the mountain from which the Israelites first saw the promised land and on which Moses died. We then rejoined the Deerfielders in Madaba for lunch, and then hit the road for Petra.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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After lunch in ‘Amman, we continued on south to the Dead Sea. Most of Jordan is quite dry and about eighty degrees fahrenheit. The Dead Sea Valley, however, is humid and closer to 100.

To get to the Dead Sea, we follow a highway through a series of switchbacks down through a sandy landscape which is piled all around. There are two military checkpoints, both of which we were waved through because of our police escort. The Dead Sea is the border between Israel and Jordan, and it is the first militarised border I’ve ever seen (the only others I’ve been near are the US-Canada border, which is not militarised, and the US-Mexico border which is heavily policed, but not militarised). Along the Jordanian shore, we saw soldiers in full combat dress standing every 50 metres, and the checkpoints sport truck mounted 7mm machine guns (according to Mr. Gendron) and probably a number of other vehicles that we couldn’t see.

The Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth, on the floor of the Great Rift Valley (the same Great Rift Valley that continues down into Ethiopia and Kenya). The Jordan River feeds the Dead Sea, and there is no outlet. In addition the seabed is quite salty. Account differed on the salinity of the water, but everyone was quite sure that it was a lot. One is able to stand up in the water, and have the water somewhere near stomache level. In addition, many of the rocks along the shore are covered in a layer of salt which has fallen out of solution. The Sea itself shimmers in the sun like no other body of water I’ve ever seen. Currents seem to have created regions of water that have differing colours and shimmering qualities. We could easily see across (the Sea is tall and narrow) and pick out some of the larger buildings on the Israeli shore.

We checked into the Moevenpick resort (more juice) and then headed down to our rooms. Some people went swimming and then we all got ready to head over to the Marriott next door for a reception and what our itinerary described as a ‘barbeque’. The reception entailed more juice, pictures of the sunset over the Israeli shore, and introductions with the King. His Majesty showed up in a khakis, a polo shirt and a sort of a fishing vest. He is quite unassuming and if I hadn’t met him before and hadn’t seen his picture plastered all over walls in the cities and on the backs of cars, I would never have guessed who he was.

Then we all went down to a lower terrace, where we sat on cushions around low tables and another epic Jordanian meal was served (see description above). The itinerary called it a barbeque, but it involved china and silver, and absolutely no barbeque sauce. The King left fairly early, but the party continued long into the night, where we were reminded for the first of many times that yes, our teachers are real people too.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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After Jerash, we passed back through ‘Amman on our way to the Dead Sea. We stopped for lunch at a famous ‘Amman restaurant.

In Jordan, as in most hot climates, the midday meal is the largest. Breakfast often consists of simply pastries, or bread and hummus, and coffee or tea. Americans are usually assumed to like only Nescafe instant coffee, while locals are always served Turkish coffee—the kind that is brought to a boil three times and is semisolid. Tea is bland and sickeningly sweet. Dinner (except when the King is invited) is always simple and often cold.

I would tell you everything that we ate, but I don’t know what most of it was and I certainly don’t know its name (now that I’m at King’s the kids are working on my Arabic food vocabulary, but I didn’t know then). If we were to count the rounds of dishes served on the table and the platters served by waiters separately, we probably had seven courses. A Jordanian meal begins with a number of vegetable items: hummus, flavored yoghurt, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and several other items that were not immediately identifiable, but which were deemed vegetable by the vegetarians at the table. After this the meal can go one of three ways (the meal in ‘Amman went all three ways, but subsequent meals chose only one or two): simple grilled meat, without sauce (this is the famous kebab); meat, usually lamb, in sauce (the national dish, mensaf, is lamb in a youghurt sauce); or meat and cheese, often with liberal seasonings of shredded herbs and nuts, deep fried in balls the size of ping-pong balls. Dessert consists of pastries, often with liberal coatings of pistachioes (the most popular is baklawa, the Arabic word for Baklava); sweetened cheese with honey; an interesting sweetened semolina dish that has the consistency of polenta—also often served liberally coated with pistachioes; or fruit, especially watermelon and whitish-yellow variety of melon which is sweeter and juicier than any melon I’ve ever had in the States. Occasionally rice or potatoes are served with the meat course, but these are often omitted entirely, or when they are served, it is in very small portions.

Bread is served with everything. The vegetable courses are meant to be scooped with and/or spread on bread, and it is served throughout the meat course(s) as well. We learned, however, that its importance goes beyond mere ubiquity. The first night after the kids arrived at King’s Academy, we tried to have waiters like at Deerfield. We don’t yet have the facilities to store food, so unfortunately our meals are catered and then thrown away when we’re done with them. (When the school opens, there will be a complete kitchen run in-house). We had had sandwiches and many people had taken then apart or rearranged them, so that each plate had a combination of random vegetables, and half-eaten bread. The waiters were presented with a table for stacking the plates on (so that the caterer could take them back and wash them) and a trash can for food. This arrangement caused a lengthy discussion in Arabic and much bustling about amongst the waiters. By the time they had finished, there was a pile of scraped plates, a trash can with vegetables in it, and two shopping bags that they had found sitting on the table full of half-eaten bread. We learned from the Jordanian teachers at staff meeting the next day that in Arab culture, bread is considered holy, and is not disposed of along with other food. Rather, it is saved and reused, or else given to animals or spread outside. My first thought was of the rules for disposing of communion bread at church. Then I remembered something I had learned in Arabic class: there are two words for bread in Arabic. The first is hubz, and it is most commonly used in textbooks because it translates directly—it carries connotations of food made with flour and served with every meal. The second word is a’ish, which derives from the word for life and the verb for to live.

While none of my meals quite matched the ‘Amman lunch in length or complexity, this is the diet I have eaten since getting here, with only a handful of exceptions.

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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We left ‘Amman for Jerash, a large town built around the ruins of a Roman city. Gerasa, as the Romans called it, is the most well-preserved Roman ruin outside of Italy (or so we were told). On the way, we crossed what is now the Zarqa River. It is another one of those biblical rivers that can now be easily jumped over. This one also was filled with some sort of detergent-polution from a factory upstream. The Zarqa is the river on whose banks Jacob wrestled with God and was given the name Israel. I don’t have a Bible here with me, so if anyone wants to look up chapter and verse for me and tell me the biblical name of the river, it would be appreciated.

(By the way: does anyone remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Abu Musab means father of Musab, but the interesting part is the al-Zarqawi just means ‘the one from Zarqa’. You’ll be pleased to know, however, that al-Zarqawi, like most terrorists, was reviled in his hometown, so no worries are necessary.)

After my first experience with a Jordanian Public Restroom, we entered the archeological site. The first stop was the oval plaza with the Temple of Zeus above it.

This was soon followed by a trip up to the amphitheater. It is acoustically perfect—a semicircle with a focal point in the center of the orchestra and ten indentations in the wall around the orchestra. From any of these eleven places, a whisper can be heard anywhere in the theater. It is almost certainly the best acoustic space in Jordan. (More on that subject later.)

And of course, all of us climbed all the way to the top, just because it was there. It is very tall.

After the theatre, we headed down to the cardo, the main street of a Roman city which takes its name from the word for heart.

The street is a bit heaved by the soil settling and by earthquakes, but the columns are still spectacular.

From here we went on to the hippodrome, where we saw a show which sounded campy (RACE: The Roman Army and Chariot Experience) but was actually quite interesting. First a Roman legion came out:

Then they demonstrated some different formations and killed each other:

Then the gladiators killed each other:

Next the chariots came out. The narrator explained to us that it was the most popular sport in the history of the world, but I have now forgotten the numbers he used to justify that theory. I do remember them being convincing, so I guess you’re just going to have to take my word for it. He also told us that the chariots actually look nothing like this—they were just very small baskets with little wheels, held together with spit and glue (not literally). They made the chariots look like they did for the safety of the actors.

This guy was explaining it all:

Categories: Jordan, Summer 2006
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