Jordan, 17 August 2023 – blog by Timo Vleerbos –
Today started a bit slow, because a lot of people were still sick. We bought some medicines before we went to ACWUA. We started with a presentation about the business model canva. After the presentation we went to work on our case.
For my case I went to the Ministry of Water with Zeyad. There we talked about what we can use treated wastewater for. I talked with the Minister about his visit to the Netherlands, he went to Delft and said it smelled like weed all the time. I laughed, but I didn’t feel proud about it. The interview was in Arabic, so on the way back Zeyad translated the interview to me. We got a lot of good and practical information. When we came back we changed our idea because of the new information we had just received.
For lunch we ordered pasta and burgers. I had the pasta alfredo, but it was a bit much for me as I wasn’t used to eating big portions as I was sick just the day before. After that we already had to clean the location up as it was our last time at the ACWUA.
We came together at the presentation room for a last talk about the paper and poster we have to make.
We finished at around 15:15 and I had to hurry as I planned a trip to Wadi Rum with 7 other people from the group. It was a 5 hour drive and the taxi would pick us up at the hotel at around 15:30. I took 3 bottles of 1.5 liters with me and we went on our way. On our way to Wadi Rum we got stopped about 6 times by police and the taxi driver got a ticket because he didn’t have a license to be a taxi driver. It was a long ride. Luckily we had music with us, so we were listening and singing along the whole time.
When I was looking out the window with a straight face, Saed would ask me “are you enjoy?” This become a joke in the group, so we would routinely ask each other “are you enjoy?”
We arrived at 21:00 at Wadi Rum. We had dinner and went stargazing. The sky was clear and we could see a lot of stars, if you looked closely you could see the milky way. Because it was dark we tried to scare each other by sneaking up on each other. It failed most of the time because everyone had a flashlight on their phone. I tried scaring Mo and Dorsaf with Saed as distraction, but Mo caught on to what we were doing so he shined his flashlight around and found me. We spent the rest of the night dancing barefoot in the middle of the dessert which was definitely a new experience for me.
