Religious Tourism in Jordan part 1

Today I spent at Mt Nebo again, this time with Feras Orekat my student, and his three cousins, Bilal, Usama and Shadhi, for the first day of Feras' field work getting tourists to fill in his questionnaire. Unfortunately, the very closed Eid shops thwarted Feras' plans to get completely organised (how Jordanian of us!), so we arrived with about 1/3 of what we needed. But we had 100 questionnaires in Arabic and 100 in English, and the main reason for going there today was to try and catch as many Jordanians as possible, enjoying the last day of their Eid holiday.

And it worked. There were lots of locals, including a bus-full on a day-trip from Irbid (amazing - we none of us had ever met Jordanian day trippers before). Also Indonesians on a break from Saudi Arabia, Aussies, Aussies, Aussies, Poles, Chinese, Spanish, lots more Chinese, Brits and the occasional American. Many ex-pat Jordanians also, back home to visit family.

(Feras in stripey shirt in centre, Usama in green shirt, Shadhi probably sitting on the wall in the shade, and Bilal propably off being useful with tourists).

But we had some equipment failures - Feras bought cheap Jordanian plastic stools and I can testify that they cannot hold the weight of a moderately sized Australian lady - let alone much larger persons. So we converted them to small tables for people to use to fill in the questionnaire. We had been advised by a sociologist at Sydney Uni to provide lollies for the participants, and I can tell you - excellent advice!

On the other hand, it was pleasing for Feras' research that so many people took time to fill in the questionnaire and were clearly trying to answer as truthfully (or maybe not!?) as possible. Except for one guy who answered the first question "What is your nationality" with the answer "For religious tourism". Clearly he was expecting some other question there at no. 1.
So in about 5 hours he got nearly 100 responses - there's another PhD off to a flying start.

And then we got completely lost on the way home - the cousins are from Salt, and Feras turns out to have no sense of direction. Luckily I was in the car and could get us home, though we did go through parts of Amman I never went to before.