Ancient Egypt Part II: Three Days on the Nile on a Felucca

1. The Nile! Big cruise ships! Titanic! new theme song for the program: I’M ON A BOAT.

2. no toilets, literally, for three days. enough said.

3. candles in empty water bottles with the top sawed off on a shifting boat.

4. sun and mosquitoes.

5. reading trashy American books stolen from the hotel.

6. Khalid to Asma, in Arabic: Get the f*** out of the water! (curse word inserted by me)

Life Lesson: Don’t swim in the Nile.

7. we got to be on the Nile for three days and live on a boat.

Um, sorry guys.

Ancient Egypt Part I: Aswan

1. Getting there:
A sixteen-hour train ride and smelly “kabob-flavored” (new flavor!*) chipsy and not having any train tickets and being in the wrong car of the train and watching as group after group of Egyptians got on and spent twenty minutes roaming the aisles before realizing that actually, all the seats in this car were taken by a group of American and Egyptian students with a drum.

2. The Souk:
All the Egyptians: “you want a scarf?” “so beautiful!” “you look here!” “NO HASSLE! NO HASSLE! COME HERE!” “i cannot believe my eyes” “whoaaaaaa.” “you want camel?” (insert vampire accent).

Winner of best harassment ever: “[you are] TWO ANGRY WOMEN.”

Me, in passable Arabic: How much is this cloth?
Man, in English: which one is you want?
Me, in Arabic: They’re all pretty, how much are they?
Him, in English: You choose and the price, no problem.
Me, in Arabic: Ok, I want this one. How much is it?
Him, in English: You want one?
Me, in Arabic: How much?
Him, in Arabic: Two hundred pounds.
Me, to myself: yeah, right.
Me, in Arabic: And what is the price for two?
Him, in English: you want two?
Me, in Arabic: maybe. how much?
Him, in English: No speak Arabic. i no understand you.
Me: Ma salaama. (walking away)
Him: Lady! lady! english! lady! hey! hey! you! here! lady!

3. Tourist scams. We’ve lived in Msr long enough to know what things cost, even at a tourist trap like Aswan.

Don’t buy ice cream from a store along the Corniche: Veronica and I went out for ice cream. We both got two tiny scoops. I went inside to pay before her and assumed it would be less than five pounds, so I gave the guy five pounds and waited for change and was not too happy when he said it was five pounds. Then I went outside and waited for Veronica. She came out and said, wow that was such a scam! I said, I know! Five minutes later, I said, wait how much did you pay for yours? Ten pounds.

Two Turkish coffees at an ahwa in the souk (which should have cost four or five pounds total)
Me and Zoe: how much?
Young coffee shop guy and old coffee shop guy literally look us up and down trying to decide how much they can get out of us.
Young guy: Twenty pounds.
Me and Zoe: no way, sucker.
Him: yes, that is good price.
Us: maybe ten pounds.
Him: ok, maybe fifteen.
Zoe: no way.
Him: yes, five pounds for coffee and five pounds for second and five pounds baksheesh.
Us: here’s ten pounds. Bye.

5. Abu Simbel is intense.
It is four hours away from Aswan, so to go there you have to wake up at 2:30 am, get on a bus at 3 am, and join a CONVOY of buses all going there. Then you ooh and aah and take pictures with a gazillion other tourists. Then you have to make sure to be back at the bus on time, otherwise you will miss the convoy and have to take the next one, which leaves in three hours.

6. The Aswan Dam.
We got off the bus and stared at it (both sides!) for fifteen minutes and paid 25 pounds or so for the privilege.

5. Then we got on a boat for three days.

Abu Simbel Temple

Aswan Souk

Philae Temple

* inside joke: all the chipsy (شيبسي) flavors are marked as New Flavor! obviously this is false. i think the real new flavor is plain “salt” which is rarely found.

Getting Around Alexandria

1. Thursday, 11:45 pm: After hanging out at an ahwa (coffeeshop), we head over to the tram station to go back to the dorms. Our Egyptian friend tells us to get on the yellow tram. Zoe and I look at each other but don’t say anything. After he leaves and the tram starts to move (in the opposite direction), we realize we, the Americans, were right and we should have taken the blue tram. After twenty minutes of sitting on the tram and laughing about it, while a fat Egyptian pre-adolescent boy is glaring at us, we decide to get off and go back in the right direction.

2. Friday, 10 pm: We get in a cab on the Corniche and tell the driver (in Arabic) where we’re going. Thirty seconds later, pointing: “That’s the library! (referring to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the re-creation of the ancient library of Alexandria). Have you seen it??” Yes, we have. It’s pretty.

3. Friday, 12:30 am, only half an hour to get back to the dorms until we are locked out for being immoral American girls who refuse to stay indoors like well-behaved women: We hail a cab on the Corniche. When we get in, the driver offers us some of his huge, fluorescent-tinted ice cream cone.

Israel and Gaza

An article on the Israeli attacks on Gaza from The New Yorker

“I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society. Omar Shaban told me that, twenty years ago, he could easily drive to Tel Aviv for dinner, and more than a hundred thousand Palestinians travelled into Israel every day for work. “The Palestinian economy was structured to work with the Israeli economy,” he said. “Most Palestinians knew Hebrew. There were real friendships.” Now, he said, “two-thirds of Gaza youth under thirty have never been outside the Strip. How can they psychologically think of peace? You can fight someone you don’t know, but you can’t make peace with him.”

Siwa: a summary

1. Renting bikes to ride to a view of the sunset from an ahwa (coffeeshop) on the banks of Siwa’s big lake.

First: put a bunch of American and Egyptian college students on rented bikes in a town square in an Egyptian oasis town in the middle of the desert, then add some donkey carts, some angry Egyptian men on motorbikes, a few autobees, some curious onlooking Egyptian children, and some cars. Result? hilarious chaos.

2. The Sahara

Why did no one else think that driving jeeps up and down STEEP, shifting sand dunes while the sunset was rapidly approaching was a horrible, horrible idea? Why did we sleep in the desert with only wool blankets (I could have used about five more, and a heater)? Why was there only a hole in the ground with four walls around it for a toilet? (Rhetorical question). And why did we forget the marshmallows?

3. Dates! lots of them.

I still don’t understand the difference between Belah (dates) and tamr (dates), but there were only belah in Siwa, no tamr.

4. A nine-hour bus ride

Khalid: Okay, everyone with a test tomorrow, you’re on the fast bus. You’ll get to Alex two hours earlier.

Zoe and Me: WE HAVE TO BE ON THAT BUS

Khalid: Zoe and Lydia, why are you on the slow bus? You have a test tomorrow. You’re on the fast bus.

Me: What test??

(An hour later, we catch up to the “slow” bus at the rest stop. and again at the lunch stop. and again at the next rest stop. We get to Alex at the same time.)

Eleven hours later, in the dorms:

Me, studying.

Eman: Zahra, is there a test in your class with Lydia tomorrow?

Zahra: no.

Me: oh.

 

5. Drinking tea with a man from Siwa in his shop and discussing Siwa and the Siwa language (Conclusion: tourism is good for Siwa and Egyptians drink tea very sweet).

 

Food III : Cairo and Siwa

Siwa Oasis

Cairo

The Pyramids and the Sphinx; the view from our hotel room; in Khan al-Khalili

Be Careful Where You Step

1. Me, in Arabic: Ahlan. I’d like three bananas.

The guy who works at the fruit stand, in Arabic: What’s your name?

Me: Lidia.

Him, in Arabic: Ah! What does that mean?

Me, in Arabic: It’s a name from the Greek language. um… I don’t know the word for Greece?

Him, in Arabic: Ah. Where? What?

Me: Greeeeeees?

(I really need to learn the word for Greece in Arabic)

Him, in Arabic: Ah, okay… my name is Mahmoud.

Me: tasharrafna! (nice to meet you)

Him, in Arabic: Are you married?

Me: no… how much for the bananas?

***

2. While discussing our utter inability to describe all the strange things that happen daily in Egypt:

Me: Did you see how on the one of the travel info sites for Alex, it says that people often fall into holes in the street and disappear ?!

Zoe: YES!

(We both walk around a large hole in the sidewalk.)

Quote from Frommers: “Be careful where you step on either of these streets: The ancient sewers run underneath, and local stories abound of people who have disappeared through holes in the street never to be seen again.”

***

Food II