And more Ancient Egypt

My post about Luxor is below my post about the Prophet's Birthday, I guess because I started it Tuesday and finished it today. Just so y'all know.

Today I tagged along on an Egyptology field trip with my Grinnell friend, Michelle. It was a long day, and I am full of sand, and there is pyramid in my shoes.


Our first stop was Dashur, the pyramid field just outside Giza. You can tell that these pyramids are earlier than the Giza pyramids because they messed up on this one...this is the Bent Pyramid, and it started collapsing when it was halfway completed, so the builders had to change the angle. The professor called it "trial and error engineering". This is the pyramid with the most remaining limestone coating; the other pyramids were this smooth once, too.
At the same site we went inside the Red Pyramid, which looks similar to the Great Pyramids at Giza.


We had the site pretty much to ourselves; Dashur was opened only a few years ago, because it used to sit inside a military training facility. So even though we weren't supposed to take pictures, the guards didn't seem to care too much what we did...

So everyone took pictures. This is the ceiling inside the first chamber of the Red Pyramid (which is empty). Climbing inside a pyramid is, by the way, sweaty, dirty, suffocating, and smelly.

We traveled a bit father south to Meidum, which is also partly collapsed.

Most of us chose not to go inside the Meidum pyramid, because it was the same as the Red Pyramid. We did, however, go inside the burial chamber of the royal family, which was right next door. To get inside this one we had to use the tomb robber's tunnel, which required crawling through dirt, climbing a ladder, squeezing through holes, and walking across wooden planks. Here's the sarcophagus (empty).

After Meidum, we left the Nile Valley and drove through the desert to Faiyum Oasis, Egypt's largest oasis and one of the most fertile areas in the country. This is technically Middle Egypt (or Upper Egypt), whereas Cairo is in the Delta area, or Lower Egypt. All through Faiyum and in the Nile Valley outside of Cairo we saw fellaheen (farmers) driving donkeys, or wandering around their fields, and women washing clothes in canals, and tons of brick buildings sitting in between palm groves, painted in bright colors, roofed with palm leaves. Unfortunately I saw all this through a bus window, so I didn't get any good pictures.

We stopped at Hawara, another collapsing pyramid, before heading out of the oasis to Karanis, the ruins of a village dating to the time when Egypt was part of the Roman empire (about 2000 years ago, I think). This was possibly my favorite ancient site in Egypt so far.

Karanis was totally deserted, like many of the other sites we visited. It was just us and our entourage of 6 or 7 armed guards (another student had a good point: the guards might be sort of useless, because it's highly unlikely that anyone would attack such a remote tourist spot--plus there hasn't been any terrorist activity in the area for a long, long time. But it does give young men jobs, and joblessness is a big factor in creating terrorists, so maybe it isn't totally useless).

This was my first real glimpse of the Western desert.

It wouldn't be Egypt without some sort of strange contrast. Here's the huge lake in the middle of the oasis. Our side is green fields and the opposite side is unbroken desert. The lake is almost as salty as the Dead Sea.

Boring, Everyday Life

I'll post about Luxor tomorrow, hopefully (inshallah!), but today I'll just post some more pictures from the Prophet's Birthday from a couple of weeks ago, since I haven't posted many pictures of "real Egyptians", as my mom said.
The Prophet's Birthday is a national holiday commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. People tell me it's mostly an Egyptian thing; it's not really celebrated in other Islamic countries. Many people still work, of course--stores are open, taxis are still running. It seems to be mostly a day when people hang out with family and friends and eat sweets, and there are also these elaborately-dressed bride dolls for sale at stands along the street, and jelly-like sweets with nuts in them.

For the Prophet's Birthday, I ended up going to the Saida Zaynab mosque area, which I believe is in Islamic Cairo. I went with three blonde Norwegians, all carrying cameras around their necks, so we stood out even more than usual. Two seconds after we got out of the cab, an old, wrinkly woman grabbed my hand and kissed both of my cheeks.

We wandered around the neighborhood for a bit, and had tea and coffee at three different coffeehouses (the coffeehouse is the main hangout for Egyptian men, and there are literally three or four on every street. The ones we went to were outdoor coffeehouses, so it was less weird that us girls were there).

We ran into some boys playing soccer, and two of the Norwegians--Nikos and Christian--joined in, while Gida and I were swarmed by the girls and the boys too young to play. They were yelling, "sura, sura!" ("picture! picture!"), so we had to take 50 bazillion pictures of cute Egyptian kids. It was intense.

Rita, another AUC friend we ran into at a cafe, taking pictures of some neighborhood boys.

The older girls wanted to show off the little ones...

Rowdy boys

The owner of one of the cafes wanted his picture taken while smoking sheesha (hookah). Everyone in Egypt smokes, because, as someone told me, "the air is cleaner through a filter".

Some guys playing backgammon, and a woman who was working at the shop across the street.

These guys wanted their picture taken. I'm not sure if they have a motorcycle or just a helmet.

I realize this post is getting long, but I wanted to mention a few other things that seem to be themes in Egypt.

Religion:

This is an obvious one, I guess. Egyptian society has changed quite a bit in the past couple of decades, and religion is a major topic of discussion everywhere you go. In general, religion has become much more public. This past Sunday, we watched an old Egyptian movie from 1960 with some Egyptian girls in the dorms (it was "Rumors of Love", with Omar Sherif, and it was the funniest movie I've ever seen in my life). Had it not been in Arabic, one could easily have mistaken it for a Hollywood movie--the girls had bobbed hair and were dressed in knee-length, sleeveless dresses, and went out dancing. Today, that kind of outfit would draw way too much attention in the street (although many AUC girls will wear less than this when they go out at night...but AUC girls are not really typical). Most Muslim women wear higaab (head covering), and a good number (a very small minority, actually, but growing) wear niqaab (face covering). Of course, many women turn the scarf into a fashion accessory, and you can get scarves with rhinestones, or made of silk, and there are tons of different ways to wear it. Many men have prayer bruises on their foreheads where their heads rub on the ground during prayer--it's a mark of piety. There are people who believe that women should stay at home, in seclusion--like the restaurant owner who invited us to Minya--and there are women like my Arabic lit professor, who says that religion should be private and that the "Islamist" interpretation of the Qur'an is incorrect, and that the seclusion of women is a cultural practice, not religious. Then there's the women who teaches me about the Qur'an every week, who doesn't cover but is extremely pious. There's Al Azhar mosque, which is the "official", (generally) state-sanctioned center of Islamic scholarship in Egypt (and authoritative throughout much of the Middle East), and there's the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian government would dearly love to wipe out, and which most people in the U.S. believe is a "terrorist organization"...but which, in reality, generally advocates for democracy in Egypt. And then there are the Copts.

School: There is a preschool outside my window, and every morning the children chant and sing at the top of their lungs for a good hour. It's actually a really good alarm clock, but kind of annoying.

I know my Aunt Cathy told her class about my blog, and asked me to try to find an Egyptian elementary school to visit. I'll try to work on that, but in the meantime, I can say that I've seen a couple of elementary schools from the bus and outside our Luxor hostel. At every school I've seen, the kids wear uniforms, and line up outside in the morning to do exercises and recitations or chants or something. They always look pretty excited to be there--or maybe they get extra points for yelling extra loud.

Skin: I hadn't realized that race would be a big deal in Egypt, but it is, to some extent. Egypt is home to "Egyptians" (Arab descent) and Nubians, who mostly live in Upper Egypt near Aswan (near the border with Sudan). "Egyptian" culture is very Middle Eastern, while Nubian culture is more African...I'm not quite sure how to describe the differences, but they're there. Our hostel owner in Luxor was Nubian, and he said that Nubians have historically been treated poorly by the Egyptian government and aren't always looked upon favorably by Lower Egyptians. People are quick to comment on skin color. My travel group usually consists of two black girls and two white girls, and I think that this strikes some people as strange, for whatever reason. Sometimes they assume that Annette and I are tourists and Janis and Jennah are Egyptian. Anyway, it's not like there's outright racism, but people definitely notice what color you are.

Dictatorship: It's easy to forget that Egypt is a dictatorship when you're in the AUC bubble...but it still pops up sometimes. Philip Rizk, an AUC student, was kidnapped by the police for several days after a pro-Palestine rally; our lit prof has to buy banned books in London and ship them here in a plain, brown box. When President Mubarak goes anywhere, there are miles of black-clad soldiers lining his route. In fact, there are soldiers and policemen absolutely everywhere. People worry about writing provocative blogs. It's not like the general population lives in fear of the government--I don't think--but you do have to be careful, and you don't really get any exciting presidential elections.

Culture Shock: Timelines of culture shock generally tell you that the "depression" phase hits around 2-3 months. It hit many people this week, maybe because of midterm stress. Lots of people have been sick four times or more already, with colds or stomach problems. We're tired from school, and not knowing the language is exhausting. And there are a thousand other small things, like gestures and little social things that are usually unconscious, but that we still aren't adjusted to, which makes it difficult to read people. So many people this week, myself included, have just hung around the dorm, because going out just seems too difficult. There cure for this is to go out more, of course, so I'm going to try to do more exploring in the coming weeks.

More Ancient Egypt

Here's a quick update of our trip to Luxor (ancient Thebes) two weekends ago...

We--Jennah, Annette, and I--decided to fly to Luxor (1 hour) rather than take the train (12 hours). The plane was almost as cheap as the train.

Here's a view of the Nile River Valley somewhere between Cairo and Luxor. Egypt is basically a strip of green surrounded by miles of desert.

We booked our hostel right before our plane took off, and so we stayed at the Bob Marley House with some old Australian men and Japanese women. Bob Marley is quite popular in Upper Egypt.

We were shocked when we got to Luxor--it has traffic lights! And speed limits! That doesn't stop the crazy driving, of course, but it makes crossing the street a little bit safer. Luxor is a very touristy town, and young men--and some women--pretty much go to school to get degrees in Egyptology and become tour guides.

Our first stop was the Valley of the Kings, but you can't take pictures inside the tombs, and above ground is just desert. It was exhaustingly hot and we were with a tour group, so it was rushed and stressful. After three tombs, we broke away from the group and struck off on our own, vowing never to do another organized tour.

The Luxor Temple is a place of very strange contrasts. It's a huge temple complex right in the center of the town of Luxor, so it's surrounded by houses and restaurants and everyday business as usual. This is why I thought it was fake at first; it looks like it was built as a"welcome to Luxor!" kind of thing to make the town look prettier for the tourists.

One wall of the temple holds a mosque from the 13th century that's still used today, and the back of the temple has some remains of paintings from when it was used as a Byzantine church

in the 6th century. Right next to the painting were hieroglyphics.

Here's Deir el-Bahry, or the Funerary Complex of Hatshepsut. By this time period, pharaohs weren't building pyramids anymore; they built temples instead. Hetshepsut was pretty cool because she was one of only a few female kings of Egypt. She's often depicted with a beard.

Deir el-Bahry is also the location of one of the worst terrorist attacks in Egyptian history, in 1997. This is the reason why every tourist area in Egypt is swarming with armed guards.

I think this is Medinet Habu (Mortuary Complex of Ramesses III), but I'm not sure. Honestly, unless there was an interesting story about a king or a temple, I was more interested in looking at everything than knowing exactly what I was looking at. It was visually overwhelming.

Medinet Habu. At one time, many of the temples were painted like this, and pretty much every surface was covered in hieroglyphics and carvings. There's continous restoration work to keep the temples looking like this.

Entrance to Luxor Temple

The hypostyle hall of Karnak, my absolute favorite temple and the site of some scenes of The Mummy. The hall is filled with these massive columns. It's mahvelous.

Karnak called for some drama in sepia tones, so here are Jennah and Annette running from the evil zombie mummy.

One last story: Luxor is full of tourists in touristy clothes (Americans wear sensible, clunky gym shoes, French women wear strapless dresses, etc). We didn't stand out as much as they did, but we also weren't part of a tour group, so we got harassed. By the time we got to Karnak, we were tired of it...so we decided to speak in Gibberish, a skill we've been practicing in markets so we can discuss prices without being understood, and pretend to be South African. This stopped the harassment because it confused people, but as we were leaving two blonde men rushed up to us and cried, "Oh my gosh, we are Russian! Where are you from?!" This was the moment I realized that it made absolutely no sense to pretend to be South African, as most South Africans speak English, but we still stuck to our story. The Russians walked away looking confused. From then on we pretended to be from Angola.

Dust

We have Monday off because it's the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and all I have is Arabic tomorrow, so I'm catching up on all the things I've been neglecting the past few weeks. So here's another post:

This morning my Islamic Art and Architecture class went to the Nilometer, Ibn Tulun mosque, and a shrine (all in Cairo)...

And this is none of those places. This blog doesn't make it easy to post pictures. This is a piece of fabric at the Versailles Palace restaurant in Zamalek. Variations on this fabric are all over Cairo, so I asked someone about it when we went to the tentmaker's section of the bazaar yesterday. He said it's just an Egyptian fabric that people hang up, usually for celebrations. It makes the city much more colorful, especially in areas like this...

...which is what a good proportion of Cairo looks like. There's a severe housing shortage in Cairo, and also a severe job shortage, which means that people live in some not-so-nice places, including cemeteries. But often there are some splashes of color, like laundry drying on lines outside windows, or pink and blue paint, or celebration fabric.

Here's the Nilometer, built in 861 CE by an Abbasid caliph to measure the water level of the Nile in order to keep records of the annual floods. The Arabic script at the top is the oldest architectural Arabic script in Egypt.

The dome was replaced and decorated like this in 1825, after the French destroyed the original. It's kind of strange to have a shiny, new, golden dome above an old, stone pit; it almost seems like two different places.

Ibn Tulun mosque, the largest, oldest mosque in Cairo (finished 879 CE). This is the main mehrab, which is the niche on the wall closest to Mecca, the direction in which Muslims pray. The mosque is still very much in use, so we only had a short time to look around before the noon prayer started.

Each arch and window has a different geometric pattern.

We climbed the minaret, the tower from which the muezzin calls the people to prayer. This is the courtyard of Ibn Tulun; the middle building used to house a fountain. The mosque is absolutely huge, and it's filled with all these small, intricate details, like the carving on the arches.

This might actually be another mosque next to Ibn Tulun; I'm not entirely sure. What's maybe more impressive than the mosque is what's behind it. It's just a mass of apartments in every direction, each with a bazillion satellite dishes on the roof.

After Ibn Tulun, we put on our headscarves and walked through part of Islamic Cairo to a small shrine (it's called Islamic Cairo because it's home to most of the historic mosques and Islamic architecture. It's also, in general, one of the more conservative, poorer areas of the city). The shrine--which houses the body of a grandaughter of the Prophet--is also very old, but it's in bad condition. We shared the building with men circling the tomb, praying and kissing the silver bars surrounding it. I felt like an intruder, standing there with with my AUC totebag and camera (which ran out of batteries before I could take any pictures at the shrine...blagh). The walk to the shrine was also an experience. We passed goats and horses, tried to share the narrow street with cars going way too fast, and had to move out of the way for two men who rushed past carrying a long wooden box over their heads, followed by a stream of sad-looking men and women maybe a funeral? It's a strange feeling to not know what's going on. The Egyptian students on the trip didn't know, either...I think the culture in this neighborhood was maybe as strange to them as it was to the Americans, because most AUC students are rich and don't interact with people in neighborhoods like this one.

As for the dust...it's probably almost the time of year when weather-jealousy is reversed. Cairo has been warm and sunny most of the time I've been here, or at least warmer than Rockford. But now begins the season of dust storms in Egypt. Today was 85 and windy, and for the whole fieldtrip we had dust blown into our eyes and mouths. Even inside, after washing my hands and drinking water, I feel grimy and thirsty. The worst part is the lungs...even walking up the stairs is hard, because my lungs are burning. Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, and hopefully the wind will die down; if it doesn't, I'm spending the day in the AUC swimming pool. People say these storms don't happen horribly often, and hopefully they're right...

Sinai...continued

To wrap up the Sinai trip...

There is a mosque and a church on the top of Mount Sinai, neither of which are usually open to visitors. In a small pit next to the mosque is a little niche where Moses is said to have waited for God to give him the 10 Commandments. I completely understood why he chose such a place to wait...the top of Mount Sinai is windy! By the time the sun set, we were huddled next to the church trying to keep warm. The Bedouin rent blankets and sell warm drinks and food at small stands below the summit, so we had some hot chocolate and cookies before we came down by way of the easier camel trail.

The mosque at the summit of Jebel Musa.

The church.

Annette and I found a little hole filled with blankets just below the summit. It smelled like camels, but was a good 20 degrees warmer than outside, so we hung out in there for a bit. I think it's a place where Bedouin or visitors can spend the night on the mountain; many people do this in order to see the sunrise, and many of the Bedouin spend a few days at a time on the mountain to work the food and blanket stands. Next time I go (inshallah!), I will sleep on the mountain; the stars are so bright because there aren't any cities nearby, and it's quiet except for the wind.

The other extreme: after freezing on Mount Sinai, we took our shared minibus back to Dahab and found a hotel with a pool and rooms with balconies for 35 LE/night, or about $12 total for two nights. Actually, our whole trip--food, guides, transportation, snorkelling, hotel, shopping--cost about $120 each. We did get better prices than most tourists would, because we're students, we speak some Arabic, and we travelled independently during the off-season, but still...Egypt is a great place to do a lot with just a little bit of money.

Here's the beach at the Blue Hole in Dahab. I wish I had had an underwater camera, because the coral reef is beautiful. The reef begins just a couple meters from the shore, so you just walk out and put your head under the water (with a snorkel mask, because it's one of the saltiest seas in the world), and there it is. The water looks so normal from the surface, but underneath is shockingly colorful. There are, of course, all the major Finding Nemo representatives, but my favorite was a rainbow-colored fish that was so beautiful that I stalked it as it swam around the reef.

The desert starts where the beach ends. If you look east, you see people lounging in bikinis and blue water and divers walking around in wetsuits; if you turn around and look west, you see camels and Bedouin and bare, rugged mountains.

The view behind our hotel. While the fresh, white balconies and pools and gardens at the Dahab hotels are nice to look at, the more run-down parts of the town have a lot of character (this goes for Cairo, too).

The next day, Enab, the man who drove us to Blue Hole, took us into the mountains to an oasis. (odd story that feels like deja-vu from the pyramids, where we saw a horse and rider fall off a drop-off: on the way to the oasis, a minibus like the one we took to Saint Catherine's took a curve too fast and plunged into a big ditch. It landed upside-down; luckily, only the driver was inside, and he wasn't horribly injured. Enab and some other men helped him climb out of the ditch).

The oasis looked just like the Great Valley from Land Before Time...but no tree-stars.

After the oasis, we threw our stuff in our bags and caught the bus for the 8-hour trek back to Cairo. We fully intend to return to Dahab before we leave Egypt.