Past Two Days

First off, just got a comment from the John W. Wynn Middle School, so I wanted to say hi to the 7th grade geographers! Woohoo!

The past two days have been a total mix. Yesterday stunk. Our tour company is totally bush league. We were told that we would get into Aswan on our overnight train by 6AM, but we didn't actually arrive until almost 4PM - and other people traveling with us knew the real time, so it wasn't like the train was late. Then they tried to cut a whole bunch out of our itinerary because the train being so late wasn't their fault. We finally straightened that out after a lot of phone calls and "unhappy customer" voice, but all seems to be going better now.

Today we went to the Aswan High Dam, the temple at Philae, and the temple at Abu Simbel.

We started the morning at 3AM with the security convoy to Abu Simbel, which is down by the border of Sudan. They've had security trouble there for years, so all the tourists join a convoy which is protected by armed guards. No hassles, no problem. The temple itself was really impressive. It used to be a border marker between the kindom of Egypt and the Nubians and Cushite kingdoms. Everything about it screams "not to be in your face, but anyone who messes with Pharaoh gets his clock cleaned...have a nice day, welcome to Egypt." I couldn't enjoy it fully because the place was teeming with people, but it's hard not to be impressed - it's really well preserved.

The Dam, meh, I'm not big on the feats of engineering, and as far as big dams go, it's actually not so tall. Plus we only had 10 minutes there and didn't even get to go to the visitor center (like I said, our tour's pretty bush league). But I've been there. Lake Nasser is pretty. Nuff said.

The highlight of the day was definitely Philae. They had to move the whole temple complex up to higher ground so it wouldn't be submerged when they built the dam and created the lake. It's amazingly preserved, and the whole complex is pretty much intact. They have a nilometer that measures the flood of the river each year to determine taxes, and a whole bunch of temple space dedicated to the goddess Isis. There are several layers to the place, starting way back to the first dynasties and coming all the way up to the 1800s. The ancient Egyptians worshipped there, and the Greeks under Alexander the Great added to it, then the Romans, and then the Coptic Christians, who briefly used the place as a church, and there's even an inscription carved over some heiroglyphics from Napoleon's army when they came through. My favorite part, other than how beautiful the place was (pics when I get myself a computer with USB), was the graffiti! (kids, don't take this as encouragement, it's only cool if you lived hundreds of years ago) There's some in almost any language you can imagine - Greek, Arabic, English, French, Italian...even some pictures carved in.

I wished I could read heiroglyphics and Egyptian iconography, because there are so many inscriptions and pictures there that are trying to tell you something, but alas I didn't have time to do my homework on it, so I'm left thinking "well...when I come back, I'll have to prepare better."

Tomorrow I'm off on my felucca tour - two days on a boat with no plumbing...wish me luck!

Pyramids-stravaganza

Be still my geeking heart.I saw the pyramids.
The driver we hired for the day was totally trying to hustle us for commissions all day, trying to take us to various "free museums" to drink tea and "get information" about perfumes and papyrus and other tourist purchases, but we weren't buying it. Before the pyramids he took us to this stable that tried to sell us a horse tour that included "tickets to the Sphinx." There are no admission tickets to the Sphinx. Lame.
But the pyramids themselves were amazing. You catch your first glimpse of them from the highway as you drive through Cairo, and they loom over everything, dwarfing all the high rise apartment buildings. I felt like all the kids from my camp this summer who were nearly passing out with anticipation of their Jonas Brothers concert...only way older and dorkier. Once you get there, the Sphinx (no tickets, please) is surprisingly small...or at least he looks small compared to the giant structures behind him. The "Father of Terrors" isn't really so terrifying. But he's awesome, even with no nose. We explored the funerary temples (entirely in ruins but still fun to poke around) for a while, and then started hitting the pyramids from smallest to biggest, all the while fending off offers of horse and camel rides to the panoramic viewpoint. The smallest pyramid actually has a huge chunk taken out where one of Saladin's nephews tried to take it apart, only to realize the thing is way too huge.
One of the pyramids still has part of its limestone outer casing intact. Even though it's not polished anymore, it's really beautiful. I can't imagine how it must have looked when the whole thing was perfectly smooth and gleaming in the Egyptian sun (which is brutal, by the way). The Great Pyramid wasn't as huge as I thought it would be. I don't know what I was expecting. I think being on Kilimanjaro has maybe altered my sense of scale just a little bit, so anything less huge-normous than...say...a mountain doesn't impress me much. But it was still amazing to think that the ancient Egyptians managed to put that thing together without the help of the wheel. Amazing.
After Giza we went to Saqqara, where there is a cemetery you can wander through. It still has a lot of reliefs intact, some even still have traces of paint! The step pyramid is also out there, along with a partially restored temple complex. The step pyramid was the world's first stone monument (as opposed to mud brick), which tells you something about how old it is. It was designed by a guy named Imhotep, who is not, for you fans of The Mummy movie, a guy who was mummified alive. He was an engineer who was so smart that people started worshipping him as a god after he died. Now that's smartness.
We saved the best for last: Dashur. Dashur is rarely visited by tourists so we had the place practically to ourselves. It's home to the bent pyramid and the red pyramid. The bent one was the first attempt at a smooth sided pyramid - didn't go so hot, and halfway up they realized that if they kept going up it would collapse under its own weight. Too steep of an angle. The red pyramid was the first one they got right. The stone has a slightly red tinge to it in evening light, and actually looked bigger to me than the Great Pyramid, even though it is way smaller.
The coolest thing about Dashur is that we got to go into the burial chamber (you can do that with the Great Pyramid but there's millions of people there, no fun). To get there you climb down a very narrow and very steep shaft for almost 100m, then suddenly you're in these big burial chambers. It's crazy hot in there, and hard to imagine that the whole weight of the pyramid is above you. So Indiana Jones. I loved every second of it.
I have tons of great pictures of the day but alas this computer doesn't have a USB connection so no photos today. Perhaps when I finish up the felucca tour in Luxor...

A happy day

This has been a very lovely bit of a day.  

Last night, I went down to the hotel's living room (the only place with a TV to get my news fix - bad news for Mr. Bernanke and Wall Street, eh?) and met a couple of Aussies who happen to be traveling on the same schedule as me, so starting tomorrow I have two travel buddies.  We're going to hit Giza, Saqqara (home of the step and bent pyramids, not-so-successful experiments before the Great Pyramid finally worked out), and Dashur, home to a few old temples nobody visits.  Then we will head off to Aswan, where we'll take a 3 day cruise on a traditional Egyptian sail-powered catamaran called a felucca, stopping off at all the famous temples along the Nile as we float with the current back toward Cairo.  We'll make a detour for Abu Simbel (those 4 giant sitting statues you see on the Discovery Channel all the time) before we go.  I'm really looking forward to having some company for a while.

I went back to the Egyptian Museum today and found out why I didn't like it yesterday: all the good stuff is in the half a floor I didn't cover yesterday.  I mean all of it.  Beautifully detailed papyri, King Tut's funeral goods, some other royal burials, along with the royal mummies.  I looked at the face of Ramses II and Seti I.  Awesome.  King Tut's stuff is just as impressive in person as it looks in the books.  Man, boy was rich.  It's hard to believe he was a minor king - and hard to imagine what the tombs of the greats would have looked like.  I mean, Tut only had a few years of rule to accumulate grave junk, Ramses II would have had 67...

So in spite of the fact that every tour group in Egypt was there this morning, I managed to keep clear of most of the crowds and find some time to really enjoy myself.  Alas no photos allowed inside the museum, but I have lots of lovely memories - too bad y'all can't see them, though.

On a totally random note, I have had several questions about what shwarma is.  It is delicious, first off.  But as for actual description, it is chicken or lamb roasted on a rotisserie, then shaved, mixed with tomatoes and peppers, then topped with yogurt sauce and served on bread.  The Middle East's answer to the Philly Cheesesteak.  I think I'll be living on it.

I'll try to get online tomorrow to gush about the pyramids, but if not, I may be disappearing for several days again as I'm on the move down the Nile.  Talk to you soon!

And for any Muslims out there, happy Eid!  Party starts tonight and you can start eating lunch again tomorrow!  Yay!

Egyptian "Pile of Everything We Got" Museum

I'm so ashamed. I got bored in the Egyptian Museum. I can hardly face myself right now. I was supposed to be in geek heaven, and now my credentials as a nerd are totally compromised.
I think part of it is I didn't have the time (or space for books in my suitcase) that I would have liked to do proper research before I came, so I didn't really know what I was looking at. The other part is that it was literally just laying out everything they have - 1000 scarab-shaped seals, 250 sarcophagi, dozens of real and fake cat mummies...It was kind of overwhelming.

There were some highlights, though. There was a way larger than life statue of a seated king and queen that was really impressive, and some fresco work that looks as new as the day it was painted, even 30+ centuries later. There were a couple intriguingly lifelike statues (including one that looked like the bald guy from Whose Line Is It Anyway), which was a nice change from the idealized look where everyone has the same face and body, just a different cartouche.

Tomorrow I'm going back to see the royal mummies and the King Tut exhibit, so that, at least, should be really cool. I'm hoping that unlike the rest of the museum, the mummy room will be climate controlled with something a bit less harsh than sunlight for illumination - as much for my own sake as for the mummies, who don't like humid tourist-breath or sunlight.

I got my shwarma! It was delish. And yay sandwich for 3 Egyptian pounds - for those of you not up on the exchange rate, that's approximately 50 cents.

Ok, off to do some serious laundry.

Safe and thrilled in Cairo!

Oh, I love the Middle East. Somehow I just feel at home. Maybe it's because I've been to a Middle Eastern country before and know what to expect, maybe it's just a vibe, but I already feel like I've been in Cairo a week and I've only been here a few hours.
I checked into the Hotel Longchamps, which I highly recommend, it's adorable. I then, for the first time in nearly a month, took a walk at night. Oh sweet liberation! Don't freak out, Dad. The hotel is in the embassy neighborhood and is crawling with soldiers and cops, nobody's gonna kidnap me.
I tried to score some shwarma, but with the evening rush for iftar (breaking the all-day no food no water fast for Ramadan), the neighborhood joint had run out and the next batch was gonna be an hour, so it's back to the hotel restaurant to see what I can score. I'm sure it'll be tasty, but it won't be $2 dinner, that's for sure. Man, I had my heart set on shwarma, too. Don't I have huge problems?
Tomorrow I check out of my decadent home here and move into a hostel somewhere, but I have to say I'm feeling really awesome right now. I'm going to the Egyptian Museum in the morning, and I may just stay there all day. I'm in geek heaven!