Deathly Hallows!!!

Harry Potter is here! Oh yes, in the middle of Egypt, a country that once banned the books for their perverse witchcraft and anti-Islamic tenancies, I have Harry Potter! It cost 200LE, but at 9am in the morning, I pranced over to the AUC bookstore, where I was immediately handed my own lovely copy. It’s the British version, complete with inky black binding and cover art depicting the locket of Slytherin. I can’t read it all now as I must save some for my beach trip to Marsa Alam, but I have Harry Potter! I still can’t watch the movie as it comes out later here than basically anywhere else in the world, and there were no midnight parties complete with children in costume, harassed parents, even more harassed booksellers, and trivia games that make me smugly think “I could kick those kids’ asses, no sweat”. So see! I am not at the ends of the earth! I am merely a commercial airline flight away from places that actually appreciate the wonder that is the last ((sob)) Harry Potter book!

The hunt for an Apartment (it makes Red October look like a well-signed exit on an American highway)

It is said that finding an apartment, a place to live, especially for a short period of time, is difficult in any city. I can attest to this fact, having spent two torturous weeks in search of an apartment last year in DC. But really, while the actual emailing and endless Craigslist reading and responding are painful, the apartment search itself it not terrible or dangerous or particularly dank and dreary. Even better for me, I found a place with the Kreutzbergs and was spared the agony of outfitting or in any other way dealing with apartment hunting. Assuming I had not found this ideal position, I would still have been protected from sketchy persons, cheating landlords, and other unsavory individuals by things like laws. By contrast, exhibit Egypt. I had an apartment, and then I didn’t, and so I spent two weeks searching the web and asking around about a new apartment. One person at the university told me “not to worry”, he would “take care of it”. I come back from vacation with my parents and, surprise surprise, he has taken care of nothing. Rather, I have nowhere to live and only the amazing wonderfulness of my parents saves my poor self from being homeless in Cairo as they agree to pay for my hotel room. But on the last day, we call one of the numbers on the poorly-spelled “I can find you an apartment” signs in Zamalek. He shows us about 6 apartments after promising he’ll show us “only 2” and one has a staircase darker than the mastaba I crawled into earlier this year and is one of the most unhygienic, dank places I have ever encountered. It reminded me of the crack-den in a dark American movie—badly scuffed furniture, barely-working appliances, water stains and dirty rugs, odd boards over one window, and probably a zillion insects crawling about.
Finally, he agrees to let me meet this “German Girl” who is looking for a roommate. This takes a couple days to accomplish, but when we finally go up to the apartment and an American girl with an Italian parent who went to high school in France answers the door, I am not even phased. And even better, the apartment will work! I talk with the girl and we agree that I finally have a place to live in Cairo—however, due to conflicting schedules it will take me two days to actually move in.
Before moving in, I decide it would be wise to invest in a set of sheets so that I can be sure to have a nice, clean top and bottom sheet, as well as a blanket. Now, I could go to the store in Zamalek, where I will be overcharged by the worth of my firstborn female child in the Middle East or I could be sneaky and go to one of the textiles districts. Now in a place brimming with textiles—everything from gossamer curtains and bolts of tapestry fabric to barely-there panties and nightgowns large enough use as a rain-fly on my tent, one would think there would be no problem finding sheets. After all, towels and lace netting are in abundance! Twenty minutes later on a back alley in the area I come upon a store that appears to have at least some of the ubiquitous heavily embroidered bed linens. These sheets would put a Victorian decorator to shame with the sheer magnitude of the gold, sparkly flowers covering every possible inch of fabric. By this point, an older gentleman with some English has been brought in to translate my exclamations of horror in English and my “la la las” into similar exclamations of horror in Arabic. I finally get the concept of “no flowers, no decoration at all” across and instead of leading me to a less-visible stack of plastic enclosed sheets I am led to the back, toward large bolts of cotton. Oh dear, I begin to think as he says, “Good quality cotton. What color you like?” Cautiously pointing toward bright pink, the only available shade that doesn’t remind me of rainbow sherbert ice cream, the bolt is immediately examined, I stutter out “itneen [two]” in response the an inquiry of “how many each sheet, pillow?” and call it good. The fabric is cut, taken away to be sown into sheets and pillowcases as I wait, and I am cajoled into a chair to wait 10 minutes. So I wait… and wait… and wait. The well-meaning Coptic store owners and workers don’t stare ridiculously, but are not quite sure what to make of this young American girl in there shop and attempt to ask her simple Arabic questions. Confronted with men who have small, secret cross tattoos on their wrists (a common practice) and who speak no English, I settle on the “nod and smile” method while attempting to read a book on Chinese individualism. Weird. An hour later my sheets and pillowcases, all in shocking pink, emerge from the outside street, fresh from the sewing room where they have been created. Who knew getting sheets could be this difficult? By this point, it’s 8pm and I trudge back across the 26th of July Bridge (and literally beat off a 9-year-old who thinks it’s funny to run by and smack my ass), only to receive a voicemail telling me that my new roommate is still not at the apartment and I am still without a key. So I find a coffee shop and sit. Today, I learned several lessons: it will always be harder than I thought it would be; don’t go shopping without provisions as you may be forced to stumble into a food establishment salivating and delirious after having not eaten in over 12 hours; and somehow, I don’t know how, it really always does work out in the end.

Luxor and Bahariyya in brief(ish)

Luxor is the heart of Upper Egypt--the illustrious home of Karnak Temple and the Valley of the Kings and the colored walls of Medinet Habu and the day-to-day existence at the village of Deir el-Medina. It's also in teh hartland of sugarcane burning and mass tourism and improperly dressed German and Russian/Eastern European visitors on their endless lines of cruiseships (most of which are ugly, kitchy, and inhibit the natural breezes of the Nile from coming onshore.
In Luxor, we decided to go the route of "small tourism" on the lesser-inhabited West Bank, surrounded by green fields and local Egyptians, as well as closer to the major funerary monuments. Getting there with all our luggage proved a mite tricky as the bridge is an astonishing 9km north of Luxor--this is either to preserve the vista view at Luxor (did I mention the cruise ships line the banks and ruin the vista already? Oh yeah, I did) or a government official owns the land up until 9km north and so the government just stole the land from the "stupid Saides", or Upper Egyptian peasants. My bet is on the latter--it's the least rational and most typical reason I can think of.
So our hotel is cute and located right next to a mosque with particularly poor quality loud speakers. For those of you who have never heard a call to prayer, it is enough to make you desperately wish for the technology of even 50 years ago when a person, as opposed to a scratchy, high pitched, wailing recorded message calls all good Muslim men to come pray. The women can come too, but they have to sit behind a curtain in the back or outside (but this is a story for a later post, wherein Lindsey is bitter and meditates on the meaning of Buddhist equality while forced to sit behind said curtain).
Cute, but Mom and Dad's AC doesn't work in their room! That's okay in January, but we are talking 45C/113F and humid from all the agriculture. It's not hot, it's damn hot. So we all sleep in Lindsey's room and wake up early to visit Karnak Temple. Mom and Dad are a little bitter about Karnak still--I got excited, they got hot, I started bouncing and talking and forcing them to walk over ruined mud brick and open mounds with one column and no other tourists. And then they laid down the law and we left.
And we get back, try to get cool (their AC still isn't working), go to tea at the Winter Palace Hotel, walk around and avoid carriage drivers, shopkeepers, annoying children trying to sell me an unneeded bottle of water for 10LE (it should be like, 1LE), and the unnumerable SKETCHY men that roam the streets trying to buy me from my father and generally be assholes (forgive the language, but I mean this with conviction). And then we go to a pub, visit Luxor Temple at night, which is a beautiful sight as the reliefs are more defined, the colors more true, and the trash is invisible. Stunning!
Except we go back to the hotel, where the fuse box white literally catches on fire, and we are out of electricity. This of course means no AC. They promise it will be fixed "by midnight" and we check into the Winter Palace Hotel, where we will make use of the lovely pool and nice on-premise restaurants.
Daddy gets Egypt-sick and Mom and Lindsey go to Medinet Habu (the mortuary temple of Ramses III) and Deir el-Medina, where I bribe my way onto the roof, take a zillion photos, get insanely excited (I wrote a major paper on the temple for class this past semester), and am mildly mean to a guy trying to sell me plaster cat statues. (P.S. Cats weren't even worshipped in Luxor, they were worshipped in Bubastis, which is several hundred km north in the Delta).
After the traumatizing ferry ride back involving a 9-year-old that needs to be smacked, I hide in the hotel the rest of the day. Seriously, it was sick what he was able to get away with.
The Valley of the Kings was lovely as always, Dad accused me of inciting the Bhutan Death March III over the Theban Hills from the Valley of the Kings to the Temple of Deir el-Bahri in the middle of summer, we swam in the nice pool, and we did a road trip down to the Greco-Roman temples at Kom-Ombo and Edfu in an insane convoy that consisted of bad driving, scary speeds on bad roads, and gorgeous temples overlooking the Nile. At this point, before intense industry, the Nile is beautiful and clear and sparkley and not filled with unthinkable toxins, though some sewage running into it is still rather... raw.

We take a flight back to Cairo to catch a van to Bahariyya Oasis, the closest and most-settled of the Western Oases. It is near the black and white deserts and is the jumping-off point for many desert safaris. Instead of desert camping, we opt for the more-refined eco-resort called the el-Bawity Resort, where after a 5+ hour drive that has redefined desolate emptiness, we encounter a palm grove, a spring-fed pool, and a lovely collection of little house-casita-villa-bungalo-ish buildings. They are all of traditional materials with no steel or conrete in sight--big domes keep hot air at the ceiling, while thick stone walls keep heat out in the summer. One room is especially beautiful, with a view overlooking the oasis, huge windows, and a suchy bed, but with no AC, it's no good and we opt for a cute suite instead.
We are served way too much food and huge amounts of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, which Mom and Dad won't eat and I have to eat in order to not be rude (I will later pay for this in a very painful manner). I attempt to climb Pyramid Mountain in flipflops and almost drop my camera. The poor shoe choice was, for once, not my fault. We go into the main town and end up eating dinner with the family (or rather served by the family) of one of the resort workers. It is a huge family of lovely women; no one speaks English; my Arabic is near non-existant; it is only slightly awkward; I am almost strangled by Yasmin, his 5-year-old daughter who wants to put I nikab on me; I almost hyperventilate once I am in the nikab (yes, there are photos) due to heat and me frieking out at being covered in a black shroud-like garment; the food is amazing!
It was a lot of fun and my first meal with an Egyptian family--definitely a trip highlight!
The next day is a desert day with huge white dunes, scatterings of black igneous rock atop white sand, crazy Utah-like arches and columns and statues of bright white chalk-stone. The driver had a crush on me--Daddy thought it was funny--I thought it was mish-quayess (no good).
We left the next day, dealt with the loal police who insisted we needed a police escort (I think one of them just wanted a free ride back to Cairo), got into a fight with the van driver, who initially refused to drop us off in Zamalek at our hotel and instead ended up south of Dokki (quite a ways away) and I had to yell at people in French in order to end up in Zamalek. Good times, always.
And then I got sick, so we just kind of chilled and I laid in bed and we looked for an apartment for me and then the Mom and dad departed.
And I sat in Cairo with nowhere to live... party!?
But more about those adventures in the next post.

Aswan

At the crack of dawn—one of many dawns we were tragically forced, I mean wonderfully lucky enough to experience—we fly in a semi-sketchy EgyptAir jet that needs some serious 409ing. In fact, I recommend 409 as an import business to anyone with marketing talent and an eye toward a very vast market. I’m not entirely sure it has yet been discovered yet. The ever present bucket of old-sock gray soapy water and a squeegie mop appears to be the extent of the cleaning arsenal for many companies. In Aswan begins several relentless days of “110 bazillion degree” weather. Though possibly an exaggeration, the 110 most certainly isn’t. The thermometers didn’t inch below 40C (104F) during the day for the entire Aswan-Luxor jaunt.
Day 1 is Aswan is a local day and as our taxi driver strikes up a camaraderie with Dad and speaks English with passable skill, we agree to hire him as our driver for the day. First however, we must check into the hotel and arrange about some breakfast. The hotel check-in isn’t extraordinarily painful and we proceed to sit on their front porch overlooking the Nile. Ostensibly, their internet café and coffee shop is just behind us and able to serve breakfasts. It doesn’t exactly look open, but we’re willing to give it a shot—we order three Turkish coffees and eagerly await the breakfast menu. But wait? Breakfast menu! Perhaps I am getting slightly carried away in this designation. Upon the delivery of our three horribly bitter and nasty coffees (but hey, we need the caffeine), we see the menu and realize it is the 10-item room service menu from before. As the hotel is “out of season”, this coffee shop is a phantom and instead one must subsist off of either a hot dog or an omelette for breakfast. Right… but never fear! Lonely Planet to the rescue!!! Just down the corniche (the ubiquitous name for any waterfront road), there is a place serving good breakfasts throughout the day. Except apparently at breakfast time. See, it doesn’t open until 11am, which is not entirely adequate, so Mom drags Dad to the nearest restaurant where he can obtain some baladi bread and a small omelette. Whew… disaster averted.
Onto the main day’s adventures, we first went to the High Dam and saw a fatally ugly piece of Soviet art commemorating the immemorial friendship between the Soviets and the Egyptians. It was tacky and a little creepy no matter what language it was in. This was also incident #1 of the guards being jerks, saying that my student ID “isn’t valid”. It’s from a school in Egypt; how much more valid do they want it to be? Ma’lish.
Philae temple was stop #2 and well worth the somewhat extensive effort to get to. Rebuilt on a new, higher island after the High Dam’s construction in order to preserve it, this beauty of a temple is mostly Greco-Roman and one of the four main temples studied in my Ptolemaic temples course over the past semester. We almost didn’t make it as the ricketiest, sketchiest, most about-to-stop-working boat picked us up, stopped a couple times mid-jaunt, and I was momentarily forced to consider if I could get myself and my camera dryly to the temple’s island.
Thank god, this potentially disastrous decision was averted as the engine kind of spilled to life. Not spilled in the sense of s smooth stream of water either—we’re talking spilled as in the whole toolbox was just upended and clattered about the garage for a couple minutes. But we made it to Philae and it was breathtaking and beautiful in yellow-gold sandstone. I gave temple lecture #1 to Mom and Dad, we looked at the pretty columns and the side kiosks and generally flitted about, before re-boarding our death-felucca for a relatively uneventful trip back to the ferry landing.
For dinner, we went to the Nubian House Restaurant, promising spectacular views, German tourists, and good food. Well, the view was to die for—a sunset over the Nubian hills, the Germans were out it a full ocean of tanktops and man-capris, and the food was divine. Unfortunately, by the time it arrived 2 hours after we got there, we were too crazed with hunger to notice that our Nubian meatballs were served with french fries instead of rice and that this restaurant is one of approximately 6 in the entire country of Egypt where one can obtain actual whole wheat bread. Again, ma’lish, and off to bed as tomorrow is the 4am convoy to Abu Simbel.
Day two, Abu Simbel. I almost died. No seriously. Convoys are a bad idea for several reasons: it puts all the “targeted” foreigners together, Egyptian police are too inept to do anything if there was a threat, it leaves too damn early in the morning; and it turns the roads of southern Egypt into the Upper Egypt-500. Engines ready… rev engine… start!!! Race across 2-lane roads at 60mph with random bumps, pedestrians and bicycles randomly crossing, other vehicles clearly in the way, all in the attempt to be the first one to the site. Two hours later, this horror will be repeated—only this time, it will actually be light and we will be forced to watch our eminent demise, passively wondering if it will be the 60-person charter bus of German tourists or the elderly, tottering biker that does us in.
Our last day in Aswan we take a sailing felucca ride around the small green islands dotting the Nile, generally enjoying the water, escaping the heat and, in Mom’s case, putting her new bird identification book to good use. I sit and am completely useless, but greatly enjoy actively ignoring the boat captain. We eat some yummy fateer (a Middle Eastern pizza) and board the train. Tragically, this “air conditioned, first-class car” is anything but. Rather, it is a constant 95 degrees with no air movement and we sit, silently and morosely sweating for three hours. On the positive side of things, I think I lost some weight (great dieting technique!) and I can now consider myself fully trained for facing the rigors of hell, purgatory, or Death Valley in summer.

Parents in Egypt: Part I (where Dad is almost killed by a camel and mentally deficient Egyptian men ask if he has two wives)

The end of school
After a month of Egyptology intensiveness, 7 tests, 5 presentations, and a lot of temples (seriously, me and Greco-Roman temples are tight like whoa), I have survived finals. The worst parts of finals were a) the sheer stupidity of much of the subject matter, especially that related to Ancient Egyptian history, b) the freezing temperatures of the Rare books library, where I spent hours translating French excavation reports, and c) the fact that I wasn’t out in the beautiful mid-80s Cairo weather. Ma’lish. It’s finished and I never have to care if the 22nd Dynasty kings ruled from Bubastis or Sais.
So the end of school is here, Shan and I have managed to not kill off any of our roommates (though we’ve come close) and it’s time to pack up. Wait, pack up? But how? How can the amount of junk inside this apartment (remember, there are 8 girls living here) possibly fit into 2 checked pieces of luggage per person? Answer—it can’t. Not a chance in hell. So Katie leaves a litter box for the stray kitten we adopted and then had to give to a surrogate mother for a month, Laurie leaves enough clothes to clothe a few families of haram females, Sam leaves all those scarves she dragged us off to buy in Luxor when really, we just wanted to go visit temples, and enough food is left to feed a large Egyptian family for two weeks. The amount of unused pasta noodles and rice is astounding. And guess who’s the last one to leave, who has to do the final cleaning? Oh, that’s right, yours truly.
But bitterness over… Mom and Dad have arrived for a little 2-week vacation and we are off to see Egypt. The destinations are Cairo and the environs, Aswan and Abu Simbel, Luxor and the Upper Egypt Nile Valley, and Bahariya Oasis.
And, as usual in Egypt, nearly everything that can go wrong or change at the last minute will both go wrong and change at the last minute.
Giza is amazing, but isn’t it always, but my Dad extends his hatred of horses to all 4-footed beasts of burden when he and my mother are spectacularly rolled off of a camel that decides enough is enough. The look was priceless—don’t worry, I have photos of him on it for all posterity, but I’m highly surprised that he didn’t beat the dumb creature to death. Probably, he is too busy trying to hustle me away from the camel driver, who is trying to buy me for half a million camels. Traveling with my father is an interesting experience—I have ascertained that I am worth at least 6 million camels. However, considering the beduin are in decline and this isn’t a native camel stronghold, I think that might be more camels than are in the entirety of Northeast Africa. This experience has also taught me that my Arabic is woefully inadequate as I am incapable of saying either “If you don’t stop trying to buy me I will feed you to a Nile hippopotamus and watch it crush your skull” or “Please leave. If you don’t, I will strangle you with your own small intestine and leave you in the sun for the flies to consume”. Anyone with a strong knowledge of Arabic is welcome to fill me in on the pronunciation and proper grammatical emphases of these two phrases.
Khan el-Kahlili is my dad’s personal version of hell—row upon row of men selling STUFF and being aggressive and in-your-face and making eyes at his baby girl. (just glad he never sees the 10-year-old who will later spend 10 minutes blowing kisses at me, asking me “how much—just for one night—you’re my sexy baby”). But, despite the inexplicable closure of Sultan Hassan’s mosque, we go to the Citadel and either my limited Arabic, the pity of the guards, or my extensive pouting gets us and a group of British tourists in to see the Mosque of Mohamed Ali. The sight? Beautiful! The last of the truly monumental mosques of Cairo, complete with a Turkish “crucifix” plan; a painted ceiling high enough that the colors almost disappear into one another, leaving vague impressions of dull gold and jeweltones; shiny alabaster walls, transparent calcite with thick whitish-yellow veins of opaque color; a spotless, dustless stone courtyard; the unbeatable (albeit smoggy) view over Cairo from the heights of Muqattam; a trompe d’oleil fountain in the highest (or tackiest, with pastoral vignettes that are overtly European) of French 1800s fashion.
Tomorrow, we will leave Cairo and that is when the day’s real adventures will begin. I think my family’s not to bad at this “roughing it” business, but we are American, let’s face it. We like AC with our hot weather and anyone who has ever stepped in a vehicle with my father is well aware that he believes defensive driving to be a quality next to godliness. Unfortunately, the Egyptians are not aware of this preference and are more accustomed to the methodology of “drive as fast as you can until something large is in your way, at which point slam on the brakes and test out those 10-year-old brake pads”. Giving foreign passengers a mild heart attack is considered bonus. Learn more about these exploits in tomorrow’s installment…

Spring Break: Italy & Tunisia, part III (a highlight, finally)

Okay, so I'm sorry that this has been awhile...
Finals and my apartment and cursory internet access and a variety of other things have kept me from being a good blogger--I have several written, they just need to be "prettied up" and posted. Due to a camera disaster including both the camera and the memory cards, I lost all my spring break photos and then randomly found them today.
So one or two might show up soon, as will all my photos of Mom, Dad, and Lindsey's Egypt "Adventure".
It's sad/hysterical!
Without further ado--the highlight of my trip to Tunisia!
I stare at the white ceiling, a white ceiling pocketed with small square skylights slightly mildewed from years of steam and heat. And I feel like my skin is being roughly torn off—probably because it is. And I begin to make a list—a shopping list for next time I lie here.
1. exfoliating gloves
2. 2 bars of orange-blossom soap
3. 1 pumice stone
4. 1 fluffy towel
5. boyshort underwear, preferably in hot-pink satin or an animal print (zeebrah?)
6. enough alcohol or coffee to overcome the initial shock of being here
The list complete, I move onto thought #2:
I am an American girl studying in Egypt. What the hell am I doing mostly naked in a Tunisian hamman (a traditional bathhouse)?
Visitors to Turkey and Syria describe their hamman visits with images recalling a spa, with plenty of privacy, plenty of clothing on bodies, and luxury facials and pedicures.
Privacy? Clothes? Pedicures? Not so much.
As I drift back to consciousness after being asked/forced to roll over, I realize three things: one, yes, entire layers of skin have now peeled off my body and ouch, does that make the hot water sting. Kind 30-something Tunisian women inquire “Il est mal?” “Non, il est bon, merci”. It’s not bad, it’s fine, I just never realized that this level of exfoliation was possible. Two, my soaking-wet self is being pulled and dragged across a tile platform like a limp fish or a dying mermaid and then scoured by a 70-year-old woman wearing itty-bitty leopard print silk shorts. Only leopard print shorts. Three, this makes me realize I am lying in a room full of 30 women and wearing a not-so-covering black bikini bottom. And the panic begins to set in again…
I have a very American attitude toward nudity—at least toward personal nudity. The Europeans can keep their prolific nude beaches—I like certain parts of both my upper and lower anatomy to be covered at all times, thank you very much. So being asked to voluntarily spend a couple of hours half naked in a semi-public setting? Scary—no terrifying.
As I look across toward my friend, we exchange a small smile that says “we’re going to be okay”—while a mere 15 minutes earlier we had been forced to count to three and emit a small, pained whimper as as removed our tops. By now we’ve realized the all-important concept… no one cares.
In all three main bathing rooms, women wash themselves, their friends and their family, while their young daughters shriek and run away from have their hair shampooed.
The frist room is cool with small faucets, a place to rinse or dry off. The second room is the cold room as well as the largest—a tile platform big enough for 10 women to lay on in the middle, wide benches around the exterior, and a cistern of cool water. The third room is dark like a cave, with dull white walls and the rusty brown-red of henna prints on the walls. Steam billows from the near-boiling water kept at one end of the room. It’s womb-like and moist and feminine.
At this point, I’m most impressed with these women’s undergarments. I always wondered in Cairo who was really buying all those barely-there lace g-strings—apparently the more covered you are on the outside, the more likely you are to be wearing black mesh, flirty embroidery, and fake crystal danglies, or a savannah full of animal prints.
As I sit longer, women come and talk to me, showing me the place where there sister placed a henna print on her wedding day or discussing, in an odd mixture of French and Arabic, the Tunisian education system. And I begin to think of this place not just as a building to get clean, but as a potential equalizer. It’s impossible to feel intimidated by or judgmental about a woman you have talked to half naked. So here’s the deal DC: let’s get over the nudity issues, open a hamman, and be able to walk into our internships and our jobs knowing that the boss-employee intimidation factor is gone. You know what that other woman is hiding under her too-formal business suit. You’ve talked about good-smelling soaps and governmental reform; maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ve even scrubbed one another’s back rather than stabbing it.
So keep the pedicures, the private room, and the concealing towels—I’ll take my hamman Tunisian style.

Spring Break: Italy & Tunisia, part II

So sorry Spring Break has taken so long... I had this written and then my internet quit and lost this entire section--sob.
So, let's try this again, shall we?
Stop #2, Palermo.
We were, of course, late on our flight from Rome to Palermo--it seems everything rungs a little bit late in Italy, but it forces relaxation, so it didn't kille me. Upon arriving, my first impression was a strong reminder of Tucson, Arizona due to the dry high new mountains. You know, good volcanic mountains that don't look like they're about to roll into the sea (i.e. the Appalachians). MC thought that it looked like the Lord of the Rings and I think she was hallucinating, but think the hills near Rohan + Tucson mountains. Got me?
So then onto Palermo--we have to stay in a lovely little bed and breakfast, which we were promised was a wonderful place my numerous reviewers. Oops--not so much. Instead, we walk a little stroll down the road and dodn't see it, but know we're in the right area. No big deal. So we go to the bus/train station, where that classic Italian "Sunday shut down" philosophy confronts us like a brick wall--the only people there are two ticket-sellers who a)have no sense of direction and b)are uniformly harsh and unhelpful. So we think, "maybe it was on teh other side of the road and we just missed it, no big deal". And then there, on the corner of the road, we see the right road! And more, we see a sign with the B&B's name. Excellent! Except as much as we ring their bell, no one comes to the door to assist us and this door could easily render impenitrable a medieval castle. Instead, I finally decide to be evil and pull someone else's bell; the poor man was rather confused, but let us in and we pass up to the correct floor. We see a sign, pull the doorbell, and... nothing. Not a sound or a movement. So screw that--we walk about 200 feet down the road, see a hotel, and find a little place where the owners speak Italian and a little German, we speak English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, and everyone is equally confused, but we get a really fun balcony, so no matter. With a precious few remaining hours of daylight left, we wander out in search of dinner and an internet cafe. Dinner taken care of, we try out the "cafe". Only it's not a cafe, it's an Australian bar, complete with koala crossing signs, Aussi beer, Ayres Rock, Brit-rock on the LCD, test-tubes full of what claims to be 98% alcohol, which we wisely steer clear of, and a few computers. While MC and Will tend to family-contact business, I order up drinks and get my first taste of limoncello--sour, sweet, potent, and very nice. Dad can have his conac and Grandpa his scotch, I'll stick to this stuff. Naturally, one must always follow up alcohol with caffeination, so we head up to Cafe Antico Spinnato, which receives great acclaim from the guidebooks. Oh my god! It was amazing! I ordered a cone with chocolate and pistachio and thought I'd gone to gelato heaven. This stuff is better than that in Rome (don't tell Haley!); the next day I will drag my friends back and gorge myself on an imperial cone with coconut and raspberrry. To understand the imperial cone, you need a visual. See Jonah the whale (Moby Dick, got it?). This is the ice cream cone--it's enormous and covered on both sides in chocolate and one side in pralines. It's filled to the brim with white and pink (pink tongue, white whale) and so large it could possibly come alive and eat my face; don't you worry, I showed it who'se boss.
After round 1 of gelato, we visit La Kalsa, an old area near the port that still bears the scars of World War II bombing. We get hopelessly lost without an adequate map and then we get a little scared off my a creepy pack of dogs, though on the way we find an ancient monumental gate built amidst rubble and heavily-leaning row houses.
Day 2: Begin at the Museo Archaeologico Regionale with a brief stop for a macchiatto and ricotta filled pastry. If I could eat this every morning, I would be a whale, but a very content whale. I love the museum, with its random bits of statuary, lush gardens with naked cherub fountains and amphorae planters, the walls and walls of mosaic and case upon case of Etruscan and Roman and Greek and Norman pottery, statuary, and broken who-knows-what. This museum is a true testament to Sicily's geographican location as the crossroads of the Mediterranean.
If all else fails, I got some great shots of color if Mom wants them for house decoration ideas. Unfortunately, they're still on the memory card as the next day my camera would stop working and remain unhappily stuck on the "zoom" position for the remainder of the trip.
After a couple churches and a fountain full of naked greek gods, we stop to view La Martorano, a mosque-turned Byzantine-turned Roman Catholic church--a true Mediterranean medley. As I leave the church I hear "MAX!" And there is Max, a West Point student abroad in Cairo with us. With our new travel partner for the day set, the four of us venture off in search of lunch, more churches, badly-dressed and ill-behaved Italian teens, their beautiful and fashionable 20-something counterparts, the Sicilian parliament and an Etruscan wall or two, random discussions about the merits of engineering programs at various universities, more gelato, groceries and limoncello for tomorrow, and dinner and wine at a little restaurant where the seafood is excellent, the housewine is good, and I daringly ordered the Sicilian national dish (sardines with raisins and pine nuts).
And tomorrow, the ultimate adventure... involving how exactly one gets on a boat to Tunisia, why rain really sucks, linguistic misunderstandings, and why I am incredibly glad to be an American.

Spring Break, Italy & Tunisia, Part I

So Spring Break... 8 days, 2.5 countries, 3 people, 15 coffee drinks, several legal bottles of wine, seafood in places and forms it is absolutely not supposed to be, one cute American PhD student, more churches than I remember or care to, and enough Roman ruins and mosaics to make MaryClaire cry out "NO MORE ROMANS!!! WE CAN'T ESCAPE THEM!". Oh, and one hammam that rocked my world and my perception of public exposure in more ways than I am capable of expressing (and considering the amount I talk, that's a lot of ways).
Italy, Sicily (since it doesn't really count as a part of Italy), and Tunisia. Jealous yet? If you're not now, you will be when I finish. The characters for this little play are MaryClaire, she's from Maryland and studying the middle east and arabic at Georgetown, Will, who's from fom Connecticut and studies political science at Tulane, except that one unfortunate semester at George Washington after you-know-what that we don't really like to talk about. It tends to make him a little cranky--for kicks we throw out phrases like "Foggy Bottom", "Will's little DC problem", and "so how about that global warming and it's effect on the Gulf", just to see how he reacts.
We sarted the trip in Rome, the Eternal City. Well, I'll contest the eternal bit as Egypt feels older and more decrepit that Rome does, but I will give them the benefit of the fact that their city is tops. Rome was the center of the world and has never forgotten that fact: every turn in the street, every Armani clad man, every high-heeled woman, and every perfectly foamed cappuccino reminds the visitor that Rome knows what's it's about: the only question is, do you? In fact, my greatest trouble in Rome was attempting to decide whether I should be more impressed that those heeled women didn't fall on the cobblestones and kill themselves or that Italy managed to get away with ripping off as many ancient treasures from Egypt as it did. Seriously? I think there are more obelisks in Rome than can be found in the city of Cairo, excluding the Egyptian Musuem. And can I just say how tacky the Ramses II Karnak obelisk looks surrounded by Poseidon and his flipping little sea nymphs? I took a photo of it so that I can Photoshop it back into place next to it's partner, still at Karnak.
However, I should really have learned my lesson about mocking the Italians after realizing that karma likes Rome: in the midst of mocking their removal of the obelisk, right in front of the Church of Saint Agnes in Agony (who named this place?), my flipflop broke. Thanks to this incident, I would soon have a pair of Dorothy sparkley-black flats and a blister the size of Tuscany on my left toe. Exhibit a) Lindsey trying to find shoes in Rome. Not speaking any Italian. Unwilling to pay 200 Euro for a pair of sandals. Just you wait... this is not the end of Spring Break being out to get my footwear, nor has it decreased my perceptions that flip-flops suck and are a vastly annoying form of footwear, but that I love them anyhow and this makes me mentally unstable. But I saw the Parthenon, finally, after many years of waiting, and walked along the alleyways, where I bought a spray-painted forest from a young Italian guy. Yes, I know, it sounds tacky... but it's actually kind of a cool painting.
The Vatican consumed the morning of Day 2, including St. Peter's Basilica, which I climbed to the tip-top of and saw the lovely views of the city. It's pretty amazing what a person can do with enough money, labor, craftsmen, and a few hundred years--not that I have any desire to at any point be buried underneath a creepy marble and gold rendition of myself, complete with tacky crown and people kissing my marble toes, but it's pretty impressive. It's also a lot less tacky than the neon green reinactments of St. George slaying the dragon that are ever-present in Coptic Cathedrals. We visited Colosseum and the Palatine-the Forum and the villas of ancient Rome. Not as impressive as the guilding of the Vatican, but these days even the Colosseum is a testament to the power of the Catholic Church. As MaryClaire says "If you can put an inscription onto the Colosseum taking credit for building it, now that's real power!" The best part of Rome might have been the food... amazing cappuccino, lovely dark chocolate, gelato, a divine cafe called Trafforia Chianti, where we, ironically, didn't drink chianti, but spent a good three hours drinking wine and eating bread and appetizers and pasta and salads and I think there may have been a dessert involved. It's a little hazy at this point... the wine and all that.
And then on to Palermo...

Soccer, suits (bathing), sexy, sad, & scary,

With a group of other international students and some of our Egyptian classmates, we went to Wadi el-Ryan (valley of the whales), so named due to many ancient whale skeletons found in the vicinity, the remainder of when Egypt was covered with a large sea millions of years ago. The attractions are the highly-saline lake and the only waterfall in Egypt (a completely pathetic 4 meter drop). We went to swim, take out a boat, and have a picnic--general funness. By the end of the day, we had bought a lot of pottery, caused a scandal by going in a forbidden area of the nature reserve by accident, and caused a second scandal by wearing swimsuits. Unlike in the US where the forbidden area would be termed as such due to migratory birds or something similar, in this case it just had sticky mud (which the whole lake had) and that was the extend of the forbidden rationale. But see we were there in order to avoid people so that we could go swimming in our swimsuits. So attempt #2: we go in the opposite direction from the main beach, where there are no guys and therefore nothing is haram, and strip down to swimsuits. Next thing we know, a soccer ball is accidentally kicked across the beach and a 5-year old is sent to chase it... with a full entourage of 10 older males. The Egyptian girls accompanying us had stayed on the beach and proceeded to give them a tongue lashing that Vanessa, Kate, and JoAnna would be proud of. Meanwhile, Saquina can't leave the water because she's Muslim and it is haram (despite the fact that her bathing costume covers more than any of my clothes have ever covered) for them to see her and so I, in my bikini, have to leave the water to bring Saquina a towel before she can leave the water. Slightly traumatizing...
But while slightly sketchy at this point, earlier in the day, and again later, I definitely did my part for international relations. I'm telling you, those 15 years of soccer have absolutely payed off.
Condie (Madam Secretary) may be making an ass out of America by telling Egypt it's okay to deny the consitutional rights of anyone who might be against Mubarak (aka el presidento) while they run around promoting his presidentness with loud pop music and oversized posters, but I am working to ensure that in the agricultural heartland of Egypt, the word "America" has connotations of getting your ass kicked by a nice girl.
It was American University Cairo (aka 3 American guys, 1 Egyptian guy and me) versus 5 guys from the Fayoum and at the end of the game (actually, when we got tired and went to eat lunch) the score was 6-5. I scored, had 2 assists, and for the rest of the afternoon received handshakes and awed stares from my new friends, who pronounced my name "lan-sea", but whatever works.
This was also one of the many major hints I have received that class differences are an entirely different matter here than America. In Egypt, socioeconomic status is everything and social mobility is considered utopian and naive. As we were informed on our first day "don't date the gas station attendent, because he will always be a gas station attendent", but they're not just poor you know... they're dirty and bad and stupid (too stupid, in fact, to vote in a democracy), and a lower, darker type of human. Don't worry, I haven't turned into a bigot, no chance of that ever happening, but in the past week I have seen appaulling displays of class-based discrimination that are rivaled only by my horror at the police. Yes, the protecting police who not only arrested ten of my Egyptian colleagues who protested the constitutional reform amendment, but raped three Egyptian girls after chasing them down Sha'aria Talat Haarb and cornering them in a building.

In other news, kitty #3 has died (I had to pick it up; it was horrifically gruesome) and we have adopted kitty #4. Giving a kitty a flea bath is get another addition to my list of "things I didn't think I would be doing in Egypt, but apparently will despite my better judgement".

Back to schoolwork--just thought I'd send this off so that you all can see the paradox and the chasms and the little joys and horrors that make me love it here so much.
Just when everything has gone wrong, something beautiful happens, you learn a lot from an internship, you get offered a position doing experiential environmental education with small kids, or the 6 degrees of separation between you and a new friend dwindle down to one or two.

why I am a bad person

So I am a bad person. Why? Because I have not updated my blog in going on a month right now and I am worry. Am I allowed to blame midterms? Yes, midterms and my fieldtrips and my visit to Luxor. Also, I am a bad person because today I am telling you a bunch of vignettes about people in Egypt and why this is the most amazing and fun and amusing place I have ever been.
To start with, the people in my everyday life...
Egypt has the most wonderful oranges in the world, straight from family orchards throughout the Delta and the Fayoum Oasis. I buy them from an old man in a galabeeya (robe) and each time I buy oranges, I say "wadi kilo) and he gives me 5 oranges, I hand him 4-5 pounds, and he smilingly unpeels a banana for me to eat on the way home. In attempting to explain where I am from the other day, since he has by now ascertained that "ana ameriqu'a" is not specific enough, I looked to my right, pointed at a shiny red delicious apple and said "hibba"--I'm from here. Sure enough, it was one of those well-travelled Washington apples I see popping up around Cairo. But lets face it, a free banana is enough to make anyone's day, right? Well a few weeks ago I was walking back from the fruit aquisition adventure and a man in front of the florists shop cries out "miss, wait!". Admittedly, I kind of ignored him but he runs up to me holding a carnation and says "I am so sorry I almost ran into you when you walked by earlier". So I had a pink carnation that lasted two weeks in a water-bottle vase on my dining room table. Just when you give up hope that men in Egypt will ever be human and normal, they do something sweet to re-instill hope in you.
Which brings me to why I keep almost giving up hope... walking down streets here in an exercise in what my third grade teacher (Mr. Smith) would term "mental toughness". I defy anyone to match my ignoring skills... in DC people ignore one another because they don't care; here I ignore men because they are making lewd, annoying, nonsensical, or incomplrehensible comments. These comments range from "welcome" and "beautiful" to a long list of countries in an attempt to figure out where I am from "Ireland? England? Spain? Mexico? Russia? France? Oh, American? Long Island? Manhattan? Los Angeles? Florida?". I am kind of tempted to see how many states they actually know sometime instead of power walking away, shaking my head in amusement. My personal favorite incident, to date, has been courtesy of a 40 something man in a nice suit outside a bank. Apparently, seeing me inspired him to break out into a rendition of "it's a beautiful life"... Suffice it to say, I totally sympathise with Dudley Dursley when he ends up in the zoo cage in lieu of the snake in the first Harry Potter movie. As a blonde American, I definitely feel "on display" at times!!!
Despite feeling on display at times, my run-ins with actual tourists have made me inendingly grateful that I am not a real tourist like them. I'm foreign, obviously, but not THAT obviously...
And I would like to take this opportunity, as an American, to whole-heartedly thank the Europeans for winning, without contest, the award for tackiest visitors. In general, people here need a lesson is realizing that you are in someone else's country and that maybe you should respect their modesty morals and pattern your clothing along the lines of not being mistaken for a cheap hooker. Tourists, in fact, seems to suffer from the same delusions as many Egyptologists, who refuse to admit that the study or visit of Ancient Egypt does, in fact, involve contact with Modern Egypt and its paradoxes, values, social hierarchies, poverty, and multiple realities.
As I was sitting in a local coffee shop near my school writing a paper, I suddenly looked up and choked on the cappuccino I was swallowing. There, in front of me, was a woman in a tight, bright orange wife-beater tanktop and short orange shorts. Her husband matched. She had a flowered tatoo peeking out from under the skin-tight demin shorts on her upper thigh. I mean seriously, just because your football team (for non-football officionados, the Netherlands kits are orange) is playing the the cup that day doesn't mean you can show off enough skin as to be worthy of Miami Beach or the Riviera. I thought that might be the worst of it, but then I got to Luxor... oh Luxor.
In one of the poorest areas of the country, Luxor's entire economy is dependent upon tourism and the Euros dominate the scene. Tacky French couples dress in jackets that not only match, but are a map of the world!!! Add a little rotundness and I saw people wearing globes in the Valley of the Kings... I actually had to sit down I was laughing so hard!
In temples throughout the valley I saw backless tanktops, entire bras through low-cut, sheer tops, men in shorts so short they might as well just retreat to Sharm el-Sheik (a big resort town on the Red Sea coast with lots of French and Russian tourists) and call them Speedos. Unfortunately, I have no great stories about Luxor Temple as I was too busy taking pictures of the horde of children who accosted me and demanded digital photos of them and hiding from the sketchy Egyptian men. Note to all my guy friends: repeatedly hiding behind ancient monuments such as sphynxes and then popping out to take photos of an unsuspecting girl will not magically make her pants fall open, it will merely make her hide behind a group of elderly British men who have agreed to protect her. This is not a fool-proof pick-up strategy. I mean really, what kind of dumb do they think we are??? ((Don't answer that!!!))
The winner goes to the American sheik, a teenage male who decided to wear a white thobe (the white robe worn by saudi men) and a white kafia (head covering with the black band around the head like a crown). You know, Laurence of Arabia style. It went fabulously with his red basketball shorts and his dramatic poses at Hapshetsust's temple, you know? I think, if she were still alive, our dear queen would have had him banished to the western desert for lack of tact, taste, and cultural awareness. Seriously? Many people in Egypt resent Gulfis (people from Gulf States) becaues they are incredibly rich and they consider the Egyptian migrant laborers in their countries to be inferior, despite being fellow Arabs.
In the next few days, you will learn about why soccer is the international language of amazing, my spring break plans, and any other random stories I come across (highly likely). These stories may involve water buffalo on a 4-lane thoroughfare... one never knows.

You know you are actually living in a third world country when

This post concerns a variety of domestic and life situations involving: dirt floors, water, electricity, inside cats that should be outside, busrides, phones, lukewarm milk, donkeys, garbage collection, and random broken bones...
My floors needed to be fixed in my apartment and they spent 5 days repairing them. This means I spent 2 days with a sandbox in my living room, because they insulate with sand here, and then three days of being kicked out of my apartment until anywhere from 6pm-10pm. Because we left our windows open to let in fresh air after they treated the floors, a cat jumped into our apartment. Not just a cat, the cat; the cat of nightmares; it was a magical cat, all gray and black and huge and ugly and hiding in impossible spaces and creeping behind shadows and jumping out when I attempted to walk to the bathroom at 5:30am before a field trip. Another cat just had babies in front of the apartment next to ours. When I say "just had babies", I mean they are a few inches long... creepy kitties.
Our electricity sometimes flickers, and yesterday, our water went out and proceeded to stay out for about 19 hours--8 girls, 2 invalids, 5th floor, no water, no problem. We survived, but have decided to invest in a hand of Fatima and an eye of Horus (double dipping can't hurt, right?)to ward off the evil jinn in our apartment.
Sometimes our phone stops working, our garbage is collected from the fire escape by people who haul it away in a donkey cart, and milk (with an initial sketchy pasturization process) is not refrigerated here.
When I was on a fieldtrip, the clutch on the bus randomly broke and the busdriver jimmied it back into working order before we were able to go back three hours Cairo.
In summary? First, Egypt really is a third world country. Second of all, I love this place so much!!! Where else do I get to go camping inside my own apartment and chase cats outside the house and down the fire escape by using a squeegie mop??? It's utterly fantastic and I am enjoying life in my ghetto-fabulous apartment, with my one broken-footed roommate (she fell into a pothole) and my other broken-shouldered roommate (she fell off of a horse).

Why am I at school again?

Sorry for the lack of blogs for a couple weeks (bad Lindsey!). This school thing is kind of a drag--I am, in the future, going to create a study abroad program in Egypt where you don't actually have to go to school. Instead, you get to go on fieldtrips to temples and learn about hieroglyphics and take a Nile cruise and learn about ecology and then they give you an apartment in the middle of Cairo and present a series of annoying, but overcoming obstacles to your contentedness in the apartment and your ability to survive in the city. It'll be called Survival Egypt: How to survive in both the ancient and modern worlds.
Ptolemaic temples is a little boring and there are plenty of what Constance and Kathy would refer to as "dumb bitches" in my classes, but they are otherwise survivable. However, to all of you who go to school with me, please hold me to this solemn vow in the future: I will never ever ever complain about discomfort in class again, having now been forced to sit on hard slabs of pine that cut into my back at about the 15th vertebrae, leaving my spine and my butt bruised and squished.
But at least I'm not in DC in 5 degree weather, right (hee hee)!!!

Since I actually do have to attend class, my tourist activities have been somewhat hindered of late. However, I have been able to visit a really neat mosque, wander around Islamic Cairo, experience the ultimate Nile Delta Trek, see the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and in the highlight of my visit to date, I have officially received both my first and second marriage proposals. Oh, and someone tried to buy me for 700LE (about 120USD). I informed him that my hair was worth more than that in Saudi Arabia and that my daddy wouldn't accept anything less than 20,000USD. Might as well make up the wedding costs, right???
Suffice it to say that on the marriage front, I am further from marriage than when I left the US (yes Scott, this is possible) and this is unlikely to change. At a Mardi Gras party last night we, in fact, named the official "songs of the semester": No Scrubs by TLC and RESPECT by Aretha Franklin. Now we just need to find someone to translate them into Arabic and see if it has any effect on the male population of Egypt.
The mosque I visited is in Islamic Cairo, south of Khan el Kalili and west of the Muqattam Hillwas and is called the El Moayed King mosque. The coolest part is that the minarets are actually built above the gates of Bab Zuweila, which led into El Fostat, the city during the Fatimid period before Cairo was officially built. Anyhow, I climbed and climbed and climbed to the very very tip-top of the mosque on a shaky iron staircase and suddenly, there I was, hundreds of feet above the city, separated from the edge by a one-foot ledge and a one meter "guardrail". First, if you ever need a job to stay in shape, convince a mosque to ditch the speakers, hike up five times a day, and do the call to prayer--it's a great weight loss strategy. My second thought was that there is no way this would ever be allowed in the US; Washington State went to the extreme of closing down the capitol dome because there was only one flight of stairs (pre-earthquake damage). If you were allowed to go up at all, you would stop at a small platfrom halfway up the minaret and gaze out from behind the beauty of plexiglass. And while I appreciate safety features, it was an unforgettable experience: here they trust you not to be stupid and fall; if you are stupid and fall, then maybe you are a candidate for the Darwin Awards, right? Sample entry: Fell from minaret while leaning over the edge to get a better shot of the facade. Should have bought a longer lense or studied physics more intensely.
The Cairo Museum is a disgrace to Egypt, archaeology, museum curation, and the artifacts in the museum. There are no signs except in the King Tut jewellry room and on a couple of Akhenaten's statues. In fact, the only decently displayed room in the museum was recently redone by Dr. Salima Ikram, an AUC professor. Instead, gold faience, glass, wood, pottery, stones, and mummies language unidentified and poorly lit, in cramped quarters. The new museum, when opened, will be a vast improvement over the current nightmare, which would be shut down in the US for failure to actually be a musuem--if the Smithsonian tried this, the US government would (and should) fire every director, trustee, and curator in the institution. But King Tut's exhibit? Not at all overrated: It's more amazing than I could have imagined it being and it gave me little thrills thinking about Howard Carter answering "yes, wonderful things" to Lord Carnarvon when asked what he'd found. The gilded shrines along would be worth any effort put forth to find them!!! So pretty!!!
On a less depressing note, yesterday I went on the West Delta trek of all West Delta treks. So I am taking a Cultural Geography course and we went on a field trip yesterday to Alexandria, the Fort of Qaytbay, the mouth of the Rosetta Nile, Burg al-Arba, Lake Idku, and Buto. Did I mention this took 14 hours, of which 12 were spent on a bus? It was insane, tiring, and incredibly beautiful, getting to see all the varied architecture of northern Egypt.

More later on "You know you are actually living in a third world country when..."

It's a small world...

No, I refuse to apologize for titling my blog with this horrible phrase. Why? Because the taxi drivers in Cairo have not yet apologized for using this cursed-annoying song as their horn yet. They are, I am convinced, too busy trying to hit me, give me a ride while walking 5 blocks to school, or refusing to take me wherever it is I want to go when I finally decide to get into a taxi, to bother apologizing. It is, for an inexplicable reason (but probably because it's catchy and they are lucky enough not to know the words), a very popular song with the crowd of taxi drivers who wheel around at night with black and red and blue lights, have lit incense precariously perched somewhere on the dashboard, and change gears with a grinding sound so metallic that I frequently look behind the vehicle, expecting to find the gearbox and half the engine lying decrepit and oily on the road behind me.
This song has taken on an even creepier note than usual since coming to Cairo. Previously to my arrival, I imagined those waxy little figures skipping about in little Dutch clogs as on the ride. However, the childrens' clothing stores here have an excessively frightening tenancy to use toddler-size dolls as display mannequins in their windows. Not just dolls, but those dolls with teeth and freckles that closely resemble Chucky. Everytime I am unfortunate enough to walk past one, I immediately imagine them stepping through the glass, little teeth chomping, chasing after me while "It's a small world" whines in the background. Overactive imagination? Yes. Ridiculous? Probably not--my roommates agree that they wouldn't be altogether surprised if the little devil-dolls have motors or could come to life.

The real reason (I swear I have one) is that it really is a small world. First, half my school (or 24 or them) decided to come to Cairo this semester, apparently an enigma-girl that I am supposed to have met from Tigard, Oregon, and a collection of people from Washington State that I randomly run into. But this was all expected. What I didn't expect was the random reminders of Seattle and home while in Cairo.
1. It rained on the Giza plateau while I was at the pyramids. Rained! In the frieking desert! I was nearlly blinded by blowing sand, had my ass beaten to death by a galloping camel, and then got rained on. Perhaps I should note at this point that the pyramids were the best experience of my life, to date. They are grandiose and huge and, despite the buses of Chinese tourists, the litter, and my near death experience inside Khafre's pyramid (feel free to read the AU Eagle newspaper next week for a full account of pushy french tourists), the age and the mystery and the open dunes of the Sahara were everything I had hoped for. I seriously almost cried when I turned a corner in my taxi and the Sphynx patiently waited, eternally regally watching those who would approach the burial place of his king. Pictures cannot begin to show how miniscule you feel compared to their mammoth size. No, unlike the new agers inside Khufu's Great Pyramid, I am not going to place my face on the floor to soak up mysical pyramid powers and energies, but it was highly impressive as a monument to death and life and fertility along the Nile. The main reason (aside from pyramid power being a stupid concept) is that the pyramid grounds are filled with camels: so it's not just 2000 year-old dust on the floor of the burial chamber, there is more recent dirty footprints all over the place and I am not sticking my face anywhere near a camel-infected floor. Ick!!!
2. Bureacracy. The American University in Cairo has more bureaucracy and less efficiency than American University in Washington DC. Try combining the two together. I am genuinely surprised and pleased that between the two institutions, I actually have classes and a place to ive. However, I will be getting a residency visa in a few days. I still expect them to screw this up and am not holding my breathe--I will probably be on an obscure watch list and either be deported or unable to leave the country for a month while they realize they typed in my passport number wrong on the computer.
3. Becoming one of "those people". I smile at pretty much everyone I pass at home and say "hi" to most of them. People don't say anything in DC and scuttle past, avoiding eye contact. I thought they were jerks. I am officially one of those people now... as eye contact is considered a sign of sexual interest, I have developed a new "power walk". Eyes straight forward, quick and delliberate movement, and a killer death glare designed to make the recipient wet his pants or crash his car upon deliberate application of the look. I will try this out at home sometime, perhaps on someone with diplomatic plates to get back at them for triple-parking on Connecticut Avenue during the peak of rush hour near Cleveland Park.
3. Apples. I was walking down the street, peering at the little shops and avoiding eye contact, as usual. Suddenly, a pretty little fruit stand appeared, with the amazing oranges and tiny bananas hung and stacked deliberately. Next to the oranges were a selection of green and red globual fruits: "Apples!" I thought cheerfully. But wait, these aren't just apples--upon closer inspection, they bear the distinctive mark of red and white and blue. Halfway across the world, at a roadside stand were Washington apples!!! As such, it officially means that the apples from Washington State have seen more of the world than 99% of the population. I didn't buy any of the apples, but this shows that globalization can't be totally a bad thing. In a country entirely unsuited for apple production due to lack of height and water, here was appley deliciousness, just waiting for a passing Cairoan to pick up and munch on!

And then there are the things people should have told me about Egypt, but didn't:
1. Paper is not 8.5x11". It's bigger, and my entire wouldview has been officially thrown out a window as I had to go purchase a new set of folders to hold this odd, big paper. I am still having problems adjusting and may need counseling upon return.
2. Studying is a very Western thing. Egyptian students don't do it.
3. Egyptians are world-class relaxers. They are really good at relaxing and sitting and conversing and drinking tea or coffee and not actually doing anything that can be defined as productive. They do, however, at least at my school, look very fashionable while not doing anything
4. The majority of people in Cairo think that AUC students go to class naked. This is not a joke: we are all godless and lustful and are apparently going to class in our skivvies. Now I am taking mostly Egyptology classes, so this is a frightening concept. With the exception of my two roommates, my classes are filled with a set of quite unattractive people that I have no desire to gaze upon in clothing, let alone without clothing. High scarring potential...

I am sure I will share more scarring incidents or potential episodes later, but until then, masalaam, god bless, and vous me manquez, I miss you all!

Recap/Yes I really have been going to class... see!!!

So Alexandria was fun--we stayed on the grounds of the former castle of a prince who had way too much money and very worldy architectural tastes. And when I say worldy, I mean he was probably just indecisive and didn't know whether he wanted Moorish, Turkish, Islamic, Japanese, or Gothic styles and decided to add a little of the above: Moorish geometry on the ramparts, a few friendly-looking gargoyles, a Japanese pagoda, and a Bavarian color scheme, just to throw us off a little bit.
The other international students are, for the most part, very nice and I continue to love my roommates more and more as we go on adventures together. Impressively enough (though unsurprising), there are actually more people here than at who are under the impression that they are the most unique, season travellers in the world. And, as such, they naturally know more about everything Egyptian than the other non-world travellers and find it beneath their sensibilities to actually converse with you. Most are more than tolerable and genuinely nice people, excited to be in Egypt and go on adventures. I have yet to find the perfect cohort to travel with, seeing as how my style of travel tends to be relatively physically demanding, bordering on damaging, but between the kid from Australia and the West Point boys, I should find someone to go on "Lindsey's Bhutan Death March of Upper Egypt parts I-II" (for details on the history of this title, please direct questions to my parents).
But I swam in a cold, pretty, polluted ocean, that proves that the '76 Barcelona Convention to protect the Med from pollution is not entirely working. Ironically, most of the pollution found is not from Egypt itself, which has only one Med port (Alexandria) and is runoff from countries to the north. Ironically, most of Egypt's coastine is marshy, shallow, and incapable of supporting a deep water port; thus, since Alexandria is an articially created port and has a harbor, the harbor acts like a sponge soaking in all the free-flowing debris and other pollution. At this port I, for the first time, realized why precisely sea turtles swallow so many plastic bags. When I previously considered the issue, I visualized a whole shopping bag and considered how little it actually resembled a plastic bag. Oops... by the time they have been tossed about the land and sea, the bags are in shreds... small shreds that shockingly resemble the whitish-clear tentacles of jellyfish.
Off of the environmental beat, it was just nice to be in a quiet place for awhile. While I am obsessed with the frantic pace of life in Cairo with its honking and constant movement and construction and donkey/man dodging (only the donkeys don't harass me, so they are on the whole a nicer addition to the streets), it was nice to feel quiet. I found palm groves and some neat pine trees with small, irregularly-shaped cones that my mom would have loved to make a Christmas wreath from, a few Egyptian couples having a bit of fun inside the palm groves, a turn of the century lighthouse, and some of the best ice cream I have ever tasted. Strawberry and mango hand-swirled inside a crispy cone--Candice would never have left and I was left seriously tempted to buy a block of dry ice and bring a few gallons home with me. Note to Kate: no, there is no competition with Graeters as this was gelato-like, and therefore serves and entirely different purpose on the ice cream chart.

I have started school now and decided to drop Colloquial Egyptian in favor of a symposium on International Development. I'll get a colloquial tutor so that I can bargain better at the markets and bring everyone back fabulously cheap jewelry and other fun things, but I wasn't a fan of getting graded on a subjet that I am taking for purely practical, non-academic purposes.
Oh, and for those of you who want gifts from Egypt (you know who you are), Egypt is well-known for the following items: scarves, knock-off designer handbags, camels, jewelry, especially gold and with some lovely alabaster and turquoise, tacky shynx and pyramid statues, good-luck amulets, turkish coffee, really yummy oranges, and a great collection of books on Egyptology, Coptic art and illuminated texts, and papyri, both real and fake. Interesting fact of the day: papyri is actually extinct, for all intents and purposes. It was semi-domesticated, but when its cultivation was abandoned upon the discovery and widespread availability of paper, the semi-domestic strain was too weak too fight against other invasive and domestic plants. In 1968, one small patch was found in the Nile Delta, but otherwise the only remaining papyrus is grown in a field to be sold to tourists. Warning: if it crinkles, it's not papyrus, it's beaten banana leaf.
So, the moral of this story... all is good in "the Land of the Pharoahs", more later, and I am busy avoiding fake papyrus, fake designer handbags, and close encounters with fake world experts!!!

How I Found Religiosity

Please note, this title does not say that I have found religion. True, "inshallah" (God willing) has entered my vocabulary as a regular catch phrase for anything from "we will leave on time today inshallah" to "inshallah I will not be hit by a car as I cross the street. Unlike some place-specific phrases (i.e. Pura Vida in Costa Rica), this one has real relevance. Life is kind of a death defying experience and the evil eye is a constant threat--between these two dangers, people tend to leave a lot to God's hands and his choices.
But since I have not found religion, how did I find religiosity?
Well, consider it a by-product of being mistaken for an Eastern Orthodox, a heathen, and a Catholic in one day.
Last Satuday, I decided to take a wander around Cairo. First, I took the subway to Coptic Cairo. The subway is an interesting and very efficient mode of transportation--it runs almost constantly, has 2 women-only cars in the front, and costs 1LE to go anywhere you want (1LE= 1 Egyptian pound~ .18 USD). Cleaner than the New York Subway (ick!) with a little more creaking and groaning than the Boston T, but altogether satisfactory.
Having arrived in Coptic Cairo, I first went to the Hanging Church of St. George, a Greek Orthodox church known as a hanging church due to its placement ontop on a round Roman Tower, thus hanging over the rest of the walled Coptic area. It's a round church on a round tower, and filled with both orthodox and coptic Christians on Sunday. So, I gave them 10LE, lit a few candles, and intently studied the elusive St. George. Apparently, this was enough for me to be accepted as a believer and due to the blonde hair and blue eyes, I am clearly not Greek and must therefore be Slavic. Okay with me! Jacqeline introduced herself in halting English, I reponded in a few of my 10 arabic words, and hugs and kisses ensued. The little girls here almost make up for the creepy little boys hissing at me.
Next, it was more St. George. St. George is a Palastinian saint who slew a dragon and was tortured. Today, the chains that bound him are said to cure mental illness and bless all who are wrapped in the chains. The nuns at the convent of St. George oversee the wrapping of people in chains, but on this Sunday, it was a crush of humanity draping the chains over their head and the heads of their children, kissing photos, and looking at the light-up, moving picture of St. Peter slaying the dragon (whose tail swings back and forth). It was a Christianity entirely unlike that found in the United States. It was bright and in your face and superstitious and so close to humanity and innately part of their lives as to be more relevant to the living of this life and its blessings than the metaphysical distance and one-on-one relationship often found in protestantism.
Entering the nearby church, I was set upon by a swarm of little girls, all wanting to hug the crazy American girl.

Meandering out the gates of Coptic Cairo, I went to the East, determined to find something in the blank spot on my map. And yes,the southest really is a blank spot on most maps of Cairo. As with most white areas on maps (except maybe the Sahara), there is an entire life ignored by the elite or absent cartographers. Cairo is internationally known as a dirty city and yet, from my experience, it actually is quite clean and the city hires people daily to clean up garbage. But I've never seen a garbage truck... where is it going? Oh yes, to the southeast by donkey cart, where people find all reusable trash items, thus forming an unofficial but strangely efficient recycling system. Not just garbage, shantytowns exist here, fronted by miles of clayware stores. You can buy anything from a small flowerpot to a thirty foot ionic column for your backyard. Mind you, that's if you have a backyard, which 95% of Cairoans lack altogether.

After several more miles of hoping that I am going in the correct direction (maps= not so helpful when there are no street signs), I found a huge Roman-style acqueduct, which led me to a mysterious red wall. Inside the red door was a Catholic cemetary, where the elderly caretaker showed me the monuments to all the French and Italian soldiers who have died in wars from the Napoleonic excursion to WWII. He spoke a little Italian and I speak some French, so we managed to stutter through a tour. And then, we went into different mausoleums, where he gave me an ancient, antique crucifix, with the Marys standing on either side of him. Covered with cobwebs, he asked me to take it and told me the lady of the tomb would have wanted me to have it. Having never actually dissillusioned him to me being French, he apparently assumed I was catholic in need of a crucifix. My roommate is creeped out, everyone else thinks my new Jesus picture and my crucifix are a little odd (the Catholic kids are really jealous!!!), and I found religiousity in Cairo. Today, our maid came and I found the crucifix right next to my bed. Apparently even our Muslim maids are trying to tell me something, but I'm not quite sure what it is. Anyway you take it, my religious relic was promptly moved back to its home on my desk, where I can see it now, but it's not staring at me while I sleep. Any chance it can send a few muses to me this semester?

I then went to Alexandria, but more later on that...

My schedule

I will post more fun stuff after this, but for now, look at my schedule and drown in the jealousy that is me taking three Egyptology classes...
Introduction to Colloquial Arabic
Art and Archaeology of Cairo
History II: the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom
The Cultural Geography of Ancient Egypt
Temples of the Ptolemaic Pyramid

Jealous yet? Oh you should be... because I get to go on field trips and my advisor loves me. Unlike the 75% of the people that she makes cry, I was in, out and had a prettified slip of white paper in front of me courtesy of the American University in Cairo.

On to other more amusing things that I have been up to, my past two days have been filled with island exploration. This is in no way meant to sound exotic--no I haven't fled Egypt yet for the Greek Isles. While I did fly over them on the plane and definitely want to visit at some point based on the pretty blueness of the water, there must be pyramids before ionic columns. The islands I have been exploring are two islands in the middle of the Nile called Zamalek and Geziret el Roda. I live about 4 blocks from the Nile at a point between the two islands, in an area called Garden City. Garden City is the home of the American, British, Canadian, and Italian Embassies, so if there is any running for embassies, I am in close range with lots of big trees and crumbling fences in the way to hide me. In fact, crumbling is a major theme of Cairo--the buildings, the sidewalks, the bridges, the boats, the stray cats and dogs and a variety of other animate and inanimate objects that probably shouldn't be crumbling. It's a beautiful city with the remnants of varied and eclectic architecture of Islamic, Oriental, and European styles. I guess I'll talk more about that when I start classes on February 4th and get to take my fun Cairo field trips. Eventually, I'll also get my pictures posted online, but that will only happen when I get my appropriate RAW converters so I can post them online and appease all of those demanding evidence that I am here and alive.
Still on the theme of crumbling, though not a politically corrent observation, I have experienced and witnessed an interested hypocracy of gendered issues. In modern Cairo, the vast majority (well over 90%) of the women are veiled, a dramatic increase from the norm of even 5-10 years ago. However, as the call to prayer rings out five times each day from the minarets and loudspeakers of the city, very few women or men are praying, but are instead walking, talking, conducting business, and otherwise carrying on without regard to this brief "interruption". A traditional sign of piety, the veil is clearly not worn only by the pious and instead is a social obligation and pressure. Not only does this create a hypocracy in that the men are not required to show a similar modesty and piety, but in that it makes life for difficult for non-veiled women such as most westerners. Men from 8-80 years old feel they have the right to harass women (actually all women, though the emphasis is on non-veiled women) with simple comments ranging from "hello" or "welcome to Egypt" to following a woman down the street demanding her name, place of origin, calling her a "yankee" (my personal favorite), or asking her "how much?". While I understand that the general perception of western women is taht we are collectively promiscious and easy, but my new roommate Kari stated it best: "Oh yes, he found my weakness... when someone says "hello" to me, I get so turned on my pants start unbuttoning themselves. But really, this is just pathetic." Realistically, forget easy... we're not that gullible and we're all wearing way too much clothing to act in a loose manner.
An additional and unfortunate paradox of this behavior is that it creates a barrier between the women who are veiled and those who are not. That women walks in, hair gloriously shining in an obvious seductive manner and it isn't a matter just of propriety, but a personal threat against other women as she is "consciously seducing" the men around her.
The entire matter is very reminiscent of "My Short Skirt" from the Vagina Monologues--my clothing isn't an excuse for your lack of respect for women and moral conscience.

in Cairo

First allow me to explain the title of my blog. Ma'at is the Egyptian goddess of order and balance and justice; more of a concept than a goddess. but that is my goal for the semester. Plus, it's one of Ramses II's dozens of titles--
So here I am, after my first full day in Cairo. It has, as my school would say, an interesting introduction to "the land of the pharoahs". Nevermind that we managed to spend 20 minutes today harassing our academic advisor about the mockery they are making of themselves by saying that...
Yesterday, I arrived on Lufthansa after a relatively uneventful flight from JFK to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Cairo. Shan nearlly had a large-scale panic attack while on the plane, but we gave her chocolate and managed to survive plane travels, despite her utter terror and fear of planes...
Then just before landing, the plane made a 360 degree turn to approach Cairo International Airport from the south--as the left wing dipped down and the sun glinted off the wing into my eyes, I saw that site. Or, should I rephrase, those three sites. Sitting surrounded by urban sprawl on three sides was the Giza plateau and the three pyramids. For the first and only time, I tears welled into my eyes and I realized, before landing, that "this is it"!!! Cairo is worth it, if only for this reason. Later on, I would work hard to remind myself of this fact! They're huge and golden-brown, and even from 5000 feet they were the most impressive man-made structure I have ever seen from a plane.
And then we arrived in Cairo. Arrived in style, one might say... no customs emergencies (since they let all the AUC students go through the special "we don't check your luggage but we will check out your backsides" line). Shan got a marriage proposal, I just got all my luggage, and everyone got into a van with relative ease. We saw the scrawniest little dogs I have ever seen in the eternally long wait for the driver to have him smoking break--finally onboard and en route to Cairo itself, we were handed a manila envelope with a letter and a key... a key to apartment 18 at 24 Hussein Hegazi street, Garaden City, Cairo. A key that you, apparently have to force into turning 4.5 times and kick-box open. So, failing to realize this detail and with several bruised fingers, we found the doorman, he failed to open it, we used a random strangers mobile phone, it wouldn't let us call the phone number on the letter, and we finally we were wandering in front of the apartment building when the "Garden City apartment manager" miraculously appeared. Then disappeared for a couple hours, leaving us with an apartment, but no working phone, no idea how the heat works, a sketch elevator, a somewhat dirty bathroon, and no directions or room contracts. He reappeared for a matter of nanoseconds, enough to see his backside go down the stairs, before leaving for the evening again. (That orientation we were supposed to get didn't so much happen...) Anyhow, later that night we got a new roommate, Kari, who had lost her luggage in New York, and we all officially decided that we are going to create a reality tv program showcasing exactly what can happen to you if you go abroad.
So it's the end of day 2 and I can find campus, a fabulous bakery, the nearest coffee shop, the next 4 nearest coffee shops, the Radio Shack, a place to exchange travelers checks, a couple of great food stands, and I am suffering from mineral deficit due to lack of vegetable intake. Let's just hope this salad I am eating doesn't leave me on the floor.
I have two new roommates today, both of whom seem very nice, and Shannon and I cleaned the floor and de-cided the freezer, which had enough ice buildup to create an ingloo for one of the many mangy cats wandering the alleys and fire escapes of our apartment complex.
So, inshallah, the tour, etc. wil go well tomorrow, I won't get sick, and much love to all of you back home.