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..."