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.