I read recently that the average blog goes about four months without being updated. I felt a lot better about my own lapses after this. I also found out how many blogs there are. Current reliable estimates are going to be understandably rough, but we think there are between 200 - 400 million English language blogs, with about 500 - 600 million readers. If you do the math, that means approximately 2 - 3 readers per blog. So, for you reliable three, more Egypt, and some observations:
Weather: It goes without saying, I suppose, that Egypt is hot and dry. Luxor and Aswan are two of the top ten driest cities on earth, with about .02 inches of rainfall per year, which is no surprise as they are essentially in the middle of the biggest desert on the planet, the Great Western Desert (3.3 million square miles), also known as the Sahara, which is not something Egyptians like it called, as "Sahara" means desert, so calling it the Sahara Desert is like saying ATM machine. The heat, as the character Juliette observed in the great movie "Cairo Time," is "remarkable." That's true, it is. Cairo wasn't so bad, but the southern cities really can heat up. October is "shoulder season," when temps are in the 90's and 100's, instead of the summer when 110 is cool. Doesn't sound that bad, right? Except remember, the sun is extremely strong, surrounding cliffs and rock absorb and reflect heat, and, away from the Nile, the air is very still.
In certain areas, mostly notably the West Bank of Luxor - which is where two main visited sites are, the Valley of the Kings (and Queens) and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, a multi-story columned building cut directly into the cliffs - the heat was, at least when I was there, overwhelming. I'd seen pictures of the temple and was so excited to go there - and don't get me wrong, it was magnificent - but the heat was so prominent, it was hard to get my mind on anything else. The heat just didn't show in the pictures I had been looking at, but it was as much of an element of the visit as the temple and the cliffs. We all quickly learned to seek shade wherever possible - in any courtyard, you can see a long string of people standing in the slim shade of an obelisk or column. One memorable moment occurred when I overheard a British woman agree with her companion, in her clipped impeccable accent, "Yes, it is quite warm, isn't it?" I laughed despite my sweating eyelids.
And let me mention the metric system. When I was a kid, we all heard about how inches and gallons were going away, replaced by the metric system, which of course never happened. In America. In Europe and elsewhere, they speak of kilos and Celsius and meters, which can make things tough. I don't know how to be impressed when someone tells me the Great Pyramid of Giza is 139 meters tall but I know how to feel when I hear it's 456 feet. When I came down with violent and miserable flu on my last day of travel and was desperate enough to see an airport doctor, I didn't know how alarmed to be when he said my temperature was 39. "39? What is that in Fahrenheit?" I asked. He said he didn't know and gave me a look that told me I was lucky he spoke English. Silly Americans thinking they are so advanced, with their uni-lingualness and their ancient measuring systems. I really wish we would switch over, because I don't know how to think metrically on my own.
Food: It's an issue for travelers. One must drink bottled water in Egypt, although one guide mentioned he can drink the local water, as his body is used to the particular parasites or whatnot. He's hearty because he's local. My travel clinic doctor advised me to eat only things that are piping hot OR peelable. I followed this advice, adding bread (because it was once cooked), as much as I could, and fared well. Once aboard the cruise ship, their triple-filtered internal closed water treatment system provides all the cooking water which means things were supposedly safer.
However, we did lunch in a couple of local restaurants and as the delicious looking plates of (cold) baba ganoush and hummus and spiced fava beans were placed in front of us along with the fresh hot pita (more chewy & spongy than here in the US, very good), I threw caution to the wind and dug in. I simply dosed myself daily with grapefruit seed extract, which has natural antibiotic, anti fungal and antiviral properties. It's also vile tasting, but it must have worked because the food was never an issue - I assume the flu I got was due to something else.
And the local food was delicious. Best baba ganoush I ever had. And the bread! You see it everywhere, in street stalls, piled in heaps and tossed in bags when bought. I saw a boy on a bicycle riding through the streets of Cairo with an enormous plank - the size of a larger dinner table - balanced on his head and piled high with pita. Most impressive! One night, we ate the hotel "Tex Mex" restaurant - the decor over over-the-top themed it was like being in Disneyland - and I got the veggie fajitas, which turned out to be a marvelous mix of peppers, onions, eggplant, carrots and zucchini. Best veggie fajitas I ever had....I had in Egypt. How odd, right?
On the flip side, in Cairo at one point, we passed by a market areas with food stalls, selling everything from dates (red, gold, brown!) to lemons (which they call limes) and limes (which they call lemons) to fish. The bins of fish and shrimp were, however, crawling with flies, so thick I could barely identify the thing underneath, and no one seemed to think much of that.
My attempts to explain what I do (for a living) were unsuccessful, as the entire idea of "supermarket" or "grocery store" was foreign - how to then describe an organic, upscale food supermarket with a focus on "local" and "fresh"? One guide finally said,"Ah, you mean expensive food?" I guess that was as good as an explanation as any - we're still trying to shake off "Whole Paycheck."
But what is Egypt REALLY like?
It was difficult to tackle describing the trip for this blog. Travel writing is, in general kind of hard, for many reasons. First, there's that cultural bias. You travel to see other places and things and to meet other people, yet everywhere you go, you carry around your own national prejudices - even I do, and I don't like to think of myself as "an American." Yet I do expect things like, say, free toilet paper in airports. I expect museums to be air conditioned and I certainly expect the artifacts to be labeled and, the valuable ones to be in climate controlled cases. The Egyptian Museum is a riot of ancient artifacts, all stuffed into a building, jumbled like a kitchen junk drawer - and, until very recently, their "security" was to, you know, lock the door at night. This from a place that has quite a few large artifacts that are solid gold (Tut's treasure is worth about a billion dollars). I expect my shrimp to not be crawling with flies and I expect the tap water to be useful for brushing my teeth and I expect people to stop at red lights.
But, I had to keep reminding myself, that's just me. One of the great joys of international travel is seeing what other people do and realizing that is a perfectly acceptable way of being in the world, despite it seeming personally unthinkable. I mean, Europeans get eight weeks of vacation and our piddly American two per year is unthinkable to them - and to me, too, but only intellectually. In practice, I work in August and merely long for summer off.
Yes, travel is about compassion. It's about looking at what seems like The Other, and then constantly re-discovering, over and over, that there is no Other. It's all Us, just Us in different forms, disguised. And that, ultimately, was the best approach to have, especially for me, traveling for the first time in a Muslim country, a developing country, an old country, etc: curiosity in what the disguises are in that part of the world. We play this game - the game of "everything is the same; everything is so different." How are the Egyptians, modern and ancient, recognizable as like me, and how are they not?
I'm a big believer in the idea that the universal reality is simply All That Is playing the great game of hide and seek - Everything That Exists broke itself up into lots of Little Bits of Everything - because it's more fun and interesting that way - and the human game is to go through life and learn how to recognize the All That Is behind the Little Bits. Egypt is lots and lots of amazing, mind-blowing Little Bits - from the pyramids to the temples to the mummified cats and birds and crocodiles. From the crazy aggressive vendors that surround you at every souk (and every attraction ends in a souk) to the old man at the carpet making school who sat outside repairing carpets and, when I spoke Arabic to him, smiled a toothless grin from ear to ear and insisted I, overweight as I am, share half his bread with him. From the guides who just wanted to give their spiel and get a tip to the guides who wanted the Americans to see the roots of Christian myth and lore in Egyptian myth and lore and thereby demonstrate how we really are all one underneath it all, it was all these terrific Little Bits. And travel, for me, is this fascinating dance - watching before my very eyes as Little Bits fit right into the Whole.
Egypt was where I encountered some of the most foreign Little Bits, and the ones we have been taught to be scared of, unfortunately. I won't go into the political and social relationships - that is big enough for an entire other blog - but suffice to say, it's complicated. Egypt has experienced tourist terrorism - those guys with machine guns everywhere, the guide books drum into you, are there for your protection - and yet it also relies on tourism. The pyramids and temples and tombs are its resources.
They make every effort of enclose and comfort the travelers who expect it - the five star hotels in the middle of poor areas, the air conditioned shuttle buses that whisk you from site to site, the porters that never let you touch your own luggage, and the waiters that are at your elbow from appetizer to dessert and coffee. Part of it, you can sense, is service that expects to be rewarded: tips, yes - and you can feel like a walking dollar sign sometimes - but understandably. You have the money and they don't. But part of it is also genuine friendliness and national pride - you can't argue with it: the stuff in Egypt is the oldest and greatest in the world. Their history is the story of civilization, the center of it all. They want you to come away, having experienced a trip of a lifetime.
And they succeeded. Our guide for the two days in Cairo, Ayman, exemplifies what was best about the trip. He was full of knowledge, humor and travel expertise - yes, he got commissions on anything we bought at the papyrus factory and rug weaving schools he took us too - and probably on the personalized cartouche he made it very easy for me to buy (you browse a catalogue over lunch, he calls it in, they deliver right to your hotel). But you could tell that his main passion was to transform people. He showed us the art on the Mastaba of Ti with such excitement in his voice: "Look, habibi, at this. The boy holding the baby calf, just the way we do now." (Habibi, meaning "dears" or "beloved" was a nickname often given to tour groups. "Habibi, this way! Habibi, listen now!")
Ayman took opportunities to explain Christian, Muslim, ancient Egyptian religions and their relationship to one another. He spoke of the gods - Isis, Maat, Nut - as being different personifications on the one god, as people in this day and age worship various versions, but it's all the same god underneath. He spoke about the people of Egypt, and the ways in which some things are still the same. He was really touching on the universality of the human condition (in a subtle way); he was doing his best to show us the Little Bits and see if we can go home to America, and talk not about the "Middle East" that we'd seen, with shrouded women and shocking plumbing, but the world of wonders and the people that are warm, friendly, proud and kind, and how they are not, after all, so different than the rest of us. In our case (we were a small group of six, already more intellectually aware and liberal-minded than the average American), he may have been preaching to the choir, but the effort was glorious to see. And he did it well. When Ayman was gone and we moved south, I missed him. I still miss him. I think of how he shook his head, incredulous, when I popped out with a new Arabic sentence, integrating words he or others had taught me, and I feel like I've got a friend somewhere on the other side of the world.
So, I've got more to say - yes, I will eventually get to describing some of the actual temples and tombs - and I've told you about the things travelers are curious about - the weather and the food and the little cultural differences - but the main impression I had is that Egypt is a wonderful land, faraway, like a place on another planet, and after I was there for a day, staring wide-eyed at the astounding things around me in a place that felt so strange, I also felt quite at home. It was all so different, yet it was all the same. In the end, I loved it. I loved the place, I loved the people, I loved being invited to see and share in a different culture, and I am grateful for all the people there, from the porters to the chefs to the guides to the guards. Sure, I was paying for it, but I was still allowed in, and any time you get to be inside another culture, it's an honor. It's an honor to be able to check out their Little Bits, and return home feeling that there's one more part of the world that won't ever look like The Other to you again.
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