Cario Again

January 24, 2007

Cairo, Egypt

To continue with the story from yesterday, while Brad was busy making friends with his Egyptian pals on the beach, the rest of us, Ambrice, Jess, Ann, myself, Sam, and Chris all decided to order hamburgers. After 45 minutes they had not arrived and by that time we were all getting pretty antsy. Eventually the servers came out with plates of club and tunafish sandwiches, which of course we had not ordered. They looked annoyed at us for refusing the food, but it was not even close to the right order. After nearly going out of our minds with hunger, the hamburgers arrived. None of the burgers matched our specifications for condiments, etc, but by then we were so hungry that we scarfed them down anyway. Nothing remained on our plates afterwards. From 5:00 to 5:10, and that was it. All of our hamburgers had gone.

Soon after we had finished Brad entered the hotel and proceeded to tell us about his conversation with the Egyptians. Since they did not speak much English, most of what was said consisted of hand gesturing and broken fragments. What he did find out was that the Egyptians liked Americans, disliked Bush, loved soccer and WWE, and were VERY interested in American girls. On that topic, Brad wisely decided to play dumb, but he said it was a very enlightening experience.

After that, we went to the happy hour at the restaurant, where we ran into a British gentleman who was very nice and told us all about how much better Egypt was than the UK, where everything was “bloody expensive”. We couldn’t help but agree. He gave us drink recommendations (Dinah Washington) and told us that the next place he was moving to was Zambia, where he could live next door to elephants and his wife could teach at an English school. He was also a teacher, and taught everything, “before the schools got bad”, and said that living in Egypt was a wonderful experience.

After politely excusing ourselves, we went and sat with the group and sipped our cocktails and hung out until later, when we went to an internet café to (finally) send emails and post to the blog, went back to the hotel and listened to this awful Egpytian woman sing “No woman I cry”, upon which I went to the small gym and tried to work out using Kilos, a kind of trial and error experience, and went to bed

Today we were roused bright and early, grabbed a huge breakfast (this was the first appetite I had for breakfast since I had gotten sick) and headed back to Cairo. The bus ride was fun, getting to bond with the group and discussing the prospect of future adventures.

We arrived in Cairo and went straight to the Egyptian museum, which features the funerary mask of king Tut. I was amazed to be standing inches away from a likeness of the young king. And was equally amazed at the vast array of wealth in his tomb. All of his jewlrey seemed to feature bird feathers inlayed on small pieces of gold, and strung together in ever-larger arcs. The coffins were wonderfully designed and decorated, and there were three nesting coffins of gold in the museum. Everyone was so intricate. The whole body of one was comprised of this elaborate feather pattern, with wings extending over the body’s shoulders, and a huge necklace and hieroglyphics everywhere. Absolutely stunning. I cannot believe how much craftsmanship must have gone into everything, and Tut’s tomb was supposedly one of the most impoverished of them all. He had not lived for more than about 10-15 years as pharaoh.

We also got to see some sculptures from the reign of Akenaton, the grandfather? of Tut. This guy was kind of a maverick in Egyptian history. He tried to overthrow the power of the priests of Amun and start his own cult, based upon the energy of the Sun Disk, ATON. He moved the capital to Amarna, and allowed artisans an unprecedented amount of artistic freedom. As a result, portraits of him show him as a kind of potbellied, androgynous figure with a distended head. Not a very pretty picture. This Amarna style is extremely distinctive, and was immediately reversed when Akenaton was assassinated and the priests of Amun placed Tut and later the priest Ay on the throne. But it is interesting, considering so much of the rest of Egyptian art is uniform.

Our tour guide took us through the rest of the museum, pointing out some distinctive statues and telling stories. However, by then most of us were so tired and hungry that we simply wanted the trip to be over. We were in the museum about four hours, with very little time to look and formulate ideas for ourselves. I hope that we have more opportunities to view things SLOWLY during the rest of the trip.

Upon returning to the hotel in Cairo, we finally got to go to the pool! We could only feel a kind of pity for everyone else back home, who at about 5 pm Cairo time, were just entering their 10 am classes. Many of us spent a long time in the hot tubs, sauna, and steam rooms, not to mention a short swim for me in the pool. I was sore from lifting the previous day, however, and did not swim long. After that, it was a dinner at the pizza place we had been to before. We tried to go to a local Egyptian place—one of the ones that has booths that are really low and more couch-like, low lighting, and heavy amounts of flavored tobacco wafting in the air—but the restaurant was full, and instead we made reservations for the following night. TWO nights in one hotel. We haven’t done that in a while and I cannot wait to actually LEAVE my stuff in my room for once.

After dinner, we came back to the hotel and a group of us played music and talked and joked and hung out. I am glad that the group is bonding as well as it is, although I am anxious to get to know people better. I feel like I haven’t really opened up to anyone yet, and being able to let my guard down will be kind of a relief. Brad, it turns out, has quite a good chill music collection, and I am making a mental note to borrow some music from him at some point. Change from my collection would be nice. Anna Marie too, although hers seems more like eclectic old school stuff than chill music, to me.

That’s all for now, goodnight.