Bazaar Egypt

 

All of Eygpt is a bazaar.  If you do not come home with mementos, it is not a fault of the Egyptians.  They give you every opportunity to purchase gifts.  The spread their wears out on the deck during a felucca ride, they follow you back to the bus yelling Obamma Obamma, and they tell you what pretty eyes you have.  All towns have a bazaar and there will not be a Starbucks or Cinnabon to be found.  Wish I could say the same for KFC.  They seem to be everywhere.  I saw a man who pressed clothes by standing on a iron and spraying water from his mouth over the cloth.  I have been buying fresh spices from the markets in Seattle, but the cumin here is more complex and  better than any I have ever purchased.  There is cheap bread for the poor in racks along the alleys.  I would buy more, but haggling over price is only fun once, but the price drop on goods is pretty dramatic as you head towards the bus.  One carved Onyx statues that was 75 dollars at the start of a trip down the bazaar was five dollars by the time we reached the bus.  Unfortunately all of the handicrafts appear to be made in China.

Photos of the Bazaar

Into The Western Desert

 

Setting on the deck of the ship, looking west towards the Sahara, I really wanted to travel into it.  Ideally, it would be a eight hour hike, with a night of camping and then returning to luxury on the ship.  Guess I will have to save that for my next trip, but I did get to go about a mile into the desert.  It was enough to give me an idea of what it would be like. I was pleased at the golden eagles that we saw and extremely pleased that a pack of vultures wasn’t following me around.  I would also recommend doing it in January and not June when the temperature is 130.

Photos of Western Sahara

Temple Art

 

The colors of the art in the temple are amazing when you consider that they are three to four thousand years old.  The really vivid ones in the Valley of the Kings can’t be photographed, but there are two or three thousand Bedouins standing around begging to sell you a picture postcard.  Some of them look like they were painted yesterday. The style is constrained by the fact that there are really writing and words tend to lose their meaning when the letters get changed. 

 

Pictures of temple art

Ships of th Desert

If the camel is the ship of the desert, then the donkey is the leaky row boat that you take to get groceries, haul the kids around, and lend to the relatives.  There were donkeys available for most excursions of any length into the western desert.  Our love of the little create was best demonstrated by our preference to walk.  But one day, when the next temple was a over a mile away and that way was very sandy, we rode camels.  A creature that looks like it is always smiling, but is really just preparing to spit at you. They get their name not from the distances that they travel over the oceans of sand, but rather from their peculiar walk.  The move the front and back leg on the same side at the same time which gives them a rolling gait just like the rolling on a ship.  While no one seems to have been made sea sick by a camel, it is only with God’s blessing that we were not thrown to the ground.  Still, that one time, it was better than walking.

 

Photos of Camel Ride

Nubian Temples

Cruising is not just lying back and drifting through time.  Every day we have one or two shore excursions.  Abu Simbel, Wadi es-Sebua, Amada, Kalabsha. There are temples of the old dynasty and temples from the Greco Roman times.  The Greco roman temples being the new comers since they are only 2500 years old, but still quite lovely in their youth.

Pictures of Nubian Temples

Cruising Nubia

Cruising is as simple as walking up on the sun deck after breakfast and setting down in a chair.  The weather is ideal.  The temperature in the mid seventies and a breeze blows just strong enough to keep the bugs away.  There is a bar if you need a drink and it is nearly always the cocktail hour, high tea or a meal time.  The occasional fisherman goes by and there is always the blue water and red of the Sahara desert to entertain you.  And sometimes you are so rested that you intentionally get up to watch a sunrise.  You would have to hide to miss the sunsets.

 

Typical Cruise photos

Nubian Palaces

Nubia is a land of gold, palaces  and beautiful maidens .We bought some gold, saw a few beautiful maidens and are traveling on a floating palace.  Nubia stretches from the first cataract of the Nile , Aswan, to roughly the second cataract of the Nile at the Sudan boarder. Lake Nasser covers most of the original Nubian villages.  We have boarded  a ship to cruise lake Nasser.  It is luxurious, we are pampered, and we liked it.  Only five ships are allowed to cruise on Lake Nasser and each of them only has fifty cabins.  We pull ashore at the monuments  and the only people there are from our ship and the monument guards are present.  Our first stop at Abu Simbel is less than twenty miles from Sudan.  The ship has two sun decks, a main lounge and staff to bring  wine.  The temperature is in the mid seventies and the sun keeps saying “take a nap.”  When we return to our state room, the cabin attendant has arranged our bed linen into swans, hearts or crocodiles.

 

Photos of Lake Nasser Cruise boat

Muhammad Ali Mosque

 

The Islamic portion of Cairo was called Babylon by the ancient Greek/Egyptian Pharaohs. It is filled with wonderful old Mosques, but we went to the Muhammad Ali Mosque which was built in the late 1800s.  It is run by the Department of Antiquities , which means that it is not a working Mosque.  Hence all of the tourists are able to enter it.  Despite all of that, it is very , very beautiful.  And even though it was not used for services, women still had to be modestly dressed.  They had beautiful green robes for women who weren’t modestly dressed and we all had to remove our shoes or put covers over them when we entered the Mosque.

 

 

Photos of Muhammad Ali Mosque

Old Cairo

There are two types of pedestrians in modern Cairo, the quick and the dead. Our tour guide said that the safest way to cross the street is to take a taxi and when we went one block too the Egyptian Museum, we took the bus. But  old Cairo with its shaded allies and old door ways maintains its  medieval charm. The streets are two narrow even for the donkey carts. The streets are cool and  are relatively uncrowned  once  the tour groups leave.  The Coptic churches are beautiful and as the Coptics say, “they were Christian before there was Christianity.”  Egypt is about twenty percent Christian and they are proud of the bible stories that take place in Egypt.  It is a secular country, not Moslem and you will find Mosques, Christian Churches and synagogues  on the same block. We met a woman named Barbara who’s house was a converted  Christian crypt from the 14th century and I got to see my first banana tree. 

 

 

Pictures of Old Cairo

Monuments great and small

Before going to Giza to see the pyramids, we toured a few famous sites in the Cairo vicinity.   We saw the step pyramid at Saqqara, a giant statue of Ramses II, and of course the great pyramids.  And in between, we got to spend some time in the countryside and visit a school for teaching people how to make carpets. The country side and city are the Egyptian equivalent of red and blue states. The cities contain the educated people and the country side the poor and poorly educated.

 

The people in the country side tend to invest in children, houses for their children to live near them or more farm land.  You see a lot of uncompleted houses in the country.  That is because the farmers build a little when they have some extra money.  They do not have to pay taxes until it is declared finished and some houses never get finished.  We visited a school for weavers, but all of the students were in their early teens.  It is not suppose to be child labor, but it sure looks like it. But the rugs were beautiful and we were told the children make a good wage wile learning a trade.  they can leave at any time they wish to start their own studio.

 

More pictures of the country  side

 

Each monument that we visited today is considered to be the first, most beautiful, or best example of something.  Saqqara had a step pyramid which was the first pyramid developed in Egypt as well as the first stone building completed by anybody.  Memphis had a statue of Ramses II which is considered to be the best in all of Egypt.  And Giza has the pyramids, Sphinx, and the most determined peddlers in all of Egypt.  But it was all pretty incredible to me.

 

Pictures of Monuments

King Tut and more

Today we went to the Cairo museum, which was filled with wonderful stuff.  You will have to take my word for it.  They don’t allow you to take pictures.  I had always thought that Egyptian statues were stiff and thick.  It turns out that was intentional and not due to a lack of skill.  In the ancient Egyptian religion, the departed persons spirit would return to a favorite place if there were a statue to reside in.  The statues were made to last for the eternal life, so they didn’t have arms extended or legs where they would easily get broken off.   You do not have to worry about starving in Egypt.  All meals start with thin bread and an assortment of spreads.  You can get full before they ever bring your meal. The yogurts and fresh fruit make a great breakfast. At the end of the day we went to the Kahn el-Khalili bazaar.

Our guide told us what the real price of items were and turned us lose to bargain with the sellers.

Pictures of Khan el-Khalili bazaar

Tired, Wired, but not Expired

I am lying in my bed composing this.  I am  tired, but can not close my eyes.  I am suppose to be resting before dinner, but might thoughts are ranging all over the place. It is the gift of Jetlag.  Having spent 16 of the last 24 hours in a space so confining, that it would be outlawed by the Geneva conventions if it were a cell, I am awed by the bright light and sound. I have been removed from the sensory deprivation chamber know as jet liner and thrust into a world of flashing lights, loud sounds and a upside down set of logic.  I appear to have followed Alice down the rabbit hole and we definitely didn’t come out in Kansas.  It is hard to described my entry into Egypt.  We had just spent the last ten hours with the blinds down on the aircraft windows.  The airline pretended it was night and the passengers pretended to sleep.  The light was so bright on opening the windows that I couldn’t look directly out the window.  Below me, the blue Mediterranean turned to bright green as we crossed over the Nile delta.  I have flown over Iowa and looked out on green corn fields for as far as you can see.  All  it ever evoked was a yawn, but as we crossed the delta and I could see the  sun on the Rosetta branch of the Nile and below were the sites of the library of Alexandria whose light house which was one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. In twenty minutes I would be flying over the pyramids.  You can’t do that in Iowa.

While driving into Cairo on the elevated roadway, we could see that many of the houses had what looked liked construction rubble on the roof.  In a country where money is scare, nobody wants to pay for anything twice.   In Egypt if you have something you no longer need, but think it could be useful in the future, it goes up on the roof for storage. It was our guide said,” a bad habit of the Egyptians.”  Many of the houses were four story apartments.  Here you just keeping adding floors to the house, so that your children and their families can live with you. In Egypt, life revolves around the family.  So all of that construction rubble will eventually be used.
Our guide asked if any of us were returning to Egypt and probably a third of our group were returnees.  There is an old Egyptian saying “If you drink from the Nile, you will return to Egypt.”  There is an old guide book saying that states, “if you drink from the Nile, you will probably go home in a coffin“, which as I think about it, is probably more comfortable than the ride over. You can stretch out your full length in it and take a nap. Perhaps it is a good metaphor for a place where in ancient times, they spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that your ride into the after life would be better than your life on earth.  Below is a picture of the Nile from the restaurant where we went to dinner