It’s been a busy week since returning from Egypt. Within a few hours after finishing my last blog post, I found an email from the choir reminding me that we had our Easter/Spring Concert coming up in only a few days. We had two shows with the Amman Symphony Orchestra, and one of the “kid’s shows” that we’re known for throughout the city (not really, but we did have a host of orphan children that came down from the Hamzet Wussl orphanage to see us).

The choir concerts were held in the Jordan Museum, a large structure down in Wadi Abdoun within easy walking distance from my house (in fact, I can see it down below me when I stand on my roof). The building has been under construction for years with a grant from Japan, but only recently was given minor details like electricity and a roof. Just like last year’s performance in a half-constructed Maronite church, Dozan wa Awtar seems to have a talent for picking out interesting new venues that we can literally say no one has ever seen before.

We’re really lucky to have some great professionally-trained soloists with us, like Joe and Allyss. Their skill really shines in our presentation of Gabriel Faure’s “Requiem” The video of Libera Me below, courtesy of my friend Maya, really showcase’s Joe’s baritone vocal talent.

We all look pretty serious in that one. To switch things up a notch, here’s a video from our last show on Friday, where instead of black suits we’re in loose white outfits with multicolored strips of cloth all over us. The main idea of this, said our director Shireen, was that we could help the kids learn about different vocal parts by showing them visual cues. You’ll see some of the kids raising up little pieces of paper during the video; earlier in the concert one of the activities Shireen had scheduled was to raise one color when they heard men singing, and the other when they heard women. Apparently they liked that so much they decided to do it for the duration of the concert.

Yeah, that’s me in the front row, probably the first and last time I’ve been featured in that position. Being 1.9 meters tall tends to relegate you to the rear. But, I got the speaking role because I was the only male choir member who showed up to the kid’s concert planning meeting; it was me and a whole group of altos. I was apparently outvoted on what color each section should wear; in order to challenge “gender stereotypes” it was revealed that all of the manly, deep-voiced bass section would be wearing hot pink sashes. Sigh.

A few days afterward, Dan and I went down to check out the first Souq al Balad, a cooperative craft and organic food market that Entity Green is deeply involved in organizing. Surprisingly enough, it was also held in the Jordan Museum, on the other side of the courtyard where I had sung just the day before. The weather was beautiful, and with picnic tables out under the shaded and vine-covered terrace, it was like we had opened up a swanky new restaurant right there in the middle of downtown Amman.

All of my coworkers had come down before Dan and I (lucky folks with cars) and could be found browsing the selection of crafts, coffees, and natural soaps, vegetables, and honeys. Lillie, our primary organizer, was handing out flyers to visitors and Winkie could be found chatting with some of her friends and hooking together a new rug. Aaron and I sampled some amazing cheesecake (I eventually went back and bought four more slices; at a mere JD 1.25 for American-style desserts I thought I was dreaming) and some of my fellow choristers were lured by my invitations that I’d given to them during the concert rehersals (after all, they knew exactly where to go!)

SEO time! If you’re in the neighborhood, check EGT’s extremely well-designed webpage for more information and directions to the museum.

Edit: February 1, 2013: Well, the link above no longer works; the website I wrote back in 2009 has been taken down as EGT no longer does training. I’ve also fixed the videos so that they’re self-hosted, instead of using Facebook’s finicky program. Hope you don’t mind, Maya!

Well, I’ve made it back home to Jordan, and I can finally start working on polishing up these blog entries and eventually hoping that they’ll be good enough to make public, someday. The house looks good; I think it was cleaned at some point during my absence. That’s one of the many advantages of having a housemate again after a year of living alone; someone with a keener, more critical eye than my own that can look around say “this place is a STY.”

Yesterday, for my last day in Egypt, I played it pretty close to home again. I spent the morning taking a second tour of the Egyptian Museum again, getting there as early as possible so I could try to see everything without feeling rushed. I clung to the hope that perhaps I would be allowed to photograph if I came in at “just the right time;” I’d read in WikiTravel that if you asked, you could take photos without flash from 9 AM through noon. Unfortunately, this turned out to be untrue, so I contented myself with wandering the massive warehouse of antiquities again and trying to get as many mental pictures as I could.

This time, I found the “mummified animals of Egypt” exhibit on the second floor. Two rooms filled with shelves of shriveled animal mummies or “faux mummies,” or dummies stuffed with straw or a piece of an animal that the poorer Egyptians would have used in place of a true sacrifice. One entire wall was taken up with the massive corpses of two crocodile mummies, deified by the ancients, as well as one of the numerous Apis Bull mummies that had a shrine and burial chamber of their own. The sign described the mummification process of the bulls as “an enema of turpentine and acids that was introduced rectally to the animal.” Geez, and if this is how they treat their deities…

As I'm from a sheep/goat farm, I couldn't resist stamping a forbidden photo of some of Egypt's gold-plated sacrificial rams

I watched the time closely, because I had something special planned for that evening. I didn’t mention it in last week’s blog post, but as I was riding the metro back to the hostel from the train station after my return from Alexandria, I met a Sudanese pastor. He offered me the seat next to him, and as I sat down gratefully with my heavy luggage, he introduced himself as Pastor Isaac. I hadn’t been expecting to meet a pastor, especially not one that spoke English. He explained that he was a minister for the Sudanese refugee camps near Hadayek al-Maadi. He gave me his business card, and before Haitham and I hurried to the train later that evening to get to Luxor, I had the time to quickly jot out an email to him asking what his church was doing for Easter Sunday. His reply was that they had a service on Sunday night in Arabic, but with an English translator.

I met Isaac outside the subway station in Hadayek al-Maadi just after the sun went down. He was wearing a silver-gray suit and embraced me happily. We chatted as he led me through the unpaved streets, lanterns glowing in the windows around us. He told me that this was a Sudanese children’s school we were going to, and that his actual church was somewhere else in the city. He paused in his explanation to shout angrily at a teenager on a scooter that roared past us, almost knocking me over, then calmly adjusted his tie and directed me to turn left down a small side street, where a tall young African welcomed us into a bright little parlor office.

The young man introduced himself as Tony, the principal of the children’s school, and he and I talked a little bit about the conflict in Sudan while Isaac left to go and prepare the next room for the church service. A group of people were just leaving from it, and Tony explained to me that on a night as important as Easter, they actually had 3-4 services in a row with as many congregations!

Tony points to the city of Juba, South Sudan - what is hoped to be the future capitol of the new Christian nation

The next two hours were filled with dancing, preaching, and song. Isaac led me proudly over to a chair in the very front row, and asked me to get up and tell the congregation a little bit about myself and how I found myself in Egypt. The translator, Augustine, didn’t seem to have any problems switching between translating my English into Arabic and the pastor’s Arabic into English. I told them about my work in Jordan with refugees and how the plights were similar, though the religion differed. Isaac stood up with tears in his eyes and said “thank you for coming to Cairo, brother!” In the second video below, Isaac leads a sermon, filled with a lot of the phrase, “al-Meseeh qam!” which means, “The Messiah is risen!” And although I didn’t get it in the video, the congregation responds, “Bal-haqeeq, qam!” which roughly translates, of course, to “He has risen, indeed!”

Near the end of the service, as one of the deacons was giving rapid announcements to the congregation, a little girl separated from her mother and crawled up onto the chair next to me, gazing at me with wide eyes. She couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old. I got out my pen and drew a cross on my hand. She stared at my hand, then at her own, and then reached out determinedly and started to scrub away at my palm. She would look at her own skin, as if measuring the proper tone, and then in confusion at my own. After a half minute of that, she settled for just treating my palm like a pad of paper and decided to fill it in with the black ink from my pen.

After the service, a little boy appeared in the doorway carrying a tray filled with old-fashioned glass bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew, and the congregation passed them around as they sat and talked to each other. I asked Isaac and Augustine how many members of the congregation weren’t regular Arabic speakers, so that they needed to use translation. Isaac looked surprised. “Oh no, Zach, they all speak Arabic fine. I brought Augustine up to translate just for you!” I want to say that I was amazed that they had gone through all that trouble for me, but after all the kindness they’d already shown me, I merely matched Augustine’s firm handshake with one of my own and thanked him solemnly for his kind service.

Tony waved us goodbye from the door of his school as Isaac walked me back to the subway station. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a subway token for me. “In case you need one to get back, brother!” As always, the kindness of people who have so little never ceases to amaze me. I thanked him for his offer, but showed him that I had already purchased my return ticket before I had come down. He hugged me again, and I went through the turnstile. The Arab guard on the other side stared narrow-eyed at the tall, jet-black man waving me goodbye and asked me, “What did that Sudani want? Was he bothering you?” I drew myself up and looked down my nose at the little man. “That ‘Sudani’ is a friend of mine and was saying goodbye to me.”

This morning was preoccupied with packing and trying to fit everything back into my suitcase again after being strewn about the floor for many days. The Canadian Hostel, to thank me for my days of patronage, had procured a taxi for me to the airport, free of charge. They made a conservative estimate on the length of time it would take to get through Cairo morning traffic, but it only took 20 minutes. That could have had something to do with the fact that my driver was a typical driver in the sense that he shucked and weaved throughout the traffic like a maniac and I just did my best to focus on my breakfast tami’yah and try to block out what was going on around me in the streets or how many old ladies we’d just run over.

My flight back to Amman was shared with a good-natured Circassian, a native Jordanian who had emigrated to America many years ago but was back in the Middle East to visit some family. Shigam explained to me with amusement how Arabs were always unfailingly shocked at his perfect usage of Arabic…at least until they discovered he was a Circassian and not a “Westerner”. As he and I sipped complimentary beers (he had charmed free beer for us from of the Eastern-European flight attendant women with his knowledge of Russian and Czech) he explained that Amman was actually originally founded by Circassians, who then later helped the first rulers of Jordan move to the area. In return, Shigam told me that Circassian families had always enjoyed great power and prestige in the Hashemi government of Jordan, serving as trustworthy treasurers and guards of the highest rank. “The kings here; they don’t even trust their own people with money and state secrets so they just have us take care of things,” he laughed. Even after the plane touched down and I had retrieved my luggage, he offered to take me back to Amman in his taxi, which I gratefully accepted.

And now, as it’s getting dark and the familiar Call to Prayer is sounding the sunset sulaah, it’s time for me to wrap up this entry and finally get some sleep!

After spending every day in taxis or trains for over the past week, I wanted to spend my last few days in Egypt a little closer to home, or that is to say the little nest of dusty/sandy clothing and discarded tami’yah wrappers. Obviously, the fact that you’re reading these entries a month later means I certainly wasn’t typing up blog articles; I was basically sightseeing and sleeping – and that’s about it!

Islamic Cairo, as the tour book calls it, was only a 10 minute taxi ride from the hostel. The driver, seeing that I was a foreigner who spoke some Arabic, started gesticulating wildly and speaking in guttural accented classical Arabic about how the war in Iraq was a sign of Western arrogance, as I stared at him helpless and attempted to point out to him that I only spoke street Arabic. Needless to say, he was helpful in pointing me in the right direction to Khan al-Khalili, the famous market that Haitham and I had passed through briefly last week at night.

Fishawi Coffeehouse in the Khan is one of the few places where you can actually find twice as many white people than Arabs

After seeing these semi-enclosed markets, packed with tourists, both in Jerusalem and Damascus, there wasn’t really much new to see in Khan al-Khalil, unless you really like arguing and haggling over prices and bumping into people. I winced at the coffee prices, then chuckled to myself when I realized that it was “merely” the price of a cup of coffee in America, as opposed to the dirt-cheap prices I’ve come to expect throughout the Arab world. It was one of those moments when I wondered, yet again, how I will eventually cope and readjust to returning to America…someday.

This master smith on Muezz al-deen street makes the steel, bronze, and iron tops for church steeples and mosque minarets. A few were sitting outside his door that were taller than I am!

It was only after I found my way out of the narrow streets of the market and back onto a road that things quieted down and I was able to walk without being jostled. Muizz al-Deen street must have one of the highest mosque-per-square-meter densities in the world; it seemed that every few steps would have me passing by another ancient stone building with robed doorkeepers inviting me to step inside and take a look around. As with all religious sites I’ve ever seen in the Middle East, there are no charges to enter ancient mosques and churches, but of course they wouldn’t mind being tipped a bit if they show you around.

The simply-adorned tomb of the sheikh Qalaun, in the mosque/madrassa that now bears his name

I stopped by the huge Mosque of al-Hakim at the end of Muizz al-Deen street, and was treated to a tour by the “caller,” or mu’ezzin who makes the Call to Prayer five times a day from the minaret. I was tempted to ask him and the imam (a large man who sat by the door smoking argeilleh and grunting at tourists) whether the stories about al-Hakim were true, that he was a bloodthirsty ruler of Cairo during the Fatmid era and killed at a whim, but decided against it. Mahmoud the mu’ezzin was happy to lead me around, and I explained to him that I’d tip him more if I was a real American tourist as opposed to a teacher visiting from Jordan. “How much did he give?” grunted the imam as we came back to the door. “Only ten pounds,” muttered Mahmoud. The imam clicked his tongue, snorted dismissively and went back to his argeilleh. I should have mentioned to Mahmoud earlier that I could understand Arabic.

Mahmoud proudly told me that his mosque had held as many as 4,000 worshipers during the Ramadan season, and looking down its huge carpeted expanse, I could believe it

As I turned back to retrace my steps, I could see the ancient wall separating the old city from new Cairo only a hundred meters away. My book said that sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d find someone’s palms to grease and they’d let you up onto the top of the wall to look out over the city. Sure enough, a few guys were smoking argeilleh conveniently closed to the large door in the gate, held shut with a padlock that just begged to be opened. One winked at me and asked me how I was doing, to which I responded in Arabic and told them that I was a “recently arrived student in Cairo.” I know what you want to see, that man laughed, and after I slipped him a five, he unlocked the door and led me upstairs to photograph from the rooftops as much as I wanted. When I accidentally included him in a video, he got all nervous and said something rapidly that sounded on part with, “what, you work for the intelligence or something?” He vanished soon afterward and left me to find my own way out of the twisting tower. The Americans on the train a few nights ago were right – bakhsheesh bribes really do work, if you know how to apply them in just the right way!

As the sun started to go down, I returned to central Cairo to visit the towering Al-Jezeera tower. “Jezeera,” besides being a relatively well-known Arabic news channel, means “island” in Arabic. Sure enough, the shimmering lattice-like structure is located on the well-to-do central island of Cairo, surrounded by a beautiful tropical jungle. Wikipedia can do a better job of showing night pictures of this lovely tower, which Haitham had decried a week earlier for its rapid price inflation. “It used to be 5 pounds to go up to the top of the tower…now it’s 70 pounds!” I had to admit that it was rather steep, but then I remember how much the Empire State Building costs to go up, and I decided not to complain too much.

The eagle on it looks like it would be better suited for the Federal Reserve building or something

The views were great (though predictably polluted and cloudy), especially to watch the sun go down and the city’s lights snap to life, but I wish that the young men wearing ridiculous pharaonic headdresses would realize that no, we do not need to pay someone to take our picture on the top of a tower. A man took my camera from me gently, photographed me several times, and then handed it back to me. He then stood and waited expectantly. I told him, “We’re surrounded by tourists, my friend; any one of them will take a picture of me for free. Sorry, but you’re not getting any bakhsheesh from me.” A few young American college tourists asked me questions about the Middle East and whether all the countries demanded constant tips. “Not my Jordan,” I said proudly. “The taxis have meters, the buildings are sparkling white, and you can breath the air.”

I glanced at my watch and realized that it was 7 o’clock, and I was about to miss the evening Easter service at the Coptic church I had visited a few days earlier. I raced back to the metro station and got to Mar Girgis as quickly as possible. When I entered, there were surprisingly few congregants. I took a seat at the back of the church and smelled the familiar eye-stinging incense. After chanting in original Coptic for a bit, a few young men at the front of the church got out some bells and chimes and began to rhythmically beat them together. It sounded nice though, and because I wasn’t sure what was considered appropriate for a church service, I risked only a few seconds of video.

I saw Monica, the girl I had met when I visited before, seated a few rows ahead of me. She, like most of the other women in the church, were wearing long shawls covering their hair. I’ve noticed at Arabic churches in Jordan, Arab women do the same, highlighting the ancient religious sense of propriety regardless of which Abrahamic faith you choose. It reminds me yet again of the utter hypocrisy of the French government’s decree to ban the hijab when I’m sure they would never think of doing the same to a bunch of nuns in their habits or Arab Christian women going to church…or at least, none that I’ve read about.

I stayed for about half an hour to listen to the songs, which merged fluidly between somewhat-recognizable Arabic Christian hymns and completely-unintelligible Coptic chants. I asked a boy near the gate why there were so few people there, and he said that since the service went until midnight, people almost never stay for the entire thing but instead come and go throughout the evening.

Back at the hostel now, I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do tomorrow for my last day in Cairo, but hopefully I’ll make the most of it!

It was amazing to sleep in a bed again last night! After three straight nights of sleeping in trains, in buses, and folded up into weird-smelling couches, there’s no place like home – or at least, my new adopted home for the next few days, the Canadian Hostel. My big private room ($20 a night) has two big beds, one of which is being used for my luggage, and a coffee table and farsha-like mattresses on the ground for kneeling on. It has air-conditioning and a window that looks out onto a landing with places to hang my wet laundry – I brought enough clothes, however, that I’ve only needed to use that for my towels.

Where was I? Coming back from Aswan on my luxurious (comparatively speaking) first class train ticket. As luck would have it, I ran into two guys, almost my age, that were coming back from their own sightseeing weekend in Aswan, an American and a Mexican. The two of them had been living in Egypt for the past 9 months as Christian teachers up in the north of Cairo (“the really dirty part, if you can believe it,” one told me) and over the first few hours of our northward ride, we talked nonstop about life in the Middle East for foreigners, and how policies and treatment of foreigners differ between a famous country like Egypt, and a country like Jordan that westerners need to be told, “Yeah, it’s the one between Israel and Iraq.” “oooohhhh.” I shared my pizza with them, and they shared their soft drinks and chips with me in return. To my surprise, they told me they actually liked the bribe/tip/palm-grease system of bakhsheesh, something that I am fervently glad has not made its way northward to Jordan. “It’s just a matter of learning how to use it to your advantage, when to pay out, and when you can safely ignore blatant requests for tips.” They had a point of course; at some point during my time here in Jordan, I passed a threshold where I was no longer getting cheated or ripped off by taxi drivers. It’s not like I need my Arabic skills in a taxi, so that can’t be it – instead, I’m sure it’s just something in my mannerism that says, “This foreigner with the silly hat actually knows where he’s supposed to be going.”

After arriving in Cairo at 9 the next morning, I took a brief nap in my room, relaxing in the comfy aforementioned bed. But, the tourist in me rebelled against my lazier half and forced me to get out of bed around 1 so that I could continue my sight-seeing. I peered at the tiny map in my Lonely Planet book and wondered what I would have time to attempt in the remaining daylight hours. The Coptic section of town wasn’t too far away, only 3 subway stations south of me, and I decided it was time to see some really old churches.

I had to take this picture of the museum and courtyard through the bars of the gate before I went in

I recalled that Haitham had told me that the word “Coptic” actually means “Egyptian” in their original language. “They like to say they’re the descendants of the original ancient Egyptians, and all the Arabs just migrated in from Saudia,” he said dryly. “Like it’s their country or something.” Of course, in the centuries since the Holy Family returned to Judea after fleeing to Egypt from Herod’s persecution, a lot has changed. Coptic as a language is only spoken by a few, and only during church services, like how many Muslims outside of the Arab world “know” classical Qur’anic Arabic, but only enough to recognize it during sulaah prayer time and repeat some phrases back.

At the heavily-guarded gateway to the Coptic Museum, I was forced to give up my camera yet again and leave it in a box at the counter. It was getting to be a regular thing. Back in Luxor, I had asked Haitham to query about this strange hatred of cameras to one of the guards. “It’s all because of the Minister of Antiquities,” he reported. The Minister, Zahi Hawass, is the one that put in all the photography restrictions, among many others. The guard chuckled. “Personally, we think it’s just because he wants to control every aspect of ‘his’ antiques and every photo taken is one that he can’t charge for.” The guard explained that most other people viewed it as free publicity; the more tourists share with their families and friends, the more likely they were to want to visit Egypt themselves…and spend money. Apparently Mr Hawass disagrees.

The museum was huge and the exhibits were lit with modern fiber optics, much like the museum in the basement of Alexandria’s library that I had seen last week. Descriptions were typed in French, Arabic, and English on professional placards. With the exception of an Italian tour group that rumbled across the creaking old wooden floors like a train, shouting and pointing at things as their guide shouted and pointed back, I was the only tourist there – and the Italian group rushed in and out of the entire thing in about half an hour. I wandered through slowly, my entire visit lasting about four hours. I noted three or four young women throughout the building, quietly seated on the floor with canvases, pens and paintbrushes, listening to mp3 players, slowly and skillfully reproducing the patterns of the ancient frescos and statues that had been discovered throughout Egypt in Coptic holy sites. If you can’t photograph it; you can paint it!

Of particular interest to me were the rooms that slowly chronicled the shifting of the language from Coptic to Arabic. I peered into the worn leather bibles beneath the glass and realized that I could read some of the larger text that was footnoted into the book. Like the Aramaic service I attended with my friend Luay last year, the book had the original liturgy written in Coptic, a transliteration in Arabic, and then finally an Arabic translation. But in huge letters at the top was a phrase which has the same meaning in all languages. I couldn’t photograph it, but I copied it onto a piece of paper so I could (badly) MSPaint it here, in as close to the same text style as what was written centuries ago in shining gold leaf at the top of each book of the ancient Bible.

It says, "Bism al-Ab wa al-Ibn wa al-Rooh al-quds (Ellah Wahad)" which can be easily translated to "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit (One God)"

I was leaving the last room of the museum just as a guard was making the rounds to clear out tourists and art students from the building; perfect timing. I wasn’t ready to leave the quiet and peaceful Coptic district yet, so I wandered next door to the Hanging Church one of the two churches that bookend the museum. The courtyard and steps leading up into the building were filled with kids and young people of all ages, from children playing tag under the palm trees to high school students and college students studying in the shade, drinking Pepsi from glass bottles, and chatting with each other.

I wandered upstairs to snap a few pictures of the inside of the church, and then outside, where I bought a Pepsi from a bespectacled young man manning the stand for a pound. As I expected, I became a focal point of interest for the youth at the stand, most of whom spoke fluent English without difficulty. Two students, Jon and Monica (yes, both Egyptian and Coptic Arabs!) struck up a conversation with me, telling me about life in Egypt as the religious minority and what sort of dangerous there might be. They both had the usual Egyptian wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, and seemed more or less resigned to the fact that every year, dozens of their coreligionists were murdered or simply vanished, to say nothing of having their livelihoods robbed from them, something that the Egyptian government is quite good at. “But Zach, remember that the meek shall inherit the earth,” Jon chuckled. “We’re about as meek as they come.” The two of them invited me to join their congregation for their Easter service two nights later on Saturday evening, and I told them I would love to come and see it.

Jon shows off his wrist cross, a common tattoo among the Coptic sect. "I got it when I was five. It hurt - a LOT!"

Back at the hostel, I wandered through the halls of the building, searching for people who might have ideas on what I could see next. In the TV room and lounge, I ran into a young man from Thailand who introduced himself as Niknak. He told me that he was interested in seeing the southern pyramids of Cairo, in the complex known collectively as Saqqara. We agreed to meet in the lobby at 6:30 the next morning, and after another quick and tasty dinner of tam’iyah from the shop down the street, I went to bed.

The next morning, the two of us took the subway system as far south as we could possible go to the last station in Cairo, al-Mounib. Niknak told me that although he’d been working as an engineer in Dubai for a year, he didn’t speak any Arabic, because all of the people he worked with, regardless of country of origin, spoke in English for simplicity’s sake. So I took care of the negotiations with Sa’eed, an elderly taxi driver who was waiting for tourists outside of the Mounib station. He wanted 200 originally, but I gently informed him that was the price being asked to come all the way from downtown, and I was able to work him down to 150 pounds instead.

On the way down, Niknak sheepishly explained that his name was actually Assayd, but after studying in the USA several years ago, he realized that he’d rather not use a name that had those three letters at its beginning. He started using Niknak instead, but since the Arabic word “Nik” literally has the same meaning and slang sexual connotation as the F word, he developed a kind of dual naming system for himself. I jokingly told him that he just came to the wrong part of the world to use that nickname (oh no, now I’m using the word too!)

The highways leading from Cairo gradually got smaller, and narrower, and the thin channel of water to our left, an offshoot of the mighty Nile, got darker and dingier. Niknak fell asleep in the back of the taxi, but I stared out into the impenetrable jungle to my right, mere hairsbreadths from my open car window. The air here, although not exactly fresh and clean, smelled like donkeys and other fertilizing materials instead of car pollution. And occasionally, for blurred fractions of a second, the jungle’s trees would part for a moment and I could peer into a slice of field or village and see children playing, men dragging wheelbarrows, and women talking to each other while carrying heavy-looking burdens atop their heads.

I'm not sure what this was, and Sa'eed didn't say, but it looked like some sort of lumberyard - possibly the only reason why there was any cleared room around it!

Suddenly, Sa’eed turned to the left and we passed through the jungle on both sides, with English-language signs on either side of us inviting us to check out native craft markets or supermarkets. It’s a general rule in Egypt – you can tell how close you’re getting to the tourist attractions by how many English-language signs you can see. Within two to three minutes, we had passed through the emerald band of thick forest and burst into the hot sunlight of the desert. The change was dramatic and stark. I craned my neck around, poked Niknak to wake him up, and looked at the almost perfect line of where the water table of the river suddenly dropped off and the trees vanished. There’s never a shortage of reminders on just how much the Nile river was revered.

Continue reading this post…

I haven’t often found myself in situations where I’m the only Arabic speaker in a group of foreigners. In fact, when I’m in Jordan, I usually find that I’m either one of many, or I’m just so poor in comparison that I just clam up and let the other Arabic-speaking foreigner have at it. Not today, though! Today, I became the unofficial guide and negotiator for an entire ferryload of foreign tourists.

The train ride from Luxor to Aswan was mercifully short. It seemed to be the dirtiest train car I had ever set foot in; my ticketed seat number had two smashed and funky-smelling sandwiches crushed into my cup holder. I gingerly sat down and tried not to inhale too deeply. A man across the aisle gave me a friendly smile after watching my obvious discomfort and told me in English that I could go ahead and move if I wanted to; the car was only half full. I gratefully took his advice and moved one seat forward, almost immediately falling asleep after my long day of hiking through mountains, temples and tombs. I stayed awake long enough to remember to get out my ticket, and when I awoke three hours later in Aswan, I noted that the conductor had gingerly taken it from my hand, checked it, and then gently tucked it into my shirt’s breast pocket.

The man who had spoke to me earlier paused outside the train car and waited for me. Introducing himself as Mohammad, he asked what I was doing in Aswan. I already had a pretty good idea where he was getting at, and told him that I was looking for the so-called night military convoy and a convoy bus that could take me to Abu Simbel. Unsurprisingly, Mohammad happened to own a hotel a few blocks from the train station and offered me a place to rest for the next few hours while he arranged for me to join a convoy bus.

Not a bad place to spend a few hours, if you don't mind the neverending thump of bland techno below you

I spent the next few hours curled up in velveteen armchair in the dim and smoky Queen Hotel, half-asleep and drowsily answering questions from two enthralled young Egyptian hotel employees, who couldn’t decide whether me or the Arabic-dubbed Planet of the Apes movie on the television was more interesting. Finally, to distract them, I asked where the throbbing, floor-shaking music was coming from. They led me outside to a small trapdoor next to the street. Normally I wouldn’t be found crawling into trapdoors at 2 in the morning in southern Egypt, but I was too tired to think of safety precautions properly.

We came out into a room that was even smokier and dimmer than the hotel, if that were possible. It was a scene out of the various argeilleh bars in Amman, with a half-dozen bored-looking and heavily mascaraed young Arab women with long black hair were gyrating slowly on a platform at the other end of the hall. A dozen young and middle aged men were lounging at counters and smoking hookah and watching them with the same interest that one gives a fresh, well prepared salad. Heads swiveled towards me when I entered, a few people chuckled, and one or two made hand gestures for me to enter and sit by the stage. I nodded politely, then feigned having a telephone call and fled back upstairs to the relative non-sleeziness of the hotel lounge.

When the bus arrived, I paid Mohammad the 100 pounds he asked for without complaint and bored the quiet and darkened bus. As it was 4 in the morning, everyone was in that drowsy, somewhat grumpy mood you can’t help but be in after you drag yourself awake just long enough to get somewhere else. The numerous potholes in the streets of Aswan weren’t making it any easier to drift back off again.

Who should I find on the bus in the seat behind me but the two Chinese students I had met the previous day on the way down to Luxor? We sleepily commented on what a small world it was and made small talk about what we’d seen in our separate day, waiting for the queue outside the military checkpoint at the edge of town to fill up. Finally, at around 4:30, someone decided there were enough tourists to warrant the trip and all twenty buses lurched into motion.

As the hours passed, the bus slowly filled with light and I could make out more of the passengers inside. It appeared to be an even mix of Caucasian and Asian people, but I didn’t hear a single conversation in English, so I slowly guessed at the nationalities to be French and Italian. It was amusing to see everyone clutching the same Lonely Planet in their hands that I had, except in four or five different languages.

Our driver Kamal exuberantly announced our arrival at approximately 8 in the morning. “EXKEEZE ME! HELLO! MY FRIEND! MY FRIEND!” he bellowed repeatedly as he shifted into park. “WE HERE NOW AT ABU SIMBEL! YOU BACK HERE AT 9 AND FIFTY! BUS ONE EIGHT ONE!” I’m not kidding, he really did say “exkeeze.” Low muttering filled the bus; we had just been on this bus for four hours and we were being given less than two hours at the site itself? What could be done, though? We exited the bus and threaded our way through the buses to the ticket counter.

As my traveling companions and I walked up the neatly-swept asphalt path, I enjoyed breathing clean air for the first time in a week. After all these cities with unregulated pollution, I was beginning to understand that Amman is, comparably speaking, one of the modern jewels of the Arab world in that regard. Here in Abu Simbel, though, I could look down into the crystal-blue waters of the Nile, now much higher than they would have been in the time of the temple’s constructor Ramses II. One of the most incredible things about the Abu Simbel temples is that because of the rising water levels due to the Aswan High Dam, they actually deconstructed the entire site and moved it 65 meters higher, and 200 meters back. Look here for more info on that.

Leaning in over the doorjamb and taking pictures of the inner room is as good as photography gets in Egypt

Rounding the corner, we all gasped in appreciative awe as the three (formerly four) massive statues to Ramses II came into view, one by one from right to left. The tourists were already in full swarm mode around the fallen sandstone blocks from the destroyed statue, which for aesthetic purposes had been left in pieces during the reconstruction. I rested my hand on one of the Ramses’ giant toes and stared up into his nostrils. He didn’t seem to notice me and continued gazing into the southeast like he had been for the past 3,254 years. I’m sure that Ramses II himself would be pleased that such care was taken into preserving his largest and grandest legacy.

Both of the temples, the larger temple from Ramses to the main gods and the smaller to his wife/Nefertari, had large signs forbidding photography. After yesterday’s hassles in Luxor, I was a broken and beaten man, and I meekly kept my camera holstered as my companions and I followed the winding lines of tourists through the yellow, lamp-lit corridors, etched with thousands, if not millions, of hieroglyphs and pictures depicting Ramses in all his triumphant glory. The main room had more statues to the pharaoh, but the side rooms had apparently been used for storage, possibly for tribute to the king from the conquered Nubians to the south. The temple definitely seemed to showcase Ramses’ god-like power over his subjects, but also his sensitive side and his wish to be pleasing for the gods. You’d probably need to be an Egyptologist to figure out the subtle differences between what made this a temple versus a tomb, though.

Proportionally speaking, I'm about at the right height (slightly below knee level) to be one of the prince statues

The nearby temple of Hathor was a gift from Ramses for his favorite wife, Nefertari. Scholars have always shuffled between calling it Hathor’s temple or Nefertari’s temple. Basically, in the same way that the pharaoh got to be a representation of a god here on earth, that means his wife often was portrayed as one as well, and Hathor was a favorite. The carvings and reliefs on these walls were even more interesting than the standard “tribute-giving” etchings in the larger and more famous temple. Here it showed Ramses and his wife giving each other flowers, Nefertari worshipping the gods, and all kinds of cute love scenes, like the two of them in a boat on a trip down the Nile. The books are quick to point out that Nefertari must have indeed been a special favorite and companion to Ramses, because it’s one of the few places where a pharaoh carved representations of a woman at the same height to himself. The picture above shows Ramses on the left, and Nefertari on the right, with her Hathor-style headdress.

Time was running out, and my three main companions – Carol, Chen, and Kenji – took our last few minutes to back up as far as we could, all the way to the chain-link fence at the edge of the hill, so we could take in the full magnitude of the temples, now being lit in full brightness by the late morning sun. Behind us, the water lapped gently against the green reeds on the shore. Somewhere directly below us, now deep underwater, was the original and ancient construction site that Ramses II had gazed upon and regally proclaimed his pleasure at his edifices.

Kamal was glancing at his watch when we returned, and started the bus moving before the last Chinese tourist had even gotten both legs into the vehicle. I had come to expect it from my past week in Egypt, but several other people looked mortified at this. Kamal happily shouted “EXKEEZE ME!” at us, and announced that we would be making a brief stop at the Aswan High Dam. Some of the Italians looked a little bored by this prospect, and three quarters of them elected to stay behind, literally waiting on the curb, when we arrived at the dam after the 3 hour return trip.

Kamal went about collecting the 20 pound fare from everyone. I asked him, in Arabic, exactly what there was to see at the dam. He stared at me, agog, and asked me where I learned to speak Arabic. I patiently explained the same story about my work and life in Jordan that I’ve told probably three times a day for the past year and a half, albeit in abridged form. There’s a museum, he told me. What he neglected to mention is that we wouldn’t be visiting the museum. No, we merely exited the bus in the center of the huge dam, surrounded by several other groups of somewhat skeptical, bewildered tourists who all seemed to be silently wondering – we paid $3.75 apiece to stand on a dam with a road already going over it? I looked at the swollen artificial body of water, Lake Nasser, on one side, and walked to the other, and looked at the tiny Nile River that would eventually stretch all the way up to delta I’d seen a few days earlier. “TEN MINUTE” bellowed Kamal from somewhere over to my left, and I saw the bus parked under the shade of a tall, obviously transplanted tree in the middle of the median. And that was it. When we picked up the Italians, who had been sunning themselves in the parking lot, I told them dryly that they had probably made the wiser choice. But Kamal and his fellow bus drivers had a captive audience. Who knew how much things actually cost when you have a driver to collect it for you?

What are these massive spires next to the dam? Who knows; you'd have to convince Kamal to actually stay at a place for longer than 10 minutes

The final stop is where things got interesting. Kamal kept throwing me little grins in the rear view mirror, as if he and I now shared some sort of magical secret that comes from being able to speak poorly-pronounced Arabic. Within another twenty minutes, we had arrived at the parking lot for the Island of Philae, which judging by the travel book seemed like a pretty interesting place. The other tourists had heard me talking with him, and some of them were now throwing me a few extra glances. I hadn’t showered since Alexandria though, and they really could have been looking at me for any number of less-than-flattering reasons. I focused on trying to stay as unnoticeable as possible.

No luck, though. “EXKEEZE ME!” cried Kamal, slapping me on the back. “Translate for me, brother,” he asked me in an aside. The two of us explained to the group that we would have an hour and a  half to take the ferry over, see the Island and temple, and return. “No, two hours,” I grunted at him, and asked the little crowd what they’d prefer. Mutinous chatter in Chinese and Italian was unintelligable to Kamal and myself, but he got the drift. “Okay good good! TWO HOUR!” he agreed. He told me to talk to the traffic officer at the nearby ticket booth when we returned, who would radio him to come by with the bus.

Suddenly, I found myself leading the busload of tourists. For better or for worse, I had been unofficially nominated as the “guide” for the group. Getting the tickets to the island itself was easy, as it was managed by the Egyptian Tourism Authority, but then all hell broke lose when we were directed to the dock, filled with little long ferryboats and lounging dark-skinned captains who sauntered forward toward us with a confident air. The last thing a tourist wants to see is a vendor with that confident smirk on his face.

Carol explained to me that when she had come to Egypt previously, the ferryboat had been 5 pounds per person for the round trip. “That was two years ago, though,” she trailed off. I counted up our little band of tourists, and matched the lead captain’s confident and firm handshake with one of my own. This was going to be interesting. Continue reading this post…

I have a bone to pick. If you’re going to get a camera, become one of the millions of camera-owning people out there, be it a point and shoot or an SLR…learn how to configure it. And then follow the rules of places you visit and photograph.

I’ve just spent the past day in a rather grumpy mood because of new rules and regulations in the Valley of the Kings that prevent any photography. The rules are from only last year in August, and the guards are extremely strict about them. Basically, all of us that love taking pictures artistically and capturing the nuanced dark angles and shadows that come from standing inside a 3,500 year old tomb are out of luck. Why?

Because of people that can’t turn off their flash. The colors in the ancient paintings and carvings are rapidly fading and being damaged by ongoing light exposure and the millions of schmucks who have taking bland, poor contrast photographs of a bright white wall with some faint etchings and pale colors. Because really, that’s all they’re going to see when they use flash photography in these places!

So, the Egyptian Tourism Authority, over the years, first banned all flash photography, and when it became clear that people were apparently too careless to follow this single rule, they just banned all photography. And recently enough that it grates on me that I’m just barely too late to take my own photographs.

Yep...this is as close as I was able to get to taking pictures of the tombs

After my last entry, I rejoined Haitham at the Australian Hostel back in downtown Cairo, just barely long enough to grab some dinner and then hurry back to the train station for our 1st-class ticket to Luxor. It turned out that we were sharing a “cubicle” room with 4 other travelers: a couple of Arabs and a couple of visiting Chinese/Taiwanese students. Unfortunately, the six chairs, all facing each other, didn’t recline a single millimeter and we all spent a cramped and uncomfortable (but quiet) night speeding through the desert towards Luxor, the home of the famous tombs of the Valley of the Kings.

We (meaning Haitham) were able to negotiate a private taxi for the day, and a ferry to take us the short distance from Luxor across the Nile River to the West Bank. The price for the day, for the two of us, was a very competitive 120 pounds, although before Haitham worked his magic they wanted 175. It wasn’t until our driver Saleem dropped us off at the ticket booth up in the mountains for the Valley that I discovered that I should hide my camera deep inside my backpack, less I lose it. The weather was hot and dry, much more than we had experienced in Cairo or Alexandria, and I was happy to have a hat and sunblock with me. Haitham boasted that he could tough it out, but it didn’t take long before he would stop at the bottom of hills, panting and glistening in the heat and waving me to “hold up just one minute, please, I’m dying here.”

One of the twin Colossi of Memnon near the Nile shore, before entering the Valley. They think that the largest temple ever created was here, but was washed away because of its proximity to the Nile

And hills there were aplenty! The ancient pharaohs of Egypt had loved this location for its easy seclusion and secrecy within the hills outside the ancient capitol city of Thebes, and also because of the orientation of the valley itself allowed the last glimmers of the sunset to fall upon their eternal resting places, something that was just too symbolic to pass up. Thousands of years later, gravel pathways, staircases, and handrails have been added, but if you take the time to actually look up into the hills surrounding you, away from the 21st century chaos that has descended upon the valley, you can imagine that there are still many more tombs waiting to be discovered up there. Or at least, you might guess that if you didn’t already figure that the Egyptian Government already used echolocation and sonar on pretty much everything within a 20 kilometer radius from here.

The ticket booth told Haitham and I that all but two of the tombs were on a “single ticket” concept. Haitham and I pay 2 or 80 pounds, and then we get tickets that are each good for seeing three of the tombs. The tomb guards all have little hole punchers on straps that they use to monitor how many tombs each ticket-holder has seen. So, I told Haitham to buy two, and I would do the same. I figured that if they weren’t going to let me take pictures, this would probably be my last visit to the Valley, so I was going to see as many painted and carved pieces of rock as possible!

As we were buying our tickets, a commotion occurred at the window next to us. A short elderly man with wispy white hair, watery blue eyes was engaged in a heated argument with the ticket seller in perfectly-enunciated Arabic. I didn’t catch all of it, and Haitham told me it was because the man was speaking in Classical Arabic. “He’s a Tunisian albino,” Haitham breathed in wonder. “The ticket sellers are refusing to sell him the 2-pound ticket because they don’t believe he’s an Arab.” The poor man was turning bright red in frustration. “I am a Tunisian!” he roared. The ticket seller regarded him with a bored expression. “Many foreigners can speak Classical Arabic like you do; you’re not one of us,” he replied in Egyptian Arabic. Although it took a few minutes, the man eventually got his proper ticket and was admitted to the site with us. He told Haitham that his own dialect was so vastly different from Eastern Arabic that he has no choice but to speak Classical when he visits the rest of the Arab world, and this wasn’t the first time his Arab-ness was called into question.

The lines of tourists were pretty bad, but not awful. After seeing the crowds at the Pyramids, I had expected there to be a lot of tourists, but I was still surprised at how many people had made it all the way down to Luxor. I should have realized that the Luxor-Aswan route was completely standard for all the tourist buses. We had passed by about 30 in the parking lot on our way in. In one tomb in particular, the spectacularly-hidden final resting place of Thutmose III, not even the electric fans could prevent us all from getting literally slicked-over with glistening sweat. I felt like I had leapt in a lake. Haitham, being medically minded, put his shirt over his mouth and whimpered something about catching all of the airborne illnesses that all these people were exhaling. Normally I regard his hypochondria with wry amusement, but the place was so ghastly hot and humid that I took his advice.

We didn’t bother with the overpriced KV62, or Tutankhamen’s tomb. It was an extra 100 pounds for foreigners and the guidebook panned it as not nearly as interesting as his treasures in the Egyptian Museum. We did, however, venture inside the tomb of his nearest neighbor, Ramses VI, the pharaoh who was buried right above him. This tomb was an extra 20 pounds for me, but it had some spectacular blue-accented paintings and particularly well-preserved carvings of the sky goddess Nuit on the ceiling. Also, the extra ticket requirement meant that it was blissfully uncrowded, with merely a few other tourists strolling up and down its single straight corridor, sandals whispering between the wooden slats and the stone floor. Haitham subtly tried to take some pictures of the sky goddess on his camera-phone, but the second guard appeared from around a pillar as he did so, grabbed his arm, and lectured him sternly on the consequences of taking pictures. He told him that people were fined 100 pounds per picture, the camera would be examined and each picture from inside the Valley would be deleted. In an Arabic aside that the guard probably assumed I wouldn’t understand, he told Haitham that he’d let him off without fine or deletion this time because he was an Arab, but any foreigner wouldn’t be given such a chance.

Continue reading this post…