Today is a public holiday. A random Monday. Which wouldn’t be weird in the States because if Monday is off it means a three day weekend. But here, where our workweek is Sunday through Thursday, having Monday off is like having an odd little mid-week island, a hiccup where I can almost catch my breath but then have to stutterstep my way back into work on Tuesday. Not that I’m complaining, so far the day has been awesome. I woke up at nine, went back to sleep, woke up at noon, and then walked past a Harley Davidson motorcycle gang of four on a tiny residential street to the Internet café where it is absolutely BLARING Enya. Like I honestly cannot hear my own music through my headphones because Sail Away is making the walls shake. Why am I being so diligent in updating the blog on my middle-of-the-week day off? Because I have plenty to report.
Basically, my landlady is trying to steal my deposit. She picked the wrong two girls to try to screw over because we’re both committed to Egypt for at least another couple years so it isn’t as if she can play the whole “Haha, you already have your ticket to go back home in a couple days and you don’t have time to fight this out” card. We really do have time to fight it out. It isn’t like this is a few hundred pounds, our deposit is one month’s rent, or $700 so it isn’t an amount either of us is willing to walk away from. She claims that when Marisol removed her gaudy chandeliers from every light fixture in the apartment (yes, even kitchen and bathroom), some of them were broken in storage. First, this isn’t our problem, she’s the one who stored them improperly, secondly, at most a broken chandelier would cost MAYBE $5 to fix. So there’s no justification for keeping our whole deposit.
We offered to pay for some air conditioner repairs, which the girl who was living in my room before me broke and then didn’t pay them for and also for a mattress which she’d asked them to buy her but neglected to put in the contract. These things we agreed could reasonably be seen as our responsibility. Then, for goodwill and good bargaining, we added about 300 pounds ($60) to make our absolute best offer 1000 pounds or $200 that we would accept being taken out of our deposit. We expect the rest back and since she’s refusing we are essentially planning to squat in our apartment through February or until she breaks. We will refuse to pay rent on the ground that she already has one month’s rent of ours and that we fairly gave our one month’s notice and therefore have one month remaining in the apartment.
Her real problem is that she bought a new refrigerator for the apartment back in December and I think she regrets it even though we paid for a full HALF of a fridge we will have gotten to use for like two months. Every time she starts to list the things she thinks we owe her money for, she mentions the fridge and then is like, oh, no, slip of the tongue. So we know it is on her mind and that because of it, she is not able to bargain in a rational Egyptian way (this info comes from Maged, Marisol’s boyfriend who has been doing the bargaining on our behalf).
Maged is pretty pissed at how we are being treated. The landlady almost caused a big problem when she said, “Listen, I have a lawyer and if you want to talk to him, you can talk to him,” and Maged was like “Fine, I have a layer, I will get Marisol a lawyer, Margaret IS a lawyer and works with a bunch of lawyers, you go get your lawyer (who we are sure is just this neighbor guy on the floor below us who does patent law) and we’ll all sit down and have a big conversation and get charged by the hour.” And she shut right up.
OH MY GOD THEY ARE PLAYING SAIL AWAY AGAIN. THIS IS THE THIRD TIME SINCE I’VE SAT DOWN.
AND, AS I’VE LISTENED, THEY JUST STARTED IT OVER AGAIN.
This is out of control. I will post an update on the apartment situation in a week or so, assuming I am not living out on the curb with my roommate and our puppy on an mountain of our belongings, but I have got to get out of this All Enya All the Time Zone I’ve stumbled into.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Margaret, ESQ week one
Thanks everyone, for being so patient with my total lack of communication this week. After ten days without internet while we were traveling around Upper Egypt, I was already super behind on reading my messages when I started my new job. And, surprise, surprise, the law firm isn’t like the non-profit office where I can check Gmail and Facebook a million times during the day.
The week started early Sunday morning, which is the first day of the workweek in Egypt. It started too early, as it turned out, since I had foolishly never asked what time to show up for work and had to go in around 8:00 just to be sure no one was sitting around waiting for me. Which they weren’t. Nobody else got in until a little after nine, by which time I’d settled comfortably into the waiting room with my Jeffrey Deaver thriller.
Turns out my firm has almost has many IT guys as lawyers and way more than we have secretaries or assistants. We use so many Lexis Nexis programs in so many new and exciting ways (that most of us don’t understand) that they’ve actually asked us to do Beta testing on new software before but we turn them down because we can’t afford the catastrophe of software stopping working, even for a day.
Speaking of days, I have come to understand the concept differently this week. A day is no longer the amount of light outside or the 8 hours in between my punch in at 9 and my punch out at 5. A day is now as long as it needs to be for me to bill 7-8 hours of work on a client’s case (which is usually 9-10 hours). There is a little clock on my computer that I click on to start the seconds and minutes ticking away until I can go home. Whenever I want to go to the bathroom or get up for coffee (I’ll get to THAT in a minute) or chat with someone, I have to stop the clock, and restart it when I sit back down to work again. Also when I stop to ask questions, which I seem to need to do every forty-five seconds. Everyone in my office has been really nice and welcoming and they seem like laid-back, funny, intelligent people, but it is very stressful to try to get to know anyone when I have to stop my clock to have a conversation and can’t start counting down to the end of my “day” until the conversation is over. There is no such thing as small talk anymore.
Nescafe and tea are available in the office for free but we have to pay for coffee, which annoys me because I think coffee (and Nescafe is NOT coffee) is the fuel that keeps workers working efficiently and it is in the best interests of any company to keep its staff fully fueled, but I kind of understand it because drip coffee is much more expensive here. Milk, juice, fruit, yogurt and sodas are all kept stocked in the fridge and if we take one, or a coffee or espresso or glass of milk for our cereal, we color in the appropriate dot by our name on a sheet in the kitchen and the cost, from one to five pounds depending on the item, is deducted from our salary.
Lunch is also deducted from our salary. We can call anywhere we want to have food delivered to the office and the secretaries take care of the check and then deduct the total from our lunches from our salary at the end of the month. If I were more responsible, I could ask each day for my receipt so I know how much I spend on lunch each day but I think it is better not to know. Instead, I usually order from a delicious Egyptian place that is so cheap I usually have to order enough food for three meals just to make their 12 pound minimum charge (about $2.50). For that amount I can get a shish taouk sandwhich (chicken or steak grilled with peppers and onions on a stick and then unsticked into French bread), a thick, spicy lentil soup with crispy pita croutons, and a quarter of a grilled chicken over rice.
My office is colder than it is outside because we are on a shady side street across from a bank and a cheap tourist hotel (where we can see directly into the rooms…shout out to the guy in the towel with tattoos on his shoulder blades!) so we get natural light but no direct sun. This will be nice in the summer but I have to wear my coat all day now because the woman I share an office with, the wife of the principal partner of the firm, hates to have the heater on. Not that I could turn it on anyway. Pictured above is the remote control for the heater/air conditioner, which looks like it was designed by a six year old. There are THREE kinds of smiley faces and FIVE kinds of checkmarks on the buttons. Did I miss a class somewhere on the three types of smiley faces universally recognized to control hot and cold? On my second day, my officemate took pity on me in my coat and showed me how to work it.
I am part of the construction team in the firm, which, as I understand from carefully timed office chit chat makes most of the money for the firm, but is not the most interesting work. We also represent Egypt in arbitrations, which falls into the much more interesting and cutting edge realm of public international law. The new hires on that side of the office do research on public international law issues, which sounds awesome, whereas I look at correspondence a bunch of contractors sent to each other over the years it took to build a really big building. There are thirty or so issues I look for, like “Procurement” and “Payment” and when I find something relevant to our case, I mark it with one of the issue categories so it can be referenced later by a more senior attorney (that’s right, folks, I said ‘more senior ATTORNEY,’ I’m a freaking ATTORNEY now booyah…ahem…sorry…moving on).
There are nearly a hundred thousand correspondence documents in the case and the construction team needs to look at all of them so we’re expected to average 150-200 a day. I did about 900 this week and have thankfully moved on from the really technical correspondence about things I don’t understand like ductwork and grout and dampers to the really exciting memos about stuff like bonds and insurance policies and inter-trade coordination. What could be next?! I’ll keep you posted.
What did the fish say when he hit his head?
Friday, our last day on the cruise started in a typically Egyptian way. We were told only that breakfast was between seven and eight-thirty and that our guide would come on the boat to pick us up “then.” Whether “then” referred to seven, seven-thirty, eight-fifteen, eight-thirty, or whenever, we had no idea. I waited until eight-forty to call our Upper Egypt-based travel agent and ask when the guide was coming. “The guide is not there yet?!” he asked in alarm, then promised “I’ll call you right back.” Fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t called and the guide had not arrived. The receptionist in the ship’s lobby told me they were about to move the boat into a different position at the dock and I called our agent back and let him know that the guide wouldn’t be able to get on the boat for “fifteen, twenty minutes,” as reported to me by the receptionist. “He is not there yet?!” asked the agent (again – you’d think he’d have asked the guy to call or text to confirm he’d picked us up, not to mention the agent was supposed to have already called ME back to confirm).
Also typically Egyptian was the fact that the receptionist’s “fifteen, twenty minutes” actually took an hour and a half. The boat finally resettled at a different dock, a five minute drive from where we started so when the guide came on board we had to taxi back to the first dock to catch our felucca. A felucca is a beautiful Egyptian sailboat with a triangular main sail with graceful arcing lines. We spent over an hour drifting up and back down the Nile around small islands of granite.
We ate lunch at a pizza place, then Philae temple, a Greco-roman period temple with a portion designed by the Emperor Trajan. All 47,000 pieces of it were moved by workers funded by UNESCO from a nearby island in the Nile when the High Dam caused the original location to flood up to within a few feet of the tops of the pylons. They moved the entire temple complex and reassembled it in an unflooded location. We did visit the High Dam and the largest man-made lake (in the world?), Lake Nasr, which Egypt shares in small part with Sudan. All of Egypt’s electricity comes from the hydroelectric power generated by the High Dam and enough is leftover to sell to other countries as well.
The trip back to Cairo on the sitting train was much smoother than the trip to Upper Egypt. No wild braking and squealing on the tracks and I slept most of the way home. The day we got back we had to see the Egyptian museum (King Tut's head is even more amazing in person and there were many other gold and sparkly things besides) and go to the Khan el khalili bazaar because it was Helen's last day and we didn't want her to miss out on anything important.
The next day, Saturday, with Sarah and Suzie was spent doing some last minute shopping and they left just in time for me to briefly clean my room and work myself into a panic the night before my first day at my new job. Even with a sleeping pill, I barely slept and among my million worries was the fact that the office assistants at my old job ordered lunch for everyone in the office from a cheap Egyptian place and, as such, I have no idea how to order lunch from myself and give directions to my office, all in Arabic. How true it is of me that of all the things that could go wrong my first day in the law firm, I am most worried about lunch!
Also typically Egyptian was the fact that the receptionist’s “fifteen, twenty minutes” actually took an hour and a half. The boat finally resettled at a different dock, a five minute drive from where we started so when the guide came on board we had to taxi back to the first dock to catch our felucca. A felucca is a beautiful Egyptian sailboat with a triangular main sail with graceful arcing lines. We spent over an hour drifting up and back down the Nile around small islands of granite.
We ate lunch at a pizza place, then Philae temple, a Greco-roman period temple with a portion designed by the Emperor Trajan. All 47,000 pieces of it were moved by workers funded by UNESCO from a nearby island in the Nile when the High Dam caused the original location to flood up to within a few feet of the tops of the pylons. They moved the entire temple complex and reassembled it in an unflooded location. We did visit the High Dam and the largest man-made lake (in the world?), Lake Nasr, which Egypt shares in small part with Sudan. All of Egypt’s electricity comes from the hydroelectric power generated by the High Dam and enough is leftover to sell to other countries as well.
The trip back to Cairo on the sitting train was much smoother than the trip to Upper Egypt. No wild braking and squealing on the tracks and I slept most of the way home. The day we got back we had to see the Egyptian museum (King Tut's head is even more amazing in person and there were many other gold and sparkly things besides) and go to the Khan el khalili bazaar because it was Helen's last day and we didn't want her to miss out on anything important.
The next day, Saturday, with Sarah and Suzie was spent doing some last minute shopping and they left just in time for me to briefly clean my room and work myself into a panic the night before my first day at my new job. Even with a sleeping pill, I barely slept and among my million worries was the fact that the office assistants at my old job ordered lunch for everyone in the office from a cheap Egyptian place and, as such, I have no idea how to order lunch from myself and give directions to my office, all in Arabic. How true it is of me that of all the things that could go wrong my first day in the law firm, I am most worried about lunch!
The temple of the god of evil things
We docked at Edfu on Wednesday and met our guide, Mahmood in the lobby of our ship, which, since I haven’t mentioned it before, is called the Nile Jewel, and, although it seems a little smaller and older than the other ships whose lobbies we have to cross to disembark every day, is cozy and pleasantly quiet since we are basically the only ones here. Edfu is a city of about sixty thousand, much smaller than Cairo’s twenty million, and, like most of Upper Egypt we’ve seen thus far, it is very agricultural. It is not uncommon to see donkeys pulling carts, or children riding donkeys down the town streets. The Nile countryside of Upper Egypt is home to the banana and sugar cane plantations that supply the rest of the country, and many fruits and vegetables, in addition to sacks of rice and flour, are carried by horse or donkey carts and sold in the town market by men in galabeyas (the long shirt-like Arab robes) and kuffiyas (checkered scarves piled and loosely wrapped on their heads) common to country areas but rarely seen in Cairo.
Mahmood’s English pronunciation is terrible, with added syllables (sp-hin-kses for sphinxes, and kiningses for kings, for example) and the emphasis on the wrong syllable many times, but he was very knowledgeable about Ancient Egyptian mythology (or else able to make up convincing facts on the spot really well), and the details of the temple at Edfu. He also helped us bargain for better prices on the exorbitantly marked- up water and soda we bought before getting back on board the ship where the beverages are even more expensive.
We spent the day on the ship sailing up the river again, covering the same distance in seven or eight hours that took Mahmood only an hour to cover by car, then disembarked again and met him in his home town of Kom Ombo. The temple at Kom Ombo, which we saw at night, is dedicated to Horus and the crocodile god whose name I can’t remember. The crocodile god is the god of evil things. Crocodile mummies had been found in coffins in the temple, but had been moved to the museum, which we didn’t go see. The temple also contains text from the Egyptian calendar, based on three seasons, and a hieroglyph of a woman giving birth, which the Ancient Egyptians did in a special chair that elevated the feet up on blocks. Comfy!
Mahmood’s English pronunciation is terrible, with added syllables (sp-hin-kses for sphinxes, and kiningses for kings, for example) and the emphasis on the wrong syllable many times, but he was very knowledgeable about Ancient Egyptian mythology (or else able to make up convincing facts on the spot really well), and the details of the temple at Edfu. He also helped us bargain for better prices on the exorbitantly marked- up water and soda we bought before getting back on board the ship where the beverages are even more expensive.
We spent the day on the ship sailing up the river again, covering the same distance in seven or eight hours that took Mahmood only an hour to cover by car, then disembarked again and met him in his home town of Kom Ombo. The temple at Kom Ombo, which we saw at night, is dedicated to Horus and the crocodile god whose name I can’t remember. The crocodile god is the god of evil things. Crocodile mummies had been found in coffins in the temple, but had been moved to the museum, which we didn’t go see. The temple also contains text from the Egyptian calendar, based on three seasons, and a hieroglyph of a woman giving birth, which the Ancient Egyptians did in a special chair that elevated the feet up on blocks. Comfy!
Tarmackanaka
The next morning, Tuesday, we saw Karnak temple (which Helen has pronounced Canook, Tamarakanina, and other butchered versions), which sprawls over several acres and includes a gigantic water feature reminiscent of the reflecting pool on the mall in Washington D.C. It contains dozens of obelisks, and the broken foundations of obelisks that have since been moved to Paris, Italy, and Washington, among other locations around the world, as well as many statues of the Gods and paintings and sculptures throughout. The scenes on the walls are depicted both as friezes and bas reliefs, which I think differ in the fact that in one the figures stand out from the wall (meaning the layer of the wall was chiseled away from the figure in a more difficult to execute art-form), and in the other, the figures are carved into the wall (easier to do since there is less chiseling to be done and also harder to destroy by later Christian chiseling). Don’t ask me which is which. Karnak’s most incredible feature in my mind, though, was the long corridor checked on the sides by smaller rooms, that runs the length of the temple and was, in its time, entirely roofed in stone supported by the massive columns. Tall, narrow slitted windows, almost like arrow slits in medieval castles, were built in rows into the top and sides of the roof stone to permit light to illuminate the corridor and the floor of the entire complex was once covered in gold and silver so the light reflected on the precious metals and glowed like the sun, which was worshipped as the god Ra by Ancient Egyptians.
We zipped over to finish our morning of touring at Luxor Temple, which was built several kilometers from Karnak temple and connected on a straight line by two rows of hundreds of sphinx statues, only about eighty or so of which have been uncovered. The government recently cleared the houses and other buildings between the two sites and has begun excavating the rest of the corridor between Karnak and Luxor temples so that eventually the entire complex will be united as a complete whole. An old mosque overlooks Luxor temple and although the mosque was built on the ground above the temple long before anyone even knew the temple was there, when it was still buried, undiscovered, beneath the sand (am I getting really redundant all of a sudden?!), the Muslim clergy agreed to move a Muslim cemetery and some shrines to clear the way for excavations once it became clear what lay below. Juxtaposed to this generosity, early Christian inhabitants, forced by persecution to worship in secret, used Luxor temple as a church (I didn’t mention before but some of Karnak’s statues were also cut into the shapes of crosses by Christians who turned part of that temple into a church as well), and desecrated many of the faces, hands, and feet of the Egyptian god’s carved therein. The Christians believed that the power and the soul of the pagan gods could be destroyed by destroying their statues, which I find ironic since the Christians aren’t supposed to believe the pagan god statues had any power or souls to begin with, what with the whole not-worshipping-false-idols thing.
We said goodbye to our Luxor guide, Tamer, and spent the rest of the day and night on the boat, sailing peacefully up the Nile (as in upstream, against the current) toward our final destination of Aswan. We spent most of our time on the sundeck reading and being harassed by the sleazy massage guy who walks around asking women (it was all women on the sundeck, us, and about ten Spanish ladies) intrusive questions, making creepy conversation, listing his many massage services and promising not to touch ladies inappropriately, and insisting on giving free trials. Twice I saw him force free trials on ladies who expressly told him no repeatedly until he just grabbed an arm or a foot and started going at it. When he told Helen for the third time he was going to give her a free trial massage (he said it like that, like it was inevitable), and she refused politely, and thanked him anyway, for the third time, and he persisted, I snapped at him in Arabic, “Enough, she said no thank you!” At first he tried to make a joke of it, then he tried to apologize for upsetting me like it wasn’t his behavior that was out of line, but rather the impact it had on my emotions. Then he tried to explain that this was his job and I was like “No, your job is to give massages to people who WANT massages.” He was upset enough to talk to Sarah about how outrageous I was being and how innocent he was once I walked away but he didn’t bother us anymore. We’ll see if he revisits us when we go up to the deck again today. I think he’ll have to since after a group of around forty Americans from Missouri disembarked yesterday afternoon there are only like 20 people on our cruise ship, which is built for about 200. We are his only potential clients so I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. I figure I can always threaten to report him to the management of the boat, which is I think what he was afraid of yesterday when he apologized, because I am quite sure there’s a large employment pool of other smarmy young guys willing to grope swimsuit-clad foreign women for a living ready to jump in if this one racks up some complaints.
We zipped over to finish our morning of touring at Luxor Temple, which was built several kilometers from Karnak temple and connected on a straight line by two rows of hundreds of sphinx statues, only about eighty or so of which have been uncovered. The government recently cleared the houses and other buildings between the two sites and has begun excavating the rest of the corridor between Karnak and Luxor temples so that eventually the entire complex will be united as a complete whole. An old mosque overlooks Luxor temple and although the mosque was built on the ground above the temple long before anyone even knew the temple was there, when it was still buried, undiscovered, beneath the sand (am I getting really redundant all of a sudden?!), the Muslim clergy agreed to move a Muslim cemetery and some shrines to clear the way for excavations once it became clear what lay below. Juxtaposed to this generosity, early Christian inhabitants, forced by persecution to worship in secret, used Luxor temple as a church (I didn’t mention before but some of Karnak’s statues were also cut into the shapes of crosses by Christians who turned part of that temple into a church as well), and desecrated many of the faces, hands, and feet of the Egyptian god’s carved therein. The Christians believed that the power and the soul of the pagan gods could be destroyed by destroying their statues, which I find ironic since the Christians aren’t supposed to believe the pagan god statues had any power or souls to begin with, what with the whole not-worshipping-false-idols thing.
We said goodbye to our Luxor guide, Tamer, and spent the rest of the day and night on the boat, sailing peacefully up the Nile (as in upstream, against the current) toward our final destination of Aswan. We spent most of our time on the sundeck reading and being harassed by the sleazy massage guy who walks around asking women (it was all women on the sundeck, us, and about ten Spanish ladies) intrusive questions, making creepy conversation, listing his many massage services and promising not to touch ladies inappropriately, and insisting on giving free trials. Twice I saw him force free trials on ladies who expressly told him no repeatedly until he just grabbed an arm or a foot and started going at it. When he told Helen for the third time he was going to give her a free trial massage (he said it like that, like it was inevitable), and she refused politely, and thanked him anyway, for the third time, and he persisted, I snapped at him in Arabic, “Enough, she said no thank you!” At first he tried to make a joke of it, then he tried to apologize for upsetting me like it wasn’t his behavior that was out of line, but rather the impact it had on my emotions. Then he tried to explain that this was his job and I was like “No, your job is to give massages to people who WANT massages.” He was upset enough to talk to Sarah about how outrageous I was being and how innocent he was once I walked away but he didn’t bother us anymore. We’ll see if he revisits us when we go up to the deck again today. I think he’ll have to since after a group of around forty Americans from Missouri disembarked yesterday afternoon there are only like 20 people on our cruise ship, which is built for about 200. We are his only potential clients so I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. I figure I can always threaten to report him to the management of the boat, which is I think what he was afraid of yesterday when he apologized, because I am quite sure there’s a large employment pool of other smarmy young guys willing to grope swimsuit-clad foreign women for a living ready to jump in if this one racks up some complaints.
First day in Upper Egypt
These next few posts documenting our trip around Upper Egypt might get kind of boring but I thought it was important to have a day by day record of what I did in case anyone wants to come for the same kind of trip or in case I ever want to organize one again. Fortunately, or, for my readers, unfortunately, not too much terrible happend during the trip so I don't have many harrowing Egypt stories to fulfill the "misery" element of the blog. But not to worry, once I am back in Cairo, I'm sure my life will rain crap once again. :)
Sunday night we left on the overnight train to upper Egypt for the beginning of our Nile Cruise. The cruise includes 5 star accommodations, three meals a day, ground transportation to historical sites, and an English speaking guide for four days and three nights, plus a night on the overnight train from Cairo and another night on the way back.
The train to Luxor was bumpy, jerky, and too bright to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time so we were all exhausted by the time we bumped and jerked into the station on Monday morning. We heaved ourselves off the train and limped into the parking lot searching for the promised guide holding my name on a sign. We searched in vain. Apparently the train had arrived early so although our guide came within fifteen minutes, our driver didn’t arrive for another twenty minutes after that. Although we had first been told we’d be able to check into the cruise ship before heading out to see the sights of Luxor’s West Bank (the City of the Dead including the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut’s temple), our guide informed us that check in wasn’t until ten-thirty. It was then around five-thirty in the morning, apparently the perfect time to sight-see, since we set off immediately for the West Bank.
Forty minutes of green pastureland dotted with palm trees and donkeys later, we forked over an exorbitant admission price that didn’t even include free range of the tombs. Each ticket buys entrance to three tombs and we went to the three our guide recommended we see: the deep, unfinished tomb of Ramses I, the long, flat tomb of Ramses III, and the super-long, slanted tomb of Ramses IX. The paint was still vibrant in the deep tomb of Ramses I and in some of the others as well and the number and detail of the hieroglyphs was boggling. There are dozens of kind of birds in Egyptian hieroglyphs, each representing a different word or sound, depending on the form and date of the language (there are three languages of hieroglyphs, I think, which evolved at different times over the course of Ancient Egyptian history). Some birds differ by only a single stroke, an added feather, talon, or the upward or downward curve of a beak, but have vastly different meanings. Unfortunately, the government allows no photos or video at the Valley of the Kings so I have nothing from here to post with this entry and my memories of the tomb scenes are already blurring with the other few thousand scenes we’ve visited since then.
We visited an alabaster factory, where the raw stone is first roughly cut with chisel-like tools into the general shape of a vase or statue, then packed with clay and material and buried in the earth to soften the top layers of the stone, then carved in detail, then polished smooth and fired in a kiln to re-harden. The stuff was beautiful, especially the green alabaster, which glowed like a green glass lampshade from the 40’s when held to a lightbulb, but I thought that even the prices one could get from drawn out negotiations were more expensive than it was worth.
We moved on to Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, or, more accurately, King Hatshepsut’s temple, since she ruled Upper and Lower Egypt as a man for twenty years. After her husband died and his illegitimate son took over, he too died and Hatshepsut’s seven year old son was next in line. She took over the throne, ostensibly ruling as a regent at first, then sent her son to a distant kingdom to be educated in the ways of war and politics while she officially declared herself king of Egypt. Why King? Because there was simply no way to understand or communicate the concept of a Queen of Egypt. The ruler was always a king. You knew he was a king because he wore a long beard and dressed in royal manly robes and depicted himself in the temples throughout his kingdom in the posture and bearing of a man. The scenes of his life written on his tomb and temples depict him hitting his enemies, hunting, and other manly ventures. Rather than break this mold, Hatshepsut found it easier to wear a false beard, dress in male clothing, and refer to herself in masculine pronouns. It must have worked because Egypt fought no wars during her entire reign. She resolved every conflict with diplomacy and political maneuvering and the country prospered until her son, now a grown man in his twenties, returned to Luxor and Hatshepsut mysteriously disappeared (her mummy was only recently located in a tomb near her own, where her supporters may have secreted it away to protect it).
Most statues, friezes, and paintings of hers in temples around Upper Egypt have been chipped away, particularly the faces, by her son’s supporters, to erase the shame of her enduring, but temporary dominance. Despite this, her temple is still very impressive, consisting of three huge levels of stone cut into the cliffside. Two large walls frame the entrance to the first level, a large courtyard which was once a great garden for papyrus and lotus, the symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt. The second level is formed by broad columns, as big around as California redwood trees (not the ones you drive through, but the next size down) forming long colonnades in the side of the cliffs with scenes depicting the journey of Hatshepsut to Somalia, or Punt, as it was called in Ancient times. A third, smaller courtyard, that I think might have originally been roofed in stone, is carved even further back into the cliff.
Our last stop on the West Bank was the statutes of Memnon, which was the name Ancient Greek tourists gave to two large statutes of an Egyptian Pharaoh whose name was not Memnon. We finally made our way to the boat to check in to our rooms and get much-needed showers. We’d been touring for six hours and it wasn’t even noon. We had the afternoon off but restricted our naps to only a couple hours so that we could be sure to sleep through the night. Lunch that day was our worst food on the ship by far but everything since then has been at least edible if not tasty, though there was some fish for dinner that night that had turned to a gelatinous liquidy ooze inside its shell of fried batter and breading. It is sometimes hard to identify what exactly the food is, especially dessert, and we often have to just serve ourselves up a small portion of something that looks like tunafish whipped into a thick paste and sculpted into the shape of a bumper curb in a parking lot on the off chance it might turn out to be chocolate mousse (which it did).
Sunday night we left on the overnight train to upper Egypt for the beginning of our Nile Cruise. The cruise includes 5 star accommodations, three meals a day, ground transportation to historical sites, and an English speaking guide for four days and three nights, plus a night on the overnight train from Cairo and another night on the way back.
The train to Luxor was bumpy, jerky, and too bright to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time so we were all exhausted by the time we bumped and jerked into the station on Monday morning. We heaved ourselves off the train and limped into the parking lot searching for the promised guide holding my name on a sign. We searched in vain. Apparently the train had arrived early so although our guide came within fifteen minutes, our driver didn’t arrive for another twenty minutes after that. Although we had first been told we’d be able to check into the cruise ship before heading out to see the sights of Luxor’s West Bank (the City of the Dead including the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut’s temple), our guide informed us that check in wasn’t until ten-thirty. It was then around five-thirty in the morning, apparently the perfect time to sight-see, since we set off immediately for the West Bank.
Forty minutes of green pastureland dotted with palm trees and donkeys later, we forked over an exorbitant admission price that didn’t even include free range of the tombs. Each ticket buys entrance to three tombs and we went to the three our guide recommended we see: the deep, unfinished tomb of Ramses I, the long, flat tomb of Ramses III, and the super-long, slanted tomb of Ramses IX. The paint was still vibrant in the deep tomb of Ramses I and in some of the others as well and the number and detail of the hieroglyphs was boggling. There are dozens of kind of birds in Egyptian hieroglyphs, each representing a different word or sound, depending on the form and date of the language (there are three languages of hieroglyphs, I think, which evolved at different times over the course of Ancient Egyptian history). Some birds differ by only a single stroke, an added feather, talon, or the upward or downward curve of a beak, but have vastly different meanings. Unfortunately, the government allows no photos or video at the Valley of the Kings so I have nothing from here to post with this entry and my memories of the tomb scenes are already blurring with the other few thousand scenes we’ve visited since then.
We visited an alabaster factory, where the raw stone is first roughly cut with chisel-like tools into the general shape of a vase or statue, then packed with clay and material and buried in the earth to soften the top layers of the stone, then carved in detail, then polished smooth and fired in a kiln to re-harden. The stuff was beautiful, especially the green alabaster, which glowed like a green glass lampshade from the 40’s when held to a lightbulb, but I thought that even the prices one could get from drawn out negotiations were more expensive than it was worth.
We moved on to Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, or, more accurately, King Hatshepsut’s temple, since she ruled Upper and Lower Egypt as a man for twenty years. After her husband died and his illegitimate son took over, he too died and Hatshepsut’s seven year old son was next in line. She took over the throne, ostensibly ruling as a regent at first, then sent her son to a distant kingdom to be educated in the ways of war and politics while she officially declared herself king of Egypt. Why King? Because there was simply no way to understand or communicate the concept of a Queen of Egypt. The ruler was always a king. You knew he was a king because he wore a long beard and dressed in royal manly robes and depicted himself in the temples throughout his kingdom in the posture and bearing of a man. The scenes of his life written on his tomb and temples depict him hitting his enemies, hunting, and other manly ventures. Rather than break this mold, Hatshepsut found it easier to wear a false beard, dress in male clothing, and refer to herself in masculine pronouns. It must have worked because Egypt fought no wars during her entire reign. She resolved every conflict with diplomacy and political maneuvering and the country prospered until her son, now a grown man in his twenties, returned to Luxor and Hatshepsut mysteriously disappeared (her mummy was only recently located in a tomb near her own, where her supporters may have secreted it away to protect it).
Most statues, friezes, and paintings of hers in temples around Upper Egypt have been chipped away, particularly the faces, by her son’s supporters, to erase the shame of her enduring, but temporary dominance. Despite this, her temple is still very impressive, consisting of three huge levels of stone cut into the cliffside. Two large walls frame the entrance to the first level, a large courtyard which was once a great garden for papyrus and lotus, the symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt. The second level is formed by broad columns, as big around as California redwood trees (not the ones you drive through, but the next size down) forming long colonnades in the side of the cliffs with scenes depicting the journey of Hatshepsut to Somalia, or Punt, as it was called in Ancient times. A third, smaller courtyard, that I think might have originally been roofed in stone, is carved even further back into the cliff.
Our last stop on the West Bank was the statutes of Memnon, which was the name Ancient Greek tourists gave to two large statutes of an Egyptian Pharaoh whose name was not Memnon. We finally made our way to the boat to check in to our rooms and get much-needed showers. We’d been touring for six hours and it wasn’t even noon. We had the afternoon off but restricted our naps to only a couple hours so that we could be sure to sleep through the night. Lunch that day was our worst food on the ship by far but everything since then has been at least edible if not tasty, though there was some fish for dinner that night that had turned to a gelatinous liquidy ooze inside its shell of fried batter and breading. It is sometimes hard to identify what exactly the food is, especially dessert, and we often have to just serve ourselves up a small portion of something that looks like tunafish whipped into a thick paste and sculpted into the shape of a bumper curb in a parking lot on the off chance it might turn out to be chocolate mousse (which it did).
Tourism on two continents - exhausting!
Please excuse my long hiatus. I left Cairo to spend Christmas in New York on December 20th and was sick for more than half my ten day American vacation. I did manage to buy Target out of cold and cough medicine (the Egyptian stuff just doesn’t cut it), vitamins, and other essentials I can’t find in Egypt. I also built up my business wardrobe for my new job but I still own barely enough professional clothes to get through a single week so my new coworkers will be treated to the same cycle of outfits for the first few months of work until I can afford to hit the mall again.
My cousin Suzie joined my family in New York for a few days of sightseeing, then flew with me back to Cairo to begin our grand tour. The audio in the tail section of the plane, where we were seated, was malfunctioning and after resetting the video system three times, and watching the first five minutes of three different movies, they finally settled on the worst of the bunch, He’s Just Not That Into You. Our flight left around 11pm so it may have been that I was exhausted, or it may have been that the movie was mind-numbingly boring, but I couldn’t even stay awake through the first fifteen minutes. I woke up in time to catch the last fifteen minutes and eat dinner, then crashed again. I woke up like seven hours later, in the daylight of a distant time zone, as befuddled as if I’d taken a sleeping pill but this was one of the only flights in my life I actually fell asleep before I could take anything. Breakfast was unexpectedly pesto pizza.
We spent three whirlwind days in Cairo. At first it was just my friend Sarah, from college at the University of Oregon, Suzie, and I, and although we did get up to eat breakfast and watch Win a Date With Tad Hamilton on my crappy TV, which is almost completely in black and white now, we pretty much slept most of the day. That night, New Year’s Eve, Suzie’s friend Helen, also from the University of Oregon, arrived from Prague, where she was spending the holidays with her grandparents. Helen arrived at 2:30am and Suzie took a taxi all by herself to meet her at the airport and escort her to my apartment and although I didn’t have to do anything but wait by the phone in case of emergency, I was worried about them and didn’t sleep well at all.
The next day, Saturday, we set out on our Desert Tour, which was supposed to include many sites around Cairo, but we started so late in the morning (around 11) that we couldn’t fit everything in. We hit the pyramids and the sphinx, saw how Egyptian silk carpets are made, visited the step pyramid at Saqqara, which was built a dynasty before the pyramids at Giza, and ate dinner in an Egyptian restaurant.
Although we had planned to hit the Egyptian museum the following day, Sunday, primarily for the purpose of seeing King Tut’s head and the jewelry room (history, schmistory, show me the sparkly things!), I didn’t notice until around 1:30 that the royal mummy room closed at 3:15, which wouldn’t give us enough time to make it through the hour-long lines. Instead we shopped at a few quality gift stores I discovered in my neighborhood a couple weeks ago and then Sarah, Suzie, and Helen went to explore Old Cairo, the Citadel and two mosques, while I took care of bills, rent, and some overdue email correspondence.
I also got a frightening call that morning from my new office saying that they thought I was supposed to start work that day. I explained that I had agreed in my interview to start on the tenth and that I was leaving on a Nile Cruise with guests the following day and could not possibly start this week. They acted like I hadn’t read my letter of engagement closely enough, since the letter did list my starting date as the third, and for a while I believed them and apologized for not noticing the discrepancy but held my ground that I had agreed in my interview to start the tenth.
They said that this was fine, if that was the day I had arranged with my new boss, and I confirmed I would be in the office on the tenth. But within a couple hours, a memory crawled to the surface of my stressed mind of receiving my letter of engagement, noticing the error that listed the third of January as my start date, and including in my letter of acceptance a notice that this was not the correct date and that I would in fact be starting on the tenth. Now I don’t know whether to go through my sent messages, find and re-send this message to prove I didn’t actually screw up, or whether this would be beating a dead horse since they were willing to let me postpone my start date until next week without hassle. This is only one of the ten million things that worry me about starting this new job!!
My cousin Suzie joined my family in New York for a few days of sightseeing, then flew with me back to Cairo to begin our grand tour. The audio in the tail section of the plane, where we were seated, was malfunctioning and after resetting the video system three times, and watching the first five minutes of three different movies, they finally settled on the worst of the bunch, He’s Just Not That Into You. Our flight left around 11pm so it may have been that I was exhausted, or it may have been that the movie was mind-numbingly boring, but I couldn’t even stay awake through the first fifteen minutes. I woke up in time to catch the last fifteen minutes and eat dinner, then crashed again. I woke up like seven hours later, in the daylight of a distant time zone, as befuddled as if I’d taken a sleeping pill but this was one of the only flights in my life I actually fell asleep before I could take anything. Breakfast was unexpectedly pesto pizza.
We spent three whirlwind days in Cairo. At first it was just my friend Sarah, from college at the University of Oregon, Suzie, and I, and although we did get up to eat breakfast and watch Win a Date With Tad Hamilton on my crappy TV, which is almost completely in black and white now, we pretty much slept most of the day. That night, New Year’s Eve, Suzie’s friend Helen, also from the University of Oregon, arrived from Prague, where she was spending the holidays with her grandparents. Helen arrived at 2:30am and Suzie took a taxi all by herself to meet her at the airport and escort her to my apartment and although I didn’t have to do anything but wait by the phone in case of emergency, I was worried about them and didn’t sleep well at all.
The next day, Saturday, we set out on our Desert Tour, which was supposed to include many sites around Cairo, but we started so late in the morning (around 11) that we couldn’t fit everything in. We hit the pyramids and the sphinx, saw how Egyptian silk carpets are made, visited the step pyramid at Saqqara, which was built a dynasty before the pyramids at Giza, and ate dinner in an Egyptian restaurant.
Although we had planned to hit the Egyptian museum the following day, Sunday, primarily for the purpose of seeing King Tut’s head and the jewelry room (history, schmistory, show me the sparkly things!), I didn’t notice until around 1:30 that the royal mummy room closed at 3:15, which wouldn’t give us enough time to make it through the hour-long lines. Instead we shopped at a few quality gift stores I discovered in my neighborhood a couple weeks ago and then Sarah, Suzie, and Helen went to explore Old Cairo, the Citadel and two mosques, while I took care of bills, rent, and some overdue email correspondence.
I also got a frightening call that morning from my new office saying that they thought I was supposed to start work that day. I explained that I had agreed in my interview to start on the tenth and that I was leaving on a Nile Cruise with guests the following day and could not possibly start this week. They acted like I hadn’t read my letter of engagement closely enough, since the letter did list my starting date as the third, and for a while I believed them and apologized for not noticing the discrepancy but held my ground that I had agreed in my interview to start the tenth.
They said that this was fine, if that was the day I had arranged with my new boss, and I confirmed I would be in the office on the tenth. But within a couple hours, a memory crawled to the surface of my stressed mind of receiving my letter of engagement, noticing the error that listed the third of January as my start date, and including in my letter of acceptance a notice that this was not the correct date and that I would in fact be starting on the tenth. Now I don’t know whether to go through my sent messages, find and re-send this message to prove I didn’t actually screw up, or whether this would be beating a dead horse since they were willing to let me postpone my start date until next week without hassle. This is only one of the ten million things that worry me about starting this new job!!
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