Backup life plan: Egypt tour guide

From the Old Wonders of the World in Egypt to the new Wonders of Dubai and from there to the wonderful and surprising interactions I got to have in Syria and Lebanon, the past four weeks were just about everything I could have asked for, and there is really more to tell then I will ever be able to realistically write down (especially given my penchant for long-windedness...). That being said, I'll try and hit some of the highlights in the next couple of posts.

Starting the moment I picked up Eleanor and Dylan from the airport I had a great time leading them around Egypt. I'd been looking forward to sharing all the things I've learned and picked up on here for a long time, so I was pretty excited to play the tour guide. Plus, during our time in Egypt for the most part I had a number of pretty gratifying Arabic experiences as the translator for Ellie and Dylan. I found on more than one occasion that I was able to converse (as in an actual conversations(!)) in Arabic at least in some very basic ways and fairly regularly even with enough skill to crack a few good Egyptian jokes which had me feeling pretty good. What's more I even managed to hold my own well enough in a few good arguments (usually having to do with bargaining for some prices, of course). At the same time, Dylan and Eleanor had no idea how much I didn't understand of what Egyptians would say to me, but as I'm sure most language learners know, you kind of learn to fake it well enough to believably limp through most conversations that you don't feel like working all the way through.

So anyway, on our first day of the Egypt tour we went to Giza--the place I had been avoiding going to specifically because I knew I would be going with Eleanor and Dylan for sure anyway. I kind of suck at touring ruins, as I've mentioned, but the size of the Pyramids is pretty hard to argue with:

Dylan and Ellie in front of the second biggest pyramid, but the only one that managed to keep some of its limestone siding from thrifty Egyptian rulers who used the limestone on the monuments for other building projects.

And of course, the Sphinx:


In Arabic, the Sphinx is called "Abu Hol," or Father of Terror

After Giza, I took them downtown to get some juice and other classic Egyptian foods. We also went to Khan el-Khalili around midnight which to my shock and disturbance was actually completely barren--something I thought never actually happened.


The next day I took Eleanor and Dylan to the Citadel to see the fantastic Mohammad Ali mosque and the stunning view of Cairo from the fortress' elevated location. I then also convinced them to walk with me somewhere I had not yet been in Cairo, but had been meaning to go to for a long time: the Garbage City. I knew from the maps in our trusty Lonely Planet guide book that the city and the famous church of St. Simon the Tanner tucked away in the cliffs surrounding the city were fairly close to the Citadel and so I convinced them that it would be a cool idea to walk there. This involved asking multiple Egyptians for directions (you can't just ask one as we know) and then walking first along a highway and then through the, um, not clean streets of the garbage city. In between the highway and the garbage city though we had the good fortune to walk past some pre-teen Egyptian boys playing soccer on a park/patch of grass between some streets. Eleanor patiently let Dylan and I indulge in some pick up soccer with the boys--possibly one of my favorite memories of being in Egypt of all time, I think.



After our impromptu game (during which Dylan, as usual, played better than me) we made our way into the garbage city which was also a very cool experience. Now the area, a portion of Cairo that is partially tucked away into a cliff, is officially part of an area called Manshiyet Nasr, but the garbage city is really its own distinct area. For centuries, this region of the city has been home to the "Zabaleen," or "Garbage People," who have taken care of the city's garbage, and who have also historically almost always Coptic Christians for reasons I don't fully know. Even to this day, you will see them late at night picking up the bags of garbage distributed on certain street corners around Cairo and loading them up into trucks. Despite having seen that countless times, I had not realized that they indeed literally just took it back to their area of Cairo, but judging from the number of trucks loaded to the brim with garbage bags driving past Dylan, Eleanor and I, it seems that is exactly what they do. I think they burn quite a lot of the garbage, but nowhere near all of it, as piles of garbage were everywhere to be found in the city, though not just piled up any old place as you might expect. Instead, they had either piled it all in certain locations, or had actually taken it into what seemed like their own houses. After walking past what seemed like more or less a giant pile of trash near the entrance to the city's main road, we passed what appeared to be abandoned store fronts filled with trash. At one point we passed one that was particularly full that actually had an Egyptian man sitting in a little dug-out amidst the trash in his store/home(?). I didn't get too many pictures here, because I felt a little intrusive doing so, but I did like the way the clothes were all hanging from everyone's windows:


The state of the city sounds sort of shocking, and while thinking about it afterwards it made me sort of sad, but at the time I was mostly taking cues from the residents I walked past, none of whom seemed particularly bothered by the state of their city. Also remarkable was that we were basically not harassed at all, even with blonde, blue-eyed Eleanor. This sort of made sense given that there is a direct relationship between how used Egyptians are to seeing tourists and how much they will harass said tourists (sort of contradictory-seeming when you think about it at first, I know). After asking a few of the nice residents we took a right turn and a slight hike up a curvy road to find the rather impressive Church of St. Simon carved into the white stone cliffs.

St. Simon was canonized as a Saint for successfully praying to God to move the mountain (as some part of the gospel of Matthew says: If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to the mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move, nothing will be impossible for you) and in the process saving all the Copts. For some reason though, he didn't get himself a fancy church until the 1990's despite being an important saint for Coptic Christians in Egypt for almost a millennium. Anyway, his church had lots of cool reliefs chiseled into the walls and though we couldn't see it, also had a multi-thousand person outdoor auditorium for big services that we were not allowed to see unfortunately. It was clean and quiet and really rather beautiful, but it also felt a little like an abandoned Christian amusement park as there were very few people there.


The next day we got up at around three in the morning to take the short flight down to Luxor (the train ride which I had recently done to Aswan could have been cool for Eleanor and Dylan, but we didn't have the time). We landed in Luxor around 6:30 in the morning to see this dream-like sight (or was it just dream-like because I was half asleep?):



And then this cheerful sign:

More on Luxor soon. Lots of crazy temples and stuff. And someone called Mr. Dude.

I'm currently obsessed with this

Things I'm also marginally obsessed by:
Dubai water parks, the amazingly cheap and delicious food in Damascus, trying to figure out whether Dylan and I should still go to Lebanon as planned in light of the recent "collapse" of the government there. My answer, still yes probably. More on my shenanigans in Dubai soon.

Alex pt. 3 - The long awaited anti-climax

I'm currently publishing this from a pay-by-the-hour internet computer in mine and Dylan's awesome hotel in Dubai. It is currently 3:28am here. Why am I up so late? Because I was doing some awesome clubbing in Dubai? Because I was base-jumping off the Burj Khalifa? Yes? No. Because I'm working on a Grad School application for a two-year Masters Arabic program that comes with a fellowship to cover the tuition and the living costs for the second year of the program when you are in Damascus. And because I decided to do this at 5 in the morning before Dylan and Eleanor came. Turns out this is maybe the worst timing ever. Alas.

Anyway, here's a little somethin somethin about my long passed trip to Alexandria.

Sculptures outside the new Library of Alexandria

I don't know what took me so long to put up this post as it wasn't even that long of a day thanks to the, shall we say, unhelpfulness of a particular ticket seller in the Alexandria train station. Generally I found most Alexandrians to be like those two young guys in the streets whom I initially tried to blow off by speaking Spanish: helpful, friendly, occasionally wanting a picture with me, and much more patient with silly foreigners than Cairenes. Unfortunately, the ticket seller in Alex was not like these other more pleasant Alexandrians. We got up early-ish thanks in part due to the insistence of our unwanted travelling companion, Rachel (actually we were planning on doing this anyway, but she made a big passive-aggressive fuss about it...) and headed over to the train station to get our tickets back to Cairo. The plan was to take a late train back and get to some of the last tourist sites done while spending a good part of the day at a beach. Now, in case you've forgotten thanks to this blogger's non-chronological blog posting, we had not yet been to the glorious beaches of Sinai, so we'd all been savoring the thought of a relaxing beach day as a change from our city lives in Cairo. Thus, you can imagine our shock and disappointment when the first ticket seller we talked to informed us that every train, except for one at 2pm, was sold out. It would seem that Rachel, to my chagrin, had been right to have been complaining that we hadn't gotten our tickets yet. Curses!

With seemingly no other options available our group started buying our tickets for the 2 o'clock train while sullenly working out a new plan for our day. Luckily, Nav and I seemed to have the same thought something along the lines of: "wait a second, this is Egypt..." We exchanged suspicious glances, started to say "Maybe we should..." at the same time, stopped, and then ducked the queue separating ticket booths to talk to the other ticket seller who had no customers (which maybe also should have been a clue). I asked him if there were any trains with free seats later than 2pm, and he gave a sort of pitying look like, "Yeah dude, why wouldn't there be?" and said yes, at 7:30pm. We got our tickets changed to 7:30 after little righteous indignation on our part and a short conversation between the two ticket guys which I couldn't hear but which I imagined was something like this:

-Actually helpful ticket seller: "Dude, wtf? Why'd you tell these kids there were only seats on the 2 o'clock train?"
-Dickhead first ticket seller: "I dunno man, they were buggin me with their horrible pronunciation and convoluted grammar constructions...and...stuff..."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "...You just had the 2 o'clock train page open on your computer and didn't want to change it, didn't you?"
-Dickhead ticket seller: "Well yeah! And I was really busy moving these papers in this stack over into this other stack! Didn't they see that??"
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "I don't even know why you have stacks of paper, man. All we do is sell tickets for the Alexandria-Cairo train route. All we do."
-First ticket seller: "Me neither, man. Me neither...But didn't they see that I had them?! And why'd you have to go and tell them about the other train? Now I have to change their tickets! GOD."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "You're an idiot."




And so it was, relieved to have only about 2 hours less than originally planned, we decided to skip our planned visit to some ex-royal gardens somewhere and go straight to the beach. Because all the beaches are not actually on the part of the coast in the center of Alex, you have to go East or West. We chose East on the recommendation of our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook as there was supposed to be a particularly good (yet cheap!) private beach that way. The free public beaches were out of the question, as those are for the more conservative, anti-bikini Muslims, but the beach we chose only ended up costing something like LE10 each, and the long cab ride east along the Corniche afforded not only some beautiful views of the ocean and beaches, but also some really interesting snapshots of the city. Driving along I got to see some of Alex's bigger buildings and interesting restaurant areas, but I was most pleased to see how many random public aesthetic additions there were along the road. With fountains and murals and sculptures and a number of other art installations, Alex really seemed to show that it was a serious city trying to not only take care of itself, but also to nurture and encourage some culture...unlike Cairo. The capstone of this cultural self-improvement we would be visiting later that day, but first...


the beach!

Our cab entered what clearly seemed to be a new, upscale exurb of pricey condos and apartments. The streets were unusually clean by the standards of most Egyptian cities I've been to, and nicely manicured and arranged palm trees gave the feel of a Miami neighborhood. We found the boardwalk entrance and walked past a number of beachy snack shops to our beach's entrance. After getting our tickets one of the attendants brought our chairs and umbrella to the only spot left still on the water at the very end of the beach, and we set up. The girls, minus Rachel who, it turned out, couldn't swim, all quickly got in the water and i soon joined them. I'd been hoping to spend the morning doing lots of walking around and exploring before I became a beach bum, so as soon as I got into the cool water, I decided to swim down farther east to get some exercise and see what was going on down the coast on the other beaches.

My little swim turned into about two and a half hour affair as I got distracted first by an international kayaking race that was being held, and then by what I realized were some prime body surfing waves. As I sort of childishly bodysurfed over and over, I couldn't help but be reminded of my best friend who taught me how to body surf in Hawaii in 9th grade. On my swim back up the shore to where I'd left the girls, I ran into an Egyptian boy--the only other person as far out from the shore as me--with whom a conversation quickly led to more childish fun for me. Afte exchanging the usual "Oh you speak Arabic?" frivolities, we were soon swimming back toward the land to gather his group of friends and a soccer ball to play keep away with. They were all apparently entry-level employees at a law firm in Cairo on vacation for the day, and I ended up goofing around and playing for probably another 45 minutes.

Now not to brag or anything, but just like in the cold spring of Abu Shrouf (outside Siwa) when our driver (foolishly!) challenged me to a race, I seemed to have a pretty solid advantage in my swimming abilities. Is it fair to say that Egyptians, handicapped by their desert upbringing, are not especially good swimmers? Maybe I'm inclined to say yes. But they sure are fun sometimes anyway. After a nice long swim back to my friends, I was good and ready for beach bumdom. The girls were slightly worried at best, even though I had been gone for almost a good 3 hours. They were "JUST starting" to get concerned. I chose to believe it was out of faith in my swimming abilities. Ha.

After a nap and some snacks, we rinsed off and headed to the library of Alexandria about half of the way back to our hotel from the beach. Outside the library were sculptures and sort of decorative pool of water between the library and the corniche, and there were plenty of tourists and Egyptians alike going in and out. Many of them were quite friendly and it was as I was trying to squeeze by a group of girls excitedly asking Julia questions that I accidentally bumped into a little boy. I said something innocuous like "excuse me" in Arabic as he looked at me, and attempted to keep walking only to find myself suddenly surrounded by a whole crew of boys. One boy saw I was holding a camera and gestured for us to take a picture (why are Egyptians so fond of having their pictures taken with foreigners on the the foreigners' cameras? I don't know...), which immediately turned into...well...this:

Thanks to Nav for taking such a cool picture with such awesome lighting.

After extracting myself from the raucous boys we made our way over to the ticket office. As luck would have it, we were given the Egyptian price for our tickets, I think because we were speaking Arabic and some of the girls look passably Egyptian, but we were dismayed to find out that you are not allowed to bring outside books into the library, ruining some of our group's plans to do homework. I think we all enjoyed walking around the gigantic bestepped library anyway. I don't think I can really properly describe it adequately, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

One of the coolest things about the library, far beyond its stunning interior and its obvious dedication to improving the city, was its partnership with this project called the Internet Archivethat I found totally awesome. The Internet Archive has archived and kept copies of every public webpage since 1996, and the Library of Alexandria has a mirror of the whole archive on its website--the only one of its kind. In other words, the Library of Alexandria is again one of the biggest repositories of information in the whole world. Thousands of years ago, the Library of Alexandria was probably the first library that purposefully attempted to amass a collection of books from around the world and its scholarly atmosphere gave birth to the scientific method. I think the new Library of Alexandria is worthy of its predecessor's esteemed title and place in history, and what's more I think it will do good things for Alexandria and Egypt.

After an hour of contentedly wandering the peaceful library (listening to the Arcade Fire on my ipod the whole time), we met back up and went to grab a quick dinner before our train back to Cairo. Sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station, I was all ready to study some Arabic notecards until I fell asleep when an Egyptian man sat down in the empty seat next to me. I could feel him watching me with my note cards, but it wasn't until I got to the flashcard for the word that meant "means" (as in a means of communication) that he started to talk to me by asking what the English word meant. Our conversation quickly turned to other things, and we ended up talking the entire train ride back in a mix of Arabic and English. Unfortunately I can't remember many of the particulars of this conversation, but he did express to me, as many other Egyptians have, his disgust and annoyance with the Egyptian government under Mubarak. He also shared his view (and what he portrayed as most Egyptians' view) on retirement, as well as why it is American youth always are portrayed working in restaurants in movies and television shows. "What is it? Is there a lot of money to be made in American restaurants or something?" he asked. Struck with a little bit of confusion over why it actually was that I and so many of my friends had worked in restaurants, I responded with a half-explanation about how American servers get tipped more because they are actually expected to do stuff. Rather than offending him, to my surprise, he agreed and complained about how the often apathetic and unhelpful waitstaffs in Egyptian restaurants annoyed him too. We touched on some bigger issues about the different ways that Americans and Egyptians approach their life and their work, but I'll save some of these more academic thoughts for another day perhaps.

Looking back, this was a rather pivotal conversation for me during my stay in Egypt as it was really the first great conversation I had with an Egyptian using my Arabic, and it set me up for the really great conversation I would have a few weeks later in the clothing market of Wikalat al-Balah. It was a perfect capstone to what had been a really nice trip to Alex, and it left us all wishing--in vain as it would turn out--that we could come back again soon. Hopefully I get to see this kind of sunset again soon:

Yes, I know I have a habit of ending my posts with pictures of sunsets...I realize it's cheesy, yes.

On future plans defined and undefined

Though I have over a month left till I start school again, today is my last "boring" day of break. I'm picking up Dylan and Eleanor from the Airport (who conveniently land only 20 minutes apart from each other) beginning what surely will be a rollercoaster ride of adventures. It starts with a whirlwind tour of Egypt with the both of them that should go something like this:

T-4
Night: get back to apartment around 10-ish and then maybe go smoke some sheesha and drink some tea like real Egyptians do all the time (if you guys are feeling up for it after your travels)

W-5
Morning: Giza Pyramids/Sphinx
Afternoon: Get lunch Downtown and then wander (take the metro back to Zamalek for the experience)
Dinner:Slow Kofta
Night: Check out Khan el-Khalily at night before chilling at Fishawi's, the oldest and probably most famous cafe in Cairo

R-6
Morning-Afternoon: Start out with the Citadel and/or the Garbage City then make the journey by foot through the backstreets of Islamic Cairo up through the back entrance of Khan in time to catch the afternoon prayer at Al-Azhar Mosque or the Mosque of al-Hakim
Dinner: Fiteer downtown
Night: hang out at Hurreya Bar or Odeon Palace and then get some street snacks on the Nile before heading back to Zamalek to get a little sleep

F-7
Morning: leave Cairo at a brutal 5:30am to get into Luxor at 6:30 by plane
Rest of the day: Marathon tour of ruin-y things

S-8
More Ruin-y things
Leave to go back for Cairo that night at 11:35 pm to get in to Cai-town an hour later

Sn-9
Morning: Probably sleep in
Afternoon: get some supplies and then go to al-Azhar Park for a picnic of Alex Top koshary
Dinner: maybe go out to dinner with my friends and one of their families to an awesome Lebanese restaurant
Night: dinner will probably go late, but if not too late then maybe take a short Felucca ride on the Nile and then go back and get ready for White Desert

M-10
Leave Early to go to the White Desert with Hemeida
Do Desert-y things

T-11
Morning: More desert-y things
Evening: head back to Cairo

W-12
Leave Cairo, Eleanor going back to the States, and Dylan and I to Dubai

If you can't tell, I'm pretty thrilled to be getting to show off some of my Egypt know-how. After Cairo, Dylan and I have less concrete plans, though we know we'll be in Dubai for two days then Abu Dhabi for two days before we fly to Damascus to explore Syria for three and a half days until we find a private cab to take us to Beirut for another two and half days in Lebanon. We haven't figured out all our accommodations yet, though we have two (or three?) nights in Beirut booked at what is supposed to be a really cool cross between a Bed & Breakfast and a home-stay, plus we have all our flights.

Luckily for my teeming throngs of loyal blog-followers (hi mom!), I've stocked up some posts in my free time over the past couple of days that are ready and waiting to be posted, so I won't be totally AWOL. It's been nice having the past week or so to myself to just be free to be totally lazy sometimes while also getting to take my time exploring the parts of Cairo I felt like I'd missed. Nonetheless, as ridiculously, overpoweringly excited as I am to start in on my adventures, a part of me does wish I had another week like this last one. I realized this is officially my first time with my "own" apartment, so I felt like I wasted a little too much time just revelling in that fact instead of figuring out some better plans for my life. This feeling probably stems from my 4am decision last night to apply to a Grad School Arabic program--though I'd all but vowed never to do any such thing. The deadline is also in just a few weeks, so it means I'm going to have to sneak in time on most of my application stuff in between showing my friends around Egypt. This is, of course, no one's fault but my own, but it's still stressing. I've also started looking at Foreign Service Exam test booklets for the State Dept. (which actually looks like it will be kind of fun to study for) and into other Arabic-specializing programs around the Middle East. So I have some plans, or at least some ideas for plans, but they're all sort of vague and open-ended. I just know, I really don't want to have had this amazing experience with my Arabic only to go back to the States and never be able to use it again.

Anyway, here's a nice picture of the sun setting from my apartment taken a few days ago:


And here's satan-cat, my only housemate for the past week, looking deceptively cute right before doing what she does best: attacking my feet.