Month: February 2007

Categories
Cultural Differences

The “corridor nod” is not acceptable here.

Anybody who has ever worked in the US knows what I mean by the corridor nod:

You are walking down the hall and you see a coworker or acquaintance.

You nod, maybe say “How’s it going” in passing. Neither of you break stride.

That is unpossible here. At least with those attuned to the culture.

There is a much more formulaic greeting ritual, for lack of a better word.

If it is the first time you have seen this person today:

  • Stop.
  • Shake hands.

Handshakes here are not like handshakes in the US.

Man-to-man, it is a firm clasp. No real shaking, just a clasp.

And then there is the cheek kiss. Men here will do the 2 cheek air kiss while clasping hands. This is taking a great deal of getting used to for me. I remember the first time this happened to me with a man. Boy, taken out of context that could be problematic for my political career.Anyway..

It was awkward. I am getting better at it, but I just know I am gonna “go left” when I should go right and headbutt someone and break his nose.

Woman-to-Woman, it is kind of a limp clasp, again with the 2 cheek kiss.

Man to woman is more problematic. The woman has to be the initiator of any contact. Do not attempt to shake her hand unless she puts her hand out first.

I remember when I learned that lesson: I met an Egyptian woman and stuck my hand out. A look of confusion and embarrassment came over her face and she barely stuck her hand out. At that point I realised I had screwed up. I took her hand very lightly and gave it a slight squeeze. It was like grapsing a dead fish. Whee.

After all that comes the:

  • Ezaik? (How are you). This is INVARIABLY answered with
  • Al Hamde-le-lah. Which loosely means thanks be to god. There can be a “Kwaize”, which means “OK”, followed by the Al Hamde-le-lah. But most times, the “ok” is dropped and the response is just “Al Hamde-le-lah”.
  • Repeat in the other direction.
  • How was the weekend, or whatever
  • Then, depending on the frequency of seeing this person, another round of air kissing and a
  • See you soon, Insh’allah

If one knows a lot of people, it can take a significant amount of time to walk a block or down a busy part of campus.

It is one of a myriad of reasons why everything takes longer than one would think.

Categories
Travel

Our next destination

Where are we headed?

Longitude and Lattitude

25deg 29’15.60″N 51deg27’05.65″E

Google Earth.

Or

Google Maps.

We’ll send photos. And we promise no spoilers.

Categories
Settling In

We’ve moved!

No big deal.

We moved around the horseshoe from 904 to 901.

The new apartment is larger, which is nice. But the real reason we moved was the noise.

The bedroom in our old apartment, 904, abutted the elevator shaft. It was always noisy, but it has gotten much worse. We finally couldn’t take it any more and requested a move.

We have complained about the noise and the housing/maintenance department say there is nothing wrong with the elevator.

A common theme with them is “well no one else has complained.” That was simple to remedy with a couple of emails. Everyone I have talked to that now lives or used to live in this building complains or has complained about the noise.

We are now the 2nd people that have moved THIS semester because of it.

Hopefully the elevator doesn’t break. The university is immune form liability lawsuits in egypt. But possibly not in the US. I don’t know.

Additionally, it sounds like our upstairs neighbor runs a tap dancing school.

I don’t know what she and her husband do up there all day and late into the evening. It is not uncommon to here someone walking around at midnight or later. It sounds like they wear slippers with heels. They have a small dog and perhaps the dog has a hard chew toy or bone or something.

It honestly sounds like they move their furniture everyday. All day.

One nice thing is that the husband is a concert pianist and we can often hear him playing during the day. We will miss that.

The reason 901 is quieter is that it is backwards from 904 in that the dining and living room are closer to the elevator. So the noise is really loud in the living space, but much quieter in the bedroom.

But the interesting thing (well, to me anyway) about this move is that it reminds me of all those college moves:

We didn’t move any furniture. We just had to pack up all our clothes and shit-knacks. We had to pack up the dishes and pots and pans. All the furniture stayed in 904 and we moved into 901 with all of its furniture in place.

But it was just the day to day stuff, no heavy items. Just LOTS of trips up and down the hallway.

And it is a rather long hallway. One of those hallways featured in nightmares and bad horror movies where one runs and runs and runs and never reaches the end of it.

We now have a couple of windows that face OUT from the courtyard. We hear the birds chirping at sunset as the roost in the trees. We can hear the church bells and the calls to prayer more clearly.

We can hear the children in the school across the street playing in the school yard.

We can hear the street noise more clearly as well.

But all in all, a good trade.

Categories
Travel

Luxor

As you can see from this post, we went to Luxor.

This is the general area where Luxor Temple, Karnak Temple, Valley of the Kings(including Tut’s tomb), Valley of the Queens, Nefertiti’s Tomb etc are located.

We managed to do Luxor, Karnak, Valley of the Kings, and Hetshepsuts temple.

All pretty spectacular items. We did not get to do Valley of the Queens, or Nefertiti’s tomb. We hope to get back there soon to cover some of what we missed.

We did a felucca ride for part of an afternoon and visited a banana farm.

The weather was gorgeous.

But Kaddee has covered that all well enough in her blog posts.

One thing that I wanted to talk about was serendipity.

Steve (Kaddee’s brother) and I got up at ZERODARK:THIRTY to have breakfast and take the ferry across the river to buy tickets. We had heard that it was important to get there early, cause they sell a limited number. [Turns out there were not a lot of tourists around, and we could have slept another 2 hours easily.]

Our plan was to get there, buy the tickets, and then sit and chill until Kaddee, Sara (Kaddee’s mom) and Kenzie(Kaddee’s niece) arrived.

On the ferry boat over we met Mr. Saleh. He is a guide. He is President of the Guides Guild. He is on the city council of Luxor.

In one of the photos you can see him showing us a photocopy of an article. He was also an extra in the “Death on the Nile” movie.

His picture is on page 151 of the Lonely Planet, Egypt guidebook.

He is the man.

Sitting and talking with him was like sitting with the Godfather. EVERYBODY stopped by to say hello and shake his hand and pay their respects. Mr Saleh never stood up and never went to see anyone. They ALL came to see him.

He chatted with us and gave us pointers on what to do and see. He gave us a ride up to the Valley of the Kings with his driver. He was booked for the day however, so he wasn’t trying to sell his services. Which was a very pleasant change from the usual M.O. in this part of the world.

We got his card and enjoyed chatting with us. We made arrangements so that IF the girls arrived at about the time he was finishing his tour, he would join us as a guide. He normally only does 1 tour a day, 3 or 4 days a week. He was not fishing for more work, but it really felt as though he was offering it as a favor.

We parted with Mr Saleh.

We bought our tickets and hired a driver for the rest of the day. We had him bring us back down to the ferry landing to wait for the girls.

Steve and I had some tea and just kind of zoned out.

The driver wandered off somewhere to socialize with his friends.

When we got the call that the girls were on the ferry, Steve and I chatted for a bit and then got out of the van to go meet the girls.

The ferry had already landed (it is a very quick trip) and our driver had met the girls at the boat and had fended off all the hucksters that meet each ferry. [They are ferocious]. The funny part was that we did not ask him to do this or even describe the 3 girls to him. He picked em out of the crowd and ushered them right to the car! I think we made the right choice of driver.

We then drove back up to the Valley of the Kings.

We hung around for about 10 minutes waiting to see if Mr. Saleh would come back down. They run a tram from the visitors center to the valley entrance, so we waited for 4 or 5 trams to come down.

We decided, “ok, we missed him. Time to get moving”. We get on the tram and head up. Half-way up, we pass the tram coming down. With Mr. Saleh on it. He waved and said he would come back up. I think if he had tapped the tram driver on the shoulder and said “stop here” he would have.

We watied for about 2 minutes and Mr. Saleh came up.

We then had a wonderful tour with him. His knowledge seemed encyclopedic. He has been a guide in the valley for 39 years.

All the tombs have signs in front of them listing facts about the tomb and show a map of the tomb. At each tomb, we would gather in front of the map and Mr. Saleh would talk about the tomb, its discovery and treasures, if any. On the map he would indicate certain spots where we would want to pay attention to some detail or another. We would then go down into the tomb and check things out.

At one of these maps, Mr. Saleh was giving his talk and another group walked up and started to talk over him. He looked at them, and said something in Arabic. The other guide started to argue with him. Mr. Saleh gave him “a look”. The other guide went pale and excused himself. They waited patiently for Mr. Saleh to finish.

Heh.

Walking throught the valley, he was constantly greeted by other guides. Walking the gauntlet of hawkers at the entrance/exit to the Valley and Hetshepsut’s tomb with Mr. Saleh was like crossing the Red Sea behind Moses: the hawkers parted and we followed in his wake.

Towards the end of the day, we went to the Colesium of Memnon. There were tour buses there. One of the guides got off the tour bus and recognized Mr Saleh. She came over to talk to him and she acted like she was meeting a rock star.

She was giddy and her eyes were actually a little watery. She kept asking us “this is your guide?”, “do you know who he is?”, “he is the ‘father’ of all the guides in the valley” [figuratively speaking, we assume].

She was incredulous that we just “stumbled” on him and hired him for the day.

I thought she was going to throw her panties and room key at him.

We then had lunch with him at a local restaurant. I have his card and have emailed him my photos of him and have corresponded somewhat.

When we return to the Luxor area, I will be sure to call up Mr. Saleh. If he is available to be our guide, we would be extremely pleased. I would also be happy to sit and have an ‘ahwa with him.

All because we were mistakenly informed that we had to get to the ticket office at the crack of dawn.

Categories
Photographs Travel

Luxor Temple

We took the night train from Cairo to Luxor. I don’t really recommend the night train. It is more comfortable than the night train we once took from Barcelona to Madrid, but it is noisy and a little bit of a rough ride. We did not get a great nights sleep.

But the one big bonus of taking that train, at that time of year, with the unexpected one hour delay, is that we arrived in Luxor just after sunrise.

Which allowed me to get this photo:

Balloon over luxor

That alone made the train trip worthwhile.

A small collection of photos from Luxor Temple is available here.

Karnak photos here.

Categories
Cultural Differences NSTIW

Yard Sale and Auction and privilege (again)

We live in “the hostel”. It has a floor of classrooms for Adult/Continuing ed classes, 5 floors of dorm rooms for students and 4 floors of apartments for faculty.

At the end of every semester, the housing department puts up signs for people to make donations of clothing, or housewares or whatever that people want to get rid of. Students returning to the US often dump clothing and some other items off in the boxes. Some of it is still good, but has to be jettisoned to make room for souvenirs. Some of it is crap. Just like donation boxes everywhere, I would guess.

The housing department collects all that stuff. They sort it. The everyday stuff: clothing, shoes (lots of them), books, cds, dvds, casette tapes, vcr tapes, hand bags, get marked and put on tables.

The “big” stuff gets put on the auction table. They had a small TV, several suitcases, a bunch of keyboards, a computer, a table top oscillating fan, etc.

All the money goes to a local childrens cancer hospital.

The doors open at 11AM. I go downstairs around 10:50 to get a cup of tea and to check out the setup. There about 40 or 50 people waiting for the doors to open! All egyptians. Mostly staff (custodial staff, office workers, security guards etc).

The yard sale was held in the glasswall enclosed cafeteria. It is possible to walk around the outside of it on 3 sides. I did that to observe what was for sale. Most of it was stuff I would not want. There were a few items of interest. Like the table top fan that I figured I would see what they go for.

While I was walking around, no fewer than 3 people asked me if I wanted to go inside to check it out before the doors opened. They were insistent that I not wait for the doors to open! I was the only non-egyptian there. I declined and decided to wait.

When the doors opened, it was a mad rush. The words “The Who concert, Cincinnati” came to mind.

Most people headed for the shoe table, which was at the back of for sale area.

Now, egyptians don’t line up for anything. And crowds consist of mostly elbows.

This.. this was a sight to behold. People were pushing and shoving to get to the shoe table. It was all good natured. People were laughing and joking with one another. While they elbowed each other out of the way.

I decided I was not man enough to wade in there during the first crucial minutes. I waited about 10 minutes for things to settle.

Then I went in.

After a quick loop through, I decided the only thing I was interested in was the table top fan. That was on the auction table and I had to wait for that.

When the auction started, the very helpful staff at the hostel kept wanting to intervene on my behalf and tell me what the bidding was. I understand the numbers well enough to be able to follow it on my own, so I said “thanks. I think I can follow it”.

At one point, one of the staff yelled “Englishi” and pointed to me. Everybody turned around to look at me. I smiled and said “La, La. Arabi kwaisz” [no, no. arabic is ok]. Everybody smiled and turned back to the auction, which continued in Arabic. For a while.

Then a smartly dressed young man fought his way to behind the table to stand near the auctioneers. He then proceeded to translate all the arabic numbers for me, looking right at me and repeating them all. I was the only non-arabic speaker in the room. I found it extremely annoying. He was being helpful, but it got under my skin.

What really made me grimace/chuckle was when he translated the very difficult arabic words “tellibishion” and “phillips” for me.

In the end I decided not to bid on anything. It was obvious that these were all local workers who made a fraction of what we make. I could have easily outbid anyone there for anything that I was interested in. But it just didn’t feel right to do so.

I am glad I went to experience it. I haven’t really seen anything quite like it before.