Woof. It has been a busy month.
We are back in Cairo again.
After being in Belgium, and being back in Cairo for a week, I still can’t drink Egyptian beer.
I have a few pictures, not many. Most of them are blurry and dark. (We spent 2 weeks in bars….)
I have been busy catching up on work and life. I hope to have a post soon(-ish)
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The view from the deck as I work today.
We are going back to Dahab for a long weekend tomorrow night, after work.
The hotel has wifi, so I will be working in the morning while The Good Doctor goes diving.
The afternoons will be reserved for lounging on the beach, maybe snorkling.
It is supposed to be 118 degrees there tomorrow.
There might even be a beer or three consumed.
The semester is over, and The Good Doctor needs a break.
So, the Good Doctor and I were have dinner at one of the upscale restaurants in Zamalek.
I had my hat with me. It is an “Australian Walking Hat”. It is a wide brim, ventalated hat. I am often hailed as “hey cowboy” here while wearing this hat. Etc.
The waiter asked about the hat and asked if it was common to wear such a hat at night.
I said, not usually. It is more for during the day to keep the sun off my face and head. But since I left the house several hours ago when the sun was still up, and I had not yet been home. I still had it with me.
He replied: “Ah. Because I have seen these kind of hats in America, but not at night.”
It seems that he spent a month in Memphis (the one in Tennessee) as the “Exhibition Manager” for a load of Archeological artifacts that were on loan to a museum there.
He is trained as an Egyptologist.
That is his day job.
His night job is waiter/bartender at a swank restaurant.
Knowing what I know about government jobs here, I would be willing to bet he makes a lot more money at his night job, than he does at his day job.
Interesting fellow.
This post deals with some, uh, indelicate issues.
If you don’t want to read it, don’t.
The Good Doctor and I went over to a friends house to play darts the other evening.
We were “subs” for some of the regulars who could not make it.
There will be another post about the evening in general. This post is about the accents.
There were a few people there with Boston accents. One was mild, one was somewhat middle of the road. And one mom’s accent was particularly pronounced.
Note: The Good Doctor and I are from the “boston area” originally. I grew up there, of parents that grew up there. My accent used to be “wicked strong”. I worked on taming it and, I like to think, that I did a pretty good job of it. [hush, my dear.]
The Good Doctor was already starting to speak when she moved to the area, and her family had none of that accent. She picked up some of it, and was able to discard it much more easily when she moved away.
Anyway, it was startling to me to hear it in the context of a Cairo suburban home. It produced a sort of “worlds colliding” vertigo for a few minutes.
After I recovered, I asked her what part of Boston she was from, and sure enough, the answer was Dorchester. “Doahchestah”.
To hear such a pronounced accent, here, in the middle of Cairo, was entertaining.
My accent came back “wicked fast” and I had to work “hahd” to tame it again.
One of the other folks there, who is friends with the woman with the strong accent, says that she often has to translate for her to other Americans.
She (the woman with the Boston accent) told an amusing story of having to go to a conference at her sons school (an American school here in Cairo, taught by Americans).
The teacher was concerned that her son had a speach impediment and needed speach therapy. The teacher was from the MidWest US and had, apparently, never actually heard a full-blown Boston accent before.
When the mom opened her mouth and spoke with the teacher, the teacher was in a mild state of shock and unable to speak for a few minutes.
After further conversation, it became clear that, while the child may have some interesting speach pathology, there isn’t really a need [as perceived by mom] for therapy.
It did not occur to me at the time to ask the mom to speak some Arabic. That might have been interesting.
Many Muslim Egyptian men have prayer bruises on their foreheads.
Some of them are quite large and pronounced.
I have spent some time looking at people as I sit in public places, and I have watched men pray.
From what I know of physics and my observations of the topography of some men’s foreheads, I fail to see how these bruises could be formed in the shapes and sizes that are exhibited.
There are many here who are quite convinced that these bruises are enhanced. I have heard many explanations as to how this is done. The most painful sounding one is with a hot iron. Ow.
These bruises are referred to, somewhat derisively, as zebiba (prune) by those who have no bruise. Either “secular” Muslims or Christians.
The largest bruises are on lower income individuals, though one will sometimes see one on a well dressed, more weathly looking individual.
And most of the bruises are on men 40 and younger. Again there are exceptions.
We have now visited 3 other mainly Muslim countries (Morocco, Qatar and Jordan) and have not seen these on any other Muslims other than Egyptians.
If my suspicions and the comments of others are true, and these bruises are enhanced, it is obviously some sort of display of piousness.
Interesting.
Somebody flipped the switch.
First was sandstorm season. Most days it was very pleasant.
Every now and then, the sand would get blown in off the desert and the temperature would soar into the 90s.
Then it would drop back down.
Then we had 2 or so weeks of very pleasant weather: mid 70s during the day, cooling down at night.
Then, WHAM. 95 degrees.
No gradual increase in temp. It went from 75 one day to 90 the next. We thought that maybe it was another sandstorm coming in and it would drop back down and resume a gradual increase in temp.
Nope.
It appears “spring” is here to stay.
Wadi Rum is a desert area in Jordan. It is where Lawrence of Arabia lived/hid and built a following that he then led during the Arab Revolt. [The Arabs dispute many of Lawrence’s later writings and the degree to which he claims to have been responsible for their success. Anyway…]
It is a rather beautiful area. Full of sandstone carved by wind and flood waters. Some very early signs of civilization [rock carving] are readily visible almost anywhere you look.
I found the area interesting, but I was still awe-struck by Petra when we visited Wadi Rum. If I had to do it over, or if someone asked my opinion, I would go to Wadi Rum first, then Petra.
We stayed 2 nights in a camp in Wadi Rum and did a 4×4 drive and a camel trek.
MY CAMEL TRIED TO KILL ME. HE THREW ME 30 FEET AND THEN STOMPED ON ME. THEN HE BASHED ME INTO THE ROCKS.
Ok, so maybe that is stretching it a bit.
To get on a camel, the camel tender/herder gets the camel to lay down, you climb on, and the camel stands up.
My camel decided to stand up while I only had one leg over. I fell off, and then the camel rolled over on top of my leg. No big deal. Except that I landed on my camera and managed to COVER it in find red sand. It still makes a grating noise when I turn the manual focus ring. I have a feeling that this is going to turn out to be a very expensive camel ride.
So, I got back on the damn beast. [Honestly, if I had been alone I probably would have paid the camel driver and sent him on his way. But I had witnesses]
Got back on and went for a relatively pleasant stroll through the desert. It took me about an hour to get over the anger and embarrasment of being pitched off the beast.
I was starting to enjoy it and get into the rythym of it when we stopped to water the camels.
To get water, they had to walk up to this trough that was in the wedge of rock. We were still on the camels. My camel decided to bump with another camel and fight for space at the trough. He managed to bump me into the rocks several times during this. And I had to lean over sideways to avoid having my head BASHED INTO THE ROCKS.
A good friend of mine wants to cook and eat a llama, because one tried to push him off a cliff in Peru many years ago. He says “It’s personal!”.
I understand now. I plan to return and our guide says he will give me lessons on preparing camel…
We took the evening walk at Petra. You are allowed to walk from the entrance, through the Siq to the clearing that holds “The Treasury”.
They lined the walk with hundres of luminaries.
At The Treasury they had hundreds more luminaries, some beduoin musicians and they served tea.
It was quite striking.
I took some photos. Most of these are at ISO800 with 4-to-6 second exposures at f4.0 (the largest aperature for this lens).
Big thanks to our traveling companion C.D. for loaning me his tripod.