Update from Egypt

Ok I haven't posted in a few weeks, so this might be a little long.

Last weekend, I went to a concert at the Pyramids. It was some French rap group I had never heard of (Iam,) celebrating their 20th aniversary. Evidently, they're a pretty big deal in France, but it's not particularly surprising I didn't know them such I know a total of 0 French rap groups. But I went because the idea of a concert at the pyramids sounded sick to me, and my friend spoke French, so I figured I wouldn't be totally lost. And it actually was really awesome. It was one of those rare things that you hype up and then it actually lives up to expectations. I have pictures of it on facebook, but it was just felt really surreal to be standing there, listening to people rap, as the sunset on the pyramids. For the last song they brought out part of the Cairo Philharmonic Orchestra and a traditional Arabic music group and they all played together with Iam. The synthesis actually sounded pretty cool. The French rap was pretty catchy, much less "gangsta" than American rap, but still good.

Last week some people in my class skipped class and went to the zoo. The Cairo Zoo was supposedly world-class like 30 or 40 years ago, but now it's decayed significantly. It also has the most random layout I've ever seen. As well as not putting related animals near each other, they have multiple cages of the same animals spread out through the zoo. I'm pretty sure I walked by 3 or 4 different peacock cages. They also keep the biggest animals in the smallest cages. I assume this is so the people can see them, but it's pretty depressing. They keep their only elephant chained to a fence, on a chain so short that it can't really move. And they keep their bears, in these small dark, dingy cages, with water perpetually falling from the ceilings. I'm pretty sure it would border on animal cruelty in America. However, the Cairo Zoo's lax standards did have some upsides. For example it only cost 20 cents to enter, and we were able to come right up to the bearcage and feed/pet the bears for 60 cents each. I'm pretty sure if we had given enough money we could've gone into the cages with them. It's nice living in a non-lawsuit happy society sometimes.

Also last week, my arabic teacher dedicated an hour of one class to teaching us belly-dancing (he used to be a belly-dancing teacher-he's a little sketchy.) Anyways, as you can imagine I was sort of a trainwreck. I got a lot of "SAM, what are you doing?" but I think I mastered some moves by the end, so maybe I'll have something special to bust out on the dance floor this summer.

This past weekend I took a trip to Siwa. I couldn't find anyone else who wanted to go so I went alone. Siwa is an oasis about 500 miles away from Cairo close to the Lybian border. To get there, you have to change buses at this random beach town called Marsa Matruh, which is 5 hours from Cairo. I took the 10 pm bus on Wednesday night, because I didn't want to waste a whole day just getting to Siwa, since I had to be back in Cairo by Sunday. However, the first bus to Siwa didn't leave till 7am, so I was facing a 4 hour layover in the middle of the night, in some small town in the middle of Egypt. Probably not the smartest decision in retrospect...So the bus pulls up at 4am, I get off, shivering (it gets cold in the desert at night and the buses don't have heat) and exhausted (Egyptian buses are pretty crappy and it's really hard to sleep on them) and look around. Luckily there's a random stretch of like 3 24 hour cafes across the street. I quickly ordered tea and started to warm up. I met 3 other Americans and 3 Italians also going to Siwa. I spoke Spanish to the Italians, and they were able to somewhat understand me. It sort of legitimated my last 9 years of studying of Spanish. Blackhawk Down was on the TV in English. A line from Seinfeld kept going through my head (which I'll get from Imdb, because I don't have anything better to do)
Jerry: Are you sure you want to get married? I mean, it's a big change of life.
Elaine: Jerry, it's 3 a.m. and I'm at a cock fight. What am I clinging to?

Except substitute cockfight for watching Blackhawk Down in a random cafe in a dead Egyptian town.

The bus came and 4 hours later I got to Siwa. There are no towns or anything besides a few military checkpoints between the two towns. All you pass on the road is just flat desert as far as you can see in every direction. Then finally you reach this enormous grove of palm trees. I think it's like 40 x 20 miles or something like that. Siwa is a small old town right in the middle of the oasis. Half the people still used donkey carts for transportation and DSL hadn't reached it yet. It was that kind of town. The first day I biked around and went to the main sights around town (the ruins of a temple of an oracle that Alexander the Great went to see, a big oddly colored salt lake, and a ruined fortress in the center of town.) My hotel room was pretty gross, but it was only 7 dollars, and I was way too tired to care.

The next morning I met up with one of the Italian girls and biked to the Mountain of the Dead, which was full of tombs from Ancient Egypt, and had a great view over the entire oasis. In the afternoon I had arranged to go on a desert tour with the 3 Americans I had met on the bus. So at 3pm we pile into this ancient looking toyota land cruiser and head off to the desert. Right at the end of town the dunes start. It looked just like the mental image I had of the Sahara Desert with enormous dunes going on and on into the distance, and a bright blue sky with no clouds. Our first stop was to go sandboarding. To go sandboarding you climb onto a crappier version of a sandboard and go down a steep dune. It was pretty cool and I got going pretty fast until I wiped out at the bottom. However we each only got to go a few times, cause the wind was really strong and was blowing sand everywhere. Next we went to a hot and cold spring. It was an odd feeling to be swimming, when everywhere you looked around were huge dunes of sand. After this we were going to go to a "special spot" to watch the sunset, but just as we were about to go down a huge dune (as the jeep went down the dunes there was a split second when you looked out the front windshield and could see nothing but air, it looked really cool.) the driver slammed on the breaks and said something was wrong with the truck. He fixed it, but we had to watch the sunset from where we were.

Finally we reached the desert camp where we were going to stay the night. The camp was not really what was advertised, since it was at the very edge of the desert, and was shared by a bunch of other groups. We mostly just hung out and played euchre. 2 of the americans were really cool (one had just graduated from Swarthmore last fall and the other one was named Sam, so he was automatically pretty awesome,) but the 3rd one was one of the biggest tools I had ever met. Like Gary, if you read this, he was a bigger tool than those kids we played beruit against at that random house on Bromfield. While trying to explain Euchre he dropped lines like these?

"So are you guys familiar with the rules of War? Good, that's an excellent starting point to begin learning euchre."
"You can think of the trump suit as sort of a superhero suit"
"In high school I was known as the king of making cheesecakes"
These were all said in Gay/Hipster accent. If anyone from Guilford reads this he was like an 1000x worse version of Colman.

We slept in tents but the bugs were horrible, and I maybe slept an hour all night. The next morning I got a ride back to town to try to make the 10am bus. Unfortunately when I arrived, I was informed that there was no 10am bus. So instead me, and this spanish couple who were also waiting got into a minibus. A minibus is basically the size of a road trip van except way more packed. The minibus took us to Minus Matruh. Then we got another minibus there filled with Egyptian Electricians returning from Lybia, and 6 hours later we were in Cairo. That last minibus was one of the hottest places I've ever been, and I was happy to get out of there. The Spanish couple was pretty cool, they had been all over the world, so I was distracted a lot of the trip listening to them talk about that.

Finally, exhausted, I reached my apartment at 8:30 PM only to find my key not work. Since I was working off of like 10 hours of sleep in the previous 3 nights I sort of lost it. After repeatedly kicking the door, I finally was able to get in on a kick/key turn combo, and collapsed onto my couch. And slept for like 12 hours. It was amazing.

Sam