Thursday, October 28, 2010

What happens when you don't pay your workers enough?







So much trash!







As Shahira explained, there are several discrepancies between the Arabic and English versions of the workers' contracts. Basically, their contracts say 600 pounds per month, but they only receive 400 after taking out "implicit expenses" the University has in place like health care. It's pretty hard to live on 400 pounds a month (=$80).

While they may have much better-paying jobs than the vast majority of Egyptians out there, AUC can clearly afford to pay these people just a little more. They work hard to keep the campus clean, which is a Herculean task in itself owing to the lack of...well, water and civilization, as well as the constant invasions of sand and dust.

Oh, and another thing. AUC students who litter.
As these students demonstrated solidarity with the workers, I couldn't help but notice a few other things. First, they pledged to skip classes to continue their protests. That's a nice sacrifice in theory, but in reality a lot of students' usual attendance records indicate otherwise...

Second, some of these students are the reason AUC's campus is currently such a mess. I see people littering every day. Trash goes in the trash cans, not on the ground. While the workers will pick up your trash for you if you leave it somewhere, that does NOT mean you can act irresponsible. (This is not a cultural-value issue--it's a cleanliness and social norms one.)

It makes me wonder whether the cycle of littering-cleaning-littering is really a causal loop, feeding on itself, which benefits both the students and the workers. Because the students litter, AUC needs to employ more workers to clean up the amount of trash, so each person's pay becomes smaller to reflect the budget considerations.

As of the following Monday, AUC and the student union have negotiated and come to a solution, basically giving the workers pay raises to 1200 LE in March and September 2011 as well as a 200 LE increase in meal compensation. Well, something clearly worked, and I'll give the students and workers credit for that. Still, this issue illustrates a certain hypocrisy that I'm seeing around here.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Giza, at last

On a lighter note...
This week, the 2nd Annual Arab University Games were held, hosted by AUC. 700 student athletes from all over the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq, came to compete against each other at an intercollegiate event that seemed more like an Arab League Olympics. In the Algeria vs. UAE basketball game I watched, there were the Algeria supporters on one side (a small but vocal minority) and the Egyptians on the other side, who have had bad blood with the Algerians ever since Egypt's devastating failure to beat Algeria's football team and make it to the World Cup last year.








Egyptians take football very, very seriously, and I guess this extends to other sports as well. But I'm sure their rivalry with Algeria is limited to the world of sports.
(Here's a clip of the game.)

I couldn't stay to see who won, but UAE was crushing Algeria when I left.

Grocery shopping in Egypt is always fun, from the imported $10 boxes of Rice Krispies to the stacks of knockoff Nutella jars. After the game my friends and I made Indian food, and the selection of spices was mediocre at best. This makes sense, because here the priority is to decimate your hunger with a veritable Mt. Sinai of carbs rather than to begin the clandestine hijacking of your taste buds by capsaicin. Still, the chicken curry and rice was delicious.

The next day, October 22, Ramesses II's birthday, my class went back to the Egyptian Museum to pick out our objects for our papers. Mine was the Colossus of Senwosret I, a statue of epic proportions and clearly overstated leg muscles.
Professor Ikram, to class: You are young and I am old, so I expect you all to keep up with me.
Us: Ok, sure. (piece of cake.)
And then she took off at top speed to the first object we were studying, weaving through crowds of tourists and Egyptian guides without looking behind to see if we were following. We went up stairs and across balconies and a few times I had to jog to catch up with her line of ducklings. None of us had expected her superhuman speed.

Saturday: Giza!
Everyone knows about the Pyramids. You learn about them in elementary school, see pictures on postcards, or encounter them in the news when a brave young man climbs one in broad daylight and has to be removed by Egyptian military helicopter.
Going there today was a bit anticlimactic. I definitely imagined they'd be bigger.






Still, it was great having Dr. Ikram with us to get into all the sites for free--several temples, the Sphinx, the Solar Boat museum, and two pyramids. Climbing out of a pyramid's claustrophobic and harrowing passages and breathing fresh air once again is an experience that can probably be compared to emerging from the womb, which maybe some of you can identify with.


Masamune smites Alia with his camel-bone mace (yes, he found it fresh on the ground)


Khafre's valley temple: stone masonry like the walls at Machu Picchu


Breast Cancer Walk




This is why our class field trips are awesome.


The Grand Gallery, Khufu's Pyramid






Here we have a hole in Khafre's pyramid. We can most likely blame tomb robbers who tried to make a grand entrance by blasting their way in, but I prefer to blame the Decepticons.



Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Life in Transit

Wednesdays are pretty much the longest days of my life. I wake up at 6am, catch the bus at 7, and have class straight from 8:30 to 12:45, and after an hour break, another hour and a half of class. Then I get the 3:30 bus downtown and take Metro to Heliopolis, where I tutor English at 6pm. I tutor until 7:30, then wait for my friends to finish their tutoring at 9:30 so we can go back together.

I couldn't do all of this without relying on transportation. You'll hear a lot about traffic and crowds in Cairo. Cairo's renowned for having some of the worst traffic in any world city, largely due to its population explosion and lack of infrastructure that can deal with it. As I write this I'm on a bus to downtown that left AUC's New Campus at 5:15, and we're only getting close to Tahrir now at 6:45. (This trip normally takes 45 minutes.) Metro was so crowded I couldn't even push through the 5 feet that separated me from the exit in time, so I had to go to the next stop and come back.

Think for a moment about driving to school. You wake up, eat breakfast, get your stuff together and get in the car. You start the engine and enter the packed road, already full of commuters, as you prepare for what will be another busy day.
What we don't realize, though, is how much can go wrong on the road so quickly.
Last Tuesday, an AUC journalism student named Ammar Tareq was driving his Volkswagen on Road 90, the suburban highway leading to AUC, when he saw a huge pothole in the road. He swerved to avoid it, but instead his car flipped over. He had not been wearing a seatbelt, and was killed instantly. AUC's student union held a prayer service for him last week, and some 200 people attended.







This is not an isolated incident. Every year, at least 8,000 people are killed and 32,000 injured while driving on Egyptian roads. In early October, 12 people were killed and 8 severely injured when a car driven by a university student swerved to avoid being hit by a lorry truck and instead hit a crowd of pedestrians. The day that AUC students mourned Ammar's death, another student had an accident just a few kilometers from campus. He was fine, but his car had been crumpled like an empty candy wrapper.

I sometimes wonder if locating the campus so far away from the center of town makes commuting there less, not more, safe. Ask any Egyptian, and they will tell you that most accidents happen outside downtown Cairo, where traffic moves much faster, the roads can accommodate more cars, and people usually don't use their headlights.

Clearly, more people need to wear seatbelts. Who knows if Ammar would still be alive if he was wearing one? I think part of this has to do with students' feelings of entitlement and invincibility, but it's also part of living here. Plenty of people don't bother with these things that just delay them getting to their destination by a few seconds. You'd think in Egypt, where time is so much different from German or American conceptions of time, they could spare the extra second.

If you wonder why infrastructure development and safe practices are so difficult in Egypt, just go to downtown Cairo. The first time I visited there, my Egyptian friend Amr and I were crossing the chaotic Midan Tahrir, a huge square where about ten major streets intersect near one of the bridges over the Nile with eight lanes of traffic in each direction. One of the cops standing in the traffic circle was checking cars randomly to see if people had their seatbelts. Anyone caught without one just paid him 10 pounds ($3) and he let them go. This is partly the cop's fault for being corrupt, yes, but the small bribe and miniscule possibility of getting caught only reinforce these dangerous practices.

Corruption isn't always bad--as a tourist, a little baksheesh can get you out of unexpected sticky situations--but when you're playing with lives on the road, the tolerance for unsafe practices is outright reckless. The excuse that road safety and other infrastructures take time to build up is not acceptable. How many more university students' deaths will it take until this culture changes?

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

It happened first in Egypt

...or so my Egyptology professor says.

Here's an ancient Egyptian story about King Snefru, father of Khufu (who built the Great Pyramid).

One day King Snefru was bored. His country didn't suffer from hunger, war or strife. But today nothing could make him happy. He paced up and down the halls of his palace at Memphis. He was bored, bored, bored. So he called his magician. "Magician! I am bored. Do something that will lighten my heart."

"My lord, O Great Pharaoh, I will do as you command," said the magician. And he turned his staff into a living snake, which writhed and twisted on the floor in front of Snefru.

At first Snefru was surprised, but he quickly lapsed into depression again. "Magician, you have failed me! Have you nothing else that will amuse me?"
The magician said, "My lord, O Great Pharaoh, you should sail upon the Nile, and on the lake below the palace. This will surely cure you of your ills."

Snefru was reluctant to go to all this trouble for something that might not even be worth the effort, as he had a particularly severe case of boredom. He could literally feel his life-force and ideas in his heart (for he and his viziers believed brain matter to be useless) wasting away with every cubit the Sun fell in the sky.

"This voyage will be different, my lord, O Great Pharaoh," Snefru's magician assured him. "Instead of your normal rowers, you must use fair maidens from your Royal House. When you see them row your boat on the sacred lake, and watch the birds flying, and the fish swimming, and the grass growing, surely your heart will become lighter."

No doubt Snefru's wife and half-sister, Hetep-heres, took issue with this amusement of the King's. But in this endeavor her opinion did not matter, and Snefru was curious to try this idea. So he ordered his attendants to take out the Royal Boat with its twenty oars inlaid with precious metals, with twenty beautiful maidens to row it, each wearing nets of golden thread and ornaments of rare gems. This was done, and he sat on the boat as the women took him up and down the stream and across the sacred lake. Snefru's spirits started to lift as he experienced this new pastime.

Suddenly one of the oars brushed the maiden who was holding it, and it knocked her turquoise fish-earring off of the Royal Boat. She cried out in shock, and stopped rowing. All the other maidens on her side stopped their rowing as well.
"Why have you stopped rowing?!" Snefru exclaimed.

The girl sobbed, "The turquoise earring that you gave me has fallen into the sacred lake, my Lord, O Great Pharaoh. I cannot go on."

Snefru had been having such a good time. Annoyed, he said, "Do not worry. I shall give you another."

The girl continued crying. "But I want this one! There is none like it!"

Snefru was not about to jump into the sacred lake, for though he was God incarnate, he could not swim, much less dive to the bottom of the lake where the earring lay. He did not want to risk meeting the Gods sooner than expected just to recover a stupid ornament. So once again he sent for his magician. The magician was brought to him. "O magician, I have done as you advised and my spirits have lifted greatly. But this maiden has lost her turqoise earring at the bottom of the lake, and I want you to recover it for her."

"My lord, O Great Pharaoh, I shall do as you ask. It is not a difficult enchantment, but I hope it may lighten your heart even further when you see its magic." So the magician chanted a great spell, and, standing at the edge of the Royal Boat, he held out his rod over the waters of the sacred lake. And as if the lake had been sliced by a great sword, the waters parted, leaving a dry area at the very bottom where, to the maiden's delight, the amulet rested. She jumped from the boat and grabbed it from the lake bottom, resuming her place at the oar. And the magician lowered his rod, and the waters slowly came back together, leaving only smooth surface where there once had been a great chasm of water. The Pharaoh praised his great magician, and all were happy.

After this enlightening story had ended, we reached Dahshur, site of the Bent Pyramid and Red Pyramid of King Snefru. (These weren't the only ones. He went on a building spree and built a total of four pyramids during his reign, which is strange because each pyramid would have taken about 20 years to build and this was about how long he reigned for.) After the collapsed pyramid of Meidum, the Bent Pyramid is the second-biggest epic fail in Egyptian history. It seems the builders miscalculated the angles of the sides and realized they were too steep, so about halfway up they had to change the angles to keep the pyramid from falling in on itself. I guess it's a lot like when you try pouring a tower of sugar...there's a certain point where the sugar won't go any higher and just collects around the sides.






Above: My professor points out an unfinished coffin for a young child; her guess was that he didn't die so they gave up the task.

We briskly strode around the Bent Pyramid to Snefru's valley temple, now a jumble of rocks far from any sacred lake or river. Technically this was off-limits, but when you're with an Egyptologist anything is possible. Just keep running.



Next on our list was the Red Pyramid.



We went inside single-file and started crawling down the 4-foot-by-4-foot tunnel that led to the burial chamber. About a minute in, all the lights shut off. I'm not joking, it was creepy as hell. But we continued and eventually reached the small room where the king would have been buried, at which point the lights went back on.



Another highlight of this trip was King Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara, a 15-minute drive north. The coolest thing about Saqqara is that it was supposed to be a carbon (well, stone) copy of the living city of Memphis, which was very close by and was the King's capital. He would be buried at Saqqara and have everything with him in exact form, down to the last sexy curve (the only one in Egyptian architecture) of his temple wall.



We also traipsed across the dusty desert to visit about 7 other tomb complexes dotting the area.


Above: The two professors lead us to our doom in the shifting sands.





Another function of Djoser's (fun)erary complex is the vast square that lies to the south of the step pyramid. It was used for running the Heb-Sed, a race that took place every 30 years in which the Pharaoh proved his worth by racing a bull around the square. If he won the race, his reign would be renewed for another 30 years. If not, he would be stamped an incompetent leader and swiftly replaced. We have no records of kings ever losing the Heb-Sed, and of course, in all the Pharaoh's portraits he has amazing leg muscles. More about propaganda in a future post.
Here's a video of me and a few classmates taking part in this prestigious tradition.



According to my professor, as you can hear on the video, we all cheated. Guess we know who's failing the quiz this Monday!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Oct 8-9: The Forever Train

Remember from the last few posts that our hotel was supposed to get us tickets for our return from Luxor to Cairo?
Well, they didn't. So we got our money back after a lot of hassle and went to the train station ourselves. Of course, this was 30 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, so all the seats were sold out. Rather than wait three hours for another train that could also potentially be sold out and exhausted from the day's sightseeing, we opted to take the earlier train and buy our tickets "bidoon kursi," without seats. They were half price, too. Since this had worked on the train from Aswan to Luxor, we figured it'd be ok. But the difference is that that was a three-hour train ride, and this would be about twelve.

We sat in some unoccupied seats for the first few stops. But our group of six was eventually kicked out by the real occupants, and we were forced to walk through the train in a vain and increasingly desperate attempt to find actual seats. Finally we settled in the only unoccupied section of the train, the space between cars near the doors and luggage compartments.

For the next eleven hours, we were unable to sleep, either standing for most of the ride or crouched in a pitiful position resembling a fetus. The space was engulfed by cigarette smoke as scores and scores of people, young and old, came into the compartment to fill their lungs with that wonderful and nausea-inducing substance and tell each other jokes in 3ameya that got progressively more and more annoying as the night wore on (we couldn't understand them). The female members of our group were hit on by several Egyptian men, one particularly brash one carrying around a computer CPU. He'd start up a conversation with us and ask to use our phones, because his phone didn't work. I am convinced he was using this solely as an excuse to find our female phone contacts, because later he took out his phone and tried to snap clandestine pictures of the girls in our group. We used this perfect opportunity to tell him "Haraamu Aleik" (Meaning "shame or forbidden upon you," the reverse of the greeting Salaamu Aleikum, "peace be upon you"). He went away eventually.

Of course, all Egyptian males don't do this. (Almost none go to these lengths.) But still. Come on.
The only brief respite from our complete and utter despair came when I found a 5-minute-long seat next to an old man from Ma'adi, who bought me a juice drink after his friend came back from the bathroom and displaced me.

I've done my best, but I don't think words can really sum up our plight. Fortunately Seth got a short video.



I never thought I'd be so happy to find myself back in smoggy, crowded, chaotic Cairo at 6:30 AM. After taking a cab back to Zamalek, we ate the most wonderful meal of our lives at McDonald's, thankful to be alive and free from the Train of Death.

It's an experience none of us will ever forget; frighteningly stupid, but enlightening at the same time, as we got to see a slice of Egyptian society that is completely against everything you could gather from the entitled AUC New Campus experience of Gucci Corner, inflated egos and cliques straight out of middle school.

Never again, though. When I explained what happened in Arabic to my Colloquial teacher, the best adjective he could come up with (after doubting me a few times) was a very naughty swear word.

I think you get the point.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Oct 8: Luxor

Aswan to Luxor





Up the Nile! On a three-hour train ride where we bought tickets on the train. It wasn't full, so we hopped on and bought "standing" tickets for the ride, which were half the price of normal tickets. Still, we got seats. (Remember this for later.)

Upon arriving in Luxor, we cabbed to our hotel. If you're ever in Luxor...STAY HERE.






It's called the Bob Marley Hotel...12 LE per night, a rooftop lounge, and Bob Marley everywhere. The guy at the desk got us a nice deal on a driver around Luxor for the next day, and also promised to get us tickets for the ride back to Cairo while we were out sightseeing. (Also remember this for later.)

The next day we were up early to do a blitz of as many Luxor temples as possible. After stocking up on fool and falafel at a street place, our driver took us to destination 1:

The Valley of the Kings



Many of ancient Egypt's pharaohs, mostly from the New Kingdom period, are buried here. They decided to move their burial sites to the valley after all the embarrassing robberies of bodies and treasure from the somewhat less-subtle Pyramids at Giza and Saqqara. Valleys are much easier to defend from tomb robbers, right?

Wrong. The tombs still ended up being robbed. In some cases robberies even happened soon after the king was buried there. This is because unlike the policies of other ancient civilizations in China or Mexico, the Egyptians didn't kill the architects and builders of their tombs after the tombs were finished. Basically a hopeful tomb robber would go up to one of these people (could also be a guard, or anyone who has some knowledge of the layout of the tomb and its potential entrances), and he'd offer to give the guy a cut of his "earnings" if he helps him out with getting in. This happened disturbingly often, and it's why we have so few incomplete tombs nowadays.
Anyway, the authorities can fine you an obscene amount of money if you get caught taking pictures inside the tombs, so be content with the above Google map. The humidity in the first tomb we entered, about 100 feet underground, was like DC but in the Jurassic Period. So much that when we emerged into the 105-degree sunlight it actually felt cool.

After Valley of the Kings, it was time for Hatshepsut's temple.





Onward to Medinet Habu, one of my personal favorites.







To verify their enemy casualties, the Egyptian soldiers would bring back wagonloads of heads or...well, you can figure it out from the picture, given the Egyptian obsession with humiliating the enemy in most painful way.




...yeah, it's a battle. Remember this for later.

We wanted lunch, so our driver tried to figure out where we should best go. He first stopped at a hilariously overpriced place in downtown Luxor where he was friends with the manager. We left rather quickly and tried the place across the street, which didn't look open since it was Friday. The broken English the guy spoke there seemed to mean that we could sit down and have lunch, but the fact that they literally had no other customers and would have to make us food special seemed somewhat sketchy. We exited, and the owner followed us, offering to take us to another place that was open. He stopped at a European-style restaurant with a minimum charge of 100 LE per person. Not another one! Luckily, our driver had been looking for us after he noticed we weren't in the second place anymore, and he drove up just as we were about to go inside and get ripped off yet again. This daring rescue earned him major points. We told him we'd just get koshary, but he seemed to really want us to spend some serious money since the next place he took us was to a buffet restaurant full of European tourists. Probably the same ones who were willing to buy a can of beer for 13 Euros at Abu Simbel. Knowing this was not good, I subtracted his points and told him to take us to koshary NOW.

Good old Egyptian food. Not great, but not pricey, either. Final stop: Karnak, the largest temple in Egypt. It's the big brown square north of downtown Luxor on the map below, so you can get some idea of its size.