Took the 3-hour train from Cairo to Alexandria, on the coast. Alexandria's a great place if you want to get away from the heat, smog and crowds that characterize Cairo. It was the first time I'd seen rain in 3 months.
On the way to the Catacombs we stopped to get some real 1-LE Egyptian pancakes and 50-piaster croissants. Delicious!
These catacombs were built during the Late Period of ancient Egyptian history, when Roman influence had mixed with Egyptian influence and mutated its art forms into a very, very strange type of offspring. This is just my opinion, but it diluted a lot of what we classify as "real" Egyptian art, turning Horus into a Classical-style baby and messing around with traditional art forms to bring them more in line with Roman tastes.
If you ever go to an ancient Roman gravesite, know that it's ten times creepier if you go there on Halloween weekend.
I'm also doing research for Dr. Ikram, my Egyptology professor.
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.
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.
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?
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!
