Hey there campers--I'm writing from an internet cafe in Luxor, which is cheap and close to the hotel, so hopefully I will be able to come back before we leave and finish up. The group is taking a chill right now after some hot and sweaty temple visits this morning, so I'm taking advantage of the lull to bring you up to speed on my Egyptian travels.
The remainder of Cairo was a lot of fun. We visited the Cairo Antiquities Museum, which is a must see. The museum feels like it's frozen in time, but not the time of the Pharoh's. Instead, it's like stepping into the eighteen hundreds. The museum has a very Victorian feel to it--it's stuffed wall to ceiling with antiquities with very little organization. There are wooden and glass cases filled with coins and jewlery and the aisles of the museum are crammed with stray sarcophagi and statues, and you can't help but stub your toe on pieces from thousands of years ago. There was a special room just for mummies. Not mummies in sarcophagi, but mummies that had been removed from their cases, and in some case their wrappings. There were several Pharohs including Ramses, who still had some hair. I have to say, I found the whole thing incredibly creepy. The museum also houses Tutamkamens treasure, which I'd grown up seeing pictures of. I kind of felt about seeing it the same way I felt when I saw the Mona Lisa--you're so familiar with it that you don't get anything from actually looking at it in the flesh, but you're filled with this amazing reverence none the less. The only difference was that when I saw the Mona Lisa I didn't have Steve Martin's rendition of "King Tut" in my head. The treasure itself is really amazing, though it kind of sickens me to think of all that wealth for one person, and one dead person at that. I was a bit suprised that so many things were made out of wood, including two or three of his outer sarcophagi (he had a bunch and they fit into each other like Russian dolls) but my friendm, who came equipped with a guide book, told me that trees were so scarce in Ancient Egypt that wood was more valuable than gold. My favorite part of the museum, though, was a display case that housed ancient Egyptian wigs. They were huge and very wooly, they reminded me a little bit of over sized afros with braids attached to the back, sort of a cross betweeen and Afro and a mullet, I couldn't imagine wearing one, let alone keeping a straight face while others wore them!
The other highlight of Cairo was the time we spent in Islamic Cairo. Islamic Cairo is a portion of the city that houses the majority of Cairo's mosques (the actual number is quite impressive, but I don't know it off of the top of my head, try Wikipedia). In order to be respectful the girls tried to dress conservatively for our time there. That meant long pants, long sleeves, closed toed shoes and I carried a head scarf with me for when we actually entered the mosque. It turns out that most people didn't really care, as long as you wore long pants and had your shoulders covered. That was good because it meant I could take off my long sleeve shirt, which was not conducive to the Cairo heat.
The inside of the mosques reminded me a lot of Cathdrals I've been in. They have the same degree of ornateness--stained glass windows, tiled walls and ceilings and those high domed ceilings that make you feel really tiny and insignificant. You have to take off your shoes to go inside, and in some places you carry your shoes with you. It's disrespectful to let the soles of your shoes point at anybody, or to have them point up, so it's safer to carry them with their soles together.
My favorite part of the mosques were the minorets, which you could climb up from the roof. The roofs themselves offered great views of Cairo and Cairo's roof tops, but the minorets made you feel like you could see forever. Climbing up the minorets was frightening because they are all very narrow, and steep and have spiral staircases. At some point in all the minorets we went up there were portions of the staircase which were so dark I could not see in front of me. This is frightening on the way up, but paralyzing on the way down. The stairs are different heights, so you step off one and never know if you will reach another one or not. At one point my friend Caroline was ahead of me, and I called out to her to see if she had reached the light yet. She said no, and I put out my hand in front of me and touched her back. She was on the step right in front of me and I couldn't see her. Once when we were at the top of a minoret, it was time for the call to afternoon prayers. The mosque started its recorded chant that calls Muslims to prayer, but we were in the middle of Islamic Cairo, so all the mosques started their chants at the same time. The noise combined with the street sounds of Cairo and was magnificent, echoing everywhere.
I have to go because my time at the internet cafe is almost out, but I'll try to make it back later tonight to write up Aswan and Luxor. Keep tuned!
king tut
