[Pictures of our camel trek are in the next post.]
the fuzzy thing is a campfire.
Monday, November 30, 2009
camel trek
We went on a camel trek for Thanksgiving weekend. Camels are particularly photogenic creatures, so forgive the gratuitous camel photos. Apart from a bit of moaning and groaning during mounting and dismount, the camels proved to be nearly as gentle as they look. We spent many many hours on the camels, and they basically ignored us. They trotted or left the group only with the greatest encouragement, and kept a lazy pace no faster than a human walk. The white formations are limestone, and the little black things in the sand are somehow iron. Enough said.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Adventures with Karen and Ross
Our friends Karen and Ross arrived just in time for the cool fall temperatures, perfect adventuring weather. First stop - Alexandria. This is the Alexandria coast. The corniche lines the Mediterranean and the whole city forms a wide bay.
Couples and families stroll the corniche day and night. It's a beautiful spot if you can ignore the honking, exhaust filled traffic.
Here we all are outside the Alexandria library, in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, which is in front of the planetarium. Alexandria is named for Alexander,, who passed through here a while back on his way looking for an oracle.
Inside the Alexandria library. It was recreated recently close to where the famous ancient one was. It doesn't have the same exceptional quantity of books as the old one, but it is quite beautiful.
Typical bread makers, but they are stuffing the dough with a spicy ground meat mixture.
Seeing the sites in Alexandria - Roman ruins are right in the center of town.
From Alexandria we drove straight to the pyramids.
Can you see Karen? She's a mummy!
Zach is bargaining for our camel rides.
There are nine pyramids in total. There are three in the foreground, then the three big ones, and then three tiny one on the right side of the farthest one. It wasn't the clearest day so you can't see them all in this shot.
Islamic Cairo = lots of mosques
This is Al Azhar park, one of our favorite spots in Cairo. You can see the citadel up on the hill, looking especially Star Wars-inspiring from this angle.
This is the Khan al-Khalili - your one stop shopping for Egyptian nick-nacks that might be made in China - hard to tell.
Buying ice cream - you have to work for it!
Couples and families stroll the corniche day and night. It's a beautiful spot if you can ignore the honking, exhaust filled traffic.
Here we all are outside the Alexandria library, in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, which is in front of the planetarium. Alexandria is named for Alexander,, who passed through here a while back on his way looking for an oracle.
Inside the Alexandria library. It was recreated recently close to where the famous ancient one was. It doesn't have the same exceptional quantity of books as the old one, but it is quite beautiful.
Typical bread makers, but they are stuffing the dough with a spicy ground meat mixture.
Seeing the sites in Alexandria - Roman ruins are right in the center of town.
From Alexandria we drove straight to the pyramids.
Can you see Karen? She's a mummy!
Zach is bargaining for our camel rides.
There are nine pyramids in total. There are three in the foreground, then the three big ones, and then three tiny one on the right side of the farthest one. It wasn't the clearest day so you can't see them all in this shot.
Islamic Cairo = lots of mosques
This is Al Azhar park, one of our favorite spots in Cairo. You can see the citadel up on the hill, looking especially Star Wars-inspiring from this angle.
This is the Khan al-Khalili - your one stop shopping for Egyptian nick-nacks that might be made in China - hard to tell.
Buying ice cream - you have to work for it!
day in the delta
Before we leave for the Delta, an ad we've been seeing around town. One street has a series of them, in fact, a giant poster every ten yards or so for blocks. What are they advertising? What, you don't read the Arabic alphabet? See that sourdough? That would be the Frisco Burger from Hardees. I want to say this makes me feel homesick for my hometown, but I honestly can't remember ever eating a hamburger that looked like this in my hometown.
We took a strange day tour of the Delta. Tourists just don't go to the Delta, so we grabbed the chance. It's like taking a tour of the central valley of California. It's farms. It's famous for being boring. It just felt strange to live here in Egypt for so long and not have any idea what happened in the Delta, where some huge fraction of Egyptians live and almost all of the food is grown. Here we are driving in the morning fog. This is only an hour or so out of Cairo, but we don't get fog and hardly get clouds in Cairo.
First stop was the town of Damanhur. There wasn't much to see here, and especially because it was Friday noon, the equivalent of arriving in a small middle-America town on a Sunday morning. Everything closed, most people out going to prayers. It wasn't nearly as poor as we'd expected, though, and this was one example of nice architecture, though admittedly most of it, like most in Cairo (and most in the world, I'll venture) was boxy and basic.
Here are the boxy, basic, crowded buildings - but they still seem cleaner and in better shape than the majority of Cairo buildings.
Damahur was very proud of their newly renovated opera house. It was very beautiful inside and outside, but we were not allowed to take photos inside. It is supposed to be a pretty decent replica of the original one.
Typical Egyptian furniture looks just like this - very rococo and uncomfortable.
Tanta was our next stop, the biggest town in the Delta, but still about 5% of Cairo's population. It also had more nice colonial-era architecture than we expected.
While hummus, dip made mostly of chickpeas, is virtually unknown in Egypt, chickpeas, which are hummus in Arabic no matter how they are prepared, are popular in other formats, especially toasted into something vaguely resembling nuts. Health-food freaks will identify these as similar to soy-nuts. These are eaten as so, or suspended in sugar and honey as a brittle.
The center of Tanta is the mosque. Every year it hosts what has been probably the largest Mawlid in Egypt for the last few hundred years. (A Mawlid is a pilgrimage and festival devoted to a saintly figure generally held where the figure lived.) We went on an average calm Friday, not during the festival, but the mosque area was popular nonetheless, particularly with people from the surrounding countryside who come to pay their respects and do some shopping along the way.
Tanta is known for sweets, though they didn't seem very different from the sweets we find in Cairo. There were a lot of gummy, nougaty, turkish delight-like sweets. Also, there was quite a bit of halva and coconut treats.
There was also a lot of plastic for sale. I guess the folks who live on the outskirts of town on the farms need to come to town to get the plastic conveniences.
Rachel outside the mosque.
Folks milling about and hanging out outside the mosque. What never ceases to amaze us in comparing what we see of mosque culture in comparison with church or synagogue culture is the large amount of hanging around that seems to happen at mosques apart from praying. Inside a few people were napping, a few kids were running around, and numberless groups were quietly sitting and chatting, absently admiring the architecture. Outside was much the same, sans napping. Especially with the loud volume of Egypt generally, a mosque makes a nice place to chat quietly, rest, or collect one's thoughts where one can be assured that no one will be yelling, selling things (at least inside), or driving a car.
These young men asked that I take their photo. They led a small band and crowd into the mosque soon after.
We took a strange day tour of the Delta. Tourists just don't go to the Delta, so we grabbed the chance. It's like taking a tour of the central valley of California. It's farms. It's famous for being boring. It just felt strange to live here in Egypt for so long and not have any idea what happened in the Delta, where some huge fraction of Egyptians live and almost all of the food is grown. Here we are driving in the morning fog. This is only an hour or so out of Cairo, but we don't get fog and hardly get clouds in Cairo.
First stop was the town of Damanhur. There wasn't much to see here, and especially because it was Friday noon, the equivalent of arriving in a small middle-America town on a Sunday morning. Everything closed, most people out going to prayers. It wasn't nearly as poor as we'd expected, though, and this was one example of nice architecture, though admittedly most of it, like most in Cairo (and most in the world, I'll venture) was boxy and basic.
Here are the boxy, basic, crowded buildings - but they still seem cleaner and in better shape than the majority of Cairo buildings.
Damahur was very proud of their newly renovated opera house. It was very beautiful inside and outside, but we were not allowed to take photos inside. It is supposed to be a pretty decent replica of the original one.
Typical Egyptian furniture looks just like this - very rococo and uncomfortable.
Tanta was our next stop, the biggest town in the Delta, but still about 5% of Cairo's population. It also had more nice colonial-era architecture than we expected.
While hummus, dip made mostly of chickpeas, is virtually unknown in Egypt, chickpeas, which are hummus in Arabic no matter how they are prepared, are popular in other formats, especially toasted into something vaguely resembling nuts. Health-food freaks will identify these as similar to soy-nuts. These are eaten as so, or suspended in sugar and honey as a brittle.
The center of Tanta is the mosque. Every year it hosts what has been probably the largest Mawlid in Egypt for the last few hundred years. (A Mawlid is a pilgrimage and festival devoted to a saintly figure generally held where the figure lived.) We went on an average calm Friday, not during the festival, but the mosque area was popular nonetheless, particularly with people from the surrounding countryside who come to pay their respects and do some shopping along the way.
Tanta is known for sweets, though they didn't seem very different from the sweets we find in Cairo. There were a lot of gummy, nougaty, turkish delight-like sweets. Also, there was quite a bit of halva and coconut treats.
There was also a lot of plastic for sale. I guess the folks who live on the outskirts of town on the farms need to come to town to get the plastic conveniences.
Rachel outside the mosque.
Folks milling about and hanging out outside the mosque. What never ceases to amaze us in comparing what we see of mosque culture in comparison with church or synagogue culture is the large amount of hanging around that seems to happen at mosques apart from praying. Inside a few people were napping, a few kids were running around, and numberless groups were quietly sitting and chatting, absently admiring the architecture. Outside was much the same, sans napping. Especially with the loud volume of Egypt generally, a mosque makes a nice place to chat quietly, rest, or collect one's thoughts where one can be assured that no one will be yelling, selling things (at least inside), or driving a car.
These young men asked that I take their photo. They led a small band and crowd into the mosque soon after.
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