Posts Tagged ‘egypt’

In which your adventurous epistolarian wishes for a fedora and dodges a cop.

Alexandria has a complex heritage.  As a seaport, it has seen roaring armies clash in war and cultures softly creeping in through trade.  It is one of the many cities built by and named after Alexander the Great, though it has the distinction of being the most famous of these.  In the city you can easily find elements of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures that have ruled Alexandria at various times.  Sometimes they stand side by side, or sometimes they are eerily overlaid upon each other (have you ever seen a mummy with a Byzantine icon for a face?)

Although it has various monuments and historic buildings to see, we picked a few highlights for our single-day outing.  Starting with… catacombs!

Okay, first, a well-intentioned piece of advice to enterprising Egyptians outside this particular tourist attraction.  Instead of stealing the toilet paper from the bathroom and selling it to us, why don’t you sell us Indiana Jones-style fedoras and bullwhips? Seriously, have you been inside the catacombs? Have you seen Last Crusade?  It’s irresistable!

As I’m sure you’ve inferred, the catacombs are incredibly dramatic to visit.  From the surface, it doesn’t look like much – just a low hut set in a concrete plaza.  But if you descend a few stairs, suddenly you’re in a shadowy spiral staircase, built from large sandstone blocks.  Ten, twenty, thirty feet down, always spiralling around a center shaft, so you can see the light filtering down from the surface, but it gets dimmer as the air gets heavier.  After a few revolutions around the staircase, your eyes are adjusting, and you see an archway a few steps further down.  Ducking your head through the archway, you take a moment to find your bearings and realize you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

> Go north
Which way is north?  You’re very disoriented from the spiral stairs!

> ^C
…just kidding.  My condolences to those of you who got the joke.  But in fact, when you exit the spiral staircase, there’s a large complex of rooms to explore.  The first room seems to be nothing but a hallway to other rooms, until you notice the neat rows of squarish holes in the walls.  Crypts, of course, a dozen or so of them; they’re square because I’m looking at them from the head- or foot-end.  But wait a minute, those two are darker than the others, because they’re deeper; double-decker crypts?  I wonder if they flipped a coin for top bunk.

Off to the right side, there’s a shaft of light cutting through the gloom.  It falls from ground level, so many feet above, into a narrow room which seems to have a stone altar inside.  And of course, the walls of the room are honeycombed with dozens of small, squarish holes.  A church in the catacombs, perhaps?

Back in the hallway-type room, there’s a dark doorway straight ahead.  It leads down a narrow, uneven walkway between dusty sandstone walls, cut here and there with dark rectangular holes.  We come to a cross-tunnel, and for lack of a reason not to, go right.  The floor is uneven and here and there puddles of stagnant water have collected.  There are rectangular crypts cut in both sides of the hallway now, and some boards have been laid on stones as a dry walkway.  Because the tunnel is so low, I’d have to duck my head to walk on the boards, so I dodge puddles instead.  After thirty-ish feet the tunnel turns left; more crypts.  After another fifty feet or so, the tunnel turns left again.  Crypts.  Seventy feet later, the tunnel turns left.  Crypts.  Fifty feet later, left, crypts.  Thirty feet of crypts later, we’re back to the crossroads.

I must point out that, but for the irreverence of the idea, this place would make an excellent junior high sleepover party venue. Just unscrew a few of the lightbulbs for added scare effects, and leave a few bones lying around just to keep them on their toes.

So, we’ve just walked a long tunnel with hundreds of crypts, but in the middle there must be something… We turn left, down the one part of the crossroads we haven’t explored yet.  The hallway descends a bit, and splits in two in a grand-staircase effect; soon you see how grand it really is.  Some fifty feet beneath an empty lot in Alexandria, someone has masterfully carved the facade to an ancient family tomb.  On left and right of the doorway, representations of ancient Greek or Roman gods, touched up in Christian symbols, look outwards from between columns.  The sandstone carvings are distinctive and (as far as I can judge) well done, but they are especially impressive after the rough-hewn character of the rest of the complex.  They didn’t only decorate the outside, though; inside is a square room with three large stone sarcophogi instead of the standard hole-in-the-wall.  The walls are again decorated, with columns “holding up” the corners of the room instead of plain stone.  And here’s something I never considered before: the people who built this tomb not only dug out the tomb behind the wall and carved the fine scenes before me, but they also dug a long entrance chamber before the tomb proper just so you could appreciate the artwork that had gone into it.  Without the entrance chamber, you wouldn’t have been able to admire the carvings – interesting, no?  Quite an investment of time and resources when you think about it.

As we exit the elaborate tomb, we see what had caused the hallway to split in the “grand staircase” fashion: a ramp between the forks, which leads down.  But it’s flooded; no exploring that way.

Back near the spiral staircase, there’s another direction we haven’t explored yet.  A large, mostly open room lies opposite the “church” room.  It is about forty feet square, with four large columns in a square pattern about ten feet from the corners.  A U-shaped bench, about 18 inches high and five feet wide, runs between the columns on three sides of the room.  What in the world could this place be?  For once, there are no obvious crypts in the room.  But then we overhead somebody else’s guide; would you believe it was a dining room?  The bench is for Roman-style “reclining dining,” and after laying someone to rest, the deceased’s friends and relations would hold a funeral feast in the catacombs.  It’s not so odd a practice, but it was nonetheless a surprising thing to see in such a dusty, gloomy, ancient place.

Tucking our imaginary fedoras low over our eyes, we returned to the sunlight above…

Our next major stop was a fortress on the coast, referred to as “The Citadel” by our guide.  I confess, though, that I wasn’t too interested.  After a while, if you’ve seen a dozen fortresses, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  Drawbridge, parapets, murder holes, check.  *Yawn*, next?  So I wasn’t very excited about the place, but why not, it would be better than sitting around waiting for the others to get back, right?

So we walk up to the entrance to the Citadel.  As we pass through the tourist police checkpoint, I let everyone else walk ahead as I investigate a little room off to one side.  One of the police tells me “no, this way, please.”  I oblige him by going where he points, but I’m curious why I couldn’t go there.  A minute later, as we decide there’s not much to see on the first floor, the same guard miraculously appears to point us to the stairs up.  On the second floor, this guard is all over us.  He is always pointing out places to take pictures from and telling me the way to go.  Strangely he seems most interested in keeping us all together, so I start taking pictures on my way in the other direction.  He gets a little distraught as I work my way around a corner, and I walk briskly around a few turns just to see what happens.  As I stand there, innocently taking pictures out a window, he finds me and hustles me up to the third floor where two of the others are looking around, but somehow, we’ve lost one.  Apparently he didn’t notice that there were four of us, and only managed to corral three.

Having started
out uninterested in the fortress, I’d now been variously followed and led around for twenty minutes by an obnoxious cop.  It got worse; on the third floor, when we were looking around, he started keeping all the Egyptian tourists out of whatever room we were in.  They looked annoyed.  I knew I was.

When the three of us started going towards the exit, our shadow asked us if everything was alright, and we assured him, out of nothing deeper than politeness, that everything was okay.  He then asked for his baksheesh.

Me: “Baksheesh?  I don’t know that word. (to my companions) What’s baksheesh?” (still walking towards the door).
The quick one: “Dunno, never heard it before.”
The blond one: “Isn’t it money?”

Sigh.  Anyway, I made my escape the same way I’d dodged him before: there were more of us than him.  It turns out that Alexandria, despite the different history, is definitely Egyptian after all.

In which your stalwart gazetteer discovers the culture of compensation, but also the pyramids, so it mostly evens out.

What is baksheesh?  Probably misspelled, for one.  Translation and transliteration are a bit tricky sometimes.  You may have seen it as bakshish, or you may just never have seen it.  It’s more commonly known as “greasing the palm” where I come from.  I’ve never needed to grease, lubricate, smooth over, tip in advance, double-check my paperwork, or make a donation to charity to get anything done before.  If I tipped in advance, it was only to make sure my bags got placed on the cart instead of, say, lobbed. If I smoothed things over at a restaurant, it was only because Andrew explains things better than I ever could.  But if you didn’t grease the palm you’d still get your bags; just a bit more worn than when you’d left them.  And you could still eat, it just wouldn’t be the table you wanted, and you’d have a few minutes.

It must be the dry desert climate, but I found things that needed greasing everywhere in Egypt.  We had booked rooms in Cairo in advance, and we were met at the airport by our complimentary shuttle driver; as it turns out, he needed a bit of complimentary money.  Likewise at the end of the trip, we arranged a taxi to the airport; when we got in the car, the driver claimed that there was an extra charge for 4 people, so he needed more money.  These are just the opening and (nearly) closing salvoes; the “pay-me” culture was pervasive and offensive throughout the duration of the trip.

For the first full day we were in Cairo, we arranged a driver through our hostel.  A car and driver for the whole day seemed like a pretty good deal for three hundred pounds (about sixty bucks).  It’s more than a rental car, sure, but you don’t want to have to navigate in Arabic.  Plus, I’d seen Cairo traffic on the way from the airport, and I wasn’t ready for that.  Anyway, the driver seemed quite nice and took us to some of the top spots, starting with a step pyramid out in the desert at Sakkara.  He waited in the parking lot while we went to look around, but unfortunately since we were unaccompanied foreigners we were immediately set upon by all the freelance tourguides.  One guy started showing us around, helpfully repeating things I could overhear from nearby professional tour guides.  He frequently stopped to have us take pictures of him, and as I said, was really only repeating things I could hear myself.  We finally pried ourselves away from him, but not before he extracted his baksheesh.  In the end we paid two pounds to his friend the guard for sitting there, one pound to a random guy who was brushing water on rocks (why? and why did he deserve money for this?).  Our guide himself put up a much harder front and made out with ten pounds and a disposable pen.  I don’t know why, but when we were firm that we weren’t going to pay any more than ten pounds for his dubious services, he asked for a pen.  Go figure.

P.S. Note that I was the one doing the tip negotiations, because Jodi insisted that her husband didn’t trust her with money. This was a perfectly legitimate excuse, so of course he turned to me.  In all fairness, though, the pen was Courtney’s.

Later on in the day, I learned that take-picture-with-me behavior was not unique to this one guy.  Apparently some people make a living by just being around.  Many people in Egypt speak English.  At least, they say “welcome,” and “you want take picture with me?”  I’m baffled that everyone seemed to think that their presence in my picture will somehow improve it.  It ceased to surprise me, though, that they of course wanted money for the service.

After Sakkara (which was okay, but only okay), our driver took us to Giza.  You know the pyramids?  Great wonder of the world, marvel of ancient construction, all that?  Yeah, well, they’re in Giza.  Our driver insisted the only way to get there was by camel, so we went and rented camels.  120 pounds per camel, plus 15 pounds for the dorky Arafat-style hat.  Actually the hat was rather liberating; once you gave in to the reality that you were a tourist, you realized that the hat couldn’t possibly make you _more_ of a tourist, so why not?  We mounted up on our camels – being the man, I got the lead camel.  His name was Ali Baba; Courtney rode Michael Jackson, who kept trying to bite my leg; Jodi got Mickey Mouse, and away we went.

Let me just say now, for the record, that the camel ride was fun.  But you don’t have to ride camels to get to the pyramids.  There is in fact an asphalt road which runs from Cairo directly to the pyramids.  Between the pyramids, in fact.  Tour buses galore at the base of the pyramids.  So the camel ride, while fun, was completely unnecessary.  The driver got kickbacks from taking customers to the camel stables.

What about the pyramids?  Well, they’re… how shall I describe them… huge.  Enormous.  Gigantissimo.  Check out the pictures if you don’t believe me – gallery.kalimera.mattborn.net now has Egypt pictures.  What was really striking about them was the size.  Aside from the size, the dimensions and the magnitude were also impressive.  Let’s not forget the volume of space they occupy, and the height they reach, as well as the area of the bases.  And no description of the pyramids would be complete without mentioning their sheer largeness.  Get the picture?

Interestingly enough, they were also quite chunky.  I don’t mean they should cut back on the Ben & Jerry’s; I mean the blocks they were constructed with were rather coarse.  Kinda like Pharoah was using Duplos instead of Legos.  When I stood next to them, it appeared as if each course was over a meter high.  From a distance, they looked smooth enough, but up close, they were very rough.  Supposedly, there used to be a finishing layer of finer stone, cut at an angle, to make the outside of the pyramids smooth.  In fact, you can still see remnants of the fine, polished, smoother stone at the top of the Great Pyramid.  However, the rest of the finish stones were stolen, and presumably reused in other monuments or buildings.

Theft is not the only crime the pyramids face.  There’s also a horrendous volume of trash blowing around the pyramids. Can’t walk up to them without kicking a coke can or two.  Entrances below ground level are covered by a solid layer of refuse on all horizontal surfaces.  I didn’t note any graffiti, at least, but you’d think that the last Great Wonder of the World could be kept a little neater.  They were impressive in their own right, but the surrounding trashiness and offensive cash-grubbing nature of my hosts tempered the experience.  Oh, and lest I forget – this didn’t make any sense at the time, and still doesn’t: Many people in Giza would greet us by saying “Welcome to Alaska!  Wecome to Nicaragua!” Seriously.  More than two dozen people said that while I was there.  Truly, I am baffled.

That about wraps up the pyramids.  The pictures speak better than words, so make sure to look.  Back to Cairo… Allow me to note that on the road back, after we explicitly asked to be taken to a particular restaurant, our driver nodded and smiled and took us to a completely different one.  We noted that it was not, in fact, where we wanted to go, and he nodded and smiled and assured us it was okay.  We paid too much for mediocre food, and of course, he received kickbacks for taking us there.

Anyway, we had seen the Pyramids, and were pretty pissed off at our driver, so we just told him to drop us off at the Egyptian Museum and go home.  Kudos to the Egyptian Museum for letting me get through without dropping a single bill beyond the ticket price.  You made me check my camera, which had me worried, but I was able to get it back without having to pad the claim ticket at all.  As to the contents of the Egyptian Museum – they had quite a few impressive artifacts, including most of the Tut artifacts, but the Egyptian Museum had no exhibits.  The largest collection of priceless Egyptian artifacts in the world was pretty much just packed and stacked in the rooms as space allowed.  There did not seem to be any pride in the displays, nor any particular effort.  The museum suffers further from a near-total lack of signage, so that even if you found an interesting piece, you have no idea what you’re looking at, when it is from, where it was found, the historical context, or the implications.  If you are interested in Egyptian artifacts, I’d save my money and wait for them to come to your local museum, where they will be exhibited with much more pride and effort than they are in Egypt.  Or go to the British Museum, where I believe they still have an impressive collection, and a much more informative and useful display.

We rounded off the evening by going to the Grand Bazaar in Cairo.  Now, here I expected people to be after my money, because it was after all a shopping district.  No complaints there; my expectations were right on target.  I picked up a few souvenirs and learned a bit about haggling.  A few tips about shopping here: If you get off the main streets, you will have much better luck haggling them down.  On buying papyrus: if it’s real, you can dump your water bottle all over it, and the vendor shouldn’t even blink.  If they won’t let you try it, don’t buy it; or, if you’re okay with fake, use this method to get the price down further.  And oh by the way, plastic is not stone.  If they won’t let you scratch it with your pocketknife it’s plastic.  Same idea.

After a grand time wandering the Grand Bazaar, though, we had managed to split the boys from the girls, and also, the boys had no idea where they were.  So we wandered back towards large, lit streets, but in the meantime, we were in small, seedy neighborhoods.  Worst moment: as we threaded through a traffic jam, one of the drivers shouts out “The Americans are here!” and then shouts echo up and down the street around us.  Although I felt in danger of disappearing, the fact that nobody tried to sell me anything there was a welcome relief.

In the next installment, I’ll explore Alexandria, including my run-ins with Indiana Jones, and the Keystone Kop.

In which your intrepid correspondent gains some unexpected family ties.

My trip started quite well – in retrospect, this is probably because it started in Athens, which is a city I’ve grown accustomed to, if not mastered.  I had an early afternoon flight to Cairo, which was a significant improvement over my last oh-dark-hundred flight to Cyprus.  Plus, I’ve got the bus to the airport down cold now, which is one tenth the price of a taxi, and takes maybe 10 minutes longer at the outside.  There was no line to check in, and I got a caffeine fix at one of the coffee shops in the airport, while the girls rounded up some sunglasses – Courtney because she had lost hers, Jodi because hers apparently cost several hundred dollars (why, I ask you, why?) and weren’t “something you wanted to bring to Egypt”.  And then we were on our way.

And on the plane I had my first taste of Egypt, when the flight attendant was passing out customs forms.  It went a little something like this:
Him: “What country, please?”
Me: “United States”
Him: “Oh! You are with the two American girls?” (We were seated in different rows)
Me: “Yes, I am.”
Him: “Congratulations, you are very strong!  Two wives.  Two is all you have?”
Me: “No, I have more at home.”
Him: “Lucky man!”

See, I thought we were joking about the wives thing.  I was very amused by the whole exchange, all the more so because Courtney was sitting close enough to hear and gave me a dirty look.  And even if he wasn’t joking, I would think that I have enough respect for other cultures not to deride his misunderstanding.  But this was just the tip of the iceberg for gender-based intrigue.  Over the course of the trip, we experienced a number of episodes that made all of us quite uncomfortable with the state of gender relations in Egypt.

Gentlemen, as much fun as you think it might be to have people compliment you on the street for your prowess – it’s short lived. Platinum-blonde Jodi and curly-haired Courtney stood out ever so slightly everywhere we went, and many a stranger complimented me on my wives.  They shook my hand.  They slapped me on the back and told me how lucky I was.

Now, ideally, each time you talk to somebody you have an opportunity to find what makes you the same, or what makes you different – to stand on common ground, or to discover where you need to build bridges.  But while every man who offered me congratulations thought we were seeing eye-to-eye, I was beginning to understand that we weren’t even on the same map.  It took a while to sink in, but the comments they gave me implied their clear understanding that I was married to the woman I was walking with.  This assumption indicates a very fundamental disconnect between our cultures.  I’m almost certain that if you count them up I have more female friends than male, and I enjoy not having to marry them to walk/talk with them.  When seen through the lens of the speakers’ culture, the assumption may have been a reasonable one; that being said, I prefer the standards of my culture in this regard.  Furthermore, I’m morally uncomfortable with the underlying reason for the assumption.  It seems to be a consequence of the wide-ranging social separations between men and women, except for family settings, but this is (unfortunately) reminiscent of the “separate but equal” values espoused in the period of legal segregation in the United States.  And we all know how “equal” that was.

(And if you liked that analogy, stay tuned to see who I compare to Hitler!)

The next cultural difference is that of polygamy, because I received comments on my wives (note the plural).  Obviously neither monogamy nor polygamy are universal values, and the debate continues as to whether one or another is an absolute value.  (If you’re unclear on the distinction, you don’t get to argue the point, so use your dictionary first.)  Without rendering unfounded judgment on the morality of the practice, the prevailing tendency to (mis-)ascribe _polygamy_ as one of _my_ values caused me endless frustration.  And while I think that the polygamy issue is actually less of a gulf between our cultures than the marital assumption, the somewhat exotic nature of the idea multiplies its impact.

Of course, some things aren’t unique to Egypt.  Pickups/piropos are pretty universal, and almost always worth a laugh, but in Egypt the pickup lines had a distinct character.  Apparently one man was going to kill his four wives so he could marry Jodi; Courtney was worth three thousand camels.

I’ve tried hard to make this a balanced impression, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have an opinion.  My basic impression is that it would be awkward and perhaps degrading to be an American woman in Egypt, and it wasn’t that great for me either.  Next time, we’ll explore baksheesh and the police state.

P.S. Just teasing with the Hitler thing.