I've had several moments over the past month or two when I told myself -- Well, here we go, summer in Cairo, Round 2! Today, though, when the thermometer hit 100 (perhaps not for the first time, but in a very noticeable way that made me dread the exertion of energy it took to cross the street), I found myself thanking my lucky stars that I am escaping for the next ten days. I am heading off this evening with two friends, Miriam and Alex, to Ethiopia. Addis Ababa is only a four hour flight from Cairo, and we will spread out from there to the north and east for trekking in the Simien Mountains and feeding hyenas in the holy city of Harar.
In fact, the last month has been memorably great. It began with my mom's visit the last week in April, when we were given a weeklong break from classes. She wanted to investigate my neighborhood - "my Cairo" - and was especially shocked by how the overwhelming shift from unveiling to veiling of women has completed changed the flavor of Cairo's streets since the 1970s and 1980s, when she was last here. It's hard for me to imagine it any other way, but it's worth reminding myself that many (perhaps most) of the middle-aged women who now walk around in modest scarves once strolled the street bareheaded and in knee-length dresses.
Since fortunately my mom did not want to visit the Pyramids again, we went instead to Tahrir Square and the Mohamed Mahmoud St. political murals; to Darb El Ahmar and the tentmakers' market behind Al Azhar Mosque, and to the gems of Islamic Cairo -- the twin mosques of Sultan Hassan and El Refaaey. It was also Coptic Holy Week, since they use a different liturgical calendar than Western Christians. And so we found ourselves in Masr El Qadima, the old Coptic quarter where the oldest churches, tombs, and museum are found, just in time for the Monday night service at St. Sergius (whose crypt is claimed to be one of the many places where the Holy Family stayed). A handful of men drifted in, took off their shoes, and readied their prayer books. An attendant told me that a service was about to begin. Can we stay, I asked? How long will it be? The man's reply: About three and a half hours. It's okay, you can leave early if you need to... just stay an hour and a half! The (very small) group of men began chanting in Coptic, with some Arabic, and a few families began trickling in -- women on one side and men on the other. As it turns out, all Coptic services are at least three hours long, sometimes longer, but we only made it twenty minutes.
The next morning, we took off for the South -- Upper Egypt. Although we flew into Luxor, we didn't dally there since I'd been recently, but instead went straight to our Nile cruise boat. There are -- we were told -- more than 300 such boats that would normally run between Luxor and Aswan. In these tough times, only about 20 are running. The boats are identical: a dining room in the basement, a couple of floors of cabins, a bar and lounge, and a sundeck with a pint-sized pool and lounge chairs. We spent nearly all our time on the 2-day journey to Aswan on this sundeck, drifting slowly past green marshes, Nile-side villages, nesting birds, and children splashing in the water. Considering the amount of river traffic that passes - or once passed - through, the trip was surprisingly quiet. Most of the way down, there is only the narrowest strip of fertile land on each side of the river, barely enough for a few homes and some farm plots, before the desert.
Our first stop, the morning after our departure, was the Temple of Edfu, to which we were transported from the riverfront via horse-drawn carriage.
Then, in the afternoon, avoiding the withering noon sun, we were off to Kom Ombu. This latter, devoted in part to the crocodile god Sobek, featured a museum devoted to crocodile mummies -- from baby to supercroc. Giant crocodiles used to be a dime a dozen in these parts, but when the Aswan High Dam was built, they were all trapped in Lake Nasser south of Aswan. That night, we docked in Aswan, which perhaps has less in the way of pharaonic ruins compared with its cousin Luxor, but offers a more laid-back vibe, a life beyond tourism, and the lively color of Nubian influence.
At 3am, we joined a minibus caravan to Abu Simbel, just 30 miles north of the Sudanese border. What I saw of the road from Aswan was a vast expanse of empty desert -- until we joined Lake Nasser, in which many of Egypt's ancient treasures, as well as most of the Nubian civilization that thrived in this area until the 1950s, are submerged. The Temple of Abu Simbel itself was, in fact, moved from its original location when the High Dam was built. What you see today, though it is no less impressive, is the product of incredible feats of archaeology -- a new rock face constructed above and behind the original site, at a safe distance from the water's edge. The egotistical pharaoh Ramses II, who built the pair of temples of Abu Simbel, constructed a smallish temple for his wife Nefertari and an enormous one for himself that features more towering sculptures of Ramses II than of the gods or religious offerings. It has some memorable touches -- a string of baboons across the top of the main temple, miniature sculptures of his children standing beside him at the temple entrance -- but with my particular interest in historiography, I was especially drawn to the artistically (and historically) inventive frieze of the Battle of Kadesh on the inside. Although the images suggest very strongly that Ramses creamed the Hittites, the Egyptians actually lost the battle.
Done at Abu Simbel by 9am -- a necessity given the sun -- we returned to Aswan for an afternoon at the Philae Temple. Layers of history linger over the evocative ruins of the Temple of Isis at Philae, which float on an island accessible only by small boat. The blend of half-eroded Pharaonic stelae and Roman arches have long attracted European painters, as well as Napoleon's army during its Egyptian campaign in 1798.
We decided to watch the sunset from the Sofitel Old Cataract Hotel, an Aswan institution recently redone in resplendent luxury. A bellman took us upstairs to the vast suite where Agatha Christie was staying while she wrote Death on the Nile. The balcony opened out onto a scenic inlet south of Elephantine Island, shaded by palm trees and the ruins of the ancient settlement of Abu. The sails of a few small boats drifted past. We settled in for karkadeh mocktails on the back terrace of the hotel, where men in matching burgundy costumes -- perhaps the same as they wore in Agatha Christie's day -- lit candles and waved censers full of some Eastern scent.
We spent our final day in Aswan at the Nubian Museum, which is full of artifacts rescued from the villages (and even cities) now deep underwater. Although the Nubians themselves have fanned out across southern Egypt and northern Sudan, a deep sense of loss and of resentment toward the government not surprisingly remains. Aswan has both Nubians and Arabs, though it's not always easy to tell who is what because the Egyptians of the South tend to be darker anyway. Elsewhere, there is increasing interest among more affluent Egyptians in Nubian culture -- in the form of cultural tourism to colorful Nubian guesthouses (a new phenomenon), cultural and music festivals, and the like -- although dark-skinned Egyptians not infrequently face the same racism as black Africans from outside Egypt. After the museum, we hiked to a hilltop restaurant called the Golden Pharaoh only to be told by the elderly man padding around inside that it was open, but there was no food. Instead, he made us karkadeh from scratch and refused payment. He offered to order some food and cook for us alone the following day -- but admitted that there were no customers. But things are fine, things are fine, el hamdolellah, he smiled at the empty restaurant. People will come soon! Elhamdolellah. Don't you mean inshallah, God willing, and not elhamdolellah, Praise be to God? I wanted to ask.
After being sold ferry tickets by an Egyptian Rastafarian who asked us to call him Ashraf Rasta, we motored over to Elephantine Island, which lies between Aswan's eastern and western banks. North of the grab bag of ruins belonging to ancient Abu lie two Nubian villages. Although many tourists come, they don't feel as though they've lost their sleepy authenticity. We stopped at a fruit stand and struck up a conversation with the skinny, bespectacled boy named Abderrahman who sold us the bananas. He was studying at the Faculty of Agriculture and lived there, in Koti village. He spread a woven mat out on a nearby bench for us, then one for himself across the path. He was curious, like many, about how I had learned Arabic.
-A lot of Americans are studying Arabic these days, I said.
-Mm, since the occupation of Iraq?
-That and 9/11, yes.
-So, who was responsible for 9/11?
-I will be honest with you, Abderrahman, but I don't believe any of the conspiracy theories. I do not believe it was an internal plot.
-It HAD to be! The US has the strongest army in the world... how could they not know? Hmm... you think it was Al Qaeda? Mubarak is the leader of Al Qaeda!
At that moment, a thirty-something man in a red jersey walked by, and Abderrahman summarized our confirmation for him.
-You know who Al Qaeda is?! Red shirt man asks, his eyes blazing. Hosni Mubarak, George Bush, and Bashar Al Assad!
-Sooo... what do you think of Obama? my mom ventures. Is he better?
-KHARA! says the man in disgust before walking away --- Shit.
Abderrahman and the two other men who joined us do like Mohamed Morsi, although they admitted that the community as a whole is divided. He's a pious man, they say. Jomaa, a middle-aged felucca captain who has lost all his business, also sat down beside us. He had gemlike green eyes that popped out from his broad, chocolate face.
We need to be more patient with Morsi, says Jomaa. It will take time. People in Cairo want change right away. But Morsi is not stealing from the country and the people, though. He is a good man! In Mubarak's time, all the money went abroad...America, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Dubai. His son, Jamal, he had 77 million pounds in England. Nothing in Egypt.
In the midst of this conversation, a wiry old man with a snaggletooth grin ambled up and insisted that, as "chief" of the village, it was his duty to give us a tour of the island for the proper sum. We strolled with Hamada through the brightly painted alleys of Elephantine and he pointed out the mosque, the garden plots, the traditional homes, the sheep wandering on their own. We wound up, as all visitors do, on the roof of a Nubian home drinking tea and posing with the owner's pet crocodile.
In fact, the last month has been memorably great. It began with my mom's visit the last week in April, when we were given a weeklong break from classes. She wanted to investigate my neighborhood - "my Cairo" - and was especially shocked by how the overwhelming shift from unveiling to veiling of women has completed changed the flavor of Cairo's streets since the 1970s and 1980s, when she was last here. It's hard for me to imagine it any other way, but it's worth reminding myself that many (perhaps most) of the middle-aged women who now walk around in modest scarves once strolled the street bareheaded and in knee-length dresses.
Since fortunately my mom did not want to visit the Pyramids again, we went instead to Tahrir Square and the Mohamed Mahmoud St. political murals; to Darb El Ahmar and the tentmakers' market behind Al Azhar Mosque, and to the gems of Islamic Cairo -- the twin mosques of Sultan Hassan and El Refaaey. It was also Coptic Holy Week, since they use a different liturgical calendar than Western Christians. And so we found ourselves in Masr El Qadima, the old Coptic quarter where the oldest churches, tombs, and museum are found, just in time for the Monday night service at St. Sergius (whose crypt is claimed to be one of the many places where the Holy Family stayed). A handful of men drifted in, took off their shoes, and readied their prayer books. An attendant told me that a service was about to begin. Can we stay, I asked? How long will it be? The man's reply: About three and a half hours. It's okay, you can leave early if you need to... just stay an hour and a half! The (very small) group of men began chanting in Coptic, with some Arabic, and a few families began trickling in -- women on one side and men on the other. As it turns out, all Coptic services are at least three hours long, sometimes longer, but we only made it twenty minutes.
The next morning, we took off for the South -- Upper Egypt. Although we flew into Luxor, we didn't dally there since I'd been recently, but instead went straight to our Nile cruise boat. There are -- we were told -- more than 300 such boats that would normally run between Luxor and Aswan. In these tough times, only about 20 are running. The boats are identical: a dining room in the basement, a couple of floors of cabins, a bar and lounge, and a sundeck with a pint-sized pool and lounge chairs. We spent nearly all our time on the 2-day journey to Aswan on this sundeck, drifting slowly past green marshes, Nile-side villages, nesting birds, and children splashing in the water. Considering the amount of river traffic that passes - or once passed - through, the trip was surprisingly quiet. Most of the way down, there is only the narrowest strip of fertile land on each side of the river, barely enough for a few homes and some farm plots, before the desert.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that Egypt has patches of green, too!
Our first stop, the morning after our departure, was the Temple of Edfu, to which we were transported from the riverfront via horse-drawn carriage.
With Mom at Edfu
Then, in the afternoon, avoiding the withering noon sun, we were off to Kom Ombu. This latter, devoted in part to the crocodile god Sobek, featured a museum devoted to crocodile mummies -- from baby to supercroc. Giant crocodiles used to be a dime a dozen in these parts, but when the Aswan High Dam was built, they were all trapped in Lake Nasser south of Aswan. That night, we docked in Aswan, which perhaps has less in the way of pharaonic ruins compared with its cousin Luxor, but offers a more laid-back vibe, a life beyond tourism, and the lively color of Nubian influence.
At 3am, we joined a minibus caravan to Abu Simbel, just 30 miles north of the Sudanese border. What I saw of the road from Aswan was a vast expanse of empty desert -- until we joined Lake Nasser, in which many of Egypt's ancient treasures, as well as most of the Nubian civilization that thrived in this area until the 1950s, are submerged. The Temple of Abu Simbel itself was, in fact, moved from its original location when the High Dam was built. What you see today, though it is no less impressive, is the product of incredible feats of archaeology -- a new rock face constructed above and behind the original site, at a safe distance from the water's edge. The egotistical pharaoh Ramses II, who built the pair of temples of Abu Simbel, constructed a smallish temple for his wife Nefertari and an enormous one for himself that features more towering sculptures of Ramses II than of the gods or religious offerings. It has some memorable touches -- a string of baboons across the top of the main temple, miniature sculptures of his children standing beside him at the temple entrance -- but with my particular interest in historiography, I was especially drawn to the artistically (and historically) inventive frieze of the Battle of Kadesh on the inside. Although the images suggest very strongly that Ramses creamed the Hittites, the Egyptians actually lost the battle.
Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel
Done at Abu Simbel by 9am -- a necessity given the sun -- we returned to Aswan for an afternoon at the Philae Temple. Layers of history linger over the evocative ruins of the Temple of Isis at Philae, which float on an island accessible only by small boat. The blend of half-eroded Pharaonic stelae and Roman arches have long attracted European painters, as well as Napoleon's army during its Egyptian campaign in 1798.
Philae Temple today
Philae Temple in the 19th c., as portrayed by the English painter David Roberts
The French left their mark...
We decided to watch the sunset from the Sofitel Old Cataract Hotel, an Aswan institution recently redone in resplendent luxury. A bellman took us upstairs to the vast suite where Agatha Christie was staying while she wrote Death on the Nile. The balcony opened out onto a scenic inlet south of Elephantine Island, shaded by palm trees and the ruins of the ancient settlement of Abu. The sails of a few small boats drifted past. We settled in for karkadeh mocktails on the back terrace of the hotel, where men in matching burgundy costumes -- perhaps the same as they wore in Agatha Christie's day -- lit candles and waved censers full of some Eastern scent.
Aswan sunset from the Old Cataract
We spent our final day in Aswan at the Nubian Museum, which is full of artifacts rescued from the villages (and even cities) now deep underwater. Although the Nubians themselves have fanned out across southern Egypt and northern Sudan, a deep sense of loss and of resentment toward the government not surprisingly remains. Aswan has both Nubians and Arabs, though it's not always easy to tell who is what because the Egyptians of the South tend to be darker anyway. Elsewhere, there is increasing interest among more affluent Egyptians in Nubian culture -- in the form of cultural tourism to colorful Nubian guesthouses (a new phenomenon), cultural and music festivals, and the like -- although dark-skinned Egyptians not infrequently face the same racism as black Africans from outside Egypt. After the museum, we hiked to a hilltop restaurant called the Golden Pharaoh only to be told by the elderly man padding around inside that it was open, but there was no food. Instead, he made us karkadeh from scratch and refused payment. He offered to order some food and cook for us alone the following day -- but admitted that there were no customers. But things are fine, things are fine, el hamdolellah, he smiled at the empty restaurant. People will come soon! Elhamdolellah. Don't you mean inshallah, God willing, and not elhamdolellah, Praise be to God? I wanted to ask.
After being sold ferry tickets by an Egyptian Rastafarian who asked us to call him Ashraf Rasta, we motored over to Elephantine Island, which lies between Aswan's eastern and western banks. North of the grab bag of ruins belonging to ancient Abu lie two Nubian villages. Although many tourists come, they don't feel as though they've lost their sleepy authenticity. We stopped at a fruit stand and struck up a conversation with the skinny, bespectacled boy named Abderrahman who sold us the bananas. He was studying at the Faculty of Agriculture and lived there, in Koti village. He spread a woven mat out on a nearby bench for us, then one for himself across the path. He was curious, like many, about how I had learned Arabic.
-A lot of Americans are studying Arabic these days, I said.
-Mm, since the occupation of Iraq?
-That and 9/11, yes.
-So, who was responsible for 9/11?
-I will be honest with you, Abderrahman, but I don't believe any of the conspiracy theories. I do not believe it was an internal plot.
-It HAD to be! The US has the strongest army in the world... how could they not know? Hmm... you think it was Al Qaeda? Mubarak is the leader of Al Qaeda!
At that moment, a thirty-something man in a red jersey walked by, and Abderrahman summarized our confirmation for him.
-You know who Al Qaeda is?! Red shirt man asks, his eyes blazing. Hosni Mubarak, George Bush, and Bashar Al Assad!
-Sooo... what do you think of Obama? my mom ventures. Is he better?
-KHARA! says the man in disgust before walking away --- Shit.
Abderrahman and the two other men who joined us do like Mohamed Morsi, although they admitted that the community as a whole is divided. He's a pious man, they say. Jomaa, a middle-aged felucca captain who has lost all his business, also sat down beside us. He had gemlike green eyes that popped out from his broad, chocolate face.
We need to be more patient with Morsi, says Jomaa. It will take time. People in Cairo want change right away. But Morsi is not stealing from the country and the people, though. He is a good man! In Mubarak's time, all the money went abroad...America, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Dubai. His son, Jamal, he had 77 million pounds in England. Nothing in Egypt.
In the midst of this conversation, a wiry old man with a snaggletooth grin ambled up and insisted that, as "chief" of the village, it was his duty to give us a tour of the island for the proper sum. We strolled with Hamada through the brightly painted alleys of Elephantine and he pointed out the mosque, the garden plots, the traditional homes, the sheep wandering on their own. We wound up, as all visitors do, on the roof of a Nubian home drinking tea and posing with the owner's pet crocodile.
Nubian houses are famous for their colorful paint jobs
Crocs are favorite totems of the Nubians
