The Best Weekend Ever

Pictures from the best weekend ever are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/joel.veldkamp

Last Thursday, all thirty of us MESPers packed up some warm clothes, swimsuits, books and snacks, piled onto a tour bus with the MESP interns, Andrea and Barrett, a guide named Joseph, and a semiautomatic pistol-wielding security guard, and headed out of Cairo for the first time in two and a half weeks. In a little over seven hours, we made a trip that took the Israelites three months. We couldn’t see much of the Sinai desert through the bus windows in the dark, but the absence of any lights outside was telling enough. Cairo is a city that never sleeps (at least during Ramadan). To be surrounded by darkness in Egypt was a new experience in of itself. When we finally stopped at a rest area, I walked with some other MESPers a few yards out into the desert, to get the feel of the place. It felt a lot like nothing, and it was exhilarating. We could feel the wind, look at the stars, and see for miles in the night. It was pretty sweet.

Around 1 AM, we arrived at the base of Mt. Sinai. I had managed to sleep fitfully on the bus for only a few hours, but I was so excited that it didn’t matter. Wielding our flashlights, we started the long hike up to the top of Mt. Sinai in the dark. We weren’t alone by any means. The local Bedouin tribes have turned the site into an industry. There were at least five resting places along the trail where we could buy coffee, juice and candy bars at exorbitant prices, and while hiking up the trail, we probably met around forty Bedouin entrepreneurs asking, “Camel? Camel?” Some of us did fork over 85 pounds to ride a camel to the top, but most of us (myself including) wanted to hike.

The hike was long, tiring, and a little chilly, even with a sweatshirt, and it culminated in 900 steep stone steps ominously named “The Stairs of Penance.” But we made it to the top in time to see the sunrise. We all sat together on a cliff at the peak, watching the sun come up over the whole Sinai mountain range, eating our breakfasts. There were plenty of other pilgrims there, from Mexico, Colombia, Romania, and the Netherlands. When the sun came up, the Spanish-speaking people started singing “This is the day” in Spanish. So we joined in English. We also sang the doxology, which we sing every morning at devotions. A Romanian priest performed a mass on the top, which was cool to see. The peak has both a church and a Muslim prayer house. (The Muslims revere Moses as a “messenger,” but think the Torah was distorted over the ages.)

Eventually, we made our way back down the mountain. It looked a lot bigger in the daylight, that is for sure. (Mt. Sinai isn’t a lone peak in the desert; it’s surrounded by other mountains as far as the eye can see, so it’s hard to say when you’ve reached the bottom.) Anyhow, on the way down we stopped at St. Catherine’s monastery. St. Catherine’s monastery is supposed to contain the world’s second-largest collection of Christian relics, including the burning bush. Unfortunately, we got there at eight o’clock, and it didn’t open until eleven. So we spent some time reading, playing cards, trying to sleep, and checking out the local cafes and bookstores. By this time, the fatigue was finally starting to hit us, so sleeping on the desert rock wasn’t so bad.

Around 10:30, we got into line. Besides us, there were a whole bunch of Indian Orthodox Christians, who dressed exactly like Hindus, and pilgrims from various European countries. After waiting for another half-hour, we were finally let inside.

I had kind of pictured the burning bush as some old withered thing inside a glass case. Nope. It’s a gigantic vine thing hanging from a wall, just as green as the day it spoke to Moses. My skepticism was not shared by most of the pilgrims. They crowded underneath it, saying prayers, touching its branches and rubbing tissues on it, for God points, I guess. But most of us cynical Americans were pretty underwhelmed. John, a senior from Northwestern, and I got a kick out of a fire extinguisher placed in a corner of the courtyard right next to the burning bush. Brian, my roommate, was pretty mad that we had waited three hours to see it. He speaks fluent Portuguese, and summed up the whole monastery as “merda.” After the spectacle that was the burning bush, we were all ready to go to Dahab.

Dahab is a resort city on the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern leg of the Red Sea. It was built about twenty years ago, to add to Egypt’s tourism industry. (Egypt lost control of the Sinai to Israel in the 50s, and only regained it in the late 70s.)

I know I haven’t traveled much, but Dahab might be my favorite place on earth so far. We stayed in a really cheap hostel that was right across the street from the Red Sea, and we ate our meals in a open-air restaurant that was right on the Red Sea. As in, if you were sitting on the cushions at the far end of the restaurant and had really long arms, you could turn around and put your arm across the low wall and touch the water. Relaxing there and on the beach after being awake for most of twenty-four hours was a-mazing. Ah, yes, the beach. The Red Sea is the clearest, warmest water I have ever seen. It’s like a bathtub. You step in and you can see all the way down to your feet perfectly. At the beach we were at, a ledge under the water stretched from the beach hundreds of yards out into the sea, so the water was only four feet deep for a couple of football fields. Also, the ledge was covered in coral that you had to walk around. Feeling adventurous, my flatmate Thomas and I walked all the way out to the end of the ledge, from where the people on the beach looked tiny. We’re wading through the sea, and all of a sudden, we come to the drop-off. One second it’s coral everywhere, the next, you’re looking into an endless, pure blue. It was beautiful.

The next day we took some jeeps to a snorkeling spot called the Blue Hole. I had never gone snorkeling before, and it was a blast. I saw so many weird types of fish, and all the kinds of coral I had only seen in books before. Again, the water was perfectly clear, so you just had to strap on your mask and you could see everything underneath the waves. In between snorkeling breaks, we lounged at a restaurant right on the shore. (All the restaurants at Dahab have cushions on the ground that you basically lay on while you eat. It’s the only way to eat out, trust me.)

Also: I was one of the few guys there who did not buy “Eurotrunks,” super-short swimming trunks like the kind sported by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, and wear them to the beach. I did not feel left out. I felt very self-respecting in my board shorts.

We stayed in Dahab for one night and left the next afternoon, taking the bus back to Cairo. It was a long ride, but we played lots of games of Mafia, including one epic round where a girl from Calvin named Danielle and I bluffed our way to victory against incredible odds. We got back at midnight, I called Mom and Dad, and then went to bed.

So that was Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the Egyptian weekend. For the purposes of this post though, I will also count Sunday as part of the weekend. Because on Sunday, we went to an Egyptian football match!

Now you all know I’m not that big of a sports guy, but this game was off the hizzook. Everyone there was so excited – waving flags and banners and chanting, and doing evening prayers in the aisle over their team’s flag (I took a picture). We showed up three hours early, and the stadium was already a third full. As gametime came closer, the crowd got more and more fired up. The match was Zamalek vs. Ahly. We sat on the Ahly side. Supposedly, Zamalek has the better tradition, but Ahly is currently the better team. Also, Zamalek is a ritzy island in the Nile in Cairo, where the uppercrust live. Ahly is the people’s team.

The last time Ahly and Zamalek played, Ahly won 6-1. In soccer, that’s huge. We saw Ahly fans wearing shirts that said: “6-1 – I was there.” The Ahly crowd’s favorite chant was counting to six (“sitta”) in Arabic. We know the numbers, so we joined in on that one. Joseph led our group in some other chants, which made the Egyptians around us clap for us.

Ahly scored the first goal eight minutes into the match. It was pandemonium. We were all on our feet, shouting and waving flags. I hugged the Egyptian man sitting next to me, and he hugged me back. Zamalek later scored two goals, one of which I caught on video, and Ahly scored again the last fifteen minutes to tie up the game.

In between goals, I struck up a conversation with the Egyptian man next to me, Mahmoud. (Fortunately, he spoke pretty good English.) He asked me where we were from; I told him America and Canada. He asked if we were tourists; I told him no, we were students, studying Arabic, politics and Islam. “Islam?” he said. “Are you going to convert?” They always ask that. “No, I’m a Christian,” I said. “So why are you studying Islam?” “Just so I can understand more about the world and my own faith.” “You want to compare them?” “Yeah, and I want to understand the way other people believe.” Then he asked me what kind of politics I was studying. “Politics of the middle east, like Palestine and Israel,” I said. I wasn’t surprised to find out that he took a pretty dim view of Israel. I kept my opinions to myself, and just said, “There’s a lot of suffering in Palestine.” Then the conversation turned to soccer. “You are for Ahly?” I told him yes. “Have you heard of Ahly before you came here?” he asked. I told him no, that my friends had brought me to the game. He told me that Ahly was the most popular team in Africa, and had won four of the last five championships. “So Ahly is the best,” I said. He grinned and shook my hand. “You are my friend now,” he said. Eventually, he gave me his phone number and offered to hook me up with an Arabic tutor. I don’t know if I’ll call him, but I always love talking to Egyptians. Hopefully I’ll be able to do it in Arabic someday.

There’s more, but this is getting long. Suffice to say, we have an awesome Muslim professor teaching us about Muslim thought and practice, and last week she took us on a tour of three really famous mosques. I put the pictures up on Picasa if you want to see. Also, last night Jason and I taught our first conversational English class at a local Christian community center. Details on that later.

Have a great week everybody!