Luxor, the Pyramids, and Homestays

Pictures, pictures, pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/joel.veldkamp/

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck other than ticket booths,
Soda-pop stands, souvenir stalls, dozing guards,
And 200 men in galabias asking,
“Whereyoufrom Youbuypostcardokay?”

- P. J. O’Rourke

We’ll come back to that.

Hello everyone. How’s it hanging? The weather here is definitely starting to cool down. The days are shorter and I don’t sweat anymore when I go for a walk in a T-shirt and jeans. How’s Iowa?

The last two weeks have been packed – we stayed with our Egyptian host families and took a trip to the ancient pharaonic city of Luxor – and the next two weeks should be equally packed. We have a huge paper on a very difficult book due on Sunday, a huge paper on the Qur’an due on Wednesday, and an Arabic final coming up to boot. After that, it’s off to Turkey! And then, Election Day! Never mind, I’m not excited for that anymore.

The point is, this will be the final update for the month of October, so enjoy it.

My host family was an evangelical Christian family – a minority within a minority in Egypt. Most of the other students were placed in Muslim or Coptic families. I was a little bummed at first that I didn’t get anything so exotic, but after finishing up the week, and hearing horror stories from some of my friends here, I am exceedingly grateful.

My family was awesome. Besides the parents, there were two brothers, Shady, 24, and Samer, also in his mid-twenties. I love these guys. Insha allah, I will get to hang out with them many more times before the semester is up. They both speak pretty good English, and they are both engineers.

Like many Egyptian men his age, Shady is working on completing his mandatory military service. Some guys can get out of it, and naturally, most try, but it doesn’t always work out that way. So for four days out of every week, Shady heads off to base for training. When he’s finished with his nine months of training, he’ll go to work as an aviation engineer for the military for another two years or so. Then he’ll finally be able to start working on his own career.

Obviously, Shady is pretty frustrated with all this, but he’s trying to make the best out of a bad situation. In Egypt, children usually live with their parents until they are married, so this is the first time Shady has been separated from his family for extended periods – one of the several areas we were able to touch base on. We also discussed light topics such as the war in Iraq, girlfriends, and my thoughts on “Egyptian people” – all on the first night. Shady is a very direct person.

Samer is a little quieter, but he has a wry sense of humor, and we got to hang out a lot too, especially when Shady was away at base. He is considering getting his master’s in engineering at the University of Nebraska, so maybe you’ll all get to meet him. His favorite phrase to use with me is, “Minoorwar, ya Joel.” (Lit.: You are lighting up the place, Joel.) The proper response is “Binoorak” – “with your light.”

Shady and Samer’s parents spoke less English, but were incredibly hospitable. The most common phrase they used with me was “as you like.” My host mom was a great cook, who always made sure I didn’t go hungry, or run out of bottled water for my delicate American stomach. My host dad enjoyed teaching me new Arabic words and watching English movies with American subtitles with me. He was also the first Egyptian man to use the double-kiss greeting on me, which was a little unexpected, but not unappreciated. The language barrier was tougher there, but with my tiny bit of Arabic and their greater amount of English, we understood each other most of the time.

The first night, Shady and Samer picked me up at the MESP villa and took me out to eat at a place called Bon Appetite. “That means ‘have a good meal’ in French,” they explained. Later, we went to Al Azhar Park, a park in the center of Cairo that you have to pay to get into, which is well worth it if you ask me. It’s full of grass and palm trees, and from the top of the hill in the center you can see the whole city.

After that, they took me back to their flat in Haram, the neighborhood closest to the Pyramids. We couldn’t see the pyramids from their flat, unfortunately – too many buildings. The closest major landmark was the “Matbaa,” a huge building I couldn’t see very well in the dark. The next morning, I had to walk past the Matbaa to hail a taxi, and noticed that it was surrounded by a very high wall, with several feet of barbed wire running along the top, and guard towers every thirty yards or so. My imagination ran a little wild until Shady explained that it’s where the Egyptian government prints its money.

My first day living with my host family was October 6, which is a holiday here commemorating Egypt’s Totally Glorious Victory over Israel in 1973. The whole day on TV there were special programs dedicated to it, even really cheesy dramatic reenactments. I didn’t know enough Arabic to discuss it with my host mom, who I was watching TV with, but even she referred to the war as a “victory.” When I talked about politics with Shady and Samer, the gulf between us was pretty evident. Samer told me he didn’t understand why American reelected Bush. I tried to explain why I thought they did, without explaining that I was glad they did. Shady agrees with me that Saddam was a very bad man, but doesn’t think it was America’s business. I told him what I thought, but also told him that most Americans thought the same thing. (A common question here, whether from host family members or my English students or taxi drivers, is “Obama or McCain?” Whenever I say “McCain,” the inevitable response is “Really?”)

The drive from Haram to Agouza is really long, so I had a few conversations with cab drivers along the way. Here’s my favorite:

Driver: Inta ismak eh? (What is your name?)
Joel: Ana ismi Joel.
Driver: Nice to meet you Joel. Inta mineen? (Where are you from?)
Joel: Amrika.
Driver: Ah, Amrika. You are Christian?
Joel: Yes, I am Christian.
Driver: Me too.
Joel: Really?
Driver: Yes.
Joel: Qwayyis. Ilhumdidillah! (Good. Thanks be to God!)
Driver: Kulli Amrika Christian? (All of America Christian?)
Joel: La, mish kulli, laakin most are Christian. (No, not all, but…)
Driver: George Bush Christian?
Joel: Awya. (Yes.)
Driver: Americans like Bush?
Joel: Uh…la’. La’. (Uh, no, no.)
Driver: Leeh? (Why?)
Joel: Uh…the war in Iraq, wa the economy mish qwayyis. (Not good).
Driver: Economy? (Blank stare)
Joel: Uh…fuhluus fee Amrika mish qwayyis. (Downward motion with my hand.) Bush mish qwayyis president. (The money in America is not good. Bush is not a good president – you’ll forgive my lack of nuance there.)
Driver: Ah. Amrika give fuhluus kiteer li Masr? (America gives much money to Egypt?)
Joel: Aywa. Ashan Bush Mubarak friends. (Put my fingers together.) (Yes, because Bush and Mubarak are friends.)

I felt proud to have gotten through that.

All of my host family demanded to see pictures of my family and friends, so they’re pretty familiar with some of you now. All agreed that Simon looks a lot like me, and Stella does not. I also got to show them all my pictures from Washington DC this summer, which was fun, especially since they didn’t take all of that American history for granted. They also showed me some of their pictures, and shared some of their English Christian music with me.

The last night before Shady had to leave for military service, he and Samer said they were going to take me out bowling. Imagine my surprise when we arrived at the International Bowling Center, a three-story bowling run by the Morale Affairs Department of Egypt’s Ministry of Defense. It looks like a hotel on the inside – brass railings, chandeliers, and stadium seating behind the twenty-four lanes. There are coffee shops, a prayer room, a lounge, everything. It’s a big deal. Always interesting to find out what this culture finds important.

Shady and Samer’s cousin, George, came bowling with us. He was very nice, and we had a conversation using Shady as a translator. He asked me if in America it was obvious to tell the difference between “good people” and “bad people,” because in America, people can drink and have sex and use drugs and be open about it, so no one pretends. How to explain the totally different value system in the States to an Egyptian? But I tried.

The next night, Friday night, Samer took me to church with him. The church he attends in the largest evangelical church in Egypt. Normally they have translation through headsets, but not on the night we went. Other than the Arabic, the service seemed to follow a pretty standard evangelical routine, with a slight tilt towards charismatic. (Samer is a fan of Benny Hinn, but we didn’t talk about that very much. If there had ever been an opportune time for me to receive the gift of tongues, that would have been it, but God had other plans.) During the songs, I tried really hard to read the words on the Powerpoint, and succeeded a few times, especially when they sang the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, but mostly I was lost. As for the sermon, Samer showed me the text on his cell phone – it was the passage from Matthew about the wide and narrow gates – and I after that I managed to pick up the words for “gate,” “big,” and “small” multiple times. So I think I got the gist of it.

After that, I went out to eat at Bon Appetite again with Samer and a bunch of his friends. I think they thought I knew more Arabic than I did, but we had a good time anyway. One of his friends startled me a bit by saying, “I hate Egypt.” But I have been getting that vibe a lot lately. Egypt might be really exciting to a Western student/tourist like me, but I can see how the pollution, corruption, traffic, inflation, and discrimination might get old after a while.

Unfortunately, that night I made the fateful decision to grab falafel with Samer from a local sandwich shop. The next morning, I was as sick as I have ever been in Egypt so far. No puking, thankfully, but plenty of the other sort, plus fever and chills. It took me a few days to bounce back from that. But I did, which is good, because on Monday we visited the headquarters of the Arab League. (Think the UN for the Middle East.) We got to go into their central meeting room, where the representatives of all the Arab countries sit around a huge circular table and talk about things. There were huge comfy seats, microphones at every desk, tiny flags to show which desk belonged to which country – the works, man. Later the chief of staff for the secretary-general of the Arab League had an hour-long Q & A session with us about everything from Lebanon to Iraq to Palestine to Darfur. As you can imagine, he wasn’t a fan of American foreign policy, but he didn’t use any diplomatic-ese with us; he talked to us straight. (Or, at least, bluntly – I have my doubts about some of the things he said.)

At one point, he asked everyone to raise their hand who thought McCain was going to win. No one raised their hand. Not even me, sadly. “Well, now I know,” he said. You know nothing, I said silently. My Johnny has surprised the world before!

On Tuesday, Brian, Jeff, Danielle, Grace and I decided that we had lived in Egypt for too long without seeing the Pyramids, and went to see the Pyramids. Pictures are on Picasa, as always. What can I say? They were huge and glorious, and there were salesmen everywhere trying to trick us into buying a tour or a camel ride. Which got old after a while. But it was still really cool. One thing I didn’t know was that there are a ton of ancient tombs nearby the pyramids, where ordinary people were buried. We had some fun exploring those. One man in a blue baseball hat offered to give us a tour. Brian, being wise in the ways of Egypt, made one thing clear: “Look, bro, I’m gonna be straight with you – we’re not looking to pay any money.” Of course he responded, “No no no, no money. I will show you. Come.” So we went. The tour was kind of interesting, but his English was a little hard to understand sometimes. Eventually, we realized, he wanted us to pay an exorbitant amount for a camel ride to the Saqqara Pyramids, a few miles south. We declined, and started to leave. At which point, of course, he demanded his fee. We reminded him of Brian’s speech, and paid him five pounds to get him to leave. Thankfully, he did. We also had to later pay off some men who basically forced us onto their camels for a ride. It was a little annoying, but hey, we rode camels at the Pyramids.

That night, after Jason and I finished teaching our English class, we rushed back to Agouza to join the group for our three-day trip to Luxor. We got on the train at Giza Station and rode twelve hours through the night into southern (Upper) Egypt. Luxor is the city that was built around the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, which was the capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom (Roughly the time of Joseph until the time of Cyrus.) We saw some amazing temples, still standing complete with hieroglyphics and statues. They must have been stunning in their time.

We also went to the Valley of the Kings, where all the kings of the New Kingdom were buried in secret tombs (as opposed to Pyramids) to foil grave robbers. (Only King Tut succeeded.) We got to go inside several tombs, which shocked me by being huge on the inside. The first one we went into had an opening chamber that must have been 12 feet tall. And they just go on and on into the rock, forever. Most of them still have colored paintings of the Egyptian afterlife on their walls. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, but Austin and Britta snuck some anyway, which I’ll try to get eventually. (Austin got his camera confiscated, and had to bribe the guard with 25 pounds to get it back – but he got to keep the pictures.)

One of the sights we saw only from a distance was Hatshepsut’s temple, built into the side of a huge cliff. We stood on top of a hill looking at it, while Barrett the intern told us the story of how in 1997, Muslim radicals linked to bin Laden stormed the temple, took seventy-four Japanese and European tourists hostage inside, and executed every one of them. (Security has improved noticeably in the decade since.) Seeing the place where that happened was genuinely chilling. Mohammad, our guide, was pretty embarrassed by the story, and interrupted Barrett to make sure we knew these were “bin Laden’s people, not Egyptians.” (Sadly, and to the contrary, Ayman al Zawahiri is an Egyptian, as was Mohammad Atta.)

Unfortunately, my camera died on the first day, so I have no pictures of the third (and best) temple, or the valley of the kings. But I’ll try to crib some together from other MESPers’ Facebook accounts, sometime when I don’t have two huge papers due the same week.

That was the fun part of Luxor. The half-fun/half-ridiculous part of Luxor was its status as a tourist trap. Partly that was good, because we stayed in a really, really nice hotel (by Egyptian standards) because there were no cheap ones. Our beds were comfy, we had satellite TV, and there was a pool on the roof where we spent many hours swimming, playing games and doing homework. It was also good because there were no shortages of restaurants or souvenir shops or things to do. CJ and I bought galabayas (long Arab dress shirts), and Brian and Britta negotiated a luxury motorboat ride for eight of us on the Nile one night, which was really fun (even though our captain offered us marijuana, and proceeded to partake himself when we declined.)

The ridiculous part was that the entire city was geared towards taking advantage of tourists. All the menus in most of the restaurants had an English and an Arabic version, and we quickly discovered that the prices in Arabic were a lot lower. We also quickly discovered that trying to get the Arabic price does not endear you to the locals. Neither does paying other Egyptians to buy the food for you.

Oh, tourist economies. You couldn’t walk down the street without a hundred different men offering you a hundred different things you didn’t want, each requiring multiple refusals if you didn’t want to get screamed at: “Why you no listen???” They ranged from the charming – the sailboat owner who entertained us with multiple accents in English – to the comical – the guy selling T-shirts “not made in Taiwan!” who would run with us for half a block – to the rage-inducing – the twenty-something Egyptian guy who kept trying to get the girls in our group to go to a disco with him and would not leave us alone. (Not, that is, until Brian got in his face.) After three days of that, we were ready to burn everything in that city but the temples to the ground.

The blessed exception to that rule was a fair trade shop Scott, CJ and I found. If the signs on its walls were to be believed, everything in the shop was made by Egyptians being paid a fair wage, and was priced higher accordingly. I think it was true because no one in the shop tried to sell me anything, or so much as tried to talk to me, until I bought something there.

In sum, P. J. O’Rourke’s revision of Shelley’s famous poem describes Luxor perfectly.

So that was homestays, the Pyramids, and Luxor. Now to cover everything else I haven’t talked about. (Oh, no, you’re not done reading yet. Not even close.)

Let’s start with iftar.

The Wednesday after we got back from Sinai, I attended the iftar ceremony at the nearby Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque. Iftar, you’ll recall, is the daily breaking of the Ramadan fast at sundown. So I fasted all day along with Esther and Whitney, who also went to iftar with me. I had never fasted before, and it’s kind of a cool experience. During breakfast and morning break, you have to keep slapping down your mind. “Hey, guava juice – no!” “Hey, Thomas’s eating a pita with nutella, that looks good, I’m kind of hun- stop it!” By noon, you’re about ready to explode with hunger. By afternoon, you have reached a kind of zen state, where you’re dying with hunger, but it doesn’t matter, because your consciousness has abandoned the part of your brain that thinks about such things. That, I suppose, is a good time to pray and meditate, but I watched the Motorcycle Diaries with Austin instead. One thing at a time, OK? (Sidenote: I was discussing the movie later with some people at the villa. I said I didn’t particularly care for it, and another girl said, “What? Why not? Che had the heart of Jesus!” Allah preserved her that day.)

Finally, at six, I walked to the mosque with Esther and Whitney. The mosque provides meals for the needy so that everyone can celebrate iftar throughout Ramadan, and the mosque had invited all the MESP students to attend. (Other students went throughout the week). The outside area where we attended services the first week was sectioned off into four big tents. Not knowing exactly what to do, we asked for a man whose name Barrett had given us. In short order, we were ushered into an office, where the director of the mosque’s charity efforts gave us the rundown of the operation and a whole bunch of literature on Islam. Then, we were led into each of the tents, introduced to the day’s winners of the Qur’an knowledge contests, handed ten-pound notes, and told to hand them to the winners. That wasn’t awkward at all.

Finally, they gave us our own table in one of the tents, separated from everyone else. That was kind of a bummer. We had been hoping to eat with the Muslims there, but considering our Arabic skills, that probably wouldn’t have been that productive anyway. To cap off the awkwardness, we were hounded by a photographer who took pictures of us celebrating iftar from every conceivable angle, including the “Here, shake hands with this five-year-old Muslim boy and smile at the camera” angle.

Oh well. The food was remarkably good – a drink that tasted like kool-aid, dried dates (I’m definitely bringing some of those back to the States – they’re like candy), chicken, noodles, pita and stew. You’d think that being so hungry, it’d be no sweat to finish it off. On the contrary, I could only eat half of it. And later that night, when the MESP alums (including the great Micah Schuurman) came to visit and we all had sandwiches, I still couldn’t make myself eat. I saved my sandwich for later. The human body is a little weird.

That weekend, we went on our trip to Alexandria. (I’ve already posted the pictures from that.) It was fun, but it was no Dahab, or Siwa. Alexandria is right on the Mediterranean Sea (another first for me). The whole city is kind of spread along the sea – very wide, and pretty short. The National Museum at Alexandria is much better than the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It’s well organized, and has floors dedicated to the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Christian and Muslim periods of Egyptian history. We also got to see an outdoor amphitheater from Greek times. Pictures of those are on Picasa. I also ate my first fish that still looked like a fish – bones, eyeballs and all – at a restaurant whose owner ripped us off pretty bad. He refused to give us a menu, but told us there was fish and chicken. Then, after we sat down, when we tried to order, he claimed he had already put chicken on the grill for all of us. Uh-huh, and President Mubarak is very healthy. Eventually he brought us what we wanted, along with a single bottle of water for six guys – at a charge of ten pounds ($2). Even in the States, that’d be ridiculous. Never mind. The fish was good, and compared to Luxor, the Alexandrians treated us like locals.

The next day, Austin, Jeff, Scott and I explored Alexandria’s catacombs. They were tombs built deep underground for Egyptian nobles in the Greek period, which were later used as hiding places for Christians during the Roman persecutions. The rooms down there seem to go on forever. Cameras were forbidden, but they didn’t search my bag very well, and I forgot that I had my flip video camera inside. So eventually I’ll post some videos from the catacombs here.

I also got some video of the Library of Alexandria. No, not the one that burned to the ground centuries ago, wiping out half the knowledge of the ancient world. The new, supermodern one that the Egyptian government is building. It looks pretty cool from the outside, but we didn’t want to pay admission to get inside, so we did homework by the Eastern Harbor instead.

Later that day, we paid twenty pounds for a taxi ride to the other side of town, to one of the few beaches Barrett approved of, and I realized my goal of swimming in the Mediterranean. It was really warm water, and felt great, but it was filled with trash. After jumping in, you had to swim about twenty yards to get to a spot that wasn’t full of empty chip bags and pop bottles. Gross, but worth it after hiking across town in jeans and tennis shoes all day. Also, I saw a woman in a niqab – full body covering, gloves, headscarf, veil and all – swimming in the sea with her kids. In case you were wondering, that’s how it’s done.

In all seriousness, I feel really sad whenever I see women dressed that way. All questions of religion and politics aside – it’s gotta be hot in those things, and I don’t see how you can interact with other people, or get them to respect you, if they can’t see your face. I once saw a veiled woman walking down the street, when a man and his son came riding up the street the opposite way. “Hi, Mama!” the little boy yelled. That jolted me. What is this boy learning from the fact that Mommy can’t go outside without covering herself in a blanket, hiding her beauty like a pestilence?

Thanks for letting me vent my prejudices. You guys are the best.

OK – that’s enough for now. Please be in prayer for our travel plans, and our papers – and, as long as you’re at it, for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the election. We all need God’s blessing more than ever. Pray for Shady, too, if you think of it. The Egyptian military is not fun.

In the name of God, the merciful and the awesome,
Joel