Sinai 1 (10/14/10)

[Sorry for the late catch-up blog. Here's day one of my Sinai trip, finally.]
Blogging on the bus is not very fun. Oh well. That's what I get for deciding to go n awesome rips to Sinai. Before I get to that, though, here's what happened today.
Umm. Not really anything. School (stuff), lunch (falafel), bus ride home (agonizing). In Arabic today we presented out dialogues, and the teacher gave us a resounding 'mumtaaz' (excellent) after we were done, so that went alright. But I digress.
Like every school day, I got on the 5:15 bus home. One of the 5:15 buses, anyway, there are usually two or three. We left around 5:10, and drove for a while, then got stopped by traffic. It took until 7:00 for me to get back to the dorms. The bus ride home has never taken that long before, and I hope it never does again. I don't know why the traffic was so bad today, but I assume it was an accident of some sort. (Speaking of accidents, the bus drove by a burned out truck this morning, still kinda on fire. That was interesting.)
Anyway, I got back to the dorms at the precise time the bus was meant to depart Zamalek to go pick up the New Campus students, and I wasn't packed yet.
I went up to my room, and finished packing, and made it back downstairs in about ten minutes, just to wait until 7:40 when we were informed by an RA that the bus would be another twenty minutes.
I left my stuff downstairs and went back to my room to charge my iPod as much as I could and talk to my mom on Skype a little. I was about to head back down when I got a call from the RA that the bus was there waiting. As if I was holding it up.
But whatever. I went downstairs, all seven students leaving from Zamalek got on the bus, and we headed out. I took the opportunity that the long drive to New Cairo provided to do a little homework for my linguistics class, and recorded (with permission of course) a conversation between several of the other students on the bus, to transcribe and analyze later. [NB: I have still not analyzed this recording. Oops.] The conversation was actually more of a debate about marriage and the benefits and detriments thereof. I was kind of disappointed that I had to record, and therefore couldn't contribute to the conversation, but on the whole, I'm glad I got the recording done with. I got almost an hour of data before my flipcam threatened to die on me, so I stopped.
We picked up the New Campus people a few minutes after that, and now we're on our way to Sinai. The bus ride promises to be long and agonizingly boring and/or painful, so I'm definitely looking forward to it. I'm going to try and get some sleep now, so I'll be all refreshed for a nice relaxing day at the beach tomorrow.
[And a special gift for you catch-up blog readers, I'll include the doodle I made in my notebook after I wrote this blog]:

yeah, you know you're jealous

tanis and bubastis

I woke up this morning without any clear idea of how the day was going to go. I knew two things for certain: 1) I had no more water, and 2) I needed to be downtown by 8:00, which left me no time to go buy some, except at the cafeteria, which was closed. That was it.
In the lobby, I met up with two other students who were going on the Tanis trip and we shared a cab downtown, where luckily, we found a McDonald's, and I bought a water bottle for the day. I still didn't have any food, but my lovely friend Kim, ultra-prepared as she was and always is, let me eat the extra banana that she had brought with her. Thanks Kim!
Actually, we were joking about Kim being so prepared all day long. In one purse, she had a giant water bottle, her wallet, mobile, iPod, book, and probably more, as well as hand sanitizer and a mongoose. I'm not sure about the mongoose, actually, since I never saw it, but she did say it was in the zipper compartment, so I may never know for certain.
Also while we were at McDonald's, I stole toilet paper from their bathroom, which turned out to be my one concession to being prepared for the day.
Once everyone had arrived, we drove in the bus to the new campus to pick up the students who lived there, and then we were off to Bubastis, an ancient site in the middle of the delta. Here's the map of our trip:

The site of Bubastis is actually in the middle of the modern city of Zaq-a-ziq, so everywhere we looked we could see cars and apartment buildings, but that was okay. Originally, the site was a temple, although the monumental structure is completely gone now because like a lot of other sites in Egypt, it was torn apart for its limestone (which was then used to make quick lime for mortar), leaving the granite facing stone lying all around. If you look carefully, it's still possible to see how some of the temple was laid out, which was pretty amazing.

a colossal statue of a goddess, reconstructed

what most of the site looked like - granite blocks everywhere

a row of granite cobras with no heads
(this is why kim needed her mongoose)

you can see the outline of the hypostyle hall in the columns

monuments are great, because i can take
pictures of soldiers and not get in trouble

a well where the holy family stopped on
their journey through egypt, according to legend

After we explored Bubastis, we used the unfinished visitor's centre's scary scary bathrooms (thank you McDonald's!) and headed for Tanis. The drive was about an hour and a half, and we had a police escort the entire way. This was a little annoying, because I think we were drawing enough attention to ourselves already, what with the huge bus, that we didn't really need a squad car and a motorcycle with both their sirens on to announce our presence. The drive went really slowly, because we had to pass through lots of little villages on the way. It was interesting to see another part of Egypt outside of the big city that I've gotten used to. Well, that is, when I could stay awake. The professor lectured a lot during our drives, and he had one of those soothing documentary type voices and it just put me straight to sleep. I did manage to get a few pictures, though.

COWS!

donkeys and a motorcycle

We arrived at Tanis around 1:30, and after the professor talked for a bit, explaining where everything was, we got to wander and take whatever pictures we wanted. The site was very different than what I expected, but still very interesting. Like Bubastis, it was full of granite blocks either left behind from previous constructions or moved to the site by the government for safe-keeping. Here's what we saw:

first, adorable puppies. don't worry, i didn't touch them.

awww

a broken colossus of ramses the great, about 10 ft tall

another broken colossus of the pharaoh
- the queen is just visible behind his leg

the royal tomb of psusennes the somethingth - originally, the 'top' was
at ground level, and everything you see here was buried.

ancient egyptian sprite bottle - so much litter everywhere!

sorry, i don't remember what this means
it's probably horus/the pharaoh, though

broken columns

pretty sure this was the inscription on the cover
of my hieroglyphics textbook

hieroglyphs inside an opened tomb

inside a tomb - the granite sarcophagus

is it? could it be? the well of souls? yes. (no.)

who is that mysterious man in the distance?

Just as I ran out of water and was dying to get back on the bus, we did, and the air conditioning was probably the most beautiful thing ever. Then the drive back to new campus took three hours, and another hour to get back to downtown and catch a cab to Zamalek. Yay for Egypt traffic, again. Our cab driver was nice, though, and even admitted he didn't know where we were going, but was happy to follow our directions instead of just driving around randomly. As soon as I got into the dorms, I bought two big bottles of water and some dinner, and I'm not feeling so tired and dehydrated anymore.

So, that was my trip, and although I didn't find the ark of the covenant, I've concluded that going to Tanis was a good idea. It was a really long, really hot day, full of lectures and driving and big chunks of rock, but I'm glad I went. Even if it ate up my last day of the weekend and I have to go to class tomorrow and talk about Antigone and The Shipwrecked Sailor and pretend I know Arabic. That's okay. I went to Tanis.

jet lag and feluccas

Today started out late. Really late. I don't know exactly what time I woke up, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't before noon Cairo time. I showered, which was its own little adventure, because I had to carry everything with me that I needed, and technically we're not allowed to walk around dressed indecently in a towel. The shower itself was fine, except for the hardware. The shower head decided that it was a good idea to spray water up and sideways as well as down, and managed to get everything, including the bathroom floor outside the shower completely wet. That was alright though, since it didn't get my clothes, just my makeup bag, which I managed to dry later on the A/C.
After my shower, I spent a few hours in my room, generally being lazy since I knew nothing interesting was scheduled. I started to get really hungry and feel sick, though, so I eventually went out into the Cairo heat and humidity to find some food. Originally, I was planning to brave the streets and find a supermarket, but I was feeling so sick by then that I settled for an orange juice from the cafeteria, which was delicious. I met a nice girl who had just arrived and we talked while we ate/drank.
I think my favorite part of being here so far in general is how many new people I get to meet. I may not remember their names, but being able to have 10 new conversations a day with 10 different people is very fun and exciting. Even meeting back up with people I've met before is fun, because then we get to guess each other's names, once we've both admitted we don't remember them.
After my breakfast/lunch of orange juice, I returned to my room and took a nap before my next step of the day, which was dinner, and hopefully real food. Well, technically I took two naps, because I meant to get up at 4:30pm, but reset my alarm for 5:30 as soon as it went off the first time since I could barely keep my eyes open.
Dinner was good, although it also came from the cafeteria. I met even more new people, some of whom I went on an adventure with later.
Two girls from my dinner table wanted to buy cell phones, and since I was pretty sure I remembered where the cell phone store was, I offered to go with them, just to get outside the dorm for the first time that day. Eventually two other girls joined us and we headed out. At first we were stuck in a large group of people, who, it turned out, were not heading to the cell phone store at all, but to dinner. Oh well. We made our way back to the dorm to try again, and unfortunately, I managed to get us lost. Not badly lost, but definitely lost enough to not know the exact way back home. We wandered for about half an hour before running into a couple of other AUC students who pointed us back to the dorm, which was just down the road in the one direction I had been sure it wasn't. So much for my sense of direction!

cairo traffic - don't try to cross the street!

The RAs had arranged a trip for us at night, a felucca ride on the Nile, which thankfully I had signed up for yesterday, because it was full by the afternoon today. The meeting time was 8:30, but we didn't leave the lobby to get on a bus until 9:15, and we didn't make it to the boats until about 10. Traffic was insane, even from a huge tour bus. Everyone was done breaking their Ramadan fast and we headed home. The bridges between Zamalek and the mainland were the worst, but it wasn't great anywhere.

The boat ride was amazing. The captains unfurled the giant red sails and pushed us off from the dock and into the Nile. We cruised for over an hour, talking and taking pictures, and enjoying the desserts that our RA, Ayesha had brought for us. I didn't catch the name of the dessert, but it was delicious, and we all ate plenty.

looking north down the nile

The Cairo skyline from the Nile was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Filled with river boats, tall hotels and skyscrapers, lit from below by headlights and above by searchlights, it was an amazing sight. Too soon, the tour was over, and our boat took us back to the dock and the waiting bus. Traffic back to the dorms was, if anything, worse than it had been on the way there. People crossed the streets every which way, some only glancing quickly at the oncoming traffic before they made their move.
Finally, we made it back, and my new friend Emily and I tried to glean whatever information we could about our student orientation on the new campus, scheduled for tomorrow. None of the RAs had anything to help us, though, so we headed off to bed, with plans to meet up and catch the earliest bus to AUC that we could get. 7:40 has never looked so early before, and if I have any plans to shower tomorrow, it's time for bed.