My experience so far: the Egyptian school system

Studying in the Egyptian school system is as much a cultural learning experience as it is about the actual content of the course.  Actually, according to this foreigner, it's more about the former.  How have I arrived at this conclusion?  Great question.  The response: personal experience.

One, classes started a month late at the university.

Two, my first day of class started an hour late.  Why?  Because the professor arrived an hour late, strolling down the hall.  This was a main reason for me sitting in an office room impressing a couple of secretaries (I'm not certain their job title actually) about the fact that yes, I am American and yes, I am Muslim.  They are not mutually exclusive ideas contrary to popular sentiment.  The class also ended early.  A two hour class had been reduced to 45 minutes and nobody blinked an eye, except for me.

Three, the next week saw a new teacher.  Acceptable, but I have no idea as to why.

Four, the week after there was no class.  I should clarify.  There was no class at the scheduled time.  It had been rescheduled to the convenient timing of 8am on the same day.  Nobody seems to have taken into consideration that perhaps that schedule doesn't coincide with the schedule of the one study abroad student in the class.  I have a class at 9am the same day.  That's part of the reason I chose that class - it fit my schedule!  Additionally, how was I supposed to know that the class meeting had changed?  That is a question, that I still have not received an answer to and not because of a lack of asking.  Logistics.  Who needs 'em?

Who knows what next week holds, and who knows when the heck the tests are, and will I actually show up to class considering I can only be there for about 50 minutes of it and for about 45 of those there's a really good chance the professor isn't even going to show up?  Great questions, but I think I'm going to adopt an Egyptian attitude and not worry about it right now.

Paradise of the Desert: the Siwa Oasis

So, listen to this.  Imagine your in a make shift tent, the only light is from candles, it's full capacity - probably about a 75 people or so and the musicians finally arrive.  Heads shrouded in kufiyyas, their bodies donned by galabiyyas.  The drink of choice upon arrival is a refreshing elixir of Stella beer  - we we're all surprised at this, considering they are Muslims - followed by cigarettes filled with an herb other than tobacco.  The music was great though, as you should have heard by now.

That was part of day one.  The rest of that day was consumed by an 8 hour bus ride from Alexandria to the oasis and a dinner at a restaurant.

Day two was a free day.  Do whatever you want with the obvious understanding that you would explore the city and it's surroundings.  Renting bicycles is the most popular way to accomplish this task, but one classmate found a motorcycle to rent for two hours for 90 EGP.  In the background are the typical birdhouses used in Egypt for pigeons from which their eggs and the birds themselves are sold as livelihoods for some people.

The rest of us settled on paying 30 EGP for a full day's use of bicycles.  Everything you're going to want to visit is easily within biking distance and you can visit most of the sites in one day pretty easily.  Biking also puts you in pretty close contact with the surrounding environment.  It was in this way, after taking a wrong turn down a dirt road, that we picked dates off of some date trees.  There was agreement amongst us that those were the most delicious dates we'd ever experienced.  Siwa is known for its dates and its olives and that, coupled with tourism, is the basis of their economy.  There are literally forests of date tree and olive tree plantations there and it is quite an awesome sight.  

Olive trees in the front, date trees behind.

So, Egypt is called the Mother of the World, if that's true then Siwa is one of its children.  You know all those hsitory books we've opened up and studied and saw pictures of and dreamed upon about this and that here and there?  Well, Siwa could basically be about half of the material in any of those history books.  Everywhere you look is essentially a relic from Pharaonic times or Roman times.  

The first place we visited, after paying the tourist price of 30 EGP for the bikes, was the Mountain of the Dead.  Here lies dead Romans.  Natural deaths and stuff, nothing too tragic as far as I know, but the whole mountain (really just a nice sized hill) is basically a graveyard.  Instead of digging graves below into the fertile ground of the oasis they interred their dead above the ground, imbedded in the sides of the mountain.  The mountain is speckled with graves, as if someone took a really large shotgun and fired four rounds, one at each  side, each pellet carving out a grave (obviously whoever fired these shots had to reload at least once seeing as how it's illegal to not have a plugged shotgun which allows more than three shells at a time.  Thanks to the Merrill-Castleberry-Conlan family for the upbringing which taught me that : )...)  Some rooms housed families so it seemed, as some of the tombs had multiple catacombs inside one carved out grave.  Others were single units, allowing for the resting of a single soul for eternity.  

The only thing is, now the tombs aren't really housing anybody, except for silly tourists during temporary stays, as seen directly above.  All remnants and remains have been plundered and who knows what has happened to them.  And thank goodness that this is the explanation for the human skull that we found while riding around and thank goodness that we had attached ourselves to a group of classmates that had hired a tour guide (and a pretty darn good one at that) that day.  Even with that though, his hesitation in answering the question and the final conclusion that if the teeth were still intact on the jaw, which they were, meant that that person had used an antiseptic mouthwash made of dates which was in use in that area in times past pointed to the fact that this skull was old and not current didn't really do much to appease our aroused suspicion and heightened sense of awareness...but on we rode.

After the Mountain of the Dead, we biked on over to the Temple of Aamoon.  This is the place where Alexander the Great traveled seeking a prophecy from an Egyptian god at that time, Aamoon, about his divinity and right to rule.  However, one small snag caught him along the way, he died while there.  So, this is the purported place where Alex, the eponym of Egypt is buried.  However, I don't know how definitive that is or not.   In fact, most of this paragraph is just hearsay that I'm assuming contains some elements of truth to it.  Check out the pictures below.

Bruce, trying his best. : )

After that came the Spring of Cleopatra.  A naturally fed spring of water at a perfect temperature.  Here we dined and had a dip and prayed the afternoon prayer in the most humble mosque I'd ever stepped foot in.  The walls and ceiling were made out of sticks and date tree branches and the cover was low enough, but slanted slightly upwards towards the front, that I was made to lead the prayer as there was no other possibility for me to stand anywhere else without adopting a bodily position as humble as that of the mosque itself.  

Then we departed once again headed towards the Mountain of Dakrour.  Four mounts of considerable height, but fairly easy to scale in about 15 minutes or so, situated at its base a small town.  Used mainly for celebrations and an annual gathering, the units are constructed of rock only or a mud compound.  Some of the structures have roofs, some don't.  Forget about windows and doors. The posts and beams I saw in use were trunks of date trees.  If you're not an inhabitant of Siwa, there isn't much else there for you other than a special type of rock to see, once used in ancient decoration, and a great view of the surroundings from atop.

And that was about the end of the day.  Except for when we hiked down the mountain the town's kids had taken our bikes because they were good play toys which on our end translated into a little impatient waiting as the day was drawing to a close and rounding up children and our bikes wasn't exactly what we had planned on.  But, I should say, the children in Siwa and in Egypt in general are leagues more mature, comparatively speaking, than our children in America.  Those Siwi children were no exception and even though circumstances were less than desirable at that point they were a pleasure to work with - that is, after I convinced the one that had given me my bike back that I wasn't going to give it back to him so he could check to see where the other bikes were.

That's not the end of the story, but it's the end of this rendition of it.  The day after was a safari trip into the desert which included whipping through the sand dunes in Jeep wranglers at 50-70 mph with slightly deflated tires (i.e. Bedouin style roller coasters...have you ever considered how high sand dunes are, or at what angle they slope?!), two natural springs sitting opposite each other a sand dune, sand boarding, a large tent pitched in the desert for the night (you know how sand gets hot during the day? well it gets that cold at night too), and then our safari drivers as musical entertainment coupled again with beer, date wine, and hashish (much to their chagrin, none of us were willing to risk our scholarship being revoked by partaking of the home-made water bong they had constructed out of a plastic water bottle).

Additional pictures:

The Ruins of Shali:

 an abandoned town about 1,000 years old eroding away in the heart of the village of Siwa.

Final note: a special thanks to all my beloved colleague's and companions who took all these amazing photos, two of which actually include them in the picture.  Also, this blog post is not complete, nor has it been revised.  I am sure I am forgetting some great information and events, as I am also sure that the quality of writing suffers in it as well.  For that I apologize. For additional information and a much more complete blog, check out this.

Peace to all.

Honk, honk!: part 2: Microbuses

They're called microbuses.  They're a great way to cozy up with some of your fellow Egyptians while only paying a small fee and they are probably the second most effective way of travelling around town.  Second only to taxis, whose downsides are they're more expensive and you never quite know who you're going to get as a driver.  However, microbuses the fare is cheaper - basically a set price of about 1.5 EGP pounds - and your interaction with the driver is to a minimum.

The name microbus says it all, but the maximum occupancy limit reaches about 15 persons.  Some have taken showers and brushed their teeth more recently than others.  You might be able to discern this because the sitting quarters are pretty tight.  The latter entails two outcomes: keeping your hands in plain sight and the awkwardness of it becoming increasingly apparent that there is no other place for the boarding opposite sex to sit anywhere, except for next to you.  Of these two results, the first revolves around exhibiting your lack of interest in other people's pockets and what is in them of valuables.  The second involves a technical term called "micro-scooching" whose goal is to ensure as little of your thigh and remaining person, between you and your sitting com-patriot, are touching as possible.  This would be easier to do given a slight bit more leg room.

Although, the occasional hand-to-hand contact is allowed between the sexes as paying your fare involves handing your 1.5 EGP pounds to the person in front of you who hands it to the person in front of them who hands it to the person in front of them who hands it the driver who then decides whether or not the length of your transit deserves change, or not, as there are some distances only costing 1 EGP pound, and others still are only at .75 EGP pounds.  Perhaps, for example though, you paid with a 5 pound bill in which case change is then due.  If so, the driver hands your change to the person behind him who hands it to the person behind him who hands it to the person behind them who hands it to you.

Well now your settled in, snug, hopefully not thigh-to-thigh with your opposing gender transit companion as that would just be weird.  Settled in, snug, and...what's that other one I'm forgetting?  Oh yeah, safe!  Oh wait, no, I'm not forgetting that one.  Microbus drivers make ends meet by filling up their vehicle with occupants and making as many trips in as little time as possible.  Turns out this equation doesn't involve any respect for superfluous notions such as speed limits, traffic lanes, tailgating distances, or the use of blinkers.    Although, to be fair, microbus drivers share this love of theirs of using the road to its fullest with taxi drivers, motorcyclists, and car drivers alike.  In light of these circumstances, there are some helpful hints to deal with high speeds while travelling in an over-loaded, speeding vehicle on crowded roads:

-Prayer.  Perhaps the greatest gift a microbus has to offer.  You might never feel so directed towards God as you will when you ride a microbus praying for safe arrival.  You might be held safe in the hands of God during the whole ride, but whether or not you recognize that is another issue...
-Look out the side windows and avoid looking ahead.  You know like when you climb up high on a ladder and folks tell you not to look down?  Apply that same vertical logic to a horizontal scale.
-Practice turning involuntary actions, like raising your hands or straining your neck from fear of impending collision, into seemingly purposeful ones.  For example, consider smoothing your hair out a little, as if that's what you originally intended to do, after your hand lifts itself up to help prevent a game of bumper cars from actualizing.

I think, so as not to keep you any longer, we'll end here.  The next entry though will cover the all important question of, how does one actually know which microbus to catch?  There are Lord knows how many of them and choosing the right one is after all essential, as failing to do so might result in a blog entry like that found under the title of "Mish Masri! Mish Masri!"  Although the Holiday of Slaughter is coming up on Sunday...that might take precedence over an entry about hand signals!