Egypt: Where the Air is Full of Spices

Before we left, Wade, Erin and I were aware that the showers would be sparse and the sun would be hot as we hostel-hopped from city to city.

I told them I'd heard that in the Middle East, the "air is full of spices," so why oughtn't we let our own bodily spices mingle with those of the Egyptians?

Let me assure you, our aroma certainly titillated the senses.

I thought I could get in a whole country per post, but there is just too much to relay.

So today, I give you "Egypt: Days One and Two."

I can't promise my descriptions will be concise, but I'll try to hit all the major memories that will go with me till the grave, or Alzheimer's, whichever hits first.

After a rough night trying to find the our hostel and being harshly introduced to the mannerless barking of the Egyptian taxi drivers, we spent our first morning in Cairo at Khan al-Khalili. It's a famously huge bazaar in the city's Muslim district. Available merchandise ranged from spices in crates to belly-dancing costumes. Erin and I bought paintings on "certified real" papyrus. I'd done a little research before our trip and learned that papyrus, an endangered plant in Egypt, is exceedingly rare, and that any artwork for sale on "papyrus" would most likely just be on banana leaves.

Then we drove over to the Citadel, still in the Muslim district, which was built in the 1100s to protect you-know-who from the Crusaders. We spent some time gallivanting around barefoot in our first and only visit to a mosque, the Mosque of Muhammad Ali.

We checked out Coptic Cairo, the city's Christian district, where we went into some weird underground room beneath a monastery where a bunch of people were chanting and chaining up small children. (I wish I was kidding, but I'm completely serious. It all had to do with this guy.)
After all that weirdness, we were famished, so we hunted and gathered some delicious Egyptian cuisine. The photo on the left displays the "salads" — which include hummus, yogurt and baba ghanoush, and the one on the right displays what it appears all Middle Easterners enjoy: chicken, rice and french fries.

That night we took the sleeper train to Luxor and woke up beneath these colossal beauties. They're 60 feet high and 3,400 years old. A funny story about these statues — for centuries they were the destination of Roman pilgrimages, even the emperors, because the one on the right mysteriously sang at dawn. It was actually just the wind passing through a crack caused by an earthquake. The singing stopped when some Roman decided to "fix" the statue, which is why the structure looks ganked up compared to its pal on the left. (Side note: I had to photoshop Wade's eyes open in this picture. Marvel if you'd like.)
The photo on the right shows me with Erin and Brittany, who joined us that morning in Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings, which was one of my favorite stops on the trip. We got to go in four different Egyptian tombs, and our guide, Al-Adin, was fantastic.

We also visited Hapshesut's temple, or embalming station. It's an enormous building that took decades to build and was only used for a few days. Hapshetsut, Egypt's only female pharaoh, started construction on the building after she assumed power, and she was embalmed there after death. The vertical statues in the photo on the left are her likenesses (she's famous for having donned a horse-hair beard glued to her chin so as to be taken seriously.) In the photo on the right, Wade, Al-Adin, and a Gilligan-behatted Japanese tourist stand in front of some of the faded relief artwork on the temple walls inside. (We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but just imagine this here but with more vivid colors and the occasional face-scratch-out, courtesy of the Muslims.)

Later that afternoon, we enjoyed the lusher side of Luxor by taking a faluka ride down the Nile to the plantations on Banana Island.

Wade and Brittany take their complimentary tea shots. Middle Easterners LOVE their tea, and they love it with lots of sugar, but for some reason, they only want it in small doses.

We frolicked through the banana fields and gorged ourselves on miniature nanners.

Toasting the evening was what our new friend, Rajad, called "horse wrestling." The villagers on Banana Island were celebrating some dead guy (martyr) they liked, so they took to running their horses up and down and waving canes in the air. A small horde of rabid Egyptian boys swarmed around us, as we were the only white people around, and eyed our pockets. I had my first Egyptian butt-groping, and I was not pleased.

Coming soon: The Giza Pyramids and the Crossing of the Red Sea