Stephen's Egypt Diary pt.2
Topic: Luxor 2007
02/03/07Up at 5:40AM after a dodgy sleep. Neither of us trusted our wake up call to occur and we slept poorly. I dreamed I was in a Bon Jovi karaoke theatre review and Elisabeth dreamed that her parents got divorced.
Last nights Indian dinner was fantastic and far too overpriced [For Egypt. Three courses plus drinks came to only a little over 22 pounds]. It put every curry in England to shame and the waiters were enchanted by Elisabeth [She somehow managed to get drunk off the food it was that good.].
Then we spaced out to MTV until we fell asleep.
I don’t have much to say about the tour today. The most memorable thing was the long, ginger haired Liverpudlian with tough guy moustache, nose piercing, three earrings in each of the five holes in his ears and outfit sponsored by Strongbow cider who got more and more sunburned over the course of the day to the point that he started glowing.
The thing bout ancient Egyptian architecture is that there is only so much until it becomes repetitive: Broken statues, columns, hieroglyphics, tunnels, sarcophagi, bricks, more broken statues, hieroglyphics, etc. And it’s all the same colour: Sand, to the point that seeing all of these fabulous things turns into a Howard Barker play: Brilliant in concept but tedious in reality.
[For the record, I really enjoyed the tour, it was just overwhelming in what we saw and what was explained to us. We saw: The Valley of the Kings plus 3 tombs, the Colossi of Memnon, Temple of Hatshepsut, an alabaster ‘museum’ that was really a shop, lunch in a horrible American-style buffet, a perfume factory, the Temple of Karnak and the Temple of Luxor.]
Anyway, awaiting room service right now and probably an early night. Elisabeth has asked me to record that saggy breasts and a saggy stomach are signs of fertility to the ancient Egyptians. When we hear a knock on the door, it’s a sign that my pizza has arrived. [This actually led to the most tense situation of the trip where the guy on the other end of the room service line mistook ‘quatro fromagi’ for ‘quatro stragoni’ and I got a bunch of meat slathered over ? of my pizza. I sucked it up, took off the meat and ate it anyway.]
03/03/07Have fully entered vacation mode and am having a hard time keeping track of time. Elisabeth keeps getting extremely anxious whenever we go on an excursion and, though she has her reasons, I don’t fully understand them. We sort of talked about it last night in the bar but the hideous musical variety act started up and we, with everyone else, left. But not before being charged with a 2.2% ‘entertainment tax.’
We stayed in our room watching a shit teen drama starring Anne Hathaway [Havoc] that kind of paralleled the cultural dissonance between rich white America vs. poor immigrant America and rich white tourist vs. poor Egyptian citizen that E&I had been talking about. But that’s giving the movie far too much credit for what was essentially an excuse of an opportunity for some escapism for bored, white American teens to imagine what it would be like to get down with the homies.
Anyway, this morning we were up before our wake up call, breakfasted and I was accidentally very rude to the Rosemary’s Baby couple and next time I see them, I need to apologize for snubbing them.
Elisabeth’s anxiety reached its peak as we caught a boat across the Nile to a village for a camel ride. While I understand that it’s a bit weird putting your fate into some guy who barely speaks your language as he takes you into the middle of nowhere, I also recognize that we’re tourists and they can’t risk damaging their livelihoods.
[As an aside, I really wish I had the opportunity to blindly cross a road, have cars honk as me and Elisabeth shout at me for being so reckless just so that I could shout “They won’t hit me, I’m a tourist!” But alas, that opportunity never arose.]
The camels were fun. Mine farted and shit itself through the hour long ride. I wasn’t prepared for how high off the ground you get and thought it was high enough when it was only ? way up and had a moment of panic when I realized just how high off the ground I was. Anyway, it was a comfortable ride compared to some of the stories that I’ve heard and the trip through the village was fascinating mainly for the fact that it was a proper working village and not a tourist trap.
E seemed to enjoy the ride but grew anxious on the way back across the river so once we got back to the hotel we sat in a secret little shaded area and talked about things for a bit next to two naked men who were rehearsing/editing a play.
Into town later and ran the gauntlet of hawkers trying to sell us things. Met Assad again and, depending on how we find the felucca ride tomorrow will probably hire him for a day. There were less hawkers today and people seemed to back off more easily so either we’ve gotten better at saying no or they’re aware that we’re not fresh off the plane and have heard their pitches twenty thousand times.
We stumbled into the Egyptian market – the one where ‘real’ Egyptians buy their food and clothes as opposed to the markets that tourists go to. It was a good experience – crowded, hectic, not very sanitary but, as E pointed out, it all gets cooked anyway, and was a nice slice of life compared to the hotel life we’ve been living. The smells were especially good, especially when we passed the spice traders.
On our way back to the hotel we did some shopping. Elisabeth did all the haggling as I officially suck at it, and she got us a reasonable price on some scarves and post cards [Which we never got around to sending]. It’s fascinating how quickly prices change – at one point, once we’d agreed on 30LE, they tried to tell us that we’d agreed on 35LE. In the end we spent 50LE (About 5 pounds) which I presume was reasonable. As Elisabeth has pointed out, at least now we have a price to draw from. Or at least she does because I don’t haggle.
Had a late lunch and tried to sit through a Pauley Shore movie on TV (Impossible) as we have well and truly gotten our dose of sun for the day and are counting down the hours to the Karnak sound & light show and our 1st opportunity to sleep in tomorrow morning.
*The sound & light show was abysmal in an astounding way; filled with pompous British voices enunciating their way through text so obtuse and poorly written with such self importance placed on what they were doing, the show was either a failed university pseudo-experiment in surrealism or a gaggle of Shakespearian actors pissed out of their minds and having a laugh. Utterly miss-able.
Bumped into Rosemary’s Baby on the way in and tried to salvage things but I just got caught in a series of lies, tried to blame E for it all and came across like a jackass. Room services has been ordered and we’re going to drink… Or, as it turns out, E will fall asleep on me and I’ll get stuck watching Celebrity Death Match because it’s the only thing on TV.
04/03/07Slept in & being lazy until our excursion this afternoon. So: The (real) story of why the scarab was sacred to the ancient Egyptians:
Back in the day, the Egyptians worshipped the sun-god Ra. And they believed that when it set, it was eaten by a giant serpent on the other side of the world and that was night. And when the sun passed through the snake (Insert ring of fire joke here) and rose, it was the new day, and so on.
Well, it came to pass that Egyptians noticed that every morning, scarabs (Known in the West as ‘dung beetles’) would pick through animals feces and roll them into little balls and lift those balls up and carry them to wherever dung beetles take their little balls of poo.
And the Egyptians said “Hey, the little balls of poo are circular. And the sun is circular. And the big snake on the dark side of the Earth eats the sun and excrete it at dawn.” So, by logical extension, they decided that once the big snake passes the sun, it is the scarab that pushes it up into the sky to give us the dawn once again. All hail Mighty Scarab! Lifter of our great poo-sun Ra!
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