so this school week was only two days long. that's amazing-- quite honestly, the thing that i'm most excited about might be simply not having to take the bus at least an hour each way to campus for the next few days. we have holiday for eid-- which i believe is the celebration at the end of ramadan. kind of the opposite of marti gras.
this last weekend was great. friday i just did some homework and chilled. thursday night i stayed up with kevin and jason and watched four or so episodes of the office, and we just finished season three tonight. i can't get enough of that show-- it seems to get better each time. it sort of contradicts (elementary) economics, with the whole idea of decreasing marginal utility-- i swear that every episode i watch brings me more joy than the one before that, and each time the amount i enjoy the show more increases. hopefully that made sense. it did to me.
anyways, on saturday my friend ozzi took me, jason, kevin, and sigmund out to the zachara pyramids. i don't know how to spell that. i forgot to read up on them at all before hand, so i don't know anything about them, but i'll tell what i saw. ozzi said that one of them, which now resembles a sandy pile of uncarved stones, was used as something of a practice try. the other two or three (i believe i counted three or four) were much more eroded than the ones at giza, but that's ok. we just walked around the grounds for a while, and this guy led us into a couple of the chambers of one of the buildings. apparently this was sort of under-the-table, since you have to pay more for this, but he just wanted some bakshiish, so that was cool. the hyroglyphics were still somewhat colored (i don't think this was the result of restoration-- if it was then whoever did it did a crappy job). after that we made our way over to the largest pyramid there. we got to climb up a path above one of the structures and the view was incredible-- right beside this massive structure, we could see cairo and the lush nile valley on one side, another set of pyramids on the other (i think south), and the giza pyramids in another direction (north?). on the other side was an expanse of sand, punctuated by absolutely charming (not really) radio towers. we were planning on checking out the ones to the south as well, but apparently they would have been closed by the time we got there-- stuff tends to shut down for a few hours after 3 pm, and open later. so we made our way back to the city.
when we got back our taxi driver tried giving us a hard time about the fare. we had agreed in the beginning to take all five of us to the pyramids, and be at our service for four hours for 150 pounds, which was probably an amazing deal for him. because we didn't make the last pyramids, we used him for only three hours-- all the same, when we handed him the 150 he got defensive. we argued for a couple minutes, to ozzi's disappointment (he said we should just give him the money and walk away, which was absolutely right), and finally just repeated le, or no, a couple of times, and left.
i would be thinking right now that this might have been a misunderstanding-- he didn't understand the original terms because of the language barrier or something. doubtful. he knew english very competently, and we took pains at the onset to verify the deal in arabic. he was just trying to squeeze the juice out of some tourists-- good for him i suppose, but we didn't feel like doing that.
tonight i hung out with kevin and jason for a virtually the whole night-- dinner, the office, then hanging out at a shisha place. it was very enjoyable. one of those stress- and worry-free moments at the start of a break.
tomorrow i'm leaving with nine or so other people to aswan and the luxor. we're taking a train south to aswan over night, and then taking a boat between the two. we'll take a train back this coming sunday. we'll be staying on the boat at night-- the 'nile cruise' thing. i wish i had taken initiative and organized something a little less generic, but it's very appealing-- the travel agency basically took care (hopefully it'll work out this way) of all the details, and we paid more than we would otherwise.
i'm pumped. it'll be nice to get away from the city for a while. i love love love this city so far, but it's congested, polluted, and it will be cool to clear my mind for a while elsewhere. yes.
that's about all i've got right now.
love
chris
1 comment:
Sounds awesome , Chris. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that those pyramids you visited are thousands of years old and were constructed using only the most rudimentary tools. I'm trying to set up Skype on my computer so we can talk but so far it isn't recognizing my mic, so I might have to resort to g-chat. Have a great time down at Aswan. Oh,and by the way, as a New Orleanian, I feel it is my duty to correct you...it's Mardi Gras, not Marti Gras. ;-)
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