week two

This is quite a bit late! Cramming 1,400 years of Muslim history into three weeks is, unsurprisingly, quite the effort, so I've been consumed with a lot of reading lately, and our first final is this Thursday (1260-modern day... clearly we have a very thorough understanding of the entire time period).

I did write a whole bunch about last week, but then we went to Siwa Oasis last weekend, and I had to throw it all out the window. By Saturday night, most of us kept declaring it the “best weekend ever!” which is easy to say, but harder to explain. So, Han wins... I'm using photos.

In retrospect, it may have been so awesome because it was preceded by the worst bus trip in the history of all Megabus trips I've ever taken. It took us two hours alone to get out of Cairo; once we were out in the desert, the temperature plummeted to the low forties, but the air conditioning on the bus was still on; Egyptian drivers like taking breaks every hour, it seems; and by the end of the trip, the driver was blasting music and opening the windows to keep himself awake. It took me two and a half hours in Siwa to get feeling back in my feet.

But as soon as we got to our hotel, life started to look not so cold; there were cats prowling around a courtyard full of palm trees, and they had banana-honey crepes (for a dollar-fifty!). Siwa, minus the tourism, seemed a little like Gudavalli; a tiny town you could wander around in as children stared at you and yelled “Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!” There are ruins of the old town right past the main square that you can wander through; mud-brick walls without roofs that form a sort of labyrinth. After exploring those in the morning, we booked a “safari tour” for the afternoon without quite understanding what we were getting into.

Three girls and I got the most decrepit Jeep; we couldn't open the doors from the inside, and to turn off the car, the driver literally just pulled a wire (keys? Who needs them?) We sped off into the Great Sand Sea.... and down dunes. At eighty degree angles. I think at some point, our drive just though our shrieks were amusing and did it on purpose.

After that and a try at sandboarding and running down dunes, we headed to a hot spring that smelled disgustingly like sulfur but was fantastic in the cold-ish desert. After that, a bonfire, dinner in the desert, and a drive back to our camp.

The next morning, unfortunately, I woke up to the only bad part of our trip: mosquito bites. Egypt has mosquitos, something I had been willfully ignoring, but these mosquitoes apparently don't obey normal mosquito laws like, oh hey, let's be civilized and not bite people on their EYELID. After putting my contacts in, I realized that:

1. I had seven mosquito bites on my face, all on the side I wasn't sleeping on, and
2. I looked like the Phantom of the Opera

After the blow to my vanity, I had to admit I looked pretty ridiculous, and having a swollen eye was certainly a novel experience.

We spent our second day wandering around on our bikes. Siwa is mainly famous for two things. The first is homosexuality; Siwan men used to have to live outside the town to protect their herds, and apparently homosexual marriage was common through the 1940s, when even the remote location couldn't stop the long reach of the law. Nowadays, apparently Siwans are very touchy about this reputation; it's certainly true that their women are THE most covered women I've seen Egypt; in addition to a head covering, they drape a black cloth over their entire face, even their eyes. We were all really disconcerted by this; it gives the effect of, I kid you not, a Dementor from Harry Potter or a Nazgul from Lord of the Rings, and I honestly jumped a little when I saw a woman out at night.

The second is the Siwa Oracle, who apparently consulted with Alexander the Great over whether he was the son of Zeus or not. Nobody knows the answer, but he wanted to buried here; a couple years ago, some Greeks claimed they had found his tomb, but it's since been debunked. The ruins of the Oracle's building are still up, and they look out onto the beautiful palm trees of the oasis.

It was near there that we ran into a Siwan student who we had met the day earlier, and he gave us a back road tip about a salt lake that tourists don't go to. We headed off on the vague directions of “When the sign says take a left, take a right, and then keep taking rights for twenty minutes and then take a left.” Miraculously, we found a long road along the lake, and a series of peninsulas and deserted islands that were beautiful. We also found a donkey skull, which Willy transported back to Cairo (I think it's decorating the boys' apartment). 

After an improvised picnic on one of the islands of one granola bar, one orange, one pita bread, peanut butter, and dried dates, we biked back to town, where I spent all my money on a scarf and a salt candle. Thankfully, tameya here is only a pound, and one of my friends bought me dinner so I could eat something besides pita and falafel, and we boarded the bus back to Cairo completely exhausted. The trip to the Egyptian Museum the next day was quiet, despite the astounding amount of antiquities literally stockpiled in that place. It's slightly unfortunate, because if we have the Best Weekend Ever two weeks into the trip, won't the rest of the trip feel a little disappointing? 

I hope not! Dharma and Suseela are coming to visit this weekend, so hopefully I will have some amusing stories from that, than Nana will of course object to and offer his own take on. I apparently have been telling enough Kodali family/childhood stories here that people have asked to meet my parents.... dun dun dun!