Egypt: Day Five, Part Two

After an onslaught of hawkers almost blocks our bus’s departure, we head to the Cairo Museum.  Traffic has picked up but we reach Tahrir Square, now calm after many rowdy days over the past few years.
       Patiently and knowledgeably, Ahmed explains the highlights of the museum to us.  (I don’t think even the curators can know all they have!  Some of the explanatory panels are so old and faded...  And French is the second language on them, not English!)  We cover both floors of the museum under his guidance, except for the special King Tut room which he cannot guide us through.  No idea why.  The upshot of this is that, not having seen the sign over the door, I get sharply and loudly rebuked for taking photos.  Of course it was about the sixth photo I’d taken, and it was a different photographer who drew the guard’s attention.  “DELETE, DELETE!” he shouted.  And I did, one photo.  “Show me!” he yelled at the other photographer, and I made quietly my exit before he turned his attention back to me.  I told Ahmed he should warn people, and he said that he really didn’t know it was forbidden, even without flash.  Maybe it’s a new rule?

     At the end of two hours, we’re given about 45 minutes to wander on our own.  I choose to fly solo a bit after being in a group all morning.  I happen upon the prehistoric part of the museum and note that all mankind, at that moment in time, seems to have been at the same point of evolution.  No difference with prehistoric France.  It makes me wonder what made things move faster artistically here in Egypt than elsewhere after that point.

     After buying a book in their understaffed and under-inventoried gift shop - which was evidently ransacked by looters looking for easy money during the recent Revolution - it’s back on the bus.  Ahmed, in his inimitable fashion, has scared up a book that has almost all the treasures we’ve just seen, and he takes orders on the bus for those, like me, who want one... and at an unbeatable price.

We have lunch nearby at a kitschy looking, Ali-Baba-type place called Felfela, with a distinctly Middle Eastern decor.  I choose to sit with Arlene and John in a quiet corner.  It’s 4:00, the hunger has come and gone somewhere in the museum, but the food is good:  Egyptian cuisine, very similar to Lebanese cooking back home, where nearby Dearborn has the largest Middle Eastern population outside of the Middle East.

The Nile waterfront

     With the traffic jams, which have returned to their normal density, there’s just enough time to change at the hotel, do my laundry and make it to the Zahi Hawass lecture, Chapter 2.  In spite of my dislike of his pharaonic ego, I sit in the front row again, joined by Floyd, a physician.  Tonight Hawass starts with his autobiography, as he did two nights ago, but gets caught up in the history side of his presentation.  There are fewer “I”s tonight, perhaps because he’s not feeling well, as he later reveals at table.
       Still, he eats with us... or rather in our presence.  Floyd and I sit opposite him and we both are determined to make him talk to us, which we manage to do.  Somewhat.  But soon I leave him to Floyd and his wife Victoria*, and concentrate on Hawass’s Assistant, Tarik, to my right, who is much more simpatico, and a colleague of his seated across from me, who is Chilean with a French father.  More at home in French, he and I discuss Easter Island and its archeological treasures.  Then Hawass rises and prepares to leave, quipping something over his shoulder about the Pharoah needing his sleep, meaning himself.  I guess I wasn’t far off with my earlier metaphor.
       Back to the room, shower and wash my hair, then bed.  Our 5 am wake-up call looms all too soon.

(* Side comment:  Over dinner, my Lost Hat Issue comes up and Victoria kindly offers me her second one, which is very generous of her and will save my scalp from burning off during our remaining time here.  February in Egypt is mild, but relentlessly sunny just the same.  And I’ll manage not to lose this hat as I did Sally’s!)

Egypt: Day Five, Part One

Citadel of Saladdin

 There’s been entirely too much eating going on, so I skip breakfast and just eat the tangerine from last night plus the three complimentary cookies they leave when they turn down my bed in the evening.  Such service!  I also have what’s left of my pistachios, just in case, because lunch today will be late.

Mosque of Muhammad Ali

       We’re venturing into Cairo.  It’s a bustling, sprawling city of 8 million people, to which must be added 8 million for Giza just across the Nile and an additional 6 million from another suburb whose name I didn’t catch (something like Hababea).  Egypt itself is very concentrated as a whole, with its population of 92 million crammed into a mere 5% of its territory.  The rest is desert.
       Ahmed is amazed at the lack of traffic, especially on a Wednesday.  His commute in the morning and evening can take a full hour or even more.  But this morning we speed all the way to the Citadel of Saladdin (or actually Salah el Din) in which stands the Mosque of Muhammad Ali (no, not the boxer).  We arrive so early that the hawkers aren’t even out yet plying their trade in souvenirs.  (An Ahmed Trick:  getting off the bus, the price of something may be one-for-$5, but by the time you’ve run the gauntlet back to the bus later, that same souvenir will be two-for-$1.  And it works.  Every time.)

Muhammad Ali's tomb

       The imposing alabaster tomb in the courtyard is that of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman ruler from the start of the 19th century.  Although Albanian by birth, he is highly respected and seen as the founder of modern Egypt because of the dramatic military, economic and cultural reforms he implemented.
       High above the tomb is a clock that was given to Egypt by French king Louis-Philippe in 1845, in return for an obelisk from the Temple of Luxor, gifted to France by the self-same Muhammad Ali and carted off to stand to this very day in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.  Ahmed looks at me as he points out that the brass clock doesn’t work, and never has worked properly.  Not a great trade.  (I find out that the other obelisk was also given to France, but it was so hard to move the first one that France never came back for the second.  In fact, it was only under President Mitterrand in the 1980's that the French gave ownership of that second obelisk back to the Egyptian people.)

       Like the pyramids, the Ottoman-style mosque and minarets are made out of limestone, but the mosque’s interior walls are covered with alabaster tiles up to a height of almost 40 feet.  Above that rise a huge central dome and four smaller domes around it.  The light plays through the high windows, seemingly pointing out architectural details, of which there are many.
       This is my first time in a mosque, except for eating couscous at the Paris mosque.  It’s very majestic, with that high dome and the light streaming in.  The floor is carpeted totally, with a repetitive design pointing east toward Mecca so the faithful know which way to face.
       As Ahmed explains certain facets of Islam, and takes questions, I start to feel the presence of my grandson Ibrahim, who miscarried at seven months while I was an ocean away.  I’m overwhelmed with both grief and a feeling he’s near.  I say a little prayer for his soul, and then take Ahmed aside to slip him some money to pass on to a needy family, alms to the poor being one of the Five Pillars of Islam.  (Later, to comfort me, Ahmed tells me that in Islam children who are never born go directly to Heaven and do not need our prayers, but still...)

Cairo as seen from the Citadel

Egypt: Day Four, Part Three

On the way back to Giza, we pass loads and loads of “tuk-tuks”, those three-wheeled auto rickshaws which are illegal in Egypt but can be imported anyway.  Go figure.  Kids drive them as of age 10 or 12, especially in the countryside... and obviously without a license.  We also see a lot of buildings that look like tall ovens with sticks and holes poked in them.  They’re dovecotes, pigeon being one of the favorite dishes in Egypt.  (We’ll see more of them along the highway from Cairo to Alexandria later on in the trip.)

Pyramid builders' tombs

As we drive past the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, which we’ll be visiting in two days.  Ahmed tells us that the Nile used to reach the Sphinx when the river flooded.  In 1942 the water came up to its neck!  That was also the year that the Temple of Khafre was uncovered and excavated.
  Waiting for us when we pull up at the Pyramid Builders’ Tombs is Dr. Hawass, who discovered them.  And there were plenty of builders.  Estimates today are 20,000 workers to build Khufu’s pyramid aka The Great Pyramid aka The Pyramid of Cheops (the Greek-isized name by which we know it in the United States).  As Hawass says, that’s the population of large cities in the Near East in the third millennium BCE.   And that population went on for nearly 70 years, year round, while construction continued.  The facilities would have included housing for the workers as well as storage for food and building materials... and even a cemetery for those killed on the job.  Men came to work from villages all over the kingdom.  It was certainly an eye-opener for country boys here in the Big City, much as it was for soldiers from France’s villages on the front lines in World War I.  Hawass explains to us that “The pyramid builders were not slaves but peasants conscripted on a rotating part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans and craftsmen who not only built the pyramid complexes for the kings and nobility, but also designed and constructed their own, more modest tombs.”
  As with many of the monuments hidden over the millennia by the sands (at least three we were told about), the cemetery was found when an American tourist was thrown from her horse who stumbled on a previously unknown mud-brick wall.  The mud-brick wall turned out to be a tomb.  And then the rest was excavated, giving us an idea of how “the other half” lived, this half being not the pharaohs but Ancient Egypt’s blue-collar workers.

Although it’s not far to Mena House, it takes us half an hour to go just the short distance.   Cars are parked on either sides of a narrow street and there’s only one lane, which is blocked.  There are also spare lots filled with camels waiting for something... perhaps tourists to ride them across the plateau.  It’s often like this, evidently, in this neighborhood of stables, where you can rent a horse to ride across the Plateau of Giza.  But all the horses are skinny and their coats aren’t brushed at all.  It’s something I’ll notice often during my time in Egypt.  Animals here seem to play a role - breadwinner or mouse-catcher or guard-dog - but not act as pets.  (Camels may be an exception to that rule, although I doubt if they’re pets, but I’m not well-versed enough in camel to tell if they’re well looked-after or not.)

I seem somehow to have lost Sally’s safari hat that she lent me for this trip.  I thought I’d left it in my room, but when I get back, it’s not there.  I ask at the desk if anyone found it, but no.  The only other possibility is that I left it on the bus, but also no.  (It turns out later that Suzanna found it and left it on the bus near the empty water bottle box, so either it got thrown out or the person who cleaned out the bus liked it and adopted it.)  Luckily for me, our early start this morning meant I was wearing both my sweater and my jacket with the hood.  That hood kept my head from burning up, but that’s how I’ll be immortalized in all those photos taken at the pyramid builder’s tombs.  Sigh.