Take a picture here,
Take a souvenir…

Time to skedaddle. I really feel like I could spend another week here without seeing everything there is to see. And that’s not even counting Aswan, Abydos, Sharm El Sheik, a nice desert jeep run etc. etc. I wish I could collect cultures the way I collect CDs and I wish languages would imprint themselves in my brain the way crappy pop songs do. I guess I’ll just have to keep traveling.

I know I’m skipping a bit here, but do I really have to tell you how awesome the Pyramids were? They’re the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. The museum? I could have spent all day there just looking at their collection of sarcophagi. The treasures of Tut only make me wonder what we missed from the other 64 tombs. (Wonder if I can start a bidness doing modern day Pharaoh style funerals. The BLING burial! Pimp your corpse!)

Anyhoo, it was a hot day walking around, but that was fine with me as any extra water would have been ready to escape my body anyway (see previous post). The funniest moment was a tourist that in reaction to the touts trying to get him to ‘kiss the sphinx’ had me take a shot so that it looks like his hand is on her ass. Try explaining that to an 11 yr old girl who just wants your money for the kiss shot.

We have a lot of work to do with NAMRU3, so hopefully I’ll be back soon. Right now I’m ready for home. I’m ready for an ice cold Dr. Pepper and a warm carne asado burrito. I’m planning on one big tall Franciskaner Hefewiezen in Frankfurt too. Yum. Maybe two…Oh and football, I’ll take that over soccer any day.

Cheers,
Mars

BWAAA HAAAA HAHAA HAHHA HAHAH HAAA!!!!!!!

In case you missed it, the School Up North pulled a boner of epic proportions in the college football world yesterday.

Simple unbelievable. Good thing Chad Henne (NSFW), Mike Hart and a couple of others came back to win the national championship.

I know, I know, college football on a travel blog, but I did listen to the Buckeye's take care of bidness with Youngstown State via the bunch of tubes sometimes called the interwebs. And this is just monumental, not just for TSUN but for the entire Big10. But it's Michigan losing to the University that brought us "Hot Hot Hot". It's too hard not to laugh.

This would be my reaction as well. Priceless.

Hey Jackass, consider this: Mike can never make fun of a team from North Carolina again.

Go Bucks!

Karnak by Day, the Luxor Temple and the Damn Dam

It's very difficult to upload images here, so you’ll just have to google the sites for yourself and take my word that Karnak was really freakin’ awesome in the daylight. Staggeringly large and slowly added to over hundreds of years by every new ruler that came along, Karnak deserved more time than I could spare for it. Like many holy places, Karnak uses gigantic columns to stress to mortals their stature compared to the gods. Karnak has an amazing array of 134 columns that dwarf all comers. All are decorated from lotus-leaf top to bottom with hieroglyphs, some of which have escaped the direct sunlight and are colored with bright shades of yellow, blue, white and red. Gorgeous.

Beware of Sleestaks

The Luxor Temple is very similar, although much smaller. The added attractions here are some well-preserved statues guarding the gate and a giant obelisk. An unused mosque sits 20 feet above the lower sites of the temple, as that’s where the sand had filled to when the Turks arrived. It shares the double-sided gate style of Karnak, which represents the mountains surrounding a narrow valley, a massive representation of the known world of the Egyptians of the time.

Since I can’t show you pictures, I’ll tell you of my guide on these journeys, who was quite an interesting fellow to travel with. Over the course of a couple of days, he opened up a bit regarding his feelings of modern Egypt, the current archeological work, and his big bringer of worry, the High Dam at Aswan.

Tyr had spent the last 12 years working in the archeological digs around Luxor. He showed me tombs that he had personally helped seal up, and sites where former houses had been blasted away by the Egyptian government. It seems that folks that had taking to dwelling over the Tombs of the Nobles in the Theben Necropolis had also taken to looting a bit as interest in Egyptian artifacts grew around the world (Space is limited for housing, as farmland is crucial. Thus, Egyptians often build over previously allotted land. See Cairo’s “City of the Dead”). These villagers would secretly dig underneath their homes at night, or in the nearby hills, and hope to find a rich tomb where they might break the finger off a mummy or carry away an urn to sell on the black market. They quickly learned to slowly sell these artifacts off, lest their sudden wealth reveal their clandestine treasure huntng. Not everything goes as planned however as Tyr told of occasionally finding bodies that had missed the mummification process: cave-ins, foul air and other mishaps often proved fatal for the unlucky villager. In one infamous case, an entire house collapsed into a sundered tomb. In the end, the Egyptian Antiquities Council convinced the government to bulldoze the village and provide new shelter elsewhere.

Tyr explained the duality of the dam project: control of the water flow had tripled crop collections (year round harvests) and provided much needed electricity for the country. However, since the silt-bearing slough from the heavy rains no longer fertilizes the fields, chemical methods have been employed to conjure up the crops. This has resulted in a steady increase in various cancers for the Nile-dwellers (unverified data, personal communication 2007). To make matters worse, several factories now dump waste into the Nile, as opposed to the age-old method of desert-burial. It is true that malaria and other infectious diseases have been on the rise since the dam was commissioned, and that the Nile delta is now slowly eroding away, where once it grew four meters a year (the silt is currently being stockpiled behind the dam).

But the most arresting alarm for a man comes when you punch him square in the pants: Tyr’s young nephews tell him of their need for Viagra to bring the latest generation into the world. “Can you believe? Young men! All the time: Viagra, Viagra, Viagra!” Which of course leads to (again, unverified) an increase in heart and circulatory problems. In Tyr’s words: “My grandfather would go to the mountain there, to get the stone to sow into the fields, a natural fertilizer. All day, he would follow the donkey, and you know, follow the donkey closely. You see, we don’t allow our daughters to act the way you do in America. But for him, it was no problem to stand tall behind the donkey all day, he was a strong man. But now, only the Viagra brings the wife relief. I hear my nephew’s wife calling like a train station: ‘Ride me! Ride me! Please won’t you ride me?’ We are being slowly poisoned.” (Yea, you know you’re bonding when the ‘Gramps was a donkey duffer’ stories come out.) As Tyr puts it, the people of Egypt don’t feel their left hand in hot water, because the right one is in cold. Maybe he said hand. It could have been testicle. Regardless, Tyr feels frustrated by the current conditions and hopes to raise awareness to change the situation, which he admits will be a difficult struggle.

And I’m the new chicken, clucking open hearts and ears…

Ever since professional eater went wild on with the comments I’ve felt obligated to post a bit about food from my travels. Sadly, the food in Egypt hasn’t been worth blogging home about. That may be partially due to my limited mobility in Heliopolis, although the Grand Café on the Nile was merely adequate, ice-cream non-withstanding. In Cairo, my favorite spot was the NAMRU3 café. Now what does that tell you? Don’t get me wrong they have a fine selection of schwarmas and lamb and on Wednesday they serve an awesome Egyptian mix of pasta, sauce and spices called Kashari (highly recommended by the Egyptian techs and now me). But beyond that, the hotel food has been a let down (it’s a 5-star place, it should be at least decent) and I’ve resorted to raiding various fast-food joints within the adjacent City Stars mall. Last night I ate at Sbarros. In Cairo. Boo me. Twice when my jet lag was still in high gear, I had nothing for dinner but a Coke and some cashews I’d gotten from a local market. (pretty perfect really: sugar AND salt)

Things turned around a bit in Luxor, as the hotel there did have a pretty good buffet, including some Egyptian main courses, salads and desert. It was tasty enough that I went back for thirds, partially because I knew what awaited me in Cairo. The breakfast there was more euro-trad, but still well done.

I also broke down and went to the McDonald’s one night. No, I wasn’t craving for some good ol’ US of A pseudo-meal, I had to get the McRoyal. I mean, a Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but the Royale with cheese…had to be done. But it leads me to the next point:

The reliable Rough Guide warns me that I’m going to get the squirts here, and basically says be prepared and deal with it. Right again Rough guide! At least it’s not the Mexico City street-taco induced ‘OMFG werz the br plz kthx bye’ type of searing distress, but it’s not exactly enjoyable either. It’s like changing a diaper, it’s not that difficult to do, but in the end you still have poop on you. Nothing seems to correct it either, like Freedom Fries from Mickey-D’s. That being the case, tonight I went for the asian eatery in the mall. Turned out to actually be Indian, so I went with the really spicy Chicken Marsala. At least it tasted good.