Egypt: What We Saw and What We Learned

We were quite excited to be going to Egypt!  The land of the Pharaohs!  Where people talk in THOUSANDS of years B.C., not just hundreds.  So we decided to “pop” for a private car and guide to show us personally what we needed to see and know about this ancient country.  Furthermore, the ship was docking at Alexandria for two days.  So we decided to go to Cairo 3 hours away with our two days’ worth of time -- because that’s where it’s at!

So promptly at 10:30 a.m. we walked through the dock’s terminal to meet Idel, the guide who was a Nubian from Nubia by the Aswan dam (“I am a village person”), and Mahmood, the driver, who spoke little English, but showed us pictures of his two kids and his wife.  While driving we noticed lots and lots of date palms with ripe dates and the Egyptians were selling them from stands all up and down the highway, like we sell tomatoes in the summer from stands.  And we saw these conical plaster objects that were between 30 and 50 feet high with little holes in them all around.  Looked like an upside down ice cream cone, only huge!  Sometimes you'd see one and sometimes you'd see three or four above a house or a long building.  When asked, Idel said they were pigeon coops.  Egyptians love to eat pigeons and these were either family pigeon coops or coops for sellers of pigeons!  Strange, huh.

Observations:

Both Alexandria and Cairo are cities with lots of smog, trash on every corner, dirt along with the trash, destitute people (some with teeth but more without!), apartment buildings that look like they are abandoned-but they are not- with clothes drying from clothes lines draped from building to building.

The streets have equal numbers of donkeys with carts, horses, and cars, busses, vans jammed with tourists.

The streets are also jammed with lots and lots of soldiers and police, each one carrying an AK-47 rifle made by the Russians.  Very visible!  Very scary!  In fact, when three minivans full of our shipmates toured Alexandra and then Cairo, there was a policeman in each van, armed, and a motorcycle policeman in front of and in back of the caravan.  I guess they weren’t worried about us!!

You’ll ask about the pyramids and the sphinx.  We saw them.  So did 20,000 other tourists that afternoon. They look like the pictures. No better, no worse. They are big. They are nearly in the city of Cairo, but there is lots of blowing sand, lots of heat, lots of walking.  And the walking includes men hawking camel rides on the hundreds of camels there and hundreds of donkeys there. And horse rides as well. Pickpockets, we were warned.  And little kids selling water, soda, pictures of things--just to make a buck.  And camel dung (I stepped in).  And donkey dung.  And horse dung.  Same thing for the sphinx, except the sphinx was much SMALLER than we thought!  One interesting thing: the Greeks named the Sphinx, not the Egyptians,  and the word “pyramid” also comes from the Greek, named after a triangular kind of bread in Greece.

History lesson:  We learned lots and lots of interesting things we won’t bore you with -- like how to embalm a mummy. And about 3200  B.C. when the upper and lower kingdoms joined together under a Pharoah and learned to write a language.  And about all the different periods of their development -- Cleopatra (who was of Greek heritage--and she did not marry her brother, they called each other “brother” and “sister” like we mean friend!) And how all these years we have denigrated the Egyptians with misinformation on the pyramids.  The guys who built the pyramids were not slaves, according to the Egyptians.  They did it because they wanted to! They were HAPPY to do it.  Because when they died, they would follow their Pharoah -- yay Pharaoh -- into his kingdom in the afterlife and he would love them and keep them happy!  It was either their job as a worker for the pharaoh, or they were hired as a part-timer for a couple years.  And there were villages that sprung up around the projects that the Pharoah paid for where they slept, got food, drink and lived.  And they had names such as “Pharoah’s Buds” or “Best Builders for Pharaoh Cheops”, kinda like our St Louis Cardinals or Chicago Cubs, I guess.  

And they didn’t bury their wives or slaves with them.  They made little clay copies of their slaves and buried THEM with them, along with every darn thing they needed to live in the afterlife, since they became king of the afterlife when they died.  AND they started building their tombs, either like a pyramid or like a tomb inside a mountain, when they became pharaoh.  So King Tut was 12 when he became pharaoh and died when he was 19, probably of an infection from falling off his chariot.  His tomb was already built or almost built when he died, ready for him.  Wives?  Well, Idel was vague about that and said something like, “She disappeared or was murdered or something.”  But I will tell you that Idel, our guide, definitely had a misogynist bent: learned early he didn’t want to talk to me, only Bos!  But, in Egypt, that is probably common!

Done with history for now.  Back to Cairo:

Lots and lots of women all over on the streets.  All covered.  I mean ALL COVERED!  Some were carrying bundles of things on their heads. In fact, they carried all kinds of things on their heads.  It was kinda amazing!!   Always with little kids trailing along. 

 On the other hand, most of the men were dressed in western wear -- jeans, polo shirts, etc.  So all I could think of was “subjugation of women”.  It was better when the men were wearing their djelabas also.   Then I could see the cultural wearing of garb for women also.  But not the jeans things with their women totally covered.  And it was hot and humid!! One of the women guides told another tourist that men in Egypt are lazy and women have to do most of the work.  She said that farmers, in particular, will have more than one wife to help with the work.  But you don’t want to be the second, third or fourth wife.  Because only the first wife has authority in those families.  And girls as young as 13-14 will be made to marry. Since they are mainly strict Muslims, they don’t drink.  Maybe if they did, they’d loosen up a bit!!

The heat, the long walks, the traffic,the dirt and trash:  none of that mattered to the women or the men, apparently.  The women, with their bundles on their heads and their little ones following, looked like beasts of burden rather than wives! Scratching out a living on the streets, in their little street gardens, their children begging from tourists.  Made me think how lucky we are in the states!

After hours and hours of looking at sites and dirty streets and dirty apartment buildings and people trying to have gardens around the apartment buildings with their little herds of goats or cows (in the center of Cairo, mind you!) Idel took us to his boss’s country club for lunch, although it was 3:30 in the afternoon!  From a gravel road with tin cans, paper, dirt gathered around walls, we entered the City of Oz,  because behind those walls was a wonderful oasis of flowering trees, shrubs and a country club that could be in the U.S.  What a contrast!

Lunch.  Well, in Egypt their big meal is “lunch”.  So they have breads,  mezes, salad, main course like steak or chicken, dessert. Bloop...  Dinner is usually smaller and no earlier than 9 p.m. or 10p.m.

So  after lunch we were back to the dirt and the beggars and the soot on buildings.  And, after a visit to a papyrus making shop (where they tried to sell us paintings on papyrus), we decided to go to our hotel.  Longggg drive to get there although it was in town on the Nile.  The hotels were in a complex with gates and fences.  And each gate (and we had to go through 3) had a guard with a dog and a guard with an AK-47 on his hip.  Once we passed those gates, we were at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza and back in lalaland.  It was as beautiful as the Four Seasons George V in Paris.  And after a shower to get the sand and dirt off, we opted to go to the lounge for a BOTTLE of wine and to compose our thoughts.  No dinner that night.

By the way, when we checked out of the hotel the next morning, there were 2 Saudis also checking out.  You can tell by their white djelabas and their headgear.  But what I noticed is: THEIR DJELABAS HAD FRENCH CUFFS!  WOW! Never thought about that!!

Anyway, after sweating our way through the un-air conditioned, jam -packed (with tourists) Egyptian museum, we trundled back to Alexandria, or as the locals call it “Alex”.  Along the long straight sandy road, we saw many many people in traditional garb, including women all bundled up, thumbing a ride.  Some were walking to nowhere -- because the road to Cairo is barren.  Don’t know where these people were going. We saw tumble-down shacks made out of straw, abandoned house, abandoned shops in the middle of nowhere.  Small busses were picking the travelers up, we suppose.  But the men sit in front and, if there are women, they are in back.  And the busses are not air conditioned!  We were so glad to get back to the boat and our own little protected world.

What Did We Learn??  

That Egypt, a very devout and conservative Muslim country, is trying to trade on their illustrious past, but has a very long way to go to become a modern country with modern living standards.  And it didn’t appear to us that they had the desire or stamina to do the work it would take! It takes more than monuments...