(some of) The Italian ladies: Maria, Valeria, Sara, Francesca.

As for the questions I left unanswered in a previous post about our arrival in Egypt… I did get champagne at midnight, though the steward had to wake me up to give it to me. My hotel did let me check in at 4 am but I had to pay an extra night. Meg did make it to Egypt, though she was actually partially strip searched! (In America, of course.)

I found Meg at the airport and of course she had already made a friend, which led to Meg’s first cultural lesson in Egypt. She had chatted with this guy who is Egyptian through the ten hour flight and he told her all sorts of things about Egypt, from the growing gap between rich and poor to his sisters’ wearisome Sinai hikes. So she felt they knew each other pretty well. He helped her wade through the throngs around the luggage belt (I assure you a survival of the most aggressive situation, as are most “lines” in Egypt), steered her through customs (No diarrhea of the mouth thankfully) and offered us a ride into Cairo. Unfortunately, I already had a taxi driver waiting and he was pretty upset about the delay (because of course there was an hour delay). When Meg went to say bye she automatically reached out for a hug. He got a look of awkward surprise and managed to stick out his hand in the small gap between them while I widened my eyes and shook my head at Meg from over his shoulder. Afterwards I told her that “No touching” between un-related men and women is a way to err on the safe side here. And if you are in a really conservative/religious area it is best to wait to let men offer to shake hands or not. I thought I would have had at least a few minutes when she first got here to tell her the basics. But I probably wouldn’t have thought of that anyway, it is so obvious and ingrained into me now.

And on that note everything has been proceeding as usual. Sarah and I went to Kom Ombo to work in the storage magazine for a day. It takes an hour to get there and for a long portion the road is really bad. The taxi kept going slower and slower in the washboard like conditions, until, one block away from the storage magazine, it rolled to a stop and lost all power! We all said Humdililah for making it that far, grabbed our bags and walked the rest of the way.

I have a new addition to my repertoire of nick names. Usually, my name is “Bes” since “th” gets pronounced “s” in Egypt. But the Italians call me Beta, and some of the guys we work with have started calling me Beyt, similar to Beta. Ironically it is a more appropriate translation of my name since it means ‘house’ in Arabic and ‘Beth’ means ‘house’ in Hebrew, so I hear. But my favorite is that one guy has had his own pronunciation: Beet! Beet, Beyt, Beta, Bes, Bet, Betty, Beeth, as long as it starts with a B it works for me. (I try to discourage Beef though.)

Oh there was one unusual occurrence a few days ago: Rain! In Aswan! We’d just finished telling Francesca the night before about how it doesn’t rain here, and I was thinking in my head that it is unlucky to say that. There was a storm that night and it really rained, more than a few drops! I of course, being trained on Michigan thunderstorms, slept through the whole thing. I hear it only lasted half an hour or so. But it was enough to flood the roads and have our hearts in our throats on the way to see our fully exposed entirely mud settlement site the next day. Luckily the spectacular Fawzy and co. had covered it with sheets (Possibly not a good idea if it had really poured, but it worked) and the site wasn’t affected at all. There are still puddles in the low spots of the roads now, three days later. And I hear that Cairo had it worse with thunder and lightning and everything!

Since we didn’t work on the site that day b/c it seemed that it would rain again, Sarah and I got to survey for rock art! Which is quite possibly the best thing to do with one’s time that doesn’t involve food or private spaces. We surveyed the entirety of a little mountain (about 100 m or so high). We found many wonderful things and one very morbid “thing.” But I won’t say more on that, only that we climbed up rocks, slid down dunes, scaled narrow crevices and had a view over all the area and the Nile.

And for the day off we are going to ride camels from Kubbeyet al Hawwa to the Monastery of St. Simeon. (Kubbeyet al Hawwa is the remains of a little chapel or something with a vaulted roof on the top of the High desert above some pharonic tombs. It means “cup of winds.”)

Italians in Egypt

Meg has left, and we had a great time going all around Egypt. I was most impressed that we actually managed to go all the places we intended to, and that all of the relatively hair splitting timings worked out in this place where you don’t really know what time the train is coming, we hardly bought tickets before hand, and one bus definitely never showed up.

While I would love to write volumes about all the people we met, the cultural and social encounters we stumbled through, my trying to show Meg all of the diversity of Egypt- its people, classes, landscapes and history- in barely two weeks (while stuffing ourselves with as much falafel and fresh sqeezed juice as possible), the fact is that I have started work again and I just know I will not.

But on the other hand it is really great to be back in Aswan working with an Italian mission on a unique and well preserved predynastic site. Despite the fact of the non-existent monetary compensation for what I am doing, I wake up every morning (at 5:30) excited to get out into the field, work past lunch break without noticing, am only happy to go home because of too much sun and dehydration at the end of the day, and I try to do as much as I can in the evening to keep my end of the project prepared and running smoothly.

The difference this year is that right now, it is all Italian women and me. So it is all Italian, all the time. My understanding of Italian is growing quickly and I’ve stammered out my first Italian phrases like “Bon journo” and “I want to eat.” But the best bit is that Serena brought her young daughter and her mother. Serena’s Mother, Teresa, has all day at the house to make sure our lunches are properly stocked and to cook! So far she has baked a cake everyday that is waiting for us when we get back from the field. And she made pizza last night. After dinners every pan goes back to the kitchen empty. Not to mention that they must have packed their bags with a grocery store, I’ve seen them pull out prosciutto, various cheeses, biscotti, Italian sweets, chocolate bars, and I’m sure there is more…

Otherwise it is a pretty similar continuation of last year. Sayid, Fatma’s son, is a year bigger walking and talking. We have a really great (female!) inspector, an appropriate addition to our so far entirely female team. Except for Hammam who is still Hammam, but somewhat subdued b/c of Teresa’s presence in the kitchen, and Mustafa, his favorite to get into arguments with, being absent. Though Hammam still manages to find drama somewhere. He set up our toilet tent with the non-closeable door facing directly toward the excavations, and found two scorpions where he set it up, the first I have ever seen in Egypt.

6:15 am. We are riding in a taxi through the Sinai. The road curves ahead through ragged mountains, layered brown red and purple in the sunrise, but I’m looking somewhere else. The steering wheel blocks my view of the odometer, I can only see that the needle is buried somewhere faster than 140 km/ph. Luckilly there aren’t many cars to get in our way at this hour. Meg asks me how to say slow down in Arabic but I don’t respond because … because it’s Egypt. We’d hoped to catch some sleep on this ride but the scenery and the speed foil that plan.

This wasn’t the 1^st taxi ride that caused us to lose sleep. Coming from Mt Sinai to Dahab we shared a car with two Russian lawyers (who prefer hitchhiking). The problem was our driver, Ismael, who had hounded us day and night to ride with him. There is not much of a job market for the Bedouin of the Sinai, and many of the jobs in the tourism industry are taken by people who move from the Nile valley, so they are left to scrape a living as they always have, out of transportation, (appropriate for people who used to be nomadic) only with taxis and trucks rather than camels and donkeys. But apparently while we were climbing the mountain, he wasn’t sleeping either. He ran in at a bakery to get bread (which was then thrown unceremoniously and unbagged into the greasy trunk of the taxi) and our Russian co-rider leaned over to tell us: “I will try to keep talking to him, but he is sleeping.” And in the rearview on the resumed ride we saw that every 10 seconds his eyes closed and his head knodded forward. An odd three way line of questioning and deliriousness ensued with Meg coming up with progressively stranger questions to ask the driver, me translating, him answering, and me translating back. Followed by a pause of silence, another nod of the head and drooping of the eyes, and another despratlely loud and engergized random question. We asked about his family, we asked where he was from. We asked what the hell was that strange pink sac that camels choke out of their mouths and back in with alarming guttural groans. (The answer, thorough mimed depictions of puberty, seems to be that it is a that it is a mating call.) No wonder Egyptian camels have a hard time breeding and many have to be imported from Sudan!

1/07/08 was Coptic Christmas and we left at 2 am that morning to climb mt. Sinai, (moses, burning bush, ten commandments, golden calf worship). 3 ½ hours, 4 “café” stops, 1 hot chocolate, and 750 stairs later we were on top of the mountain watching the sun come up and the mountains slowly unveil themselves of the night. Us and a few hundred tourists. We’d brought up our sleeping bags to ward off the cold and squirmed around like a pair of green and blue giant slugs trying to stay warm and see the main event. We drew many looks teetering between disgust and entertainment. A group of Columbians nearby sang their national anthem. I accidentally interrupted a praying nun, asking her to take our picture (she was very tight lipped and quiet about her praying!) The second that the sun was fully up, the few hundred tourists minus 4 (us and the two Russians) were on their way back down, exhaustion from exhertion, thin air, and lack of sleep made us incredulous as to why people wouldn’t stick around for just a bit longer, but it worked out well since we got the mountaintop to ourselves. It took us 12 hours all in all from when we left out hotel for the climb, utill we came back down, had lunch and clambered into the sleepy taxi.

The 2^nd pyramid at giza had a few parallels to this Mt. Sinai climb. Mainly the feeling of wanting to turnback. Before we left to ascend the mountain we were freezing at our Bedouin camp/hotel, and the prospect of hiking for hours on no sleep or getting half way up the mountain and having numb toes with no way to warm them made us trepidacious at best. Similarly, we entered Khafre’s pyramid light heartedly joking, but as soon as we were doubled over descending to an unknown depth, feeling the air get hotter, thicker more humid, knowing the passage was too packed to allow a quick exit, knowing how many tons of rock were above our heads… there were at least two moments where both Meg and I wanted to turn around. But we went down the shaft and we went up the mountain regardless. At the top of mt Sinai everyone left before us and we had the place to ourselves. After a few minutes In Khafre’s burial chamber we looked around and found that we were between the ebb and flow of the tourist tide, and that for a moment, we had the tomb chamber all to ourselves! We celebrated: