From Jordan...

As swine flu break continues, I am enjoying my time on the Sinai peninsula. Rough life, eh? I have a lot of pictures to show, but for now I have two panoramics:

This first one is from Petra, on top of a mountain, near the monastery (see next picture). In the distance you can see Israel.

This is the monastery in Petra, which is probably the coolest part of the whole city. When I upload more pictures, you will be able to see how huge this monument is. For now, just trust me--it's huge!
I know in my last post I said that Luxor was the coolest place I've been so far, but now I have a new number one pick--Petra. Jordan in general is a wonderfully beautiful country. The Sinai region is much more mountainous than I had expected. Getting there by ferry from Egypt was the terribly difficult part. It was chaotic, to say the least. Fortunately, we made it through unscathed, even though it was quite stressful.

I'll be uploading more pictures later!

Upper Egypt Travels

I know it's been several days since I last updated the blog, but I have a good excuse--I was in southern Egypt, based at Luxor. This was without a doubt the coolest stuff I've seen since coming to Egypt a few weeks ago. If you ever plan a visit to Egypt, Luxor is an absolute must.

I've included the link to many pictures from the couple of days we were in Luxor at the end of this post, but here's two special panoramic pictures. Again, if you click on them, they'll get much larger.

This is Deir al-Medina, a village from around 1500 BC where the people who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. It was incredible to see the bricks made of mortar mixed with straw from such a long time ago. On the upper left hand side of the picture you can see the place where the archeologists lived. On the right hand side of the picture, you can see the village's temple.

This is a picture of the temple of Queen Hatshepsut. It was probably one of the highlights of the trip. If only it wasn't 102 F, it would have been perfect.

Luxor is much smaller and quieter than Cairo and made for a pleasant stay. We ate a lot of traditional Egyptian food, including stuffed pigeon...which is actually really good. It tastes just like turkey, but there's hardly any meat on it. I also had really good fruit juices: watermelon, strawberry, and banana. Watermelon is probably the best one.

Other than the extreme heat and the overwhelmingly pesky carriage drivers, Luxor is great. You have to be careful because prices are HIGHLY inflated. One of my friends bought an "authentic" pharaoh statue (which we later determined was made out of plastic) for 10 LE when the original price was 200 LE (dropped the price from $36 to less than $2).

The next few days I'm going to be studying, but on Saturday, we're leaving for the Red Sea for almost a week. I'll keep ya updated! Have a good Wednesday!

Here's the link to the pictures from our Luxor trip.

Oh, Snap!

Here is the flyer that I received from the Student Needs & Academic Programs (SNAP!) office today while eating lunch in The Cube:

The university is cancelling classes because of the Egyptian Ministry of Health. An article explaining it can be found here.

So, I was actually pretty upset about it because that's two weeks of classes that we're going to miss, but I'm sure we'll make it up somehow. Since this weekend is Eid ul-Fitr (marking the end of Ramadan), we were planning on going on a 5-day vacation to Luxor, but now we're just going to extend it out and travel around a bit more! So there should be some interesting posts coming in the near future...

Alexandria Trip

This weekend we went on a trip to Alexandria, which is about a 3 hour bus ride north of Cairo. We were only there for 2 days, so we only got to see some of the high-points of the city, including stops at the Fort of Qaitbay, the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, and the Library of Alexandria.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was being able to swim in the Mediterranean for the first time. The water was a perfect temperature and was so clear. We swam out to a depth of about 9 feet, and it was easy to see the ripples in the sand of the ocean floor. Absolutely beautiful.

After we got done swimming, I made an observation--no one was playing in the sand. I was with my friend Johan (the "j" is pronounced as a "y") who is from Norway. Of course we were already being stared at (which is a strange phenomenon to me) because we're two very tall, skinny, white guys on a beach that was most definitely populated primarily by Egyptians. But then I told Johan that we should make a sandcastle to see what people do.

After a minute of sandcastle construction, we had people gathering around us, watching us building our castle. As the construction continued, we had around 20 people circled around us, ranging from middle-aged men to little boys (no women came to watch, but they were certainly observing from their nearby chairs). Johan and I attempted to talk to them in broken Arabic, and they attempted to talk to us in broken English. It was so much fun and was definitely the best part of the short weekend vacation.

Here is the link to the pictures that I took in Alexandria.

This weekend marks the end of Ramadan, so we have an extended weekend. We're going on a trip to Luxor, which is in southern Egypt. It's gonna be hot, but it has some of the most amazing monuments in Egypt.

Have a good Tuesday!

Uh, is the water tower empty?

Here are a couple of panoramic pictures I made from the pyramids trip last week. If you click on either of them, you'll get a much larger image.

One of the things I'm expecting to take away from my time in Egypt is the ability to roll with the punches. After sitting on the patio enjoying the morning sunshine and eating breakfast, I walked up to my bathroom to rinse out my bowl of شوكو بامبس "Choco Bumps" residue, but no water came out of the faucet. Alright, no biggie. At least I was able to take my shower earlier in the morning. Ten minutes later when I was walking to class with a friend, he pointed out that the fountains (of which we have about a zillion around campus) were working. Good thing. As long as our fountains work, we're good to go!

On a side note, Choco Bumps are not as good as the Honey Flakes. However, I have yet to try the Choco Pops or the Choco Bits, which are all of the same brand. Next time I go to buy cereal, I'm probably going to get the Choco Pops, which I think are similar to chocolate rice krispies. Choco Bits are similar to Cocoa Puffs, but there is no American equivalent (that I know of) for Choco Bumps. Aren't you glad you know all that?

I've officially completed my first week of classes in Egypt! Overall, I haven't had too much work to do, except for my Arabic class. The main difference between my classes here and those at Purdue is the size. I don't have a class with more than 25 people in it. My smallest class, which is my Arabic class, has 6 people. It's pretty sweet.

On another side note, the professor for my course about Islam is a former Boilermaker! I was pleasantly surprised. He studied math and then went on to Near Eastern studies at Princeton. I was quite excited...

This weekend I'm going on a trip to Alexandria, so I'll most likely post some pictures and blog about it on Sunday. Have a nice Thursday!

Camel Video

Here is a video I took while riding the camels on the Giza plateau on Friday. It's a pretty shaky video because the camels were running at this point, making the ride even more exciting since I was holding my camera in one hand and holding on for dear life with the other hand all the while bouncing in and out of the saddle.

Needless to say, I was sore the day after the camel ride, but it was so much fun.

Paying for just about anything in Egypt is an experience. We of course had to tip our camel guide at the end of the trip, but then the camel guide's "brother," who we had never seen before until he randomly appeared at the end of the trip, expected to get paid for doing nothing...the "brother" didn't get any money from us. Nearly everyone who gets paid something has a so-called brother who also expects to get paid.

Have a good Tuesday!

New Pictures

Today we went on a trip to the pyramids! It was awesome; it was also very hot. But hey, what do you expect when you're in the middle of the desert? Without further ado, here's the link to the pictures:

Click me!

I didn't add many captions to those pictures, because they're all pretty much self explanitory. These three other pictures I pulled out so I could explain them.

I bought this cereal, 3 bottles of soap, 1 liter of Coke, 3 liters of water, and 2 cartons of juice for about $6. Just sayin'. Oh, and by the way, Poppins Honey Flakes are A-mazing.

This is a picture of where I'm living. The dorms are really nice, especially compared to what I lived in at Purdue. When I get around to it, I'll try to get more pictures of campus, but the campus police don't like us taking pictures. Lame.

Directly across from the dorms is the AUC Sports Center. It too is very nice, except for the pool, which is "closed indefinitely" (good thing too because the water is dark green right now) and the sign on the door to the indoor track reads, "We have no idea when the track will be finished." At least they're honest. Overall, very good facilities.

Hannah Montana's Omnipresence

She's all over Egypt. There's some things you hope you can leave behind in America...here she was clogging the beaches in Savannah this summer, and now she's a huge deal here too. Even the university president based his speech on her song, "The Climb." Ugg.

Since orientation week turned out to be more like a 2-day deal, things have been a little relaxed, read "slow," here. Usually we have 1 or 2 things on the agenda we have to take care of (like getting our student IDs or buying textbooks), and then the rest of the day is just spent taking it easy. Hard, right?

For the first 3 days I was here, I decided to drink water from the tap. I don't think that was the best idea. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say that it was not pretty. I'm now sticking solely to bottled mayya (teaching ya'll some Egyptian colloquial Arabic, halla!). Fortunately, it's really cheap: about 45 cents for 1.5 liters.

Speaking of good deals, textbooks here are insanely cheap. Engineering books at Purdue--probably around $150 each, right? I got mine for about $60. Cha-ching!

This evening (Wednesday), we went on a dinner cruise down the Nile. The food was good, even though much of it I wasn't exactly sure what it was. There was some chicken, turkey, meatloaf-like-stuff-but-in-roll-form, lots of good breads, some sort of orange colored juice that tasted like raisins, and stuffed fig leaves, amongst other things. We also had some live entertainment, as seen in the video below. I'm not sure what this dancing is called, but it was neat (Peter, do you know?).

After the Nile dinner, we (me, Rachel, Henry, and Lucy) decided to get an infamous black-and-white cab to go to the mall. We wanted to get a cab that was going in the right direction, so we needed to get across the highway. So we walked across...like everyone else does. Oh, and there aren't nice little white crosswalks or even streetlights for that matter...anywhere. At least we don't talk on our cell phones like the Egyptians do while crossing the road.

That's all for now! Stay tuned...