Felucca parties and tomb raiding...

On Friday, Heather and I are flying to Athens (where we'll meet a friend who's been studying in Prague) and will bus/ferry our way around Greece. Our plan is to explore Athens, investigate neat archaeological sites on our way through the Peloponnese, ferry to Crete for more nerdy historical fun, and ferry our way back to Athens via the beaches of the Cyclades.

I am really excited.

And I learned to read Greek!

Anyway, I felt I might use this week to fill you all in on some stuff I've been too busy to share previously. First, a little about recreational activities in Cairo. Egyptian society, supposedly the most religious in the world, frowns severely upon alcohol consumption. We Americans enjoy pointing out (far from Egyptians' ears) that chain smoking cigarettes and/or hashish, though more culturally acceptable here, is equally ignoble and likely more harmful to their health. Anyhoo. The point is, though the drinking age is 18 (and for those who are counting, I'm 21 anyway), bars are scarce, sketchy, and often expensive, as they are catered toward tourists and less pious (male) Egyptians. Additionally, security guards search our bags for alcohol every time we enter the dorms. As a result, when we feel the need to let loose a little, we opt for the limited privacy of a boat.

Last weekend we celebrated my friend Steve's birthday. Renting a felucca boat is extremely easy, as it's not tourist season yet and all the captains jump at the prospect of customers. For about $30 you can put 30 people on a boat for a couple of hours and cruise around El Geziira, the island in the Nile that we live on. It's great. I would like to point out to any scandalized readers that these are not outrageous parties. We bring a little Egyptian Stella or Omar Khayyam (Egyptian wine... predictably sub-par), plug an iPod into the boat's speaker system, and relax under the glare of tacky pink and green Christmas lights.




Amusingly, when we were out for Steve's birthday, our felucca got rammed by a little police motor boat around 1:30 AM. The police barked at our captain in Arabic to take us back to Cairo. Apparently there's a curfew on the Nile. No harm done, though, and it makes for a good memory.

And as I AM here to study, I might mention a neat field trip I took the day after Steve's party. Four of my friends came along, making it a delightful day full of Egyptology and fun. We headed south of Cairo and past the Giza complex to some of the "less impressive" Old and Middle Kingdom pyramids in Dahshur, Meidum, and the Fayyum. Lovely scenery outside Cairo:

The pyramids at Dahshur are the Bent Pyramid, which was collapsing under the weight of its steep walls until the builders adjusted the angle, and the more classically shaped Red Pyramid. They're sort of second generation pyramids built by King Sneferu around 2500 BCE.

We climbed inside the Red Pyramid. This means walking (bent over) down a long corridor to the empty storage rooms, where the air is hot, stale, and smells faintly of urine. Lovely houses for the afterlife. Here's the ceiling, plus the shaft down to the tomb, plus friends at the entrance to the Red Pyramid:

The Meidum Pyramid, a step pyramid, was another architectural mistake that partly collapsed upon itself mid-construction. We also climbed inside this one. Neat, with fairly similar structure to the Red Pyramid. We then entered a mostaba (single-level step pyramid, essentially) in the same complex through the grave robbers' entrance. this meant crawling through the dirt and dust, descending 15 feet on a rickety staircase, and squeezing through a gap in the rock to reach the tomb chamber where there's still a huge granite sarcophagus. That's the Meidum Pyramid on the right and mostaba on the left:

Photos courtesy of my friend Derek (the bus drove away with my camera while I was in the bathroom, so I have no pictures on this site). The grave robbers' entrance to the mostaba, plus the tunnel leading to afore-mentioned ladder:

We headed to the Fayyum next, an area southwest of Cairo that was prime agricultural land after Ptolemeic rulers connected the area to Nile canals. It was a hugely important area beginning around 300 BCE. Here we checked out the Hawara Pyramid and saw the site of Egypt's famous labyrinth, which no longer exists (Herodotus and Strabo, the Greek scholars who told us pretty much everything we know about Ancient Egypt, wrote extensively about it). We also visited the extensive ruins of a town near Karanis in the northern Fayyum. Glorious mud brick ruins of homes, two stone temples, and a neat doorway perched on a hilltop.


Friends climbing on temple walls (it's okay to do this). That's the fertile Fayyum in the background:

Anyway, it was a lovely trip. Just a few more positive details about my life for you!