Egyptian insight – both historical and tangential

You know what’s missing from my blog?  Well, a lot of things.  But what I’m currently thinking about is how you’re all probably missing my rantings and ravings about how hard it is to eat while I’m traveling, what with the food allergy, my vegetarian propensities and my general finickiness.  But I’ve got nada.  Every morning I go down to breakfast in the hotels and there’s yogurt and pita and tahini, breakfast potatoes and toast.  There’s usually this fava bean stew in a big cauldron and these boiled eggs nearby and so I plop a boiled egg into the fava bean stew and I eat that pretty happily.  I’ve seen no corn whatsoever, except on the side of the road in Cairo, grilled and available from street vendors.  Last night we arrived late at the Luxor Winter Palace hotel (look this place up – the gardens and courtyards are beautiful).  Exhausted from a day of Cairo sightseeing and watching Mohamed negotiate the traffic, I felt the best possible use of our time was to march Ron around to each lovely restaurant on the property, look at the elaborate menus and then declare that I wanted room service.  And there, right on the room service menu, was an offer to bring us two simple bowls of lentil soup, which is what we ordered and enjoyed from our balcony overlooking the grounds.  Here’s the beautiful view from our balcony, where I got to stand outside this morning and listen to the first call to prayer – it’s something quite special to hear.

And here’s another thought: I love room service – I dream about it and draft up my orders all the time.  But when it comes down to it, I’m too cheap to actually call it in.  But not here.  The lentil soup?  It was under 80 Egyptian pounds, which means that each tureen of soup we had delivered was under 4 US dollars.  The prices are unbelievable here – even in the tourist areas, where I imagine they’re somewhat inflated.  Surely that is a sad reflection on the economy here.  I believe the Egyptian government let the pound “free fall” before we arrived here and so we’ve come to visit when it’s about 19 Egyptian pounds to 1 US.   It was something like 8 to 1 as recently as November.  We had an ordering “incident” at the Four Seasons in Cairo, involving one of us, who I will not name, who felt that it was necessary to order grilled chicken and some cheese bread, not understanding the fine details of the menu as it was written in a creative/rustic/translated form of English by someone with either limited translating skills or extraordinary translating skills and a wicked sense of humor.  What arrived was an entire barbecue (actual grill!!) covered with chicken and vegetables for 2 or 3, along with an entire pizza.  Keep in mind the other, nameless and more rational, traveler had ordered spicy harissa potatoes, babaghanoush and hummus.  Plus a drink.  And it was all $34.  At the Four Seasons.  Do you think they are still laughing at us there in the kitchen?

You’re all dying aren’t you?  Where are the tourist travel details?  All right.  But first, this is Hassan. I do not know what his position is with Egypt and Beyond Travel.  Ron and I call him a facilitator. He shows up when we move from one place to another and clears the way, sets things up and makes things smooth.  And he’s just the friendliest, nicest guy.  Ron and I spend a lot of time transiting around on our own in Europe.  It makes for some fun stories later on, but while we’re in the midst of it, it generally means we’re hauling our suitcases through large cities, covered in sweat, staring at the GPS on my phone, bickering about whether or not we’re lost.  Sometimes, for variety’s sake, we bicker about why we never seem able to just hop in a cab and do it the easy way.  Hassan makes it easy and he might be ruining us for Europe next time.

If you’re still reading, you deserve to know that we went to the Karnak Temple site today.  This is a temple site in Luxor started in the Middle Kingdom.  The scale of this place is incredible.  I’ve tried to include some pictures of the Hypostyle Hall, which has 134 massive columns in a 50,000 square foot area.  There’s 3 obilesks there at the site as well and all sorts of art/writing.  The coolest parts for idiot-me were the areas where the paint has remained on the underside of the capitals (no idea what these were – looked it up on Wikipedia to sound more intelligent) for all these thousands of years, together with an area that shows how offerings brought to the temple were tallied.  I was a quick study in learning the Egyptian numbering system, but I probably shouldn’t brag.  So here’s your columns, your paint and your numbering (wait, oh my god, instant karma from the bragging – I apparently forgot to actually press the camera button when I “took” the picture of the numbering system.)

More on the temples later – we’re seeing another in a little bit here. I know this is less historically important, but I’m obsessed with the traffic lights here. What’s the deal with this writing that scrolls across during the red light? Nothing scrolls across during the green lights.  A less weighty, but still compelling, Egyptian mystery.

We’re headed out to see the Luxor temple now.  I’ve been typing this from the sanctuary of our room on the Amarco Nile Cruise Boat.  We’re here for 4 nights, making our way down the river to see sites that will be awesome but that I will surely confuse in my mind and report to you in a suspect and haphazard fashion.  Ron slept away soundly on the couch as I typed this and, when I woke him, he declared he wasn’t sleeping at all.  So here you go Ron: