My Favorite Post

This post, as you could have already guessed, is going to be about CANDY. So stick around! There will be pictures.

As you know, (if you read my summer Japan blog!) I love to sample new candies and snacks wherever I go. And in Egypt, this has become all the more necessary, because I am often hungry between meals here. (See the last post for a refresher on how long it takes to get from lunch to dinner here.)

In light of this additional requirement, that my snacks be filling and maybe not just sugar, my favorite discovery in Egypt is the Datto.


Isn't it pretty? You may not be able to tell from the packaging, but a Datto (we all say date-o, even though it's spelled dat-o. You'll figure out why pretty quickly.) is a Fig Newton with date filling instead of fig. The cookie part of the Datto is a little dryer and harder than a Fig Newton (or, a Fig Newman, anyway, since that's the only kind I've had in a long time...) and the filling is quite sweet, but Dattos are delicious. They also feel somehow healthy, as opposed to like candy, so they are wonderful for packing to take to the excavation. (Christine and I like to munch on a Datto, or something else small, at around 9 or 10am, and then we make it to lunch at 11:30 much more easily.)

The next picture features the real candy, for the first time. There are, it turns out, plenty of chocolate bars available in Mut, so we have been enjoying ourselves testing them out. The following selection is of favorites, except for the "G.R." chocolate bar (top of photo, under other bars). It tastes like powdered hot cocoa mix in bar form. Which is terrible, in case you weren't clear on that - grainy and not quite real chocolate-tasting.

The other three types of chocolate are intriguing/delicious, though. The Gersy bar is something like a cross between an Almond Joy (minus almonds) and a Charleston chew. It's a chewy coconut inside covered in chocolate, and it's strangely delicious. The Cadbury Dairy Milk bar, which features hazelnuts, is just plain good milk chocolate with hazelnuts in it, so obviously that's delicious. (Something we've come to recognize is that while milk chocolate is readily available, dark chocolate doesn't exist in Egypt. So I've come to respect high quality milk chocolate, even if it just makes me want dark chocolate even more intensely.)

And finally, the Moro bar. This is just a pretty generic candy bar, featuring caramel and nougat covered in chocolate. But, as the packaging notes, there's "energy inside!" Which I find hilarious. Also interesting, Moro bars cost a whopping 3 Egyptian Pounds, which is equivalent to roughly fifty cents. The Gersy bar costs 1 EP. Snickers bars, which are only sold at a single overpriced store, cost 7 EP, so we don't usually buy them. (Sometimes I can't resist a Twix, though!)


Next, the unexpected discovery of marshmallows! And who do we have to thank for them? Well, of course, Muhammad himself! Sometime last week, as I understand, was Muhammad's (yes, THAT Muhammad) birthday. Which means that all the stores set up extra awnings stretching into the street to fill with birthday candy to sell. Among these candies, we discovered the above specimens. Which are undeniably... marshmallows! They are, I admit, covered in coconut. But I'm really not complaining. They are delicious. We recently made peanut butter cookies (which turned out a bit strangely, despite my foolproof Forrest Gump Cookbook 3-ingredient recipe... ) in which we placed tiny bits of marshmallow instead of chocolate, because we didn't have enough chocolate to make a batch of pure Kissy Cookies. And they were intriguing/delicious! (I think I have lower standards in Egypt. But still, I liked them...)

And finally, the most entertaining of all Egyptian discoveries, the BORIO.


Can you guess what cookie/candy the Borio resembles? I know you know... Yes, the Borio is almost exactly like an Oreo. However, it is a little smaller (truly bite-sized, unlike the Oreo) and a little dryer. I can't exactly describe the difference to you, but Borios are unique. Nonetheless, they are extremely delicious. I also love that there are little flecks of chocolate in the cream, although you can't taste it from eating one. I didn't realize they existed until I opened one up to take this picture...

And those, my friends, are my first and favorite candy discoveries in Egypt. I promise to keep you updated as I discover more delicious snacks.

Excavation Days

Today was my third day of excavating! I am exhausted. Also covered in sand. Also happy! Because excavating is really just as exciting as you'd think it might be. (Or it's getting there.)

I am excavating an area called "Street 2" just outside of a Roman era villa that is being beautifully reconstructed at the edge of the site. An architect worked to build it last season (I think, but maybe two seasons ago, or something), and an Egyptologist named Dorotea is painting the inside this season - because several of the rooms were beautifully painted with geometric designs, from Homer, and depictions of the gods. It is an INCREDIBLE reconstruction.

But anyway, excavation is exciting and interesting and just as cool as you'd think it should be, but also quite different. And not that exciting to describe. So unless you're my parents, probably don't even want to keep reading this post. (Thanks for hanging in there, though, Mom and Dad!)

Here comes the long description...

In Egypt, there are laws about how you can work at a site, and those regulations mostly mean that you must hire Egyptian workmen. Which means that we, the Europeans/Americans/white people order the Egyptian workmen around as they move the sand. And then when anything particularly interesting appears, we move in.

So that is a little strange, to say the least. But otherwise, excavation days are long and hot and sandy and awesome.

We/I wake up at approximately 5:30am (which usually ends up being more like 5:45 or 5:50, if I think I can get away with it.) Breakfast, which you know all about, is at 6am. By 6:30 we are on our way, in a bus (not on camels, sadly...) to the dig site, which is 30-45 minutes away.

Arriving at about 7am, we all stamp our feet in an effort to get warm (it's FREEZING in the morning! And by freezing I mean 40s and 50s...), and gather our gear.

Then, we walk from the cafeteria where we are dropped off (near the reconstructed villa!!) to the site, which is just over a hill covered in potsherds.

As I mentioned, my site is Street 2, excavated by Mirjam (who is Dutch! Another of the languages often spoken here that I don't speak...). My fellow student is named Christine, and we usually start the morning by setting up an automatic level and taking the "day height." The automatic level lives in an orange box, and it is just a small telescope/microscope oriented horizontally and featuring an automatic level (the kind with the bubble of liquid!) in the base. So we set that up on top of a tripod, and then either Christine or I will grab a "stadia rod" (a really long, retractable stick that can measure up to 4 meters) and carry it over to a point, marked by a nail, that the topographers have measured for us. This spot is marked by a nail, and ours is 139.00 meters tall. Whoever is not holding the stadia rod then looks through the "telescope," reads a height on the stadia rod, and adds that number to 139. And THAT is the day height (the height of our automatic level!).

Whenever we need to figure out the elevation of anything in the field, we just have to look at the stadia rod through the "telescope" on the automatic level, and read the number. And then subtract it from the day height... You're getting this, right? You'd tell me if you were bored, right? Sorry...

So that is Christine's and my main duty for the day. After that, we just do what Mirjam, or her assistant Sander, or Ellen (because she's working with us too) tell us to do. We take pictures. And measure things. And take elevations. And watch the workmen move sand...

This doesn't make it sound very exciting, and the truth is that it's pretty slow, but it's also quite exciting. We've uncovered walls, and pits, and groups of bricks, and even something that might be a doorway! We think there will be more going on when we actually reach the level that
the street was probably on. Right now we're just sifting through sand that has accumulated above this level.

And that is excavation! So far... I'll let you know when it picks up.

Temples: The Field Trip

This weekend we went to the Kharga Oasis, the larger oasis North of Dakhla Oasis. There, we visited about four sites a day, which meant a LOT of temples and fortresses! But it was really fun. And exciting. It was so cool to see all of these things in person!


This is a picture of a book I saw in a museum in Kharga. This book, however, was found in the Dahkla Oasis, at a site we visited, by an archaeologist (Colin Hope) who gave us a tour of the site. It is THE OLDEST BOOK IN THE WORLD. Isn't that incredible??? It is called the Kellis Account Book. You can look it up. I, however, have seen it in person. AND seen where it was dug up (although I didn't take a picture of that - it was backfilled with sand again, so there's not much to see...)


That's me! On top of a wall! At a huge fortress called El Deir, 30 minutes by car plus 45 minutes by tractor (really!) away from downtown Kharga. It was incredible.

This is some graffiti at the fortress of El Deir. This fortress was used during WWI/the Anglo-Turkish war, and they wrote all over the walls! It's a little sad, but a little interesting. S.F. Sellek clearly had a lot of time on his hands...


This house is actually an animal mummy tomb! There are 100s of dog mummies in here! But I posted it because it looks just like the Flintstone's house... This tomb is associated with the fortress at El Deir. In that it's quite close by... You can also see the escarpment to the left in this picture, a huge (300m high?) barrier to travel. The fortress at El Deir was probably built to control the two passes through this escarpment.

So that was the field trip to Kharga! A final story:

On Saturday night, we decided to head out in search of ice cream. I and a few others from the program were accompanied by Fatma, our lovely young Arabic teacher, because she travels with us everywhere and we adore her company. But it would turn out that we would be delighted to have her company.

After we'd been walking for approximately a block, a police man approached us. He wasn't dressed as a police man, though, so until he had an exchange with Fatma we had no idea! Luckily, she was there to answer his questions - who we were, where we were going, where we were from. Who knows what would've happened if Fatma hadn't been there, but as it was, we continued merrily on our way.

A few blocks later, another police man stopped us and spoke to Fatma. This one told us that he would need to follow us, because we were foreigners, and it might not be safe. (Kharga and Dakhla are, after all, in a militarized zone!) So we headed on our way again, trying to ignore the green pick up truck trailing behind our lone guard.

We didn't really know where to go for ice cream, but we wandered around for awhile before admitting defeat. By that time, we were a little more used to being followed by an armed escort, and had decided to treat it as exciting rather than sinister. So we asked our friendly police man (with Fatma's help) to guide us to ice cream. And then we were following him.

As we trailed along behind our police man, we passed several places that seemed to have Nestle coolers full of ice cream. We kept looking at one another, wondering why he wasn't taking us to one of those. Then we passed a homemade ice cream shop. We were confused, but Fatma looked relaxed and comfortable, so we didn't worry.

When we arrived at the location he had been guiding us towards, it was closed... We weren't worried, though, because we'd passed so many ice cream shops on our way. We simply walked back towards the legitimate-looking ice cream parlor, and I had DELICIOUS banana ice cream, which made me extremely happy.

Even better, we next had to go to another ice cream place to buy something packaged for my buddy Trisha, who had just been sick and wasn't sure she should eat anything questionable. But by the time we'd arrived at that ice cream shop, I'd finished my first ice cream! So I got another... this one was a chocolate and vanilla ice cream bar dipped in milk chocolate with hazelnut chunks in it! It was also delicious.

In the end, I was grateful to our awkward police escort for leading us past such delicious ice cream shops. I hardly feel I need to tell you that I went back the next night for more banana ice cream...

A Day in the Life

We are nearing the end of the first section of the program, which means we are getting very close to digging! Clearly, I'm excited. But before we get there, I feel you should have a better sense of what life has been like the past few weeks. So, here's the schedule, annotated by your faithful narrator, to give you a sense of what EVERY DAY has been like (with the exception of Fridays, which are field trip days/days off from Arabic class).

The day begins at 8:00am with breakfast. Breakfast, as you may recall, is pretty delicious. You recall, right? From the breakfast post!

After breakfast, we are free until 10:30am. I usually take a nap. Or do some reading. Or take a shower. It is a very nice, lazy time, before the day has gotten too hot, but the flies are usually out in full force by then, so you have to pick and choose where you sit outside.

10:30am is TEA TIME, a lovely time of day. They offer five kinds of tea: black, cinnamon, peppermint, anise, and hibiscus, as well as milk and sugar, and these delicious little cookies called "Pastos," or "Kikos," which are biscuits covered in chocolate. AKA delicious.

At 11:30am we have seminar, for which we do a lot of reading, and make presentations on the oases. We sit in the tea room, which is always blissfully cool, dark, and practically fly-free, which makes it a very pleasant hour and a half.

At 1:00pm it's LUNCHTIME! Which is a wonderful time of day. When I began writing this post a few days ago, I wrote "lunch is typically all vegetarian, and features soup and bread and some other dishes." But then this week we've been having a series of non-vegetarian, slightly unsatisfying lunches. A famously unpleasant one, which we've had twice, consists of french fries for a main course. Most of the time, though, lunch is pretty yummy. Soon, when you see the lunch post, you will understand.

After lunch we are free until tea time. I usually do homework for Arabic class, which coincides with 4:00pm afternoon tea.

Arabic class is from 4-5pm. In it, we play a lot of vocabulary bingo, memorize new words, and draw pictures on flash cards. We also call one another by arabic names - mine is Zahra, which means flower. Not to be confused with zara, which means plantation! Our teacher Fatma, is a lovely young woman from Giza - she has just won a Fullbright scholarship, and will be going to either Boston or Ohio next fall to teach Arabic. She is a lovely person and a patient teacher. (But sometimes we find it hard to focus! The days sound free here, but the time passes quickly, and there is always research to be done and reading to be taken care of...)

From 5-7, we have our afternoon break. This is just around sunset, which usually occurs at about 6pm. Sometimes we do yoga with Christine, if the mosquitoes aren't too bad, and sometimes we just laze about. This is the time when I am most likely to be found playing card games - cribbage is my new favorite suggestion, since I discovered Eric knows how to play!

At 7pm it is dinner time. Dinner is usually delicious. You will see all about it in the dinner post! After dinner we can have tea or coffee in the tea room (a lot of tea, I know! It's wonderful!), or we can do more homework.

If we don't have much work to do, we can walk into town, which is about half an hour's walk away, and buy oranges or ice cream or peanuts or pastries. (They have delicious macaroons here, but I find things are generally a little too covered in honey... More on pastries later, I promise!) We also sometimes watch movies on the projector, and look at the beautiful stars from the roof!

I usually try to go to bed at 10 or 11, so I can wake up at 7. But usually I end up asleep by midnight... Or 1am, if it's been too difficult. And then, in the morning, I wake up to do it all over again!

Breakfast Times!

I have decided to split my food post up into sections. Because, sometimes, each meal deserves more than one picture. Like breakfast! So today I have for you a series of snapshots of Egyptian breakfast, which is served at the ungodly hours of 6:00am (for people who are about to head out to "the field") and 8:00am, which is for the rest of us, and is not supposed to seem all that ungodly but always does...

This is what breakfast looks like:


You can see the fig jam in the background, and the black tea with milk, and the ubiquitous "Pasto," a chocolate-covered biscuit that they feed us at breakfast and tea time (which is twice a day). So basically, we live on Pastos. In the center is some delicious (unpasteurized?) yogurt, and behind that is some of the bread that they serve at every single meal. This bread is a new development. For the first few weeks, we had a more pita-like bread, that was even in two layers just like pita bread. But then about four days ago we came down to breakfast and here was this new kind of bread! It keeps things exciting. The white cheese on my plate is called "gebna beta," or white cheese. It is made from BUFFALO milk! Isn't that cool? It tastes a lot like goat cheese, and is also served almost every meal. It is delicious. (Don't, assume, though, that this means I've seen buffalo here. I have no idea where these lactating buffaloes are, I assure you. You'd think they'd stand out in the desert, but no sign yet! )


This picture shows the yogurt without its lid on, showcasing the strange film that collects on the top - because it is unpasteurized? Who knows...


In this picture, Irene is removing the film from the top of the yogurt, just so you can see. I hope you are not grossed out, I am sure it's just the fat separating out. So it makes the yogurt much healthier, I'm sure!


This picture features the latest addition to breakfast: an "omelette," which as you can see just means one egg cooked up in a fry pan. I prefer it to hard-boiled eggs, though, which we are also offered, so it's pretty exciting. To get one, you also have to use Arabic, so that makes it all the more exciting. Let me teach you how to order it: "Mumkin omelet." Now you know how to ask for anything you want in Arabic! "Mumkin" means "may I have," or "please," or just plain "may I." When you know this word, you can get far in the Arabic-speaking world. I promise.

And that's breakfast!

Pharaoh's Revenge!!

Faithful blog readers (I pretend there are multitudes of you...),

I apologize for the delay in posting. I haven't been excited about taking pictures of meals, because I haven't been going to meals, because I've contracted "Pharaoh's Revenge," or, pretty much, food poisoning...

I am recovering now, but no food posts yet. (Luckily, I packed myself instant oatmeal, which has saved me from starvation! Hooray!)

The Dig House!

The Dig House is my home for the next two months. It is both extremely luxurious and strangely backwards at the same time, which produces a decidedly foreign (I hesitate to say Egyptian, because I don't know what that actually means) but comfortable feel. Above is a photo of the entrance, which has a stone label above the door - it says "welcome!"

The house itself houses between 40 and 50 people, mainly in double rooms that each feature a bed, a table (no, not a desk - none of the rooms have even a single drawer...), a chair and a bedside table per person. There is also a closet in ours, which is rather dirty. My room, number 234, has a tile floor, but some of the bedrooms have dirt floors, as do all of the courtyard areas. (See my half of the room? The picture on the right!) Because the house is set up to enable you to spend the maximum amount of time under the open sky. On the second floor, which is mostly bedrooms but also has rows of showers and bathrooms, groups of four rooms are clustered around courtyard areas, (See the picture below.) some of which have tables and chairs. This is convenient, because the mud-brick construction makes the house very sturdy and relatively well-insulated, but it doesn't make it act like a house with actual heating and cooling systems. At night, when temperatures fall to 40 or 45 degrees fahrenheit, our rooms retain the heat of the day and are a delight to return to. Similarly, while it is between 70 and 80 during the day, our rooms stay cool bordering on cold. This can be a nice respite, but in the morning when I wake up barely willing to drag myself from my warm bed, it is nice to know that I will be able to warm myself in sunlight just outside my bedroom door. The house is pretty empty right now, as just we students and our teachers have arrived, but in late January when all of the archaeologists arrive, we have been warned that it will be full to bursting. This is a bit hard for me to believe, because there is so much space here, but I will tell you how I feel after everyone has arrived.

The first floor of the house, which is just as sprawling as the top floor, is where the kitchen and dining room (or, "Restront, as the sign above the dining room door announces) are. (The picture to the right is of the three doors that open onto the "Restront," which is divided into three sections, Restront 1, and then 2 and three.) There are also several workshop rooms for the archaeologists, including a pottery room, a computer room, a general workroom, and our lovely library. As students, we use the library the most, not only because it has books but because it is one of the few places in the house where you can access the internet. After 10pm, when we are allowed to skype, the room is filled with chatter in several different languages as all of the students contact their friends and families. The downstairs courtyard is also the location of morning and afternoon tea, although evening tea is served in the tea room, a cozy room on the second floor with a skylight and a balcony. A photo of the library, filled with students as always, is on the left. (Can you find me?? Trick question. I'm behind the camera, of course...)

The bathrooms are the one part of this house that don't make me feel as though I'm staying in a pretty nice hotel. They, like most places, are full of flies. But these flies remain into the night, unlike the irritating daytime flies that follow us around. These nighttime flies cluster around the lights in the bathroom and shower stalls. And yes, I really do have to take three minute showers. They are not as bad as you might expect, although I'm still struggling with the unexpected difficulty of getting the water to cool down enough for me to get into it. The water heats up to scalding temperatures extremely quickly, and only cools down in a few minutes, which is obviously difficult when you're trying to keep your whole shower under three. At least the water pressure is pretty great. From the roof, it is easy to understand why - each tank of water sits literally above the shower, with a single tube running down to connect it to the shower head. The water, no matter what its unreasonable temperature, falls straight down the pipe onto my head.

That picture of the roof brings me to one of the best parts of the dig house - the roof. Because there is no rain to worry about, roofs are all flat, so they are easy to climb around on, and to turn into nice lounging spaces. The picture on the right is of a porch right above the entrance to the house, where there seem to be fewer flies buzzing about in the afternoon. I spent a lovely few hours reading there this afternoon, and it was very peaceful. (One interesting thing about the oasis is that there are very few animal noises. Apart from the buzzing of the flies and the occasional - very occasional - bray of a donkey passing on the road, both night and day are pretty quiet. The picture on the left, obviously of a sunset, is a view from the highest roof in the building, above a few second floor bedrooms. Because one of my tripmates is a certified yoga instructor, we do yoga on this rooftop several times a week. We did it twice at around sundown, between 5 and 6 pm, which was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes have encouraged us to change our scheduled time. I guess we're not living in any sort of mythological Eden, then, but it's still a pretty beautiful place to stay in. Stay tuned for a photographic tour of our delicious Egyptian meals inside the Restront!

Arrivals

Well, friends & family, I've come and I've seen Cairo. But unlike the Romans, I left it pretty much unconquered. So that, I'm sure, will be a relief to you. You are not reading the blog of a conqueror. Just a traveler (minus dog named Charlie). So with the references out of the way, welcome to my blog! And, for the moment, welcome to Egypt!

I feel as though I keep needing to repeat this point to myself - You are in EGYPT. Got it? Not yet? EGYPT. I still haven't quite gotten it yet. But I'm figuring it out, as sand becomes more ubiquitous and I remember that it's not supposed to be in the 70s in January. It is in the 70s today! On January first! I'm not complaining, don't worry, but it's a little hard to remember that it's supposed to be January when it feels like April.

So I hope that you, my faithful blog readers, are desperately awaiting tales of my adventures. From here, then, I will recount my adventures!

On Tuesday, which seems soo long ago, I arrived at the airport to meet up with my tripmates. I had met most of them before, but I met the others then, and we began the long wait. We got together at 3 just in case anything went wrong, but nothing did, so we got through security well in advance of our 6:30 flight. Which was mysteriously delayed, due to technical difficulties, until about 8:00pm. So we tacked another 5 hours onto the front of our eleven hour flight, which is shocking in retrospect and maybe explains a little more how long the flight seemed, but wasn't too terrible to actually experience. Then, of course, there was the eleven hour plane flight, in which slightly grumpy flight attendants growled at those of us who didn't speak Arabic to return to our seats and not ask for such luxuries as extra glasses of water. I passed the time sleeping, waking up to take Tylenol (remember my wisdom teeth? I do... :( ), and watching whatever inflight movie was playing without mustering the effort to plug in my earphones.

We arrived in Cairo at 2:00pm Cairo time, 7 hours ahead of New York, and bought visas (very pretty stickers you got to put in your passport yourself! I thought about including a picture, but what if it's illegal?? No Egyptian prison for me, please!). In a haze of jet lag, we stumbled through the airport, collected our bags, moved through a very minimal customs and fell into a small bus hired to pick us up and take us to "Happy City Hotel." There, we played cards and spoke slowly to one another in desperate attempts to stay awake until dinner at 6. But the walk to dinner certainly woke me up. Cairo, you may have heard, is famous for its traffic. I don't know what you've heard, but it's probably true. We were petrified. Every intersection is unmarked, and you simply dash between the cars whenever you think you might be able to make it. This involves expecting cars to stop for you that maybe won't. They usually don't. Which means you leap backwards out of their way, heart pumping, and try to collect your wits for a second attempt. So by the time we got to dinner, I was awake enough to ask what to order, learn the Arabic word for thank you (shokran!) from a tripmate who just finished a semester abroad in Jordan (Sarah), and eat very safe, non-bacteria filled foods before fleeing back to the hotel and to bed.

New Year's Eve dawned a little brighter, though my roommmate Camille and I slept through our alarm. But why did I just say "though"? That was one of the best things that happened on New Year's Eve. I love sleeping! So, to rephrase, New Year's Eve dawned promisingly, as Camille and I ate a slightly rushed breakfast after a much needed but slightly illicit eight hours of sleep. Then the entire group braved the traffic jams again, to arrive at the Mugammat.

This building, off a 10-lane circle (a nightmare to cross! Luckily we were a group of about 15, which gave us power against all the cars), looks like something that would make Stalin, or maybe the East German Police****, proud. The only difference was that its tiny banks of windows were arched, which gave them a slightly less ominous feel. Still, inside they took our passports and had us sit in a line for a looong time, waiting to get our visas extended for three months. The chair beside mine was empty, and at one point an Egyptian man sat down beside me and casually lit a cigarette. I turned helplessly from him on my right to the large "No Smoking" sign on my left, unable to say anything in Arabic but thank you, which I figured was inappropriate to the situation. He only left after he'd finished his cigarette, stamping it under his foot and leaving the butt on the marble floor. Eventually, our wonderful and accommodating guide Ashraf, who had begun taking care of us upon our arrival at the Cairo Airport and will hopefully never stop, sent us all off into the city, promising to wait himself to retrieve our passports and visas, as long as we signed a sheet authorizing him to receive them. Obviously we did, and rushed off to purchase cell phones!

Again, my inability to speak the language infuriated me. Irene, a girl who came on this trip two years ago and is doing thesis research for two months this year, took four of us to buy phones, which was very helpful, but it was infuriating to know I couldn't function at all without her. Still, she found us phones for about $40 each, including some minutes, and I felt much safer in the large city knowing I could call Ellen if I ever needed help crossing the street or finding my way back to Happy City Hotel. (Ha! I just wanted to say the name of our hotel again. Isn't it hilarious??)

I spent the rest of the day wandering the city with several tripmates, and finding cheap meals at strange places (one was highly recommended as Cairo's equivalent of Starbucks. This was certainly true, but it didn't deserve any recommendations), exploring timidly, and whiling away the hours until our 8pm New Year's party at two former students' apartment. This apartment was located past a courtyard hookah cafe, up about eight flights of crumbling stone stairs, but really quite pretty. We stayed for a little while, but I was tired! Jet lag, I guess, lasts much longer than one day. So we headed home to the hotel at about 10:30, where I showered and then met my new buddies on the rooftop to wait for midnight and watch fireworks. At midnight, we couldn't hear a sound anywhere in the city. We counted down and cheered, but, subdued by the silence around us, we only did it quietly. Then, a few minutes after we thought it had turned 2010, we heard the distant pop of fireworks. They were, however, obscured by a building next to our hotel. After all that waiting, all we saw was Cairo's smoggy gray sky, and two Egyptian men watching wrestling on the rooftop bar of our hotel. Slightly disappointed, we slunk downstairs to pack, sleep, and set our alarms for 6:00am.

We spent the first day of 2010 on a bus. As we moved from 7 am to 7 pm, from Cairo to the Dakhla Oasis, we watched the rock begin to disappear, the sand redden, and the greenery vanish, until all of a sudden, just discernible in the twilight, we caught sight of more greenery, and here we were in the Oasis.

The dig house, where we're now staying, is incredible. We have delicious meals served to us (well, I've only eaten one, but it was great!) and really friendly people taking care of all of our daily needs. So far, it feels more like a hotel than an excavation house.

We'll see what it's like when we start classes tomorrow...

LOVE,

Callie