The New Normal

The new normal here is constant turmoil. It’s been a full week since protestors occupied Tahrir Square and though we hope everyone votes on Monday (the elections are still on so far), no one is really happy with the interim prime minister appointment. But I reiterate that Harris and I are fine, and in fact, it’s a sign of the times that though protests continue in Tahrir, life continues beyond downtown—stores are open, services available, and no curfew or unusual police presence marks the area.

Monastery of Saint Paul the Theban, Keep + Chapel

We took a short trip sponsored by AUC for Thanksgiving to see two monasteries on the Red Sea, with two nights in a rather crummy hotel that did offer a lovely waterfront. We arrived Thanksgiving morning at the monastery of Saint Paul the Theban (not Paul the Apostle,

Brother showing us refectory lectern

 who wrote to the Ephesians and Corinthians); this Paul was probably the first true hermit saint, c. 250 AD, who lived in a cave in the eastern desert; his example inspired Saint Anthony, who founded his order based in part on Paul’s example of asceticism. As we waited for one of the monks to return from his cave to take us around, we marveled at the architecture combining mud and stone, with touches of the modern world (like a gift shop).

Fresco of Paul with lions and ostrich egg

Mark and Sarah; ancient refectory dishes

When the brother appeared, he took us around those parts of the monastery open to visitors, like the ancient refectory (dining area), which displayed dusty ancient dishes and a stand where a brother would read the Bible while his fellows ate; the keep (where monks would hide during Bedouin raids); and the beautifully painted chapel below which Paul’s body is said to be interred. The chapel walls are painted with frescos from the 13^th century. Our favorite depicted Paul with a pair of lions who helped Saint Anthony dig Paul’s grave. Notice the ostrich egg pendant hanging from the ceiling. Ostrich eggs were associated with new life in Pharonic Egypt as well as in Christian iconography.

After dinner at our hotel and wine at its Fun Pub (which didn't live up to its moniker), we got up Friday to go to the larger and more opulent (by monastic standards) Monastery of Saint Anthony. Alas, a pair of colliding tankers on the only road blocked it for the day—happily, the drivers survived pretty intact—and we returned to the hotel with time on our hands.

Tanker accident, so no Monastery of Saint Anthony

Screams "fun," doesn't it?

I suggested to our buddies Sarah and Mark that we charter a boat for an afternoon ride and look for dolphins. Captain Achmed was either confident or nuts, but he gave me the wheel after we left the marina. Luck was with us, as we found a beautiful pod of bottlenose dolphins. My photos are mostly of the water after they dived—but Mark should have some good ones to send me. Harris was dolphin-spotter extraordinaire, and we had a great afternoon. Refreshing beverages from the Fun Pub were enjoyed.

Cap'n Mel

Dolphin-whisperer Harris

Dolphins, courtesy of Mark Mineart

Now it’s wait and see time. Most faculty (me included) have canceled classes for this Sunday since the day falls between Islamic new year’s and the elections, and no one is around, so we have a Saturday night that feels like one for a change. We alternate between housework, school work, and Al Jazeera, and hope all goes well. I’ll post after the elections, but unless you see us on CNN, we are fine. Both the university and State are looking after us, and Ma’adi is its own quiet neighborhood.

PS: we now have heat in our flat, and Harris gave a great short talk on Hamlet last week at the university. We feel a little like we are fiddling while Rome burns, but hope all goes well. Nothing we do will help here except carrying on with daily life.

Interesting times

Political posters everywhere

The Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” is in force here. The elections are supposed to begin Monday, the 28^th, and when I went to U.S. Embassy on the 18th to get some legal papers notarized, the city was papered with political posters; there is a permanent protest in front of the Embassy against the imprisonment of the blind sheikh in the U.S., and soldiers and police with automatic weapons were everywhere. As I stood in line to get through Embassy security, it was the first time since arriving here I have felt both Other (which I feel all the time) and at risk. So many weapons frightened me, as did the sense that “something” might happen. The events of the past couple days in Tahrir that turned violent have everyone on edge. However, we are fine. Ma’adi is 12 kilometers and a world away from downtown, and the AUC campus in New Cairo even farther. Its downtown campus has suffered some violence and looting and is closed for the time being, however, and one student was arrested yesterday and is detained. My students are really upset, anxious about the elections, yet hopeful. I remind them that no matter the outcome, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain!

Tahrir news photo from AP, Nov. 20

November brings change to Cairo. The days are shorter (sunset at 5PM, heralded by one of the five daily calls to prayer), the weather cooler (jackets and long sleeves, even scarves), and we now sleep huddled under blankets (since we haven't learned how to turn on the heat in our flat). One of the least pleasant phenomena is when rice farmers in the Nile delta finish their harvest and burn leftover rice straw. The result is 80,000 tons of CO2 released into the air, as a smoky black pall sets in over the city, blown here by the prevailing north-to-south winds. I awake with my sinuses clogged and eyes watering, and though the sun is out, the sky is covered by smog. Evidently, during Mubarak's time, Egypt worked on ways to use the rice straw, to create building materials, paper pulp, or active carbon for filters, but farmers are set in their ways, and continue to burn. Ironically, the rice straw could earn them money, around $50 a ton, but for the present, it goes up in smoke and those who live downwind get to breathe it for a few weeks.

Rice straw smog over Cairo

 As we walked around Friday doing errands before shops close up for midday prayers, Harris noted that in Cairo, taxis hail you rather than you hail taxis. Not a one passes without a honk on the horn, seeing if we’d rather ride.

An invitation to a musical evening at a local club, the Ma’adi House, allowed us truly guilty pleasures: wine and swine. Ma’adi House is provisioned by the U.S. commissary, its members all U.S. citizens, and thus their menu includes pork—the first we’ve had since August! We gobbled down ribs and chops like the condemned. Thank you, Eden and Nate, for the invitation.

This week has brought collegial socializing with it. Dinner with Sarah and Mark Mineart, colleagues from the theater department, at our favorite neighborhood restaurant, China Winds, renewed the question of how Cairo, Egypt, has the best Chinese restaurant outside of Hong Kong? It’s a mystery but in the meantime, we intend on eating everything on the menu except the camel’s trotters in special sauce. Nothing’s that special. Dinner at home with another pair of colleagues capped our weekend (which ends Saturday night, not Sunday).

After lots of juggling, we have settled on a trip for Christmas. Tarek Swelim, a Harvard art history Ph.D., will guide us on a trip on a sailing boat from Luxor to Aswan, a special Nile vessel type called a dahabeya There will be 9 on the trip plus Tarek—us, our son Andrew from Los Angeles, my brother Bruce and his kids Katie, Ryan, and Daniel from Virginia, and Sarah and Mark—and between the sights of the Valley of the Kings and Temple of Philae, we will relax on the Nile on our private boat. Normally, this kind of trip would never be available to us, but the upside of the downturn in tourism here means that folks like Tarek and private boats are available to the likes of us. No more diving this year, since the waters of the Red Sea are just too cold. 

In the meantime, we are fine, ISA, and though things are tense, it's okay.

Our dahabeya for Christmas

Weeks 11 and 12, Diving and Luxor

First, I have to add another one of those things that remind us we don't live in the U.S.. The Cities of the Dead in Cairo are famed, huge tracts of land devoted to family mausoleums. Over time, the cities of the dead have also become the cities of the poor. Some of Cairo’s poorest live in the alleys and mausoleums, like this photo of a woman cooking inside one such with an elaborate sarcophagus next to her (I took this off the internet). Seeing the cities of the dead stretch out as you take the highway into Cairo is amazing—they seem to go on forever.

one of the cities of the dead

Woman cooking in mausoleum

Through the bus window, another half-finished building

There is a flipside to the Cities of the Dead. A common feature of the Cairene cityscape are thousands of unfinished buildings, sometimes covering several square kilometers. Often, the first floor or two are occupied but the upper floors remain unfinished. We have heard several explanations for this phenomenon, but here is the executive summary: most Egyptians prefer that their investments be concrete (quite literally), and thus buy land and begin to build upon it. Sometimes families pool resources. These buildings, so we hear, function as the future homes for sons and daughters when they marry (the assumption is that everyone will marry—no matter your sexual direction or personal preference, the heteronormative goal of marriage abides). We’ve heard that until the building is occupied, no taxes are due, so shells of buildings abound, awaiting their future occupants. Harris has named these the “cities of the unborn..”

Make your investment concrete

The Eid Al Adha holiday began Thursday night the 3^rd, celebrating the near-sacrifice of Ismail (in the Qu’ran) or Isaac (in the Hebrew Bible). We were happy to leave the city and avoid seeing the sheep sacrificed in honor of the feast. Though it’s illegal to conduct home butchering, evidently it is common, and some have told us the streets of Cairo can be quite bloody. Certainly there were abundant flocks of sheep lining the streets before we left. I suspect their numbers will be vastly decreased when we return on the 12^th.

Blue Fin

When Friday the 4^th rolled around, we hightailed it to the airport for a short flight from Cairo to Hurghada to join the MV Blue Fin,  a liveaboard dive boat whose itinerary this trip took us to the Brothers islands about an 8 hour steam south of Hurghada, then to Safaga, the port for Luxor. The Brothers, a pair of tiny islands in the middle of the Red Sea, boast sheer walls covered with hard and soft corals, and are famed for currents and shark sightings. The currents were entirely manageable, and we were delighted by the fishes.

Thresher shark

Dive deck gear

Our favorite was the magnificent thresher shark, a splendid animal whose body is about half tail; it swats schools of sardines with its tail, and gobbles up the stunned fish. Diving there meant 5:30AM calls since the government does not permit night diving, but those early dives were when we saw threshers. Their sinuous swimming motion and large eyes make them the most aesthetically pleasing sharks we have seen. The smaller of the two, Little Brother, sported a series of small piles of rocks along its shores, which Harris dubbed Egypt’s Lesser Pyramids.

Egypt's Lesser Pyramids

Blue Fin was a remarkably nice liveaboard dive boat managed by a U.K. company. We booked a king suite and had more room in it than in any boat we’ve lived aboard, plus our suite came with its own plasma TV and mini-fridge. We watched trashy movies like “The A-Team” and “Dodge Ball” when we were not socializing with the other divers, largely from the U.K.. The waters there were not for the faint of heart: they were cold, with my computers reading 71 degrees F on some dives and 66 on the one night dive (and this is the average of the 6 computers we wear between us—that is seriously cold water). Both of us exhausted our supply of wetsuits, hooded vests, neoprene socks, and gloves, and envied the one diver on the boat who brought a drysuit. The food was healthy and plentiful, and we were only too happy to gobble it down to replace those precious lost calories from diving. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Mel and Hamdi

Hamdi's art

My favorite linen sculpture

One feature of the voyage kept us in stitches. Head steward Hamdi took perverse delight in not only policing up cabins between dives, but in our case, rearranging the duvet, towels, and pillows to create…well, sculptures from linens. One included a duvet transmuted into a swan, wearing my baseball cap and reading glasses; another, a birdlike duvet with a covey of towel fowl. We called it The Many Faces of Duvets. Hamdi’s wit provoked laughter after every dive no matter how chilled we were.

The Safaga and Hurghada dive sites were very different from the Brothers, reefs rather than sheer walls, with more chances to bimble around looking for creatures. I particularly enjoyed the shallower parts of the reefs when the sun sparkled on the stony and soft corals, bringing out the blues, greens, and purples of their colors while multi-colored fishes darted in and out. Total eye candy but we loved it. We did an afternoon and night dive on The Seven Pinnacles, a lovely site near Safaga.

BTW, the transits between Hurghada, the Brothers, Safaga, and back were impressively rough. Of course, Blue Fin is a dive boat, not a cruise ship, so eight foot seas at 12 knots tosses you like salad. We remembered our Bonine every day (“pleasant raspberry-flavored chewable!”) and were fine, but other divers forgot and spent time worshipping the porcelain god, no treat in a marine head. The waters around the Brothers were rough enough that one inflatable was shredded on the rocks and reef despite the best efforts of the driver. Admittedly, there were moments shaking with cold, dripping and salty, whipped by wind, and tossed by waves when we asked ourselves why we do this? The answer, of course, are creatures like thresher sharks. Also, on a good boat, the camaraderie and cheer of convivial shipmates creates its own good climate, even if we go our separate ways after disembarking. 

Rita and Bill Bruce, me and Harris at Karnak

Entry to Karnak with ram-headed sphinxes

and the columns are at least 6 stories high, too

Painted details of Karnak's ceiling 

After 5.5 dive days, Blue Fin returned to Hurghada, where we flew first to Cairo and then to Luxor for an overnight with my aunt and uncle, Rita and Bill Bruce. It was deluxe. Bill and Rita met us at the airport with a guide, driver, wrangler, and van, and after a lovely lunch at the Luxor Hilton (where we stayed), we set off to visit the temples of Karnak and Luxor—about as much as one can do in a short afternoon. Karnak (not to be confused with Johnny Carson’s Karnak the Magnificent, may the yak of happiness fly up your nose) was built over 1500 years, with one pharaoh adding to the next. The temple complex is enormous, about 100 acres, yet until the advent of tourism, only priests and pharaoh ever went beyond the outermost courtyard, lined with ram-headed sphinxes. The temple is not just about worship and keeping Amon happy, but about demonstrating pharonic power. Each sanctuary is more spectacular than the last, with the most breathtaking being the 134 columns erected under Ramses II (who ruled for 67 years). The columns themselves are either topped with capitals representing the open lotus flower, while the rest represented the papyrus plant. The scale has nothing to do with humans—it’s all about power and the deity—and I pulled a photo off the internet to give some idea of what it’s like inside the area with its many columns.

Luxor temple was not quite on the scale of Karnak, but fascinating for its layers of history. There were hieroglyphics for arguably the last pharaoh, Alexander the Great; a small area where early Christians worshipped, with bits of plaster remaining on walls under which were carved earlier pharonic glyphs. One wall of the temple was actually the back wall of a mosque built in the 13^th century, when the temple was covered by sand and dirt, with only the tip of an obelisk peeping out. The sun was setting as we wandered through the temple, and the warm colors made it particularly beautiful.

After a sound and light show at Karnak, Rita, Bill, Harris and I went to a Nile-side restaurant for a delicious Egyptian meal. By the time we tumbled into bed around 10, I can safely say all of us were happy and very tired. Rita and Bill left to join their ship for a cruise up the Red Sea and through the Med, Harris and I went back to Cairo (quickly becoming Egyptair frequent fliers) and today was business as usual. As I taught today’s classes, sometimes I’d think of how 36 hours before, I was in the presence of ancient stones and displays of power. Talk about cognitive dissonance. This week is a normal one, teaching, dinner with friends, then next week, another AUC-sponsored trip to two Red Sea monasteries, Saint Anthony’s and Saint Paul’s. But we will get to sleep in a regular hotel and won’t be taking up anything more monastic than reverence in front of Coptic arts! Big hellos to all.