When I'm calling you...

Shot through our cabin window somewhere between Aswan and Esna.

Kom Ombo Temple or "Just one more thing..."

Our boat

leaves moorage in Aswan and we motor with the current up the Nile toward the city and temple of Kom Ombo. This temple, relatively speaking is newer in that it is only 2,300 years old sans a few home improvement type additions added by a couple Roman emperors.

We travel with the current passing scenery reminiscent of the illustrations in catechism texts of my stint at St. Gabriel’s parochial school. Cattle herders, mostly boys wearing the traditional Egyptian galabia, a long flowing ankle length shirt – tend to their cows. Fisherman row small color faded boats back and forth near the shore, one manning the oars another beating the water with long poles, chasing their catch of Nile perch and catfish into nets.

At the banks of the river date palms and other greenery hold the desert at bay with varying success, sometimes only a couple yards sometimes nearly as far as one can see, but always eventually the sand and heat wins. Here and there floating pump stations the size of two car garages aid and abet the greenery while some farmers employ smaller and louder diesel engines coughing black smoke into the air, everybody along its banks wants a piece of the Nile.

Our MS (motor ship) Sherry Boat docks in the town of Kom Ombo and our group walks the ten minutes to the temple. Kom Ombo temple is considered Greco-Roman as it was built during the time of the Greek occupation of Egypt by Alexander the Great. The temple took 400 years to complete and was finished in 80BC. The unique detail about this particular temple is that it was built to worship two of the over one thousand Egyptian deities. Generally temples were built in honor of a single god. In this case though, the duo is Horus – the falcon headed god of divine protection and Sobek the crocodile god of evil (pronounced eeeeeeevil by our tour guide Magdi.)

It was hoped that by erecting a temple in the honor of the crocodile god that the actual crocodiles which used to bask in this area of the Nile would refrain from snacking on the locals. Of course a town could be considered suspect if they had a temple to the god of evil so it was decided to split the thing with a much more reputable god Horus.

The country was under the occupation of the Greeks at the time of the temple’s groundbreaking Alexander the Great and after him the Ptolemys understood that in order to get the populace to submit to foreign rule they had to show respect for the local culture and customs. Rather than erecting temples to the Greek gods, these guys depicted themselves in the style of the established Egyptian divinities, employing a “you catch more lies with honey” style of governance. This technique seems to have been lost to some more recent heads of state.

Finish what you start...

We fly into Aswan

to join our cruise ship the MS Sherry Boat. The boats that ply the Nile are large four deck affairs – not as big as the ships that cruise Alaska or the Caribbean – neither of which I have experienced – so this is the largest boat I have ever been on. Lounges, dining halls the whole shebang.

The rooming situation is a bit different form the spacious apartment given us in Cairo by the American College. We are now, three of us, inside a room the size of one of the three bedrooms that were in the apartment. Fortunately all we are using the room for is sleeping – so it is kind of like camping – except we do have our own bathroom.

We are on a package tour with a guide – the ship sails for about four or five hours at a time and then we disembark and tour historical sites with an English speaking guide named Magdi. We are in a group of a dozen or so strong of other English speakers from the US and Canada. Our first stop in Aswan is a visit to see an unfinished obelisk. An obelisk is a giant pointed stone structure – think of something the shape of the Washington Monument. These sculptures were roughed out in the quarry from where they were extracted, transferred to the Nile and then floated to their final destination where they were polished and inscribed.


The reason this particular obelisk was left unfinished is that it cracked during its extraction. This defect occurred even though there were painstaking processes in place to verify the stability of the rock before the quarrying took place. Three further attempts were made to remove smaller portions from the original attempt and they too failed. Again I was surprised by the sheer scale of the operation. This piece was at least three times bigger than I was expecting. Perhaps it was over ambition on the part of the original designer (if the effort had been successful – it would have been the largest of its kind ever produced in ancient Egypt) of this particular obelisk that doomed it from the start.

This led me to speculate the conversations between the laborers when the cracks appeared.

“I knew it would crack, I told them so – but did they listen to me? – Noooo, Mr. I Designed the Biggest Obelisk Ever just went ahead and tried anyway. But what do I know I’ve only been cutting these things out of this pit for thirty years, my father cut obelisks, my grandfather cut obelisks – but do they want MY opinion? Fancy Cairo education – book learning, that’s all they know. They ain’t got a lick more of common sense than one of those baby crocodiles in the market. How ‘bout you come on down in the pit and insert the cedar wedges? Not a chance, they might get some granite dust on their starched white skirts – I told them so.”

His long suffering buddy just sighs, “I know you did.”

And the foreman shouts down into the pit “We’re not paying you in beer to flap your lips!”

Finished Obelisk @ Karnac Temple

notice man in bottom right corner

Cairo American College

It's Official

Cairo American College is one of my favorite schools that I have visited - ever.

I had a rotten cold for two of the days I was teaching here and even that couldn't put a damper on my enthusiasm for the students, staff and parents who populate the campus.

We based our operations at a round table in the library outside of curriculum specialist's Peter Ducket's combination office and coffee oasis. From this vantage we deployed into elementary, middle and high school classrooms for five days. In every single class we found interested students eager to learn and engaged teachers. We worked hard, but with participants like the crew we met here in Cairo one can really say, without fear of hyperbole or cliche, it was a labor of love.

Every evening was filled with excursions into the city or to the campus book fair which was running in conjunction to our visit. Special shout out to Sue and the rest of the parent volunteers at the book fair - you made us feel like rock stars. As long as I'm naming names Shy-mar (my phonetic attempt) Peter's secretary couldn't have been more helpful, knowing what we needed before we did. If Ann the librarian is not one of the nicest persons walking the face of the earth I'll eat a bowl of sand from in front of the great Sphinx.

I can't thank Seamus Marriot, the elementary school principle whom we first met while he was Shanghai, enough for facilitating our visit here. And of course, I would be no better than a mummy eating jackal if I neglected effusive and babbling kudos to our gazelle gaited guide to all things Egypt, Peter Ducket who went above and beyond the call of duty making us feel welcome, wanted and in some cases happily weary.

Thank you Cairo American College - 'til we meet again.

Walk Like an Egyptian (Curriculum Specialist)

Thursday Morning here

which is the equivilent of Friday in this Muslim country - so it's the last day of our work at the Cairo American College. I'm going to swing by the Sudanese refugee school where Franklin has been volunteering at this afternoon to read the kids some Ashley Bryan stories. Then we are officially on a vacation. We hop a plane to Aswan and start a three day cruise down the Nile.

It's been a great experience at a wonderful school. Super staff engaged students and they have kept us busy. I'll be posting later in more detail - in the meantime here are some pics from a nightime street market run and I do mean run - our number one poet wrangler and curriculum specialist, Peter Ducket, the very long legged man with gray hair in one of the photos strides through the city at a pace that sets the rest of us mortals on the verge of breaking into a trot.

In a state of De-Nile

Today after school a couple of the librarians from the Cairo American College took us out on a falluca ride. A fallucca is a sturdy sailboat that plies the Nile. We drifted up the river with the tide and then sailed back as the sun set behind the pyramids. It was a perfect way to end another busy and productive day at the school. The staff here is making sure we are getting a rich Egyptian experience.

Part of that authentic Egyptian culture included mooring the boat to a dock a block or so from a TGIF restaurant where we all had hamburgers. The menu was pretty standard fare - but I would hazard to guess that not many of the franchise restaurants stateside have hookahs next to the tables.

Afterwards, near our apartment, we stopped with one of our host librarians at a local grocery where we bought some staples for the apartment, eggs, milk, bread that kind of stuff. We also bought a couple pomegranates at a quarter of what the price would have been back home. The librarian explained to the owner of the market that we were visiting poets and I ended up giving him one of my books. He in turn gave me a story.

He said that it is written that within the pomegranate only one of the juicy and tart seeds is blessed by god so that when one is peeling the fruit - it behooves one to be very careful not to lose a single seed because it is impossible to tell by looking which is the blessed seed.

There are a thousand lessons one can take from this parable - but I know I will never peel another pomegranate without remembering Cairo.

Cairo - day one

Well,

I was happily surprised by how impressive the pyramids were. I had heard from several folks that one could be underwhelmed by the size of the tombs in real life. I disagree - they were wonderful on the seven wonders of the ancient world roster definition scale.

I knew the sphinx was not very large – relatively speaking so I did not expect too much from it so I was not disappointed. Frank and I did go into the second pyramid – taking the claustrophobic, steeply downward angled, nearly airless and stiflingly humid tunnel into the depths of the monument along with busloads of screaming elementary school aged children. Definitely not a trek for the asthmatic or easily spooked as the average height of the route I guess was around four foot. Luckily halfway down the passageway it opened up into a small chamber where the ceiling shot up to lofty level of five foot or so – allowing me to uncoil my back a bit. The burial chamber at the end of our journey was of course empty and about the size of Winnebago. I’m glad we did it, but it is definitely one of those did it once – don’t need to do it again experiences.

From there our guide took us on the obligatory separate the tourist from some cash destination. Now I don’t know for sure – but I think it is a pretty safe supposition that these guides supplement their income by steering their clients to certain opportunities to spend money. For example, in Bali a tour we took included being taken to an artist’s house who was selling his pen and ink drawings. His work now proudly hangs in our house. Here we were brought to a perfumery where we watched glass being blown and received a thickly accented treatise on the advantages of Egyptian herbal extracts and then maneuvered toward the purchase of three hundred dollars worth of various unctuous concoctions. We demurred – opting to pick up a much less expensive bottle of eucalyptus oil. We also let our guide know we felt we could skip the papyrus factory and instead headed directly to the Museum of Antiquities.

Two hours are not enough time to really see the museum – but that was all the time we had. Realistically – jet lag was beginning to swim around our skulls and two hours was most likely all the attention span we had left. Even in our foggy states, the collections impressed. The King Tut exhibit was literally breathtaking. Seeing the gold death mask ubiquitous to all things Egyptian for every westerner just four or five inches behind a glass display case was much more moving than I had expected. What was amazing though was the sheer quantity of the artifacts that came out of the tomb. I was very impressed, especially since I worked for a moving company almost three decades ago and can appreciate expert packing. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed inside.

To be cont…

pics from pyramids

like a whirling dervish

Today blew by like a sandstorm - no time for a real post have to get some sleep in order to be able to be on my toes at school tomorrow.

sara me and frank

Waking in Cairo

Well,

The trip here was fairly uneventful. Long and somewhat grueling - but nothing compared to going to southeast Asia. We did have a lost wallet scare for an hour or so in Rome - but somehow - miraculously - we were able to get it back. My son Franklin, of the lost wallet, has started a blog to chronicle his side of the trip -

http://frankiesalinger.blogspot.com

Today we tour the pyramids and the museum of Egyptian antiquities. Sunday we start school - the week here runs Sunday through Thursday so Sunday is their Monday.

to be continued...