Dance off

This is a quick post because I’ll let the pictures and videos do most of the talking for me. Otencia and her husband were going to attend one of the events that I missed with the school so they were kind enough to let me tag along. I had heard good things and Otencia said it was great, but didn’t know really what it was and what to expect. The location was a monastery that holds a Sufi dancing and music show every Saturday. Again like most of the things I see they don’t really come with a brochure or information, you’re kind of on your own to figure it all out, so this will be another thing I look into when I get home. My understanding is that it is a group of monks that put on a show through the cultural center to illustrate the traditional music and dancing. When you initially hear of monks dancing and singing I don’t know if you get excited but it’s not like the first choice of concert I would pick, but now I know why Otencia was so hush hush about everything because these guys could rock. It was kind of like watching a drum line or battle of the bands or something. There were about 20 performers most being musicians, a couple dancers and a singer. The performance was only an hour and a half, but it was full of energy. These guys were great and very entertaining. The dancers would just spin around, but one guy literally spun in a circle fast for about 15 to 20 minutes. They were making me dizzy but it was pretty cool what they were doing with their skirts. The pictures will show you more, but the big circles are actually cloth that they were spinning like pizza.

Note: a few more post still to come even though I will be back in the states. The connection was really slow so each of these post took about an hour to upload.


Inside a Mosque close by the Show


Outside of the Mosque



Inside the monestary where the show is.

The starting lineup. All the main instruments

This guy was good. playing the little finger symbols, feeling the flow.

Here come the drummers

This guy spun fast for literally 15-20 min without stopping

Finally done. I thought he was going to pass out.

The horns

Some more dancers

Spinning their skirts

More Spinning...

more spinning...

And some sideways spinning. There was a theme if you didn't catch it. the theme was spinning

These were not the loli pop twins

This guy was incredible, try to spin for 15min, I couldn't last for more than 15 seconds.

The Drum Line

Most entertaining musician, he loves this stuff

Day on the coast

Note: every picture that was shot besides the museum were from someone elses camera. My memory card got loose so it didn't save a lot of cool shots, but thanks to Chris for the pictures.

Another week has gone by and I have a lot to talk about and have seen so many cool things. I apologize for not keeping this up to date a little more, but it seems that there is not enough time in the day to go to school, finish homework, explore Cairo and write about it to share, so with only a week left in this City I figured I should post a few stories and a lot of pictures that will hopefully hold you over and so stay tuned because with a week to go, I’m gonna rock it to the wheels fall off.

So now to the good stuff. School has been going great and I have learned so much it’s hard to keep it all straight. I also continue to meet a lot of great people both with school and around town. I have a guy in my class named Christian who is from California and who I’ve not only been going to school with but hanging out and exploring Cairo and other parts of Egypt. There is also a great lady that I met from Spain who is going to the same school and her husband are also staying in the same hotel as me so we have been going to dinners and planning trips together. That being said with the weekend approaching we decided to go to Alexandria for the day. I was going to go by myself and mentioned the idea to them and Otencia, her husband “Nacho”, and Christian all planned a trip last minute to the coast and to see the sites of Alexandria.
Now of course the story wouldn’t be complete without a little “hick-up” or something to detour us and that’s pretty much what happened this trip also. The original plan was to take a train in the morning and arrive in Alexandria after a two hour trip. Sure enough we go to get our tickets and they were sold out. Now for those of you who don’t know like we didn’t, August 23rd is an Egyptian national holiday like our 4th of July to celebrate independence so Alexandria is a pretty popular beach destination for the locals and travel by train is a popular form of transportation, so we had to take a time out and come up with plan b, which is pretty much what my life consist of so no big deal.

Here we are talking about what we are going to do and magically a guy appears out of nowhere and asks if we are trying to find a ride to Alexandria. Some crazy Jedi mind trick I guess but we were all for it and found a driver to take us out there for a small price of 600LE for the four of us. Now I’m sure by now most of you that are reading this have seen the post about the taxi driver and this trip was no different as far as speed and traffic only there were four of us crammed in the car together and it was a two and half hour roller coaster ride. I knew what to expect but Otencia’s husband just got there the night before so he was freaking out the whole time, and it was pretty entertaining although on the way back it finally was enough and I was able to brush up on my Spanish curse words when he started yelling at the driver.
We arrived in Alexandria about 10:30am and started at the museum to get a little history lesson in and although it wasn’t as big as the Cairo museum it had a lot of great info about the different cultural influences like the ancient Egyptian empire, Roman, Islamic and Ottoman (I think on the Ottoman part, could be Byzantine and those could be the same for all I know, I just look at the pictures). After the museum we zipped over to the old Roman Theatre that was right in the middle of town and even though some parts were reconstructed, there were still some dig sites going on and it was pretty surreal.

The next stop on our trip that we pretty much just put together in the car was the catacombs. This was the one place that I haven’t been able to take a camera in yet, which was a bummer, so I’ll go into a little more detail on what we saw. We got there and one of the guards got up and probably saw tourist dollar signs and took us on a tour. The roman catacombs were an underground graveyard and were one of my favorite things so far. You walk down a winding stairwell that is open in the middle like water well about 100 feet. When you get to the entrance at the bottom you find out why the stairwell is hollow and there is water at the bottom attached to a canal system in the catacombs. This well was to lower the dead and transport them to their final resting place via floating them to their tomb. This catacomb I was told was one of the biggest ever discovered and held approximately 150 people. Now my source on this might not be accurate since it came from a security guard that spoke very little English so I apologize. My thought process is that I can do all the research when I’m sitting at home some day, but there is limited time to see the sights so I encourage all of you to check out the web if you are interested in learning more about it, because I will definitely do that when I get back. So the catacombs were amazing. There were tombs which had all been excavated so there were no bodies, but you got to see a lot of the open chambers in the wall, where the bodies were kept. There was also a room that was for the families to pretty much have the funeral. We were told that they would have a feast down there and sit around and celebrate/morn. There were a couple of things that stood out and one that I thought was pretty interesting was that they had a horse catacomb in the same place as the humans for the horses of the humans that had past. The other thing that caught my eye was that even though it was a Roman burial ground there were a lot of pictures of Egyptian and Roman gods etched into the walls. Very cool site and all though it doesn’t look impressive on the outside if you ever get a chance to go to Alexandria, go see this.

The day was getting shorter and we wanted to pack everything in so after grabbing a delicious fresh seafood lunch we were off to go see the site of one of the ancient wonders of the world. The ancient lighthouse no longer stands, but there is the Citadel that sits overlooking the ruins. We got there around four just as the Citadel was closing so we didn’t get to go in but got some good pictures and just being there overlooking the Mediterranean was a cool experience. I did get some mango ice cream so it was all good.

With the driver wondering when we were going to leave we made a deal and told him that we were going to go grab a drink and some Sheesha and we would call it a day and head back to Cairo. We told him to meet us at the Library and after grabbing a drink we were standing outside the library we had originally tried to start our day there but being a national holiday we were told it was closed, but like most things in Cairo you can never believe what you hear the first time so make sure you ask a few times and take the majority answer. It turned out that it was open and we got a chance to go inside. The ancient library was long gone but this was pretty impressive and very modern looking. Now many of you are probably sitting there with your jaws hanging saying to yourselves “did he go into a library for fun” and the answer is yes! I’m all about the history and it was a very impressive thing to see. After an eventful day we headed back to Cairo around 7 so we were able to fit a lot in.

Greek Santa

Mosiac, each color is made up of little stones. thousands of stones to shade the face.

This translates to: "If you want to go to Alexandria grab your walking stick, it's safer than a taxi."

The original Pimp cup

This shield was detailed on every part. Scene of an angle and demon fight. Sorry for the bad picture.

Cofin...like you needed me to tell you that.

These are where the mummies body parts were stored. Brains, stomach, liver, etc. where stored in these. I think the heat made them boil out a long time ago, thats the black stuff...lunch anyone?

different layers of a coffin...that one you probably needed me to tell you.

This door had thousands of little pieces of ebony and ivory (not the Michael Jackson and McCartney album cover) put together in a wood door. very detailed, which you can't tell by my blurry picture.

The Roman Theatre

Chris, Me, Otencia

From the "nose bleeds"

The rest of the town around the theatre

On the boardwalk

If you pass "GO" you can collect $200

After a long day, just heading back to my castle. AKA Citadel sight of the ancient lighthouse.

The other muscle beach

Outside the library. next picture you can see the inside of the slope thats to the right.

The rebuild Great Library.

Proof! I have been inside of a library, and this time it was for fun. wow, how things have changed.


BYE BYE

We didn’t start the fire!

I am waiting to get some pictures back from some friends of Alexandria to get caught up on the blog. I had my camera but I dropped it outside of the museum which was the first thing we did so the other pictures I took early on were not saved, so look for that post coming soon along with about three others I have already written, but I wanted to stay in order so they made sense. In the mean time I wanted to share a quick story about my hotel catching fire. I awoke to the fire alarm going off at around 2am the other morning and thought it might just be some false alarm…I was wrong. I waited a few minutes and decided to get out of bed to see what was going on and so I threw on some clothes and stepped out to the hall way. As soon as I opened the door I could smell smoke! Another guy walked out of his room and we both kind of looked at each other and then plugged our noses. Regardless of what language you speak that’s a pretty good sign to use when something stinks and we both looked down the stairway shaft to see a thin cloud or haze of smoke a few stories down with people running down the stairs. So if the fire alarm wasn’t enough to tell me to get out of there the people running for their lives were and I followed suit, but not without packing up my computer.

So I ran down the stairs and when I got down to about the 4th flour the smoke was pretty bad and I had to cover my mouth because the air was hard to breath. I got out into the street and saw the first responders on the scene. It was a guy standing on the top of a car with a fire extinguisher trying to spray inside the window of the room with the fire. I wish I would have taken a picture of that but the fire department showed up soon after. There was smoke coming out of the window in the second floor and it turned out that it was coming from the bank which shared the building with us. So with everyone in the street and about 6 fire trucks lined up, Egypt’s finest went to go handle business. This whole ordeal took about an hour of going down in the street, the fired dept showing up, putting out the fire, and waiting for the smoke to clear to go back in our rooms. The pictures that you see below are really bad because it looks like the building is blowing up, but I assure you those are the lights from the trucks. The fire that I saw was just a lot of smoke and I heard the fire dept breaking glass and hacking at the room, but it wasn’t all that bad, it just makes for one more story to add to the experience.

The Smoke was coming out on that first row of windows above the first truck

The other day I had an awesome trip. To summarize the trip I rode a horse from Giza, which is the site of the big pyramids to the Saqqara Pyramids and the Abu sir Pyramids which are less famous but are some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt. Now I will say this, any time you take a 5 hour round trip horse ride, your ASS will hate you the next couple days and I’m not talking about if you have a jealous donkey at home (waant waaant, bad joke, that was for you grandpa and dad). I went with a buddy I met out here at the Arab Academy named Brian and being his last day he wanted to go on one last adventure. I agreed when he told me what he had planned not really knowing what to expect, but that’s pretty much how things go down here in Cairo. Now meeting up was an adventure altogether and involved a crazy taxi ride, which if anyone has followed the other posts already knows that’s inevitable. I said take me to the Sphinx and he took me to this restaurant in town and then I told him the pyramids and he did take me there but to the wrong gate about 5 miles away. Not completely the Taxi drivers fault on this one, so I’ll take the rap. Brian and I met up at the Giza pyramids after I got out of school and were going to try and find a stable and get a good price for the trip without having our horse die on us in the desert. I will definitely write about the Egyptian selling techniques or “hustle” in a later post, because I’ve seen a lot of them and I’ve been involved as well, and I will use this trip as a reference for sure for both the taxi ride over and the stables and our trip, but it deserves its own post for sure. Now getting back to the story we found a stable to take us out in the middle of the desert for LE 250 (Egyptian pounds) to look at these pyramids and to do some exploring on our Egyptian Cadillac’s as our guide called our horses. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, but we didn’t make it all the way to Saqqara due to a misunderstanding, but we did get pretty close and took some pictures and had a good time. We weren’t about to argue too much with our guide since he did hold our lives in his hand and if I was on that horse for another hour or two I would have regretted it, and I’m sure the horse was happier too since it try to turn around on me a couple times on the way out there. On the way back from the desert we took the “back way” home and saw a whole other part of Cairo that was really cool to see. This place is huge and so diverse and it really is fascinating. I thought Egypt would be all desert and although we were in dirt for most of the day we saw so much green on the way back. So take a look at the pictures below and definitely the videos. I probably should have taken a couple more pictures to illustrate but I’ll do my best to describe in the captions.


You would think that they wouldn't be that hard to find
(taxi ride there).


Our journey already begin by the base of these. I should have taken more pics
leaving the stables, but this is about an hour into it looking back.


The road ahead for the next couple of hours.


The next time I looked back at the Giza Pyramids.


Coming up to the first destination Abu sir. small but some of the oldest and
possibly the first. We ended up passing it and coming back by on the way back.

Half time, time for some photos. If you look very hard between me and the horse

you can see the Giza pyramids where we began.

Not to many people can pull this look off in the desert and I think I also fall into that

category. Abu sir behind us. If you look really hard about an inch to the right of the big one

you can see Saqqara's very top

The hotels close to mine in the far distance to the right.

I had to cut off the horse on the right due to the PG rating of this blog.

We went on a little bit more to get closer to Saqqara. The original plan was for the guide to

take us here and to explore a little, but do to a "misunderstanding"/we got hustled, this is about as far as we went. to get here we talked him into letting us go to the next hill (about another 2 miles) to take a better picture. The guide didn't mind, but my horse waaas pissed.

You smile you die in the desert. In the distance the Giza Pyramids even further.

Rhinesstone Cowboy, don't hate on the white "boots".

On our way back, going to pass back by Abu Sir

Cairo off to the right, pretty hard to see because of the polution.

Walking by Abusir. Not to far from this is the road and some really huge nice houses. In between these houses (where the videos were filmed below) is a man who lives in a shack, our guide stopped by and had a drink of moonshine.

I only have 1 horse power, but I was still moving. This was after we visited the guy in the shack. the guide filmed this while he was running next to us, if I could state the obvious. That's Brian with me.

Secretariat eat your heart out.

You can see some larger houses coming up behind us and when I say big I mean equivalent to $3-10 Mil American homes. Our guide said that at one houses we passed one of the horses the guy owned and kept there was a show horse worth LE 2 mil or about $360,000. We cut through to the street where you see the backside of Cairo pic about 2 miles up the way.

The "back side" of Cairo and our guide. I should have took more pictures but there were a mixture of really nice homes and as we got closer to Cairo, it turned into more like projects or poor housing. to the left about a mile is the desert we walked through and to the right is farms and homes.

Looking to the right of the road.




Cutting through some hood about an hour away. In between the buildings you can see the slant of the pyramid. It looks like the wall of that building, but its not, I just have bad timing.



Again I should have taken better pictures coming back to the stables, but the walls were lined

with horses and camels who were finishing up for the day. The Giza Pyramids were about 2 miles away and I should have taken a picture of them as well, but since I was visiting them later in the week I didn't bother.