Eid, the Flat and the Start of School

Having returned from Siwa I met up with the landlord of the flat that I had seen and decided upon. There was a problem, he said, as the owners were coming from Sudan for Eid. So, he was to put me into a temporary flat for a couple of weeks until they left after the celebration and some cleaning had been done. I was a bit annoyed about this until I saw the flat.

That's a picture of the reception/living room/ dining room.

A couple of days after that Emily left. We spent them wandering around the city and eating well in the evening. She caught the overnight train from Alexandria to Luxor and caught the flight in Luxor the next afternoon. She had time to see go out and see some things for a few hours but told me that she spent them in a McDonalds, the nearest air-conditioned building to the train station because Luxor, in her words, was "a tourist oven".

The time following this was really quite dull. For almost a week there was really nothing to do. As Ramadan drew near to the close people seemed reluctant to stick to the already vague and cut down schedules that were given. Shops were shut, streets deserted and cafes empty. Even after dark there were less people around than before. This all changed when Eid arrived.


Eid alFitr marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan (fitr means "breaking the fast") and traditionally people eat alot, go to the cinema, and take to the streets. Children spend the money that they have been given as gifts during the holiday on sweets, wear the new clothes they have been given for the holiday and everyone has a jolly time. This lasts for three days and for three days the city came alive. All along the promenade there were people walking, eating ice-creams, sitting in makeshift cafes on the beach or pavement and food vendors sprouted out of the ground which they would return to in a couple of days. Overall, it was really nice. There was no big fuss, no concert or single event, just everyone going out and enjoying themselves. My favourite part of the three days was seeing someone riding a horse with two large speakers strapped to it, blaring tinny arab music.

After the end of Eid Jake arrived. Jake studies Arabic and Persian but will be staying here for the whole year, not going to Iran for the second half (SOAS doesn't give that option). He spent a couple of days in Cairo, where he flew into, then headed up to Alexandria and joined me in the flat. We will be living together for the rest of my time here.

And since then everything has been rather busy. We both started taking some spoken Arabic classes, doing two hours a day for a the week or so before school started just to get a leg up. This was a great help because, although my Egyptian had been improving, the dialect here is very different to the standard version of Arabic I know. It was great to get feed back on what I was doing correctly and incorrectly, be given definite rules to follow on certain things as opposed to vague guidelines I had worked out for myself and have someone to pose the questions I had to which were numerous. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to ask people what things mean or what the word for something is. The reasons for this are still unclear to me.

The teacher also set us practical homeworks, aswell as written ones. He would ask what jobs we had to do that day, tell us the best place to go and then tell us the name of a good restaurant, juice bar, patisseris or all three in the same neighbourhood. He would ask us to go, have dinner, do our jobs, go to certain places and maybe bring something back. This was a great way to explore parts of the city which we otherwise would not have seen.


We looked around the university, met some of our teachers and found our way around. I made use of their facilities and spent a couple of days completing my application for the University in Jerusalem.

We also moved into the permanent flat, which is very nice and can be seen below.

The Reception. First right dining room, second living room, 

 

 

the hall to kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms.

The dining room

The living room

My room

The balcony. If the sun was up, you would be able to see the sea in the black space in the middle

Only one room is air-conditioned, the nicer bedroom. We flipped a coin. I won the nicer bedroom. The balcony that you can see through the living room door runs along, past my bedroom door, round the corner of my room (the corner of the building) and ends.
There were, however, quite alot of initial problems. First we had to get someone in to make the television, internet and sparker on the gas cooker work. There followed problems with both toilets, a leak in a pipe and a good clean, something the landlord said he had given it. The definition of clean is very different here. After visits from several plumbers, a gas-man, the internet-man, the satellite-man and a host of other people (all sorted and paid for by the landlord, and brought promptly) everything was in working order. We used excess furniture from the dining room to make the stylish balcony set up you can see above, moved bits around in the living room then cleaned again. After a few hot, sweaty and tiring afternoons (classes were in the mornings) Things had taken shape.

Around this time others were also arriving to the city and, before we both knew it, it was the 19th and we were in school at 9:30am. We were both in for the first two days before missing the next two. Apparently we both ate somthing strange and spent these days and nights either in bed or on the toilet.

And thus we arrive to now. This morning I sat a placement test to determine the class I will be put in. The flat is nice and comfortable, the city still exciting and, although not so much this week due to being kept indoors, I can feel my Arabic gradually improving. Although by no means perfect, I have gotten to grips with the alternative verbs, phrasing and expressions and am building my vocabulary. I won't go into too much detail about the language now, maybe another time.

I am sorry for not being entirely regular with my postings. Although the last couple of weeks have been very busy, I am sure the coming ones will be too, so I will make sure to get these out more regularly.

Siwa

The bus ride to Siwa was 8 hours long, at first following the sparsely populated coast along then eventually turning south into the unpopulated desert. We drove for hours with the view unchanging. Finally, out of the distance, rose up exactly what one would expect to see from an oasis. Palm groves, irrigation canals, and mud brick buildings neslted inbetween the Qattara depression (desert) to the east and the Great Sand Sea (more desert) to the west. On one side of the town there is a great salt lake but the rest of the water there, which comes from deep wells and springs, is fresh and clean.

On arrival we were greeted by the predictable gaggle of men with donkeys and carts offering to take you to a hotel. We got a ride and by the end of it had somehow agreed to be taken to watch the sun set over the lake that evening. We watched the sun set, drank lemon juice and ate dates picked fresh from the trees before going for a swim in a deep pool.

Siwa has a long history of independence, an individual culture and its own language called Siwi, all of which the isolation of the town has protected. The site is known to have been settled since the 10th millenium b.c. and, later with the arrival of Pharonic culture, was the site of a great temple complex which included the Oracle of Amun, one of the most important oracles of the ancient world. It was here that Alexander the Great was pronounced to be the son of Amun, descended from the gods and true ruler of Egypt. He is said to have found the oasis by following birds across the desert.

Siwans fought against the introduction of Islam and are thought to have continued worshipping the Egyptian pantheon until around the 12th century.

The next day we woke and visited the ruins of the fort. Standing in the middle of the town, these ruins stand above most other buildings and are visible from almost everywhere. In the past all of the residents in the town lived within the fort and it stood strong for hundreds of years. However, although the mud brick walls had withstood attacks and dangers for centuries, three days of rain in 1927 was enough to crumble most of it.

That afternoon we rented bikes and went out to a spring outside of town. We lounged in the sun and dived into the deep water until the children crowding around us were replaced by men coming from the mosque after prayers.

The next day we arranged to go out into the desert, later in the afternoon once the summer heat had subsided slightly. A driver was to take us in a 4x4. We drove out, leaving views of the town behind us until we were surrounded on all sides by dunes. We were then taken first to a small hot spring with a ring of grass and palms around it, beyond which was just sand. The water smelled faintly of sulphur but was beautifully warm.

Next, we went to a cold spring. The water was deep and cool, the reeds around swayed in the desert wind and fish swam around you when you wallowed in the shallows.

Finally, having charged around the dunes in the land rover, we came to the top of one of the larger ones and got out the sand board we had brought with us. Although the experience would have been made alot easier by a chair lift (sand dunes-not easy to climb) this was great fun. We then settled in to watch the sun set and relax with a cup of tea before returning to the town.

It was in Siwa that we felt Ramadan at its strongest. In Cairo and Alexandria it had hampered us but not too much. Siwa however seemed very different. Through alot of the day the town was very empty, shops shut, people at home asleep. If you hadn't bought your lunch the night before then you, like the residents, wouldn't be eating til nightfall. But, when that time did come, the town came alive. The streets were crowded and lively and people ate and drank in the cafes.

On the last of our three days we rented bikes again and went on a longer round trip to take in two of the three main sites in Siwa, the other being the fort. These are the remains of the Temple of the Oracle of Amun and the Temple of Amun itself. Not much remains of these once splendid sites except for a sense of its former glory. The temple of the oracle still stands taller than all of the buildings around it, built from great blocks of cut stone. Even less remained of the Temple of Amun, chief god of the Egyptian pantheon, with the exception of one wall with spectacular carvings on plaster still easily visible.

Before going back we stopped off at another large spring, 6 or 7 metres deep and 4 wide, the largest we had seen, with nice fresh water and a cafe next to it.

Later that night, our last night in Siwa, we met the same boy who had taken us to the lake on our first night. He took us out to another spring beside the salt lake and cooked dinner over a fire. We swam in the salt lake which was warm and shallow, salty enough to float in, before cooling off and cleaning up in the freshwater spring. We ate after the sunset and stared at the night sky, a thousand stars shining brightly down.

We left the next morning on a journey back to Alexandria which took far longer than it should, but safely. Siwa was a brilliant place to get away to for a few days: the hot dry weather; the cool fresh springs and the local people.