Days 5-6 – Pyramids, Overnight Train, Aswan

The last couple days have been a bit of a blur. It feels like we’ve been here for a couple months, but it has only actually been a week. I think I’ve done more in this week than I have in any other week in my entire life. Not only did I travel 11 hours on planes to get from Boston to Cairo, but I’ve now taken an additional 15 hour train ride to get from Cairo to Aswan. I’ve finally learned the difference between Cairo time (our time + 7 hours) and “Egypt time:” and no its not as easy as switching time zones. Dr. Dennis always referred to time as “Egypt time” over the past week. Egypt time means that if you expect to leave somewhere at a certain time, that you shouldn’t expect to leave until another half hour or hour after the set time. This also held true with the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan, which I will talk about later.

On Monday, we got to see a few more pyramids. We saw the first pyramid ever created, which was really cool. It wasn’t as big as some of the pyramids I saw earlier in the trip, but it was just as impressive. It was still massive, and just the fact that it was the first pyramid ever is awesome. The pyramid was called a “step pyramid,” because when it was built, the outside wasn’t smooth, but was instead left as is – looking like steps for different levels. In addition to seeing the step pyramid, we saw from a distance the bent pyramid. This pyramid starts at a large angle, and then about halfway up the structure, the angle changes to a more gradual incline. This is because when the Egyptians were building the pyramid, they were concerned that if they continued with the starting angle, the pyramid would become to large and heavy and be more likely to collapse. The third and final pyramid we saw on Monday wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Except that we got to go inside the pyramid. To go down into the pyramid, we had to follow a passage about 4 feet tall, so we all had to duck, which went for a couple hundred feet on a decline. Finally, when we reached the bottom we were able to stand up and check out the inside of the pyramid. It wasn’t the most spectacular or eye catching thing inside, but it was pretty cool how the Egyptians made the inside look nice and not just thrown together. I got a nice picture looking down the shaft that we walked down into the pyramid to give you an idea of how far we had to go to get inside.

Driving back to the hotel Flamenco I saw something that really put in perspective how poor and dirty Egypt, and specifically Cairo is. As we were driving we saw kids playing around in one of the irrigation canals. To give you an idea of how disgusting this is, the kids walk through villages that are covered with horse/camel/donkey crap. The air is extremely dirty and when it doesn’t smell like crap it has a musky smell to it. The irrigation canal is also lined with garbage down the sides. People don’t have anywhere to put their trash, so they throw it alongside the canal. Sometimes the canal will take some of the garbage with it, and sometimes the garbage forms almost a dam because of the amount of it. In addition to the kids swimming and the garbage, there are people washing their animals, and fishing in this same canal. This combination of things is disgusting. Not to mention the worst thing I’ve seen so far is seeing a couple dead animals on one of the “garbage dams” in the canal. This is how the people of some villages live, and there is no question why more people in Egypt are sick or dying at a young age.

After we returned to the hotel we had a couple hours to relax before boarding the overnight train to Aswan. While we were waiting in the train station, two trains arrived before ours did. These trains were something right out of some sort of horror movie. The front of the trains were just a dirt covered steel plate, with a couple miniature windows. As the trains came to a halt alongside us, there were people hanging out the window, yelling and shouting things at other people. The trains themselves seemed over cramped almost as much as the Boston MBTA gets during rush hour. Finally our train came and we boarded. It was like a scene straight out of the movie Eurotrip, with the train cars. It was nice because it had much more space than being crowded during an overnight flight. Me and Alex were in one room, and Ben and Sean were in a connecting room. We boarded at 8:15 pm, and we were set to arrive in Aswan at 8 a.m. – a 12 hour train ride. This is where the definition of “Egypt time” comes into play. Instead of arriving at 8 a.m., we didn’t even get in to Aswan until 11 a.m. It turned into a 15 hour train ride. Now considering this was a 12 hour ride, 3 extra hours might not seem like that much, but it is to the people who are cramped on the train and want to get off. Once we got to our hotel in Aswan everyone immediately flocked to the pool... yes there was a pool. The hotel was in an amazing spot, right on the Nile. We went on another Felucca around the Nile where we were staying. It was a lot warmer than the first Felucca we went on, as it was before sunset. On this felucca, we saw a bunch of tombs and sites that weren't too far from our hotel. There was an entire desert hill that had a bunch of tombs in it, and behind it started the Sahara desert.

After the Felucca, we explored the surrounding area of Aswan, including the Suq, and we eventually found dinner. The suq is a bargainers market. Me and Al instantly loved the atmosphere. Some people get addicted to drugs or alcohol, we got addicted to bargaining. It was so cool to have something where there wasn’t a set price for anything. Me and Al talked one guy down from selling these weird hats from 220 Egyptian pounds each, to the point where he tried selling them for 5 pounds each to us. Eventually we just declined, because the hats were so ridiculous that the only reason we were considering getting them because he said they were one pound. Well this one pound he claimed was one “Nubian pound,” which doesn’t even exist. It’s just a way of trying to trick you, as we learned very quickly. We also went into one store that sold jersey’s, and ended up getting them for 45 pounds, 9 dollars. Granted they aren’t the best quality, but I would buy Egyptian soccer, or should I say football, jersey’s for 9 dollars any day. The craziest thing about the visit to the Suq though, was not the prices or the atmosphere, but was some of the people that worked there. In the jersey store we went into, the guy behind the counter had a full education, including a bachelor’s degree in architecture. This amazed me that with such a high level of education he was still working at a run down shop in a huge market. We talked to him for a while and he told us his intentions of going to graduate school to work on a project that he had been longing to do for a while. We mentioned to him that we were from Northeastern University and we told him that we’d ask our group leader, Dr. Dennis Sullivan, if there was anything that we could do to help him out. He gave us his full resume and cover letter and invited us back later for some coffee or something after dinner. We didn’t end up returning but we did check with Dennis, and unfortunately he said there was nothing we could do. This just goes to show that there could still be a lot of potential in Egypt as far as education goes that just doesn’t get a chance to evolve because of the lifestyle and the restrictions that the society has.

Even though Aswan seemed much cleaner than Cairo, once we stepped outside of the Suq on the back roads, we were back to reality. It smelled like the streets of Cairo and Giza, where all the camels and horses lived. After our adventures in the Suq, we found a nice restaurant on the Nile… literally it was floating on the Nile. They had some food translated differently than we spell it, so some of it seemed funny to us. Usually they would interchange the letter "p" instead of "b", so we could have gotten a "big hamporger." Even though this is very subtle, there were misspellings and different spellings of the same meals on every menu.