My Exodus Pt. II

The last entry was only the first day of my Egyptian exodus. I needed to take a little break from writing so I decided to split the blogging of the trip into two (maybe three if I get bored again). But before I get back to the exodus I wanted to take a moment to voice my thanks to the late Charleston Heston for his epic role in the Ten Commandments, making Moses a bad ass and giving all Jews something besides matzah to look forward to during Passoever.
We decided the previous night that we would get up early and start the day off by going to Great Pyramids of Giza and the Step Pyramid, a 30 to 45 minute drive from Giza. After traveling the entire day and not getting to sleep until pretty late at night, waking up early turned into sleeping late. We slept until around 11 and ventured immediately to the Great Pyramids.
When you see pictures of the pyramids in books it appears as if they are in the middle of a desert surrounded by sand and nothing else. This is only half true, Cairo has spread out into such an enormous city that they sit at the border of a metropolitan city and a desert. From the pyramids you can gaze in one direction and all you can see is smog and the outline of buildings and in the opposite direction yellow sand. As we approached the pyramids they popped out of the city and seemed out of place. I felt cheated, I wanted to see the pyramids as they were for the thousands of years before modern Cairo, I wanted to see the Nile as a glimmering source of agriculture and power for the ancient Egyptian empire and ponder how they were able to construct such structures. This said, I was still very impressed with the Pyramids and how the Egyptians built them with little to no knowledge of geometry and how something so old can still be standing today. We walked up to the base of the largest pyramid (though it appears smaller then the one behind it due to the other one being located on a hill) and were amazed at the size of the base stones, each one taller than an average man and a few meters wide. As most know, the pyramids served as the burial places of the kings, whom were buried with stockpiles of food, large amounts of jewelry and items used in everyday life but all for the afterlife. However, most to all of the things of worth were stolen from the pyramids, not just inside the tombs but also the outside. Each pyramid used to be layered with a shinny marble making them glimmer in the sun, only on the top of the second largest pyramid can you see the remnants of this marble. The smallest of the three pyramids is distinguished by a large scar on one of its sides, a mark left by Saladin’s son. He wanted to destroy the pyramids and build himself a castle in its places, but after years of demolition in which little progress was made and a lack of funds he gave up on his effort to destroy the pyramid.
The Sphinx (half man half lion) is located right next to the Pyramids, however, it interested me little though it made me recall the story of Oedipus and how he saved Thebes from the terrorizing sphinx. The face is 90 percent destroyed from a combination of factors, wind erosion and a rock disease that is eating it from within, also it does not have the gravity that the Pyramids have due to their size. One point of interest about the Sphinx is that the story of Napoleon breaking the nose is a fabrication and that it was maimed some other way.
After leaving the area with the Pyramids and the Sphinx we caught a cab, which in Cairo is as easy as catching the clap in a shady Thai message parlor, and headed for the Egyptian Museum which houses everything taken from the tombs and pyramids (minus all that was seized by the French or British during their colonial rules). But before going to the museum we caught our usual lunch of koshery followed by a dessert of rice pudding (note Egyptian rice pudding does not come close to measuring up to Greek diner rice pudding).
The museum building, like most other buildings in Cairo, is old. It was built in the beginning of the twentieth century and has not undergone any major renovations since. Everything in the museum is old as well, not only the ancient artifacts that range from 4000 to 200o years old but the few descriptions located next to the artifacts (the English on the descriptions is laughable). The only new section was a part that was financed and displayed by a university in the Czech Republic in conjunction with the Egyptian Antiquities Council showing the recent recoveries of items from Aswan, located in southern Egypt almost at the border with Sudan. Looking back on the trip this had to be one of my favorite places that we visited. It is shocking how much preparation and how much resources and energy went into the burial processes for the royalty. There were full beds with jackals as bedposts, jewelry by the hundreds that were layered in gold and inlaid with precious stones, whole sarcophagi weighing a ton that housed the ornately decorated coffins, and the main showpiece of King Tutankhamen’s burial mask that looks calm, cool and awaiting the afterlife. I really enjoyed the Greco-Roman room that is relatively new in Egypt standards but shows the combination of two cultures. Additionally, it amazes me how these artifacts are still around thousands of years later and able to be observed by peoples with such little connection to the ancient Egyptians.

My Exodus Pt. I

There are so many thoughts running through my head in addition to the experiences I wish to share that I can’t seem to find a starting point and am weary of the return of writers block; though not a true viral infection (versus bacterial, after watching House I pretend to know something about medicine) I feel that once affected with blocktitus it is impossible to rid oneself of the disease. But knowing that I have a devoted audience gives me the encouragement to push through and try to punch the computer keys in an order that will produce some story.
Thinking of spring break brings back memories of middle school and high school days, rushing home to see MTV’s lineup of quality shows with half clad collegiate students clutching margaritas and fruit drinks in their hands and having the ‘what happens in Cancun stays in Cancun’ look in their eyes. Trying not to get caught in the plotlines I would wait until the grand moment where two 20 something blonde sorostitutes (try urbandictionary.com for my over 30 readers, also a great reference for picking up the latest street lingo, but I digress) throw their inhibitions and bikini tops, sometimes bottoms if I was lucky, into the wind and make out. But these days have passed and spring break now means a week, or in this years case two weeks, off from school to do whatever I please. My original intention was to wait until I could find a last minute deal to somewhere in Europe for a week and travel there. However, after talking with some friends who where planning to go to Egypt for a week and wanting to see the Pyramids, temples and everything else associated with the ancient Egyptians I decided to leave Europe for a time where my dollar doesn’t buy me half a euro and go to recreate the exodus of my ancient ancestors.
Our group consisted of my two friends Matt, an imaginative Canadian from Montréal, and Ben, a fellow American from Providence, RI who happens to be the first person I met on the entire program (sans Michigan people) and myself. We started our trip Wednesday/Thursday night where we caught a 12:30 bus from Tel-Aviv to Eilat. A bus ride with Israelis is always an experience for people argued over seats and other unimportant things until about an hour into the bus ride. Also, there were other kids from our program on the bus; one of them, Nicole, an Argentinean girl who now calls New York home, happens to be very nice but does not understand subtle hints and social queues. We talked for a few minutes telling each other our plans for break and what not but when I nonchalantly dropped lines and tried to close my eyes she continued talking and complaining about the noise of two Israelis brothers trying to hit on the same girl. After a few more minutes (what felt like forever) of small talk she returned to her seat and I was able to get a few minutes of shuteye. We got to Eilat at 5:00 am and we heard that the first bus from the Egyptian border town of Taba to Cairo didn’t leave until 10:30, so we had sometime to waste. We wondered to the beach where Ben and Matt decided we should take a shot and try to get a room in a hotel for a few hours. The first hotel we got to, La Meridian, also happens to be one of the nicest hotels in Eilat with a private beach, pool and a killer buffet. I was extremely skeptical that this would work, but after Ben’s smooth talking and our luck at having a nice front desk attendant lady who told the security officer that we had a reservation in a few days and to let us sleep on the beds by the pool. Even though not a room like we wanted we were grateful for the mattresses that gave us a view of the sun coming over the mountains in Jordan and fell asleep for a few hours. We milked it for as long as we could even scoring a plate of fruit and brownies from the buffet and headed for the border.
We crossed the border with no trouble on both sides. But we were aware of the fact that the Israeli side is much more serious and observant than the Egyptian side which had two guys where only one was needed and doing nothing more than drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. The bus stop where we were to catch the bus to Cairo was a short walk from the border. We got there at what we thought was 10:00 am, a half an hour before the next bus left, however, none of us knew that Egyptian time was an hour behind Israeli time. We plopped down at a small little shop had a cup of tea and waited the extra hour and some until the next bus left Taba.
The next leg of the trip was another bus ride, this time six and a half hours, through the desolate and sand blasted Sinai Desert with numerous (three or four) Egyptian security checkpoints. These checkpoints like most other things in Egypt were overmanned with people just sitting around. The government hires as many people as possible to say that it creates jobs and keeps its citizens employed but the outcome is a huge waste of money and manpower as most of the police officers and soldiers that we passed are just sitting in the shade smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee/tea. The bus ride was uneventful and we arrived in Cairo about 4:30 and took an overpriced cab from the bus station to the American University where one of Ben’s friends from uni (Australian for university), Jim, is studying abroad.
When I told people that I was going to Egypt for a week there were two types of responses. The first came from Israelis who compared going to Egypt to taking a vacation in Baghdad or Gaza, someplace to stay far away from. The second response was from other students who wished me a good time and thought Egypt a cool place to visit. Anyway back to the story, the four of us, Ben, Matt, Jim and myself, looking like misplaced tourist, started our walking tour of Cairo (city of 20 million people). Cairo is an old city with even an older feel, 90 percent of the buildings were built during the British reign of Egypt and the other 10 percent of the buildings are the mega-hotels where only tourists and very wealthy Egyptians live. The other most striking thing in Cairo has to be the driving. There are no traffic signals, very little signs and no road lines so the driving is a mix of Grand Theft Auto and crossing the street like a game of Frogger. I would have to keep my eyes closed in some cabs just in order to try to keep my heart pressure down and from kicking through the floor panel with the air break.
Our first evening we were introduced to koshry, a mix of noodles, some beans, fried onions topped with a vinegar tomato sauce that cost less than a bus ticket in most U.S. cities. This meal became the staple of our diet for six days having it some days two or three times. So after having our first meal of koshry we took a cab to Islamic Cairo and walked around the outdoor market and to one of the world’s oldest mosque, Al-Azhar (built 970 AD), which also serves as an Islamic educational institution and a magnificent example of Islamic architecture and engineering. After some walking around we went to go meet up with a friend of Ben and Jims from uni in a high-rise hotel located on the bank of the Nile. After snapping some pictures from 21 stories above the city and getting some room service from a butler named Sayed, we went to an outdoor café where they serve fresh fruit drinks and like every other coffee shop in Egypt sheesha/nargila. However, at this point I was getting extremely tired from traveling all day with the only sleep that I was getting was on a bus and outside. We all went back to Jim’s apartment where I crashed for the night while Matt, Ben, Jim and his roommates went to ride horses near the pyramids.

My Vino, Nature and Stolen Swim Suit

All my family members and Israeli friends ask me “Are you learning anything or did you just come here to livalot (a Hebrew word best translated into English in this context as to live life up)?” I answer them with the hesitance of an adolescences boy who is asked how many times he masturbates, always lowering the level out of embarrassment. The classes here are not of the level that most are used to at their home university but I am learning interesting and relevant things, however, I am also learning a plethora about traveling, outdoorsy things, wine and the Israeli bureaucracy. I am enrolled in five classes all of which deal with a wide variety of issues in Judaism, Middle Eastern politics, ethics, business and my favorite the environment. This said, only one of the classes has a attendance policy, which makes it hard to go when it is nice outside, and their idea of a midterm in the class is a 500 word essay on topics that can be written using wikipedia.
Alright, enough of my school life and now to get to the reason why you come back every week craving for details about my travels, social life and whatever else is going on in my life. This past week has been pretty relaxing and normal. I have started to run a few days a week because my diet of pita and hummus for the past three months has transformed my usually sculpt physique into something that looks like a combination of subway Jared (before he lost the equivalent of 3 young teens) and me before I left. I have also given up the consumption of alcohol* until the end of Passover that coincides with the Boombamela Festival (boombamela.co.il). This has been in an effort to become healthier and to get in shape for beach weather.
This past Thursday a few friends and myself took a train to Benyamina, a small town 30 minutes northeast of Tel-Aviv, to visit one of Israel’s many wineries. Before this trip my liking for wine equaled my liking to long lines, I would rather move strait to the front but if the ride was cool it was worth the wait (this analogy worked better in my head). We got a private tour of the facilities and shown all the different stages of the wine making process from the weighing of the grapes as they arrived from various vineyards to the barrel room and most peoples favorite the finished product via the wine tasting. I was schooled in the proper etiquette of what to look, smell and taste in certain wines. We tasted one white, two reds, desert wine and a chocolate liquor. After getting our fill of samples from this winery we took a ten minute bus ride northwest to the small artist village of Zickron Yakov located in the beginning of the Galil Mountains. Again we visited a winery this time skipping the tour and going strait to the wine and cheese. After tasting one of the wines we decided to by a bottle, enjoy the scenic view and good food and wine. We stayed until around five when the restaurant closed and took another bus to a different part of town. Our waitress from the restaurant rode the bus with us and showed us the small shops and stores that the town is known for. After taking many pictures with the mountains in the background and eating and drinking some more we boarded a bus back to Tel-Aviv.
Right now is the most perfect time to come to Israel for the weather is perfect and all the trees, plants and flowers are blooming and everything around is green. The following day after my wine trip, Friday, the Overseas Program, the part of the university in which the abroad students are a part of, organized a trip to the northern part of the country. The trip was to begin at 7:30 in the morning, but like most things Israeli an hour was wasted, and we ended up leaving the dorms around 8:30. We drove north along the costal highway, a scenic road with the beach on one side and the sun on the other. We first arrived to Mount Moron, previously a 1208 meter high mountain before the Israeli air force shaved off four meters for an observation post and the peak of the mountain. What I enjoyed most about our hike was the fresh, clean crisp air of the north. Its scent made me reminisce about previous Passovers, also called Chag Aviv (holiday of Spring), for this is usually the time back home where the weather changes and you can smell the flowers when sitting outside. Also since it was still early in the morning and a little cold when we were hiking everyone was pretty quite. This allowed me to reflect so many different things from Joe Greenberg, an elderly blind man who I used to read to and watch baseball games with, and opening day, to my summer plans and the state of the Chinese economy. I don’t want to use the cliché that silence is golden because I think I would have gone crazy if it were completely silent, but with the sounds of nature it made everything in the world seem ok for a few hours.
That night and the entire weekend we stayed at a kibbutz a few kilometers from the Kineret (Sea of Galile, I think Jesus walked on water there at some point) in Hukuk. On Saturday we did another hike this time a little longer, though less intense, however I don’t remember the name of the place. Since it was Saturday the trail was packed with families and school groups so it was not as peaceful as the other, nonetheless also very fun. The coolest part of the day was when we went into a cave that was pitch black. A few things of note, we only had four flashlights for a group of 15 people, therefore climbing in the cave was a bit interesting and really fun. Entering the cave reminded me of the Jules Verne novel, Journey Into the Center of the Earth, I crawled through tiny spaces, climbed a wall and squeezed between two walls in order to explore the caves magnificent stalagmites and stalactites (all those geosci classes came into handy and I impressed some girls with my knowledge of calcium carbonate rock and how dripping water ate away at the rock). Saturday night, after Shabbat, the counselors organized a trip to the sulfur baths in Chamat Hagader, literally right at Israel’s border with Jordan. We relaxed in the pools for a while and also went into a pool where the water was around 45-50 degrees centigrade.
The low point on the trip came the next morning when I went outside and realized that the bathing suit (one of my favorites) I left outside the night before to dry was not there and was most likely stolen (it was stolen, Gabe who also goes to Michigan also got his bathing suit stolen so we concluded it was a thieving OSU asshole). Anyway I wasn’t going to let a missing bathing suit ruin my kayaking down the Jordan river. I shared the kayak with my Hungarian friend Adam and we were the first in the water. We took our time going down the river that in some places is at most six inches deep.

My Rural

Tel-Aviv is sometimes compared to Miami Beach, and rightfully so. Both have huge skyscrapers marking the city skyline (though TLV is the most polluted city in Europe so sometimes the smog interferes), both have magnificent beaches where the sites include beautiful girls in little more than their birthday suits and both have a nightlife that goes on to the early parts of morning. I have been living in this city for two and a half months and have tried to take in all of Tel-Aviv, the sun, the bars, the hummus (Jaffa/Yafo actually), the people and the metropolitan culture.
But this past weekend I decided to spend the night at my friend Deb's apartment which is 30-40 north of Tel-Aviv and 10-15 years behind Israel's secular cultural center. She lives on the edge of Michmoret in a small town called Olga. The town's population can't be more than a thousand people for as I walked from the bus stop to her apartment I did not see more than 30 people and began to miss a little bit the buildings in Tel-Aviv I have become familiar with. We walked into a grocery store that had one isle, perishable items on one side and non-perishable items on the other. We picked up some bread, hummus (israeli staples) and some fruit, had a few words with the cashier who was wondering what two Americans were doing in this town of mostly Russian and Ethiopian immigrants and continued to her apartment.
The town of Olga is pretty much on the beach and Deb's apartment building is one of three brand new luxury apartment built in Olga and the tallest buildings for miles. From her window you can see the water and the only remaining sand dunes left in Israel. We quickly put the groceries down, made a little lunch and left for the beach. The beach that we went to is nothing like the Tel-Aviv beach packed with people and hotels in the background. We walked through the dunes and down a cliff to the little beach where we were two of about a dozen on a kilometer strip of beach.
If you ask me I am a child of suburbia, if you ask Deb I am a city boy. As we walked I commented (to others, only Deb, complained) on the gigantic insects, the dirty sand, the climbing down the cliffs in flip-flops and other things that came to my attention. Now to give you a little background on Deb. She grew up in Connecticut as an only child. But if you ever talk to her you would think that she has siblings for she talks about her dogs and horses as if they were (and to her they are) her brothers and sisters.
Deb also works on a horse farm here in Israel with prized Arabian stallions and such. So after the beach on Saturday we visited this farm. Walking by the stalls of the horses I was impressed by how the people working with the horses knows each ones tendencies, whether they liked to be petted on the nose, which one eats what type of food and who their parents or children are. In Harrisburg we have the yearly farm show where people from all over the East coast bring their farm animals and show off riding skills so I have some notion of what it is like to be on a farm. However, when one of the horses got loose from their stall (and it happened 3 times in a span of an hour while I was there) I was called on to help retrieve the horse. I was called on to step in front of horse running to make it stop and direct it into the ring in the center of all the stalls. Maybe some of you would have helped but I decided to move/jump out of the way and not to be run over. I was teased by Deb and her friends at the farm for being city boy and not liking the animals as much as them.