Done with Cairo, not with Egypt

For an idea of the scale, keep in mind that Egypt is twice the size of France, just a little bit smaller than Alaska, and bigger than Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas combined.

Hello everybody. Sorry for the delay in the posts about the big trip, but it's gonna be a little longer still. Finals and packing owned my life for the last week or so, plus we spent last weekend at the desert, which was very time-consuming. Immediately after finishing all my work, I headed out of Cairo. I was lucky enough to have all my finals assigned before the finals period, which means I get to use that time to see parts of Egypt I've been too lazy to get to until now. Yesterday I took a train to Alex and then a bus from there to Siwa Oasis. Siwa is one of Egypt's most beautiful and interesting oases. It's in the very Northwest of the country, only about 50 km from Libya. The culture was totally isolated from Egypt for most of its history, and they still speak their own language, Siwi (which is a Berber dialect... not even related to Arabic), in their personal interactions. Anyway, it's a pretty cool place so far. This afternoon I'm going out on a desert safari to the Great Sand Sea. While the Black and White Deserts which we visited last weekend are probably the most interesting deserts in Egypt, the Great Sand Sea is what one thinks of when the word desert is uttered. It's basically miles and miles of gigantic dunes and very fine sand. I'm pretty pumped.

After I finish in Siwa I go all the way back to Cairo, this time via Mersa Matrouh, to take an overnight train to Aswan, way in the south. I'll stay there for a day, then head even farther south to Abu Simbel, a fantastic ancient Egyptian temple that was totally relocated brick by brick when the Aswan High Dam was built forty years ago and Lake Nasser was created. Abu Simbel is about 50 km from the Sudanese border. I'm really going directly from one corner of the country to the other. Pretty krazy. But it's gonna be great. After that, I'll head north to Luxor where Peter is flying in to meet me. Unfortunately, he didn't get so lucky with his finals schedule, and they go right up until two days before we leave. He has to fly or else he wouldn't get the chance to see Luxor, which is an absolute must. It is right next to the ruins of Thebes, one of the great capitals of Ancient Egypt. So we'll spend a night and a day there and then fly back to Cairo, shoot over to our apartment, grab our stuff, go back to the airport, and fly home. Our flight gets into Boston around 2:30 PM on Wednesday, June 4. I really can't believe how fast this all happened, and that I've said goodbye to all my buds already. It's pretty sad, but I'm excited to come home, too.

Anyway, I gotta go enjoy myself in Siwa while I can. I'll get more posts up soon after we return, in shah allah.