I Really Like Zamalek

Our plans changed today, but you know what? That’s ok, cause we can do whatever we want! Our plan had been to get up early, grab a taxi, and head out to see some non-Giza pyramids. However, one of us wasn't feeling so well, so we decided to postpone our Saqqara/Meidum/Dahshur trip until tomorrow.

But before I tell you about today, let me tell you about what we did last night (it’s nothing fancy, but Lindsey and I were excited). We’d planned to try an Asian place for dinner (seriously, it was Asian- Japanese, Korean, and Chinese all on the menu), but nixed that idea. Lindsey and I, being the intrepid adventurers that we are, decided we could navigate our way around enough to go forage for dinner and supplies. Our first stop was the 2.50 store, where everything is, you guess it, 2.50 LE (about $.42). We got bowls/plates, forks, glasses, dish soap, and a knife. No, our hotel doesn’t have a kitchen, but we have plans to eat a lot of mango and you just can’t do that with toilet paper and a pocketknife from ACE Hardware. Then it was off to Subway (yeah, there’s a real Subway in Zamalek, just like there was a real Chili’s. It’s like home!) to get a veggie sandwich for Tasha. We thought we remembered passing it on our shopping outing, and we were totally right at where it was located! Ok, so dishes: check, Tasha dinner: check. The next stop was Nola’s cupcakes... again. Don’t judge us, they were tasty! Now we needed dinner for us. We’d passed by this kebab place several times, but had both realized we’d never be able to go there, because Tasha is vegetarian. At the same time, we realized that this was the perfect opportunity! So we walked up to the counter and ordered donner kebabs sandwiches! We were so excited. Then we went back to the room and dropped everything off. Tasha couldn’t believe what all we got and that we didn’t get lost even once. The kebab sandwich was really good, and of course I forgot to take a picture of it until I was on literally my last French fry. Oh well. After dinner we enjoyed cupcakes and some wine, then hit bed early. It was a lovely night! If we can do it after just a few hours shopping today, Lindsey and I feel pretty confident that we’ll be able to get around just fine once Tasha leaves.

Ok, back to today. So what can three girls with no real plans do? Go shopping again, of course! Nothing really opens until 10am in Egypt, so we spent the morning with a very light breakfast of bread and cheese at the hotel. After some long showers, we headed out to a bunch of different shops. Aside from our lunch break, we walked around Zamalek, shopping and browsing, until 4:30pm.

We ended up with WAY too much food because the menu didn't say that the sandwiches came with fries. So I had a chicken/mozzarella/pesto panini with baked potatoes/cheese/herbs. And a fresh strawberry juice. It was really tasty, but way too much food!

Our plans for this evening include recuperating from all of that walking. We bought a ton of fruit at the local market, so we'll probably do that for dinner. But I'm happy: we've eaten lots of good food, seen a ton of cool stores, and spent way too much money. Between the meals and all the dessert places we've been stopping at, I'm well on my way to gaining back what I lost just in the past 2 days alone. Dan will have to kick my diet back into shape once I get home. But for now, mmmmm cupcakes.

For anyone following the news, yes, Tahrir is completely full of people and reports say tear gas and other things are being used against protesters. Live image shots shows thousands of people camped out on the square. And yet, business and life in Zamalek is the same an usual. We hear and see absolutely nothing because we are so secluded. I promise that we are staying safe and we don't plan to leave the hotel when the hardcore demonstrations start, but to be honest, it wouldn't even matter if we did. It's kind of like we're in Gary, IN while people are protesting in Chicago. Though Zamalek is a lot nicer than Gary.

In other news, you all can be the first to hear some wonderful news. I literally JUST found out about this (like 5 minutes ago when I checked my email), but Jonathan and I have been accepted to give a talk about our block yard project at the CRE (Current Research in Egyptology) conference! Looks like I'll be spending a few days in England in March!! I can't wait to go back to the University of Cambridge. I wonder if the fudge shop and sandwich place that I fell in love with are still there. One adventure at a time, Janelle.

We're In Cairo!!

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to blog yesterday, but it was a busy day (and this will be an extra-long post to make up for it)! We woke up at 6am (hurray for sleeping in an hour) to get to site by 7. The first order of business was stringing up the remaining pottery boxes, then schlepping them into the pylon. After a few years, we have this down to a science: Tasha was the expediter, organizing the loading of the boxes onto the wheelbarrows from our work area; I stayed at the base of the pylon, unloading the wheelbarrows and organizing them into numerical order so that the guys could carry them into the pylon and up the stairs to Lindsey, who found their positions among the numbers we left in the pylon from previous seasons. We’re pretty good and had all hundred or so boxes back in the pylon in a little over an hour, and that was because the wheelbarrow guys seemed to be in no hurry. Even with our strong guys doing most of the lifting, though, I couldn’t get around bending over and carrying heavy boxes of pottery, so my back is rebelling quite fiercely today. I cannot wait to get back to the US and see my massage therapist to get back into position, because I hurt! See, archaeology isn’t all fun and games and drawing pots under the shade; we do heavy lifting.

Anyway, after loading the pylon, we had a few last-minute tasks, like cleaning off and folding up the tents. The site looked pretty bare when we were done with it (I didn’t bring my camera, sorry!). We were done by 10am, so it was back to apartment to pack, shower, and clean the house. Unfortunately, the car wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 2pm, so we had a bit of down-time, which we spent reading on the couch and checking our watches every 5 minutes. I wanted to get on and blog all of this then, but my internet key crapped out. When the car finally showed up, we loaded up our stuff and waved goodbye to Edfu with a certain finger. Then it was off to Luxor!

Kat will be staying in Luxor for a week, twiddling her thumbs before the beginning of her 10-day season to Abydos with Greg and one of our old professors who now works in Copenhagen, Hratch Papazian. This is a long way of saying that there was a hotel room where Tasha, Lindsey, and I could crash and watch awesome Arabic music videos and the beginning of The Matrix while waiting for our flight. Around 6pm we headed out to dinner at our newly-found favorite restaurant: Pizza Roma. It’s owned by an actual Italian lady, and they make amazing pizza with REAL cheese (you have no idea how amazing this is after the gross feta-like processed crap that you normally get in Egypt. They even had real gorgonzola cheese, which made Kat VERY happy). After dinner, we said goodbye to Kat and headed to the airport for our 10:30pm flight to Cairo. At this point, we were really starting to hurt, since our normal bed time is no later than 9pm. But we managed to make it to the hotel in Cairo by just past midnight. Thankfully, we used one of Nadine’s travel contacts and he had a car waiting for us to throw our exhausted selves into. He even got us all checked into the hotel. We’re staying at the President in Zamalek. It’s $20 per night, so it’s nothing fancy, but it’s a place to crash, it has Arabic music videos on TV, and actually pretty fantastic water pressure. We can live with the fact that the place hasn’t been properly cleaned since the 1970s and the toilet doesn’t really flush. It’s also located in the heart of Zamalek, right in the middle of where the ambassadors live, which provides us a great view of gardens and provides and extremely safe place to be (if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in Cairo, now is not the time to google it, ok, Mom?).

Cairo is much as I remember it: way too crowded, filthy, and huge. But driving along at night, looking at the billboards advertising 7Up, Doritos, cell phone plans, McDonald’s, and TV shows like The Voice (Egypt), it almost feels like a normal big city in the US (if you disregard the fact that most of the billboards are in Arabic and the buildings are incredibly run down). But you can’t really beat the view out of our balcony:

View looking to the left off of our balcony. I love the look of that church.

View looking straight off the balcony. The red complex is the Chinese ambassador's residence (and maybe also the embassy). We passed several complexes from various countries on our walk, but China won for most spectacular.

View to the right off the balcony and around the corner. Just in front of the tall building in the background you can see the Nile.

Today’s adventure included sleeping in! Well, Tasha did most of the sleeping in, since Lindsey and I could only sleep until about 6:30. But hey, we were able to lie in bed and read until 8:15 (when we got up for breakfast), so it felt great. After a leisurely breakfast, showering, and some unpacking/reorganizing of bags (we’ll be here over a week, after all), we hit the streets of Zamalek around 11:30! We stopped by the cell phone/internet shop to get more credit for our phones (it’s about 1 LE Egyptian to send a text to the US, which ends up being something like $.17, so we send a lot of texts to spouses) and to fix my internet. You’ll never believe where we ate lunch. Chili’s! On a boat! Don’t believe me?

I told you. Chili's. On a boat.

I had a salad and it was AWESOME to have something that wasn’t fried in oil and involved fresh veggies. So good. Plus, we got to look out over the Nile as we ate, and they had free refills on Diet Pepsi with grenadine. Life seemed complete. Then we went shopping at the various fair trade centers and on the way home, got some amazing cupcakes. We are now fed, sugared, and happy. Life really is complete. At least until we go to dinner. :P

One of the stores we passed while out walking. Lots of Christmas supplies! 

I think tomorrow’s plan is to head to Saqqara and get my 3^rd Dynasty on. I’m really excited about seeing the newly-opened serapeum (I’ll tell you more about what it actually is tomorrow). Fingers crossed that we’re allowed to take pictures inside (though I doubt we’ll be able to). For now, I’ll stop with the novel I appear to be writing. Cairo is a new and exciting place compared to Edfu and I’m ready to explore as much of it as we safely can in the 9ish days we have here. :)

It's The End Of The Season As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

Today was the last full workday of the season, and I didn't even really work the whole day! In the morning, I grabbed a few quick shots of the block yard with the good camera and spent the next few hours drawing, packing boxes, and writing box lists. Since there was basically nothing more that I could do around, Kat and I went home to pack up our stuff and the house a bit around 12:30. Lunch should be soon now that everyone else is home, so after we eat, we'll pack up the metal boxes that stay at Chicago House, finish some apartment cleaning, and pack up the rest of our own things.

Tomorrow we'll go to the temple in the morning to do last-minute things: clean up our stuff, put the pottery boxes into the pylon, and put our work supplies in a storeroom we have on site. Then it's off to Luxor to grab some food and a late-night plane trip to Cairo! So if you don't hear from me tomorrow (and you probably won't), don't worry! It'll be a long day and I'm not sure when/if I'll get the chance to sit down with my computer and the internet.

We have lots of stuff planned for Cairo, but if you've been watching the news, Cairo is a bit unsafe these days. Don't worry, we're keeping an eye on everything and have already changed several of our plans to accommodate the situation (we probably won't re-visit the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, we won't make a day trip to Alexandria, and we'll take taxis everywhere instead of the metro). We'll be staying in Zamalek, which is a little island full of foreigners that is totally safe. There's lots of shopping and food right there, so we won't have to leave the little safety bubble. Some of our plans include shopping at a lot of the local shops there in Zamalek, going to Saqqara and the newly-opened Serapeum (super excited about this!!), seeing the mosque of Ibin Tulun, heading to Ma'adi for some American-style salads and shopping, etc. So it should be a great time and I'll post lots of pictures if I can :)

The season is coming to a close and while I did have fun again this season, I'm happy it's almost over.

Busy Day Off

An update on last night's dinner: it was DELICIOUS! Chef made 2 different kinds of chicken; 1 was roasted and the other was homemade breaded cutlets. Then there was mashed potatoes, which were pretty darn close to the American way we do them, but without any butter. There was also zucchini with garlic, bread, and soup. And finally, the most amazing sweet potatoes ever. For all the hassle of explaining what they were, they did an AMAZING job of pureeing and blending a super smooth and sweet sweet potato mash (we decided not to explain the marshmallow thing). For the most part, they sat between me and Kat all dinner and when Taib came to take the almost-empty dish, we smacked his hand away. So all-in-all, it was a great evening! We're even considering just making our own Edfu celebration in the future instead of going to Chicago House. Chef was VERY pleased that we liked his meal better, since there's a huge rivalry between him and the chef at Chicago House.

Today we got to meet the mission from Aswan led by Pamela Rose. She worked at Amarna for a long time, so it's her pottery reports that I'll be using for Amarna bread moulds. They got a quick tour of the site and then came back home for a large lunch.

The rest of our day was spent cleaning the house and starting to pack up. Tomorrow is the last full day on site, then we pack up the pylon and head to Cairo!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I can't believe that I forgot to mention yesterday that our awesome guys (seriously, they are the best) find joins in the blocks that we missed! There are 5 more blocks total that now join- 2 for one pair and 3 for another. It's really excited and they were pretty happy to help out.

Today we finished the benches, too! Bench one is nicely laid out with lots of different kinds of blocks so that tourists can see what we have (can I use this time to point out that I got really, unreasonably, excited when the first tourists came over to look?). Benches 2-4 are set up with things squished together a little more, but everything is upright and in the correct orientation, and for the most part, all similar stuff is together (columns, Ptolemaic, offering tables, etc). Greg and Nadine have been gone the past two days, so they were pretty floored when they came back and saw everything I had done (I can't take all the credit- I had a little help from Kat now and then, especially with Arabic words I didn't know).

Doing my best "Barker's Beauties" impression in front of bench 1 to show off my finished (for this season) block yard! Heck yeah!

The other side of the walkway looks so empty without 350 blocks strewn about.

For all of you in America, you know that it's Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving!! Typically, we'd be hopping a bus to Luxor around 2 and heading to Chicago House for dinner. But this year, Chicago House was invited to the governor's mansion and we can't blame them at all for canceling the dinner. So we're doing up Thanksgiving Edfu style! Since our guys love any excuse to have a party, last night we tried to explain typical Thanksgiving fare. They understood the mashed potatoes, though the concept of not putting meat and cheese and spices in them was odd to them. Chef was really excited about the prospect of stealing the turkey from next door for us, but we convinced him chicken would be fine. After much back and forth (2 of the kitchen guys speak almost no English and the 3rd was gone), we finally explained to them the concept of mashed sweet potatoes. In Arabic, "potatoes" is batatis. And "sweet potatoes" is batata. We didn't know the word for sweet potato though, so we kept saying, "It's like a potato, but red."To them, sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, so they were having a huge problem figuring out what we were talking about. Yes, the words sound super similar, but for some reason, they didn't get it until suddenly a light-bulb went off in Said's head, he ran to the fridge, and came running back with a sweet potato! They were going to put it in dessert (I know, it's odd), so instead they saved it for tonight. Again, they were really confused why we wanted 2 kinds of bland puree veggies, but we assured them it would be ok. Greg even picked up some marshmallows while in Cairo yesterday so that Lindsey and I could teach the Frenchies the weirdness that is... whatever you call the sweet potato and marshmallow dish. No cranberries here in Egypt, but we're using cranberries as a substitute. So dinner tonight should be: chicken, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, some other kind of veggie (b/c chef doesn't consider either of the starches a veggie), bread, and pomegranate. I have no idea what dessert will be, but I requested kunaffa. Not American, I know, but it's not like we're going to get pumpkin or pecan pie. I'll let you know tomorrow how it turned out.

Tomorrow is our day off, but it'll be busy with all the last-minute things. We have a team from Aswan coming to visit our site, so we'll go out in the morning and show them around. The lead lady is someone whose work I'll be using a lot in my dissertation, so it'll be nice to meet her. In the afternoon, we need to clean the house to prepare for our departure and start packing up some of the supplies. Plus, this will be the last time some of us will be together until next season, so Valerie and I need to sit down and discuss the pottery that came out of Lindsey's First Intermediate Period (she's doing the other pottery and I get the bread moulds. It's actually pretty exciting because we found some things that have HUGE possibilities for being really important, so that's really cool for my work).

So, the big thing I'm thankful for today is that we have such an awesome team... and that we get to leave soon. haha.

Block Yard Update

Exciting news on the block yard project! After several weeks, we're finally able to start putting the blocks onto the benches for conservation with the help of our amazingly strong guys. It's so exciting to see these things finally in their final resting places. Next year, the exposed brick with be covered and painted, but with only a few days left to the season, this is how they have to stay for now. Look how far the project has come:

The block yard when we arrived.

After we moved most of the blocks to the other side of the walkway for analysis and so the benches could be built.

Trenches being dug for bench foundations.

Bench foundations poured.

Then the layers of cement, bricks, tar, and sand.

Slowly, they start to look like benches!

A coat of lime paint gets added as a final barrier to water.

2 benches full of blocks. Don't they look good?

Next season, Jonathan and I will continue epigraphy, recording, and conservation of the blocks. As of right now, every block has a database entry, a high-quality photo, and measurements. By the end of next season, we hope that every block will also have a full database description (including transliterations and translations of texts) and epigraphic drawings.

Playing With Fire

Remember how I said yesterday was Valerie's birthday? Well, our kitchen guys love birthdays! They spent several hours in secret yesterday decorating where we eat:

And they got this very beautiful cake from the bakery. Take a minute to look at all the wonderfulness:

Yes, on top there are several different kinds of candied fruits, along with the candles that were inside the pumpkin, and pieces of chocolate in the shape of shooting stars, fans, and a guitar.

But decorations and cake weren't the only things we had. Oh, no! Our guys wanted this to be a TRUE celebration, so they found sparklers!

Valerie was a little confused by the sparklers (as were we all). We were even more confused when they started passing them out and lighting them. In the house. Over a plastic tablecloth...

I have to admit, the cake was pretty good. Nothing like we'd get in the US, but it was fairly moist and not overly sugary, so it wasn't half bad. They even got a vanilla AND chocolate cake this time- fancy!

Yes, I did get a fan and the guitar. :)

In other news, they finished the benches today (well, as finished as they are getting this year. The sides aren't fully covered in cement and painted, but we're running out of time, so that will happen next year.), which means we can start putting blocks up tomorrow. I suppose that means I should get off of the internet and figure out where they are actually going, huh?