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Back to Ras Sidr

Before leaving we made one last trip out to the Red Sea. I mentioned earlier that this was my our other experience that rivals for best memory out of the whole trip.

One morning Donia and I were swimming in the ocean and a entire pod of wild Dolphins swam right by us! We quickly caught up with them and when they took notice of this they began to circle us. There were at least a dozen of them and they swam in close circle completely surrounding us twice. We were a little nervous but could see that they were curious about what we were. They were checking us out. When we demonstrated to them that we could dive and race and play some of them got so excited!!! They would swim up alongside us playing! When we would slap our hands down in the water to make a splash a few of them would slap their tales down in response. IT WAS SOOOO SOOOO SOOOO AMAZINGLY WICKED AND COOL!

Then they began to move on to continue their fishing, leaving Donia and I completely blown away. We would have followed them around all day long if a couple of idiot workers at the resort didn’t swim up to us pretending to be life guards only to have their pathetic pick-up attempt completely backfire in their face and result in us getting them both fired. But in case you can’t tell I’m still a little furious about all of that so I will try to restrain myself from seething too much and using up all the memory on my blog ranting!

It was a strange day a the beach to say the very least. The tide was behaving oddly and so uncommon sea creatures seemed to be popping up all over the beach. When we were in the water later that day Donia stepped right on top of a bright blue balloon… or was it a ball? Or maybe a plastic bag? No wait I think it’s coming up, maybe it’s a… OH MY GOD IT’S A JELLY!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Thankfully Donia had stepped directly on the top of the strange Jellyfish and so had not been stung. We have seen many many jellyfish on this trip but none of them anywhere near as big and with such fantastic colouring. Even though it left Donia shaken and scanning the water every 30 seconds for anything blue it was still a pretty cool encounter.

There was also a very odd minow that insisted upon running into the two of us and would not go away. It was so persistent that I eventually picked it up in my hand and placed it back in the water facing another direction.

Donia and I went for a tour of the horse barn that night and were introduced to all the handsome ponies that lived there. The owner of the resort’s son is a competitive jumper and his world-champion horses come to the resort in the summer for some time to relax!

The handlers who worked in the barn were so happy to have people there who were interested in the ponies and couldn’t help themselves gushing about them and telling stories.

Like the stallion Sphynx who has such a sugar tooth he broke out of the container he was in on an airplane and ate an entire shipment of grapes. Or the time he put a hole in the side of the transport trailer truck that he was being moved in because he was in a bad mood.

All of the horses we saw there were beautifully cared for with wonderful temperaments toward us and their handlers.

The next morning when the horses were coming out for their morning cool-off swim in the ocean the handlers waved me over and let me ride around in the Ocean on a beautiful grey stallion. It was so wonderful!

This was the perfect way to say goodbye to the Ocean. And, as promised Mom, here are a bunch of photos of the gorgeous animals for you!

Kahn El Khaleeli Market & Bazaar

Who ever created Aladdin has been to the Kahn El Khaleeli market.

Kahn El Khaleeli is one of the only places in old Cairo where it is relatively safe for tourists. Most of the rest of old Cairo is quite impoverished and not really open to outsiders. Which was a real disappointment because it was in the few brief glances we would get of old Cairo when driving by and rare opportunities to visit, like this, that I really felt I was in an ancient city. Sun bleached houses and shacks piled one on top of the other, housing generation upon generation, the dirt streets teeming with people and merchants.

It was so like the movie Aladdin is was hilarious – people yelling at you from every direction trying to sell you things –

“Dates, sugar dates! Sugar dates and pistachios!”

“Fresh fish, get your fish!”

“A pretty necklace for a pretty lady!”

There were even people selling Tupperware! And every time you tried to walk away they’d do anything to try to call you back.

Suffice to say I no longer have room in my suitcases for any clothes at all. Donia and I took our shopping very seriously!

Belly Dancing on the Nile

We spent the week after Sharm recuperating in Cairo, visiting with family and bidding farewell to Donia’s sister Dahlia and her family as they headed back to Canada. We kept ourselves busy – I got sick, Donia got migraines, Donia’s mom had to have dental surgery and bandage her toe after stubbing it really badly.

After all this merry-making we decided to take a night off and went for dinner on a cruise ship on the Nile. As we floated along the Nile peacefully enjoying our meal a belly dancer came out to perform entertainment. She was beautiful and a very good dancer. Then she came wondering though the audience and decided out of the blue to yank me up on stage with her! It was HILAROUS! I thought Donia was going to DIE from laughter but I held my own and danced my little toosh off up there! It was great!!

Ode to Egyptian Food

You guys would be so impressed with how much weird stuff I have eaten this holiday, and most of it I’ve liked! (I’m not saying at ate it fast mind you, I was still always the last person at the table, as usual, but I ate it!)

Mangos & Mango Juice

Yeah, ok, Mangos are just gross. They’re really stringy and mushy and you have to scoop them out of the skin with a spoon. And Mango juice isn’t really juice it’s more like purée Mango. The ‘juice’ is so thick and stringy that you almost have to chew it. Mangos did not get the thumbs up.

Fayrouz!!!!!

Fayrouz was WICKED! The best tasting beer on the planet!! It’s a non-alcoholic beer made from apples and it tasted like carbonated apple cider. It was SO GOOD!!!! Big thumbs up!

Borio

Just like Oreos but brown instead of black. Thumbs up, of course!

Cactus Fruit or Prickly Pears

Like their name implies, these grew on Cactuses. The people would sell them on the street from the back of wagons would have cut away the spiky peel with their calloused hands that had become accustomed to the sharp brown spikes on them. Inside was this yellowy fruit. It was pretty good, quite sweet actually, but throughout the inside of the fruit were tonnes of very hard little seeds and I didn’t really like always biting into them and having to swallow them whole. With more practise I think I could have grown to like these a lot. But in my limited exposure to them this trip I would have to just give them a noncommittal ‘meh’.

So SO many GLORIOUS chocolates, cakes and pastries!!!!!

One of the nice things about constantly being invaded and occupied is that sometimes the invaders bring with them cultural traits that you like and decide to keep after the invaders have gone or disappeared into the population. In Egypt’s case, one of the things they kept with them after being invaded by France is the knowledge of how to make some of the most wonderful pastries on the planet. I imagine a symphony playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 when I look at these pictures!

Koshari

Koshari is like the equivalent of Toronto street meat. It’s what locals will often grab to eat when they’re on the run. I tried it while in a traditional Egyptian restaurant and my companions said that it was the fanciest Koshari they had ever seen. It’s a mix of caramelized onions, chickpeas, noodles, wheat seeds, tomato sauce, rice and it is usually wrapped up in a piece of flatbread but here it was served on a plate. I thought it was really good (of course, it’s hard to go wrong with me if you’re putting tomato sauce on something) so I give it thumbs up.

Uh, I don’t have any pictures of these but another kind of traditional food that you could grab on the run were shawermas. Shawermas can be made with chicken or beef and are cooked on those weird looking vertical grills like the one you see at Jimmy the Greek’s. Before the meat is cooked it is ground up, seasoned and then mushed back together in to a solid cone of meat (that resembles no part of a chicken or cow) and thin slices are cut off as they cook on the grill and served on flat bread with veggies and dressing. I have always been wary of this odd looking meat when I’ve seen it in Canada but they were great! So they get a thumbs up!

Molokhiya

Green soup. Basically the leaves of a presently unknown plant cooked in water and a lot of oil. Can be served with rice and Tomato sauce (whoo hoo!) At first I really liked Molokhiya but by the end of the trip I was pretty sick of it because we had it a lot. Still, I will give it thumbs up!

Veal bones and Mahhshi

This is baby cow bone and Mahhshi. The cow bone and baby cow meat is considered a delicacy. The bone is so soft that you can eat it, which we did. It’s hard to describe, it’s a very odd texture and it tastes like you would imagine bone to taste like – kind of chalky? Well I wasn’t a huge fan but Donia, as you can see, ate it ravenously.

The other thing on the plate is called Mahhshi. Mahhshi is rice, beef, seasoning and onions rolled up and cooked in cabbage or grape leaves. They were great and we had them all the time, thumbs up!

Pigeon

This is a whole pigeon on a bed of wheat. You eat the whole thing. You eat the skin, it’s stuffed inside and the spine. You eat the spine! You eat everything but the wing, rib and hip bones and even those the more expert of eaters (like Donia) could eat parts of. There was actually very little meat on it except for on it’s small breast. It tasted pretty alright but I never really got over the whole spine-eating thing. Everyone eats pigeon here, I guess it’s almost as common as chicken. You would see pretty pigeon coops all over the place where the pigeons could come and go to freely until they were caught for dinner that night. Donia said that they still use carrier pigeons for delivering messages sometimes too.

We often also had a bean paste called Foul on flat bread (kind of like Texas style beans) which was really good. And for breakfast in Ras Sidr we almost always had Taamias which are pretty much the same thing as Felafels. Also very good!

So all in all I thought I did quiet well for myself with the foreign foods on this trip. And when we were desperately needing a hit from home we could always order Pizza Hut!

Sharm El Sheikh

And now I have the extreme pleasure to introduce to you a fantastic group of companions who forged friendships and sought adventure together for four fabulous days in Sharm El Sheikh. As you can see we became real comfortable with each other, real quick.

Missing from this picture is Morgan. (He was taking the photo but there will be lots of other shots of him to come!) Here is how the associations work…

• I am Donia’s friend from University, we were in the Theatre program together.
• Donia knows Hilali and Omi from elementary and high school in England and they are in a band together along with Hilali’s brother Ahmed who came to see the Pyramids with Donia and I, but did not come along on this trip to Sharm.
• Morgan is Hilali’s friend from here in Egypt, they are studying at to become Doctors.
• Dhruve, Erik and Moe are friends of Omi’s who are studying in England with him to become Engineers.

We met early in the morning, many of us strangers, and piled into Omi’s van for the 6 hour through the desert to Sharm El Sheikh. We were quite the mix and we got more then a few strange looks while we paraded across the country.

• Donia is Egyptian but has lived most of her life in England and Canada. Her pail complexion, bright green eyes and foreign manner would often cause a few strange looks when perfectly fluent Egyptian would came out of her mouth.
• Omi is half Egyptian and half Philippinno so people practically fell over with surprised when Egyptian would come out of his mouth.
• Drhuve is from India, holding down the brown fort for our group.
• And the rest of the beiges were Hilali and Morgan (both full Egyptians) and Moe who is Pakistani.
• Then there were whities, Erik and I. I of course am a mongecake Canadian and Erik was our Jewish boy from Greece.

The poor border guards had a rainbow of passports to deal with whenever our van would drive up.

Sharm El Sheikh is one of the most popular destinations in the world for the rich and famous. It’s beautiful coral reefs grow right up to the shore and the water is incredibly clear and warm.

We arrived in the afternoon and spent the remainder of the day settling into our rooms, lounging around the beach and pummelling each other with viscous games of chicken fight. (Chicken Fight: everyone gets into partners, one person sits on the others’ shoulders then all the pairs face off against each other and try to knock the others off their partner’s shoulders via kicking, biting, scratching, pushing, pulling and hitting. The last pair with someone remaining on their shoulders wins.) Suffice to say that Donia and I more then held our own in these face offs.

SNORKELLING

The next day we set off for snorkelling along the reef. We saw so many beautiful and exotic looking fish and coral, it was so fun. Not to mention the exotic creatures that roamed around above deck…

One of the most amazing things we saw on this trip was not actually while we were snorkelling but while the boat was heading to another snorkelling location. Our group had taken over the very front of the ship and as we were dangling over railings and acting stupid we saw a group of small fish cross the path of the boat. Then, like magic, a whole fleet of them actually jumped out of the water and flew the length of basketball court above the water before dropping back in!!! It was so amazing!!!!! We were so excited we all started cheering! I had no idea that flying fish could actually fly that far, I had always thought it was more like really long jumps but this was totally real FLYING!

MOUNT SINAI

At 11 pm that evening, with tired muscles and the two whities with very burnt backs from snorkelling and swimming all day we piled onto a bus that would take us the 2.5 hour drive to Mount Sinai.

Mount Sinai is the mountain where the Prophet Moses was said to have seen the burning bush and given the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments from God. It is a Jewish pilgrimage and there were a vast number of people who were climbing the mountain that night.

We were told that it would be cool on the top of the mountain so before we started our climb I bought a small red shawl from a bedawinn who had a small stall at the base of the mountain. Then at 2 am we began our climb!

Moe seemed to be part mountain goat and basically sprung up the mountain right from the start so Omi gloriously decreed that we shalt follow ‘Moe’s-Ass’ up the mountain. And so we did…

It was a long, hard trek. We walked for hours led by 5 flashlight shared between us. Although the path was well worn it seemed to go on forever and the thinning oxygen and constant uphill climb did not go unnoticed. But we brave adventurers forged onward!

At times we would come around a curve in the path and get a good view of the winding route that lay ahead and it would be magical. A small stream of little lights wound all the way up the mountain from flashlights of other people making the trek that evening and it looked like something out of a fable. It was so beautiful against the mountains’ dark backdrop. Of course, not all of us found it so captivating when they realized that it showed just how far we still had to go!

There were camels everywhere for people who couldn’t climb any more and wanted a ride up the rest of the way. None of our group were quitters though… very loud complainers, yes, some of us… but not quitters! We all made it the full way up on foot.

The camels soon became very annoying because, while the path was easily wide enough to allow people on foot to pass each other, we were practically ran over every time a camel would come and pass us from behind.

By the last stretch Donia and I were certain that Omi was going to puke because he had consumed 3 cans of Mango juice and 5 Snickers bars to keep his energy up. Miraculously we were spared and seemed to have underestimated his digestive system!

Finally, we made it up to the top just in time to see sunrise on the mountain range. It was a magnificent sight. Well all of us who saw it thought so, Donia and Omi slept through it completely. I was very glad to have my bedawinn blanket, it was very cold at the top and I thought of mom while it kept me warm.

With the sun up we could see the winding path we’d taken in the dark of the night.

And then after about 45 minutes of resting, napping and listening to a church choir that had gathered to sing on top of the mountain it was time for our decent.

We practically skipped down the mountain in daylight, ravenously hungry for our breakfast at the bottom. (After which Dhruve promptly fell asleep right at the table.)

We had then planned to tour the Monastery that stood at the base of mountain but instead spent our last hour on Mount Sinai searching for Omi’s camera that had gone missing. Miraculously (and this is no small miracle in a country where pick pocketing can practically be claimed legally as a profession) it had been found by security and we were able to retrieve it safely, drive back to our hotel and happily to collapse into bed and sleep for the rest of the afternoon.

Our time in Sharm ended much too quickly and after one last morning on the beach we headed back to Cairo. We parted with Dhruve, Moe, Erik and Omi back where our adventure together had first begun, in front of Donia’s apartment, and from Cairo they went on to Alexandria and Luxor. Even though our time together had been very short we had become friends very fast. They were some of the funnest people I have ever met and we will be sure to keep in touch.

ALEXANDRIA

The next day I was much better!!! I HAD to be as we caught a train for Alexandrian early in the morning to go to Donia’s cousin’s wedding. Some of the stomach pains remained but I was no longer barfing up every piece of food I dared to even look at, never mind eat!

Alexandria was so hot. Way hotter then Cairo at the time and really humid. We were dying but Donia’s mom is a slave driver and forced us to go sight seeing all over the place and even though by the end we thought it would not be possible to drink enough water in a month to make up for how much we sweated out that day we saw some really cool stuff. So thanks Donia’s mom!

The heat might have not been so bad if our hotel room hadn’t been so very, very, well… special. They had jammed three beds into a room that looked like it had been built for a single so that we had to climb over one of the beds just to get to the bathroom which you wanted to go in as seldom as possible because it was completely covered in a layer of dust as if someone had left a window open for a year and had not cleaned up since but I suppose we were lucky enough to just to have a private bathroom to ourselves instead of being like the people down the hall who had to share a bathroom with people from other rooms and I guess it was perfectly understandable WHY someone would have to leave a window open constantly there because our room had no air conditioning, other rooms in the hotel had air conditioning but, oh no, not ours! Whew. So yeah, that’s my rant about that. But really, Donia and I didn’t have to much of a problem with it, we thought it was kind of funny and just tried to think of it as camping. But Donia’s poor mom couldn’t deal. She made the lives of every person who worked in that hotel miserable for the full 3 days we were there. There was a never ending stream of bus boys and servers running back and forth from the room, fixing this and moving that. We thought it was pretty funny.

But now, on to the sight seeing…

THE ROMAN PILLAR

hahaha Note the oh-so-pleased faces in this picture!

The Roman Pillar was built by, well obviously, the Romans. One of the really cool things about it was that this ancient building was constructed in order to be able to withstand earthquakes. Under it’s base was a hollowed out area in the rock which acted as a sort of shock absorbers for the huge pillar.

In the area all around the Pillar they have unearthed all kinds of ancient statues and objects, even bathtubs!!

CLEOPATRA’S LIBRARY

Not to be confused with the Library of Alexandria, Cleopatra’s Library was thought to have sunk into the ocean until it was discovered in a series of Catacombs directly below the Roman Pillar.

Book shelves were carved right out from the rock and chambers were dug deep into the earth so they would be cool while they read by torchlight. There were also small holes throughout the caverns about the width of snake holes. These had been secret compartments for very special scrolls that would have been covered over with a perfectly fitted rock and hidden amongst the decorations so that thieves or spies would not be able to get hold of important information.

AQUATIC MUSEUM

Not much to say. The aquatic museum was just about as terrible and upsetting as this table of death that was set up right out side selling souvenirs to tourists.

It made me very sad.

QUIT BEK FORT & CASTLE

Right in the lands’ edge this Fort & Castle over looked the beautiful port of Alexandria.

It had beautiful, intricate stone work inside and employed another form of protection against earthquakes. Like many of the churches we saw while driving through Cairo, this castle had been built by stone masons. It was many stories tall and each floor was supported by arches in all the walls but on every other floor the arches were staggered so that no arch was ever directly above the weak points of another arch. This strengthened the walls and offered protection from earthquakes which is probably why it still stands today.

In this castle we also got to see the sleeping chambers of the king’s harem. There were enough rooms for 21 women in all.

From the windows of the castle you could also see a view of where an ancient city had sunk into the ground. They believe that this city must have been a great centre for art and science in its’ time because of all the incredible pieces they have found down there. Our guide at the castled said that they are constructing a huge underwater museum of the city because much of the treasures down there cannot be moved with out risk of severe damage. They have pulled some things up though and here are some pictures – statues, and yes, more bathtubs!

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL

Remember how angry Donia’s mother was about our hotel? She was so upset that the only thing I think she really enjoyed doing that day was taking a tour of the brand-new-not-yet-open Four Seasons Hotel. It was so cute, it was like she had found her very own castle. She refused to leave and go back to our dismal hotel room until after the host had shown us both ball rooms, the outdoor patios and 4 out of the 6 in hotel restaurants.

EGYPTIAN WEDDING

The following day was Donia’s cousin’s wedding. We did very little that day other than recover from the previous day, whine about no air conditioning and get ourselves ready for the wedding.

The wedding itself was very much like the reception at North American weddings – You rent a hall, serve a fancy dinner, there’s lots of dancing, they cut the wedding cake. The most striking difference was to start the evening off it is traditional to hire a special type of band who play traditional Egyptian wedding songs on drums and flute like things while singing with the bride and groom in the centre and guests circling around them. Here is me, Safa (Donia’s niece), Donia, Ronda (Donia’s cousin) and little Zelia all looking gorgeous at the wedding.

ROMAN AMPHETHEATRE

The Roman Amphitheatre was really cool. They had discovered it while digging out the foundation for a new sports centre.

It was so neat. We’ve talked about these legendary theatres so much in my Theatre courses that it was so amazing to see one in real life. Although this theatre was relatively small compared to many that still exist in Rome and Greece today it still employed the same principals of construction and still worked the same way. In the centre of the stage was a round keystone. When you stood directly on this keystone your normal speaking voice was amplified by the acoustics of the stone seating ten fold!!! It was SO COOL!!!!!

And next to the Amphitheatre there were more, you guessed it, more bath tubs and bathhouses!!

LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

This Library was basically built as a tribute to the great ancient library of Alexandria that had been a storehouse for books, scrolls, art and information from across the world until it was burned down by invaders. It’s got a spacey design and a lot of books and artwork but unfortunately did not make that huge of an impression on us at the end of a long, hot day.

And so, before we knew it, we found ourselves back on the train and heading to Cairo.