…Egypt (8)
Sunday, may 9th 2010
Although some are finding the starting hours of the trips we make a little early, I am glad we start this early, because it is still bareable and not so crowded at this hour. Today we do the eastbank: first we visit Karnak-temple, a huge compound of all kinds of temples and halls, constructed by many pharaos over a period of 2500 years between 3000 and 500 b.c.
And indeed, having seen it yesterday at night enhances the experience greatly!
Some of the story we understood and combined with the explanations of our new guide Khaled I get a good impression of the importance of Karnak. It was founded for the god of gods Amon, when Luxor, or Thebe as it was called back then, become the capitol. And many pharaos built chapels, obelisks, temples, walls and statues. I talked about the megalomany of the pharaos? Well, just a small story as one more illustration: queen Hatsjepsut, who was stepmother, sister and grandmother of Tutmosis III (Jerry Springer, eat your heart out!) got an obelisk from her father and put it at this temple. But you know: mine is or will be bigger than yours, so she had two obelisks built of her own, much bigger than the old one. But the Gods punish immediately: one of them fell and broke before it was lifted…
Here by the way, we get more proof of how far ahead the egyptians were in terms of architecture. The front wall/pylones are amazingly high and to ensure their stability, they already invented and built foundations! Dig a hole 5 m deep, put layers of sand and rocks to the surface and then build the wall. Also, as the Nile flodded the temple every year, they built what is now known as the Holy Lake to function as a drainage system: all of the excess water streamed into this lake ensuring the absence of water under the constructions!
Aside from Khaled’s wonderful explanations, it seems all of the guides like to do small theater. To illustrate their stories they pick out people from the group and give them roles. I was Ramses II, Kyrah Cleopatra and Daya was queen Hatshepsut… It would make for an interesting science fictionmovie with atimemachine, but whatever!
Next on the list is Luxor temple, which is not so far from Karnak (3,5 km as I already mentioned). In front there used to be two obelisks, but as one main archeologist was De Champilion, the egyptian Mohammed Ali gave one of the obelisks to France as a gift. This obelisk is at? Tthe Place de la Concorde, right! Inside of the temple, you can see the edge of where the sand used to be about 7 meters above our heads. And on top of that in the 11th century, they built a mosque. Think they did that to nag the old religions? Nah… So now, as they excavated the rest of the temple the mosque is on kind of a plateau in the middle of the front portal of the temple… Altthough the temple is beautiful, we are becoming a little blase: another temple?! But I personally see the bright side: can you imagine how much culture they had, that we can become so blase? Exactly.
Just in the sphere of observation: I sometimes get lost in the origin of things.
In the taxi, I see an amount of old-fashioned cassette tapes on top of the dashboard and I wonder if they would still play at all… And my mind automatically goes back in time to when the artist was in the studio recording his/her masterpieces of which he/she was absolutely sure it would become a hitrecord… And maybe it was played; it was sold at least, but now this tape ends up in an egyptian cab… How I would love to see that in a condensed timeframe!
Anyway, the last on the east bank is the Luxor museum. Not very big and I think also not very big collection of artifacts (as most of it was robbed during ancient times), but the stuff that is there is very beautiful.
The rest of the day is very relaxed as we hang by the pool, have some drinks there and basically just chill.
We just decide to walk the egyptian souk and back through the back streets of Luxor. This is so amazing! Dirty, naked children running around the streets and here we are the only white people… Beautiful to see and experience and I tell the grlz how I always love to see these parts of a place as well, as this is not touristic or prepared; this is real egyptian!
At night, we walk to the riverside and take the ferry to another one of those amazing places at the Westbank; we sit on the terrace and have fantastic food, fish, beef tahjin, all kinds of vegetables; amazing night.
And when one of the girls in the group proposes to start dancing, we dance and the grlz are taught how to bellydance with the skirts we bought at the nubian village…
When we are back in the hotelroom I see an absurd commercial by the way. Although I don’t understand arabic it is a commercial against terrorism as if they want to discourage youth to become extremists! Pictur a black and white commercial where clowns with red wigs first play funny and then seem to execute a woman! This is just a plain horrormovie!
Tags: egypt
