Siwa

I've now had my first proper desert experience! Last weekend I went to Siwa with a big group of people from school, I think there was about 20 of us going. Siwa is an oasis in the Western Desert, quite close to the Libyan border. The biggest town in the Siwa Oasis is surprisingly called Siwa, and is home to about 25 000 Siwans. The Siwans have throughout history had to endure many attacks from other desert tribes, so they built their whole city within a citadel in order to better defend themselves. It must have worked quite well, as the Siwans managed to stay independent for quite long, and the area has only been part of Egypt for the last 200 years or so. The citadel, called the Shali, is almost completely abandoned now, but the remains of it still towers over the new town. If I understood correctly, "Shali" means "town" in Siwi, the mother tongue of the Siwans. The Siwans have retained their own Berber language (the Berbers are the indigenous people of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), and only speak Arabic as a second language.

9 hour bus journeys are not my favourite, especially as I get car sick easily, so I can't really do anything productive with my time, like reading or doing homework. Luckily my friend Harriet has the same problem, and 18 hours on the bus in one weekend proved to be quite a good bonding opportunity. It's not fair, though, as she's studying French and Arabic and will be leaving to go on her year abroad in France already in January, which means I will have to find a new bus buddy! Another of the girls I travelled with, Cat, will also be leaving for France soon. I think their going to France is a terribly bad idea. We should rather import some more French people to Egypt - let me know if you know anyone who might be interested!

Aaaaaaanyway, our first day in Siwa was spent recovering from the bus journey and going on a desert trip. Our guides took us on a drive in the Great Sand Sea, as the desert surrounding the oasis very poetically is called. The sand dunes themselves are beautiful - and as I mentioned in a post before, the desert landscape quite reminds me of the winter landscape in the mountains in Norway. It made me really feel like skiing, something which might seem like a strange urge in the middle of the desert. We did try sandboarding, however, but unfortunately I turned out not to be a natural talent. In my defense, I've never been on any kind of board before, be it a skateboard or a snowboard. Our guides also took us to see a petrified forest, which was very cool. The petrified wood really looks like a cross between wood and stone - which I guess is quite logical as that is pretty much what it is: wood which has fossilised and turned into stone.

We set camp around sunset and the evening was spent sitting around the camp fire chatting. At one point our guides started singing Siwi songs for us, which sounded really beautiful there in the middle of the desert. They also served us chicken cooked in an earth oven they made in the sand, so I guess we got to see some of the desert culture.

I can inform you that after dark it gets very dark in the desert - at about 7 I was sure it was nearing to midnight. It was ideal for stargazing, but not quite as ideal when trying to figure out where in the Great Sand Sea you left your belongings. It also gets rather cold this time of year - something I think many of my fellow travellers can confirm, as the romantic idea of sleeping under the stars turned into a night of more sleeplessness than sleep for them, wrapped up in blankets which weren't quite warm enough. I went to bed a bit early in order to secure space in a tent - you know how I hate being cold. And ooooh, how they all  laughed at the Norwegian when I turned up with my big luggage, but if I hadn't been so busy sleeping snuggled up in all my nice, warm clothes, I would definitely have beenthe one laughing by the end of that night! I come prepared!

Cat, Harriet and Aisha enjoying brunch our first morning in Siwa

The Great Sand Sea

Me, Cat and Harriet ready for the desert!

Salman trying to recover from his car sickness

Me in the desert!

Cat sandboarding

Waking up a bit sleepy and disoriented the next morning, I was surprised and stunned by seeing the whole desert in front of me when poking my head out of the tent. It was an amazing sight. On the way back to Siwa town, we stopped for a swim in a hot spring. I have never been to a hot spring before, and was surprised by how hot the water actually was. I guess I have a talent for letting truisms surprise me. The smell from the spring was rather rank, as Cat would say, but we still had a very refreshing morning bath. And if we all emitted a faint smell of rotten eggs for the rest of the day, then we were happily oblivious to it.

The desert in the morning

Ant by the hot spring

Me and Cat enjoying the hot water

We had a few very lazy hours lounging in a restaurant and visiting a few of the local handicraft shops, and then I went with Cat, Harriet and Tom (all from my class at SOAS) to visit the Shali. From the moment we arrived in Siwa, I was fascinated by it. From the distance, the Shali first looks like a weirdly shaped rock, and then you realise that many of these shapes look suspiciously much like houses. This is due to the fact that the houses were built entirely of mudbrick, so they have the exact same colour as the rock, and over the years the rain has made many of them halfway melt, giving it all a distorted look. I think the Shali perched on a hill overlooking the town gives the whole place such a spooky, mysterious atmosphere.Visiting it was great - we could pretty much climb all over the citadel, and Tom had a lot of fun hiding in the weirdest places in order to jump out and scare us when we were walking by.

Shop selling traditional Siwan handicraft

I love this bank!

The Shali looming above the town

Cat on top of the Shali

The last thing we did in Siwa was going to a lake to see the sunset. Driving past palms upon palms upon palms I fully realised for the first time that we were actually in an oasis. It was very beautiful and peaceful, and the perfect ending to our trip. After spending most of the time in the desert, it was nice getting to see a bit of the oasis as well.

Me in a hammock by the lake

Some of my fellow travellers

In other news: we went to a karaoke night yesterday, close to the beach out in Montazah east in the city. It was like being in a completely different world: the atmosphere was so relaxed, people were dancing and singing and having a really good time. It was not the Alexandria we see every day when trying to get through the insane traffic while hurrying to school. I don't think I'd ever imagined that my first karaoke experience would be taking part in singing Spice Girls in Egypt, though. Slightly surreal.

The karaoke crew

International Practise Your Arabic With Old People Week

Last week we had tests at school, so most of the time was spent catching up on school work. After our last test on Thursday, we went to visit a neighbour on the floor below us, a sweet old lady who always peaks out of her door when we walk past and who always tries to invite us in, but this was the first time we’ve actually been able to take her up on her invitation. Her family came around as well and we were served cookies and cakes and were chatting to them for a few hours – very nice and very good Arabic practice. I was particularly pleased as I earlier in the week felt like I couldn’t speak any Arabic at all, so it was great discovering that that is actually not the case.

I have been wanting to do some volunteer work, in order to do something meaningful with my time at the same time as meeting new people and practising my Arabic. A girl working at school put me in contact with Rotaract Cosmopolitan, one of Rotary's youth clubs in Alexandria. Saturday three girls from Cosmopolitan were gonna visit an old people's shelter, and I decided to join them.We were just sitting there talking to the old people for an hour or so, but they seemed to enjoy it, and so did I. One of the perks of being such a strange creature - that is, an Arabic student from some place no one's ever heard of far up north in the world - is that it's impossible to run out of conversation topics as people's curiosity is endless. 

Afterwards I went for lunch with the girls from Cosmopolitan, and another girl from the group also joined us. I had a very good time with them and am eager to get to know them more and take part in more of their activities. It seems to be a very diverse group: among the girls I met that day both Armenian Christians, Copts and Muslims were represented.

The next day Chiara and I went to the Alexandria National Museum, which is only five minutes away from our home. It is a pretty small museum, and in a couple of hours we saw everything. I do quite like that though - big museums stress me out a bit as I like to see everything and see it properly as well. It was definitely worth the visit! There is one floor dedicated to the Pharaonic Period, one to the Greco-Roman Period and one to Islamic and Coptic Egypt. Everything was great, and I especially found the Pharaonic section fascinating. There were so many beautiful old artifacts: incredible statues and offering tables and amazing sarcophagi. Last year Chiara did a course on hieroglyphs, so she could read some of the inscriptions, which I found really cool. Another must-see in the museum was a silver shield from the Islamic Era, it had such detailed and beautiful engravings that I could hardly believe it. Unfortunately this is the sort of place where you can't take pictures, and words really can't describe these things, so I suggest you come see for yourself!

I and Chiara outside of the museum

It has been quite a good week, but still, for some reason, I've been sad a lot. I've really been missing my mum, who died five years ago. Some days I just wake up and it hits me what her being dead actually means - it's such a hard concept to grasp. I guess the last week has been full of such days. Oh well, such is life. At least I got to share 15 years with my awesome mum.

Hurghada

So, what do you do when you've just come back from a beach holiday? You go on another beach holiday, of course! The day after we came back from Marsa Matrouh, Chiara and I took the night bus to Hurghada with the girls I lived with in the beginning: Lara, Hamida, Scarlett, Nosheen and Zubda. There were as many mosquitoes as passengers in that bus, but we reached our awesome holiday villa in Hurghada more or less in one piece.

Most of our time in Hurghada was spent going on boat trips in the Red Sea. We were tanning on the deck, enjoying the view, singing along to the cheesy music and being pretty rowdy, but it seemed the crew thought we were a nice change from the hordes of unenthusiastic Russians, and were much more attentive to us. It must be said that we did make up quite an interesting group: seven girls dressed in everything from bikinis to niqabs, representing the seven different countries of Norway, Italy, England, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan and Somalia. Even so, when we walked around Hurghada we hardly attracted any comments or stares, which at least for me is a first in Egypt. I think it’s a long time since I’ve felt that relaxed.

The aim of one of the boat trips was to look for dolphins we could swim with, but we had no such luck that day. However, on another trip we saw dolphins jumping around the boat, so we weren’t too bummed out. We also saw flying fish, which I got extremely excited about, as I’ve only seen them in comic books before. They were so cool, it really seemed as though they were flying above the water.

We stopped once on the sandy island of Giftun and snorkeled and splashed around in the water, and we stopped plenty of times by different coral reefs to snorkel. The water is so clear it’s amazing: you can see straight to the sea floor 20 meters below you. The reefs were beautiful and there was really an abundance of fish in all shapes, colours and sizes. We were in the middle of the sea, but the water was as calm as in a pool – it was absolutely unbelievable. We just played around in the sea, and had a very good time. The crew were all great swimmers, especially one guy whom we only called the Dolphin. I have never seen anyone being able to move that way in the water, to go that deep and keep his breath for so long. He would literally swim down to the sea floor on 12 meters’ depth and just sit down and chill for a while before swimming up to the surface again. Half of the time I was just as amazed by watching the Dolphin swimming as by watching the actual fish. 

To sum it up: we had some really lazy days where we just enjoyed the sea and the sun. It was perfect.

The end of our super relaxing holiday was a bit less relaxing, however. We had to leave for our bus at 7 in the morning, at which point we realized that the caretaker of the villa was not around, and had to call him and get him to hurry over to give us back our deposit. When we reached the bus station we discovered that we had left our tickets behind in the villa, and the poor caretaker had to jump in a taxi and bring them to us. We did get on the bus in time, however. The actual bus journey passed by without any major incidents, and I made friends with the woman sitting next to me. I was extremely proud of myself when I managed to explain to her what my father is doing. You see, he could have chosen a straightforward job, and worked as a teacher or lawyer or engineer or geologist or whatever, but evil as he is he decided to work in a state-owned company which guarantees loans given to foreign companies in order for them to buy Norwegian technology, tools, machines and so on. Now try saying that in Arabic. It is, by the way, an ironic fact of life that whenever someone compliments my Arabic I am unable to understand them.

But back to the unfortunate incidents of that day. When we finally got home after an 11 hour bus journey, Chiara and I had to look for a place to pay our internet bill. We had never seen or heard of this bill until we got a warning that if we didn’t pay by Saturday, our internet would be cut off. As we don’t have Egyptian bank accounts we couldn’t pay online, and were told to go to a specific shop to pay it. When we went there, however, we were told that they couldn’t help us and that we had to go to another shop to pay it, and thus it continued. We were sent from place to place, and were just about to give up when we finally found a shop where we could do it. Relieved we went home and started to make dinner, and then the electric system broke down. All the electricity was gone, there was smoke coming out of the fuse box and it smelt burnt. Luckily we got an electrician to come around after not too long, and after he replaced some of the components in the fuse box everything was working alright again. Oh well, at least I learnt the Arabic word for fuse: maftouH.

It is well known that a picture says more than a thousand words, but I've played it safe and have provided you with plenty of both. Anyway, enjoy the pics from our awesome trip!

Our holiday villa

Me and Nosheen

Lara

Scarlett

Dolphins!

Zubda, Lara, Nosheen and Scarlett

Giftun Island

Chiara

The Doplhin also makes quite a good bird

 

Look how clear the water is!

 

The Dolphin chilling on the bottom of the sea

Eel!

And to top it all off: a video!