2 days in athens

we are spending just a couple of days in greece because winter is apparently not the best time to see the country. all the islands are closed now and the ferry services are limited, so instead we decided to spend a couple of days in athens, and then head off. tomorrow we head to italy on a 21 hour ferry ride. allegedly, it is supposed to be one of those fancy cruise ferries, but we are using our eurail pass to ride it (one of the many banes of my existence), so we will probably be at the bottom of the ferry shoveling coal, or maybe human excrement, into the ocean.

here is a brief synopsis of our brief stay in athens...(all times are approximate so don't hold me to them)

Day 1

12 pm...we finally leave the hostel and venture out trying to buy ferry tix.
12:30 wander into a meat market and almost vomit while being viewed as meat by the local butchers
12:45...wander trying to find a starbucks, but it evades us
1:00 see a church and snap some pictures of it...have no idea why it is important, but snap pictures like a good tourist should. aforementioned picture is below for reader's pleasure.




1:45 find the ferry office, only to be confronted by a mega bitch who gives us no information
2:00 decide to forget her attitude and take a walk into the national gardens. see a building called the zappeon. continue taking pictures, despite cluelessness as to purpose of building. decide that it has pretty columns, so must be important.

the fancy zappeon...very pretty and greek looking (or is it roman looking?)


a sample of what the inside of the zappeopn looked like...it isn't really blue, i just like this setting on my camera.



2:40 walk around and see the olympic stadium where the 2004 olympics were held...quite cool...
3:20 walk back into the gardens and see an aviary and other animals on display. kind of cool (i especially loved the peacocks), but the smell of feces overwhelms, so we walk away.
4:00 walk to the house of parliament and see the changing of the guards (quite dull). there is a man there selling bird seed. annette buys some and proceeds to cover me with them. pigeons swarm and begin eating off of me. some attack my head; still may have a bird nest in my hair.

being harangued by pigeons



5:30 walk into an internet cafe, planning to stay for an hour, but in fact stay 2 hours fiddling around
7:45 hurriedly leave internet to go to see "revolutionary road" (amazing movie!). this is our 3rd movie in 3 days...the night before we saw the curious case of benjamin button (also quite good) and the day before that, in jordan, saw body of lies
9:00 the movie has an intermission (apparently quite common in greece) and annette has a mini temper tantrum
9:15 movie resumes
10:45 head back to hostel and prepare for bed (living on the wild side)

day 2 pretty much runs the same as day one, although we do not encounter any mean people. we hiked up a monstrous hill to go to a church. why do the catholics make their churches so high up on mountains? i climbed it, not for the holiness of god, but because i needed an urban hike. annette lit a candle and prayed (she is better than me). the walk was incredible and beautiful and there was a magnificent view from the top. from there you could see the acropolis and parthenon. afterwards, we walked around trying to find the 1st cemetary of athens, where many famous greeks are buried. we came across the ruins of olympius and saw the temple of olympian zeus. its construction began in the 6th century and it used to have 104 columns. today only 16 are left, one of which is on the floor because of a storm in the 19th century. we managed to find the cemetary, but it was closed.

this is the hill with the church on top that we climbed...

annette and me looking young and vibrant after our steep hike up


a gate/wall remaining from the temple of olympian...it's old...



the remaining 16 columns of the temple of olympian...you can make out the one that has fallen on the floor...



i saw a lot of cool stencil graffiti in athens...there were some riots here a couple of months ago because a young boy of 15 years was shot by police, apparently for no logical reason. there is a lot of anarchy symbols and angry messages spray painted on the walls. actually, i can't read greek, but i assume the messages are angry. the letters look angry to me. but here is some stencil graffiti that i can actually understand.

i don't think that this has anything to do with the riots, but i thought it was really cool...

the lost city of petra

here is a mere glimpse of petra...my pictures cannot do it justice...







getting into jordan from egypt was supposed to be pretty easy, according to the lonely planet guide book. but as we learned, nothing is easy in egypt and now we hate the lonely plnet for its vicious lies...we now refer to it as the lonely liar.

we left alexandria at 4:30 pm and were supposed to be able to catch a direct bus to aqaba, the city in jordan on the other side of the gulf of sinai. but, instead of there being a direct bus, we had to take a 4 hour bus ride to cairo. then we had to wait from 8:30 pm until 11 p.m. to catch a bus from cairo to nuweiba (the city where we were to take a ferry into jordan). the waiting was fine, but once we were on the bus, it was miserable! the bus driver sat us in the front so we would not be hassled by all the men (so nice, considering that we were the only jezebels traveling at the witching hour). but as the 6 hour trip continued, the bus got colder and colder to the point of freezing because: we were going through the desert at night, the driver had his window open the whole time, and there was absolutely no heat. i had to put my head all the way into my fleece so i would not die of hypothermia. poor annette kept muttering with her quivering blue lips, "i am so cold" over and over. that was really all she could say, and that is saying a lot, because she is a talker.

finally, we arrived at nuweiba at 5 in the morning, when it was still dark, but the ferry building did not open until 8 so we waited in a coffee shop (an outdoor one at that!). i was so cold that as i was drinking my coffee, i kept shivering so that the coffee just kept spilling all over my hands. eventually the sun came out and the building opened so we could buy our ferry tickets. when we bought the tickets, we were told that the ferry wouldn't leave until 2, so again we had another waiting period of 6 hours. at this time jenny, annette, and i were all running on empty so we were resigned to wait. when 2 o'clock finally came, we shuffled over to the ferry boat, anxious to get over to jordan and closer to showers and beds. but the universe was not on our side that day. instead of leaving at 2, the ferry did not leave until 6:30 and apparently that is a common thing. the ferry NEVER leaves on time. when we got into aqaba (jordan), we still had to take a 2 hour taxi ride to wadi musa, the town where petra is located. so what was suposed to be a fairly simple, direct bus ride, turned into a 31-hour hellish experience.

BUT...it turned out to be well worth it because petra is absolutely mindblowing. i knew a little about petra and knew that it was one of the 7 wonders, but i had no idea how expansive it would actually be. from what i knew, it was a lost city that was carved into mountains. definitely that sounded cool, but i ssumed that it would be pretty small, witha few primitive houses carved into the mountain face. but i was very wrong! it spanned over 3 miles and there is no way to see everything in one day. there are so many little paths that take you all around the city where you can see the houses they built, but also temples, a monastery, a place of high sacrifice, and they even had a treasurey! the treasurey and the monastery were not only built into the moutain, but they were actually quite ornante as well. petra was a city built thousands of years ago by romans and nabetheans and was really an amazingly organized and functioning society. it wasn't discovered until the early 1900s. that just goes to show how much of the world there is for us to discover still...

some of the houses carved into the mountains where the romans and nabetheans lived once upon a time...all of this was created without the aid of modern tools...how did they do this?!?


a bedouin man chilling out in petra. jordan has a large bedouin population and many of them were in petra selling postcards, jewellery, and such. there is also a small bedouin village within petra where some bedouins still live.


jenny walking in front of a donkey. a lot of the bedouin kids were trying to get people to climb up to the monastery on donkeys because there are over 800 steps to get there. we refrained and decided to walk up.


the mountains that were the backdrop for the city of petra.

the treasury! isn't it magnificent?



jenny standing in front of the monastery...this is what we saw after climbing the 800 steps. way better than riding a donkey!


me being astounded (and confused?) at all the detailed intricacies of petra...



jenny and me trying to take a picture, while a bedouin boy tries to convince us to ride a donkey

family in egypt

one of the many perks of going to egypt was that i was able to connect with some family that i had not seen in over 14 years. so after scuba and going to luxor in the south, we headed north to cairo and alexandria to see some of my family. most of my family is based in alexandria, but we had to make a stop in cairo so jenny and annette could see the pyramids. i have visited the pyramids before, but each time i go, the beauty and mystery of them of them still astounds me.



jenny and me at the pyramids of giza




with annette

after visitng the pyramids, we were supposed to meet my aunt nahid (my mom's sister) at the egyptian museum. i was quite nervous, seeing as how i had not seen her in 14 years, but more excited than anything else. annette, jenny, and i arrived at the museum about 20 minutes before my aunt was to come. while we were waiting, i couldn't help but to scope the crowd for signs of her. i obviously had an image of her from my childhood, but i was a tad worried that i wouldn't recognize her, or that she wouldn't recognize me. so i waited nervously for a while. and then the nervousness turned into fear, and then eventually into impatience, as time passed and my aunt still had not shown up. i kept calling her cell phone, but got no response. i did a couple of laps around the museum to check if i had just missed her, but still there as no sign of her. i decided to call her one last time before we headed in for lunch, and luckily she finally answered her phone. she sounded completely frazzled, being that she had overslept (hence her tardiness) i am my aunt's niece! i guess sleeping in is in my blood, so i will stop trying to fight it (not that i try all that hard).



my aunt nahid and me



annette, me, aunt nahid, jenny

eventually she came to the museum and we had a warm, lovely meet-up. we walked around the museum, then took a short boat ride on the nile. afterwards we went to my aunt salima's (she is really my aunt's cousin) house for dinner. there i met 2nd cousins that i had not met before, and we had an amazing dinner of all my favorite egyptian foods: stuffed peppers and cabbage, rice, zucchini cooked in tomatoes, macaroni, and chicken. i kept piling the food on my plate because i was so excited to eat it and because my family force fed me. i probably had 6 helpings of food that day and gained about 10 pounds (this was to be a theme the entire time we were with my aunt).



aunt nahid and cousin sara on one side. aunt salima, jenny, annette on the other.



jenny, annette, me with amani (also a once removed cousin?). she is the daughter of my mom's cousin, but i am not sure ho to label our relationship to one another

we stayed awake until 3 in the morning hanging out with the cousins: amani, amir, mohammed, sara, selma, and baby seif. there was a lot of looking at pictures and catching up. jenny and annette french braided hair and watched videos of my family on the computer. it was a grand old time. at around 2 a.m. i started getting ready for bed, when all of the sudden there was more food to be had. my aunt started passing out sandwiches. jenny, annette, and i were absolutely incredulous that after a 10 course meal, followed by a dessert of fruit, that we could possibly eat again. and at 2 a.m.!!! but we reluctantly ate the sandwiches at the insistence of the family.


aunt nahid, me, jenny, and my cousin (once removed, i think), amir drinking sugarcane juice





mohammed with baby sief


the next day we headed up to alexandria where my cousins were coming to meet us. the last time i was in egypt was when i was 16 and at that time my cousin serag was five, my cousin salem was 3, and my cousin sara was 8. seeing them now was a surprise. serag and salem are now 17 and 19 and are in college. sara is 22 and just finished her engineering degree and is engaged to be married. for all intents and puroses, they are grown-ups! i just couldn't believe how quickly time flew and how dramatically things change. hanging out with the cousins was awesome. they are so fun to hang around with and also so kind. they really went out of their way to show us around. i just wish that we had more time to spend with them.



here with my actual cousins, sara, serag, jenny (not a cousin), salem, and me


i also got to see my uncle nohad (my mom's brother), who is now married with 3 kids, and my great uncle mustafa. it was so invigorating to get a chance to see my family, but it made me sad that i couldn't communicate with them. i really regret my decision to stop speaking arabic when i was younger. but i am making a commitment to start classes once i get back to the states.



uncle mustafa, me, aunt nahid in the back. aunt tutu and cousin serag in the front. that is salem peeking out in the background.



my uncle nohad with one of his twin girls, nor (hich means light in arabic)



all the family together

luxor, egypt: land of temples

well, i was ready to leave hurghada, where we got scuba certified, seeing as how there is nothing to do there except dive. and after the diving is over, you just walk down the street with half-finished buildings as your scenery and get hissed at by random men. as fun as that can be, especially in the heat of the night, it was time to head out.

we took a 6 hour bus ride from hurghada and arrived to luxor in the evening. we were met on our bus by a man named mohammed ali (every man here in egypt is somehow named mohammed) and he took us to our hotel, the arabesque. we wanted to stay at another hotel, called nefertiti, but they did not have room that night, so we were resigned to be at mohammed ali's mercy. so of course we got wrestled into taking a tour with him to the east bank, where the infamous valley of the kings, valley of the queens, and valley of the workers are (which are basically necropolises). we had to sit through lots of his bad jokes and offers of egyptian whiskey (which is actually hibiscus tea, and not very good tea at that). eventually we were able to break free and have a walk around the town of luxor. we were able to see luxor temple lit up at night, which was gorgeous. on the down side, we also had to endure the hissing of various lecherous men. there is not much we can do in these situations, so we just ignore them and move along our merry way. luckily, we were able to find the most delicious falafel sandwiches ever, for just 3 pounds each, which is the equivalent of 50 cents. at this point, we were all kind of "hangry", (which means angry due to hunger, a word coined by jenny), so biting into these delectable, fried morsels was quite a magical moment.



here are a couple of shots of luxor temple at night. the lighting is quite incredible.

the next day was our tour. we went to valley of the kings first, the necropolis where many of the male pharoahs were buried. the crazy thing is that even though these tombs are over 4000 years old, new tombs are being discovered even now. our guide (and alleged egyptologist), emy told us that a new tomb had just been discovered last week. god only knows what more treasures will be discovered there. at valley of the kings, we went into 3 different tombs, one of ramses the 2nd, ramses the 9th, and some other pharoah whose name has mof course escaped me. we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but oh i wish we could have. so many of the hieroglyphics and colors were still intact and vibrant. the hieroglyphics were quite impressive and massive, but the thing that i was most taken aback by was how the colors and the pictures were able to withstand so much time. granted, they were faded a bit, but you could really get a sense of the brightness and the grandiosity of the works. temples for the pharoahs took anywhere from 10-25 years to build, so they were obviously started before the pharoahs even died. there were a lot of symbols of scarabs in the tombs. we found out that the scarabs represent resurrection because these beetle-like creatures dig a hole (tomb) for themselves before they die and upon death, another scarab pushes them into the tomb and buries them. pretty incredible, right?




here are just 2 examples of how the colors, painted 3000 years ago from plant bases, have survived. these images are from queen hatshesput's temple.

we also visited valley of the workers and the funerary temple of hatsepshut, one of the more popular female pharoahs of egypt. valley of the workers is where all of the people who were working on the pharoahs' temples lived. we saw the basic outlines of how they all lived together: basically they just all shared a large common space, compartementalized into smaller spaces by rocks and some type of roof. they also had tombs that their bodies were placed into after death, but they were obviously much smaller than the tombs at valley of the kings. typical socieconomic disparities. i guess that this is a pretty universal theme throughout history.

hatsepshut's temple was ginormous! she was seen as a maverick because she was a strong fermale figure in a time when there were really no strong female figures in power. after her 1st husband died, she chose to rule as pharaoah alone, which was apparently unheard of. so she had this huge shrine (if i can even call it that since it was so grandiose) built for her. it had 3 levels with statues, hieroglyphics, and paintings on each level. sadly, there was a lot of damage done to many of the larger statues due to erosion and apparent destruction by various occupying powers in egypt.





here are some columns and just a few of the hieroglyphics we saw within the temples. again, i am amazed at how long these have lasted.

so we had a few days of serious temple sight seeing, which really made me realize how fleeting life is. as i walked through the temples, i had images of them being built, and of the ancient egyptians walking through, dying, being buried, the sights found, excavated, robbed, and so on. and i thought about how much time had passed and how i was just but a dot on the line of time. i know that this sounds cheesy, but these thoughts have been pervading my mind. but at the same time, it made me happy to realize that during my miniscule time spent in the land of the living, i am lucky enough to get to experience so much.



me with emy, our "egyptologist". she was cool, but honestly i had a hard time understanding her english. she had a large vocabulary, but when she put words together, it was like a mismatched puzzle.



standing in front of the temples of karnak, also in luxor...

scuba diving in egypt

we arrived in egypt about a week ago. we flew into cairo, met jenny (yay!), and stayed in cairo for one night before we hopped on a bus and headed to hurgadah, where annette and i signed up for scuba diving classes. hurgadah is a town along the red sea where there is supposed to be some of the best diving in egypt. a couple of months ago annette and i decided to get scuba certified in egypt so we would have a chance to scuba dive in some other places that we were going, like australia and south africa. the class we signed up for was a 4 day open water course that would allow us to dive down to 18 meters.

the first day we had to watch a few dvds and learn the theory before going into a closed session, which basically meant that we were going to dive in shallow water close to shore before being thrown out into the treacherous open water. the theory was pretty interesting, but they teach you a lot of worst-case scenarios, like what to do if you are out of air, which is not really what you want to hear before you go into the water. but i guess that it is best to be prepared for the worst.

when it was finally time to go into the closed sessions, i was excited and felt ready, but a little of that excitement was dampened after having to put on a wet suit. i really, really, really hate wet suits. this was the first time that i had worn one and it felt like i was toothpaste being squeezed back into its bottle. not the most pleasant feeling. after stuffing myself into the wet suit, it was time to learn how to put the equipment together and check it, which is not very hard, but you have to be very thorough to avoid any potential underwater disasters. then it was time to go underwater and practice the exercises.

annette and me getting the scuba equipment ready.



my frustration at not being able to get my water shoes on

just getting out of the water...now it is time to put away and rinse all the equipment, which includes the weight belt




it is quite an unreal feeling releasing the air from the bcd (basically the vest that the oxygen tank is attached to) and sinking underwater without having to hold your breath. you breathe through the regulator and it feels like you might not be able to catch your breath, but you do and it begins to feel quite natural. while we were underwater we had to do a few exercises, like take the regulator out of our mouth and replace it, as well as flood and clear the mask. the mask clearing was hard for me because for some reason once there was water in my mask, i just couldn't blow out of my nose and lift my head up to release the water. each time i did, i would lift the mask off my face and flood the mask even more. i had to keep coming up to the surface to ask questions about it, but finally i kind of got it and was able to clear at least some of the water out of my mask.

another one of the exercises that i couldn't do was swimming in flippers so one night annette showed me how to kick my legs with flippers (sadly, it continued to be a struggle for me)


after 2 days of theory and doing the closed water exercises, we were able to go out on the boat and into the open water. this was definitely my favorite part. even though we had to do some exercises, we mostly got to dive and see all the underwater attractions. i had a hard time at first maintaining neutral buoyancy, so kept rising to the top without meaning to, but eventually i was able to hover a little and actually pay attention to the underwater world around me. the water in the red sea was startlingly blue and clear and we were in an area that had some of the most colorful coral reefs and fish. we say a monstrous sting ray, barracuda fish, brain coral, lion fish, puffer fish, needlefish, moray eels, just to name a few.


annette, me, and our diving instructor hilde after completing our 4th open water dive and becoming PADI certified


getting ready to go under the red sea

my 1st jump off our boat, named pegasus, into the open water...definitely not the model of grace, but at least i made it in

after the 4 days we both got our padi certification and that was quite a feeling of accomplishment because you feel as if you have really worked for it. whenever you watch somene scuba dive on tv it looks so easy and natural, but it really is a lot of work and quite exhausting. annette went on another dive our 5th day here in hurgadah, but i chose to sleep in. i just needed the break. but i look forward to all the diving that awaits us elsewhere.