Must Learn Arabic

Yesterday I was very forcefully reminded of how difficult it can be not to know Arabic in Egypt. It's possible to stay in places where people will generally understand you, and to meet English-speaking friends to spend most of your time with, but you can hit the wall even when trying to perform very simple tasks.

Like catching a cab, naming a very obvious landmark, and expecting to be dropped off there.

Last night I hailed a taxi to take me to Cinema Tahrir, where I was planning to meet Dan and then walk somewhere for dinner. When I leaned in the window, I said, "Mumkin Dokki? Cinema Tahrir?" and the driver confidently repeated the words back to me and gave an affirmative nod. I was thinking to myself that this was going to be an easy, awesome ride. We were zooming along at typical Egyptian cab speed—you get used to your life flashing before your eyes—and everything was great.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear he had no earthly idea where he was going and that he was going to string me along anyway in hopes of getting a fare. As neither of us spoke the other's language, there was no way to correct the situation. We ended up ineffectually gesturing at each other and getting increasingly frustrated. When I was completely sure he was going the wrong way, I started hunting frantically for landmarks. When I saw a Metro station, I told him to let me off ("Hina! Hina!" means "Here! Here!"). He didn't want to do it at first, so I kept getting more agitated until I had to yell "BAS!" (stop!) and get the hell out of that car. Then, after some handy cell phone discussion with Dan, I hopped the metro and ended up where I was supposed to. It was a real hassle, and it's not the first time something like this has happened to me. I also have a tough time making specific requests at restaurants, reading street signs, communicating with workers on site, and haggling. It sucks.

Conclusion: I need to know Arabic yesterday. Fortunately I'll be starting it up this school year, and while it takes a long time to become comfortable with Arabic and to start picking up Egyptian colloquial—I'll start with Modern Standard Arabic, so at first I will sound like I'm simultaneously inarticulate and on the news—I think it will be well worth the effort.

The food last night was also well worth the effort. This time we went to the fancier sit-down section of Gad and stuffed ourselves with chicken schawarma. The menu offered some real surprises. You'll know it when you see it:

Old Cairo

Sure, I've already been there a million times, but I just can't quit visiting Old, i.e. Coptic, Cairo. The gorgeous churches and the Coptic Museum always call me back. It was miserably hot today, but the whole area was still crammed with tour groups and Copts just chilling out in their part of town. I got dropped off at the end of Sharia Mar Girgis, where I passed through a metal detector that is really just a formality. I avoided all the shopkeepers shouting "Welcome!" and "Come here," and skittered down the steps that lead to the churches of St. Sergius and St. Barbara. Or, as the signs say, St. Barpara.



I think B and P mixups must be common here because there really is no "P" sound in Arabic. When people talk to you about Egyptian pounds, they say "bounds." I also frequently see trucks that say either "Jumbo" or "Jumpo." Sometimes both versions are painted on the same vehicle.

Anyway, taking those stairs leads you to an alleyway studded with sites and shops. To get all the way to St. Barbara and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, you have to be carried through a shopping area by a current of tour groups and then squeezed out like toothpaste at the other end.



Visiting these churches is fascinating because they are a combination of ancient and modern, austere and kitschy. At the church of St. Sergius, a gorgeous icon of the "Angle Gabriel" was placed next to some blazing blue Christmas lights. Some of the gift shops sport glow-in-the-dark Jesus and Mary figurines, as well as Coptic Pope car fresheners (coconut scent!). St. Barbara now sports some kickin' flat screen TVs.



It's very strange to watch acts of piety and tourism occur at the same time. One dude can be snapping photos while another is scribbling a desperate plea to place with an icon or holy relic. It's also very interesting when tourists pick up local practices—some of the scraps of notebook paper I saw today were written in English.

Some things, however, are deeply traditional about the setup of Coptic churches. For example, many of them have sets of white columns, with one painted black to symbolize Judas. The way the space is divided up is also interesting—that screen with the icons lining the top and a curtain blocking the door separates the main church area from where a lot of the action happens during Coptic services. I noticed at the Hanging Church that when the doors and windows are unblocked for the liturgy, the priests know just how to stand so that their faces are picturesquely framed for the congregation's benefit. I wonder: Does the separation between holy and generally accessible space make everything feel more sacred?

Salvage Surveying

Dawn, Sean and I have spent most of our week mapping what's left of a building complex—possibly a second monastery—in the northwestern part of our site. Although the area has already been excavated, the previous team did not do a very good job of documenting the finds. All of the exciting objects are probably in a drawer somewhere, never again to see the light of day. However, we are doing what we can by shooting points along the still-visible walls. Unfortunately, the walls are now mostly globs of mud that have melted down in the sun, providing a perfect example of what happens when you don't properly backfill your site.



Although opinions differ about what should be done with archaeological sites after they have been fully excavated, our solution is to backfill. This prevents ancient buildings from falling prey to vandalism and brutal weather. It is sad to cover up what has been so carefully brought to light, but I think it's better than letting everything be battered by the elements.

There is some pretty interesting stuff in that complex, including a second church—there is another a short hike away from the manshubiya that we are currently excavating. That round shape you can make out in the sand is an apse.



Our site is huge, and there are obviously several more unexcavated buildings awaiting us beneath the sand. The churches, however, are very small, which leads me to wonder what kind of role they played in overall monastic life. What's the point of a meeting place that doesn't fit very many people? Are we dealing with two monasteries, as some people assume, or are we looking at a single community that happens to need multiple churches? It's interesting either way.

One of my favorite objects, which was unfortunately left exposed and is damaged as a result, is an ancient table. We thought about eating breakfast on it, but it's surrounded by sand and is a little uncomfortable.

Bus Fail

One of the recurring characters in my life here in Egypt is our bus, where I spend a couple of hours a day being shuttled between site and Anafora or, on the weekends, between Anafora and Cairo. Our bus driver, Zachariah, has to get up at 4:00 AM with the rest of us, run errands, and do other hellish tasks for the entire month he is in our employ. He sometimes drives too fast and smokes cigarettes on the bus while he has it to himself, but both of these vices are typical of Egyptian drivers so I don't fault him too much.

I will fault our bus for having the wimpiest horn on the planet. In Egypt, having an effective horn installed in your car is an important part of communicating with other drivers. Horns here show incredible variety, from a respectable AAAGH! AAAAAAAGH! to a melodically aggressive DO-RE-MI DO-RE-MI!!! Our horn, however, goes out with a whimper. It sounds like a dying animal, starting out strong and then fading away to nothing. I managed to capture this depressing sound on our way out of Anafora yesterday morning. (You can't see much because the sun hasn't risen yet...) Zachariah gave the horn a pretty good thump to wake up the porter, so believe me, this is as good as it gets.



Unfortunately, our bus has become extremely unreliable. On the way back from Cairo last week, it broke down in the middle of a busy highway. It was absolutely terrifying to watch Zachariah crawl under the bus to tinker with it while traffic whizzed right by. Chrysi, our epigrapher, was particularly displeased.



We sat around for a while until an alternate car could come pick us up and take us to buy groceries, and the bus was fixed and ready to go by the time we finished the shopping.

Or so we thought.

Once again, this time on the way to Cairo, our bus broke down in the middle of a busy highway and we had to be rescued by cars coming from Cairo. We were set back by about three hours. But now we're here, and really it could have been a lot worse. One of the most commonly used words in Arabic is "malesh," or "nevermind," and it definitely applied to this situation. Never mind, it's cool, inshallah we'll eventually get where we're going.

Night on the Town

Tonight I went out to dinner with Dan and Sean, my awesome new survey partner. Our survey team is now up to three people, which means that Dawn can leave us alone to work while she hikes around site looking for new features to map in. Since Sean and I spent most of today slogging through sand in the broiling sun, we got hungry. Really hungry. Fortunately for us, there's Gad. Gad is basically an Egyptian version of McDonalds that sells falafel and foul (a bean dish, pronounced "fool") sandwiches for 1.25 EGP each. We also enjoyed some schawarma. Check out that meat!



Unfortunately, I couldn't get my meat without an awkward encounter with the schawarma boy, who asked me where I was from. Our conversation went something like this:

"Where you from?"

"America."

"Washington?"

"No, Texas."

"From sexy! Hahaha!"

"No."

Gad actually has two floors. The first floor is cheap takeout, and the second is a sit down restaurant with a fancier menu. We went with the first floor extravaganza, then took our food over to one of Cairo's many outdoor cafes. They usually consist of clusters of plastic lawn furniture, where you can sit around, drink tea, and smoke shisha pipes. We were in a crowded area, so our relaxation was constantly interrupted by a stream of traveling street vendors and begging children. Among the products offered to us were watches, socks, and tissues. But we were more interested in our feast.



As we walked around past cluttered storefronts, we also saw crowds of street vendors with their wares laid out on the sidewalk. Pants, toys, t-shirts, head scarves, and even underwear were on display for streetside shoppers. Right by our cafe there was a store with a large display of Egyptian lingerie (very tame by American standards). Every so often an old man would appear at the door and eagerly scan the area for customers, which did not make me feel inclined to shop there.

It was great to sit and chill for a while, but the evening was not perfectly smooth—we were seriously overcharged for our tea and shisha because we obviously weren't Egyptians. Our waiter got very uncomfortable when Dan turned and asked another customer, in Arabic, what he was paying for the same items. Even though it was obviously bull, the cafe staff still gouged us. While it didn't actually hurt my wallet, the price hike got my hackles up. But that's just part of the game when you are a foreigner in Egypt, and even though it's no good to be a pushover, sometimes you have to suck it up and be a good sport. In the end, we still had an awesome time shooting the breeze and lazily blowing smoke into the air.



And afterwards, we couldn't resist another trip to a juice bar! I almost regretted all that food on the way home because our cabbie drove like a madman, but we made it safe and sound.

On the subject of food, last weekend we were outside of Carrefour when Dan and I took some free samples from a food cart. Eventually Dan could no longer resist and bought these donut-like treats, made of fried dough that is glazed and perfectly crisp when you first bite down on it. A "small" batch cost 7 EGP (roughly $1.40). Behold this glory:

Gold Rush

While surveying this week, I have gotten to map in all kinds of exciting things—mysterious mounds topped with potsherds, architectural features, and the locations of this year's pottery and plaster dumps. (Some artifacts, like weathered potsherds and pieces of white wall plaster, are so ubiquitous that it's pointless to keep them all. So our experts record, identify, and rebury them in set locations.) One point, however, is tied to the big excitement of the summer so far. A gold coin managed to work its way to the surface of one of the unexcavated mounds, and a worker stumbled across and reported it. We added a point to our map to mark the exact location of his find.

When precious metals are discovered at archaeological sites, there is automatically tension. Locals who hear about such finds have been known to sneak onto sites and dig holes in search of buried treasure. This habit poses special problems for surveying. Fixed points that are used to map our site are usually marked with a circle of rocks, but those circles cannot be too obvious because a curious passerby might uproot our stakes in hope of finding valuables. They would instead find a bunch of sand and inadvertently destroy our entire grid. There are horror stories about archaeologists leaving visible pegs in the ground for mapping purposes, only to find their site destroyed overnight by locals digging for something of importance. It's illegal to go treasure hunting on archaeological sites, but if you are poor and desperate, that might not be enough of a deterrence.

The coin has also excited our inspectors, who represent the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and monitor excavations in Egypt to make sure regulations are followed. Ever since the coin's discovery, we've been swamped with inspectors—precious metal finds are considered glamorous and exciting, and it's pretty clear they are hoping we discover more. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will. So far most of our finds have been "boring" by buried treasure standards. But one of our rooms is producing glorious painted plaster, and even the construction of our walls has something interesting to tell us about monastic life. I'm sad that it takes something extra sexy like solid gold to grab people's attention.

The Dune

This week, Egypt graced us with a couple of the hottest days of the year—the kind of days that require us to gulp down rehydration packets and drink extra bottles of water. I usually go through two 1.5L bottles of water during work each day, but had to go up to three.

Unfortunately, my kidneys do not know what is good for them. I gave them so much wonderful water to help protect my body from its archenemy, the sun, but what did those kidneys do? They dumped the water straight into my bladder.

As you might remember, my dig site is in the middle of nowhere with no real bathroom in sight. We had a makeshift outhouse last year, but this year we have given it up entirely in favor of a giant sand dune. Every so often, you can see archaeologists make the long trek from the monastic dwelling we are excavating to the dune, and you know exactly what they are up to. Given that one of our important survey benchmark points is on top of said sand dune, I frequently get phone calls begging me to step away from the total station and momentarily vacate the premises.

You might think that relieving yourself behind a giant sand dune is a horrible experience—I know I thought so all last year. My one attempt to use the outhouse was so horrifying that from then on I was willing to hang on until we got back to Anafora, no matter how miserable I was. Eventually the outhouse collapsed due to strong winds (good riddance), and on the second-to-last day of the season, I was finally forced to hike behind the dune. I hiked extra far to ensure complete isolation.

Unfortunately, while I may have escaped the view of my compatriots, I realized that I had walked into the distant view of farm buildings and active monasteries. This does not mean that the buildings were even remotely close to me, or that anyone would have noticed a faraway novice archaeologist about to drop trou while huddled behind a sand dune. But the paranoia was there. For good measure, a low-flying helicopter passed overhead.

But once you get over such scruples, it really isn’t so bad. It’s definitely more pleasant than using one of Anafora’s main floor bathrooms, where everyone has already thrown their used toilet paper into the trash. (Egyptian plumbing cannot handle gobs of wet toilet paper, so you can’t flush it.) The sand dune really is a more natural way to handle things. Let’s just hope I never encounter nature in the form of a horned viper primed to attack while I am most vulnerable.

Lazy Zamalek Day

Given that my ankles are still threatening to give up and detach from the rest of my body, I didn't go on a grand adventure in Cairo today. I did, however, hang out in Zamalek and eat like a starving person. The dig food at Anafora is not actually bad, but it is repetitive and extremely salty. Every meal is guaranteed to include rice, salty white cheese, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, and shredded carrots. Breakfast is tasty, but also always the same: cheese, bread, boiled eggs, yogurt, a little fruit. We are all relieved to eat "real food" on our days off in Cairo. Last night I dragged Dan to Mezza Luna, which is a cozy little western-style restaurant that serves all kinds of pasta. I was really in the mood for carbs and cheese, so dinner last night really hit the spot. Check out our pan-fried halloumi:



I have also made a few trips to the juice bar, because fruit juice is quickly becoming my favorite Cairo treat. In addition to strawberry, which is probably still my favorite, I have been enjoying banana and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Every time I see hanging fruit I am tempted to make a detour because I know something delicious is nearby. The juice guys nearest me have started to recognize me, and today the old cashier gestured for me to sit in a plastic chair when I dropped in. The younger man who prepped my banana juice in the blender saved the last few extra mouthfuls until I had drained my glass, then gave me a mini-refill. They must have sensed that it would make me a customer for life!



Later in the day, I will be meeting up with friends for lunch at another Zamalek favorite, La Bodega, which is a fancy-ish restaurant where I particularly enjoy the seafood soup. After that, we're going to take a trip to Mandarine Koueider, the dessert shop that makes my favorite ice cream of all time. I desperately hope they have the lemon flavor today because it tastes so fresh.

There is a lot to eat around here, but I would be lying if I called this weekend an exotic Cairo experience. Zamalek, the island we stay on, is packed with tourists and expats. Many of the shops and restaurants cater to westerners, and you are more likely to find people who speak enough English to figure out what you need and help you to get it. I should also note that while the food here is inexpensive for me thanks to favorable exchange rates, it is grossly expensive for your average Cairo resident. On the bus back from site this week, my friend Mohammed commented that 33 EGP can feed ten people a reasonably good meal, but that's what I dropped on my own dinner last night. The restaurants on Zamalek are largely populated by foreign visitors and very wealthy Egyptians. If you want a more "authentic" experience, go for the street food. Kushari and treats from the juice bar are more normal for Cairo and the prices are relatively uniform throughout the city.

That said, I am really enjoying my day off. It's turned into a real day of rest, and by 4:00 AM tomorrow I'll be dragging myself out of bed and preparing for another long, hot desert day.

Maybe I also want McDonald's on the way home to Anafora.

Woman vs. Desert

When I agreed to be the assistant surveyor this year, I knew it was going to be physically demanding—my afternoon poling sessions with Dawn, my now-boss, wore me out like nothing else last year. But after a week of hiking back and forth across our site in the blazing sun, I can officially say I have never felt so tired in my life. There are perks, though. Allegedly a tight pair of pants will fit just fine after two weeks of this stuff.

At the beginning of every day, Dawn and I set up the total station, which is a machine that shoots lasers at a prism (which is fixed to the top of a pole) and records the location of the point where the prism is situated. Because our site is mapped onto a grid that is based on a handful of fixed points, you have to set up the total station directly above one of the known points, then take a reading at a second known point, before new points can be mapped in accurately. These fixed points basically span the central part of our site, so getting from one of them to another can involve lots of hiking.



Setting up the total station is a real challenge because to ensure accuracy, it must be leveled directly above the fixed point from which you would like to determine new points. Our machine has a red laser beam that can be pointed at the ground to show how far off we are. Fixed points at the site are marked by metal rings set into the ground, some of which are set in concrete. The first step in preparing the total station is to situate the tripod as directly above a fixed point as possible, while also keeping the tripod level. There is a hole to look through, and I drop three pebbles from directly below the hole to see where they land. If they all land off to the side, I adjust the tripod. If I hear three satisfying thunks of rock hitting metal ring, I grab the actual machine and screw it onto the platform.

After that, the total station must be completely leveled to ensure accuracy. Level has to be checked repeatedly during the day, because wind, a careless bump into the tripod, or even the malevolent rays of the sun can throw everything off. This morning we had to re-do our setup because the temperature went up so quickly that it knocked the station out of whack. Apparently there are machines out there that can automatically level themselves and find fixed points without human intervention, but they cost about $50k.

Since we won't be spending that kind of money anytime soon, I have had to practice setting up the station every day after we come back from site. Anafora has a sandy "garden" area filled with slightly disturbing papier maché animals, where I have been setting up the machine and then taking it back down, much to the amusement of both the Egyptian church groups that come through and my fellow archaeologists. Sometimes I look up to see groups of girls (at Anafora on some kind of retreat) sitting on the front porch and staring at me, or catch my friends from the dig giving me knowing looks because setting up the total station is notoriously frustrating. Hanging out in a giant Noah's ark setup makes my work more entertaining, however. Check out this elephant made of cement bags! I reached out to touch it gently, which caused a couple of panicked birds to come flying out. I have not repeated my mistake.



Dawn's and my current project is topographical mapping of our site, which means that one of us stays at the total station while the other "poles," or holds the prism level so that the person at the total station can aim at it—there are crosshairs and everything—and shoot the point. I confess I have allowed myself to utter the occasional "pew! pew!" when about to fire a laser beam at the prism. The person with the pole walks in lines across the desert, stopping every five meters, to create a kind of grid pattern across the sand. Our toe lines from a few days ago are still partially visible, and it's somewhat satisfying to look over all of that work! Unfortunately, our walkie talkies are dead, so we have had to communicate over long distances with a combination of arm waving and text messages. I am so glad I bought that cell phone last weekend!

Speaking of Egyptian cell phones, they all seem to come with a particularly useful feature—a flashlight. We have begun to suspect that this is a logical response to frequent power outages, because the power has already gone out multiple times this week!

There Be Monsters

For the first day of excavation, Dan and I were allowed to sleep a couple hours past 4:00 AM—for a price. We were assigned the task of taking the shelves and school supplies out of our storage shed and setting up the dig workroom, which is where we all do paperwork and occasionally watch DVDs. You would think this is an easy task that involves grabbing a couple of boxes, hauling them up the stairs, and tossing out the contents in a reasonably orderly manner. Unfortunately, you didn't take the rats into account.

Every summer, rats get into the storage shed and chew through everything, and I mean everything. This year we lost a bunch of thermoses and found nests made of shredded colored pencils. I guess they do say it is healthy to have lots of color in your diet. Seriously though, after gnawing on all that plastic, even if it's just to file down their teeth, how do the rats survive? Aside from the chewing, the rats crap all over everything, meaning that whatever you touch is bound to be contaminated. One chest, the one that contained all of our leftover tracing paper, was filled with bugs, which spilled out onto the floor when we opened it. At one point I moved a box and suddenly mice were skittering everywhere, causing us to beat a hasty retreat. The room was also filled with mosquitoes and ominous-looking spiders with long legs and knees well above the rest of their bodies. We eventually emptied out the storage room and got everything up to the third floor, which is where our team is living at Anafora this year. We were gross afterwards:



Before we could set up the office, we had to decontaminate everything, especially the plastic shelves. Some of them were covered in teeth marks and no longer salvageable, but the rest were washed in buckets filled with water and disinfectant. It was nasty to watch all of the now-murky water being slowly sucked down the drain. After we set the shelves out to dry on the balcony, our archaeobotanist, Menna, helped out by putting them together.



Ultimately, though, we ended up with a nice workspace where we will be spending many hours this summer, so I'm glad we did it. And hey, I got to sleep for three extra hours and then spend most of the day inside!

Hanging Church

Despite the protests of our jet-lagged bodies, Dan, Agnes and I all dragged ourselves out of bed this morning and made our way to Coptic mass at the Hanging Church. As Dan said afterward, "There's nothing like a three hour liturgy to start off your day." Although Sunday is the big day in America, Friday is the traditional day off in Egypt, and thus the day for major religious services. When we arrived, the man at the door initially waved us off because he didn't think we would actually want to go to mass, but we convinced him to let us in.

There were only a few people in the pews when we arrived, with a small group of men chanting up front. I don't know Arabic, but I could tell they were going through their lines as quickly as they could—so would you if you were performing a three hour service! Everybody who was helping with mass got a chance to say a part, even a little boy, but there were only about two microphones so they had to awkwardly pass them back and forth. After this prelude, the chanting group donned these white liturgical robes decorated with gold and crimson crosses and sashes. The best part about these was that the collars of the men's dress shirts, inevitably in clashing patterns and colors, were poking out! Dan initially sat with Agnes and me but one of the priests scolded him and sat him on the men's side of the church. Oops. I was happiest when they recited the Coptic sections, since I could pick out some words.

At first I thought there would not be a very big crowd, but during the first hour congregants started to stream in, men on the left and women with small children on the right. It's hard to make kids sit still for a 30 minute church service, much less a three hour one, so there were lots of kids shuttling back and forth between their parents and crawling all over the place, much to their elders' chagrin. One little girl found Agnes and me so interesting that she marched right over during the service and held out her hand for us to shake. Later she brought over a loaf of bread and tore off pieces for us. People were in general very friendly—at one point people were all formally supposed to greet each other as part of the service, and the women around Agnes and me turned to greet us as well.

The women all covered their heads with stylish scarves in a variety of styles. Some were lacy, some sheer, but my favorites were white with images of saints on the back. I spent a good portion of mass seeing which scarf images I could identify. Mary was extremely popular, but I also saw Jesus, Paul the Hermit, Pope Shenouda III, and a fancy embroidered St. George. The clothing styles were all over the place—some people wore jeans, some dresses, and some of the guys wore clothes so tight they looked like they were going to a Jersey Shore casting call. But the mood was serious, and that headwear was fantastic!

Relics and icons are also clearly important and are incorporated into the service. At one point there was a procession around the church with incense (LOTS of it) and men carrying a cross and various images of Jesus. As the line of icons passed by, churchgoers would touch the images and then kiss their hands. One of the women who sat next to us during the service wrote prayers in Arabic on scraps of paper and inserted them into the relic boxes along the walls. I hope she gets what she was asking for.

Towards the end of the mass, a very irritating thing happened. A tour group came barreling right in and started taking pictures of the service like everyone there was part of a zoo exhibit. Even worse, despite the "no flash" signs hung up all over the place, there were flashing lights coming from every direction. Not cool. There was a redeeming moment, however: One of our pew neighbors had left to take care of her kid for a second, and a tourist had hopped into her place. She marched back over, glared at the tourist woman until she slunk away, then plopped down next to us with a sigh of satisfaction.

After we stepped blinking into the light, surrounded by incense haze, we went to have a nice lunch at the St. George cafe. I hadn't realized how intense the incense was at mass until I coughed twenty minutes later and tasted incense! We also went into the St. George chapel, which received plenty of visitors today based on the lit candles inside.



The icons were also getting a lot of attention. Check out the money slipped under the glass at Archangel Michael's feet:



Now I am relaxing at the Anglican guest house on Zamalek until it comes time for us to drive out to Anafora. You'll hear more from me in a week!

Back in Cairo!

I am very happy to say that Dan and I arrived in Egypt safely, as did my new boss and her family (she is the surveyor, and I am the assistant surveyor). Everything about our trip was easy and smooth—we even found our driver quickly! He was carrying a sign for "McCormack famillig, Daviddon and Schriever." But I should have known it was too good to be true. He dropped us off about a block away from where we were actually staying, then abandoned us, which led to great confusion for all since we didn't know exactly where we were going. Fortunately a very kind bilingual Fulbright scholar happened along to help us, and we eventually got to the right place.

Dan has already proven himself to be an invaluable travel buddy, since his Arabic is pretty good and he knew where to acquire my number one most wanted item: a cheap Egyptian cell phone. I have found it nearly impossible to find people, hire drivers, or make detailed plans without one. We started out at the Vodafone store, where the cheapest phone, before SIM card and minutes, was 899 EGP. Oh hell no. I didn't know what to do, but Dan did. We crossed the street to these little stores that turned out to be tech geek paradise (and also paradise for those who want cheap designer perfumes). In addition to iPods and Playstation 2 equipment, they sold boring old Nokia phones that were exactly what I wanted. I ended up getting phone, SIM card, and initial minutes for 210 EGP. We did have to wait forever for them to set the phone up, because the first SIM card they tried wouldn't work right. But hey, things run slower on Egyptian time. Moral of the story: Dan is a pro traveler who has it all together right down to the "everything bag." (I am not permitted to call it a purse.)



After the phone adventure, Dan took me to Doqqi, where he lived during his year in Cairo. We ate at a Yemeni restaurant, creatively named Yamany, that is owned by his former landlord. We ended up with a seriously delicious spread:



We ripped up the giant bread and ate with our hands like savages, which was deeply satisfying. I would do this again anytime.



And the night got even better when we went for strawberry juice. How did I not discover these juice places before? Apparently, any little shop with large bags of fruit dangling from the overhang is likely to sell delicious sugar cane and strawberry juice. I even got to see one of the workers shoving long sugar cane stalks into a juicing machine. Sugar cane juice is only 1 EGP, or about 20 cents. But the strawberry juice, at 3 EGP a pop, really takes the cake. It is basically liquefied strawberries with a little added sugar, and it tastes delicious. Now, however, it's after 11:00 and I should go to bed. We're going to try to see a Coptic mass in the morning!

Fired Up, Ready To Go

My packing efforts have been successful! Unless Delta was lying about its carry on measurement guidelines, I won't have to check anything. And even if I am forced to gate check my larger backpack, at least I will be able to personally ensure that my stuff made it onto the plane. However, just as I predicted, I'll be carrying slightly heavier cargo than expected—my advisor emailed Dan and me a request to bring copies of his Arabic/English edition of the Life of John the Little as gifts for our modern day monk friends! I don't mind though, because I know they'll love it. One of the coolest things about working on a dig like mine is that the results actually matter to a whole community of people who care about their distinctive Christian heritage.



In case you forgot, John the Little (previously known as John the Dwarf, but we have better manners now) is the monk after whom we suspect the monastery we are excavating is named. It would make everyone's day if we found rock solid evidence to back that up, such as a wall inscription saying "Hi, this is the monastery of John the Little." But I guess that would take some of the fun out of it. In the Apophthegmata Patrum, or sayings of the desert fathers, there are some pretty good stories about him:

It was said of Abba John the Dwarf that he withdrew and lived in the desert at Scetis with an old man of Thebes. His abba, taking a piece of dry wood, planted it and said to him, "Water it every day with a bottle of water, until it bears fruit." Now the water was so far away that he had to leave in the evening and return the following morning. At the end of three years the wood came to life and bore fruit. Then the old man took some of the fruit and carried it to the church saying to the brethren, "Take and eat the fruit of obedience."

Of course, J the L also reminds us that monastic life is not as austere as it ought to be: "He who gorges himself and talks with a boy has already in his thought committed fornication with him."

I've been excited about this trip all year, but now that I'm on the cusp of leaving it is bittersweet. By tomorrow I'll be having a great adventure, but I also know there are great things to come home to. My apartment is clean and ready to welcome me back, and I've spent the last couple of nights hanging out with my amazing friends. We're all going our separate ways for summer, but we'll be reunited in the fall.