On our first day in Egypt, the only country I’ve ever been nervous to visit and a place where I’d promised to be extra cautious and take no unnecessary risks, we went to Tahrir Square. “Look over there!” said Basma and Mamdouh, big smiles on their faces. “That is the building they burned during the revolution!” We turned, still foggy with jetlag, and saw a pair of barn swallows winging their way across the square and towards the soot-covered building towering over the museum. Thus far, Egypt was not what we expected. |
Let me back up. After 2 days of flying, we arrived in Cairo in the evening, made our way to our (surprisingly swanky) airport hotel, got (surprisingly good) Thai food in the restaurant, and collapsed in to bed. After not quite enough sleep, we met up with our collaborator, Dr. Basma Sheta, a professor in the Faculty of Science in Damietta, along with her husband Mamdouh, who is a photographer. Basma and Mamdouh are the nicest people ever and are determined to show us Egyptian culture- in addition to helping us catch barn swallows, of course. We therefore spent our first day in Cairo sightseeing.
Tahrir Square itself was a little anticlimactic- if we hadn’t been seeing it on the news for the last several years, it would be just an anonymous plaza, surrounded by hotels, government offices, and the American embassy. We asked if Basma and Mamdouh had been in Cairo during the revolution, and Basma said “Oh, just once. I had to go to the government offices to get some documents signed, so, you know, I went to get the signatures, then went to the revolution, and then went home.” They both talked about the revolution that overthrew Mubarak and set Cairo on fire like it was a state fair they had stopped by on a whim.
We wandered across the historic square and into the pink-walled, neoclassical Egyptian Museum. The museum was spared during the revolution, due in part to what Mamdouh described as a human shield of protestors protecting it from looters. There was no sign of unrest today, as the palm-lined lawn was full of visiting Egyptians and a fair number of foreigners. The only signs of trouble were the numerous metal detectors we went through to get inside.
The museum is a cavernous building, filled with fabulous artifacts- including the mummy of King Ramses II and the gilded contents of King Tut’s tomb. We wandered the halls in awe, as huge stone statues of pharaohs towered overhead and millions of dollars worth of gold jewelry, artifacts, and mummies lay in haphazardly placed glass cases. We could have spent a week in the museum and not seen everything.
The museum is a cavernous building, filled with fabulous artifacts- including the mummy of King Ramses II and the gilded contents of King Tut’s tomb. We wandered the halls in awe, as huge stone statues of pharaohs towered overhead and millions of dollars worth of gold jewelry, artifacts, and mummies lay in haphazardly placed glass cases. We could have spent a week in the museum and not seen everything.
After the museum, Basma and Mamdouh took us for kushary, a traditional Egyptian dish of pasta, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions, and vinegar-y tomato sauce. It was delicious. The restaurant was named Tom and Basal, which, in addition to translating as “garlic and onions” in Arabic, is a play on the Tom and Jerry cartoons that are wildly popular in this part of the world.
We hit the road after lunch. Damietta is a 4-hour drive from Cairo, and, still bleary and tired, we spent most of the ride sleeping in the backseat. I woke up occasionally to see a dusty, desert landscape dotted with date palms and mosques sliding by out the window. Basma and Mamdouh settled us in to the Zamzam hotel, our home base in New Damietta City. The plan was for Basma to take us to our first potential netting site the next day. The jetlag prevented us from sleeping well that night, and we woke up late the next morning, still foggy but ready to find some barn swallows.
-Liz
-Liz