Egypt: Yele Yela

(this was meant to be posted 3 weeks ago but....)

i went to egypt!

it was incredible and dusty and beyond fun. i went with a group of 14 family friends/family members, and being chinese there was at least 1.5 cameras per person and at 2,000 minimum pictures per camera - basically what i'm saying is that there are just too many pictures to post here. and obvs too many stories to mention.

so i'm gonna try to pick 10 (one for every day i was there) pictures to summarize my trip:

1. went to the pyramids; rode a camel
the pyramids are incredible - super epic. even more nuts is that the city of cairo really rolls right up to the brink of them. egyptians don't care too much about preserving the area around the monument - the kfc is literally a couple hundred feet from the sphinx.

the camels. they are stinky, like makes you vomit kind of stink, and much taller than you think. my camel was a jerk; there were 6 of us in a camel caravan and i was at the end - my camel kept on trying to bite the camel in front of mine's butt, which caused some camel body slamming and galloping. so not cool. but totally cool all at the same time.

2. abu simble
this was my favorite place visited. it's down south of cairo and luxor. there are 2 temples carved into the mountains by lake nassar and the insides are really elaborately decorated with tons of hieroglyphics. no one knows how, but it was built in such a way that these 4 statues in the back of the temple get sunlight only twice a year (when the sun hits the entrance in just the right angle), during the two equinoxes, coinciding with the pharoh's birthday (or something). how the eff do you figure that out?!

the other incredible thing about this temple is that it was originally built a couple thousand years ago... and a miles away/couple hundred yards lower - what is now under water. basically in the mid 50-60's the eyptians built a dam which resulting in lake nassar's water level rising. they figured it would submerge these two temples so what a team of archeologists did was take it apart and move it up to higher ground. people in the 60s were doing this. it took like 20 years! and this ish is big! looks like new tho.

3. yele yela
as you can probably tell, i retained a lot of historical information on this trip. i blame our awesome tourguide sal. he was with us the whole trip and had to deal with all the space cadet "older people" (parents) on the trip. aside from tourguiding hes also teaches at a university and is an archeologist... basically indiana jones (but not really) but he did discover a mummy that is now in the cairo museum and is going to be in a nat geo doc so that's neat. so what i'm getting at is that he had all this cool insider information to tell us and i was literally taking notes. because i am a major nerd. but now my pictures have cool captions.

oh btw yele yela is what our guide yelled out to wrangle us. it means "come on lets go"! ...or so he said.

4. cairo
cairo was an interesting city. unlike luxor and aswan, cairo was extremely urban, crowded, dirty, and polluted. At one point we were driving along this canal off the nile, and there were all these beefy dead cows (no pun intended there with the beefy, although i love puns. and beef) DECAYING in the canal. the canal is the lifeline to the city - the townspeople wash their dishes in that water, get there drinking water from the canal - about 20 yards upstream from a rotting ox there was some fool fishing. ajdlkfjad BLEH!

oh also, like any good urban city, there's a starbucks, kfc, mcdonalds, and coffee bean. and we stayed at this bougie marriott. jan was very impressed by the gym that served lemon water.

5. how bazaar, how bazaar
do you have that OMC song stuck in your head now.

the bazaars in egypt were fab, very one-jump-ahead-of-the-breadline esque. they were also insanely stressful at the same time. lots of pressure to buy trinkets, lots of pressure (from my mom) to get a good bargain. i was only allowed to spend at most $1 per item. the shop keepers are suspiciously friendly, and they all try to reel you in by relating to your nationality. it's quite impressive, they all speak at least 7 different languages (or at least know how to say hello). I got a lot of "konichiwas" "ni-haos" "aloha" and "you from singapore yes?".

those lights were my favorite.

6. mosques

so aside from the 4000 year old ancient temples, we also saw a bunch pretty mosques. this one was my favorite. The main room goes up like 7 stories into these 4 domes and there are all these wimpy little wires that hang down and hold candles. (they're lightbulbs now, but were candles at one point). then there's this huge chandelier in the middle. this mosque in particular is covered in silver plates which in theory would look super impressive, but cairo is so dirty that all the pollution makes the silver look like cement.

7. laser light shows
this was the funniest part of the trip. so worked into our sigh seeing were these light and laser shows held at the pyramids and abu simble. they set up all these chairs and then go all space mountain on the monuments. complete with planetarium voice overs. and it hasn't been updated since the 70s. some of my favorite lines:
"people fear time, but time fears the pyramids"
"the mystery of night was but a promise"

i like that top picture because it looks like the Sphinx is in that waiting for tonight jlo music video. lolz

8. pyramids
jump like an egyptian.

the pyramids were definitely cool. it's crazy how close they are to urban city - literally 30 yards from a kfc (egyptians not so great at urban planning). first, the pyramids are ginormous. each block is taller than me and there are liek 10000 levels. we decided to pay an extra $10 and go to the center of the middle/biggest pyramid - not because there's anything cool to look at inside (there's not...), but just to say we were inside a pyramid. it's actually very claustrophobic in there. you have to go through 4 minutes of down-sloping tunnel (that's 4 feet tall, without stairs just a ramp), another 3 minutes of up-sloping tunnel (that's like 3.5 feet tall, terrible, also without stairs), and then you end up in this little room that has no hieroglyphics or anything. looks like a basement. and it's hot as ish and stanky, like you can smell the bo on the guy who was there last summer. but regardless, when you're in the middle of 6million tons of sandblocks put there thousands of years ago, and no one knows how the thing youre standing in was built - still cool.


9. the parents
its not anything new that our parents are embarassing and spacey and clueless. but when we're traveling, or when they're together, they bring out the ridiculously embarassing/spacey/cluelessness in each other. it increases exponentially. highlights -

-After our tour guide would explain something to the group, at least one parent would ask exactly (literally word for word) the question he just explained.

-The moms would purrell their forks, knives, cups, and fruit.

-The dads, especially uncle johnson (re: above) would 1. take 6 minutes to take a picture and 2. get in the oddest positions to take the picture. Also, our parents could not grasp the concept of digital images being capable of sharing. thus when we took group pictures, everyone would hand our tour guide their 1+ cameras and the whole endeavor would take 3.75 minutes when it really should have been a 2 second thing.

we got lots of stares.

but no hating from me, my parents are the reason i got to go on the trip at all so just love from this end!

10. the non-parents
aside from being in one of the most exotic places in the world, the best part of the trip was being able to go with my friends - 6 other people my age, most who i've known since fetus status. really takes the pressure off of family time (although they're like my cousins - some of them literally are each other's cousins - and one is my brother...) and i love them all so much!


annnnnd that was egypt in a nutshell.