Audaces Fortuna Iuvat

Conversations you can only have in Oxford (1)

2012-02-11T04:04:00.001-08:00

Although names have been changed, I literally had this conversation last week.

Adam (English man living in Oxford who is an Oxford Graduate): You know I know a lot of Australians, and it seems to me that all of their fathers are surgeons who own farms on the side... that must be the done thing over there. Does your dad own a farm?

Me (Australian living in Oxford who is an Oxford Graduate): No.

Adam: Oh, what does your dad do?

Me: He's a roofer.

Adam: Oh, so are you like the black sheep in the family with a degree and all?

Me: No. Everyone in my family has a degree, except my sister who is a professional gymnastics instructor.

Adam: Oh.

Only in Oxford could (a) 90% of the Australians you meet have fathers who are surgeons and also own a farm on the side (b) someone assume that because your dad is a roofer you are the only person in your family who has gone to university.

Where do books end up: The Girl with the Glass Feet

2012-01-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading “The Girl with the Glass Feet” by Ali Shaw, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, but which I only finally forced myself to read when I saw that his second book had just been published. Its often things like this – and more often the film version being released – which finally pushes me to get my hands on a copy.

Now that I have finished the book I have to decide what to do with the physical (now quite water damaged) copy, which I got on sale for £7 at Blackwells: will I keep it on my bookshelf, will I pass it on to someone else to read, or will I give it to a charity store?

These three destinies for a book are also an unintentional rating system. If I keep a book, it means that I loved it, and I either plan on reading it again, or I want to continue owning it so that it is part of ‘who I am’. If I pass the book on to someone else (rather than just recommending that they read it), it means that I enjoyed it and can see its value, but that it didn’t really ‘speak to me’. If I give it to a charity shop, then I didn’t really enjoy it… I’m sorry not to give more selflessly to charity but it does ‘begin at home’ as they say.

I believe I will post this book to my mother in Australia. The reason I will give it to her is that she loves fantasy novels, and she only buys secondhand books (possibly another reason I should give more generously to charity) so she is unlikely to have already read it.

So why won’t I keep the book? Well, I’ve read a handful of reviews of the books now that I’ve finished, and they are all full of praise, such as the review in the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/books/review/Romm-t.html. I feel that all these reviews are ‘correct’, the book is brilliantly written, the metaphors were deeply philosophical, and the fairytale references witty. If I was grading this, I would certainly give it an A*. But I’m not grading it, and the fact of the matter is that the characters just didn’t speak to me. The NY Times suggests that the book questions why people don’t live their lives bravely, and although I won’t claim to live every moment of my life like I have nothing to fear, the characters in the book are all so timid that they fail to induce my empathy. The review also suggests that each new character contributed their secrets to help unravel the books underlying mystery – why people live their lives the way that they do – but I don’t think that the book deals adequately with its less esoteric surface mystery, why Ida is turning to glass. This is never explained, and neither are any of the mysterious things that live in this world. I think that dealing with these mysteries in parallel to the deeper philosophical mystery of the story would have made it a bit more gripping.

Still, I will be passing this book to my mother, so I think it is a fine work well worthy of praise and recommendation… I just won’t be keeping it on my bookshelf.

Movies my husband made me watch: Green Lantern

2012-01-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

I got quite excited when the voice over began (Geoffrey Rush is usually a good omen), but this film has a lot of problems. Rather than being a problem per se, it is a fact that Ryan Reynolds is Tom Cruise in Top Gear. Again, not really a problem, but there are quite a few gratuitous body shots of Reynolds... though I suppose we should appreciate the fact that both men and women are objectified in this way these days. In actual problems, it seems a little unfair that Reynolds’ character gets a lot of ‘knowledge’ downloaded straight into his brain and doesn’t have to work for it. It seems a bit inexplicable that such ‘advanced species’ as the other lanterns would be so prejudice against Reynolds’ character from the get go, you would think he would be a bit more open minded and see the potential in Reynolds character, which obviously reveals itself by the end. The catastrophe with the damsel in distress that turned Reynolds from a quitter after five minutes of lantern training into a hero was lame. The mask is pathetic for hiding his secret identity; though at least they acknowledge that.

Overall I thought the cast were good. Ryan Reynolds exudes charisma so even at the start of the film when he’s playing a bit of a jerk, you’re on his side. I thought Blake Lively was actually quite good. I know a lot of people don’t give her much credit due to her Gossip Girl and similar credits, but ever since I saw her in The Town with Ben Affleck I’ve had a bit more respect for her, and I think she held her own here. She’s charismatic enough to be believable as the love interest of the hero adnf the obsession of the villain. Peter Sarsgaard (or should I say a very skinny Sarsgaard) is always an excellent piece in an ensemble cast and at the start of the film is so pathetic its palpable. Add in Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Tim Robbins, Temura Robinson (Jango Fett!!) and Geoffrey Rush (if only he had been on the screen!) and the film had credibility. I just wish the script had lived up to it.

Now I’m looking forward to when Reynolds has his go at Deadpool, and hoping that it’s not exactly the same and this has ruined it.

By the power of Greyskull!

Password Clean Up

2012-01-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

Since its January, like so many people I’m ‘renewing’ things, like budgets, eating plans, goals, etc. One thing I decided to renew this year was all my passwords. When I first moved to the UK five years ago I started with two really good passwords that I used for everything. Every time I signed up for something new I used one of these passwords, or a variation if they didn’t take unusual symbols, or if I thought the site was less secure and didn’t want to use the same password as for another site, or was forced to change my password on a regular basis and couldn’t use one that I used the last four times (I really hate that!). This meant that over the years I developed a large number of different, but very similar passwords. This isn’t great firstly because I often find it difficult to remember which variation I used on a certain site, and also secondly because there are marked links between the passwords I use on my bank, my work email, my love film and my facebook, leaving me infinitely hackable.

So yesterday I decided to change all my passwords. The first think I did was make a list of everywhere I have passwords: the bank, work, google, facebook, twitter, skype, amazon, audible, ebay, paypal... and the list goes on. I then grouped them all into categories: (1) personal work stuff, (2) shared work stuff, (3) bank accounts, (4) places where I used my bank account details, (5) accounts connected to google (which is a lot of things these days: email, calendar, reader, blog, google+), (6) other social media stuff including facebook, twitter, skype and academia.edu, and (7) shared passwords, such as for the love film account I share with my husband.

Having done this I needed a scheme to make up appropriate passwords. I picked a favourite movie, tv show or book - though one that was obscure enough that not everyone would be familiar with it - and ranked the characters from 1-7 to match my various categories. I then came up with a formula for altering the characters’ names, for example I could replace the vowels A E I O U with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5, have A-K letters as capitals and L-Z letters in lower case, and then use the symbol belonging to the rank of the password 1-7 as a character to provide a symbol element, which could just be used as the number on the few sites where symbols aren’t allowed.

Having devised a system I went through my list of sites changing all the passwords one at a time... a rather time consuming task when for many of the sites I had just saved the password on my computer and didn’t really remember what it was, but you often need to enter your previous password for the site to update it, so there was a lot of trial and error and getting reminders sent out. Then of course with my android phone synced to many of my accounts I had to update all my accounts on there, so overall the whole process took a good two hours.

Nevertheless I think it was worth it as now I can be confident that all my personal online data is at least more secure than it was before, and I have a system for knowing which password I will have used rather than having to stare at the screen blankly like I have so many times before. I have broken the cardinal rule and have written down hints for myself for my passwords, since 7 new passwords are a lot to remember, but naturally I’ll eat the piece of paper once I’m a bit more familiar with them!

Films my husband made me watch: The Lincoln Lawyer

2012-01-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

My usual apprehension when I sit down to watch a dvd with my husband was augmented by the previews, all for horror films: The New Daughter (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0951335/), Scream 4 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1262416/) and Blood Creek (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450336/). Add the dubious acting credentials of Matthew McConaughey and Ryan Phillippe and my expectations were low.

With such low expectations I was - as I often am - pleasantly surprised. The action was fast paced - though I think most movies should be closer to an hour and a half than two hours - and McConaughey carried the film on his shoulders (with little help from Ryan Phillippe) even through some inconsistencies in his character's writing.

One thing that did annoy me was the unhealthy and unbelievable relationship between McConaughey's character and his ex-wife (how many people really have that kind of relationship with their divorced partners).

I was also disappointed when William H. Macy's character was killed off, since he's always a quality addition to an ensemble cast.

I was pleased to see a brief cameo from Angela from Bones... I love seeing a favored TV star show up briefly in films!

Although I was pleasantly surprised, I still don't know if I'm looking forward to the next few in the series that are likely to be made from Michael Connelly's books.

The Politics of Gifts

2012-01-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

For birthdays and Christmas my husband's godmother not only selects but purchases the gifts she would like to receive from all the members of my husband's family, which my husband's mother then distributes to the individuals to wrap and collects the money.

I understand and approve of telling people what you would like, better that than close friends and family wasting money on presents that will be thrown out as soon as is polite, but I don't think that all gifts should be given in this way as part of gift giving is thinking hard about the person and what they would like, and trying to find them something they will enjoy but they would never buy themselves.

Feeling this way, on the last two occasions I have convinced my husband - since we now give gifts together - that we should try and find her something else that we select to accompany her present to show that some thought went into it. He agreed, but neither case has been very successful. When we gave her a birthday present in November, she actually asked upon opening the present if we had kept the receipt. I have just today received a text from her thanking us for the Christmas present 'especially the one she had selected' with no comment on the other item.

I might have taken this second rebuff better if the same policy of gift exchange worked the other way. I am always expected to show suitable gratitude for the presents I receive - complete with thank you card... this appears to be a tradition within my husband's family - even though I have never actually received anything I particularly liked. This year I received a barbie pink sweater, though I haven't worn a single pink thing since I was 10!

I am nevertheless grateful for these gifts and pleased that my husband's family, and by extension my family, have gone out of their way to get me something, but I'm a bit miffed that I do not receive the same standard of gratitude in return. I'm not sure if this will lead me to continue to attempt to get her thoughtful gifts until we finally strike gold, or if I will give up and just hand over some cash each year for a pre selected and bought present... only time will tell.

Welcome 2012

2012-01-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve struggled over the last few days to decide what I should make as my new year resolutions this year. There are a lot of things that I would like to achieve this year: I want to apply for (and obviously get!) a promotion at work that is coming up; I would like to manage to pay off the last vestige of my student debt; I’d like to brush up on my Italian which I haven’t used in about 3 years; I would like to finish translating a book written by my grandmother from Polish into English – a project that has similarly been on the back burner for a few years; like most women I wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds; and I took up capoeira about 6 months ago and I would like to improve greatly.

It would be a bit ridiculous (and no doubt counter-productive) to try and make a series of resolutions linked to all these individual goals in the hopes that they will in some way help me meet them all throughout the year. However, I also don’t want to just settle for one thing, as I love new year and the idea of new beginnings, starting a year with no terrible mistakes in it yet (a la Anne of Green Gables – also explaining why I actually love Mondays); though the lack of mistakes depends on the state of the new year celebrations.

Eventually I came up with the only resolution I could make, simply to take control of the year, to be personally responsible for ensuring that it is successful, to take personal responsibility for the success of my life generally rather than sailing along and leaving anything to chance. What this will involve is complicated... self control (in order to eat a bit less, spend a bit less, and dedicate a bit more time working on my projects) and diligence (again to focus on what it is that I want and make sure all my actions are steps towards those goals.

Naturally I will have to pinpoint individual goals to work to throughout the year, but I hope that this resolution will define my year, and win or lose, I will have done everything in my power to make 2012 the best year yet.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Review

2011-12-27T02:48:00.000-08:00

I saw the new American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night, and overall I enjoyed it, though I don’t know how much I would have enjoyed it if I hadn’t already read the book as they left a lot unexplained; they didn’t even explain the pressed flowers that they used to introduce the film! Nevertheless I thought it was acted well, and evoked a stunning atmosphere.

At one point near the end of the film I turned to the person next to me and said – they’ve changed the ending! It usually annoys me when key elements of a book's story are changed for a movie, but it worked in the case to streamline the story without losing any of its power.

Christmas Card Etiquette

2011-12-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

On Christmas eve we had a dozen friends over for a big festive dinner, and all in all it was a fantastic evening. Among the party was a girl who was more of an acquaintance than a friend of mine, but we invited her as she lives around the corner, and is the on and off girlfriend of another friend. Before leaving at the end of the night she distributed to each of us a Christmas card. Later, at the end of the evening my husband, myself and two close friends were left, and one of our friends held up the card and read it out 'to X from X' with no additional message beyond the 'Merry Christmas' printed in the card. He then flicked the card towards the bin and commented that it was a complete waste of time and a pathetic attempt to say 'please be my friend'. Although I think his reaction may have been a bit harsh, though no harsher than some of the things I said at the stage of our rather long drinking session, I do agree that the card was a complete waste of time.

I don't give out many cards myself, I usually send my more geographically distant friends and relatives proper emails during the festive season, and I don't bother to send the people I will be seeing cards as I will simply speak them, and likely give them a gift to express my sentiment. I am required to give certain members of my husband's family cards each Christmas and birthday (not to mention other events like moving house, getting a new job, anniversaries etc., they do a lot of cards) as they are much more traditional than my own family, and I have never given such a card without a message, even if it is only a sentence because I can't think of anything else to say.

Perhaps my feeling towards the need to have a message in a card is influenced by the fact that I always throw cards out after receiving and reading them, and do not keep and display them like many people do, and so the message is the most important element of the card rather than the image (it would have to be a very special message or image for my to actually keep the card - though I do have a stash of a dozen or so collected over the years).

If the card doesn't have a message it does feel to me like just participating in a social conformity experiment of meaningless exchange. Also, if someone can't think of something to put in the card, they reflect the absence of a relationship between themselves and the recipient, and the emptiness of the gesture.

Dado Disaster

2011-12-22T07:38:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago my husband and I moved into our first home. The woman who lived there before looked after it really well and the place looked really good; if a little 'old lady'. The characteristics that made it seem this way were firstly dado rail (picture rail at waist height) throughout the entire house with cream paint on top and an olive on the bottom, and a gas fire with floral tiles.

The first thing we did on receiving the keys was start to demolish these elements, and I say demolish, as within an hour of owning the house I was already worried that we had broken it. The gas fire stood in front of a small chimney shoot, so a massive whole in the wall, and the wood look floor in the living room did not extend under the fire place base, so post removal we were left looking at a massive hole in the wall and a square of concrete slab on the floor. Not deterred my husband called a mate who works in building and he managed to fill and plaster the hole in a few days, though we still haven't got around to trying to match the flooring to fill the 1ft by 2ft gap in the floor!

Meanwhile, we attacked the dado rail, which was simply glued onto the wall and had to be levered off. This clearly took a lot of paint and plaster with it, creating cracks and gaps that needed filling. Fortunately (or not as the case may be) my husband had the first week after our move off work and he and his father set to work filling the gaps on the wall and sanding it down. I set to work painting these walls once they were done.

I've actually found painting quite relaxing and fun, but certainly not rewarding. Firstly we are painting all the walls (except the feature wall which is 'blue-gravel' and looks quite good) an extremely light cream, so painting over the olive green on the bottom half has required 4 coats. But worse than that, the walls just aren't flat: there is an extremely noticeable 'ex-dado-rail' line around all the walls, and something else we didn't noticed when we bought the house, the previous owner had a lot of pictures handing, meaning a lot of holes that also needed filling.

I'm on my 5th coat on the largest wall in the living room, and although the colour is even, I feel I still need to keep going to try and 'paint over' this evil problem... unfortunately I think no number of coats will really help.

Lesson to self, never glue anything, especially dado rail, to the walls.

Christenings

2011-12-21T05:37:00.001-08:00

Earlier in the year my sister-in-law had her new baby christened. I was surprised by this since I have known my husband and his family for 5 years and none of them have ever gone to church except for weddings, funerals, and now christenings. I was even more surprised when my husband was asked – and accepted – to be a godfather. Not only does my husband not attend church, but he doesn’t really have any particular opinion on religious matters at all, very much ‘being a Christian’ by birth but not actually knowing anything about the religion at all. The following conversation ensued:

Me: I'm surprised you agreed to be a godfather since you're not very religious yourself, so your not exactly the ideal candidate to lead your niece on her journey towards god and faith.

Husband: That doesn't matter, god parents aren't about that anymore, its just makes someone responsible for looking after your kids if you die.

Me: I think that's actually the type of thing you put in your will.

Husband: You know what I mean, it just expands the person's family.

Me: Well then you're still a terrible choice since you're already her family, you're her uncle.

Husband: Oh god, you're such a bitch sometimes.

Me: I believe Christians aren't meant to take the lord's name in vain.

Husband: For fuck's sake, what are you going to be like when we have our own children christened?

Me: Well we're not going to have our children christened.

Husband: Of course we are, everyone expects it.

Me: Do I look like I give a fuck what everyone expects. You know I was never christened because my parents wanted me to make up my own mind about religion when I was old enough, and not choose for me arbitrarily... naturally I feel the same way, and its not as though you're particularly religious so why is it such a big deal.

Husband: Don't be a bitch, we have to do it.

Me: I'm not being a bitch, I'm just stating the facts.

Husband: Whine, whine whine (a certain tone of voice I've learned to tune out).

Me: Yeah OK whatever, we can talk about this in the future... we don't even have kids.

My parents - both of whom are Christians who, although they don’t attend church, study the bible and have personal faith – wanted my faith to be my own decision. Today of their three children, one of us has subsequently been christened while myself and my brother have not; not an unexpected outcome since according to the most recent census 1 in 5 Australians do not have a religion. I doubt the census figures would be the same in the UK if my husband's family is anything to go by... responding 'Christian' rather than 'no religion'.

Luckily I know that having our children christened is not something my husband can do behind my back like buying a 60 inch television.

I really think parents should think about what christening means and what kind of example about following the heard and the importance of belief that it would set for the child in question to do it arbitrarily rather than with genuine belief

Michaelmas Bops

2010-10-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

It is currently 0th week of Michaelmas (1st) term in Oxford, the week when all the freshers (first years) arrive. As I watch the action as a fairly uninvolved observer I find myself reflecting on my own freshers week when I arrived for my first year of a masters a few years ago.

In this first week freshers are forced to sit through boring course inductions teaching them how to use the library and 'internet resources'. Although these long talks may possibly hold some interest for undergrads who have little research experience, for graduates these courses seem pointless - and at this stage everyone is more interested in the social inductions that are taking place in college.

Oxford is a collegiate university - a foreign concept to anyone who did their undergraduate degree in Australia. Undergraduates apply to a particular college and the college organises their academic studies in conjunction which the subject departments. Graduates apply to the university and study through departments, and join colleges for accomodation, and for a sense of belonging similar to the houses at Hogwarts. While the departments are busy conducting academic inductions, the student bodies organise copious social events, 90% of which revolve around drinking. I wonder if this is why Oxford does not admit child prodogies, or almost anybody under 18 (with the exception of some students from Scotland), since there is realy no way to fit into college communities if you cannot participate in these events (whether drinking or not).

The entire week is populated with events organised by students who have been elected to the college's student government. The most prized student government job is that of president, who is the chief of the student body and is responsible for representing it to college. At the end of Trinity (3rd) term, when elections are held all the students with political aspirations consceintiously fight for the position to add to their resume. The hardest job is that of social secretary, and two or three are usually elected for the year. They are responsible for planning and attending all the social events; understandably by the end of the year you can often see them suffering from burnout. There are various other positions as well, such as women's rep, living-out rep (for those who don't live in college), LGBT rep and minorities rep - basically a representative for every type of person who could possibly be a member of the college. (No men's rep of course, an issue of contention in my college that led the male contingent to introduce the unofficial position, elected on the basis of wrestling. Two men wrestled for the position, and throughout the year the position could be taken by any other male member of the college, they need only wrestle the current rep to the ground!)

So freshers week is a series of events planned by the social secs and the rest of the committee, and they are all heavily attended by freshers and stalers (existing students). The freshers are keen to make friends in their new home, and stalers enjoy the free food and drinks that are often on offer. Many stalers also come because they are desperate to stay at the centre of the community's social hub and not become yesterday's news.

These events culminate on the saturday night with the freshers week bop, a house party put on by the college with bars, DJ and dance floor. Bops always have a theme, and I believe that the theme of my first bop was 'School of Rock'. I remember two tables of vodka jelly shots for 50p each...

In the inebriated state caused by the vodka shots, one is confronted by all the people met during the last week's social networking exercises - which is the equivalent of speed dating - so there are many cases of confused names and mistaken identity. It is at this bop where if something dramatic is going to happen it will happen: inhibitions are down and people still don't know one another very well so other members of the community represent possibility rather than 'friends' or 'social risk'.

All in all the bop is the highlight of the week, and an excellent last hoorah before the intensity of term starts. If we believe Oxford's claim that their students work hard and play hard - rather than some of them working too hard and some of them playing too hard - this is the play hard element of 0th week.

Buried (review)

2010-10-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

I was dubious and distracted during the first few minutes of the film as I was aware that the entire film would be set in the small box that was slowly revealed to us among the sounds of Ryan Reynolds heaving panting - my husband had dragged me to see the film and I was sure that it would be tedious.

How wrong I was! Writer Chris Spalding, director Rodrigo Cortes and our protagonist Ryan Reynolds succeed in making what seemed like a limited premise into a nail-biting thriller.

Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a contract truck driver in Iraq who is kidnapped and buried alive in a coffin while he is held for ransom. Alone in the coffin he is armed only with a lighter, a pencil, a hip flask, and a mobile phone. The drama stems from his interactions with the outside world through that modern medium of communication.

Reynolds' performance makes the film, as he must since he is the film. It is one of the best performances of his career, certainly his best dramatic performance, perhaps unsurprisingly considering that his resume mainly consists of light comedies and action flicks. Reynolds gives off intense emotional waives and pulls the viewer into his world, allowing us to experience the drama from his perspective and forcing us to share in his claustrophobic fear.

The telephone conversations with the characters off screen act as an important break from the tension inside the box, but each character also left me with a particular feeling, and not always a positive one. Like so many modern movies set in the war zone, these characters also make political comments about the running of the region.

Often while watching I felt that the script was better suited to the stage, with the action panning out in an episodic like fashion, but regardless the dramatic tension was woven together so well that by the end of the film I was actually shouting instructions for Reynolds at the screen, much to my husband's embarrassment.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Colntiki Tour (summary)

2010-09-17T06:50:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on my trip on the flight back to Heathrow I thought that I had a fabulous time, and that the trip was planned perfectly. It started off with a bang, with the pyramids being the first thing that we saw, and having finished the trip I am glad that the pyramids were our first stop as I feel that they would have been disappointing to see at the end: although they are impressive in their architecture, they are not as awe inspiring as the elaborately decorated temples we saw in the rest of our trip.

In fact, whenever we were on the tour bus and Sherif was explaining our next destination to us he would say 'this will be highlight', and we laughed because he said this every day and we all thought not everything can be a highlight... but basically until we returned to Cario at the end of the trip, I do feel like every place we went to got better and better.

I cannot heap enough praise on Sherif as a guide. He was such a nice guy and so helpfully, whether we were batering or booking flights, but more than that he knew the right balance for the group: he knew exactly how much historical information to give and exactly how much time we should spend in the temples so that we left when we thought we had seen everything but were still excited, rather than being overawed and tired.

I also thought that the trip was exactly the right length. My brother and I had contemplated staying on in Cairo for a few days after the trip when we first arrived, but by the end we had decided against it because the tour really did end at the perfect time, so we left with a positive feeling rather than feeling over done.

I highly recommend this tour to anyone who wants to go and see Egypt (rather than just go diving in the Red Sea). I had a thoroughly fantastic time and I really don't think that you would have the same experience if you tried to do it on your own.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (7)

2010-09-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

We disembarked from the train at about 6am, and our coach took us back to the Victoria Hotel where we would be staying that night – Sherif arranged for us to get an early check in so that we could shower before heading off for the day.

Our first stop was the Alabaster Mosque. To visit the Mosque women must have their knees and shoulders covered. If they are not covered you must rent a tunic for E£3 and wear it for the duration of the visit. You must also take off your shoes, or wear plastic bags over them, so you look like a doctor in surgery. If you do not comply with these dress regulations you will be hounded by the fashion police, a middle aged woman walking around with a pile of cover up tunics.

The mosque was built for the Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali between 1830 and 1857 in Ottoman style – it is also his tomb. It is called the Alabaster Mosque because of its extensive use of alabaster in the architectural decoration.

Before we entered the mosque to have a look around Sherif explained some of the muslin traditions to us. He explained all the washing that had to be done before prayer, to clean yourself before approaching god, but he suggested that the practice was also introduced to maintain sanitary conditions in communities: if you wash five times a day you are pretty clean. Sherif also suggested that the ritual prostration was meant as a form of exercise.

Sherif also explained that the reason that Muslims pray five times a day is so that they can keep god in the heart constantly and always live with a holy spirit, rather than thinking about him only once a week and forgetting about him. I’m not religious myself, but if I were I think that contemplating my religion five times a day seems like good practice.

After we left the mosque we headed to the Khan El Khalili Bazaar. Sherif has warned us at the start of the day that we should cover up, both for our visit to the mosque and to the markets as we would come into contact with locals who were not accustomed to having tourists around.

The markets were excellent if you were after jewellery – silver not gold, Sherif told us that gold is very expensive at the moment so that it is best not to buy any gold from street vendors as it may not be pure – and souvenirs like alabaster vases and Egyptian style bric-a-brac. Half of the market sold only this type of thing, clearly designed to cater to tourists. At one point, when we got a little lost, we wandered into the local section of the market where they sold mostly food goods and a lot of children’s toys. It was also much more crowded in this section of the market: crossing over a small alley was like crossing into a different country.

We were wandering around the market with the shop keepers encouraging us to come into their stores and bartering in the usual way, with only the occasional offers of camels for our hands or references to us as Barbie, but while we were there the call came for afternoon prayer, and the atmosphere of the market completely changed. All the men who had moments before been encouraging us to come into their shops shouted at us that we could not walk that way and had to get out of the way. Suddenly all the shop alleys that faced towards Mekka were filled with mats on the floor and men praying, and we were forced to stand in the alleys facing the other way and wait it out. This change in atmosphere ended just as abruptly as it began and business continued as usual.

After the market we got on the bus for the roughly 1 hour trip to Sakkara where we saw the Step Pyramid, constructed in around 2700BC is it the oldest surviving stone structure. The architect of the pyramid was Imhotep, who was also considered a doctor, an astrologer, a high priest, and was clearly the renaissance man of his day… and of course the inspiration for the villain in the new Mummy movies with Brendan Fraiser.

After seeing the pyramid and the nearby mortuary temple we drove a short distance to the Sphinx. You could get pretty close to the Sphinx, standing on the brick walls that surround it, and we took pictures of the Sphinx in the foreground of the pyramids.

After this we went for a late lunch at a nearby restaurant, and we had barbequed meat with side dishes very similar to what we had on our first day in Cairo.

This was the end of our tour with Sherif. After this we went back to the hotel for a debrief and so say goodbye to him. We still had one more event scheduled for that evening, but Sherif would not accompany us… to be fair it was Friday afternoon and he was due to pick up the next group at 7pm tomorrow night. Sherif told us that he only has one or two weeks off a year. We were asked to fill in questionnaires from Contiki and we all gave Sherif some generous baksheesh and had some pictures taken with him. Many in the group mentioned that they had plans to send Sherif some branded sporting clothes from our home cities when we got home. Every day of the tour Sherif wore a hat or a shirt from a different sporting club: American football, baseball, soccer and even an Australian Melbourne Storm Rugby League jersey.

After Sherif left we packed our bags (as most of us had an early start to head to the airport the next morning) and then hung out in the hotel playing cards, having a few cocktails, and getting a little bit of dinner from the hotel restaurant. The pasta was a large serving and tasted pretty good, the sandwiches were a disappointment.

Another Contiki representative came by at about 7pm with the mini bus and took as to the sound and light show at the Pyramids. I had heard from people who had visited in the past that the show was pretty bad, but everyone decided to go because we thought it would be a nice way to end the trip… but it was bad. The light part of the show was alright, but the movie voice over was shockingly cheesy and not particularly interesting. I went to the bathroom three times during the hour long show just to distract myself and keep from falling asleep. To be fair the problem with the show was probably that it was an hour long, a 15-20 minute spectacular (maybe with some fireworks) would have been much more effective. Having said that I can understand why they make it an hour: Giza is an hour drive from Cairo and the show starts long after the pyramids close so you do have to make a special trip, so clearly people might not want to come if it was only 15-20 minutes.

After the light show we were planning to go out to dinner, but it was already 9pm, there was a one hour drive back to the hotel on the bus, and many of us had to be up early to get the mini-bus, arranged for us by Contiki, back to the airport, so again we just headed back to the hotel and sat in the garden and worked on the last of our duty free booze and some Pringles we picked up at the shop nearby.

Eventually we wished our new friends goodnight and went to bed to get up for our 7am minibus ride to the airport. If you are planning to do any duty free shopping I don’t recommend saving it for Cairo airport, for although there certainly were shops there was little of variety.

Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D

2010-09-13T01:30:00.000-07:00

Since I am a fan of Resident Evil I probably will go and see each and every one even though the story lines get worse and worse, so although I personally quite enjoyed this film, there is no escaping the fact that it just wasn't a very good film. The story line lacked momentum, and it did not really progress the broader multi-movie story ark, so if you missed this one, you could comfortably see the next one without missing any major plot developments.

The acting was uninspired, and although Milla Jovovivh has real charisma and is always good to watch, she lacked some of the sparkle she presented in the previous films. Alice is stripped of her powers near the start of the movie, and perhaps the low key presentation of the character was meant to relfect this; but if this was the purpose it was not effective. Wentworth Miller and Ali Later equally feel like they are just going through the motions for the paycheck and are not particularly inspired or interested. The new villian does his best Matrix Mr Smith impersonation, but it really does take an actor of the quality of Hugo Weaving to inhabit a character like that and bring it alive, and Shawn Roberts just doesn't pull it off.

The fact that Alice is stripped of her powers in this film may also explain that beyond the opening sequence the action is limited to guns, which really limits the variation. Alice does whip out some of her martial arts moves near the end of the film, but this seems idiosynchratic since she has lost her speed and strength: if this was temporary its return is not explained. In addition to the action being on the dull side, the constant slow motion shots, no doubt designed to show off the 3D elements of the film, were a tad annoying.

Overall this movie was disappointing, and all in all it felt like watching a rather badly done episode of one of your favourite TV shows, its bad, but you are willing to forgive it because you like the show.

All we can hope is that the writing, directing and acting teams all get a bit more inspired for the next installment, and it seems that there will certainly be a next installment, as the scene imbedded in the credits suggests.

Annoying New Couples

2010-09-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

We recently had a friend and his new girlfriend around to our house for dinner and to play board games (articulate is my favourite!!!), and because they are a new couple they are still very much in the lovey-dovey faze, constantly touching and kissing, and they constantly call one another dear in Polish (his new girlfriend is Polish). I should have been prepared since they behave like that all the time, but by the end of the night I was pretty fed up, and as much as I like spending time with both of them individually, I was happy to see the back of them.

I don't really know why it annoyed me so much, since I remember when I first started dating my husband about four years ago we were exactly like that, always touching and whispering and making out anywhere and everywhere we got the chance. I also remember all of our friends being really annoyed, and my best friend in partcular constantly slapping me on the arm and telling me how irritating I was.

I'm not particularly apologetic for my behaviour, because it was new love and you have to indulge in it and enjoy it while you have the opportunity, but despite the logical half of my brain constantly reminding me that they feel the same way and that it shouldn't bother me, I still find it really hard not to roll my eyes.

Petite Anglaise - review

2010-09-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

Is Socrates right when he says that an unexamined life is not worth living?

I recently read the book Petite Angliase by Catherine Sanderson, which is an autobiographical tale based on an autobiographical blog started by the author which proved very popular in Paris amoung British ex-pats like the author.

I really enjoyed this book because it allowed me to vicariously imagine myself living in Paris through the stories of the author, and as a new blogger myself I am fascinated by what other people blog about.

However, although I liked the book, by the time I put it down I did not like the author. I just felt hostile towards her because she seemed to me to be one of those people who manages to make everything about themselves, and can't see, or doesn't really care about, other people.

I've spent some time wondering if this characteristic is just the inevitable result of the genre of autobiography, since it is by definition talking about yourself, but I've read other autobiographies and wasn't left with the same distatsful feeling. Also, some of the actions she describes in the book are really selfish: leaving the father of her child for a fling, resenting the time that her new fling spends with his own children... to be fair the author admits that these are selfish thoughts and actions, but she still has an awful lot of them.

So now I'm wondering if we're all actually that self-involved, we just don't realise it because its not obvious until you sit down and write about the details of your life, or if this is something peculiar to the author. I also wonder if this is a general character trait or something that was developed by the blogging. She didn't seem self involved before hand, when she was making sacrifices to stay with her partner and to support his career etc, and when she never priorotised going out with her friends over looking after her daughter, the selfsih behaviour all seems to come after the blog.

So this makes me wonder if it is healthy to examine all the little nooks and crannies of one's life and one's feelings about it, or if over-examining life kind of cuts us off from everyone else as we become less capable of seeing other people as similarly conscious beings whose thoughts and needs are just like ours.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (6)

2010-09-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Day 6: Luxor, Valley of the Kings

Yet another early start this morning as our coach picked us up at 5.30am to visit the Valley of the Kings which opened at 6am. The ticket to get into the complex, which also includes entry into 3 tombs, cost E£55, and this was included in the Contiki Tour price. Before entering we could also by tickets to get into the Tomb of Tutankhamun (E£100 for adults and E£50 for students) and Ramses VI (E£50 for adults and E£25 for students), my brother and I purchased both of these.

The first tomb we went into was that of Ramses XI. It was quite a trek: we had to walk up a path on the side of a hill, then down a narrow corridor 100 metres long, and of course on the way back out up a corridor 100 metres long, and the heat was stifling inside. The wall decorations inside were very simple, almost stick figure like, which was surprising following the temple decoration we had seen. This might have been because the pharaoh died before the temple was complete so things like the final decoration were rushed.

One the tomb of Ramses XI see: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/ramessest11.htm

The other two tombs we saw on this ticket were those of Ramses IX and Ramses VII.

On the tomb of Ramses IX see: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/ramesses9t.htm

On the tomb of Ramses VII see: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/kv1.htm

The tomb of Ramses VI is beautifully pained with images on a white background; and it is significantly painted since the walls and ceilings preserve some important Egyptian religious texts: the Book of Gates, Book of Caverns, Book of Amdut, Book of the Dead, Book of the Earth, Book of the Day and Book of the Night. Although we naturally could not read the texts, they are painted and decorated in an awe inspiring way, much like a church.

On the tomb of Ramses VI see: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/ramessesvit.htm

The most notable thing about the tomb of Tutankhamun, which contained his mummy and not much else, was the fact that it was tiny, I just can’t imagine all the artefacts from his tomb displayed in the Egyptian Museum fitting inside - and that’s not everything since Carter and Canarvan probably stole everything which did not have the king’s name on it as these were the only things they could sell on the black market without them being identified as stolen. After being in the other tombs it really brought home what people say when admiring the artefacts from Tutankhamen’s tomb: he was very unimportant, imagine the riches that were once placed in the other tombs.

On the tomb of Tutankhamun see: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tutt.htm

On the Valley of the Kings see: http://www.ask-aladdin.com/valley.htm

After the Valley of the Kings we headed to Karnak Temple, stopping to see the Colossi of Memnon, two massive statues of Amenhotep III, which including their base are over 20 metres tall.

Karnak Temple is the largest temple in the world today and is in fact a conglomerate of temples begun under Ramses II and added to by approximately 30 different pharaohs until Ptolemaic times. The temple is primarily dedicated to Amun-Re, his wife Mut and their son Khonsu. We only saw a small section of this vast complex, but I have to admit that by this point – even though I am a history buff and even taught Egyptian history for first year university students for a while – my brain had kind of hit temple overload and many of my memories has started to bleed into one another.

On Karnak Temple see: http://www.touregypt.net/karnak.htm

After this temple viewing we returned to the cruise ship at around midday, and were due to stay on board until about 5pm, unless we wanted to volunteer to go on a tour of an Egyptian village. Nine people, including my brother and myself, decided to go.

We took a felucca up river a bit and on the shore were met by a group of young boys. We had to decide when we signed up for the trip if we wanted to ride a camel, a donkey, or in a donkey cart, and my brother and I both picked camels. We then proceeded to ride around village back streets for 45 minutes in the hot sun trying to make stilted conversation with the young Egyptian boys that led our animals. I did not enjoy this, but this was my own fault. The previous day I had been sitting on the boat deck playing cards in a bikini and shorts, and I had then taken off my sorts to go for a swim but failed to apply more sunscreen, so I got a bit burnt right where you sit, so riding the camel was less than fun! Our guide Sherif didn’t ride with us, but rather drove to the location in an air conditioned car. Suffice to say that when we got there, sticky and sweaty, we were all a bit jealous.

At that time we sat in the house of a friend of Sherif where we were offered tea and homemade bread, which apparently it would have been offensive not to accept even though I don’t like tea. We learned that the man who owned the house was a lawyer who primarily helped foreigners who moved into the area with issues buying land and similar things. He was also a city councilman for his community, which we had ridden through. After speaking to this man for only a few minutes his 10 year old son Sherif (yes named after our guide) turned up and took over the entertainment. We were fascinated by this little boy who spoke with a posh English accent, and it turns out that his mother is English and works in the tourism industry in Egypt. Little Sherif showed us how they made bread, where they kept their live stock, and then through their house.

The house we went into was an old one story mud brick house with less than half a dozen big rooms and a large outdoor patio space. We saw the older generation pottering around the house, and then little Sherif took us into a room decorated with pictures of family members, which he identified including his grandparents, great grandparents, uncles and cousins, but there were noticeably no pictures of him. The boy explained that to have your picture hung in the family home a child had to be born there: it is traditional for women to go to their parents or parents in law’s house to have their babies. Because little Sherif was born in a hospital in the UK he would never have his picture hung in the house. I felt a little sorry for him at that point, but then we were taken out the back of the house to see a four story town house with visible air conditioning units, and it turns out that while his grandparents and some of his cousins live in the traditional house which we had just seen, little Sherif and his parents live in the modern town house. It also turns out that while all of little Sherif’s cousins go to a local school, Sherif was currently having a private tutor teaching him a bit of German because in a few weeks he would be starting at a foreign school in Luxor where they taught in German because his mother wanted him to be fluent in Arabic, English and German; he also spent two or three months of the year in the UK with his grandparents. So although I thought it was sad that he was excluded from the family portrait wall for a seemingly strange reason like not being born in the house, we checked with big Sherif and it seems that because he is half English little Sherif gets other benefits.

Before we left a man who had come up to us on our journey to the house and taken our pictures on the camels brought in the pictures he had taken, printed and developed, to sell to us for E£10 each. This is not the kind of souvenir that any of us wanted, but five of us went ahead and purchased. This was because unlike at the tourist sites where people similarly tried to sell us unwanted pictures and such things, we were in someone’s home, and this was clearly someone Sherif knew, and it felt rude not to buy it... besides E£10 is less that UK£1.20, so it didn’t seem like a big deal.

As we left I dreaded getting back on the camel, but as we walked back to our boat we all realised that the house that we went to was only 50m from where the boat had dropped us off, and we had simply gone on the camel ride for the experience... my bum was outraged!

We returned to the cruise ship, showered and packed our stuff ready to disembark at 5pm to head to the train station. We did make an important stop on the way to the station however, at a McDonald’s in Luxor. We were told that it was possible to buy burgers made from camel meat, and most of us went in intending to buy and try, but it turns out that this was a myth and no such burgers existed. The only noticeably different burger we saw on the menu was Big Mac McChicken, which is a Big Mac made with the chicken patties used on the McChicken burger rather than beef. My brother had one of these and I had a rather tame quarter pounder.

From here we headed to the train station, where we stocked up on supplies from the local vendors remembering what the food was like during our last trip. This proved wise as dinner turned out to be soggy chicken nuggets and soggy chips, which seemed both ironic and off putting considering we had just been to McDonalds. We spent the night chatting, though turning in quite early at around 1am as the train was scheduled to pull into the station at 5am. Our evening was not restful as the train kept coming to sudden stops, throwing us out of our seats and beds.... one of the porters came around and apologised, informing us that we had a trainee driver.

The Expendables (review)

2010-09-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

I went to see this one with my other half on the weekend, and believe it or not it was my choice, I vetoed the husnad's suggestion of Dinner for Schmucks.

I love a good action movie and I was particularly excited for this one because I'm a Jason Statham fan: he has some great British gangster films behind him (Lock Stock, Snatch, Revolver, the Bank Job) and some action sereis of his own (Transporter, Crank), and he just has sex appeal, as proven by the fact he's dated Kelly Brook and is currently dating Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (the hot Victoria Secrets model whose replacing Megan Fox in Transformers for those who don't know).

Anyway, the film focusses on a group of mercinary soldiers of fortune with ethics and heart. They are offered a job getting rid of a dictator and his American posse from a South American island. They go and decide that they would need a small army rather than their 4.5 men (Jet Li counts as half a man) but when Stalone and Statham are there scouting out the mission they meet a girl willing to die for her island, and it seems that Stallone is willing to die for her pretty face.

One disappointing part about the movie (for me) was that it was Stallone who had the girl, played by Giselle Itie, as a love interest rather than Statham. At the end I had to turn my face away when I thought they were going to kiss, but luckily this was avoided. Statham gets a love interest earlier in the film with Charisma Carpenter. When I saw her name in the credits at the start of the film I did get a bit excited being a bonafide Whedonfile, but she only had two scenes.

Speaking of only having two scenes, Schwarznegger and Willis, who both appeared in the promo, had one scene, and it was not only brief but badly done. Throughout the film excessive references to past films and nostalgia were thankfully avoided, but in this one scene, when the three big action stars of the 80's were together on screen, was the time for throw backs and references to their great films, and these were lacking.

Mickey Rourke had a much more important cameo role, playing a retired mercinary and the fastest tatoo artist on the planet (seriously you won't believe it - I wish they really were that quick - if they were trying to skip time then it was cut very badly). He has an emotional scene in which he sheds a few tears, and although I've read a few reviews which praise this scene as the only real acting in the movie (which is probably true) I found the scene a bit cheesy... nevertheless Rourke was a welcome film element.

Randomly Jet Li gets his butt kicked by Dolph Lundgren on a couple of occassions. I heard Steven Segal rejected a role in the film because it would mean losing, and as an action star he doesn't like to lose the fight, so I'm surprised Li agreed to the set up.

Overall I really enjoyed the film... and found it randomly educational about cauliflower ears...

Banana Muffins

2010-09-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

When I go to the supermarket I am always a good girl telling myself that I will eat lots of healthy fruit and vegetables in the coming week, which I then proceed to buy.

Of course I don't manage and I'm left with fruit that's just going a bit gross.

With the bananas, however, I've found a muffin recipe which uses mashed bananas, and they're relatively healthy (as far as muffins go) because the bananas are used instead of a lot of sugar.

ingredients:

3 bananas, mashed
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1 egg slightly beaten
1/3 cup of melted butter
1 tsp baking powder
1tsp baking sida
pinsh of salt
1.5 cups of flour

Then all you do is mix the wet incredients together, add the dry ingredients, poor into ramakins and bake at 180 for 15-20 minutes.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tours (5)

2010-09-08T05:08:00.000-07:00

Although going to bed late, we had another early start, waking up at 5am to watch the sun rise on the top deck of the boat. At about 6.30am we then piled on our tour bus to get to the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Sherif apologised for getting us up so early after a big night but promised that it was best to be the first people there and beat the crowds; so we crowded around the entrance and rushed in when they opened at 7am.

This is a Ptolemaic temple dedicated to Horus and is the second largest temple surviving in Egypt. On the walls scenes of the mythological battle between Horus and Seth are depicted: Horus wanted revenge on Seth for killing his father Osiris. In the battle Seth is depicted as a hippopotamus: like crocodiles hippos were dangerous animals in ancient times. Apparently every year this mythological story was enacted as a play, and that is why it is depicted on the wall, so those in the crowd who were too far away to see the play could still ‘see’ the action. It was noticeable that many of the anthropomorphic images depicted on the walls of the temples are defaced, Sherif told us in Christian times. When we left the temple and returned to the main entrance, which had been empty at 7am, it was absolutely packed with people!

On the temple see: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/edfu

After the temple we returned to the boat which started to cruise up river towards Luxor. Some people went back to bed, and some of us returned to our swimming and card rituals on the front deck; this was pretty much the only relaxing day of the trip.

Luxor is the modern name for Thebes, the capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom. As a result it has some of the most amazing remains, and is often referred to as an ‘open air museum’. Friends are planning on visiting the Red Sea in September and told me that they planned to take a day trip to Cairo to see the pyramids etc. I told them that if they had to choose they should go to Luxor, because there was just so much more to see.

When we docked in Luxor we were picked up by a coach and taken to Luxor Temple. The temple, primarily dedicated to Amon-Ra, was built in the 14th century BC and then majorly extended by Ramses II. It is massive, apparently once housing a village, and has several monumental entrances, and has a colonnade of sphinxes over a hundred metres long.

On the temple see: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/luxor-luxor-temple.htm

It turns out that the coach that took us to the temple, like the coach that took us to the Aswan markets, was hired for us by a local business, this time a papyri art dealer. This time I, of course, was not worried. Again the first thing that happened was that we were given a talk about papyri, and how it is made, and how to tell the difference between real papyri and the stuff made from banana leaves that the vendors sell for cheap in the street. All their papyri were also hand painted. Then the purchasing began, and this time 98% of people made purchases, I think this time everyone except for my brother bought something. I got two A4 sized pieces for about E£50 each, one depicting a star chart with all the signs of the zodiac, and one depicting the Nile Valley with small drawings of all the major sites, such as Abu Simbel, Kom Ombo and Giza, so I figured that I could hang it on my wall and show people where I went (not that I’ve had it framed or hung it yet).

For information on the shop and their prices see: http://www.luxor-westbank.com/papyrusinstitut_e.htm

After that we returned for our final night of sleep on the boat, which we would sorely miss, especially considering that the following evening we would again be sleeping on a train. We sat around, tried to make a further dent in the copious amounts of liquor that we had bought and the duty free shop, and played some more cards…

Archive of Fine Books

2010-09-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading a book and, being a Sunday and not living particularly near a book store, I searched my shelves for something to read. I pulled a book off the shelf, 'The 21 Lessons of Merlin' and found inside the bookmark from the shop where I must have bought it, the Archive of Fine Books, next to the Pancake Manor, in my hometown of Brisbane, Australia.

I started visiting the archives when I went through my occult/new age phase from about the age of 15 for three years, and I never quite gave it up after that just took it a bit less seriously.

Recently I discovered that a friend who I went to uni with, who used to work at the store, bought it, and is now the proud owner of over a million books and the store in which they live.

Its strange how the world turns...

Audio Books

2010-09-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

I love reading, and I always have. In the past year or so, however, I've seriously taken up the habit of audiobooks. It all started because I wanted to read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings again, but it is long, and I've always had trouble with the first few chapters of Fellowship of the Ring, and have always found it really hard to get through all the chapter before they leave the Shire.

Having said that they are very important chapters and are one of the things that annoy me about the film. In the book Merry, Pippin and Sam spy on Frodo and plot to follow him because they love him and want to keep him safe, in the movie they kind of just get dragged along for the ride, and I think it was important to show that the friendship and commitment were there from the start.

Anyway, so I got on my itunes and purchased them all and I listened to them when I was walking and when I was at the gym, and I loved it and never looked back.

I started with things I knew that I would never sit down and read myself, classics like the Aeneid, Wuthering Heights, Mrs Dalloway and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, but also stuff I wanted to read before I saw the movie but wasn't that interested in, like the the new Dan Brown, the Twilight series and more recently the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I actually really loved this last book, and since then I've also been going for things that I really want, like the sequels.

A lot of people ask me that if listening to it rather than reading it dilutes or changes the experience. I suppose it does to an extent, since the intonations of the narrator can effect my interpretation of words. Some people have also suggested that it is a really different experience because the words come out a lot slower giving you more time to mull them over, but this isn't actually a problem for me because I have always been a really slow reader so it is like I narrate the book in my head, but I've never minded taking it a bit slower because I do find that it gives me more time to enjoy the book.

Of course buying them off itunes can be pretty expensive, so I've joined audible.co.uk. I pay £3.99 a month and I get one free audio book a month, so I always select the most expensive of the titles that I want, and then pick up other titles in the sale.

Oxford Taps???

2010-09-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

One thing that I, and every other colonial, notice when they first arrive in Oxford is the sink taps. Everywhere you go the sinks have separate hot and cold fawcets. This seems ridiculous and means that you can only ever have hot or cold running water, never warm: if you do want warm water then you have to fill the sink. For those of us who have never lived in a house more than 100 years old - and for who something post 1970's is much more common - this was just weird.

This was made even more inexplcable for me by the fact that the 'locals' don't find it strange at all. I remember a guy telling me once that they had to be seperate as you couldn't mix hot and cold pipes in the wall because they would explode. I mentioned that showers provide a mixed fawcet, and he said that was OK because they were higher up the wall. I'm sure that this guy had to be messing with me - he was a chemist - but nevertheless he just didn't think it was unusual.

The tap problem doesn't just seem to come from the fact that in Oxford we're in old buildings (I also noticed that the door handles are very low in many of the Oxford buildings, clearly designed for a shorter generation, and great for shorties like me but just amusing to watch anyone over six foot use). In my second year I was moved into a building built in the 1990's and I got excitied for a minute because my sink did have a single fawcet. However the first time I washed my hands I was surprised when I burnt one hand and the other was freezing cold. My fawcet was the type with a cricumference of little holes which the water came out of, and it turned out that half of them provided hot water and the other half cold, so even though I had a single fawcet, I still had separate hot and cold taps.

The other thing I noticed is that many bathrooms, both showers and toilets, have carpet instead of lino or tiles... I will never get used to that, it just seems a bit unsanitary.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (4)

2010-09-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Day 4: Aswan to Edfu

We had a very early start this morning as we had to be at Aswan airport for a flight to Abu Simbel at 6.55am. When we arrived at the airport we were all waived through the metal detector as a group as it beeped for each person. Most of the sites around Egypt had metal detectors which we had to go through to enter, but we were never asked to remove metal from our selves, and we were never detained when we set off the detector, they were really rather pointless… unless they were meant for checking locals rather than tourists, just as the tourist are there to protect tourists and not viz.

Abu Simbel was one of the extras not included in the total price of the trip and I was undecided whether to go or not because it cost an extra US$236, which is a lot. Almost everybody did the extra trip in the end, and I’m glad that I did because it was one of the highlights of the entire trip. At Abu Simbel there are two temples, one built for Ramses II with the sun god Amon-Ra, and one he built for his Nubian wife (he had many wives) Nefertari and the goddess Hathor. Hathor is the goddess of love and she is often depicted as a cow: the ancient Egyptians associated cows with love and beauty, so it wasn’t an insult to call a woman a cow.

These temples are not only amazing for their grandeur and decoration, but also for the fact that they were moved by UNESCO in the late 1960’s. The original site of the temples was flooded by Lake Nasser when the new Aswan High Dam was built, so to save the temples they had to be moved. Apparently they debated several ways of preserving the temples, including creating a giant dome around the site and ferrying people to it via submarine: Sherif told us that this was rejected because the site would lose its natural setting and the Egyptian government considers it very important to maintain the setting of its sites. In the end the temples were cut into large blocks, averaging about 20 tons each, and were moved 60 metres higher and 200 metres further back from the river. You can see the cut lines in some of the structural stones.

We went into the temple of Nefertari first. We were not allowed to take photos in either temples, though they did sell decent sets of photos at the site, but everyone queued up at the very entry to the temple to have a picture taken of themselves holding the key to the temple towards the door, naturally paying the entry porter E£1 for the privilege. I actually think that the porters there must have made quite a bit of money that day… not a bad job really.

The entrance door to Nefertari’s temple is flanked by three sets of statues on each side, each showing the queen standing between two statues of her husband. These are significant because it is the first time in Egyptian art that statues of the king and queen were of equal size. Traditionally the queen stood behind or next to her husband, usually no taller than his knees, laying her hand on him in support. The interior of the temples was decorated with larger than life images of the pharaoh, his wife and the gods, all elaborately carved. These were the first walls decorated with hieroglyphics that we saw during our trip, so this was also when I started to get really excited.

We then headed to the main temple, the façade of which is decorated with four colossal seated statues of Ramses II, 67 feet tall. The inside of the temple was again elaborately and beautifully decorated. One of the walls in the first room held particular interest for me as it bore a description and depiction of the famous Battle of Kadesh. I remembered learning about both the battle and this description of it during my first year of university, so to see it ‘in the flesh’ so to speak was particularly exciting. At the back of the main chamber was a smaller chamber with four seated figures, which Sherif told is were Ra-Horakhty (the god of the rising sun), Ramses himself, Amun-Ra (the sun god) and Ptah (the god of the underworld and night). Apparently due to the axis of the temple – which the architects deliberately preserved when they moved the temple – twice a year the sun illuminates this room, throwing sunlight on Ramses II and the two sun gods, but leaving Ptah, a god associated with darkness, un-illuminated.

For a good discussion of these temples and some photos see: http://www.bloggersbase.com/travel/sacred-rock-cut-temple-abu-simbel/

Our flight back to Aswan was at 10.45am, so we got back just in time for lunch and for the boat to begin moving down the Nile. We relaxed on the deck, either in the pool or playing cards, and enjoyed the breeze as the ship moved for the first time. We passed through Esna Locke and in the mid afternoon we docked at Kom Ombo to visit the temple there.

Kom Ombo is apparently one of the hottest places in Egypt, so it was here that Sherif introduced us to frozen towels. When we got back to the boat after Abu Simbel Sherif told us to wet some towels and put them in the freezer (you have to put them in a plastic bag first or they stick to the freezer). When we went to the site we wore them around our necks to keep cool, and if you put it over your head like a hood, when the breeze came in it acted like air conditioning.

Kom Ombo was another tour highlight. It is a Greco-Roman temple started under the Ptolemys, the Macedonians who took control of Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great, and completed by various Roman emperors. The complex is actually made up of two temples, one dedicated to Sobek the crocodile god, the other to Horus the Pharaoh god: in mythology Horus was the pharaoh, and the living pharaoh was often assimilated with him. Sobek was associated with danger and he was primarily worshipped to prevent crocodile attacks, which were apparently common in ancient times. There are fewer crocodiles in Egypt now as they are prevented from coming down stream by the dam. Horus in this complex was treated as a healing god, and this site became know for its healing power and became a major pilgrimage site. The walls were decorated with symbols of healing, notably the eye of Horus, and with pictures of medical instruments, like scalpels, and those birthing stools with a whole in the middle – fun.

For more info on the temple see: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/kom-ombo.htm.

That evening on the boat we had our Egyptian party. We all dressed up on our coin covered wraps which we wore as skirts and were inducted into the art of belly dancing by a man in his mid-forties – I had expected a woman when the night was explained to me – he was surprisingly good at shaking is hips and had a naturally comedic charisma. Although this was the theme of the evening, this night really was more about drinking and partying, and this is really the only ‘party night’ that we had on the trip. Everyone was surprised by this back home as Contiki are holidays specifically for 18-35 year olds, and are known to be heavy duty party holidays with lots of drinking and lots of late nights. I think that it was different in Egypt firstly because as a Muslim country there were no bars or clubs to go to, unlike on the European Contiki tours. Secondly, it is very hot and there is a lot of walking, so I also just don’t think everyone had as much energy for late night drinking and partying as on other holidays. This night was, however, an exception, and several members of the group stayed up all night (I only made it to about 3am).

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (3)

2010-08-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

Day 3: Aswan

I awoke at about 7am on the train, though our wake up call was not until 8am and took the opportunity to look out the window as we passed through desert and small mudbrick towns. All of the people I saw through the window looked rural, unlike the metropolitan population of Cairo. At about 8am the porters brought around our breakfast, which was three different types of pastry - a croissant, a danish and something else - and a piece of fruit.

Before departing we were all told to leave our suitcases in the hallway and just take what we needed for the day as the porters would transfer them to our bus. We were often told to leave our bags somewhere and that they would be transferred for us. Travel advice sites always tell you never to leave your bag unattended in this way, but everyone was so nice and helpful, and the trip was so well organised, it never occurred to me to worry about doing this at the time.

Jumping onto our air-conditioned coach, thankfully since in Aswan in August it can get up to 50°C, we drove up to the Aswan Dam, both the original Old Dam - completed by the British in 1902 - and the Aswan High Dam - completed with help from the Russians between 1960 and 1976. Our guide Sherif praised the dam for saving Egypt, allowing irrigation all year and stopping flooding, but made no mention of the many problems that the dam has caused. In particular the dam catches the silt that previously washed down with the Nile flood and deposited itself in the Nile Valley acting as a natural fertilizer; now Egyptians must rely on artificial fertilizer. I wonder is Sherif really does think that the dam is the ‘best thing to happen to Egypt in recent years’ as he said, or if this is a company line. I’m not suggesting that the Egyptian government controls the dissemination of information to tourists in the same way that the North Korean government does, but I do just wonder...

On our way back down from the dam we stopped firstly at the Russian Memorial Monument, a lotus shaped open aired building commemorating the Russian aid that allowed the building of the Aswan dam. Our second stop was at an Ancient Egyptian stone quarry, where workers would cut large stones out off the rocky cliffs and then transport them down stream to be used in many of the major monuments that we would see later in our tour. The main attraction at the quarry was the unfinished obelisk. An obelisk is a tall slender rectangular monument with a pyramid point on top, and these were erected all over Egypt. The unfinished obelisk would have been 42m tall, making it the tallest know obelisk, but it was abandoned because it developed a major crack in its surface while it was being quarried. It lies on an angle on the cliff making it look like a giant sandstone slippery slide, perfect for skateboarding.

We managed to fit in all these sites before lunch, and for lunch our coach took us to the cruise ship that was to be our home for the next 3 nights. It was impressive. There was a chandelier in the entrance, every room had a balcony and a plasma screen television (which I didn’t turn on the entire time so I’m not sure what channels it picked up), there was a large dining area, a bar, a swimming pool, a deck, a shop, it was amazing.

The shop sold engraved gold and silver jewellery which we were encouraged to purchase there. However, the following day when the tour members who had placed an order (the shop arranged to have all the engraving done for the day our group left the boat) were discussing it among themselves and with Sherif, it turned out that many had been dramatically overcharged. This worked out in the end as Sherif went to the shop with the group and sorted out the problem, but it seems that even after this it was cheaper to purchase this type of jewellery in the shops in the Hilton shopping centre in Cairo, where two of our group had gone on a major shopping spree the previous Saturday before meeting with the tour group.

The lunch was a buffet, and a buffet breakfast, lunch and dinner was offered to us every day that were on the boat. The breakfast buffet was a variety of breads and pastries, eggs done in different ways, fresh fruit, cheeses, ham and salad. They did a similar buffet at lunch and then one day there was burgers, another pizza. Dinner was a lot like lunch, and the desert bar mostly had different types of tarts, and lots and lots of different types of Baklawa.

After lunch four of us - me, my brother and two others - who spent most of our time together on the ship hit the pool for a bit and then sat around playing 500 (an addictive antipodean card game). These two past times really characterised the majority of our down time on the boat.

In the late afternoon we all jumped on a Felucca, a small Egyptian sailing ship, which took us to some botanical gardens which we walked around. It was the sellers outside the botanical gardens which gave us the most grief. In particular one seller, who was missing a hand, was giving a Canadian girl, with, to be fair, noticeably large breasts, a particularly hard time. This was the only time that I really felt uncomfortable, but there was a big group of us there so we were OK.

That evening the cruise ship stayed docked in Aswan, and after dinner we went shopping. Our first stop was Elite Perfumery (El Sadat St., Aswan), a manufacturer and wholesaler of essential oils. This seemed like an unusual itinerary item to me so I asked Sherif about it, and it turns out that the perfumery paid for the hire of the bus that would take us around that evening, on the condition that we visited their store. On the journey there this made me uncomfortable as I thought it would be quite embarrassing for them to pay for the bus rental and for us to arrive and buy nothing. When we arrived we were given a glass of hibiscus tea and a gentleman named Ali gave as a rather lengthy talk, which was clearly well rehearsed, and very entertaining. He explained how all the oils they sold were 100% pure and not mixed with alcohol or other diluting agents. He also explained how the base oils they sold were the foundation of the perfumes we buy in other parts of the world, their pure oil exported to other countries where they were diluted and sold as perfume. For example the blend they sell as ‘Queen Hatshipsut’ is the base of CK Eternity, ‘Mitso’ of Old Spice and ‘Five Secrets’ of Chanel no. 5. Ali mixed samples of the oils with a little bit of water and members of the group familiar with perfume scents verified that the scents were genuine. He also explained how lettuce oil is supposed to be excellent for weight loss and watercress oil, used externally, for hair loss. He also suggested that Cleopatra used a face cream made up of one part honey, one part milk, one part yogurt and one part sandalwood.

At the end of the talk my fears were proved groundless as 70% of the group made purchases. I was tempted myself, both by the essential oils and the beautiful glass perfume holders which they sold, but as I was travelling on a budget and resisted. Nevertheless it seemed that the manager of the perfumery knew much more about the shopping habits of tourists than I did.

Our next stop was the duty free store to stock up on alcohol supplies for the party we were having on the boat the following night. They did sell alcohol on the boat, but at E£25 per drink it was cheaper to buy our own bottles. The duty free store was the one place where they did not barter, and then did not take cards; it was the only place where it seemed that they did not want to sell us everything in the shop.

The market that we went to afterwards was exactly the opposite. Walking along the street we were approached from all sides by sellers. Many of them would simply say ‘I don’t know what you want, but I have it, in every colour’. Other shop keepers would watch us while we browsed at a shop across the street, and when we walked away they would try to coax us into their store and undercut their competitor’s price. I say competitor, but if you wanted something in a colour or size a shop didn’t have, the keeper would discretely pop to another shop and get what he needed: it was clearly us against them. Bartering was fun. Sherif had prepared us before we went into the market by giving us a rough idea how much things should cost, so we could barter reasonably. This price was more than locals would pay for the same goods, but considering how much better off we tourists seem to be than the locals, I mean financially not in life and spirit, I can hardly begrudge them charging me an extra E£10, so just over UK£1, for a shirt. When we really got into the spirit of bartering I felt like both I and the shopkeeper were having a bit of fun. He would tell me that I was robbing him offering him only E£25 for a scarf with jingling coins on it – we also needed these for our Egyptian themed party on the boat the following night – but I wasn’t, since this is how much Sherif said they were worth, and he seemed to be having fun while bantering with me about it. The shopkeepers were less pleased with those in the group who offered ridiculously low prices for their items. I was surprised that all of the shopkeepers spoke excellent English. I asked Sherif about it and apparently they did not learn it at school or anything like that, they just picked it up from the sheer number of tourists, and amount of American TV.

When we returned to the boat we went straight to bed as we had a 5am wake-up call scheduled for the next morning.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World (review)

2010-08-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Why I loved “Scott Pilgrim vs the World”?

I went to see this film with my partner, and afterwards he told me that as soon as he saw the ‘universal’ opening credits he knew he was going to love it: the usual universal opening credit was displayed with 8 bit graphics and the sound was done with Nintendo style beeps. The question I have been asking myself since that conversation is why I loved this film, and loved it I did, when I’m not a gamer, a comicophile, and I have a noticeable dislike of Michael Cera.

Based on graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley and set – rather than just filmed – in Canada, there is something about the movie that is just cool. I was drawn in by the world that Edgar Wright creates, every bit as immersing as those he created for Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Spaced. You enter as the player Scott Pilgrim and navigate the world from his perspective. From my perspective this was a drawback. Michael Cera has played the same character since Arrested Development and he’s a bit on the whiny side for my taste. Although I enjoyed this film, I enjoyed Michael Cera much more in Juno when our guide was the delightful and charismatic Ellen Page.

A few scenes into the film we meet the player’s objective, Romona Flowers, played strangely deadpan by Mary Elizabeth Winstone, who exudes cool but sometimes fails to produce the sparkle needed to really understand her as a femme fatale. We then meet the obstacles, the evil exes. I especially enjoyed ex number one, Satya Bhabha’s Matthew Patel, and ex number three, Brandon Routh’s Todd, who gets his superpowers from his vegan diet, since, in short, being vegan just makes you better than other people. In fact the first three are so good, that the last three exes, who should really take the movie to another level, are a disappointment. This is not a particular problem, however, since the seven evil exes are representative of seven layers of hang ups and insecurities which our hero must overcome to be worthy of sharing himself with another.

The show stealing hidden star of the movie is Ellen Wong as Knives, the seventeen year old school girl that Scott Pilgrim has a platonic rebound relationship with, and who is abandoned by Pilgrim in favour of Romona. It is through her that we get a clearer view into the motivations of the highly stylised evil exes.

I was also impressed – having sat through all the credits – to discover that the young actors in Sex-Bob-Omb actually played all their songs, especially since the soundtrack was a key character in this epic adventure.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (2)

2010-08-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

Day Two: Cairo and the Pyramids

Our 6.30am wake up call came at 6.15am, something which surprised me and about which I was not very happy. After showering, while trying to remember not to open my mouth in the shower and to rinse after brushing with tap water, we went down to breakfast. Breakfast was fruit salad, scrambled eggs, hibiscus tea, and about 20 different types of breads and pastries. Bread was always on the menu, and sometimes it was the only thing on the menu that Sherif recommended as safe to eat: by the time I left Egypt I never wanted to eat bread or rice again!

It was also on this morning that we had to pay for all the extras offered on our trip. Fortunately we did not need US$ as a Contiki representative arrived with a remote card reading machine. We paid US$20 for a camel ride later that day, US$11 for a group photo that would also be taken later that day, US$236 for a trip to Abu Simbel in a couple of days, US$30 for a sound and light show at the pyramids on our last day, and US$25 for Baksheesh.

Baksheesh is a tip. Basically anyone who does anything for you in Egypt will expect Baksheesh, this includes waiters, taxi drivers, bus drivers, camel drivers, the people hanging out around the tourist sites who will either offer to take pictures of you with your camera or to appear in pictures for you, and most importantly, the bathroom attendants. Make sure you have a few E£1 coins on you throughout your trip to tip the bathroom attendants. This is very important because rather than leaving loo roll in the cubicles these attendants hold on to it and only give you a few sheets when and if you tip them.

Sherif arranged for us all to pay a certain amount to provide Baksheesh to all the people who were helping us as a collective, like our various coach drivers, so that we would not all have to worry about tipping them individually.

Our first stop of the day was the Egyptian Museum. We went early because Sherif wanted us to get in before it was too crowded. Sherif arranged for us all to have radio headsets so that he could take us around the museum and give us information about some of the key pieces. There are no plaques explaining things in the museum and there are no audio guides, so if you want more information about anything you do need a live guide. There are many locals hanging around the museum who will offer their services as a guide for baksheesh. Photography is also not allowed in the museum and we were advised to leave our cameras on the bus.

We were only in the museum for about two hours, but we could have stayed five times as long since there was so much to see; but to be fair if we had stayed much longer I think my brain would have been too full to absorb any more. Sherif took us around and compared the portraits of the scribes, nobles, pharaoh and the gods and explained the importance of the different iconography and the different stances of the figures. We also saw a bust of Nefertiti, though not the famous one which is now in Germany. It was interesting that whenever Sherif noted that an important item was not in the museum because it was overseas he described it as ‘stolen’. I noticed that in Athens the same terminology was used when commenting on missing items, in particular the Elgin marbles which are in the British Museum. I don’t disagree with the accuracy of the term, but it is interesting to compare it with the terminology used in, for example, the British Museum, when the items are described as saved or preserved.

The Tutankhamen collection is upstairs in the museum, and I was amazed at just how much stuff was in his tomb, especially after we visited his tomb in the Valley of the Kings and saw just how small the tomb itself was. Sherif also emphasised that Tutankhamen was a boy king who ruled for less than a decade - he was a relative nobody - so imagine the riches that were in the tombs of some of the great pharaohs like Ramses II and Thutmosis III.

Also upstairs are the mummy collections. There is a wing dedicated to mummified animals, where there are some amazing sights like cats, birds, giant crocodiles and fish. This wing is free, and there is another wing which houses some of Egypt’s famous royal mummies, and many of them have been unwrapped to reveal their faces. This costs an entry fee of E£100; there is a 50% student discount.

For a good brief overview of what is in the Egyptian Museum see: http://www.planetware.com/cairo/egyptian-museum-egy-cai-egypt.htm

After the Egyptian museum we all piled back onto the tour bus and made our way to the Pyramids. As expected they were an amazing sight to see, looming so large against the landscape. I was also amazed how close the pyramids were to Giza, the third largest city in Egypt located only 20km from Cairo. When you looked at the pyramids from one side all you could see was a vast desert. Walk around and look from the other side and the city makes the background. Although we were discouraged from climbing on the pyramids in general by the tourist police – though they did not comment when the locals sat on the sides of the pyramid – tourists are allowed to climb on one particular side of the pyramid for photo ops.

In addition to walking around the pyramids we also had the option of going into the chamber inside the great pyramid. They only open the chamber for entry twice a day, at 1pm and 5pm, and tickets cost E£100. Entry into the pyramid complex itself was E£60 but this was paid for by Sherif as part of the price of the tour. Inside the pyramid it is hot, it was obviously hot outside, about 40°C, but inside the pyramid where it was stuffy it was very hot. When I first stepped in I though it was going to be cool as it was the first time in a few hours that the sun had been off me, but within about two minutes I started sweating – I didn’t find that I sweated outside much as it is so dry. It is quite a climb from the entrance to the chamber, and you have to stoop as the ceiling was low. It probably took about ten minutes to climb each way. I was hoping that the hall to the chamber would be exciting, but the walls were bare, and hand and foot railing had been erected everywhere to help us tourists climb, and it kind of took away from the magic. The chamber itself was a dark room which looked like it had plain black walls. The only things in the room were an empty stone sarcophagus box fixed to the floor and a ventilation fan on one of the walls which looked like someone had installed it with a pick axe. It was very dark and it was at this time when that torch that the guidebooks told me to bring would have come in handy, but naturally I had left it in my bag on the bus, along with my camera as cameras were not allowed inside the burial chamber. This didn’t stop some people, I saw at least two people take pictures using their phones while we were in there. Although I was slightly disappointed with the inside of the pyramid because it was so bare – to be fair Sherif warned us that this was what it was like before we went in – I’m glad I did go in because, as Sherif also said, its not about what you see, its about how the experience makes you feel, and it felt cool!

After we exited the pyramid we jumped back on the bus and enjoyed the air conditioning. The bus then took us to the other side of the pyramids where we were going to ride camels. Before we got off the bus Sherif went around and gave us each a E£20 note and told us that we were to give this to our individual camel drivers, who would guide our camels, at the very end of the trip: he emphasised that we should not give any more, or next time he brought a tour group the camel drivers would expect more, and that we were to wait until the very end, otherwise they would want more money at the end.

I’ve never even been on a horse before, but I really enjoyed riding the camels. I was the first one to sit on a camel, and I was pretty nervous. My camel driver then tapped my camel so that it would stand up without giving me any warning. They stand up using their back legs first so you have to lean backwards to keep your balance. Once we were up I was quite comfortable while I waited for the others to get on and get up. Once we were all up we formed a train and began to walk away from the pyramids to a place where we could get a better view. The ride took about 20 minutes and was pretty smooth, although some of the camels did have the strange habit of head butting one another which led to a few screams from a couple of the group. When we got to our destination we all passed our cameras to our camel drivers who took pictures of us with the pyramids in the background. On the ride back to the bus my camel driver let me take the reigns and steer the camel myself, which was fun, and near the end he kicked the camel and several of us raced back. The camels are quite fast, but not particularly comfortable for racing on since you jump up and down in your saddle, but it was really fun. After we got off the camels and they were sitting down some of them rolled onto their backs and kicked their legs up in the air much like dogs do, that was surprising.

That was the last of the official tourist things that we had planned for the day, up next was a late lunch (it was about 4pm when we ate) and swimming at a local hotel so that we could cool down and clean up before getting on the train for the overnight trip to Aswan. The lunch was barbequed meats with sides of breads, rice and veg, very similar to the kind of sides you get in an Indian restaurant – it was yummy. The pool was also yummy, and our group was joined in the pool by some of the other guests, but only men and children. We saw no other women in the pool, some were sitting nearby, but not many, and they were all dressed as they were on the streets. At that moment some of us wondered what all the people around thought of us – we also noticed one man taping us on his mobile phone. This was a good time to get to know the others in the group and to bond as we could concentrate on each other rather than all the amazing sights around us.

Although the pool was amazing, the toilets and the showers were filthy, but I was still thankful for what we had before getting on the train.

The train was clean and the rooms were OK. When we went into the rooms there were three seats on one side facing a wall which had a sink unit. Small table tops, much like those on airplanes, slotted into place, and it was onto these that dinner was delivered. Dinner came in the aluminium boxes that Chinese take away comes in. We got rice, beef in some kind of brown sauce, some dry chicken, a bread roll and a small cake. None of it looked particularly appetizing. Sherif had warned us generally against eating beef in Egypt unless he told us otherwise (like he did at the hotel) since we could not always be sure that the beef came from a reliable source. He also warned us off dairy in general because apparently many shopkeepers and so forth turn their fridges off overnight, so depending on how long it had been on the shelf the product could have been chilled and heated many times, creating a breeding ground for bacteria. I did not end up eating more than a mouthful of any of my dinner as the chicken was very dry, the bread tasted very sugary, much like McDonalds bread, and I just don’t like dry rice. Instead my brother and I feasted on our apples, which were amazingly juicy and tasty, and our pringles.

After dinner the train porter came through and folded down our beds which were bunks. We then made our way to meet the rest of the group in the dining cabin. The dining cabin had about 20 chairs attached to the ground arranged around five tables, and a bar which did not serve alcohol. It also smelled very strongly of cigarette smoke. The same smoking bans do not exist in Egypt as in the UK and Australia, but I was nevertheless surprised that there was so much smoke as there were no locals on the train apart from the staff and a handful of guides: Sherif described the train as a tourist train. The smokers were all tourists taking advantage of the fact that they could smoke. Not many of the group stayed in the cart for long because of the smell and the fact that there was no where to sit, but before we all retired to chat with the people in the adjoining cabins before bed one of the train porters did put on a fascinating belly dancing display for us all. The next morning the same porter got out his lap top and showed us a video of a five year old girl belly dancing on a local television show similar to Britain’s Got Talent. It was fascinating and disturbing at the same time.

Egypt's Nile Valley - Contiki Tour (1)

2010-08-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

In my next few posts I plan to review my recent trip to the Nile Valley with Contiki Tours which I took with my brother in August 2010. It was amazing and I hope that this review both recommends the trip and also offers those who do plan on taking it some valuable information to prepare since I couldn’t find much information about the tour online before I left.

Day 1: Arrival in Cairo

When packing for the trip I was amazed how quickly my small list of essentials quickly turned it to a massive bag full of crap! I carefully selected which clothes to take so as not to over-pack: one swimsuit, one pair of shorts, one pair of cargo trousers, one linen collared shirt... and I carefully placed them in a small bag, which would be easy to carry around since this was a ‘tour’. However, to this list of essentials I then added all the things that the tour books and websites recommend I bring: 50+ sunscreen, moisturising sunscreen for the face, after sun, hand sanitizer, an insulated water bottle (to keep the copious amounts of water I am told I will be drinking cool), toilet paper (I’m told that the food can mess with your stomach and loo roll isn’t always available), my guide book, a flashlight (apparently many of the tombs are dark and you need it to see anything), a charger for my phone, a charger for my ipod... by the time I collected all this stuff together I had to upgrade to a bigger bag, so all my careful wardrobe packing was wasted! At the end of the trip I discovered that I didn’t use most of the stuff that the guidebooks and websites recommended.

In the flight from London my toughest decision was whether to read my book (an autobiographical account of someone else’s trip to the Nile Valley in the early 90s) or to make the most of the individual entertainment system and watch two movies...

When you arrive at Cairo airport before passing through passport control you must buy a visa from one of the money exchanges in the arrivals lounge. In 2010 these cost US$15, though you have to make sure you have $US to pay for it because once you start trying to buy it in another currency the price goes up and up! We wanted to get some US$ when we landed because all the tour information we were sent said that we should pay for the extras in US$. I did some web research on the matter before leaving and all of the sites said that it was easy to get US$ in Cairo airport; this was not true, the money exchangers would only sell us the local currency, Egyptian pounds. Throughout Egypt itself we also found that we could only purchase Egyptian pounds (E£). When we were there the exchange rate was E£9 to GB£1.

A representative from Contiki met us just beyond baggage collection and took me, my brother and another tour member who was on the same flight to the Victoria Hotel, where we would be staying that night, in a minivan. On the trip, which took about 40 minutes, he filled us in on a couple of the cultural quirks of Egypt that we should be aware of. In particular Egyptian men will approach western women and tell them that they are beautiful and offer to purchase them for camels. He told us that this is just a sign of appreciation, like a wolf whistle, and should not be taken too seriously. He told us that the men won’t touch you, but if anyone does in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable you should report them to the tourist police. You will see these men in white uniforms at all the major tourist spots and their job is to ensure that tourists are safe and comfortable. Although not every individual tourist policeman speaks English, they travel in loose teams and someone in their team will speak English.

The Victoria Hotel is about the same standard as a European 3 star and was quite clean and comfortable. However, depending on which side of the building you are sleeping on you will be woken up when prayer begins in the nearby mosque at 5am.

We arrived at the hotel at about 4pm and were not due to meet the rest of the group until 7pm so the three of us who arrived together decided to wander the streets of Cairo for a while. Our hotel is in downtown so the surrounding streets were all shops. Crossing the street was a scary experience as Cairo’s roads seem to be governed by fewer rules (well at least what Australians, Brits and Americans consider road rules) than Rome’s (if that’s possible) – it is one of those places where to cross the road you simply need to step out confidently and believe that the drivers will not hit you. At that time of afternoon we did not see any other tourists on the streets, and we also hardly saw any women, just men. It is noticeable that women all wear the Muslim dress we expected, but the man dress exactly the same as men everywhere.

One of the things that the Contiki representative told us on the drive to the hotel was that if we were approached by an Egyptian salesmen who asked us to come back to his shop by offering us some kind of special deal, do not go with them, they are just trying to lure us back to their shop to corner us there and sell us something. While walking we stopped across the road from the Egyptian Museum for a look and were approached by a gentleman who advised us that if we were thinking of going into the museum we should wait and come back tomorrow because it would be closing in half an hour. We thanked him for the good advice, and he followed up by asking us where we were from. At this point I and our new American female friend began to walk away without answering (I live in Oxford where the streets are overpopulated with the homeless and you get very good at politely not answering), but my brother dove in and answered, Australia! Immediately the gentleman, whose name was Ali, informed us that he had a brother who lived in Australia and that he loved Australians for all the kindness that they had shown his brother, and that he would adopt my brother as his own brother in gratitude. He then told us that we would have to go back to his shop so that he could give us his business card. We all started to make our excuses but again my brother, who is too nice for his own good, gave in and began to follow Ali back to his shop. Although we thought it was a bad idea we followed my brother into the shop so he could not be cornered alone. To be fair Ali did not try to sell us anything that he had in the shop, however he did tell us that if we were planning to visit the Egyptian museum we should call him and he would be our guide, if we wanted to go to the pyramids we should call him and he would be our guide, if we wanted to rent a felucca we should call him as he has a cousin that owns a felucca rental business, if we went to Aswan we should call him as he had family in Aswan who would show us around. Ali would have expected to have been paid for these services. He would not leave until my brother promised that we would call him, so we lied and left. When we started to make our way back to the hotel about half an hour later we saw Ali standing in the same spot where he has met us across the road from the Egyptian Museum where he would no doubt meet other tourists who might wish to take advantage of his services. Although it was quite an uncomfortable situation, perhaps especially so because we had be warned to avoid such situations, Ali seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and I don’t see anything particularly strange about a salesman trying to drum up customers.

We got back to the hotel just before 7pm and met the rest of the group. We also met our tour guide Sherif who gave us an overview of what to expect on the trip. After this meeting we broke into groups to go off and get some dinner and also some supplies for the next day. The next night we would be sleeping on an overnight train and Sherif warned us that we might not like the food we got on the train. For dinner a group of us went to a place Sherif recommended where we could get Egyptian pancakes. Egyptian pancakes are something between filled crepes and calzone. Like crepes they can be filled with anything, savoury or sweet, but the bread part of the dish is more doughy like pizza. Each pancake was also about the size of a pizza and they cost between E£20-30. The restaurant reminded me of a pizza hut, but less clean, or the upstairs of a McDonalds restaurant at 2am.

To get our supplies for the next night we first went to a fruit market around the corner from the restaurant which Sherif had also told us about. This is where we had our first taste of the infamous Egyptian bartering. My brother and I wanted to get four apples. We went up to one of the first stalls in the food market which was attended by a boy somewhere around 10 or 11 years old. We asked him how much. He looked at my brother, looked at me, made a dramatic sign of thinking about it, even scratching his chin. I giggled as he did this and he looked at me and smiled and then said in the most hopeful voice, E£50. We walked away. The next place where we stopped the seller said E£12 for four apples off the bat, and we took the deal without bartering any further. Our next stop was what Sherif characterised as a ‘very large supermarket’, but was in fact a small corner shop inside a petrol station, though it was the biggest shop of this kind we saw during our visit. Our group had quite some trouble finding the place and tried to ask some locals on the street for directions. In general everyone we met in Cairo spoke at least some English, though they did not know the word petrol station, so I had to charade pumping petrol into the tank of a parked car... amusing but effective communication. At this time of evening we also noticed many more women on the street than earlier in the day, and it seems that late night was the peak shopping hour. When we eventually found the shop we were considering buying some beer or wine for the overnight train trip, but all the beer we found in the fridge was non-alcoholic. In fact the only places we found that we could buy alcohol in Egypt were places like hotels which specifically catered to tourists, though this is not particularly surprising considering Egypt is a Muslim country. We settled for some pringles to augment our apples, and of course some bottled water.

Tourists are not advised to drink the tap water in Egypt. This is not because it is dirty (though this is why they are advised not to swim in the Nile) but because the balance of minerals in the water is different to what we are used to and so can make you feel ill. Bottled water can cost anywhere between E£2-10 depending on where you get it.

We got back to the hotel at about midnight and went to bed; our wake up call for the next morning to begin the tour proper was 6.30am.