Aswan

We're in Aswan, and relaxing. And of course, I have caught the trip cold/sore throat/cough. Just today, so I've spent the day in bed. Otherwise, we've had a great trip, I think. We drove into Aswan yesterday. Such a lovely drive. The desert gets very close to the road and the houses become more part of the landscape. They are most unpainted, with some exceptions, and some of them make use of Nubian architecture, with rounded roofs and decorative brickwork at the top of the walls. They almost all have satellite dishes, though. Even the smallest and meanest of them.

Luxor was lovely. It's always one of the biggest places we visit in terms of sites and guiding at the sites. This year we've been particularly lucky with our guides - last year's guide was a buffoon and wrong for the type of trip we have, but this year's have been quiet and have just been lovely people. I don't know if I mentioned previously that Jeremy Armstrong, one of my colleagues, has come along. He is one of the Romanists in the department, and we're setting up a complementary trip to Rome to run in alternate years. He's here to see how it's done and we've been discussing all kinds of options regarding content and integration between the two time periods. It's been great fun. He's got great ideas about how this can be better in terms of studying all eras of Egyptian history, pharaonic, Greek, Roman, and Arab. It'll take a while to set up, I think, but it could be a really interesting course, in the end.

Speaking of Luxor, they're working on turning the entire city into an open air museum. They've begun this by razing the houses over top of an ancient avenue of sphinxes. They have plans to raze almost everything up to the train station, including the souk (market bazaar). It means that the landscape of the city has already changed. Favourite shops and cafes are gone or moved to the outer rim of the city. I can't see how they're going to move the souk, but they've taken down an enormous amount already. People get money to move from places they've lived in sometimes for generations, but it can't be enough. And some of them are living in places with very cheap rents (like 5LE a month = $1 CDN, $1.25 NZD), and will have to move to places with rents of 2000LE a month. It's very hard.

Okay, I'm going back to bed now. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but the wifi here is slow as molasses in either January or June, depending where you live. We'll be homes soon, anyway. I apologize for the lack of posts on this. I had planned to have more but ...