Luxor problems strike again...

A couple of hours after my previous post, we went out for a tasty and cheap dinner at the Amoun restaurant. On our way back to the hotel, I twisted my ankle on stairs leading down from the restaurant. It promptly swelled to the point of not looking like an ankle anymore. Antonio ran to a pharmacy for an ACE bandage and something to kill the pain while Jane and I managed to move me down to the ground floor.

We were up late icing my ankle and feeding me ibuprofen before going to bed and getting up early to catch the train back to Balyana. Hopping around train stations on one leg (where would one find crutches in Luxor?) is tiring work, but we made it back without more of an incident than being stared at a lot while hopping down the platform (I called this the "bouncing hawaga show"). Once back at the house, Hasan promptly made me some makeshift crutches from some wooden poles that were at the house.

Breakfast the next morning (ankle up, of course)

Getting around was pretty hard for a couple of days, but I'm back on my feet now with only a little pain and swelling remaining.

Update: after we returned to the States, I discovered that I actually had a fractured fibula, which I had walked around on for a couple of weeks before we came home. However, as of December it is all healed and doing very well.

Luxor...again

While I had pretty much sworn off of visiting other locations, especially Luxor, after having been out of commission for a day and a half after getting back from Luxor last week (I went over a month without any stomach problems before that!), we are back in Luxor again. With Ramadan ending this evening and the eid (feast/festival) going on for the next few days, we decided we needed to go somewhere and do some sight seeing, since there would be a long weekend during which we cannot work at the site.



We spent the day trekking all over the West Bank, from the Valley of the Kings to the Ramesseum and then back to the East Bank to visit Karnak Temple and walk around its sprawling monuments for a couple hours. Having now exhausted ourselves, we've retired to an internet cafe to check email, put out fires, and, in my case, make a blog post.


We will return to Abydos tomorrow, having not stopped for McD's food before getting on the train this time!

Luxor

We were pleasantly surprised to find the train from Balyana to Luxor on-time Thursday afternoon and arrived in Luxor by early evening. However, we were unpleasantly surprised to find that prices have gone up on many things in the city, especially on the residents’ price on hotel rooms. I was hoping to stay in my favorite hotel from 2004, but my teammates and I could not afford the nearly tripled price a room fetches from a resident (we have residence visas). Instead, we settled into a cheap, but clean place on a back street. It was much more affordable, at 90 LE per double room, per night (about $16 USD), including continental (in the barest sense) breakfast. The guys had a decent view, but Jane and I didn’t really care that our window looked out on other buildings or that the shower was cold (the latter wasn’t really any different than back at the house) because we were only interested in three things: air conditioning, soft pillows, and a lack of mosquitoes.

On Friday, we walked around town getting some shopping done and bargaining for many items in our combination of newly and long ago acquired Arabic. The ability to say and understand numbers, as well as to ask how much things are and remark “that’s expensive!” in Arabic seemed to help our case a lot, even though we were shopping in a very touristy market. Antonio was particularly impressed with the responses we got to “b’kem da?” (“how much is this?”) and got several hand-stitched pillow covers for his couch at home.

At the end of all that wheeling and dealing, which involved copious walking on paved streets, I was ready to have a shower and a nap, while Jane and Antonio ventured on to an internet café and some local sights.

We had hoped to evade tourist police detection on our train ride back Friday night, but did not manage to do so. When asked where we were going, Antonio spoke for the group and told the police we were going to Girga (they never want foreigners going to such an out-of-the-way place in Middle Egypt) for work. The police waffled back and forth among themselves with little being understood by us other than the word for “problem.” Eventually, they asked us some more questions, like where we are from, and Antonio told them that we are Spanish and that the police in Girga knew we were coming on the train and would be waiting for us. With such a persuasive argument, they seated us on the train (walked us to the particular seats they wanted us to occupy in first class – how could a foreigner ever travel in second, or god forbid, third class? They obviously couldn’t imagine such a situation). The rest of the journey went smoothly, though we were totally exhausted by the time we arrived home, and I ended up quite ill in the morning from some McDonald’s french fries we had had for dinner.

My Long Blog Absence

In continuation of our ongoing problems, equipment and otherwise, we were unable to make outgoing calls (including connecting to the internet) for the past week because the phone bill for the house was not paid! We were told it would be paid on three separate occasions before it finally happened and today our connection is back to normal. Of course, the expected DSL is still nowhere to be seen.