Langwitches Travel

It has been amazing how many languages and people from different countries have been surrounding us. Egypt is a country that attracts visitors from all over the world. Tour guides have told us that they are mainly coming from Russia and Spain, but we have seen so many different nationalities that we gave up counting all of them.

An incredible experience for me was listening and observing all the different nationalities and languages that were represented in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It was fascinating to watch the (clearly Egyptian) tour guides walk around with different groups and each explaining the same thing, only in a different language. After hearing English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, and Russian we gave up trying to identify the language.

The travel industry is quite big here in Egypt and tour guides need to learn several languages well. Once we started on our tour of Upper Egypt and later on boarded the cruise ship down the Nile, we joined a larger group of travelers. It is an amazing group of people from all over the world that are being thrown together in different groups. These groups are formed depending on what language you speak. So, people from Australia, England, United States and Canada are lumped together, while we saw other groups with members from Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, Chile, and Panama. It was interesting and fun for me to listen to our English speaking guide, then listen in on the lecture from the German tour guide next to us and hear additional information from the Spanish speaking group that was following our group around the area.

At our assigned dinner table on board of the cruise ship, we have an incredible diverse and language rich group: a wonderful British couple living in Geneva, Switzerland, another couple from Oslo, Norway and a recently married couple from Perth, Australia. When you throw these together with your two teachers from Birmingham/USA and Germany/Argentina, you get interesting dinner conversation.

Street vendors and their language abilities are another very surprising and interesting situation. All of them seem to know basic selling, bargaining, numbers and getting your attention vocabulary in ALL the languages. Even the young boys try to get your attention, by yelling “Hello”, “Hallo” or “Hola”, “Senora”, Miss, Lady, etc. When one does not respond to their calls, they usually switch the language and try another one. They are desperate to find out from which country you come from, so they can shift to that language to start bargaining with you. These vendors can make change in any money currency on the spot.

from Sunday, September 30th
On board of the Sonesta Moon Godess

We are up a little earlier than the wakeup call from the boat. Enough time to enjoy some quiet reflection on the deck. We are still docked in Aswan, ready for a morning of sightseeing before we leave to ride “down” the Nile to Kom Ombo this afternoon.

Egypt s so far has been more than I ever expected. Very different and at the same time still the same as the expectations that one has after preparing yourself for such a trip.

“Everything that seems so unreal is real and at the same time the reality of many things seem unreal to us “westerners.”

We are so accustomed to high budget movies, created and made with special effects that seeing the Great Pyramids or gazing up the giant statues of Ramses II might, at the first glimpse, be nothing that extraordinary, since our eyes are used to seeing such fascinating sights on the movie or TV screen.

The moment of “awe” comes, when realizing that this is the real thing, that it is not created by a talented special effects artist. You are standing before “time”. How many people before you have looked at and touched these stones? Most of the moments in time and history that are studied in school and influence our daily lives today are nothing but a recent flicker of a moment in time compared to when these monuments were built. The realization of how much these ancient stones, paintings, and stories engraved for eternity have witnessed and who has stood before them, comes with a sense of humbleness to me.

“Everything that seems so unreal is real and at the same time the reality of many things seem unreal to us “westerners.”

On the other hand, coming to the Middle East for the first time allows us to look at the modern life that seems so intertwined with the history, traditions, religion and present politics here in Egypt. Our western minds are surprised at how “unreal” daily life and certain customs are that we are witnessing and trying to sort, compare, compartmentalize and tag in our minds. Having traveled during the holy month of Ramadan has allowed us to gain a faint amount of insight regarding what role religion plays in the everyday lives of the Egyptian people. We are finding ourselves observing unfamiliar actions by locals and then suddenly able to make connections and being able to understand the background behind a particular behavior. We have seen many men with dark spots on their foreheads and then finding out that these come from praying and touching the ground with their forehead five times a day. We have seen many, many men sitting at street corners or on the side of the road and reading silently or chanting out loud from their prayer books. We spotted many pairs of shoes in front of a hidden corner of a house, only to see 10- 15 men kneeling on the ground, bending their heads towards Mecca. We have seen lots of little beaded necklaces in the hands of men or hanging down the mirror of a car that look very similar to a rosary. We were told by one of our drivers, that these are “sephas”, used after prayer. One very obvious fact is that we did not see many women after we left Cairo. All our tour guides have been male. There is not one woman working on, in or around our cruise ship. Not one woman or girl in the Alabaster factory shop we visited. The bazaars are filled with only men and boys. It seems “unreal” to not see many women out on the streets. But maybe this is only because we are in a tourist area and do not get to see the places where the average Egyptians lives, works and shops.