Day 2: First Day in Cairo The Citadel Aug 29 Part 1

 We slept deeply and well, but I really wish we could have had one more hour of sleep. It was really tremendous to look out our window and see this in the distance:

Here is a close up of what got me so excited.

That is right I could see the pyramids from my hotel window. It was hazy and they were far in the distance, but there they were the real pyramids. We were actually in Egypt. There was no denying it now! We got up at 6:30 and had a sumptuous buffet breakfast in the hotel.

Below was our first sight of the people on the cruise with us.

Early in the morning we met and climbed on a bus so we could go to the citadel of Salah ad Dhin ( قلعة صلاح الدين) that sits in the Muqattum hills overlooking Cairo and get a glimpse of daily life. 

The roads that crossed the Main Street were full of shops and people selling their wares. It is not very easy to get good quality shots from a moving bus, so I apologize for the quality of some of these images, but I want to include them to show what we were seeing.

Often people were out on the street corners selling fruit in large baskets.

We also saw palaces and monumental buildings. Our guide identified some of them, but I no longer remember what they are.

Of course there are many Mosques and minarets. I believe in the picture below, you might be able to see the mausoleum of Sultan Qaytbay from the 1740s (central dome and minaret or maybe it is just in the style of his mausoleum).

Here you can see the Citadel in the background and I believe Egypt's largest cemetery al- Qarafa (القرافة) in the foreground, known in English as the City of the Dead.

The cemetery surrounds the Citadel which divides it into Northern and Southern halves about 4 miles long.

The Citadel is where the Arabic lands were governed between the 13th and 19th centuries. 

In the 1800s many of the buildings were demolished by Muhammad Ali Pasha who then redesigned the area adding new buildings and giving the Citadel its current look.

It was begun during the attacks of the crusaders by Salah ad-Dhin (Saladin) and his idea was to wall in the former capital city Fustat with Cairo to unite it as one large city protected by a wall from Nile River bank to Nile River bank. Below you can see the members of our tour as we prepare to enter the Mosque of Muhammed Ali Pasha.

The building was made of limestone quarried from nearby (and alas also from some of the pyramids of Giza). Below is a kind of court yard between the buildings with a wonderful panoramic view of the city.

The facade is gently decorated.

Originally, the Mosque was clad in alabaster, but the panels on the upper level were stripped away for the palaces of Abbas I (a grandson of Muhammad Ali Pasha.)

Here is a picture of our guide describing the Carrera marble of Muhammad Ali Pasha's tomb.

When you enter there is a central plaza in front of the mosque. 

Our guide said the King of France, Louis Philippe had given Egypt the clock and the story goes that it was in return for the gift of the Luxor Obelisk that is still in Paris.The clock was famous for not working and many attempts had been made to repair it, prompting some wisecracker to say something about the nature of French gifts.

Below you can see our group shod in temporary booties as we have to remove our shoes to enter the mosque.

The interior is beautiful with lots of gilt and geometric patterning. 

Below you can see the lighting which is suspended from the ceiling, but hangs very low.

The view of the city was stunning. It was a jumble of buildings in various states of repair. (Evidently earthquakes have taken quite a toll on the city and many people live in buildings that need work.)

Every tourist group also has a security guard provided by the State. Here is ours for the day. He was a wonderfully sweet man who took very good care of us.

If you can see what is in his pocket, it shows that he was very serious about his job. Thank goodness he never had to use it!

It was time to head on to our next sight, so we took our last pictures....

...and said "Goodbye" to the ever-present dogs and cats and headed back to our bus excited to see what was next!

 

Day 1: Departure and Travel

My husband and I decided to sign up for a dream of a lifetime vacation - an elegant cruise on the Nile. After looking at a couple of options we chose a Viking Cruise on one of their older boats, because it looked like the kind of elegant ship that was used by the elite in the olden days. I decided pretty early on that I wanted to be on the HS Antares. It was old, had a sauna and wooden inlaid floors - charm and elegance that I expected on a Nile Cruise. The only problem was that the only vacancies were in August more than a year in the future. Summer is not, of course, an ideal time to visit an already warm climate, but it didn't matter, I wanted to be on THAT ship and so my spousal unit and I decided to bear with the heat for the pleasure of the style.

We let Viking arrange our flights (something I would not do again as they chose three sets of flights each direction, when two would have been just as easy and much shorter in length.) The first flight was to Newark. They tried to take my small carry-on bag away from me because the  overhead bins filled up quickly. In fact I was the first person to be required to relinquish my bag. It made me angry because I was SO careful in packing and even went down a suitcase size to be sure to fit on the smaller flights (of which this was NOT one). Because some other people were selfish and insisted on taking on too much luggage, we would have to wait at baggage pick-up.  They tagged my bag, but nobody was at the door of the plane to take my bag, so I carried it with me onto the plane and stowed in first class. When we left the plane the flight attendant saw the tag and glared at me, telling me I was supposed to leave it at the door, even though there was no one to there to collect it. I was not prepared to go 17 days with only the change of clothing in my small back pack, so I am glad I had not left the bag. (No one on the smaller flights tried to take my bag, so I really think the airline could have handled this better!

The flight was fine. We passed over a nuclear plant and the usual fields and highways.

It was the layover in the airport that was hard. It seemed to last forever. The second flight which went to Frankfurt was wonderful, because it was half-empty. There were so many unfilled seats that we could stretch out in the plane and sleep - exactly what we needed in preparation for all the walking and activity we would experience in Egypt. The flight wasn't quite long enough to get sufficient sleep, but it did go a long way toward keeping us awake enough later to on to manage to find and catch our next flights.

Again the wait in the Frankfurt airport was long and grueling and I was starting to feel I was already ready to go home, but it was probably the long night and insufficient amount of sleep.

This is a shot of some of the fields and villages in Germany or France from the window of the plane.

The last leg of the journey was a flight from Frankfurt to Cairo. The plane was hot, but I met a lovely woman in a hijab, with whom I was able to practice my Arabic a bit. When we got to the airport, we met with our Viking representative Raul and eventually boarded the bus to go to our hotel. We were SO tired that we basically tumbled into bed upon arrival. We had a great view of the Nile out our window.

Inside was clean and comfortable. We were ready to sleep!

Our Late Summer Cruise to Egypt

Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to be posting about our cruise on the Nile. 

I will do a day by day account, but it will show up in reverse order as I do new posts. (Don't forget you can click on the pictures to make them larger.)

All my life I have wanted to visit Egypt to see the temples and the tombs. I started off as a child being fascinated by the ancient gods of Egypt and even painted a bathroom to look like an Egyptian tomb. (I actually never finished it, so it almost looks like a ruin that has been excavated and I don't have pictures of the cabinets which make the room look a little more complete).

My parents would always take us to the Chicago Art Institute to see the reliefs and artifacts and so my interest grew with time.  

                                                                   

Stela of Mersumaat, New Kingdom 1340-1295 BCE - Chicago Art Institute  (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/34432/stela-of-mersumaat)

                                                                            

Amulet of Tawaret - Third Intermediate Period (circa 1069-332 BCE)   Chicago Art Institute (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/135989/amulet-of-taweret)                                       

When studying at a German University in Munich I was able to take a course on Hieroglyphics from a fairly well-known German Egyptologist and of course I simply had to visit not only the British Museum to see the mummies on the top floor, but also the Egyptian Museum in East Germany when I got a chance to cross into the GDR. 

Akhenaten from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

My plan for this set of posts is to put everything in reverse order so that the events can be read chronologically from the top of the blog to bottom, but this may mean that things as they appear will be the last half of the trip first. Bear with me until I get all 17 days up and organized. I hope people will find my blog about the trip informative and interesting. If you do, think about donating money to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the Antiquities Endowment Fund,  https://arce.org/antiquities-endowment-fund-aef-projects/or maybe the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation doing research until 1928 on the tombs of Quebec El Hawa North, the West Bank of the Nile near Aswan) to help further the research and excavations that are on-going. There is still SO much to learn about ancient Egypt and there is never enough money to fund the excavations that are continuously going on.

Updated Photos

 Okay, so I was so embarrassed by the mess, that I had to a tiny bit of organizing. Here is what my room looks like after an afternoon of hiding junk. There is still much to do, but at least I can work here now.

The desk is mostly clear except for a box of "what the heck do I do with this" stuff.

(It is very visible on the right middle in the shot above.!

Here is where the greatest improvement is visible. The loom behind the table is now mostly clear (lots of unfinished projects still stored underneath, but at least I can get to them now.  Other projects have been restored in the closet.  I also began bringing in the plants for the winter.  That will be the next challenge since there are always more plants than window space and things tend to get crowded again when winter comes. Our average freeze date is September 15, so we are already well past the time when things could have already come in.  I am trying to bring in a plant a day, so that when the inevitable freeze arrives I won't have such an enormous task all at once.

Beware the Ide(a)s of the Home Improvement Project!

It has been quite a while since I have blogged. This is mostly because I have not had access to my account. My old computer died and I no longer had access to the old phone number I had used as back up verification. Google has an annoying security measure that won't let you log in from a new device without back up verification (and no I couldn't answer any of the personal questions correctly - I guess I'm not who they think I am!) I have had to go through a bunch of silly hoops, like blindly calling the old phone number and asking the person who has it to send me a verification code: Talk about an Identity crisis! It is a really weird feeling trying to call someone you don't know so "they" can identify you to an organization that doesn't know you either! Luckily I can impersonate myself well enough to regain my virtual identity!

Anyway, whoever I am, I'm back!

I thought I would start off with an introductory blog on my so-called fiber room. Covid has given me time to think about self-improvement and so I have set about considering what I can do to improve. It has taken me two years of covid to get to the point of actually taking any action on this, but after lots of hard thinking (and 100s of episodes of Perry Mason and Crossing Jordan) I decided to improve my creative space, so I am taking the corner room of the house to make it a place to write and do art and crafts. 

Unfortunately I started impetuously without taking any real before pictures, so I can't show the couch piled high with stuff and the desk facing the window that was obscured by art supplies and things to be scanned. I had already torn everything apart and removed the couch before I even thought of taking pictures. The first thing I wanted to do was paint. I thought that would make everything look fresh and clean and be the perfect setting for my new start. So I pulled all the crap out into the middle of the room so I could get to the walls.  I figured I would paint one wall at a time, maybe over the course of a couple of days and then have everything organized in a week or so.

Here is the result of pulling out all the stuff.

As you can see there is far too much stuff in this room and alas it hasn't gotten any better as I have worked on it.

As I moved stuff away from the walls and removed the couch etc. I discovered all kinds of hidden issues. This was on July 21. There were big stains all over the carpet and the furniture had been hiding all kinds of problems with the walls.  Each step I took meant stopping my project to fix something that I hadn't planned on. 

First I decided to shampoo the rug spots. naturally I ran out of rug shampoo and had to order more resulting in at least a weeks delay for that part of the project.  Then there was the issue of the baseboard heating system that had been torn out when we decided to switch to geothermal heating. There were gouges and holes in the wall and floor where pipes had been and even burns. And of course there was no molding where the baseboard heating units had been all along the wall. While waiting for the rug shampoo I decided to fill holes and get the walls prepared for painting. Here is one part of the wall in the southeast corner of the room. 

You can see I had already started the sparkling process, which took several passes because of the depth and number of holes and gouges. As you can also see, I decided to paint the parts I could so that my project would not be delayed for such a long time. (Note that now it was already more than a month later : Aug 30th). Look at the huge improvement in the order and organization in my fiber room! ;-(

So much for a two week project! Here you can seethe missing baseboards and more of the problems.  I speckled and sanded and put on multiple coats of paint to cover the black burns (and then repainted the whole wall, because there first coat didn't seem even) and shampooed the rug when the new cleaner arrived, but the didn't solve the problem of the baseboards.

Wouldn't you know that this prefab house from the 70s used nonstandard baseboard sizes! I looked everywhere for baseboard wood that was 2" by 1/2" only to be told repeatedly that they do not make that size. Of course I could special order cut it, but I had no intention of paying 30$ for an 8' piece of wood.  Add t this the problem that the trim going up the corner was yet another size also pretty impossible to find.

I ended up buying 2" by 1/4 inch board, but of course it didn't come in the shiny green color of my already existing baseboard. No problem I thought, just run to the hardware store and buy some glossy green stain. Of course it was not that easy! First they didn't have a glossy stain. I was told I would need to buy a stain and then polyurethane over it. Okay, so I GUESSED about the green color. (Yes, I know that color memory is one of our least accurate human abilities - I am an artist I knew better, but I was fed up by this time and in a hurry.) So of course I did not get a close color and I probably should not have gotten semi translucent stain, since it didn't go on very dark, BUT..... since it was an oil based paint and I do oil painting, I took some of my precious oil paints and palette mixed an olive green color for the  make-shift baseboard. It wasn't perfect, but by this time I felt that half-assed would do.

Here is a comparison of my new board (below) with one of the pieces of trim I needed to match. Not dark enough, but too bad!) The trim, by the way is the part that goes vertically up the corner of the room.

Now I had the problem, that the trim and the baseboard on the east wall were 1/2 inch thick and the new board was only 1/4 inch thick. I also had a 6 inch gap in the vertical trim that I would have to fake somehow. I dug around in my garaged, stained another piece of random wood for the vertical trim and (more oil paint and palette mixing - two more days of drying and then another day or so for polyurethane and I was ready to do this jigsaw puzzle of a molding problem.

When I put it all together it looked terrible, because the vertical trim stuck out 1/4 inch farther than the horizontal trim along the south wall. So I got out my sandpaper and started narrowing the trim long the last inch of the trim (Making it more like 3/8 inch in thickness. Then I crow barred the thin trim away from the wall just a little bit so that there was a tromp l'œil  effect to make the boards look like they were the same width. (I swore I wasn't going to do anything half-assed, because I had inherited so much of a fish-mosh in this room, but by this time I was desperate to be done.)

Here is what I ended up with. This is before:

And this is after:

Okay, so it isn't terrible and besides there is furniture in front of it anyway.

Now comes the hard part, organizing and reducing the amount of stuff.   So it is October now and I'm still working on that part. I'll have to do an update as soon as I can get that last part done! (Of course I haven't even mentioned the traverse rods and curtains and what an ordeal it was removing and replacing them, but it is time to close this blog entry so that will remain a mystery.). 

So as embarrassing as the mess is, here is where it currently stands. The walls are painted, but the mess is still a mess. Why doesn't that surprise me?

Puzzle Repair

So, I love wooden jigsaw puzzles, but they are expensive.  I decided to buy a couple on ebay with missing pieces and see if I could manage some kind of replacement pieces. IT turned out to be pretty bad, but here is my first attempt.

Here is the puzzle with the repaired pieces inserted.

Here is the puzzle with the pieces removed.
 

Here is a close up of the pieces. They aren't very delicate, but I think they do the job.

Various Garden Images

The garden has been lovely this year, although I haven't gotten very good pictures of it. The Irises and Lilacs have come and gone and a rain storm a couple of days ago took out the poppies. Because of Covid 19 I decided to do some vegetables this year. They had to be planted in beds near the house to keep the rabbits and deer from devouring them, so they are in beds that usually have flowers.

Below is my cherry tree. It has cherrieson it. The blossom period was very short and I didn't get any good images of it, but I am going to try and get some of the cherries!! ;-)

The perennieal poppy in the Western bed had five buds, but the rain got most of them. This is before the thelast ones opened. Clearly the peonies and the poppy clash, so Iam going to have to move something, but I haven't yet decided what should go where.

This is a humming bird that was resting on the wire that holds our bird feeder. It is a very fuzzy image, but I am amazed I got it at all!.

These are peopnies in the Japanese garden in the back yard. (The cherry treeis also in that garden.)

This is the herb garden in the front yard. You can see the basil seedlings in the front. The sun drops aren't really herbs, but I wanted a little color in this bed. I am going to move some of the sun drops to the east side of the house.

 

This is kale in the "tier garden in the back yard. I usually have flowers in this bed, but wanted to keep the bunnies away from it.

Here's my red and white garden. It always seems to get visitors from  other color groups!