Siwa, Part One

The following was written Saturday evening.

What a crazy weekend. Wow. I’ll update you on older stuff later, I know I haven’t written in forever, but … amazing. My eyes and ears are gritty with sand and parts of me are soaked from, um, falling in a lake. BUT. What an unbelievable experience. I’ll divide it into parts because I don’t think I’ve ever done this much stuff in one weekend before. Anyway, though, let’s start at the beginning….

Thursday morning, 7:30 am, I received a mass text from Matthew saying he hoped we were all awake, as our bus was leaving at 8. Oops. Somehow my intended 7-9 pm nap had turned into 12+ hours of sleep, and as such my alarm wasn’t set. So I woke up groggily and slightly panicked, took a shower, and hastily packed up a weekend’s worth of clothes, plus my camera and laptop and iPod and phone and all of the corresponding chargers, and headed out the door, reaching the bus at 8:10. So I almost made it on time…

Luckily they didn’t leave me behind, and Dr. Randa—the Egyptology professor who accompanies us on most of our historical outings and such—wasn’t there yet anyways so it wasn’t a problem. In a few minutes she arrived though, and thus began a twelve-hour bus ride to Siwa, a desert oasis and historical site in Egypt. So that was … something. Mostly I just slept and listened to music and ate delicious peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and chips and drank a number of juice boxes in flavors like peach and pear and piña colada and other wonderful combinations that are sadly unavailable in the states. Oh, and also visited a bunch of shady rest stops and observed a lot of adorable animals.

Also on the way there we stopped at El Alamein memorial and museum. El Alamein was I guess a decisive battle in WWII where I think the Allies defeated General Rommel (aka The Desert Fox) and maybe changed the tide of the war? Something like that. I don’t think I actually realized that WWII extended all the way to Egypt before, but apparently it did. Oops. I am bad at knowing history. Anyway, the memorial for the Commonwealth soldiers was really beautiful:

 

  

  

 

And after that we stopped at the El Alamein museum, where they had old tanks and stuff. Also, it overlooked the Mediterranean, I think. Cool cool. They also had wax figurines of various soldiers, which were super creepy/cool, but I didn’t take any pictures of them. Oops.

 

 

After forever, and getting somewhat lost, we finally arrived at our hotel in Siwa. The rooms were simple but nice and had electricity and [kind of sulfurous] running water alhumdulillah. No internet haha, which … I can’t even REMEMBER the last time I went more than a few hours without internet, so that was a little crazy. Probably for the better, though. Definitely for the better. The campus or whatever it’s called … just, the grounds of the hotel were really beautiful. Trees and pools surrounding the hut-like rooms. Very serene. But yeah, Thursday all we did was eat dinner at the hotel and then crash. Which was fine with me. The real adventures began Friday and Saturday…