Antelope, Vultures, Locusts and Nubians

(Pictures: Top: unfinish oblisk. Middle: bird at botanical gardens. Bottom: pheonix hyroglyphic)Well, sorry for the delay in the posts, but our cruise was lacking in the intenet area. I haven't posted in five days, so I think I'll just start where I left off to avoid confusion. Well, we left Luxor at about two (a bit late due to winds) and headed off towards the locks. We had to go under this bridge on the way, and since we were one of about 400 cruise boats on the Nile, it was quite a race. It was quite terrifying, really, because there was a boat on each side of us trying to go throught eh same space as us, where there was only room for two boats. I feared shipwreck, but the crew perservered (screaming at the other boats the whole time to stop) and we went through ahead of the rest. After all this excitement plus dinner, we went back to our little room for the night. Then we heard it.
"Hallo?! Hallo! Open de weendow!" So we opened the window(it was more like a glass door) and looked down to see this man standing up in a little row boat yelling up at us.
"English?" He said.
"Yes! American!" Dad called back.
"Welcome to Alaska!" (that's the catch phrase they use for Americans) "look at this!" He held up some scarf or something. Then he chucked it at us. It flew up while we cowered in fear of it's fate and went right into the room. This kicked off a storm of crap flying up four stories throught the window while we protested and tried to throw it back. The guy tried to buy me for a few camels (I'm really getting sick of these sexist egyptians.) while continuing to attack us with flying linens, shirts and scarves. We finally bought a tablecloth and napkins to stop the continuos flow of junk through the window. it took dad about 15 minutes to get the price down from 600 egptian pounds(L.E.) to 100 (about 18 U.S. dollars), and even that, we realised later, was to much.
From that point on there was a continuous stream of merchant type people who we started to call vultures because of how ruthless they are and the insanely large number of them. Our third night (in Edfu) showed us little kids, some only 4 or 5 years old, selling things on the streets. We bought a few bracelets from one of them, and were then mobbed by 5 0r 6 others, who all shouted at us in multiple languages to buy all they're wares. There were so many of them and they were so close to us that we couldn't even move. We eventually mananged to get to a staircase and made our escape to the boat, followed by shouts of "Habla espanol?" and "Only 10 pounds! All this! Only ten! Good quality!" I gave those ones the name locusts.
My rockstar legacy continued on the boat due to this egyptian family who became somewhat obsessed with me. The family was made up of a woman in her mid twenties (my main fan), her husband (picture taker), and their large mob of 4-6 children. The wife looked very young and spoke a bit of english, and on our first night in the boat they came up to me and asked for my picture. they also dragged a somewhat confused italian girl into the photo. Throughout the whole trip I had a total of 4 photo ops with the young family, and they said hello and introduced themselves everytime they saw me. I honestly have no idea why they're so obsessed with me, but I think it's a combination of my age, eye color, hair color and skin color. I also think that they're more willing to ask me for a picture because I'm a girl. I'd like to add that there were about a thousand kidsbetween the ages of 2 and 10 on our boat, and I think they're the worst behaved kids in all of Egypt. They ran up and down the halls continuously through the day and night and there wasn't a moment during meals without a screaming child somewhere. Dad put it well by saying that it was like being trapped in an airplane. We gave them the nickname "antelope" because of their habit of pounding through the halls at 1:00am.
I've seen so many temples throughout this trip that I don't think I could survive another. My favorite temple was one that had to be moved because of the Aswan Dam. It sits on this secluded island and it's very beautiful, sort of like a garden. It was very well preserved and it also had the added bonus of three crocodile mummies. That temple was created in honor of the god of evil with a crocodile head, and the god of good with the falcon head, Horus.
My favorite bit of the cruise was at Aswan, in the botanical gardens. I hadn't seen green in ages and in was nice to suck it all in before heading back to nasty old Cairo the next day (today). We also saw the unfinished oblisk, which was situated in the granite quarry from ancient times. Basically the ancient egyptians started carving this huge mass of conctrete to make an enormous oblisk (about 42 meters high and more than 20 tons) and it cracked. That must have sucked, because they were almost done with it when a huge crack went through it and ruined the whole thing. Anyways, we're kinda happy it happened at this point because now we know how the made that sort of thing.
Last night in the boat some Nubian people came onto the boat to do some traditional dancing and singing. Nubians are native egyptian people with black skin. They were very entertaining and had some amazing drum playing skills. Their music and dancing told stories and they had some vibrant costumes. I really enjoyed this part because they had the audience interact in some funny ways. Dad got really into it because near the end the pulled a bunch of people up onto the stage (including myself and father) and had us do some odd things. They had dad mimick one of the actors in everything he did and it looked like they were fighting. They were spouting giberish and pushing eachother around. It was hilarious.
Now we're in some fancy hotel by the Cairo airport, and we're ready to embark on the next bit of our journey tomorrow. Next stop: Nairobi!
Also: If any of my friends from school are following my blog, please leave some comments. That goes for everyone else too, I love reading the comments and seeing what you guys think. Chao!
~Kelly