EGYPT

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!!! i'm going to a party tonight with my friends and really changing my appearance a bunch...to be a little boy. haha. i look funny without any jewelry and baggy pants and a sideways baseball cap. trying to get rid of the chest was a little problem, but it still works....i'm like a shorter version of chris. i'll get pics up soon i promise. heres the looooonnng note i wrote earlier in word cuz our internet was being SLOW. enjoy!

alrighty. so i didn't write before fall break, so i'll have to start there to catch us all up on the past couple weeks of my hectic life, and then get to the 'good' stuff of the actual trip to egypt for 9 days. so i left off the before the weekend of our second homestay. only about half of our group went for the homestay, which was in a village a couple hours drive outside of accra, and we worked laying a foundation for a house and building mud bricks for about 2 hours before lunch and a little bit more after lunch. i only helped making the bricks, which consisted of digging up dirt, adding water to it, stepping all up on the wet mound to make it a nice even consistency of mud...and then scooping that into brick forms. i'm not sure how helpful we really were, but it was fun. then about half of the group that came went back because they didnt want to spend the night in the village. i think only 13 of us stayed, and consistent with all of the trips through the nyu program, the 8 boys in the program turned out an even more pitiful showing than they already represent. out of 40 girls we'll typically have about 30 of the girls participate, but for some events none of the boys have done it... it just makes me laugh. but anyway, the 13 of us stayed over, and this experience was very different from the other homestay, because none of us had a real interaction with our particular host families. it was more just like we were provided a place to stay, and then had activities we could do within the village. i got a tour from a young girl before dinner, and had some fish for dinner which was actually pretty good. after dinner they had a performance for us with singers and drummers, and we all danced badly of course, but it was fun. it also rained earlier in the day which is how some of us got our showers...and that evening it rained again, and was kind of nice to fall asleep to the sound of rain on the roof. unfortunately most of us then woke up to the sounds of goats and chickens making all sorts of racket. in the morning i walked around again, and had another wonderful breakfast of omelets, which I’ve strangely fallen in love with here. We had the option to go to church, but that’s not as big of a deal here. I actually walked with a group to the church, but no one was there from the village yet, so I decided to go for a little hike with one of the other girls. We also played around with the younger village kids a bunch that morning. It was generally a fun experience, until some of the kids started begging, cuz that’s just always hard to deal with. Coming back in the afternoon was pretty uneventful, but we missed a fun football match in accra. Hopefully we’ll get to see one some other time.

So the week leading up to our fall break was stressful, partly because it was midterms, but mostly because we had no idea if we were actually going to egypt for the week. our travel agent here had been sick most of the week before, but was miraculously better two days before the trip to collect our money, and said she'd get our tickets and everything together later that day. so we thought we'd wait til the next day to pay and collect the tickets all at the same time. but no. she needed the money first. which we didnt realize til the next day.... so then we paid her the day before the trip. and when we got our tickets and tour package, things were not exactly as we had planned, but she wasnt in the office to talk to any more, and we were leaving....so we had no choice really but to just go and when we got there we had to sort it out...

so on thursday, 5 of us went to the airport and played cards for about 3 hours waiting for the plane. it was four of us in the group, but another kid in the program was meeting up with his dad there and was on the same flight. we basically slept overnight, and woke up to the sunrise over the desert. i got my first glimpse of the pyramids out of the plane window. when we landed we were met by people from the company and things were handled as far as that, but that morning we spent reworking our tour plans, and then started seeing stuff. the first day we just saw the museum, but that was cool. mummies and hieroglyphics and other ancient egyptian stuff galore. the next day was packed full of seeing all over cairo- memphis, sakarra, bazaars, the pyramids. At Memphis we saw a couple big statues, a little sphinx, etc. it wasn’t that exciting and we were only there for like 20 minutes I think. But they did have one big statue of one of the pharaohs, that was so big, and it was laying down, and the guys head was still taller than us. Next we went to one of the famous sakarra carpet schools, where they make really nice rugs. From there we drove to see our first pyramid, but this one is from an older period, and has steps to it. After we learned about how papyrus is made, and bought some nice artwork on papyrus, and at another bazaar got cartouches, which are necklaces with our names in hieroglyphic symbols on them. We did a bit more shopping, and in the afternoon headed to giza to see the real pyramids!! we took a camel/ horse ride out to the pyramids. i rode a horse out, and the other three rode camels, and when we made stops the others took turns on the horse. but when we were riding out the guide let me have the reins and i ran across the desert a little bit, which was thrilling! the pyramids i might add were also quite intriguing. haha. (actually i was only fascinated by the horse ride. thats the whole reason i went all the way to egypt) but the pyramids were sweeeeeet. we got to walk up to them and touch em. we didnt get as close to the sphinx as i would have liked cuz we got there late in the day, and they were setting up for the light show, so the area in front was closed, but i got the main idea. and there's always next time...except its apparently eroding a lot... but still. i learned a lot on this trip about what to do and not do and how to do stuff. it was a good (although expensive) learning experience. it was also nice though coming later, because we got to watch the sun set behind the pyramids. That night we spent more time wandering around near our hotel, and met up with a really nice guy who showed us where an internet café was, and then we went and smoked hookah with him, which they call shisha here, and guys can be seen doing it any time of day or night, but girls never do, so it was funny being female and smoking here.

the next day we saw old cairo and the citadel, which included more shopping, and haggling, and the citadel is a huge mosque, and it was intense. We spent a couple hours in this really touristy shopping area, and it was always really funny walking around with 3 girls and Justin, because we all kept getting calls to come over to people’s shops, but then they’d look at us and exclaim…o my, three wives how lucky, and so on and so forth. So the whole trip was full of wife jokes with Justin. and then we took a train to aswan overnight. We were in a 6 person little cabin with chairs, and had some fun conversation with a backpacker from Switzerland, but his background makes him a mutt from all over and he was really cool. The other guy is from peru, but spent a lot of time in iraq, and showed us a bunch of card tricks. All together in our car, we determined we could say thank you in more than 15 languages. It was neat conversation, but less interesting sleep in the seats. We got to aswan exhausted, met our new guide, put our stuff on the cruise boat, and did a quick tour of a couple things in aswan. Another group of 5 girls from nyu Ghana had gone to Egypt, and we saw them at one of the temples, which was funny, because their guide is roomies with our guide. But we said hey and continued on our merry way. That day was a bit of a blur at this point, but we did see some pretty temples, one of which we had to go out on a boat to. The next day we had no tour plans, and the boat wasn’t leaving until late that night, so we used the day to just relax. In theory, I would have liked to have used the time to wander around aswan a bit, since we don’t have much free time to just explore, but I got kind of sick the day before, and used our free day to sleep off some of the head cold I came down with. I still was coughy and had a runny nose for most of the rest of the trip, and still do a bit, but it was good timing I guess that the day I felt really bad I had the day to just sleep. That night the boat took off, and after an hour parked at our next stop. In the morning we got out and saw another temple really quickly. Later in the afternoon, farther up the nile we got off and took a horse drawn carriage ride to another temple. By that evening we were pulled up in luxor. We spent all of the following day seeing luxor temples, and saw our first finished obelisk. In aswan we’d seen the largest attempt at an obelisk, but it was queen hatshipsut’s unfinished obelisk, still left in the quarry, because it had been too big of an attempt, and the stone had cracked. On the west bank of luxor, we also saw the valley of the kings, and got to go into three tombs. This was really neat, because at most of the temples, the color on the walls had mostly been washed off, but down in the tombs, the colors were really nicely preserved still. I think the fact that all of the hieroglyphics on everything originally had color was one of the biggest shocks for me, because when I’m used to seeing ‘ancient egyptian’ things, I think of designs cut into the stone face, but it was more complicated than that, and there was color on all the designs, most of it has just not survived all this time. We kept getting glimpses in corners, or on ceilings, where the sun and elements hadn’t completely washed away the color, but down in the tombs it was really stunning how intricate all the stuff was. Too bad we couldn’t take pictures in the tombs. But later that day we went to queen hatshipsuts something else, and there were a lot of color on some of the walls there, so I took a lot of pictures to remember how color was used. I really enjoyed luxor I think.

That night we got on another train to go back to cairo, but this one was not as pleasant. We thought we were supposed to leave at 10, but didn’t really leave til after 11. when the train got there, our guide led us from one end to the other. Then he went back to the front end of the train again. Apparently the conductor or someone was supposed to have our tickets, and he was supposed to get them, but he didn’t speak much English, so communication here was difficult. Then he came back and got us from waiting at the back of the platform and took us all the way back to the front, where we boarded, and started to get into our seats. The trains here are all different too btw. We opted not to take sleeper trains cuz they are so much more expensive, but the front of this train was 4 seats across, and was clearly the section where most of the local people sat, and in the back of the train had been 3 seats across, and was clearly where the tourists were sitting…but we were cool with sitting up front. But then they came back and told us we were in the wrong seats. The 27-30 seats we were supposed to be in were on another car. So we just started following them. We thought, o the car behind this one. But then we talked through 10 cars. And we actually counted. At this point we were back in the tourist section, but our luggage was 10 cars in front of us. And we had a problem with that. So we were going to go in twos to retrieve it, at which point the train had started to move, and we had to drag/ carry our suitcases back through these 10 cars. After walking that distance 3 times we knew it was 10 cars… so anyway we were not really happy, but were exhausted, and confused, because we still weren’t actually in our seats on this train because other people were in 27-30, but they said just sit a few rows back in these empty seats. That would have been fine if we hadn’t stopped around 1 am to pick up people at another stop, and we then happened to be in someone’s seats…who stood over us and argued in Arabic a bunch until they told us to move back one car again, because that was really our car. But still ‘our’ seats weren’t available, so we were placed in other empty seats, and moved our luggage again and then tried to go back to sleep…. We were a tad tired in the morning. But we got picked up by our new driver, who was taking us to Alexandria for the day. We didn’t really know what we were doing there, and in theory were supposed to be rushing around, but we left Alexandria pretty early, and I’m not really sure what we saw, but we got to see the Mediterranean, so that was cool. We also saw a couple catacombs, one of which I would have liked to spend more time exploring, but the other 3 were in a rush… but o well. Theres always next time. That evening we had mcdonalds, just because we thought it was so amusing that its everywhere in Egypt, but that did not agree with my stomach at all, so Saturday morning before the plane ride I didn’t really do much. We walked around a bit, but mostly just waited for the van to take us to the airport. And for now there ends my Egypt story. The plane ride back was pretty comfy though because I had a whole row to myself in the back to sleep across.

we got back Saturday night really late, and I slept most of Sunday, but there was a concert in accra, that was supposed to be Saturday, but was postponed due to rain, until sunday instead. So I went and saw john legend, who is apparently a grammy award winner, but it was cool cuz he was putting on a souls of Africa benefit concert for the people devastated up north. It was supposed to start at 4. we got there around 6:30…things didn’t start happening until around 9…john legend came on from maybe 10-11…and we were literally front row….standing up against the barricade. I don’t even know him, but for 2 bucks, they were pretty sweet ‘seats’ or standing spots. There were no seats in front really. There was a VIP section over to the left, but like far left of the stage, and that’s no fun. After him they were resetting up the stage for a guy that would appeal to the rastas more, but we didn’t know him either, and at midnight they still hadn’t started, and just had some people talk, and then they were having some other guy play for a bit, and we decided we were too tired and we’d already seen john legend who was who my friends wanted to see…so we left. It was weird though, because at the entrance, you literally had people feeling up your pockets, and it’s a good thing we’ve learned to keep money in our bras, but some of the other people from nyu Ghana who went in other groups and did the VIP section had phone and money stolen… but such is life. And now it’s Wednesday, because I had a lot of classes and stuff on Monday and Tuesday- they are my busiest school days, and I had a couple papers due. But today I’m going to chill a bit. Do some laundry. And hopefully upload some pictures. Be on the lookout for Egypt pics, as well as the long awaited hair cutting off pictures where I look ridiculous with parts of my hair cut off and the little clumps left where the braids used to be. Anyway. This weekend we have no group plans, but I’m thinking about making a little trip up the coast a bit. I’ll try to write again next week. Much love everyone~

will write more soon

so i'm back safely from my trip to egypt for fall break, and it was generally lots of fun, and i know a lot of people are itching for details and pictures, but i've been a bit busy with class and homework and sleeping off a bit of a bug... yesterday i started writing about the trip, and i'll work on it more tomoro, and hopefully get the full story up for you all soon.... i haven't forgotten about this...i just need a bit more time. for now i have to go write a paper. til later~

busy

so i've been busy with a lot of different activities lately. classes are starting to seem more like classes and the workload is increasing. My community service activities are also starting to get off the ground. I should hopefully start teaching AIDS prevention in schools soon, and I've already started a little trumpet class. I was planning on writing more last night, but my comp was being slow, and then I tried to write again before I left Saturday morning at like 5:30 am for Kumasi, but again the comp didn’t work, so now I’ll catch you all up on my various trips and stuff. Last weekend we drove to Kumasi, which is the second largest city in Ghana, and which should have been about 4 hours north of Accra, but with all the traffic, it took more like 7 hours both directions. I feel like we spent more time on the bus then we did actually visiting Kumasi. We saw one of the museums we were supposed to and had a couple hours to run around the cultural center and the market and some specifically wood shops, and so we killed a bunch of money there and all bought lots of gifts.

The weekend before was the homestay through AFS. It was an interesting experience. My family made me a lot of chicken and starch meals, and only wanted me to watch tv. I tried to be helpful, but they didn’t want help with dishes or anything. Their two older children are working in Canada as a doctor, and studying in Chicago through AFS. Their youngest came home from his private school for the weekend, but mainly played video games. There were 3 other kids in the house, but I never really did figure out how exactly they were related. It’s really complicated how everyone is your sister and brother and mother and whatnot, because they aren’t really related in that sense, and I get confused. But I had fun going to a naming ceremony on Saturday, and less fun sitting through four hours of church in a language I didn’t understand on Sunday, but my family has invited me back and since we’re always gone on weekends I’m going to go visit again this evening. When I was there last time, I watched a pair of birds build a nest in my window all day Saturday. It was actually pretty crazy because they started from very little when I noticed them, and had completed it and laid an egg by the next day…too bad when I told Abigail she wasn’t as intrigued and threw it away. I spent a lot of time with her- Abigail, the 7 year old- last time, helped with her English homework, and the father wanted me to teach her how to knit, because I had brought a project with me. I also tried to show her Sudoku, because she slept on a mat next to my bed for some reason, so I stayed up with her the second night while she mainly drew pictures, because I don’t think she understood the number game really. Communication was probably the strangest part of the experience, because they all communicate in Twi with one another, and it’s not like they’re talking about me, but it just felt very strange to either be excluded, or purposefully included in conversations. I will be doing another homestay this weekend, but in a village instead, and we're doing a Habitat for Humanity project working out houses that Saturday before we spend time with our family.

Let’s see…what else has been happening. I went to a dance class last week, where we learned to drum and dance, and then we walked back through one of the communities to the tro-tro station, and that was an interesting experience. I’ve also gotten sick of being charged a bunch for taxis, especially to the part of town that’s like the distance of a few blocks away where we go for groceries, so I’m doing a lot more walking even though all the taxis will honk at you a million times. One of the funniest times walking home though was a couple of weeks ago when we had a huge storm, I thought it would be fun to walk home in it and I got soaked, but all the Ghanaians huddling in their little shops looked at me like I was crazy. It was really refreshing though. I’ve also been running a bit in the mornings, but I have to do that really early or else I can’t breathe because of how thick the air is during the day. Last Friday was also fun, because at the school where I started teaching trumpet/ music, they had teacher appreciation day, which just sort of consisted of each class getting a chance to play football/ soccer, and we played one of the girls games. It’s crazy how differently the girls and boys play, because the girls were pretty terrible and they all just sort of attack the ball all at once, so there are constantly like 10 people around the ball just kicking madly, which helped me get a nasty bruise on my leg, but when the boys played, even the little boys, the ball spent most of its time in the air, because they were just superb at kicking it up and over each other. It was actually really fun to watch. Last week I just had a bunch of free time cuz one of my classes was canceled, so I actually went and sat in on one of my friends classes, and walked up and down Spintex Road, which I saw on the way to my ‘family’s’ house, and there were just a bunch of neat shops along there. I also stopped near there so I could go check out what the Accra Mall is like, because I just wanted to see how different/ similar it was to a mall feel, and it was strange how much like a mall it felt. They have this big store called Game that’s like a Kmart or Target, but based in South Africa. The mall is still being constructed, but the few stores that are open just have such a different feel from the market or street vendors. It kind of felt like walking into another world. It was just pretty strange. I also finally had a seamstress make some clothes out of some of the ridiculous amount of fabric I’ve bought. I had some really neat pants made, and now she’s working on a shirt and dress. It’s a fun process.

I really need to write more often so that this isn’t just a bunch of little one line stories, but a couple of other notes on life I guess are that I spend a bunch of my time after dinner watching the TV show Lost with a couple friends cuz someone bought all three seasons, and that’s fun. I should also hopefully have my Fall break Egypt plans finalized this afternoon…..i’m hoping. On another note, our water heater for the laundry room has been broken for a week, so I washed my clothes in the boys house this morning early when none of them would be awake anyway, and then because one of the boys is real smart, I learned where the lint filter is in the dryer, and cleaned ours and was able to dry my clothes a lot better than before. It used to take like 3 cycles to dry stuff, so we’d been air drying, cuz none of us realized the filter was inside the machine… Also, in an effort to save water and energy, I’m constantly turning off lights and air conditioners and water heaters, since we’ve been trained so well, and my roomies are getting better at doing that too. Mom and bill would be proud too, cuz I’ve trained my roomies to save water, by letting yellow mellow… which still grosses out some people in the program, but it really helps, cuz our house runs out of water after everyone elses every time. Go saving water. Haha. I also save money by boiling a lot of water, and then using kool-aid to flavor it!! Yea hydration! I’m a big dork and am going to stop now, except for-

The only other big news for now though is I took some pictures of my head, and so some pictures are finally up. I'll get pictures from my friends of when I actually cut the hair off later, but now you can at least see what it looks like. There are also pictures from my homestay visit in the second Ghana album

http://picasaweb.google.com/nicole.beall/GhanaPart2

I've also put up some of the pictures from the roadtrip that alicia, daniela, and I took this summer...so those of you who wanted to see some of that can, and I'll work on labeling them later. I’ve also not gotten all of them up, but it’s a sampling, and you can see some of them here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nicole.beall/Roadtrip
and
http://picasaweb.google.com/nicole.beall/OnTheRoadAgain

I’ll try to write again soon…or at least before fall break (which is oct 18-27) and I should be able to have internet while I’m there, but we’ll see… My phone should work there too probably, but I won’t use it much, as always. Talk to you all later~