Cyprus is just like home...

Cyprus is just like home. Except you are surrounded by the Mediterranean, there’s no chick-fil-a, and everybody here speaks Greek.

Questions from my mom’s class:

SAM ask-- How many kings lived in the Valley of the Kings?
answer: so there’s this deal (or at least how I understand it):
Kings and rich people decided they wanted to be buried in cool places.
The chronology goes kinda like this: mastaba tombs, then step pyramids (djoser), then bent pyramids, then red pyramids, then the Great Pyramid and others at GIZA, then came the valley of the kings.
The pyramid development happened like this -- kings were like “HEY! I want a bigger better place than the last king - BUILD IT!” so pyramids got nicer and bigger each time.

Then during the pyramid time, kings noticed they were getting looted....everything was stolen little by little. So they were like “HEY! Let’s hide me in the mountains instead of a pyramid!” and so pyramids were uncool and people began to be buried in the Valley of the Kings -- 62 tombs were there [they think.. can’t ever really tell] and 21 of those were royalty – cause anyone w/ enough dough could have a tomb in the valley.

FYI -- king tut is not a big deal as a king. Not at all. He doesn’t really matter. Ramesses II is the most notable ruler buried in the Valley of the Kings. King tut is just the only tomb they found intact with no looting. So that makes him important cause they now have a li’l understanding of what was buried in the tombs. And if there was that much gold in his tomb [he was a nobody who was died unexpectedly, meaning his tomb/riches weren’t even ready for burial when he died] there must have been crazy amounts of cool things and gold in the other big tombs.


SAM asks – What do you eat?
In Egypt we were kinda busy trying to not get sick – we didn’t try too many foreign foods. Though I didn’t get sick, almost everyone else did. We like to call it FRAGILITY FACTOR. A cool something new: Khirkade juice made from the hibiscus flower. Looked kinda like red cool-aid but tasted like nothing you have ever had before.*
In attempt for “safe” food, we ate one meal at a place called Roy’s Country Kitchen, located in our five-star hotel. Here they required workers to wear plaid button-ups and overalls as uniform and played only Johnny Cash music. [I sang a li’l ring of fire here and there.] It was memorable.

Cypriot (pronounced SIP-REE-OUGHT) food has been excellent. Like, you don’t even know. We have eaten at many small town café sorta places. In Larnaca, we ate souvlaki, which is a semi-circle pita sandwich filling with roasted meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, etc., which has been argued as the 8th Wonder of the World. There are strange sauces to go on the souvlaki, one which is a sesame seed sauce called tahini (it goes in hummus too), and another is a cucumber and yogurt sauce called tzatziki. Those livin’ on the edge add hot pickled peppers and celery.
The cheeses here are divine. For breakfast, we usually take advantage of the opportunity to make a tomatoes and helloumi sandwich, on toasted bread. It’s either souvlaki or helloumi pitas for every meal, who am I kiddin?

The coffee here is very strong. You get a nice little 3-ounce cup, saucer, and a large glass of water. Not really thinking, I had my first cup of coffee when we were in Cyprus before going to Egypt. After a few sips, I reached complete grind. Lots of grind. Bitter grinds. Settled at the bottom. Not knowing any better, I decided to chug all the grinds at the bottom. All of them. I immediately regretted my decision. It was AWFUL. Then they told me that you don’t drink that part. And that’s why they give you water. Ever since then, this story comes up quite often. Almost every time we have coffee. “HEY ANNA MARIE! ‘MEMBER THAT TIME YOU DRANK ALL THE COFFEE GRINDS! HAHA!” They call it stupid. I call it HARDCORE.


SARAH asks -- Did you see through the windows in the pyramids?
There are actually no windows in the pyramids. Only stone…. On all sides. No windows at all.

SARAH asks-- Is it true girls could not be actors thousands of years ago?
Yes, this is true. Women really couldn’t do diddlysquat back then. No rights, really. Men played the role of women in the plays of classical theatre.

SAM asks --Did you go inside the pyramid? What did it look like? How many pyramids did you see? What were the carvings like?
Yep, I went inside the pyramids. Well, only one was open. And empty -- cause everything has either been stolen or put in museums. But we walked in and it was like this really long tunnel that was probably 4 feet wide/tall, that finally ended in a chamber room. And had little oxygen. And was empty. But at least I went inside. Here are some really bad pictures I found online. I can’t find any good ones, and photographs are not allowed. http://www.phouka.com/pharaoh/egypt/photos/luxor/westbank/vk/ramesses3-01.html ; http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2002/egypt/tomb_vr_1.shtm
The Valley of the Kings, on the other hand, had amazing hieroglyphics and paintings on all the walls.*

I would like to take a moment to fill you in on how ghetto the Egyptian Museum was in Cairo. Egypt was dirty overall. And they know Americans don’t understand Arabic, so it is easy for them to make us pay for things like bathrooms, even in big places like the Egyptian Museum. Examples of how ghetto this place was include: to lock up the cases with really famous sculptures and artifacts, they used wire twists where a lock would go. Sometimes rusty little padlock. I was looking into some of King Tut’s Tomb stuff, and there was packaging tape all over the top of one of the funerary boxes. They also used classy handwritten slips of paper to signal which pieces were “on leave”, though many of the pieces in this museum didn’t even have identification. It was weird.

*A MUST-GOOGLE