khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-14 01:41:00 |
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Return to Egypt
In just under three weeks I will leave on a three-week vacation for India, Tibet and Nepal, to wander and get visuals for my The Stiff. I’ll be back just in time for Stumptown at the end of April. On the occasion of this trip, it occurred to me that I never actually wrote anything about, or posted any photos from, my trip to Egypt back in May 2007, almost a year ago. Here are the photos. Now for some commentary, if you're interested...
Why Egypt? It all started with a random phone call from my friend Jake Forbes, who was feeling the wanderlust and wanted a vacation. The fact that he asked me to come along with him was just good luck on my part. Jake pretty much did all the planning, and I would never have done it without him. We considered going to Nepal, but Egypt was considerably cheaper, and so we settled on it for partially financial reasons. (I also felt a faint desire to travel to Egypt sooner rather than later, just in case there were still any bargains due to Americans being scared to travel to the Middle East, although I was probably a little too late for this, thankfully.) I have been interested in Egypt ever since I was a little kid, of course, and I also love Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe which talks about all the ancient civilizations, but my current fascination with Egypt dates back just a few years and owes itself mostly to the nerdiest of reasons.
So, let’s join the "in memory of Gary Gygax" nerd-meme and just say it: I was playing in a D&D campaign a few years ago when one of my fellow gamers, a guy who works at Aquarius Records, told me about a new RPG book. That book was Scott Bennie's Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era. I was immediately taken with Bennie’s insane agnostic mixture of comparative religion, mythology and hit points. I was always somewhat into ancient history, but soon, with the convergence of history and RPGing, I was buying books like Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra and African Adventures and Aesheba: Greek Africa and still weirder stuff. From late 2004 to late 2006 I ran a weekly D&D campaign set in this potluck of Ancient Egypt, goblins and lizard men, and in the process I ended up doing TONS of research into the real setting (which of course clashed terribly with the fantasy elements that I had introduced in order to have a relatively familiar D&D experience and sate my players' desire to play halflings or psionicists -- sigh). But at the same time, I was doing tons of actual research and becoming increasingly more interested in the geography, the history and the religion of Egypt. Soon I was reading fairly hardcore books like Gunther Holbl's History of the Ptolemaic Empire, and branching out into general studies of the late ancient world: Tony Perrottet’s awesome and funny Pagan Holiday, Herodotus, Pliny, Thucydides, the outdated and prejudiced but colorful books of E.A. Wallis Budge. Frankly, most of my periods of intense historical research are inspired by some roleplaying game or another, so this was nothing new.
So it was to "get a feel" for Egypt, the landscape and the history and the sights, that I decided to join Jake Forbes on this trip. At the time I was deep in the middle of proofreading "Manga: The Complete Guide," so it couldn't have been worse timing, and I was stressing about work right up 'till the moment I got on the plane (in the process accidentally leaving all my suntan lotion back in San Francisco). I deactivated my cell phone voice mail since it would have been prohibitively expensive, and I quickly abandoned any stupid ideas of taking my laptop with me. We were to arrive in Egypt for a day by ourselves, and then join up with a GAP Adventures tour, Absolute Egypt. I brought along a huge floppy sunhat, a pouch full of electrical power converters, my digital camera, a copy of "Lonely Planet Travel Guides: Egypt," a soon-to-be-wrecked library copy of The Western Desert of Egypt, a sketchbook, and a lot of sunproof clothes. Jake brought a copy of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk.
Lastly, I brought a (soon-to-be-ragged, also from the library) copy of the Koran, out of a feeling that I should try to understand a little of the dominant culture of Egypt of the last 1300 years, rather than just stuff that happened 5000 years ago (but hey! I'm into the Greco-Roman era of Egypt! That's a mere *2000* years ago!). And thus, in a way, my tourist foolishness began. For although my studies have been concentrated on pharaonic Egypt, and I knew no Arabic and had nothing but misapprehensions and stereotypes about MODERN Egypt, I had this vague idea that I would try to be a "good tourist" and represent America in a good light, and perhaps even discuss the Koran with some random Egyptian dudes in a cafe, like this New Yorker columnist once did. My total disconnection from reality should be immediately obvious from that statement... and in fact, this travelogue is going to be littered with dumb tourist things I did, and stereotypes, and crass thoughts, so if you want to retain a good opinion of me, please STOP READING NOW.
Still here? Okay. I'll post more tomorrow.
In just under three weeks I will leave on a three-week vacation for India, Tibet and Nepal, to wander and get visuals for my The Stiff. I’ll be back just in time for Stumptown at the end of April. On the occasion of this trip, it occurred to me that I never actually wrote anything about, or posted any photos from, my trip to Egypt back in May 2007, almost a year ago. Here are the photos. Now for some commentary, if you're interested...
Why Egypt? It all started with a random phone call from my friend Jake Forbes, who was feeling the wanderlust and wanted a vacation. The fact that he asked me to come along with him was just good luck on my part. Jake pretty much did all the planning, and I would never have done it without him. We considered going to Nepal, but Egypt was considerably cheaper, and so we settled on it for partially financial reasons. (I also felt a faint desire to travel to Egypt sooner rather than later, just in case there were still any bargains due to Americans being scared to travel to the Middle East, although I was probably a little too late for this, thankfully.) I have been interested in Egypt ever since I was a little kid, of course, and I also love Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe which talks about all the ancient civilizations, but my current fascination with Egypt dates back just a few years and owes itself mostly to the nerdiest of reasons.
So, let’s join the "in memory of Gary Gygax" nerd-meme and just say it: I was playing in a D&D campaign a few years ago when one of my fellow gamers, a guy who works at Aquarius Records, told me about a new RPG book. That book was Scott Bennie's Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era. I was immediately taken with Bennie’s insane agnostic mixture of comparative religion, mythology and hit points. I was always somewhat into ancient history, but soon, with the convergence of history and RPGing, I was buying books like Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra and African Adventures and Aesheba: Greek Africa and still weirder stuff. From late 2004 to late 2006 I ran a weekly D&D campaign set in this potluck of Ancient Egypt, goblins and lizard men, and in the process I ended up doing TONS of research into the real setting (which of course clashed terribly with the fantasy elements that I had introduced in order to have a relatively familiar D&D experience and sate my players' desire to play halflings or psionicists -- sigh). But at the same time, I was doing tons of actual research and becoming increasingly more interested in the geography, the history and the religion of Egypt. Soon I was reading fairly hardcore books like Gunther Holbl's History of the Ptolemaic Empire, and branching out into general studies of the late ancient world: Tony Perrottet’s awesome and funny Pagan Holiday, Herodotus, Pliny, Thucydides, the outdated and prejudiced but colorful books of E.A. Wallis Budge. Frankly, most of my periods of intense historical research are inspired by some roleplaying game or another, so this was nothing new.
So it was to "get a feel" for Egypt, the landscape and the history and the sights, that I decided to join Jake Forbes on this trip. At the time I was deep in the middle of proofreading "Manga: The Complete Guide," so it couldn't have been worse timing, and I was stressing about work right up 'till the moment I got on the plane (in the process accidentally leaving all my suntan lotion back in San Francisco). I deactivated my cell phone voice mail since it would have been prohibitively expensive, and I quickly abandoned any stupid ideas of taking my laptop with me. We were to arrive in Egypt for a day by ourselves, and then join up with a GAP Adventures tour, Absolute Egypt. I brought along a huge floppy sunhat, a pouch full of electrical power converters, my digital camera, a copy of "Lonely Planet Travel Guides: Egypt," a soon-to-be-wrecked library copy of The Western Desert of Egypt, a sketchbook, and a lot of sunproof clothes. Jake brought a copy of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk.
Lastly, I brought a (soon-to-be-ragged, also from the library) copy of the Koran, out of a feeling that I should try to understand a little of the dominant culture of Egypt of the last 1300 years, rather than just stuff that happened 5000 years ago (but hey! I'm into the Greco-Roman era of Egypt! That's a mere *2000* years ago!). And thus, in a way, my tourist foolishness began. For although my studies have been concentrated on pharaonic Egypt, and I knew no Arabic and had nothing but misapprehensions and stereotypes about MODERN Egypt, I had this vague idea that I would try to be a "good tourist" and represent America in a good light, and perhaps even discuss the Koran with some random Egyptian dudes in a cafe, like this New Yorker columnist once did. My total disconnection from reality should be immediately obvious from that statement... and in fact, this travelogue is going to be littered with dumb tourist things I did, and stereotypes, and crass thoughts, so if you want to retain a good opinion of me, please STOP READING NOW.
Still here? Okay. I'll post more tomorrow.
