SIWA!

Tomorrow I get to leave Cairo for the first time since coming here, and, while I love this place, I am super, super-excited. We'll be taking a bus out into the Sahara to this little oasis town called Siwa, which is very much still a center of bedouin/berber culture...Andrea and I have been reading about the culture a little bit, and it's incredibly fascinating.

A couple of fun facts from our book on Siwan culture:

Siwa used to the be the site of an oracle in ancient times, who was so well-respected that none other than Alexander the Great made the trek out into the desert (No small thing in the days before air-conditioned busses...even with one of those, it's going to take 10-12 hours through open desert to get there).

Until 1820, there was only one family in Siwa that spoke Arabic, much less English or any other language. Everyone else only spoke Siwan. Even today, because the society is so insular, most of the women, who are very heavily isolated from outside society, speak only Siwan, or possibly Arabic.

Until fairly recent history, marriage of grown men to boys, similar to the practice of Ancient Greece, was not only socially acceptable but was a widespread phenomenon. Men paid higher dowries to marry boys than they did to marry girls.

And so on, and so on...

But, I've got to admit, while there's all sorts of interesting sociological stuff about Siwa, I'm most excited about getting the chance to go out in the desert on Friday, see that surreal and intensely beautiful landscape again, go sandboarding, relax in the hot springs, and then spend the night out in the desert. It's going to be INSANELY cold, though, so I'm packing about ten layers. More on all the adventures out there when we get back!