For Labor Day weekend, the university sent all of the study abroad students down to El Gouna on the Red Sea. We left at 3 am Friday morning. We would have left at a more normal time, but blocking off half of the street in front of the main campus would have been nearly impossible during the day. We were originally supposed to leave directly from the dorms, but the State Department of the Kingdom of Thailand objected to having 8 large buses on our street. (I never realized that the State Department of Thailand would ever directly influence my life)
We started out across the desert, in our 8 charter buses and military police escort (apparently bandits can be a problem when driving at night). I slept for most of the trip. I woke up for the last 5 minutes of desert, followed by our drive through El Gouna. The development looked exactly as I would imagine a wealthy suburb in Southern California would look. Rows of spec-houses built in a pseudo-Mediterranean/Arab style with heavily irrigated lawns surround a golf course. During the 5 minute drive to our hotel, I didn't see a single individual outside, except for some landscapers and construction workers.
Once we reached the hotel, we went about distributing room keys with the typical model of Egyptian efficiency. The rooms were divided up alphabetically by first name. All 300 of us were herded into an auditorium, where they proceeded to hand out all of the keys one by one. My name starts with a D and it only took an hour and a half to get my key.
The distribution of keys was just the beginning of our coordinators' methods of organization and communication. All announcements about meeting times and locations were given by the director walking into the restaurant where we had all of our meals, announcing the message to a table, and telling them to pass it on. Quite a few people ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time throughout the trip.
The Red Sea is shallow in this area. You can walk about a quarter of a mile in knee deep water before reaching the drop-off (and most of the beaches have No Swimming signs before the drop-off, which makes for a wading experience more than a swimming one. The weather was nice though. I spent quite a few hours under an umbrella on the beach reading The Kite Runner. After two weeks of the intensity of Cairo, it was very nice to get away into something much less intense.
The resort was a bit unsettling in some ways. Even if I exclude our group from the statistics, about 90% of the guests were European, so the entire town was filled with wealthy westerners and the Arabs who serve them. And everything about the area felt artificial. A bit like being in Disneyland without having Micky Mouse.
My classes start tomorrow (After Empire: Nationalism and Social change in the Middle East and Introduction to Development) - both of which I'm looking forward to.
We started out across the desert, in our 8 charter buses and military police escort (apparently bandits can be a problem when driving at night). I slept for most of the trip. I woke up for the last 5 minutes of desert, followed by our drive through El Gouna. The development looked exactly as I would imagine a wealthy suburb in Southern California would look. Rows of spec-houses built in a pseudo-Mediterranean/Arab style with heavily irrigated lawns surround a golf course. During the 5 minute drive to our hotel, I didn't see a single individual outside, except for some landscapers and construction workers.
Once we reached the hotel, we went about distributing room keys with the typical model of Egyptian efficiency. The rooms were divided up alphabetically by first name. All 300 of us were herded into an auditorium, where they proceeded to hand out all of the keys one by one. My name starts with a D and it only took an hour and a half to get my key.
The distribution of keys was just the beginning of our coordinators' methods of organization and communication. All announcements about meeting times and locations were given by the director walking into the restaurant where we had all of our meals, announcing the message to a table, and telling them to pass it on. Quite a few people ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time throughout the trip.
The Red Sea is shallow in this area. You can walk about a quarter of a mile in knee deep water before reaching the drop-off (and most of the beaches have No Swimming signs before the drop-off, which makes for a wading experience more than a swimming one. The weather was nice though. I spent quite a few hours under an umbrella on the beach reading The Kite Runner. After two weeks of the intensity of Cairo, it was very nice to get away into something much less intense.
The resort was a bit unsettling in some ways. Even if I exclude our group from the statistics, about 90% of the guests were European, so the entire town was filled with wealthy westerners and the Arabs who serve them. And everything about the area felt artificial. A bit like being in Disneyland without having Micky Mouse.
My classes start tomorrow (After Empire: Nationalism and Social change in the Middle East and Introduction to Development) - both of which I'm looking forward to.
posted by David at 2:30 PM
2 Comments:
The development looked exactly as I would imagine a wealthy suburb in Southern California would look.
Have you ever seen Arrested Development?
I'm glad you're having fun. It's really too bad about the camera, I'm sure there would have been lots of great pictures from the Morocco trip.
Yeah, it was kinda like that - Slightly Arab-themed McMansions in the middle of a desert - though I doubt that the CIA funded these.
I bought a new camera - it's a Kodak, since that was about the only brand I could find that I had heard of before, but it's 5.2 megapixels and takes relatively decent pictures.
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