Nails and Eyes

 

You took off your glasses and set them on the table. My nails really were beautiful. They gleamed, and there wasn’t a single imperfection to be found. You went over to the sofa and flopped down. Still sitting in my chair and holding my fingers out, I watched you stretch out. It wasn’t unusual for you to lie on your back like that. But now, horizontal on the sofa, you looked like something the furniture store had thrown in as part of the package. You closed your eyes. But that’s not to say that you fell asleep.

Comprised of a novella (the titular tale, which won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize) and two short stories, this collection, while not quite horror, explores feminist themes of women’s lives and roles in modern Japanese society; a position seemingly pulsing with dread and danger. Kaori Fujino’s writing (in translation by Kendall Heitzmann) is crisp and allusive, and despite frequent whiffs of the supernatural, I absolutely believed the lives and characters she has created here. A short read that I found totally satisfying. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

You couldn’t see anything that you could make sense of. There was only light. In front of you, there was brightness. And a surprising clarity. Your past and future, equally clear, stretched out from your body into the distance. You weren’t able to focus on any single particular event. But all the time that had passed to this point in your life and all the time that remained to you had formed into a single plane of glass that now threatened to cut you in half at the waist. ~ Eyes and Nails

Such a creepy novella. Narrated in the second person POV by a woman who was three at the time of the story she’s telling — and who could not possibly have known the intimate thoughts and actions of the others that she’s relating — this is the tale of a young woman who moves in with her widowed boyfriend, mere months after his wife died in strange circumstances. This mistress who becomes a reluctant/neglectful mother-figure and housewife is pretty unlikeable, and the little girl she’s in charge of is clearly damaged, and there’s a claustrophobic tension that builds to a disturbing climax.

Now more than ever, Shoko despises anything and everything: Kawabata, and her daughter who doesn’t understand a thing, and her granddaughter who acts like a child well into her adulthood, and herself: an old woman who forgets her own name until the moment someone calls her by it. ~ What Shoko Forgets

Melancholy story of an old woman in a rehab hospital, visited every night by a mysterious stranger. It’s hard to say whether these visits happen in fact or only in Shoko’s muddled mind, but they are very real and disturbing to her.

I was overcome by a mixture of rage and inebriation. I felt that I had to protect Daiki. Children are horrible. Two days from now, Daiki would of course be alive and well, and he would show up at school perfectly fine, but that didn’t mean the other children would all gather around to congratulate him on escaping the jaws of death. They might even start bullying him. Daiki, the cursed child. ~ Minute Fears

A pocket park, a ghost, a curse: This story of a young Mom who wants to go out for the evening with her old college friends — but who is held back by her uncharacteristically clinging child — suggests that we might become ghosts of ourselves while still living our lives; and isn’t that a horrifying thought?

I don't want to give away any more than that, but if you enjoy reading Mona Awad or Han Kang — as I do —you'll probably enjoy this as well.

eden

 

Their workers, now fewer than fifty, are bereaved and must be reassured at once, before the imp of disobedience takes hold like some fast-growing tare; and first one, then another, then a crowd grow bold enough to think that, possibly, the world is more enticing than eternity. Then what of eden? Those tares will multiply. Those fields and gardens will grow wild. The masters cannot tend them on their own. Those walls and barns and sacred roosts will age and crack like trees, weighed down by ivy, moss and vines, brought down by wind and time. And what of angels? Where will they take wing?

I have enjoyed reading Jim Crace before and went into eden with high hopes, but despite Crace’s consistently interesting and poetic writing style, the storyline here felt ultimately pointless, failing to deliver on early promise. Set in “eden” long after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, the garden’s immortal labourers and the angels they support through their efforts — luminously blue-feathered, human-sized, sermonising, hook-beaked “birds in all but name” — are all upset by the disappearance of one of the “sisters” (a sassy orchard-keeper who has apparently gone over the wall to see what all the fuss is about the outside world, with its rumoured sorrows and death). This Tabi is every bit the bad influence that Eve was: her disappearance stirs thoughts of disobedience in the males that miss her — Ebon, her closest friend and workmate in the orchards; Alum, the brutal snitch who acts as the angels’ “nose” among the labourers; and Jamin, a nearly fallen angel who has enjoyed Tabi’s preening of his feathers — and initially, this served as an interesting enough set-up. But as the story goes on, the only question we seem to be exploring is if remaining within the cloistered garden — with routine, hard work, sacrifice, safety, obedience, forever — is an authentic way of being compared to taking one’s chances with the great unknown, and that’s not very interesting: this was done better in Brave New World and reminded me very much of films like M Night Shyamalan’s The Village or even The Barbie Movie. Even as a theological critique — with the heavy-handed angels serving as intermediary and mouthpiece for the never-seen “lord” — there’s really nothing new here. But there are some pretty phrases. (Note: I read an ARC and passages may not be in their final forms.)

This is a story that will be told for years to come. A love story, a history, a tale of wisdom gained, of growing old, of treasuring what’s drawn in air as much as what is solid earth and stone, of clinging close to flesh and bark, of birds and bells, of work and play, and forging out of hardship hope. This is a story that unends.

This didn’t quite unend me, and I don’t want to discuss more of the plot than I already have, but I do want to note some of the surprising phrasing. I was entranced by passages like, “The early, luke-white moon is sliced and narrow” and amused by “He probes the undergrowth and overyawns”. And although I had to look these up to make sure they were real words, I liked rolling the phrases “scrumping apples” and “mammocking butterflies” on my tongue; appreciated that other words I didn’t know like “venturing down the slypes” and “the chevet sky” are terms from cathedral architecture. I liked the writing at the sentence level, but they didn’t add up to a satisfying novel to me.

The garden was never as loose and carefree as the world on this side of the wall or as embroidered. Its cloth was always cut as plain as possible. Whatever brute or blackguard made this place, it certainly was not the same lord who fashioned eden. That lord would never be so whimsical and fickle. Compared to this, his paradise has been begotten endless, sullen, constant, dull, sedate.

Again: no surprises in eden’s philosophy, and a bit of a disappointment.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

 

We don’t have one mother; we have many. And to each Eve, her particular Eden: We have the breasts we do because mammals evolved to make milk. We have the wombs we do because we evolved to “hatch” our eggs inside our own bodies. We have the faces we do, and our human sensory perception along with it, because primates evolved to live in trees. Our bipedal legs, our tool use, our fatty brains and chatty mouths and menopausal grandmothers — all of these traits that make us “human” came about at different times in our evolutionary past. In truth, we have billions of Edens, but just a handful of places and times that made our bodies the way they are. These particular Edens are often where we speciated: when our bodies evolved in ways that made us too different from others to be able to breed with them anymore. And if you want to understand women’s bodies, it’s largely these Eves and their Edens you need to think about.

In an often recounted story, a journalist recalled being in an Anthropology class when her female professor held up a picture of an antler with 28 tally marks carved upon it, saying: "This is alleged to be man's first attempt at a calendar." We all looked at the bone in admiration. "Tell me," she continued, "what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar." In Eve: How the Female Body Drove Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon (with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition) expands on this idea of considering the needs of the female of our species when looking for the catalysts behind the great shifts in our development — from bipedal locomotion to language and tool use — and in a narrative that starts with the first tiny mammal that coexisted with the dinosaurs and traces that story up to today’s reality, Bohannon has assembled a fascinating, comprehensive, and entertaining study of what is usually left out of the story of “us” — all while making a forceful case for why focussing on the history of the female body matters for the future of all of humanity. In a quirky bit of formatting, Bohannon starts each chapter with a glimpse at the “Eve” of a new development — the Eve of lactation is a Morganucodon sweating beads of milk through her fur in an underground den during the Jurassic Period; the Eve of menopause is a grandmother using her experience to serve as an emergency midwife in early Jericho — and I found the format charming. I loved everything about this (even if it did take quite a while to read) and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to any reader. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It’s not that topflight scientists still think female bodies were made when God pulled a rib from Adam’s side, but the assumption that being sexed is simply a matter of sex organs — that somehow being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic form — is a bit like that old Bible story. And that story is a lie. As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “extra stuff” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.

I first encountered this idea of the Platonic form (and the Homo sapien female being merely a weaker variation on the male ideal) and its persistent chauvinism affecting medical research in Invisible Women. Relatedly, Bohannon includes in her Introduction recent research into women’s “gluteofemoral” fat (on hips, buttocks, and upper thigh) — ie., the “stubborn” padding that a woman might turn to liposuction to remove — writing that it is composed of unique and essential lipids (accumulated since childhood) that are vital during pregnancy and breastfeeding to build a baby’s brain and eyes. But apparently no one, before the author, ever asked what the ramifications might be when a post-liposuction woman becomes pregnant. When Bohannon later introduces the genesis of breasts and placental wombs and women's heightened sensory perception — each of which development was absolutely essential to evolving our species into what it is today — it’s hard not to think that perhaps the female form is the pinnacle of human evolution, with the stripped-down male contributing some sperm now and then. Bohannon makes a strong case that the first tools were probably gynecological — we were still opportunistic scavengers long after walking upright and growing large brains made human childbirth a risky business, so the first tools were likely not hunting related since we’re here to tell the tale — and she also makes the case that human language (with grammar and syntax that differentiates it from animal communication), however it arose, was passed down, mother to child:

The majority of scientific stories about the evolution of human language fall in line: at each turn, human innovation has been driven by groups of men solving man-problems. One popular tale holds that language happened because we became hunters, forming large parties (of men) who needed to shout complex directions at one another across wide savannas. But wolves are pretty fantastic hunters, do it in groups, come up with surprisingly complex plans for the hunt that depend on members performing diverse roles, and don’t have a lick of language…So the male narrative of the evolution of human language misses the point. Language isn’t like opposable thumbs or flat faces — traits that evolution wrote into our genes. Our capacity for learning and innovating in language is innate, but nevertheless, for the largest gains in intergenerational communication to persist over time, each generation has to pass language on to the next with careful effort, interactive learning, and guided development. Language, in other words, is something that mothers and their babies make together and is dependent on the relationship between them in those first critical three to five years of human life. A long, unbroken chain of mothers and offspring trying to communicate with each other — that’s what’s kept this language thing going from the beginning.

Eve is stuffed with interesting facts — I did not know that openings in a breastfeeding woman’s areola “uptakes” her baby’s saliva to scan for infection and send specific immunity supports, or that a stress hormone is released in women when they hear a baby crying (while the top frequencies of a crying baby are cut off in the male hearing range) or that reducing the number of girls married before they are eighteen by even 10 percent can reduce a country’s maternal mortality by 70 percent — supported by pages of footnotes and citations. I trusted the research. But Bohannon’s main thesis seems to be that, despite nearly dying off a couple of times, our species has been able to thrive and populate the entire planet primarily because we mastered gynecology; learning to have the right number of babies, raised at the right time, according to the resources of their mothers’ community. And while advances in birth control and midwifery did improve maternal outcomes, it was sexism — controlling the bodies of fertile females and controlling who had access to them — that did most of the work. Now that medical advances in birth control, midwifery, and gynecology ought to guarantee maternal outcomes — and this again stresses the need for proper medical research on the female body — Bohannon suggests that it’s past time we released ourselves from the cultural constraints of sexism. (Even in America, maternal death rates are on the rise: a hot combination of racism, sexism, ableism, reduced public support for female health, and the crippling of science-based sex education has finally made it more dangerous for American women to be pregnant than it used to be.)

Now, I’m hardly the sort of person who wants to think of women as simply baby factories. But as a species, let’s say all of us want to get smarter. That’s what it takes to cure cancer. To solve the climate crisis. How do we do that? For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children. So if you want the best possible chance to make a lot of kids with high IQs, you want healthy women who are fed well, and have been fed well, consistently, for at least two decades before they become pregnant. You want them to have had a rich and well-supported childhood education. And you want them to be well cared for throughout their reproductive lives, with readily available education about nutrition and healthy habits and newborn caretaking. You want them to have community resources available when they get sick and when their kids get sick. And, because STIs have such a proven effect on reproductive health, you want them to have ready access to prophylactics and good sex ed.

So, ultimately, this isn’t simply an objective overview of the science behind “how the female body drove evolution”. But as I agree with Bohannon’s conclusions regarding the need to eliminate the atavistic drive to control female bodies (which is somehow increasing around the world?), I’m still happy to have read this. It’s scholarly and engaging and necessary. This should absolutely be read alongside popular male-focussed histories like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; he left out the bits about how the first cities were made possible by wet nurses.

Also: from the beginning, it's clear that Bohannon uses the terms "female" and "woman" to refer exclusively to cisgendered XX folks —

In the world of scientific research, there’s been very little attention to what happens in the bodies of people assigned one or another sex at birth who then go on to identify differently. In part, that’s because there’s a massive difference between biological sex — something wound deep into the warp and weft of our physical development, from in-cell organelles all the way up to whole-body features, and built over billions of years of evolutionary history — and humanity’s gender identity, which is a fluid thing and brain based and at most a few hundred thousand years old.

I acknowledge that this passage might not satisfy all readers — and that some readers might be put off by her sole focus on mothers as infant caregivers — so I drop this here as warning.

Lessons in Chemistry

 

“That's why I wanted to use Supper at Six to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work."
Roth looked confused.
"I'm referring to atoms and molecules, Roth," she explained. "The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them."
"You mean by men."
"I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach."

An older woman at the bookstore was buying Lessons in Chemistry and she told me that she had read the first few pages and found them hilarious, and she wanted me to know that “the boomers love this book because we lived it.” And that made me think of my boomer Mom and her awful stories of how she was treated as an attractive young woman — by teachers and doctors and priests and bosses; pretty much any man who had power over her, and they were everywhere — and while I can see how this book might provide a certain schadenfreude for a reader who has experienced that kind of repression, I really didn’t like it. I didn’t find it funny (every awful thing happens to the main character) and I didn’t find it relatable (this main character is effortlessly sexy and a self-taught chemist who knows more than the PhDs around her) and I didn’t find it credible (I especially didn’t like the genius dog with the big vocabulary and, apparently, the ability to read). I wonder if the older woman from the bookstore still found this “hilarious” after the first time the main character was sexually assaulted and called a certain c word; personally, I found the treatment vulgar. I do want to stress: I can see what kind of satisfaction a reader could get from watching this character overcome so many obstacles — and especially if that reader had been held back by similar obstacles — but it just didn’t work for me. Slight spoilers (not much more than is on the jacket) from here.

Neither of them had wanted children, and Elizabeth still fervently believed that no woman should be forced to have a baby. Yet here she was, a single mother, the lead scientist on what had to be the most unscientific experiment of all time: the raising of another human being. Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied. The questions were daunting and there weren’t nearly enough multiple choice.

It’s the late 50s and Elizabeth Zott — probably the world’s leading expert on abiogenesis, even if she doesn’t have a PhD, can’t publish her research, and has no real standing in the lab she’s lucky to work at — meets and falls in love, despite her best efforts to remain a serious-minded ice queen for the rest of her life, the lab’s celebrity chemist, Calvin Evans. This is a meeting of equal minds, and their too brief love story is rather sweet, but he ends up dying, leaving Elizabeth alone, unmarried (by her insistence), and pregnant. She’s fired from the lab, builds a new lab in the house Calvin left her (to continue her research, with her dog as capable lab assistant), and after a few years, when their daughter (who reads Mailer and Faulker at four years old) is enrolled underage in kindergarten, Elizabeth is scouted to host an afternoon cooking show. And while the producers would like for the “luscious” Elizabeth to wear skin-tight dresses and sip cocktails while reading her mindless cue cards, as soon as they go live, Elizabeth decides to speak to the housewives at home as though they were serious people doing serious jobs, and the audience laps it up. She becomes a cultural phenomenon over the next couple of years, but still, the suits upstairs would like to find a way to remind Elizabeth who’s in charge.

All of this would be fine if the story wasn’t burdened with the melodrama of Elizabeth and Calvin’s messed up childhoods (and characters from Calvin’s past popping up by chance), or if Elizabeth wasn’t so book smart but socially dense — like seeing no reason why declaring herself an atheist on TV in the early 60s should cause a fuss, especially when she uses her faith in science to make a belief in God seem backward — or if everything wasn’t so black and white about who is good (the women, and two weak men) and who is bad (all the rest of the cartoonish oafs who try to keep Elizabeth down). I didn’t like that, despite growing up in a crazy household and having to teach herself from library books, Elizabeth constantly refers to salt as sodium chloride and vinegar as CH₃COOH: I have no doubt that her (terrible) parents used the words “salt” and “vinegar” and can see no reason for her to speak that way as an adult. There’s a lot of extraneous drama going on in this book — like: I understand that the author Bonnie Garmus is a rower, but the rowing scenes were so unnecessary, even from a feminist perspective — and it just didn’t all hang together for me.

“Stability and structure,” she repeated, looking out at the studio audience. “Chemistry is inseparable from life — by its very definition, chemistry is life. But like your pie, life requires a strong base. In your home, you are that base. It is an enormous responsibility, the most undervalued job in the world that, nonetheless, holds everything together.”

There is a good message at the core of Lessons in Chemistry (even if society has moved on to the point where equal rights between the sexes is not an earth-shattering concept anymore), but I found its delivery to be pedantic: Both overtly, through Elizabeth’s constant lecturing, and contextually through the endless obstacles she is shown to face as a woman in her time. And I know from my Mom that it could really be like that, but this, for me, was an unsatisfying literary treatment of the times.

I was just thinking a couple weeks ago (after I read Naomi Alderman's The Future) about how moved I had been by Alderman's previous novel The Power: That book (about women gaining a strange electrical power that suddenly gave them physical supremacy over men) was like a gut punch that left me wet-eyed and breathless. But, even though I gave it four stars, it's probably not a great novel; just one that I completely identified with in the moment. In the same way, I really do see how there could be some uplifting wish-fulfillment for boomers who read Lessons in Chemistry. I took a screenshot of this post that my Mom shared on facebook last night:

I can see how she'd find that hilarious even if it didn't land with me; at least she got a thumbs-up from another boomer.

Tunesday : Walk Like an Egyptian

 

Walk Like an Egyptian

(Liam Hillard Sternberg) Performed by The Bangles

All the old paintings on the tombs

They do the sand dance don't you know?

If they move too quick (oh whey oh)

They're falling down like a domino

All the bazaar men by the Nile

They got the money on a bet

Gold crocodiles (oh whey oh)

They snap their teeth on your cigarette

Foreign types with the hookah pipes say

(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)

Walk like an Egyptian

The blonde waitresses take their trays

They spin around and they cross the floor

They've got the moves (oh whey oh)

You drop your drink, then they bring you more

All the school kids so sick of books

They like the punk and the metal band

When the buzzer rings (oh whey oh)

They're walking like an Egyptian

All the kids in the marketplace say

(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)

Walk like an Egyptian

Slide your feet up the street, bend your back

Shift your arm then you pull it back

Life is hard you know (oh whey oh)

So strike a pose on a Cadillac

If you wanna find all the cops

They're hanging out in the donut shop

They sing and dance (oh whey oh)

They spin the clubs, cruise down the block

 All the Japanese with their yen

The party boys call the Kremlin

And the Chinese know (oh whey oh)

They walk the line like Egyptian

All the cops in the donut shop say

(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)

Walk like an Egyptian

Walk like an Egyptian

To begin: I don't even remember the last time I did a "Tunesday" post, and while I can't even be bothered to look up when it might have been, my sense is that the last one that would have really mattered to me would have been from three years ago when Dave and I went on our last big adventure. But then COVID shut down the world and Dave's parents were sick (and then gone)  and we bought the Lakehouse and Kennedy had her backyard wedding and we helped Mallory get into the housing market and it seemed we would never go away again...but we did! After Christmas last year, Dave and I decided that in 2023 we would travel again and we landed on a definite bucket list destination: Egypt, in all its ancient and modern majesty. We booked a tour that seemed to hit all the highlights: Cairo and the Giza Plateau, a cruise up the Nile River to the Valley of the Kings, and at the end, three days at an all-inclusive resort on the Red Sea. And I have to say: it was a wonderful trip that filled me, heart and soul. (And also reawakened my greed for these kinds of experiences: What's next? When can we go? Anywhere, anywhen with this guy.)

Here's a story I need to get out of the way: When we got to Cairo (after something like twelve hours of travel), we learned that Air Canada had failed to put our luggage on the flight; it was still on the ground in Toronto. And while our tour coordinator and a representative from the Cairo airport assured us that this happens all the time and that they would find a way to get our bags to us, Dave was super frustrated and insisted on calling Air Canada as soon as we were seated on the shuttle bus to the hotel (which was super embarassing for me, increasingly more  frustrating for Dave - as the rep spoke imperfect English and he felt the need to keep raising his voice and repeating everything - and it must have made a bad impression to everyone else on the bus, who had all just been forced to wait an extra hour with us as we watched for the bags that never came and filled out our paper work). With only our carry-on luggage, we needed to go shopping for clothes a few times (not a nice experience; we paid too much for poor quality knock-off "designer", but there really weren't any alternatives) and it took us several days to find sunscreen and hair product (this picture at the pyramids above shows us in our not-quite-right clothes; note I couldn't even get a hat for the sun). But, the bags did eventually come (the last evening of our river cruise), and if nothing else, we tried to act like good sports about it and the situation served as a good icebreaker with the rest of the tour group. All part of the adventure. But insult to injury: Air Canada delayed our bags on the way home, too; they never made the connection with us in Athens. (I mean realllly, lol.) But, before we even knew our bags were lost, this was the amazing view as we came in to land in Cairo:

So, day one: We got to the hotel in the early afternoon (the Ramses Hilton; it was fine - they may call it a five star, but it was just okay; the elevators that did work were terrifying), and our tour guide, Isis, told us we could find clothes at the Ramses Mall across the street if we wanted to join those in the group who were planning to go out to dinner together. Naturally, we went over, and it was floor after floor of the same knockoff designer purse and shoe stores, lots of pyjama stores for some reason, a "Cottonli" (really affordable socks and underwear made of soft Egyptian cotton), a dollar store (where I found an eyeliner, mascara, and deodorant) and, finally, one store that sold familiarish tops and bottoms, where we bought a few things (hoping our bags would catch up with us before we left Cairo), and it wasn't until we got home that we saw how they had overcharged us (I think that first shopping trip was $350 for 6 items? We went back a couple days later and bought a few more things - including a top that literally disintegrated in my hands as I pulled it over my head - but that time they hailed us as good customers that had earned a discount and we paid the equivalent of $150 dollars: I'd say never pay on a mobile credit card machine where you can't read the payment screen - we needed clothes and had no other choice but to shop in this one store, but I suppose we could have went to an ATM to get cash and control the cost. Live and learn.) 

At any rate, we were able to join the group for dinner at the Sky Rim restaurant - on a mountain overlooking the city as the sun set - and the "typical Egyptian meal" (hummus and baba ganoush, roast chicken and fish) was tasty and familiar. Sitting and really talking with the other folks on the tour for the first time (somehow, our end of the table were all Canadians) made for a friendly and satisfying evening. A crazy start to the day ended perfectly.

(Not to belabour the complaint, but I'm wearing a dress here from the Ramses Mall that was fine, but the bottom was so sheer that I had to wear my yoga pants from the plane under it.)

The next day was the first proper day of the tour. We started at the Great Pyramids (!!) and had the opportunity to enter the Pyramid of Khafre:

The tunnel feels just as small as that looks: I was bent over at the waist, with knees slightly crouched, the entire way down (thank goodness there is a wooden walkway with rungs along it for traction), and as claustrophobic as that may seem, I hadn't realised until the first time it happened that people exiting would be coming back up the same ramp. As we kept going down and down, with electric lights every here and there barely showing the way, I began to wonder just how long the tunnel was - and I also became very aware of just how vulnerable we were: if anyone started freaking out and scrambling past the long line of us for the exit, it would surely start a stampede and people would be hurt (but I was reassured by the fact that I had never heard of that happening). As it turns out, it took about twenty minutes to get to the "burial chamber" (compared to the hour+ it takes at the Khufu Pyramid [which is the one tourists usually get to enter, but which was closed to us; thank Ra]) and that was just enough time to feel like we had "earned" it. Standing upright in the open chamber (which isn't decorated beyond graffiti from the nineteenth century and a sarcophagus of dubious provenance), I was in awe of the millions of tons of quarried rock above and around me; in awe of the human effort behind its flawless construction and the thousands of years that it has stood and the fact that my own breath was now adding itself to that ancient story. The tour guide, Isis, had explained that entering the pyramid (for an extra charge) wouldn't be visually stunning - and that it certainly wouldn't be for anyone even slightly claustrophobic - but when people ask me what my favourite part of the trip was, this was it: more than anywhere else we went in Egypt, this was where I felt most in communion with that country's long and storied history.

I also want to note: It was at the pyramids that I first encountered what an aggressive tipping ("baksheesh") culture Egypt is. In the burial chamber there was an official-looking man who waved people to move behind the ropes and pose on the sarcophagus, with his hand out at the end for a fee. When we were back topside and taking selfies in front of the pyramids, another man (who looked like an official) told us not to stand in a certain place (and being polite and law-abiding, we moved to where he suggested), and before we knew it, he had Dave's phone in his hand and he was telling us how to pose and moving us to another vantage, and then another man was opening Egyptian headdresses and putting them on our heads and then they were telling us how much we owed for them. I can't explain how fast that all happened, and how it soured me. And this would happen everywhere we went - one of the friends we made in the group, Raul, even had a policeman hustle him this way (and as Raul explained: when a machine-gun-toting man in uniform separates you from your group and then puts out his hand, you put money in it) - and it took me nearly the whole trip to come to terms with the fact that this is just the culture: I was not being singled out for harassment and we should have had a stack of American dollar bills to give to anyone who felt like doing us a favour. Still, aesthetically, I do prefer our selfies:

After our experience in front of (and inside!) the pyramids, we were brought on the bus to a panoramic point up and behind the plateau. This is where some in our group decided to ride camels out to the "perfect" picture site, but since Dave and I have had a (better) camel experience in Jordan, we took the free time to enjoy the view on our own, and ended up walking back down to the pyramids anyway (and I am delighted to share the pro tip that there was no one at the back: we had the landscape entirely to ourselves to explore and take our selfies).

And then we saw the Sphinx (and Dave had no idea what I was asking him to do with the perspective here; this lame photo is as close as we got, lol):

And then we finished the day with a trip to the Egyptian Museum. And as amazing as it was to see the mummies and the artefacts and the golden treasures of King Tut's tomb, my absolutely favourite experience was seeing the room devoted to my favourite ancient weirdo, the Pharaoh Akhenaten:

The next day we flew to Aswan and took a trip to the Aswan High Dam (I have to say: I understand how important and technically challenging the construction of this dam was for controlling the annual flood of the Nile, but having seen the Hoover Dam, this didn't feel like it earned the name "high dam"). We saw an unfinished obelisk in a nearby quarry (my word, but it was hot out: in the forties and we still had no hats), we took a wind-powered felucca boat on a spin around the Nile as its crew sang for us (hands out at the end), and we boarded our river cruise boat, the Alyssa. We went clothes shopping again in Aswan - and we were just so lucky that when we went to cross the street out front of the dock and an aggressive hustler tried to get us to follow him to a "spice market", we slipped into a door that turned out to be the entrance to a multistory department store (women's clothes on the main floor, kids' on the second, men's on the third), and not only were we able to find suitable clothes at a reasonable price, but they directed us to a nearby pharmacy, where we were finally able to get sunscreen, razors, toothpaste, and hair gel. Everything about the river cruise was wonderful: our room was lovely, the staff was friendly, and with big buffets at every meal, it was easy to find something good to eat with very little effort. There was a pool on the top deck of the boat, but while Dave was able to buy himself a swimsuit at the department store, the only options they had for women covered from the ankle to the wrist; maybe for others, not for me.

That first day in Aswan we also had a tour of the Island of Philae - a temple complex that had needed to be moved to an island with higher elevation after the damming of the Nile raised the water level - and we had a fascinating tour guide for this excursion whose story tied in nicely with what we experienced during our tour of Abu Simbel the next morning (another, huge, temple complex that had had to be moved to higher ground when the Nile was dammed). I'm just going to share what I wrote about ancient "graffiti" on facebook because this is the kind of historical insight that fires my brain:

A word on graffiti: Yes, there are idiots who sharpie on the temple walls, and it seems that every 19th century archeologist carved his name in between hieroglyphs, but I was most fascinated by the graffiti at the Philae temple we visited yesterday. Here are pictures of the entrance (with the goddess Isis having been defaced by the early Christians because they didn't like her virgin birth story; the empty plinth on the left is where the obelisk in Trafalgar Square is from). And I'm sharing a picture of a statement (top right) left behind by Napoleon's army. And the last is a picture of graffiti from antiquity to which our guide had a personal connection: almost finished his Masters in Ancient Egyptian languages in London back in the 80s, his advisor told him that a couple of Canadian archeologists had apparently discovered the last ever use of demotic Egyptian in antiquity, and told him that his Masters thesis would be improved if he could find it and translate it. The Canadians were long gone by the time he got there, and it took him nine months and a bunch of good luck to find the tiny carving amongst all the hieroglyphics and cartouches. And when he translated it, he discovered that it had been written by a Greek (from the time of Alexander the Great) and it translates as: I am Peter junior, son of the son of Peter. I was FASCINATED by that - this is recording the death of a written language, and it's "Kilroy was here" - and I felt really lucky to have had this guide on this day; I don't know if anyone else tells that particular story. Naturally, you hate to see the modern graffiti, and it's sad to see how the Church tried to erase the parts they didn't like, but in the end, it's all a part of the human history of these sites.

Also note: Taking the "optional" tour of Abu Simbel meant meeting in the lobby at 2:30 am for a four hour bus ride (the temple is way down south, 20km from the Sudan border, and we were held up for an extra hour at a military checkpoint). I'm not good at sleeping in moving vehicles - and no one who could see how the bus driver played chicken with oncoming traffic was able to relax anyway - but this was an incredible experience and I am happy to have taken advantage of it. People who didn't go on this tour had the option of visiting a Nubian village (seeing the crocodiles they keep in their houses, experiencing their hospitality, and taking a dip in the Nile), and while I wish there had been time to do absolutely everything, I have no regrets. After returning to Aswan, we joined the rest of the group in travelling onward to Kom Ombo, where we saw the "twin temples" of Haroeris and Sobek.

The next morning we docked and met in the lobby at 5:30, and although our itinerary said that we'd be taking horse-drawn carriages to the Temple of Edfu, everyone was relieved to discover that we were to go by bus. When you see the horses - not only their ribs but their hipbones were painfully visible - it's hard to understand why tourists would be lined up to use them (but to be fair: if our tour company was still using the horses, it would have been hard to refuse to get into the carriage. If more tour companies stop using them, maybe the industry will be put out of business; but, of course, that comes with its own downside for the carriage operators. It's hard to know what to wish for, but participating in what looks like animal abuse isn't for me.) Back on board the riverboat and we spent the day sailing up to Luxor - we had a sun shelter on deck and I read in the shade while Dave swam in the pool - and it was fascinating to watch hawkers row out to our much bigger ships to try and sell goods as we waited our turn to go through a lock. They'd try every language (as they do on dry land) until someone answered them, and then they'd put a Tshirt or a tablecloth or some such in a plastic bag and throw it up on deck. If someone decided to buy it, they'd put money in the bag and throw it back down, or just throw the goods back (or, as someone in our group apparently did, refuse to touch the bag of goods as it lay on the deck beside her.)

When we got to Luxor, our lost bags were brought on board! And although Isis told us to leave them in the lobby and someone would bring them to our room eventually, we took them immediately to our room and changed into our own clothes before we left again. Off to see the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, back to the ship for dinner (and to finally pose with my copy of Death on the Nile while we still had daylight on the Nile) and then back to Karnak for a sound and light show. Now, not only was it still hot out when we got to the temple complex at 9 pm (it had been so hot all day), and not only had I been disappointed that the sound and light show we had prepaid for had been moved from Cairo and the Pyramids to Karnak by the tour company, but the show itself...was kind of boring. More sound - droning, dramatic storytelling - than light. We spent half the time walking through with a sea of lit-up-phone-recording people as various obelisks and panels of writing were illuminated one by one and half the time sitting beside the Sacred Lake - but the water itself wasn't used for reflections and there wasn't, like, a laser show or fireworks or anything (and maybe it's like: good for them for respecting the space and not going for big Hollywood/Disneyworld effects, but it was a little long and dull?)

The next morning we went back into Luxor, but this time to the West Bank and the Valley of the Kings. (Note: There was an optional excursion to have a sunrise hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings, and while I know that I wouldn't like the heights and the instability, those who went - leaving the hotel at 3 am - said it was a "commercial balloon" that holds up to 35 people; "as stable as an elevator"; looking over the side is "like looking out an airplane window". I don't know. It still scares me; no regrets.) It's amazing to travel through this area - a barren desert with looming sandstone cliffs, dotted here and there with tomb entrances - and I could just imagine the people who for millennia had walked over the graves of their long-dead pharaohs without any clue of what was beneath their feet. Or imagine the early Egyptologists, randomly poking around for a tomb entrance, sometimes getting lucky; none so lucky as the fabled Howard Carter. As tourists, we were given a ticket that entitled us entrance to any three tombs, and Isis directed us to what she said were the three biggest and most brightly decorated (if I remember it right, it was Ramses III, Ramses IV, and Setnakht, and they were phenomenal). Entrance to King Tut's tomb is an extra $20 US, and even though Dave had read on the internet beforehand that it's not worth the price, I wasn't going to come that far and not see everything possible. Yes, what you can see of Tutankhamun's tomb amounts to just two small rooms - one with his mummy in a climate-controlled glass case and one with a stone sarcophagus; all of the treasures are in the Egyptian Museum - but I was amazed to have experienced this (even taking out Death Comes As the End for a picture). Just look at these happy faces:

We then went on to the Temple of Hatshepsut, and I have to say: It is huge and imposing and amazing, but after so many huge and imposing and amazing sites, it all became a bit too much; I was suffering a temple hangover, and by this point, I think I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the scale of it all. We stayed that night at the Steigenberger Resort Achti (pretty "swish" as our new Scottish friends proclaimed), and while it was the last evening we were to have with many of our new friends, we were certainly looking forward to the next phase of the tour: three nights at the Amarina Abu Soma Resort outside of Hurghada on the Red Sea. Although there had been a fatal shark attack in Hurghada just the week before, as well as a deadly boat fire, there was a shark net (patrolled constantly by a life guard) at the resort and we did end up going in the water. As an all inclusive, the food and the drink, the sun and the sand, the buffets and a la carte restaurants, were exactly what we needed to recover from a week of early starts, late nights talking with new friends, and cramming our senses with overwhelming experiences. Several others from the main tour group joined us at the resort - we especially enjoyed the time with our Scottish friends - and three days was just enough time to recover. Dave never did get the waters to part for him, however:

A downside: When we split with the main group at Luxor, they flew back to Cairo, enjoyed a last day and night in the city and then flew out the next morning. Our last day was spent (over nine hours !!) on a too small bus, driving back to Cairo. And when we got there, Dave and I were whisked off on the Old City tour that I had prepaid for (we didn't know we would be the only ones; the rest of our group was taken to the Old Cairo Bazaar, which the itinerary had us visiting on day one). And while our guide was friendly and knowledgeable and gave us an amazing condensed history of the city and the country as he showed us the Saladin Citadel, the Alabaster Mosque, and the Church of Abu Serga (built over the cave where the Holy Family lived while escaping Herod's slaughter of the innocents; this felt like it closed the circle of visiting Bethlehem on our last trip), it was hot and we were tired and stiff from the long bus ride. At the end, he said he was supposed to take us next to the bazaar (it had been part of what we were expecting), but we told him we would be happy to go on to the airport hotel instead.

We checked into Le Meridien, also quite "swish", had a refreshing rest in the lobby bar, and met up with our Scottish friends for one last dinner. Woke up the next morning and started the journey home. Sidenote: I wish I had really looked at the itinerary, and seeing that we were changing planes in Athens, I wish I had looked into making it a long enough layover to see the Acropolis. Not only would I like to see the Acropolis, but the connection was so tight that an Air Canada agent met us at the staircase down to the bus that would take us to the terminal, she rode us to the terminal and passed us off to another agent who said, "Can you run?" And then we ran for like ten minutes through the terminal - including up two flights of stairs - with our carry-ons. He brought us through a private security area, unlocked a back door to the gate area, and got us there just as our flight was boarding. We kind of knew at that point that our bags wouldn't be making the connection with us, but going home, there wasn't much at stake and we knew it would be just another data point to take to Air Canada.

And if anything here sounds like complaining, it's truly not. This was a trip of a lifetime, in a lifetime of amazing trips, and I feel grateful and enlarged and just so lucky to have been able to see and touch and breathe the air of this amazing country. Fun facts: the pyramids and the Sphinx are maybe not as big in real life as I had expected; the pyramids aren't built on a sandy desert but on top of a wobbly limestone surface (which is like, duh, that's why they haven't sunken down, but it never crossed my mind before I felt it under my feet); and while at first I bristled at the baksheesh culture, I grew to understand it as a way of getting by. There are so many things that are a part of me now that I didn't get from books or shows and I could cry to think of how I have been so soul-nourished with this knowledge. I had no idea that pharaonic mummies had these weirdly carved gold finger and toe covers before I saw them in the Egyptian Museum. How had I never seen these before?

This is long enough for today: I will need to come make another post about the people that we met; what an incredible group, from all over, that made us smile every day. I simply feel blessed.