farama, saqqara, & dashur.

Tell al-Farama is located in Northeast Egypt, next to the Mediterranean coast. It was the first place for visitors and invaders to Egypt to arrive at, from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar. My professor told us not to expect grandeur, but even so I thought it was amazing. It looked like a Greek ghost town, abandoned by a people long ago that decided to make plans and split. The sand is soft and comfortable and there are seashells scattered about from the residing sea tides, with faded corinthian pillars lying humbly where they first fell. It's literally in the middle of nowhere and I was caught off guard by how unaccustomed I was to the sound of silence. Farama was a major fishing port so they were a big fishery, indicative of the thousand-year-old pottery shards covering the ground. On our way back we caught the sunset at the Suez Canal when the ships were coming into the ports.

My day to Dashur and Saqqara was one of the most beautiful I've experienced. We wandered through the deserts and crawled into pyramids all day, looking for graffiti carved by previous visitors like Napoleon. My 5'1" feisty ninja professor further proved that she is a badass by removing a snake from the Red Pyramid and tossing it over the side of the pyramid, as I hummed the Indiana Jones theme song. The sky was so blue and the clouds looked like we could touch them if we climbed up to the tip of the pyramids, until a black storm rolled over the deserts and a thunderstorm covered the greater Nile Delta area, cooling everything down and clearing the air. "Seth has brought us rain," said our professor. As we drove past neighboring villages, children in the fields danced in the mud while farmers ran for cover, the crops looking so green and the flowers looking so happy. I woke up this morning completely sore from scurrying down dark pyramidal pathways, but bemused that I had just witnessed the ancient monuments I had only previously seen in textbooks.