White (Desert) Christmas

Merry Christmas!

The prospects of having anything close to a 'normal' Christmas in Egypt were looking pretty slim, as the typical elements were nowhere to be found - no Christmas tree, no family, and no snow.

Somehow, I ended up with one of the coolest Chrismases ever. Although my typical Christmas elements didn't magically appear at my doorstep, I had some interesting replacements. No tree though. Luckily, some of my good friends from Kalamazoo had some time off their respective study-abroad trips, and had the money to come to Egypt. I've spent so much time with them, they're as good as family. And we found an interesting snow substitute.

My friends/roommates from K, Erin and Sarah (and Sarah's brother Stephen) came to Egypt for a while during their winter breaks. Sarah and Stephen stayed for about five days, and Erin stayed a little more than a week. After the first few days, we had pretty much visited all the typical Egyptian tourist spots, and I wasn't quite sure how to entertain my guests after that. Fortunately I happened to have made friends with a guy named Omar from AUC a few weeks before school ended. I told him some of my friends were coming to visit me in Cairo, and he offered to help show them around/whatever. He also offered to set us up on a trip to the desert if we wanted to go. Since I had already shown my friends some of Cairo, we decided on the desert.

Christmas in the desert was surreal. By pure chance and coincidence (and help from Omar) we had ended up in the only white place in this entire usually-a-strange-shade-of-brown country, and had ourselves a merry little Christmas. So, we found ourselves camping in the White Desert on Christmas Eve, watching the most brilliant sunset/moonrise I've ever seen.

It was awesome. I didn't get any pictures, because my camera was out of batteries, but I could probably paint a pretty sweet picture. We were standing in the middle of the White Desert (which really does look snow-covered), and had just watched the sun set from atop one of the many odd rock formations in the desert. We climbed down and walked back to our little camp site, and waited a little bit while our guide set up camp. Suddenly, in the eastern sky, an orange light broke the horizon. For a moment, I thought it was just the light from the fire of another camp site. But a few seconds later, a luminous, orange, full moon began to rise over the eerie rock formations. It was amazing. This was the biggest, orangest moon I have ever seen. And it was even cooler, because the sun was still going down on the other side of the horizon. The big ball of sunlight had disappeared, but it was still casting an intense rainbow on the horizon. So, we could stand there, and turn from east to west, and see the big orange moon, and also the strong colors from the sun. As the moon rose higher, it lost the orange color, but still kept its brightness. It ended up being really light out all night long - I had to hide my face under the blankets to fall asleep. But it was really cool to walk around the desert under the light of a full moon.

We also saw a desert fox.

And in the morning, we drove past one family's camp site where they had set up a Christmas tree and done presents - apparently Santa does come to the desert.

Needless to say, it was definitely a different experience on Christmas.