Winter break - Abu Simbel Temple

Warning!

*This is a long entry*
**Get a coffee please. This is a history post**
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Abu Simbel Temple, Aswan, Egypt.

Awhhhh! What I love the most about our trip. Oh btw, I was joining a 6 days 5 nights trip to south Egypt part.

Aswan is about 12 hours road journey from Cairo. I took Metoclopromide/Maxolon (originally for motion sickness) but I took it to its drowsiness. I love Pharmacy, mwah.

Abu Simbel was beautiful! It was really unique, intelligently designed, every part of the temple were always brought the meanings, though the drawings were confusing to me; all Pharaohs/Gods looked the same to me. Hahaha.

Well, I wasn't really good in explaining history (though I love it so much) and yes, I'm not a travel blogger. So some points are absolutely going to be missed.

Okay, since my lovely friend, Rab (hello Rab, my loyal reader haha), asking me to blog about these historical places, so I would give it a try.

Okay..

This huge temple was built about thousand years ago (Year 1264 BC) as an order from King Ramses II to celebrate the greatness of some gods, like, God of Sun (Ra), God of All Gods (Amun), God of Darkness (Ptah) as well as the greatness of himself (King Ramses II) during ancient times.

They had a lot of Ramseses (nicknames for the ancient Egypt kings), but King Ramses II was believed to be the greatest.

They also had God of Sun, God of Death, God of Fertility, God of Darkness and so on. Basically, everything had their own gods, not sure if they had God of Food also. Lol.

Original look of the temple (Pic from Google)

Discovery

It was abandoned and no one noticed about this. Until 1813, an Italian found it buried under the sand. And it's called Abu Simbel, means a little boy, who are believed to be a boy who used to bring people to the temple for visiting purposes.

Moving The Temple

(Pictures from Google)

The exciting part! When Aswan High Dam was about to be builded, it was quite chaos debates went around about how water rising from the dam might destroy the temple. So as a conservation effort to preserve this historical piece, UNESCO decided to move it.

Amazing, how the workers cut the temple precisely into 1050 pieces and rebuild the same exact temple about 60 meters higher from the original place.

It took a few months to completely moved it with the help of archeologists, experts and workers, with USD80 million (some said 60M or 40M, so I don't know).

When I was following the trip, I heard the tourist guide was talking something about the artificial mountain or something, so I did a little reading, and it said, they built two rock mountain around the temple for the purpose of strength and to make it looked as original one.

*Aswan High Dam is said to be one of the largest dam in the world, supplies about all Aswan areas with electricity and water needs.

Details

King Ramses had about 200 wives and 100+ children, I'm not sure the exact numbers. But for King Ramses II, his favourite wife was Nefertari.

At the entrance of Abu Simbel Temple, all Gods were accompanied by their favourite wives at their right side and their lovable sons at the centre.

Inside The Temple

We were not allowed to take pictures inside the temple. We did try to do, but the Pakcik was following around, as if knowing our intentions hahaha.

So, the pictures inside the temple were taken from google. Thanks Mr Google.

Every inches of the walls were carved with drawings that showed some actions doing by the King and it always brought some meaning. I was interested to the ancient Egyptian alphabet hieroglypics. It was fun, yet funny. Sorry, no offense, but when you look at something drew as comb, it actually means men! Hahaha. Okay, not that funny.

There were several small rooms inside the temple, the place for the people to pray or meditate.

Two Special Days

Interesting also. People at the old times were pretty good in predicting the future, making the other people sick/die/rebirth or something. They're also good in pharmacy, medicine, architecture, astronomy, and so on. Actually, they'd done better than people on our generations.

So, what I'm trying to say is, I was amazed when I was told that the sunlight couldn't get through the temple, except for these two special days. On 22 October (birthday of Ramses II) and on 20 February (coronation day of Ramses II as a King). Of course, they're doing a good job on predicting the sun progress; usually 61 days before and 61 days after the winter solctice.

Wait. We're coming to the most interesting part.

Can you see that small door? That's where the Gods' sculptures were being placed. When that 2 days arrived, the sun would be able to penetrate inside the temple but only illuminated these 3 Gods; Ra (Sun), Amun (God of All Gods) and King Ramses II, but not Ptah (God of Darkness). Why? Because of 'darkness' tittle that he held. Awhh, sorry, no sun for you.

**Ptah - God of Darkness, a God that was believed to be connected with the underworld, who always remained in the dark.

Well, I'm not really sure which God was which. Sorry.

Nefertari Temple

Since King Ramses II loooooved Nefertari so much, he build her one temple just beside Abu Simbel Temple. I don't really know much about this temple, but we can always google-ing. Basically, inside the temple there're a lot of drawings on wall, showing the scene like, when King Ramses doing something with another God. Or when Nefertari was doing something sweet with her husband, King Ramses II.

You know, things like that.

And also, a lot of small rooms also. For meditations.

**Sleepy, guys? Yeah, me too! Hahaha. **

 Nefertari Temple during day and night

In front of Nefertari Temple.

 Till then. Bye! :)

Winter break - Damietta

Damietta, Egypt.

It was hmm maybe 3 to 4 hours from Zagazig (I'm not sure, I was sleeping throughout the journey). Damietta is just a new developing city with a small populations, so maybe that's why it's a little bit cleaner than Zagazig. It's well known for their beaches, shellfish (cockles, of course) and the people here are famous for their furniture business - which they carve them by themselves.

 I loooove their building architectures which are so unique, much less like the combinations of the classic and modern ones, with the sentimental details on windows and carved-doors. Lovely! And suddenly reminded me of the ones in Istanbul.

(I've been to Istanbul last year - promised to update it in my blog, but never do)

At Ras El Bar, Damietta..

What amazed me the most: the meeting between Mediterranean Sea and Nile River.

As written in Al- Quran, 

"He unleashed two seas so that they merged together. And yet there is a barrier between them so they may not overstep." [55:19-20]

Okay, question of the day. How to differentiate between the river and sea?

Sea water is absolutely salty, and of course, people like me won't go down to the ocean just to taste the saltiness. Okay, just for knowledge, seawater (which comes from ocean) usually has a lot more solute than river. Thus it will have different density and weight. And it is a lot more calmer than river, just by looking at it with our naked eyes.

While river compared to the sea, it's usually cleaner than the sea and the waves are crazy. And the crocodiles inside are crazy too.

And they don't mix with each other, my theory is, maybe because of their difference in concentration and density.

Awhh, I'm proud. I should be the world next geologist. Wait, or is it water scientist job or something? Well, let's just stick to pharmacy.

Met Zen from Cairo.

And we're off to the beach!

Okay, since it's winter, the breeze was a lot more chiller and the beach was totally colder, felt as if I was stepping on ice or something. Ahh and I'd got a frostbite. It hurt for about 3 minutes then it went away.

And Damietta is actually quite famous for its shellfish (mainly cockles), especially for Malaysians, since Egyptians don't really eat them which I don't know why, seriously, cockles are one of the best seafoods ever. I love seafood, so much.

If only they had prawns here, I seriously didn't mind getting on a boat to catch them.

And unfortunately, we couldn't get to find even a single cockle. Reason: Because every Malaysian knew about this place and they came to pick them up earlier than we did. So, bangkai je yang tinggal. Hahaha.

The sunset was really beautiful, isn't? With the tamar trees everywhere, I felt like the one in Yousoff Taiyyob commercials. It was a good day. Then we're off to the mosque for a prayer and to a restaurant for Nasi Arab.

I definitely would come here early on the next winter, for you cockles! Hahaha.

Alexandria

5 days before Wani and Kiena went back to Malaysia for good, they said, "Alex jom esok?"

Everybody was like, "Jom"

Alexandria and Zagazig is 4 hours road journey. We stayed 2 nights there, so Lin and I had to skip 2 classes. Hehehe but I did it willingly. Lecturer actually recognized me and asked, "Were you absent last week?", I replied, "Yeahh, sorry (smiled very very wide).

It was my very last outing with Wani and Kiena. Kiena suddenly acted like a tourist and captured every moments throughout the journey and Wani started to buy almost everything in Alex to bring them back to Malaysia as souvenirs. This was exactly like what we planned to do during our final year in Egypt. Little did that I knew, last year was their final year. T_T

Our moments were filled with laughs and tears. One minute when we're really happy and teasing each other, and the other minutes we shed tears thinking how much we're going to miss each other.

I'll never forget this. The moment when we're having a lunch in a cafe in Alex, I said, "I'm so sad".

Wani said, "Me too".

I said, "Are you guys sure with the decision?"

Kiena said, "Only Allah knows how I feel. I wanna stay in Egypt. But things are getting harder."

I started to cry, and continued, "Honestly, I don't mind if everyone in our class is going back, but not you and Kiena. I'd rather stay with just you guys".

Silence.

Everybody cried. 

Breathe in, breathe out. We continued eating.

Deep inside my heart, I actually agreed with their decision. Going back to Malaysia was the most brilliant decision for them. And I'm really happy. It's just that, I'm so gonna miss you.

Spring yaww

So it's a spring season in some other countries too, since my friends who study abroad got to upload their pictures behind the tulips everyday and got me so jealous - cause there's no tulips here I want to capture a picture with!

I was so eager to see how spring here looked like and we went to a park last week. 

Egypt's first impression of spring wasn't that bad. It was rare since there's no way in the whole world you will find a flower wholly covered by dust! Hahaha. Well, it's true.

Since the park is in Cairo, so I invited Aiman (Ameerul's brother) to come and joined us. Aiman, who knows so much about Kakqis and how she loves camera, like she cannot go anywhere without a camera and how obsessed Kakqis is towards camera, so Aiman brought his DSLR.

The moment when Aiman took out his camera, I said, "Wow you bring your camera?"

Aiman replied, "Eleh, buat tanya pulakk!"

Hahaha.

Am I that annoying that people will get that impression on me? Hehe.

Few pictures.. 

Okay, it went like this, when few pharmacy students who study about plants, flowers, trees and how they grow, how important they are in producing drugs, how poisonous they are, how they can be cultivated and collected, we were sort of excited seeing these plants that we knew!

So we went like "Ohh this is Karkadeh!" or "Wowww, Cammomile, look at its ray floret and disc floret". Sigh, it was more like a Pharmacognosy class trip. Haha.

It was fun. I love it how we were altogether enjoying the good scenery of the park, the calmness that made me forgot about all the continuous exams, and beautiful-hearted friends with me, and the camera that was following me! Haha. No, kidding.

But I like it when my friends were so comfortable with Aiman, and how they can get along so well. We laughed a lot.

And went back to Zagazig with few stressed acnes, hehehe.