california, oh me.

homemade vietnamese, homemade fruit tarts, best friends, bonfires, capture the flag, lesbo bars, panoramic views.

purge thyself of negative thoughts

(from a couple days ago)

I feel very discombobulated living out of a bag, with a new phone number where no one can reach me. no vehicle. computer in another state. same dirty pair of underwear & dirty jeans. i wonder how long it will be before i get my energy back. i hate the thought of going back to egypt still in this permanent state of fatigue. i'm also embarrassed that people I haven't seen in so long will have to see me like this - a vegetable. i haven't accomplished much of anything - and that's fine - it's only been a week - but it feels like forever. each day that passes without some kind of accomplishment is a little slap in the face. there are people out there - friends of mine - who are like that, workaholics, always on the ball - always in the game.

i should be a little more careful about coming home and try to take things slower. send less mass emails announcing my arrival and just let time be. disappoint less.

I am trying to learn how to enjoy the small things: sitting on the porch with a book, taking care of myself, learning how to communicate better. Most of all, to learn how to be where I am. Right now the best thing I can do for myself is to not make too many plans - to sleep when I'm tired, to take vitamins, and sleep some more. I have to recognize that I've got all the time in the world. I will get around to being a photojournalist and being on the ball when I'm good and ready. I just have to understand that and all that anxiety about "the clock is ticking" will fall away.

(from today)

Health-wise, I've come full-circle. It's been two months since I came down with tonsillitis. In Egypt I took antibiotics and penicillin. Back here, I'm already on my 2nd course of antibiotics, the same course they started me on two months ago. It's clearly viral and resistant to the antibiotics. that's a no-brainer.

Even though I tested negative for Celiacs disease my mom is convinced if I cut out Gluten from my diet for a month, my immune system will have a chance to recover and I will have my old self back again - energy and all. It seems almost too simple. But it worked for her several years ago. Turned her life around. Now you can't hardly find anything with wheat or gluten in it in the whole house, except for Tom's cereal. So on top of the antiobiotics, the 3,000 mgs of Vitamin C a day, and the probiotics, I'll try to cut out Gluten, which means no beer and whiskey. ??? Good luck right?!

But if i can log on here in a months time and say that my tonsils aren't swollen and I'm not feeling tired all the time, what a blessing that would be. It's almost worth it. All i want, more than anything else in the world, is to have my old healthy self back again. Amen.

i should be sleeping

but im going to take this opportunity to write. because whenever i'm supposed to be sleeping i don't, and whenever i'm not supposed to be sleeping, i sleep. so fuck it, i guess that's just how i am.

every once in a while, i totally break down. it's part of being me. it usually involves a mixture of sleep deprivation, or just generally always feeling tired, sadness in a depression kind of way, and then all of this almost always leads to some kind of serious sickness. it's my body's way of saying - "here, go take a friggin vacation already, you're hardly doing anything as it is". so here i am with tonsillitis and this is going to sound fucked up but i was actually really grateful when i finally pointed the hot lamp down my throat to find pussy white lumps. because i've been feeling gradually more horrible for a long time. and it went beyond the feeling like i had a pill stuck in my throat, or some sick that wanted to come up. and seeing those little white lumps verified for me that, yes, something is in fact wrong with you, you haven't imagined all of this. it's not all in your head.

because the thing is, i usually start thinking about things - about my life, and then at some point i become convinced that i'm taking the easy road out. that i'm side-stepping my real goals. that in some small way i'm giving up without ever owning up to the fact that i'm giving up.

i mean, ever since i was about 15 or so i knew photography was it for me. i went to one of those summer programs where you do a bunch of artsy stuff and i took a little photo course and i met a photographer and i saw his work and he did a little slideshow of other important photography and i was sold. so for 10 years now i've played with this thing i call my camera and i guess you could say i've done pretty well for myself but sometimes i get convinced that you know i'm always going to be just scraping by and that i don't have the balls to step up to the plate and actually become a real photojournalist. I originally envisioned myself as some Nachtway type, some Shutterbabe character, some Dan Eldon type chick running around post-Soviet Russian republics, the Middle East and Africa, falling in love with photography and people over and over again. Part of me has lived this life, but most of the time I fall victim to the other part of me which insists that I have given up and then I only take the path of least resistance - in this case, a job that requires me to do nothing more than photograph a 16,000 set of homogenous ancient stones over the course of two years simply because it provides a steady income and a home away from America. That part of me will say the same thing for the relationship that I am in - saying that I merely followed the path of least resistance, that something fell in to my lap - something so good, something that makes my life so comfortable, that I took it up without asking myself if it was actually something I could dedicate my heart to.

at some point, my self-esteem just started doing a full on spiraling-down thing following this line of thinking. collapsing in itself exponentially like some dead star farting itself out of existence. i stopped being able to talk, i stopped being able to enjoy myself, and started dragging through each day wondering what was to become of me if this were to go on for another year.

i guess at some point you just make a decision to trust yourself. you decide that you are going to make shit happen and you act on that decision, because really, what else is there? it's so easy for me to fester away in the notion that i am going nowhere with this and that i've made amuck of a glorious opportunity. everyday i see things on the street that if photographed properly, would make for amazing photographs.

in any case, i have at least one more day to sleep and eat antibiotics before going back to work and i'm going to soak it up. my shit is tired.

here comes the sun

Yeah, I live right off this "Avenue of the Sphinxes". I never really get used to it. I mean its several miles of Sphinxes just sitting out there, crumbling, being climbed on, shat on. I'm going to try and upload more video so people can really get a sense of what this place is like. Owen has a little Canon point and shoot, so this comes in handy.

As you can see, it's getting hotter, but things are really going much better. We really only had one week of total hot spell that was unbearable when I wrote that last entry and then it cooled off and I even got to take a 3 day weekend at a resort in Safaga on the Red Sea, where we did a great deal of snorkeling (amazing coral reef), played random word and hand-slapping games with our Parisian friends, including Asshole, and even a lifesize game of chess. I even got to play the new and improved version of Super Mario Brothers on the car trip back. It was dope. Now we are working 6 day weeks but we work 6.30 - 12 on site so while we do have to get up at like 5.30am we can come home as soon as the heat starts to get to us instead of boiling in it and feeling like we might just faint before making it back to the van. So things are good. Only 2 months to go before the project is over and we can come back to swine-flu infested America.

I can't wait. I have some buddies on the West Cost I'm really looking forward to catching up with and a whole lot of family on the East Coast to catch up with, including the newest member of the family - miss Evelyn Karr, born while I was here. My priority beyond visiting friends is to run a river - either in Canada or the States. Originally I heard about the McKenzie River - which takes a whole month to run, and I said - "that's it - let's go". But apparently the pre-planning is just too extensive to make it happen in our appreviated summer. But there are other good river trips to choose from. And if all goes as planned me and Owen will get back to Egypt early so we can do another feluca boat trip with our Nubian friend Khalid. 4 days just wasn't enough. A 2-week trip would be just right. Only problem is that approaching Luxor and anywhere north of it, you can't get in the water without getting skin disease and what not, so the plan to just skip buying a connecting flight and sail from Cairo to Luxor on the way back isn't so appealing to me. Seems a bit like torture to be on a boat for two weeks getting all warmed up by the desert sun but be forbidden to get in the water. So we'll see. There's still time to work it out.

Do you have specific summer plans I should know about ? I wanna know.

Fleur

after you left

i lay awake for whole hours
dead eyes & a faint kidney ache
when you kissed me & left i was
dreaming i had been sent back to college
surrounded by 17 and 18 year olds
terrifying
i could not fall back asleep so i
ate cereal & read the news
there is a bartender from north carolina
who spent a year in darfur
and now he raises money to install
clean water systems in Sudan, Cambodia,
Uganda, & other places.
I would like to help.
there is a 90-year old man who does
not think he will make it to 91 and
he has no problem with that.
he says there is no soul & that after he
dies he will be dead. enough is enough.
he says he will live on only in his children,
in his books, in his reputation.
i think he is correct.

Sunstroke

Before I finish the bit about sailing around for 4 days on a feluca, I just want to say that its finally reached that temperature that makes daily life uncomfortable. We all knew it was coming, I looked it up as soon as I got the job and shuddered to think that I'd be working in the desert, where there is a 0% chance of precipitation and the temperature rarely dips below 100. Today it was around 110 I think. I wouldn't know. I didn't make it past 11am, before I had to go home. I made the mistake of taking a shower last night and then sleeping with wet hair in the AC. We've started sleeping in the guest room because the AC in the bedroom doesn't work. We pushed the two twin beds together and I wear earplugs to block out the noise of children, weddings, cars, and dogs from the street.

It feels kind of like the way it did when I first moved to NYC and I was living in Astoria, broke, in debt, and without an air conditioner. I had to take a shower 3 times a day just to function in that apartment. Thankfully we have air conditioners here, but its funny, if you just stop to turn it off for a moment, you instantly feel hot again.

And so I have gradually become that person that enters the room looking pissed off, looks pissed of or miserable all the while everyone is eating and chatting, and I usually leave looking the same way, unless conversation is capable of lifting me out of this dumpy condition I find myself in. People say each time "are you feeling any better?" to which I reply something along the lines of "I feel hot" because that is all I can think of.

I hate myself like this obviously. It will be interesting to see if I make it to July. It's true, I've never felt to persistently unwell, heavy-limbed and dead-headed in my life. If I do make it to July, it would be a miracle of sorts. I feel bad for the people who have to be in my company like this. At least they know what I was like before it got hot.

We have no water tank at our flat, like we had at ARCE so water bottles must be toted to the flat every couple days. This is wasteful unfortunately and tedious, since we have to drink about 6 liters at work just to stay hydrated. Soon we will have to start getting up earlier to arrive at site by 6.40 or so that we can leave earlier. The sun is already making it impossible to stay until 2pm. Even with a fan blowing on you, the air is warm, and you have the uneasy sensation that you are a cookie baking in an oven. I bring lemons to site everyday because they truly are a life-saver when your electrolytes are gone and you swear you can't drink any more water. Emergen-C will save my life several times over over the next 2 1/2 months. I will ask my friends to bring some back.

Several ARCE employees are leaving this week for 2 weeks in America and I am a little jealous. A break from the heat would do me well and of course some much needed time with family and friends. Chicago House, the other large conglomerate of archeologists and artists have packed up and shipped out, leaving a dozen ARCE employees to waddle around in the heat of the temple uneasily. It would be much more civilized of course, if we could pack up and leave come May, but that's not how things run around here. At least I will have some good stories to tell for when I'm old and gray and my grandkids complain. "You think this is hot? Have I ever told you about the time I worked in Egypt and my face melted off my skull??" and so on. Wait for it.

feluca forever

I want to live on a feluca boat with a bunch of Nubian dudes and listen to a lot of Arabic, African, and reggae casette tapes.

There's something about boat trips, river trips - it's always really hard to come off them. You leave the boat hesitantly, not really sure if this is the best thing for you. Painstakingly you come to understand that the trip is over and yes, you must return to regular life, to civilization.

after 3 nights and four days on the river, we got off the Nile, with two passengers not feeling quite right. just as we were about to pick up our gear, owen starting barfing over the side of the boat. he barfed some more until he felt normal again and we proceeded to leave and he paid Khalid and we signed the feluca's guest book, thanked our friends, shook hands, and pushed through the hungry Kollesh drivers and got a cab to the station.

TO BE CONTINUED

back on top

things are good again.

nose to grindstone; grindstone to the ground

I've gotten a couple letters recently - most of them of the "so what's going on?" variety. It seems I've managed to write a lot on this blog but I've missed conveying what's actually going on with me and what it's like to live here.

2009 thus far has been a year of sickness and exhaustion. I haven't conveyed that because I myself was trying to drive through it and didn't want to admit it. But the truth is I've been sick more often then healthy, with bouts that last for several weeks.

I'm rather fed up with it. Throat raw. Limbs heavy. No energy. Little desire to mingle with my co-workers. Barely enough energy to make it through the day. One day weeks ago, I thought it was on the way out today and then I slept for 12 hours, got up, showered, got dressed, ate lunch and went back to bed. Not feeling it.

I guess I've avoided writing about it because I don't want to meditate on it and I don't like myself in this state. Everyday is the same - up at 6.45, to work at 7.15, back at 2. Shower, eat lunch, try to fall asleep and take something for head. sleep until evening. get up. work on talatat (process photographs and upload to server for the Egyptologists), eat dinner. work on talatat. sleep. repeat.

The hardest part about this is that there is so much going on here. If I were coming into this place with the sole purpose of shooting - I would have endless resources - life on the Nile, the orphanage that I discovered not so long ago, the Copts vs. the Christians, gender issues (big time), the whole gamut of important and interesting social documentary projects. Having to shoot blocks every day for 6 hours and then edit them on a computer for 3 more kind of destroys me in a sense - slowly I've come to run purely on auto-pilot; I'm getting through the days, I guess you could say, but the "I" isn't all there - isn't the same. I also noticed that up until yesterday I haven't written a damn thing for myself - more evidence of the fact that I've locked up inside. I make lists of things I intend to do in my spare time but the weekends are typically filled with sleeping, catching up, and trying to break out of this stuckness with some activity out of the house.

So - I want to apologize - I need to do something to come back down to earth, to get healthy, to feel like a person again and once I do that I can be a good friend again. I'm really fortunate to have people that care about me and ask and genuinely want to know how it's going and what it's like and I want to be able to do a better job of conveying that. Sometimes it requires waking up and putting the pen down onto the paper - there are some things computers can't capture first hand. (This was originally written in my book for the sole purpose of getting it out onto the paper and copied into this blog).

So what is it like? Right now it's not so good because I'm on autopilot, feet dragging, there is no time or energy for exercise, for Arabic, for photography, for writing, for love, for bike riding. But I will get out of this.

Owen is good, he is trying to figure out a way to bring me back. Obviously I'm the only one who can do this. His uncle and cousin are going and a 3-day feluca trip in Aswan is in route. Not sure what this will be like - I don't want to put on a face. I can only be myself now. I hope the water and the fresh air cure me and I can be a pleasant person to be around again.

I'll try to write about what it's like to live in Luxor, Egypt in my next post. Give me some time.

can't find the time to find the time

SO much has happened.

Let me chronicle them one by one.

1. We went to Dahab and Aswan in December (I wrote about that a little before).
2. Owen put the moves on during the overnight train to Cairo.
3. I got super sick during Thanksgiving and barfed up my dinner multiple times.
4. My sister gave birth to her second daughter: Evelyn Ruth Karr.
5. The ARCE compound started to feel like a police state.
6. Work got insane.
7. Me and Owen moved into a new flat together.
8. My boss got fired and his wife, my other boss, resigned.
9. A bomb went off in Cairo.
10. Me and Owen got hired for another year.
11. I paid off all my grad school debt.
12. I turned 26 and Owen and 7 others here in Luxor took an epic early morning cruise over the Nile in a hot air balloon.
12. I thought I was pregnant and almost lost my mind.
13. I got THREE pieces of mail, one of which was a package (THANK YOU GABBY, LAURA, AND CLAIRE!).
14. I have had no time to do anything except work.

Phew. Ok. Let's start with numbers 4 and 5. Remember that bit about "the doubling" - when I had to start shooting twice as many blocks as I had been shooting? Well after that shit got even crazier. After increasing our production at the talatat magazine by 400% going from 20 blocks a day to upwards of 80-100, our "project director" came to us telling us that we should really be doing about 300 blocks a day. This was a little jarring, considering we only have about six hours to actually work at the magazine once you take out our breakfast break and the time it takes to set up and put everything away - and at that rate we'd have to take a block out of the magazine, clean it off, conserve it, number it, document it, photograph it and put it back in approximately 70 seconds. The fucked part of this is that we actually were forced to kind of go along with this and make preparations as if we could actually accomplish this.



Let me explain, the said project director was a little bit off. This is someone who isn't an Egyptologyst and had no degree in anything relating to antiquities. In fact, he previously worked as a manager in big oil. And he pretty much took the same approach with us, as long as you are out there producing the right numbers you are doing your job. Basically, all concern for the real job at hand: conserving, documenting, photographing, "researching" was kind of not his concern. I was pretty flustered by all of this. I kind of had a really bad month. I got sick at some point during all the madness of it all and couldn't get better. One day it got to the point where I could barely walk so I left the magazine and caught a cab home and only came back halfway through the workday the following day. The sickness stuck around for 3 weeks.

So how do you go from 70 blocks to 300? Number one - you get Owen in on it, take him away from his three other projects and make him come to the talatat magazine at least two days a week. Number two, instead of shooting blocks one at a time on one table, you get three more tables made and shoot on four at once. But since you can't buy [read: don't want to spend your money on] 3 more sets of fancy Swiss Elinchrome studio lights you just get your photographers to use house lamps. That's right. Owen took it upon himself to make several trips to Luxor's one and only "hardware store" or something that resembles a hardware store to inspect what kind of lights and bulbs were available so he could rig up something strong enough to light the blocks with. I kind of scoffed at all of this.

From a photographer's point of view, it is totally ridiculous to be asked to shoot with household lamps when you've thus far photographed over 2,000 blocks very carefully and systematically using top-of-the-line studio lamps to pick up the blocks every detail and fine relief. I mean, we're talking hieroglyphs and relief carvings that are around 3,000 years old. This isn't a job for Ikea and they don't even have that here.

In any case, this went on for some time, we ordered two more tables to be made, Owen screwed around with the lamps from our apartment and a bunch of tin foil to no end and I cursed under my breath.

The strange thing about the PD (Project Director) is that no one really recognized him as such. There was a plaque on the door that said that was his job, but the archeologists and Egyptologysts certainly didn't consider him to be their superior in so far as he knew little to nothing about their projects or their historical significance.

We had one meeting with said director where he basically had pulled us in to say, "you know, I've been fired from a couple jobs because of lack of communication with the director... so I'm just going to let you in on a little secret here - check in with me from time to time. You know, come in once a day, or even once and week and tell me how it's going, what is working, what isn't. If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's that communication is really important."

Now if this were coming from anyone else, I would have thought to myself "of course! my mother would have told me the same thing! how silly of me.." but coming from him it felt a little hypocritical because it was really part of his job to "manage" and in order to "manage" you have to be there from the beginning, you have to have an idea of what's going on with your projects from day one, you can't just jump in half way into the deal and say "hey, what's going on? you need to be shooting 5 times as fast as you are now! why aren't you checking in with me? if you don't pick it up now we're going to scrap your project and they're going to throw your precious blocks in the back of a pickup truck and drive them to another city [finger pointing and beat-faced here]. Of course, when several weeks later, he was fired, this whole conversation became even more ironic.

Anyway, during this period of stress and administrative difficulties, the whole ARCE compound became like a ship out in the sea. Like a ship in the sense that a small isolated community became ridiculous, everyone had gossip to spread, everyday we heard another update on the absurd situation we were in and once you told one person everyone else immediately knew. The problems were daily: once we were reprimanded for cooking eggs and told that we weren't allowed to buy our own eggs because we were a risk to ourselves. This quickly became a favorite joke amongst all.

Once we got a strangely worded memo about photographic guidelines and were lectured about the dangers of photographing any Egyptians in non-standard lighting. I should really upload this memo. We were told we could be put in jail and that we should remove any pictures from the internet immediately. We politely asked what picture had caused the problem but the PD replied that he could not tell us and that they were all a risk. After this meeting, Owen and I both frantically went through all of our pictures trying to figure out what picture was the problem. We found nothing. We had our flatmates look through them. They found nothing. We later found out the real reasons for this memo/meeting - a complaint from the PD's secretary about a picture that she found and didn't approve of that we had in fact taken with and at the PD's encouragement on the roof during our first week of work. This rendered the whole thing totally ridiculous and un-called for.

Once we got a memo in our email accounts entitled: "A reminder about the purpose of the ARCE residence" which told us again that we couldn't cook our own eggs, that we shouldn't take too much food from dinner, that we couldn't use the laundry room after 8pm, and that we shouldn't become overly familiar or friendly with the staff and that we were listening to our music too loudly. Here are some of my favorite quotes from this memo:

"Although ARCE intends that its residence may be as comfortable as home . . . ARCE employees are reminded that the residence is not their personal space, but is in fact a hotel facility. Complacency and excessive familiarity with the residence and its staff can be an unfortunate psychological result of living in a hotel environment for an extended period of time"

That last bit is my favorite.

This too:

"In order to control hygiene standards, food prepared in this facility will be prepared by our kitchen staff. Residents are welcome to provide suggestions to the facility manager for supplemental menu items. Residents are also welcomed to vary their diet at any one of Luxor’s fine restaurants."

The bit about suggestions to the menu was particularly comical to everyone at ARCE. The menu had become kind of unbearable. See the thing is Egyptian food is fantastic. Everyone loves it. Everyone except the PD. He was convinced that having the Egyptian cook prepare Egyptian food will physically make ARCE's residents sick. As a result, he made the cook prepare Western food, but since the cook is Egyptian, it's kind of a strange version of what you usually encounter. Hence the grilled cheese consisted of a thick piece of bread with American cheese on it. No grilling involved. Just like that. Fajita consisted of a piece of pita bread with fried peppers and feta cheese. Pasta consisted of a full plate of the same white curly pasta with a teaspoon or two of sauce. Needless to say, day in and day out, this got a little frustrating.

Now I'm not complaining. The ARCE facility is amazing. Almost breath-taking. When I found out I was going to be working in Luxor, Egypt, I imagined a plain barren room with a simple cot and maybe a lamp for reading in the middle of the desert. When you arrive at ARCE you are taken away by the downright luxury of it all - the huge mahogany dresser, the Japanese styled window, the Queen size bed, the European bathroom equipped with a bidet (that no one uses). The point is that it became clear that ARCE funds were happily poured into the building itself where we were living but with great hesitation when it came to actually supplying ARCE projects with necessary amenities such as wood trays for damaged talatat blocks, new mastabas, and shelving. And in terms of the meals, the PD just basically decided that his sensitive stomach or whatever scared him about Egyptian food gave him the right to make things miserable for everyone else in a way that they really didn't need to be. From day one, Owen and I and others suggested maybe just letting the Egyptian cooks just cook what they know how to cook (fabulous chicken, fish, and other meat dishes which are tastier than god). But he basically knocked our suggestions unanimously, explaining that Egyptian food was liable to make residents ill. Huff.

One of the funniest things about this memo and other memos is the way in which it makes us look like a big company. We are about a dozen people. The tone of these memos and emails just never seemed appropriate to me. There were half a dozen other things - like locking the door and changing the lock on the door that connected our office/Owen's bedroom to the exit which forced us to bring our photo gear through the cafe at the end of each day into the offices and caused a fire hazard as well. I don't know. It's not so interesting any more because said PD is gone and I can forget about all this now. But I remember when every single incident felt just like icing on the cake of a totally ridiculous situation. Indeed, there are somethings I just dare not bring up.

Here's a new one from today: The PD came by the labratory one day where Sayeed - the Egyptian who translates lectures all day works. He asked Sayeed if the lab needed anything - Sayeed responded that they really needed a copy machine so the students could have copies of the worksheets. "A coffee machine!" the PD thought, "a great idea!" The next week a top-notch coffee maker was installed in the lab. It was until much later the much-needed copy machine materialized.

Anyway, stay with me for more news.

letter to an old studio photography prof at SVA

De Lessio!

Hey is this still your address? Try real hard to remember me, this
is Sara Lafleur-Vetter I took your studio class at SVA 2005-2006,
tall, skinny, rough around the edges. We have to talk. I've since
been hired to work for the American Research Center in Egypt.

I've been living in Luxor, Egypt since October and I'm on contract
till about July 2010 it looks like. Guess what my job is? After not paying
any damn attention to studio photography I got the job of photographing
16,000+ ancient Egyptian blocks with fine relief hieroglyphs and
imagery. That's irony for ya, screw Alanis Morisette.

Anywho, please write back and tell me you are still at this email address
and we can have some correspondence. That would be swell.

I'm currently at about 4,000 blocks. So, I've got a ways to go.

Best,

lafleur

I can receive mail

Sara Lafleur-Vetter
ARCE
2 Midan Simon Bolivar
Garden City, Cairo
Egypt 11461

After not receiving a drawing my friend Dominic sent me in my first week, I assumed, along with other stories that I'd heard that I could not receive mail. Then a couple weeks ago Owen got this nice package with chocolate, food, and a cd and some photos and so I think it's safe to give it a shot. In any case it would be rad to get anything at all. Even if its just a piece of mail art to put on my wall.

A Day in the Life

Christian: How the job going? How much of the language have you picked
up? How's the food? Is there a night life? Let me know.

Sorry for not responding sooner. I got overwhelmed all of a sudden, stressed out, exhausted, ill. My to-do list forever teeming with things I said I'd do.

The job is going well. But a big change has happened in the past couple weeks. I work at a "talatat magazine" - a dusty storage facility for ancient Egyptian blocks attached to Khonsu Temple at Karnak. I'm not going to get into the history and significance of the temple here, but I will say that these blocks were re-used in different periods under different Egyptian kings such that many of them have inscriptions or hieroglyphs on more than one side, and such that one side can be right side up and then you rotate the block and the next side is upside down. Hmm. Up until a couple weeks ago we were working at a leisurely pace, I would photograph the blocks as they came to me. Before they get to me they must be removed from high stacks from inside the magazine, rolled out to our conservators where they dust them off and apply various chemical agents, epoxy on the parts that are falling off and then when they are satisfied they send the block off to our Egyptologists, who take notes on all the things they can: color, what kind of hieroglyphs or imagery or relief is present, what kind of state the block is in, etc etc. When they are all done they paint on some more chemicals "a patch" which must dry and then paint on a 6 digit number. After some minutes, the paint would dry, I would photograph it and then it would get sent back into the magazine. I was shooting 20-something blocks a day like this. With time in between to sit down with my workers and learn some Arabic with a child-size chalkboard and some chalk.

And then. And then word got around that we were working altogether too slow. 16,000 blocks at the rate we were working at would have taken about 4 years. We have 5 months left before my contract expires and they fly me back to America. So Ed, our Egyptologist friend stepped in and we began to brainstorm ways to speed up the process. I remembered in high school those nifty paint markers kids used for graffiti and had a photographer from John Hopkins bring over a dozen. Ed took the conservation paperwork and cut it in half, and lectured the conservators on how each block should take only a few minutes - especially blocks of no apparent significance - plain surfaces with nothing on them. And yes, there are quite a bit of these. Jay - said photographer from John Hopkins also dropped by the magazine to see what my process was and how he could speed up the photography element. So after all this - I'm now shooting 50-60 blocks a day - up to 70 sides. I know maybe this doesn't sound like a lot, but let me explain.

The blocks are heavy. Although they were constructed with the intention of one Egyptian man being able to carry it 3,000 years ago, nowadays most require two people to carry over to my table. Unless you want a hernia. Then the talatat face must be leveled. My table consists of a sandbox on top of a big screw so I can spin the block around to face it to the camera or face the 2nd side. The sandbox makes leveling the rock easier, as I can simply shift the level by shuving sand under one side of the rock, or propping it up with a wooden wedge. Sometimes this whole process takes all of 10 seconds. Sometimes it can take 10 minutes. Since some of the rocks are fragments, you have to find some indicator on the inscription of the rock as to what should be horizontal or vertical - some hieroglyphs, a seemingly horizontal line, etc etc. Sometimes you have to call on the Egyptologists to make this call, sometimes you don't, sometimes you make mistakes and you have to fix it in the computer, or, if the mistake is really bad, you might have to reshoot the block.

In any case, after the block is leveled, we use a mirror to make sure the face of the block is flesh with the camera lens. This involves having one of my workers (I'll talk about them below) hold up the mirror against the rock and looking through the lens and telling them to swivel the table to the left or the right until I see myself in the very center of the frame. It looks kind of like this:



Once this is set up, then we hang a board on the table (we glued a big fat magnet to the back of it) with the 6 digit number of the rock, a color patch, and a small scale to show the size of the block. Then we dust the black fabric off with a paintbrush and a blower brush. Then I shoot the rock. I've got the pavement spraypainted at various places to dictate where the camera should be depending on which way the rock is facing and the same for the Elinchrome lamps I'm using. Until recently I would do a lot of shuffling around, changing the power on the lamps or changing their position until I got the talatat lit exactly the way I want it. But since Jay came by, I've ditched this for the most part. Now I stick with the two to three lighting scenarios, sticking with the spraypaint marks on the ground and only varying this if the rock is exceptionally unusual (sometimes it truly is necessary, or the block is upside down because of fragile areas and has to be lit backwards and flipped in Photoshop). Right.

If there is more than one decorated surface, I do this all over again to the second surface, careful to label the various sides of the rock as A or B or C. I jot the rock number down in my Moleskin, the boys chalk a check onto the top of it, and it goes back onto a table until there are a whole lot of them to be carted back into the magazine and stacked in precariously tall stacks.

Like I said, it used to be twenty-something and now the numbers are more than double that, with the administration telling us that we have to double it again. For those that care, here is the number-crunch from my email to Jay:

"Shooting with Owen on Thursday we got production up to 59 blocks and 106 sides - our best track record thus far. Owen is going to try his best to shoot 2 days a week if possible and this will help to keep the numbers up... This week we shot 242 blocks/319 sides - if Owen could come twice a week and work out the patch issue, I would expect production to be up to 280 blocks a week - 1400 a month. If we have 5 months remaining that puts us in at 7000 blocks - add that to the 1700 or so we've done thus far and we're up to 8700." That's half.

I wish I could convey the manner in which we are running around like maniacs. I bust my ass so hard at work everyday that my butt cheeks chafe. That's a first. I actually have to apply baby powder to my butt after work. All of this doubling has definitely changed the nature of the job. Shooting twice as many blocks means I have to process twice as many - which made for a week of working on the computer until 8, 9, and 10pm. When you start work at 7.30 and finish that late it can really put a dent in you. Hence the sickness. The soar throat that never goes away. Irritability.

Before the doubling happened, I used to do a lot of other things like exercise, yoga, post photos, blog, take Arabic lessons, and ride bikes on the weekend and watch films and such. Since then, this has all been cut and my mood, noticeably, has done a bit of a 180. So the trick will be to find a way to keep the numbers up for shooting and processing but still have a life and get healthy.

Before all this I started writing about the job in more general terms. Read this as A Day in the Life before the "doubling" epidemic happened, when things were still pretty easy-going and life was pretty grand:

"There is a certain monotony to it I suppose, but you would be absolutely crazy to say my job is 'boring'. Yarko (dubbed "the Obi wan Konobi of photography in Luxor - quite possibly all of Egypt")



- a photographer who has been working for here forever took me aside one day to remind me that I have the best job in the world. He's right. I will try to explain to you why this is with little success but aside the point, I really hope my contract is extended so I can have another year here. I'm not ready for America and like many of my fellow-expats, I'm not really sure what the hell I'd do there. I have no interest in Graduate School at this point, or interning for some famous photographer, spending all day Photoshopping or keywording his nice pictures from Afghanistan (almost happened in PA with McCurry), in fact the only thing I can actually see myself doing/pursuing in the States is being a white-water river guide in the Canyon or somewhere else. The more likely route for my future is in another country, with my camera, or with some organization aimed to make shit better. But anyway, back to my job:

I get up at quarter to seven every morning, run downstairs for a glass of juice and a muffin, Ed makes some comment about the economy still being crap and what is your man Obama going to do about it, I scoff at him and grab my gear and jump in the company van, we (used to) swing by a nearby hotel where we pick up a group of Italian conservators, at least one of them having worked on conservation at the Vatican of all places. They all come wearing crisp white jumpers and I hear that at their site in Karnak they have nice little mats set up with nice lighting and tables with coffee and tea. Our space on the other hand is less neat I suppose, a tented area attached to the talatat magazine, where I shoot up to 30 blocks on a good day. This is the "monotonous" part, whereas every other aspect of it is not.

We jump out at Karnak where there's usually two dozen tour buses lined up and the morning light is pouring through the temple.





Tour guides buzz around us speaking everything from French, English, Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Russian, and other languages I can't make out. We push through the metal detectors and the crowds with gear in hand taking in the same scene every morning.


I work with two Egyptian guys who are very dear to me. One is a 19 (now 20) year old boy by the name of Mohammed - a name which you can call out on any street corner and get at least 5 people to turn around.




I don't have time to do a full character analysis of Mohammed or even do him any justice here, but let's just say he is very smart, a rebel of sorts, and hyper-active. I have stories to tell about him that I will save for other posts - stories involving weddings, motorcycles, etc. The difficult part for Mohammed is not getting bored. He is forever telling stories, a mile a minute, to Dowop, then at some point during the day, when the last hour or two comes up, he gets bored out of his mind, sometimes sitting down with his head in his hands, clipping his fingernails, doing anything other than working. Which is fine, because at that point, Dowop can take over for the most part.

Dowop is a 30-something year old husband and father. His third daughter was born yesterday at 5am and he showed up for work. That is the kind of person he is. His wife was in the hospital. He stuck around for a couple hours until we told him to go be with his wife and new daughter.

Dowop is obsessed with the word "wahad" which means "one". It's wahad miraya (one mirror), wahad forsha (one brush), wahad mezan (one level), wahad Owen, wahad Sara, etnein Dowop (two Dowops, because sometimes he holds up the mirror and there are two of him - philosophical right?). Sometimes the wahad game gets a little old and unravels into absurdity - wahad wahad (one one), wahad kewayis (one good), and he will start talking to himself about various things with wahad in front of it.

Each time we saw Dowop last week we would ask him if the third baby is here yet, and he would say la lesa - no not yet. We jokingly told him that if it turns out to be twins he can give us one baby since he only wants one (wahad bes - just one).





Dowop is hilarious. He has definitive facial expressions and a way of talking and smacking his lips together and a definitive tone of voice that I wish I could convey to you. Sometime I'm going to have Owen video tape our breakfast so that I have a record of this.

Everyday around 10am whoever went out to fetch breakfast arrives back with a couple plastic bags heavy with goodness. For two Egyptian pounds (40 cents), we get a meal of kings consisting of a falafel-type sandwich called "tamia" - super fried bean balls



inside the most amazing pita I've ever tasted with tomato, lettuce, green onion, sometimes some white feta-like cheese, and always some fruit jam. All of this is plopped down on a plastic tarp on the temple grounds that we sit on and happily munch away. this is followed by tea with milk and sugar as we sit among ancient blocks telling stories and trying to communicate in broken Arabic and cherades.








The best is when tourists are wandering around and they see a bunch of Egyptian dudes plopped down on the ground, dipping pita into plastic bags of beans and jam and then see the lone white girl there, munching away. It all looks pretty funny.

How much of the language have you picked up? How's the food? Is there a night life? Let me know. Sorry, but this will have to wait till next time. 11pm is here and my throat is collapsing in on itself and my head is throbbing so I've got to call it a night. Sis - I hope this suffuses for never writing you enough or posting enough. Good news is me and Owen are going to get our own flat soon, which is going to improve our situation immensely. More on that later. Thanks to everyone for being patient and not getting too pissed when I don't respond to emails or write about "what it's really like". I intend to post to this religiously. Thanks for reading. Love, Fleur.

forever young

I have just finished watching the entire catologue of Gabby Miller's YouTube videos - everything from Pandas fighting in the gym, pandas in the library and at the lesbo club, to Gabby's grandmother wishing everyone a Happy New Year, reciting the Ballad of Yukon Jake or the player piano playing music recorded in 1922 from Millerama. For those of you don't know, Gabby Miller was someone I went to school with at Reed College. We met my Junior year when I returned from Russia in the spring, and then we lived together in a house called The Stables my senior year. She was and remains one of my favorite people on the face of the earth. Sitting here watching the videos, I have come to the realization, and maybe I've known it all along, that the people I met at Reed are people that will remain my favorites forever. There is something about the people I met there that make them most valuable. Aside from a particular best friend in Philly and my family members, they constitute that one circle of friends that I will always come back to. And now that we have all graduated and entered the real world, it's kind of funny to see where we all ended up:

Gabby goes back and forth between California and Vietnam, Serene opened up an art gallery in post-Katrine New Orleans, Sunny Daly is studying in Cairo, Egypt, Jesse is organizing lunch-ladies in Oregon and playing music, Layla is baking vegan goods in San Fran (as far as I know), Keith spent two years in Prague studying film, Babbits is living the dream in Portland at the Fridge soon to take a roadtrip with me across the states in summer 2009, Dan Denvir is living in Quito, Ecuador playing journalist/community organizer protesting all things evil and leading Caterwaul Quarterly (which I'm proud to help out with) while his girlfriend Thea holds down the fort in Philly studying for her PHd, let's see... Wilkes is somewhere on the West Coast getting his photography on magazine covers and being too busy to communicate, Julia Bean works for a neon light co. in NYC making rad signs for companies like Adidas, Jacob and Hana, who've got the most amazing track record of all: traveling from New Zealand, Indonesia, across America, and back again to Indonesia, etc etc.

But then there is also the extended network of non-Reed friends that I have kept in touch with: among them Laura - my friend in Germany, Bryan who has recently re-located to Columbia/Venezuela, Sean in NYC, Simona my friend in Morocco, and all my friends in Russia: Denis, Alexey, Albina, Rushina, etc. I feel well-rounded because of this.

I suppose living here amongst archeologists/adult peoples has done me some good in that I can pretend to be more like them, to begin to understand their mannerisms and speech patterns, to begin to take on responsibility and have a real job, but there is also the recognition - in a positive sense - that I know who my people are. My biggest fear, I know now, is being normal. I started to tell myself that I was "becoming adult" and slowly liking the idea of "adulthood" and accepting it as not so bad. Now I'm not being nostalgic in the slightest, I just want to state for the record that being away from friends for three years or so has led me to understand how much I love and respect them - for all their weird behavior, for the way in which you can't really guess what they are going to do or say next, and I will always understand this as the only way to be. It's ingrained in me and it was rather foolish to think I could take it out or tell myself that taking it out was the right thing to do.

What made me realize this? It was many things. It was the reunion with Sunny Daly in Cairo, it was watching all of Gabby's YouTube videos from way back then, it was sharing the stories of the good old days with a new friend, it was playing strip poker for the hell of it last night for the first time since that spring break weekend we took up to Canon beach back in 2005 with Gabbers, Layla, Gene, Jesse, and Isabelle. I do believe that I will remain a child at heart forever and I accept this with great joy.