28/10 to 31/10 : Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter

Hello again! First of all : yes, I'm still alive. I have been ill, but the antibiotics worked really fast, so I'm better now. I know now that I had a virus, since Steffie and Sandre have fallen ill as well from the same virus.
I have visited the American Research Centre on Thursday. Unfortunately we only got information about the library and nothing about the instistute itself. When we sat in the library to work a bit, one of the researchers put on some Christmass music in his bureau. It was difficult to retain myself from bursting out in laughter! I'm dreaming of a white Christmass... In Egypt?!
I missed the lecture by Seidlmayer, a very good egyptologist, because the antibiotics made me too tired. I have been able to go to another lecture on Friday, by one of my personal (professional) heroes : Salima Ikram. She's just an amazing egyptologist in my opinion. She lectured us on experimental archaeology. She and her students team at the American University in Cairo had done a wonderful experiment : they had mummified animals to see what is was really like to do it! They mummified successfully three rabbits (Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter), and, a bit less succesful, a sheep called Brownie. They found out that to mummify you need muscle power, a good stomach and a lot of natron to keep the bugs and flies away (about 250 kilo's of natron for 1 sheep!). The lecture was extremely interesting, but extremely disgusting as well. I had just eaten, and at the first image of the sheep's intestines being pulled out, I felt quite bad. Everybody did, you could hear some nervous sound sin the audience. Even Salime Ikram, who had done the experiment, had to drink a lot of water, I noticed! But everything for egyptology!

The same day of the lecture (29/10) it was Kaz' 21st birthday (only 3 days after mine). Alas alas, most of us were too tired or too ill to have a big birthday party. So Quentin and I invited Kaz to our appartment, wehere we talked and laughed a lot. We gave him 'original papyrus', purchased in the Alphamarket, and a chocolate bar which sais 'This is NOT for girls!'. I tried to find the 'This is NOT for boys' counter bar, but it didn't exist!

This weekend Quentin and I went to the Cairo museum to work on our museum assignment. We had to deal with some annoying taxi drivers. The first one tried to let us pay 10 pounds, whereas we know that the common price is around 5 pounds (especially for a 3 minute drive, which was our case). We had to get angry on him for insisting so much. We just gave him 5 pounds and then got out of the cab. The second one was a white taxi, and they always have metres, so we thought : nice, no discussion possible. Of course, you can guess... He did an enormous detour! Luckily Quentin knew the way, so he was able to argue with the driver to take the short cut, so the damage wasn't too bad : 8 pounds. But I'm sure that if Quentin hadn't noticed anything, he would have done a tour around Cairo to let us pay at least 15 pounds. After this I felt really bad. I was still nauseous, it was hot, the assignnment had taken all my energy, Guillaume was ill, the taxi drivers are stupid... I had a little crisis of homesickness!

But apart from that this first week was great. Despite the illness and the culture clash, I had a great time, with some very funny moments. The Dutch people are all very sweet and humourous. I hope every week will be like this one.