As much as I enjoyed the trip to the Egyptian Museum, I really started to feel like I was in Egypt on the first day in Luxor. We boating over the Nile, visited with a middle class farmer, and walked the streets to a business that empowers local women, and enjoyed the view from a rooftop restaurant. I'll post on each of those in turn, but first the journey to the west and back. As a bit of context, ancient Egypt's cities were on the east bank of the Nile while the tombs were on the West side. Our guide has told us that this belief resulted from the path of the sun which when it sets in the west travels through the underworld to return to the East. While the Nile runs the length of the country there are only twenty some bridges and between Luxor and Aswan the two sides were often quite distinct from one another at times almost seeming like different countries.
Luxor proper is a city with a tourist district along the water with continuing density, five story plus buildings and the like, further in. By comparison, we spoke to a farmer directly on the west bank of the Nile and he didn't really consider himself a resident of the city. There are towns and some reasonably tall buildings amid the west bank farms, but I'm told that most of them are multi-generational extended family dwellings. [The picture to the left is of a few such buildings in West Luxor]. Population growth is fairly high here, 2-3 children for middle class farmers but 5-6 for poor ones, and from what I'm told that's driving most of the construction. Due to this growth, upper levels of buildings are often left intentionally unfinished, with rebar showing. This allows for adding more floors when finances allow or family size demands expansion. This didn't seem as common in the center of west bank towns, I would guess that this may be a somewhat recent trend.
[Update: I changed the post date to properly position it chronologically.]
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