It's hard to believe that I am in my twelfth season of living and working in Luxor for six months of the year. And in May of 2015 this blog turned eight! I can only hope that I will have the good fortune to return to Egypt for many years to come.
I am the proud owner of a new Canon PowerShot S100 (Thanks to KV and CG for their help in making the decision to purchase this particular camera and thanks to ES for transporting the camera and SL for bringing the great retro camera case to Luxor!). What follows are some of the first shots I have taken with this lovely camera. These are all "Automatic" or "Scene Selection". I haven't had a chance yet to explore the semi- and fully manual options available to me. I'm going to have to "re-learn" manual photography as I haven't had to use those skills in years!
Flora:
Poinsettia
Red Flame (Clerodendron splendens)
Persian Acacia (Albizia julibrissin)
Fauna:
Look closely for the kite in the palm tree!
Kite near their nest
Kite again
Bee-eater just before take-off!
Buttons blending in
Beau doing his third favorite thing (after eating and playing)
Finally! Anait and did a shopping walkabout last Sunday, with a well-deserved stop at The Roof for lemon juice (theirs is the best!), wonderful coffee (the real thing with cardamom) for Anait, and my first shisha of the season (plum). The light everywhere was wonderful, as it tends to be in the mid-to-late afternoon. And of course the views from The Roof are magnificent!
Our resident egret who always seems to hang around near CH:
On our brief walk through the tourist souk:
Bougainvillea is very opportunistic. Here it's used the trunk of the palm tree to establish itself:
One of the ubiquitous homages to ancient Egyptian influence:
Just over a month since I arrived in Luxor and I'm finally getting around to my final post about the process of arriving! In April of this year I made a small donation to the fundraising campaign for "Trésors du Caire". The project revolved around restoring two treasures for installation in the new "Arts de l'Islam" department of the Louvre: a mashrabiya and a Mamlouk porch. Here is a video from the Louvre that was produced to encourage donations to the two projects:
October 13 was a rainy Paris day, which made it perfect for visiting a museum:
I spent over three hours in the department and I barely scraped the surface of the two levels of extraordinary items. While the layout is a bit confusing, the displays themselves are excellent. And the design of the space really works. Here are just a few examples of both architecture and displays:
And here are photos of the Mamlouk porch which has been installed as a passage between two sections of the display space:
My name on the video display of the list of donors!
Here is the fully restored mashrabiya:
By the end of my visit I was suffering from the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect, but I shall return as often as possible to be able to examine individual items and sections more thoroughly.
On my way out of the museum I caught this interesting juxtaposition:
The old encompassing the modern surrounding the recent--an untitled piece in laser-sculpted stainless steel by Belgian artist Wm. Delvoye. The whole a fitting image of the Louvre itself!
A native Californian (yes, they do exist!) who has landed a dream retirement job as Librarian for the library at Chicago House (The Epigraphic Survey of The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) in Luxor, Egypt...