These houses are all from the time of "Alexander," the fourth century BCE. The town is definitely a sight to see. It's out of this world, and I have no idea how to explain something like the whole planet of Tatooween in one blog post, but here are some snippets.
It's not a big town by any means, but it has its own language. The language has Arabic roots, yet no one in the world except a Siwan can understand it. Almost everybody in Siwa speaks Arabic fluently except for some of the older men (I don't know about the women because they are kept inside all day, but that is for another blog post). English is pretty pervasive too. The kids seemed to only know the "Welcome in Egypt" or "Hello" phrases, but many of the shop keepers and waiters spoke English very well. Needless to say, I was pretty impressed that many of them had three languages down cold.
This is definitely a tourist town. We didn't go at a crowded time, but everything seemed to revolve around a couple tourist activities. The Siwan tribal dance during the sunset, biking around town, taxi rides by mules, climbing the mountains overlooking the town, swimming in hot springs, and a safari in the desert that consists of driving up and down vast mountains of sand, swimming in a movie-like oasis, and sandboarding.
In addition to their tourism industry, they export great bottled water and possibly the best dates in the world (the price: 4 Egyptian pounds for 1 kilogram). With such great economic resources, I was awestruck to find that Siwa was so different than anything I've ever seen.
Siwa has definitely started to modernize (and it's only at the beginning), but that doesn't mean it has westernized. There's a difference that I'll explain further in the future, but here are some examples for now. They have the first world necessities such as a hospital, police station, gas station, hotels, pharmacies, restaurants, and even a sports club, but they don't have a supermarket and internet access is limited mostly to tourism. There was one shop where you could play playstation, but I didn't see any kids playing Alexandria's favorite game: FIFA '08. The kids were all outside swimming in pools or dancing at night. Some ten-year-olds even drove around tourists on their mule wagons. All the Siwans whom I met had cell phones (nice ones with video cameras and mp3 players), yet they all wear very traditional robes. Most people had motorcycles, yet most of the college aged Siwans whom I talked with had only left Siwa two or three times in their entire lives. Before I visited Siwa, the Siwans had never seen a Westerner beat a Siwan in ping pong... well, let's say I was more than happy to show them something new.
More to come on Siwa in upcoming posts. Five days without the internet means a lot of catching up to do with the world.
