Journey to Anafora

I wrote these posts while in Anafora (December 26-January 2) but since I did not have/want internet access there, I am posting them all at once.

I decided at the last minute (December 21) to go to Egypt to stay at a "Coptic retreat farm" for a week starting the day after Christmas. I took a chartered flight down, which I thought would be amusing at best and frightening at worst, since these flights are generally full of Swedes bound for merry-making at one of the beach resorts at Sharm el Sheikh or Hurghada. Indeed, this flight was too, but folks were sedated in the post-Christmas feeding frenzy (the people sitting in front of me only had a couple of gin and tonics and wine with lunch) and not everyone seemed bound for a tourist resort. There were others - such as the Arabic-speaking, Swedish passport-carrying gentlemen who sat next to me - who also seemed to be taking advantage of the cheap, direct flights to Cairo.

After 4.5 hours (plus one hour sitting on the plane in Stockholm while the wings were being de-iced), we landed in Cairo. I was picked up in a nice van and driven for a couple of hours, the first of which seemed to be getting out of Cairo through moonlit cityscapes of colonial buildings, laundry lines and minarets.

Eventually we turned off a smaller freeway into a gate with script above it saying "Anafora," but spelled in what looked like Greek letters. We drove around various domed mud and wattle buildings of different sizes. Finally we came down an alley lit with lamps covered in baskets and stopped in front of a building. We were greetted by some women who had dinner waiting for us (a Swedish guy was also picked up): homemade pasta soup, tahini (sesame paste served with every meal, I've discovered), fresh bread, feta cheese, olives and a lovely green mango paste. One of the Swedish residents - Katja - gave us the history of the place, showed me my room, and then took me to watch some of the advent service in the church that takes place every Saturday night before the Coptic Christmas, celebrated on January 6 (our Epiphany). They had a visiting group from Cairo so there were about 100 people standing, singing biblical psalms until 4 a.m. It was very dark, only lit by candles so it was difficult to notice anything about the church except that the outside form reminds one of a cave (below is a picture taken in the morning). Fell asleep to the sound of mosquitos buzzing outside my net and a donkey braying somewhere in the distance...