Luxor

Amazingly I didn't get off the ship horrifically hung over. Oh, I felt peculiar for sure, but better than the others as they stumbled down for breakfast. I apologized to the group and Kim and her husband, but they said it was nothing and I was fine. Pfew.

Luxor. Karnak Temple. Our first purely Egyptian temple (ie. not built by Greeks or Romans) and we get the Grand Poobah. The temple complex covers 65 acres. The site was continuously added to for something like 1700 years. I honestly don't know what I can say. Immense. Spectacular.

Oh. Wait. I know. On the way in, we saw vendors hocking cheapo statues, one of which was missing an arm and the opposite leg, but then had an erection so large I thought perhaps the gods had used his missing arm and leg to make it.

Sure enough, there in the temple, there was a massive engraving of the pharaoh presenting Mr. Impressive with gifts.

"Here, this is all I got! Please don't rape me!" I joked to myself.

Crass tour group that we are, we had Magdolin tell us who he was. At some point, when the army took all the men to go off to war, they left one guy back to look after the women. The army was gone so long he and the women figured they'd been killed in the war so he felt it was his duty to repopulate. After he unleashed that thing, apparently the women were on board with his plan, because he impregnated all of them. Then, of course, the army showed up.

Understandably annoyed that Mr. Too-Weak-To-Fight-So-We'll-Leave-Him-To-Watch-Over-The-Women was actually Mr. Tripod, they cut off one of his arms and one of his legs, but didn't kill him, supposedly out of respect for his incomprehensible fertility. They were so impressed, in fact, that they made him the fertility god.

Personally, I think they thought better of killing Old Kickstand because an entire generation, his kids, were probably not going to take too kindly to their daddy being offed. I think the lesson to be learned is this: if the guy seems scrawny and constantly complains of a bad back, you take him on campaign, dammit.

That night we were treated to a "belly dancer". I put belly dancer in quotes because she wasn't a belly dancer like you'd think. She didn't gyrate her hips lasciviously in the usual way. She had a pretty good sized belly, covered in panty hose material, and she was dancing. That would be how she could claim being a belly dancer. Sorta. Mostly it seemed like she was trying to slap her shoulder blades with her boobs. Her top, thankfully, kept her from achieving that particular goal.

I had an amused smirk on my face the entire time. This was apparently the Egyptian version of Naughty Time, but it was very tame. I'm not bragging about US strip clubs, but back home I can get a woman to degrade herself for a solitary dollar. Just saying.

I'm not sure if it was the dancer or the fact that I'm 31 years old, but I was actually much more impressed with the guy whaling away on the bongos the entire time. "Boobs. Yawn. Man, how does he keep that rhythm up?!"