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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 5:42 AM

    That's the Siwa that tourists have historically come for, the "eco-lodge" vibe (but this one with electricity), the charmed simplicity that the King of England heaped praises upon 20 years ago as a model of environmentally sustainable tourism, local and renewable building materials, etc

    A lot's happened in the last few years. Material, construction, the road out to Dakrour now lined with new hotels that look like the palace-compounds along the Mediterranean coast.

    More vehicles bringing in more materials bringing in more vehicles. Profitable to build, but there's a limit to what the power and water infrastructure can sustain, and Siwa's always feeling its way just past the edge of that limit

    A palace-compound on the drive out to Dakrour
    Another palace-compound under construction
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Replies

  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:28 AM

    A street scene that will look familiar to anyone who visited the Oracle Temple of H.A.C.K. :)

    A beaten-up teapot and three assorted tea vessels - two glasses and a wee mug - on a tray at the kerbside in the souk
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:40 AM

    The trip is drawing to a close, starting to regather myself, revisit bright spots and pick up small things to bring home

    Found the library / museum has a new terrace cafe, sat up there and drank Turkish coffee and flipped through the PhD thesis of the composer Brigitte Schiffer, a work of ethnomusicology published in 1935
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte

    Die Oase Siwa und ihre Musik
    The new terrace cafe above the Shali library
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:51 AM

    Even selectively skimmed through the eyes of Google Translate, the picture Schiffer paints of Siwa-as-expression is astounding

    All of it interconnected - building ornamentation, jewellery, dance forms, music, and of course the embroidery - each part of it a harmony in the same endless song

    You realise *how much of it had already been lost by the time the road came*

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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 5:32 PM

    Looked like someone had abandoned their breakfast in Abdo's cafe, and i had a whole schtick lining up about "I pity the ful", but after 5 minutes they turned up, shooed the flies off and ate it, spoiling the moment

    A plate of fava beans with a wee lemon and a sprinkle of flies, bread on the side
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 25, 2026, 7:11 AM

    Found the nicest roadside hut, with car seats and plastic pallets for furniture, and a possibly-functional drinks machine, if this weren't such a busy dusty road now it would be a real effort to leave #HutLife

    View from a hut made of date palm leaves. It's abandoned, i think, there are cactus planters which look very dried. Imagine the particulate index here is really high
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 25, 2026, 5:24 PM

    An afternoon spent in the sewing matriarch's front room, had arranged to actually buy one of her heirloom-level shawls, telling myself it's to learn from. Just a dimensionality and intricacy i've never seen anywhere else, not on public sale in Siwa, not in the museum. Looking at it is like reading a book

    Yesterday i'd made it back to Ashraf's, the hidden haberdashers for women, we split 50/50 the colours i couldn't find last time.

    Did some little sketches in the rough yarn i'm still mostly working with, which she looked at and pronounced "good", gave me a little thrill of accomplished satisfaction :)

    My host dropped by for a while with a couple of winsome young American women in tow, both speaking surprisingly good Arabic, to look at the embroidered souvenirs. Guess they got an extra show out of it all

    A couple of small details from a large shawl, this would have been a layer of marriage wear, part of what we once called a trousseau. No photo will do it justice
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 25, 2026, 5:46 PM

    Made it back to the souk and spoke with the new-energy stallholder doing the pyro calligraphy, lots of easy to carry, customisable trinkets but nothing distinctively Siwan

    Collected his details to pass on to folks helping local women get a fair price for their work, sweetened the pitch with a couple of prototype handmade signs in Chinese and Korean reading "Made by Siwa sisters"

    Look, i'm on holiday, a recreational marketing initiative is my choice of use of time. And they're nice sized practise canvases, it's the 10,000 hours thing

    A view of the last stall in the Shali before you go up the steps to the mosque
    A selection of bag charm prototypes, now all dispensed as gifts
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 25, 2026, 5:53 PM

    The Sufi hadra / reconciliation meeting in Dakrour is tonight, we learned by showing my mum the new cafe in the library. Part of me would love to be there, but there wasn't an offer

    And while the night is technically young enough for me still to summon a motorbike-sidecar tuktuk all "take me to the mountain" to listen, which is permitted if you're tactful, decided against it

    Because it's still an all-male thing, there's no joining that circle, so it's a version of "if i can't dance, i don't want to be part of your revolution". As much as i want to sit on the edge of things, i also want that to be a choice, not the only option

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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 4:39 AM

    No pump/generator in the pre-dawn hour, so i got to see the pillar of light in its ideal state, dark except for the cries of individual dogs, lighting right up for the closest donkey.

    Threw taste to the wind for its last night on the roof, added a yellow/pink/blue colour range in the middle, like a sunrise, and white at both ends, the simple maths dropping out from its two previous incarnations.

    Carefully dismantled it with no little sadness. The landlord was up there at sunrise, packing the roof dates back into crates (after having done the same last week, then returned and spread them back out a couple of days later).

    So maybe the Siwans worked something out at the town reconciliation meeting, the folks who missed the unannounced window get to sell their dates after all. Hope so, and hope the price is fair.

    Was a lucky chance to fill a biscuit box with roof dates to take home to the kid, though (offered retail price, and the landlord insisted on giving me half back)

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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 8:55 AM

    The cats. I was peer pressured into feeding them (by humans) and for the past few days they have feasted on chicken. Other cats come and go, these are the committed ones.

    The two kittens were petrified of me at first, and now perch on the stair hoping for more chicken. Their mum blessed my toes with a scratch this morning. Got a small wooden cat statue to remember her by

    Two desert kittens
    Mother cat posing with a small wooden cat statue
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 10:54 AM

    Upward climb out of the oasis bowl, past some tiered geology, occasionally pockmarked with tombs / caves / dens, and onwards through approx three hours of rubble, a barren unchanging landscape punctuated every 50km or so by a mosque + petrol station + cell tower arrangement

    Flat stone/sand hills
    Just rubble for hours
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 12:51 PM

    The scenery's starting to change a little, pockets of vegetation, but it's still mostly rubble. Tbh it's meditative, you can tune into the slight differences in its emptiness

    Passed some roadside camels and beeped at them to keep their distance. One lucky photo, others of camel backside

    Camel
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 1:11 PM

    Sadly the rubble turns into half-trash for at least 500m back from this point, the main checkpoint for getting on and off the Siwa road, who knows how far it goes back

    A long roadside stretch of half-rubble, half-rubbish
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 2:35 PM

    The drive out was overnight, you don't get to take in much. I remember a lot of façades of coastal gated communities, massed speculative building like you'd find on the Mediterranean coast in Spain

    It helps recontextualise all the new building in Siwa! Some of the roadside has the organic-growth feel, the layers of brick and tob and rebar poking out the top. More of it is large planned developments. A lot of effort going into building them, quarries the size of multistorey blocks. You wonder how much demand to live in these places there is

    Show flats at the front, single-word English names - "Salt" or "Soul". It's like a landscape generated by AI

    A procedural building
    Organic building
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 4:57 PM

    You pass some beautifully illuminated LED trucks on the night roads, but it's as impossible to get a good phone photo of them as it was of the pillar of light. They're often beautifully painted for the day, too

    No i'm not thinking about animating truck lighting, it would be a traffic hazard

    I remember seeing more LED mosques in the past, perhaps it's out of fashion now. Still, a lot of spiritual art potential if you could get the imams on side

    A blur of an illuminated truck
    Another blur of an illuminated truck
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:20 AM

    @discontinuity thank you :) it's satisfying, documenting the time here

    Heading home before long, timeline will turn to overnight dispatches from the symbolic realm as seen through the prism of Luton airport, not sure anyone wants that ;)

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  • Johnsemanticist@mastodon.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 4:01 PM

    @zool Calling the stuff in the first picture 'soul' is a bit on the nose. Looks like a playground for parkour people, or a good map for an FPS video game.

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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 26, 2026, 4:50 PM

    @semanticist need to have a good squint at some remote sensing timelapses of that part of the world sometime, the footprint as seen from the land was startling

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  • Johnsemanticist@mastodon.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 6:47 PM

    @zool It looks like it was extruded from the ground, the walls of the buildings are almost exactly the same shade as the soil/sand around them. Going for a wander through those would be an experience. Probably a nightmarish one!

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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 27, 2026, 3:55 AM

    @semanticist they're unfinished :) no pics of the polished ones nearer to Alamein, but they acquire balcony-effect ornamentation, a layer of sand-coloured concrete spackle, end up a lot more aesthetic

    I remember first passing through Alamein and thinking how Chinese it looked, though at a smaller scale, identi-buildings stamped out for km outside a city core

    Bits that look like Benidorm and its sister town Finestrat, further along. That's the Mediterranean coast for you, pile 'em high. Almost makes me want to go back and look at how Benidorm is growing

    Tall towers on the Cairo side of Alamein, looking very Mediterranean resort
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  • zoolzool@icosahedron.website
    Oct 27, 2026, 4:10 AM

    @semanticist Spain got caught up in a building development bubble that deepened the 2008 crisis, despite having taken steps to protect their banking system after past shocks. It took the everyday economy much longer to recover there than other places. The development along the North Coast looks like that, but with generative marketing

    Sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf funding the building, according to the FT ft.com/content/5cbc4708-c11b-4

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%

    Ghost developments

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