tantramar

St Catherine's Monastery

I was in Egypt over Christmas and although I mostly just swam in the sea looking at the fish and coral I did take a little trip up to St Catherine's Monastery.

The place has some serious history being one of the oldest functioning Christian monasteries in the world. It's at the foot of Mount Sinai, yup the place where Moses came down with the ten commandments. The (alleged) burning bush is there too (pictured left) although I think it's just a cutting now!

The place is stupidly hard to access, in the middle of the desert. It took bloody ages to get there. This makes it all the more impressive realising how hard it must have been to undertake building it, in the 6th Century!

Apparently the scientific thinking about the burning bush was that it was natural gas escaping from the ground that had caught alight. That's why the fire never went out. Science can solve all questions don't you know, well most of them.

There's a Flickr set here if you want to see more pictures.

Hand Painted in Egypt

I’ve posted a couple of signs from Egypt before but they do it so well, so here’s another one. I like this one simply because the signs are bigger than the shops. As you can see, hats and lithium batteries are the main saleable tourist items. Only the middle sign is professionally done and it pales in comparison to the beautifully bad kerning examples on each side of it.

I’ve Seen The Sign

I’m quite the fan of signs produced by hand. Here’s a couple I saw last year in Luxor, Egypt.

This has be one of the best toilet signs ever created. The woman has serious colour issues and the man has no hands, maybe she ate them, before her facial features disappeared that is.

Why is the horse a different colour from the cart? Why did someone feel the need to paint an arrow within an arrow? I expect we’ll never know.

I’ll pop some of these up every now and then when I come across them.