LOST in Luxor (Egyptian saga continues)

Is it possible to overblog a trip to Egypt? Are three posts on the same subject too many? and can you possibly take too many pictures in one trip? These are questions I've been pondering while concluding the posts on Egypt (or not). 

(so at the last post, we were trying to teleport out of Luxor)

and we found ourselves at the apparently over-photographed Valley of the Kings. 

So over-photographed in fact, 

that they dont let you take any pics, ever, never. 

they have secured the entrance with miniature meta-pyramids that no doubt send messages to the sky if they see you take your camera out.

at the tombs, so much security that they dont even let you in. 

Is the Valley of the Kings that precious really?

or is it just so over-renovated 

that it does not look like an ancient extraterrestrial monument anymore, 

but like present day Las Vegas instead? 

(I would show you more pics, 

but the guard that caught me insisted that I delete all the photos, 

after I refused to pay him to get my iphone back, 

it was quite lol, etc)

anyway so the Tombs have been manicured and botoxed to perfection, becoming unreal and unruins in the process. It is clearly the Knossos school of Fake Ruinry.

pretty little path so you dont think it's just a desert mountain

 most of the tombs look like this, though some of them had no hieroglyphics on them, and we wondered wether they had just not applied the Egyptian Ruin coating on yet. Alas, those pics will never see the light of day.

Other temples were friendlier, though disappointingly authentic in their ruination

on the way back we stopped at the temple of Hatshepsut

where we witnessed an impromptu Alien visitation

on the way back to town, yet more Security inspired meta-puramids

and were rather spooked when we had to pass a drawbridge 

and a complete security check to enter our next hotel.

all the security hysteria seemed to be worth it,

since it was situated on a beautiful private island on the Nile.

some of the landscape did seem a bit artificial, but who could complain?

the island was dotted with cute little vernacular egyptian huts,
with some strange infrastructural things on the roofs.
Did machines live in these huts?

other huts seemed to be hiding inside specially constructed trees

then we started to notice various machines hiding in the bushes



even machines hiding in the sand











machines trying to pass as trees

suddenly it all started to make sense

 we had landed right into the lost Egyptian season of LOST, 

this was Dharma Central, right down to the hexagonal bungalows

the cores of the bungalows were inhabited by machines too

some buildings were curiously upsidedown

an innocent looking swimming pool was just a place to hide more machines

even the smoke monster was immortalized in the topiary designs

 suddenly trees seemed threatening

 Hexagonal Conspiracy #3

 Hysteria checkpoint #6

 Museum of Disaster?

suddenly screams and people running and coughing

it was the Jollie Ville Smoke Monster!  we had to get out of here!

(the hotel staff assured us this was just the regular anti-mosquito cloud, that they unleashed every evening)

we located a Topiary Teleport near the entrance and decided to make a run for it

(do be continued, perhaps)

Urban Instagram (Warsaw Year Zero)

 A few weeks ago I visited Warsaw
for a lecture at the Faculty of Architecture
that was part of the FATA MORGANA XV OSSA 2011 WWA

later on Grzegorz Piątek, one of the two curators of Golden Lion winning Hotel Polonia in Venice Architecture Biennial, took me for a walk around Warsaw, explaining how the city had been meticulously reconstructed after being basically wiped out during strategic WWII bombing.

I thought it was funny that in Poland they still talk about WWII, whereas in Greece so many other things, the current crisis included, have happened. 

Had time stood still in Warsaw? Was it still WWII?

Apparently the Warsawians had made careful plans of every historical building in the center, because they predicted that the center would be bombed, so they were ready to reconstruct even before it would destruct.

Sp after the war they were perfectly able to rebuild everything perfectly, going as fas as using the original materials of the buildings.

the made only slight adjustments so that, for example the main square, would become picture perfectly picturesque but just with a little bit of extra space for events. 

Around the 1970's the Warsawians completed the reconstruction of the wiped out buildings, and started renovating the "saved" buildings that survived the bombing.

This could be one of those 17th century "saved" buildings, freshened up in the 90s.

but this is a building built in the 1970's which now has started to acquire a bit of patina.

Suddenly I realized that the "17th century buildings" that were built in the 60's and 70's looked older and more authentic than the real 17th century buildings from the 17th century, because those had been freshened up in the 90's and 00's. This was Instagram Urbanism!

rushing to my photoshop actions, I made my 2011 photo of a 1970's 17th century building look like it was taken in the 1920s.

Then I examined more of the buildings, trying to understand if they were new original, 

old original, refurbished authentic or simulated old new.

Time had indeed stood still, but it was more of a time warp that a freeze frame

but perhaps Warsaw, by warping into this time machine urbanism had become the best example of out non-new non-time specific Tumblr Times, 

where everything that's interesting is new.

we ended the walk by the old castle, so perfectly manicured during it's reconstruction, and perhaps because it was one of the later examples, it ends up looking as new as the Giant Regional Style Shopping Malls that crowd the suburban exurban nowherelands of Central Europe, 

when in fact it's just a really old uber botoxed castle.