McCall Donnelly Band In Egypt

Musical Experiences

We were asked to tell our band teacher about our musical experiences in Egypt. Here are our stories.

By Emilia Frost

This trip a lot of interesting things have happened and its been kinda hard to choose just one experience.

On Sunday March 19 we were on our cruise ship. That day we stopped in Luxor to end our cruise. We still were able to stay on the ship and eat dinner though. After dinner we went up to the lobby to watch a belly dancer person. We sat on the couches and watched her dance. It was very uncomfortable but my dad was obviously really enjoying it. There were two guys playing music for her, a keyboard guy and a drummer. The bellydancer obviously knew all the songs. Anyways, I saw Cason was trying to look anywhere but at the dancer, so I tried to get her to come up to Cason and make him even more uncomfortable. That didn’t happen because she left and a whirling dervish walked in. He had a very colorful dress and pointy elf shoes. He was pretty cool cause he was twirling in a circle nonstop and on top of that spinning a skirt above him. He did that for like 10 minutes but I missed the bellydancer :( And the night before that my brother also became a bellydancer but that’s a different story.

By Cason Sisneros

My musical experience is the instruments that people try to sell to you. For instance the instrument that I bought was a two stringed thingamabob that had a “bow” to play with. Despite it sounding extremely bad it is still very fun to play. We went on a place in a boat and tried to have the person trying to sell us bracelets and necklaces play the instrument and he played it very well. we then all ( Alice, Emilia, And I )  tried to play it but it did not sound nearly as good and most likely 10* worse than the random boat guy. That’s my musical experience in Egypt.

Here are local street musicians (This is not our video, but it shows the Rababa)

The Rababa has also been used in orchestras around the world.

Here is the Rababa on our trip. The guy on the boat showed us a small sample of it.

To learn more click here: Egyptian Center

Alice :)

I would share a musical experience but the citadel banned trumpets…. jkjk there was other music. The music was truly all around us, but my personal favorite musical experience was on the way to a hotel. The hotel was on an island, so you had to go on a boat to get there, and these two kids swam on these surfboard-lookin things, gripped the boat and started singing. They were singing songs in multiple languages, I recognized Arabic, English, and French. They sang to us for a while and it was really cool. 10/10 would listen to again.