the last entry from egypt

im in the cairo airport right now, but im like an hour and a half early for my flight (who would have figured that the airport could be the most efficient system in the country??) and i have free internet, so its either write this or go browse the wide selection of cheap alcohol at the duty-free store. ill probably do that later anyway. and plus, it seems like i should write the last egypt entry while still in egypt. it would be a little unauthentic to deliver it from romania or home.
im not sure who reads this; actually to my knowledge, its only mom and dad and luke and lauren (maybe katie and margaret still do?), but anyway, in case you didnt know, im going to romania. and if everyone already knew that then sorry for being redundant.
i left off last entry during one of the busiest weeks of the semester. interestingly enough, the week after proved busier, though in a different way. this last week has been so incredibly jam packed with stuff, and very little of that stuff has been sleep, so ive been hectically bustling about trying to enjoy my last few days in cairo while refraining from failing classes. however! i still havent written about israel, so ill do that first and see what happens from there.
it all started on thursday, the fourth of december. the players are regulars in these tales: luke and chelsea, corina and lauren, and, naturally, me. we planned to leave for taba (the border town between egypt and israel) on thursday night, thus arriving friday morning, but luke and chelsea decided that they needed an extra day in cairo, so we just piddled around on thursday. we went to citystars (the big, hugely westernized mall) with the intention of getting pedicures, but apparently no men are allowed, which i found sexist until i remembered that i was in egypt. so luke and i sat in a coffee shop while lauren and chelsea got pretty, and then we all went to this ridiculous pseudo-amusement park inside the mall. its a really ridiculous place called magic galaxy, and it is filled with janky kids rides that look like they are made entirely of plastic. but everything was supremely colorful, and they have this ridiculous roller coaster so we rode it and yeah. that was that. we slept at chelsea's that night, if i remember correctly, which i usually dont, with plans to leave on the nine o'clock bus on friday.
luke and chelsea were taking the evening bus so that they could do work all day friday (but of course they didnt do any work at all for reasons that i have mentioned before), so lauren and i left without them. first thing, we had to return to citystars to go to the bank; i may have mentioned that the atm in dahab ate her debit card so she had no money, so her dad wired her some and we had to go pick it up. unfortunately, the address that she had led us to a cafe- the bank closed two years ago. then we were wandering and this random nice egyptian picked us up (i know it sounds sketchy, but dont forget that im a highly trained assassin) and drove us back to citystars where the main branch of the bank was located. we finally found the office and knocked and some guy in workout clothes answered the door; we soon found out that this office was only a representative and that they do no actual money exchanges and, in fact, this branch was totally removed from egypt in 2006. bummer. i dont even remember the name of the bank, but i kind of think it was amex. not important. the point was that lauren still had no money, it was 0922 and we were supposed to meet corina at the bus station to catch the 0930 bus on the other side of town. once again, this random egyptian was super nice and told us where a nearby bus station was, so we could wait there for corina, she could get off, give us tickets, and we could go. so thats what we did. on the bus we met marcus, an austrian who liked to talk philosophy (my kind of guy). thats pretty much the most interesting thing that happened on the bus. we arrived in taba and proceeded through customs.
in case you were wondering, in case there was any doubt whatever in your mind, yes, it is in fact difficult to get into israel, especially from a muslim country, and extra especially if you: 1) have a lebanese stamp in your passport, 2) are wearing a bracelet covered with lebanese flags, and 3) are carrying in your bag a Qur'an.

um... they have started boarding. i guess ill go get on the plane; so much for catching up on my blog. i guess i can type it out and then post from germany; ill still be in egyptian air for like the next hour :)

this was written a while ago, but i didnt have internet... trying hard to catch up

Picking up again; I figure that I should finish thanksgiving weekend before I go off to Israel, because otherwise it will just be overwhelming and you wont get the full picture. Of course, lots of interesting stuff happened in dahab and most of it I wont be sharing, so you wont get the full picture anyway, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And also, im writing this entry on word because im bored at the mall and they don’t have wireless. I only mention that to explain why this one entry out of all the others has (almost) correct capitalization and punctuation. I haven’t had a change of heart; word just auto-corrects.
Anyway, I believe that we left off after I got back from the desert. I probably did some stuff that week, I don’t really remember, but mostly I just read books for the paper that I had to write. I read a total of four books, more or less cover to cover, so about 400 pages of sufi mysticism, and at the moment I am a huge fan of that spirituality stuff. It all makes a lot of sense. But theology isn’t what this blog is about, so moving on… it was incredibly difficult for me to get work done at home, unfortunately, so I hid away in the library at school a couple of times and I went home with christianna once because for some reason her apartment is really conducive to getting work done. But anyway, by the time Wednesday night rolled around I had 15 (count them, FIFTEEN) pages, single spaced, of quotes for my paper. The paper only had to be 10 pages, double spaced, so obviously I had way the freak too many quotes, and I hadn’t even started writing at all. whatever.
Enter kira and sarah; I don’t know if I have mentioned them before, but theyre two of my favorite people here. The two of them, luke, Chelsea, Lauren and I had made plans to go to dahab on Wednesday night, but then luke and Chelsea decided to stay until Thursday night for whatever reason (they said they were doing homework, but they are both grossly irresponsible so I doubt that happened), so I went with Lauren and sarah and kira and got on the bus to dahab. We arrived at like ten in the morning and got a room at the same place we stayed last time, which I decided I really like because the people were super helpful, as you will soon see. Then we ate and I had to buckle down and start working on that stupid mysticism paper. I sat on the beach and typed and Lauren sunbathed and sarah and kira wandered, and that’s how we spent most of the day. In case you have forgotten, or in case I have never explained this, the beach at dahab is not a beach by any standard definition. Its mostly a rock and mortar wall about 3 feet high and then a rock floor at the bottom, plus water. And coral. And at some places there are “easy entry points” for divers, but those don’t count as beach. That wasn’t particularly relevant.
Eventually Lauren and I got tired of doing work (she had a paper to write in between sunning as well), so we went back to the room and found sarah and kira asleep, which was lame, so we wandered for a while and then woke the puppies up and went to dinner. I saw Muhammad, the guy I met last time with the really cheap restaurant; he was super excited to see me, but he was way more excited to see sarah, whom he hit on outrageously despite the fact that she told him she has a boyfriend. That’s Egypt for you. And then we went back to the room. Lauren went to skype with her family and the puppies and I had a Disney sing along because no one felt like sleeping. And then Lauren and I wandered for a while and smoked sheesha (you will see that this a recurring theme; see a few entries ago when we walked all the way across cairo at four in the morning…), but she was super tired and so we went back to the hostel, but then we decided to go on a walk because she couldn’t sleep, so we wandered some more and swang on swings and smoked more sheesha and played with kittens- there are literally hundreds of stray animals in dahab and theyre all super cute, just wash your hands. We went to a particular restaurant wherein one of the cats had recently birthed a litter, and the kittens were mewing around and they were so incredibly tiny… very cute. And then we slept. At like 4 in the morning. Not very responsible divers.
The next morning we woke up to luke and Chelsea knocking on our door, and then a few minutes later sawwan, our dive instructor from cairo, arrived, so the four of us (luke, Chelsea, Lauren and I, since kira and sarah weren’t diving) headed to the water. We suited up and did three offshore dives, which was sort of disappointing because I was expecting to go boating (I think boating is way more fun than diving, personally), but it was still quite beautiful and we saw tons of lionfish and various other types, and I saw two eels that no one else saw, so that was pretty special.
That night everyone ate together- I guess that would make our number seven. And we played never have I ever. If you don’t know what this game is, go ask someone because I don’t feel like explaining it, but, in short, I usually win (I haven’t done very much of the stuff that generally comes up in that game). But this time I came in second; in the end it was just sawwan and I with fingers up, and he kept pulling out things like “I have never eaten Chinese food,” and “I have never ridden a roller coaster,” and I was like, geeze, you are amazing at this game; you haven’t done anything that an average American has done. So he won that.
As a little side note, we weren’t the only auc people in dahab. Actually, the Wednesday night bus over was totally packed with auc people; I would guess that there were about sixty floating around at the height of the weekend. Our group of six was pretty nice- we fit at all the tables and we could shop without being overwhelming and all that jazz. But there was a group that we saw every night at dinner that was literally pushing forty. they would fill an entire side of a given restaurant with loud white people. I really didn’t understand why they didn’t branch off and go their separate ways, but I guess no one wants to walk away from the cool group. I knew a lot of the people in the giant gaggle, but we tended to avoid them.
Last time I came to dahab I met a man on the bus; his name was… well, I actually don’t remember his name, but he goes by “sheesha man,” and he asked me to come to his shop to smoke with him several times. My hostel last time (and this time too) was right next to his shop, so I passed him standing outside all the time, and every time he would ask, when are you coming to see me? And every time I would say, tonight, later, soon. And I never went, and I felt really bad, so this time when I saw him I said hi and I was like, this time im definitely coming to smoke with you.
Everyone else went to bed after dinner, but I wanted to go to sheesha man, so I called trish, who was also in dahab, and she and Lauren and I went to his shop and smoked the best sheesha I have had thus far in Egypt, which would therefore be the best sheesha I have ever had. This guy had a plaque (from germany) on his wall that awarded him the best sheesha in the world. It was really good. Apple mixed with mint, if I remember correctly. And then we slept, I think. Actually we probably wandered, but we slept eventually.
Then we woke up. And sawwan was calling me telling me that we were late, so we hustled to the dive center and hopped in the car to get to the next dive site, a place called “the canyon.” It is so named because it is, well… a rocket ship. Not really, it’s a canyon. It starts about 16 meters deep and goes down to about 52 meters, so we weren’t actually allowed to go inside (luke and I are only certified to 18 meters and at that time Lauren and Chelsea weren’t certified at all), but we went into some caves and peered down into the gorge; it was really amazing. And then there was coral too. Huzzah for coral. And fish.
Then we came back and I was a crazy emo kid for a little while and I really wanted to write some poetry, and then Lauren and I sat on the roof of the hostel and looked out over the corniche at the red sea and it was awesome. Man, I like the sea. I want to live there. And then we hung out at a random restaurant until it was time for luke and Chelsea to leave. Those two and sarah and kira were taking the afternoon bus back to cairo, but I wanted to stay in dahab to work on my paper, because its nicer to write on the beach than in a dorm, and Lauren decided to stay to work on hers too, so the other four left and she and I went back to the beach to type.
Then at 430 we took a study break to go to this bar to watch the new Zealand all-blacks trounce England in rugby. And then we went back and took a nap, and that’s where the fun began. Our bus left at ten at night, so I set an alarm for nine to give us time to pack and get to the station. But, since im awesome at all things military, I set the alarm for 2300. in case you are slow on the uptake, that is eleven pm, not nine. So at 2202, Lauren woke up and said, hey andy, its ten. And I was like, hmm, I feel like we had something to do at ten, but that cant be right because my alarm would have gone off… ooooooooh. So we missed the bus. For which we had already bought tickets. I went to the office. When is the next bus? Nine tomorrow morning. I went back to the room. Can you ask about a microbus? I went back to the office. What about a microbus? The one to cairo left at eight, another one for just two people costs 600 pounds. I went back to the room. Its crazy expensive. Well I have to be back for my theater class, can you ask him to set it up anyway? Um, yeah, I guess so. I went back to the office. We need the microbus. So Lauren and I, at like 1130 at night, boarded a microbus, just the two of us, and drove back to cairo. So there was a random 275 pounds I hadn’t expected to spend (they gave us a discount just because they were nice. I don’t think that this rendition portrayed the guys at the desk particularly spectacularly, but they were really helpful and understanding and didn’t at all call me an idiot for missing my bus. In case you wanted to know.), but we made it back in time for school.
Hmm. This week wasn’t too exciting, just super busy. I had a physics test, a physics lab practicum, 2 physics homeworks due, an Arabic exam, an Arabic essay due, a philosophy paper due, a Qur’anic studies paper due, and a philosophy test. I think that’s it. Oh, I forgot about the papers… so I had written about seven pages by the time I got back to cairo, and then I found out that, hey! The philosophy paper isn’t due until Wednesday, hooray! So I relaxed on that a bit. Here is how clever I am, though: I had a 7 page paper for philosophy and a 10 page paper for theology, but I got one topic approved for both papers- I wrote them both on Sufism and the mysticism of ibn ‘arabi. That topic really does cover a lot of philosophy and theology both. So I finished the ten page one and turned it in, and then all I had to do was cut out three pages and I was finished with the seven page one. Let me tell you, writing a paper by cutting out three pages is way easier than writing one by adding pages as necessary. And that’s about it. This entry is super long. And tomorrow im going to Israel.

a ten day break and a twenty page paper, hot damn

i have about 20 minutes until my bus comes. lets pick up where we left off, shall we?
the weekend before thanksgiving i went out to the black and white desert. i was actually in charge of this trip, which was sort of annoying since i had thus far gone the entire semester without planning anything myself, but i got jeeps and guides and stuff and we had eight people who wanted to go and all was well, but then like 3 days before we were to leave, half of our group dropped out and i was left with three people to fill two jeeps... not at all financially viable. but then i went to chelsea's house (this was the day of my date with the subway guy, if you recall) and i was talking with mitch, one of her flatmates, and he was going to the desert that same weekend, so i latched my three on to his group, which was convenient because about half of his people bailed as well. we ended up having seven, but it was a really fun group. introduce mitch, wolf (yes, thats his real name), kasey, chelsea (a different one). lauren and trish, the two who were originally in my group, you already know, i think.
so the seven of us got on the microbus with mahmoud on thursday night and drove until like 4 in the morning when we arrived in bahariya; we crashed in a random hotel that i genuinely thought might be a monastery, and then in the morning we hopped in jeeps and went into the desert.
it was not at all the same as the desert trip in siwa; there was no dune surfing because there were not really any dunes because the desert was mostly rock. the black desert is covered with volcanic ash (so its black), and the white desert is covered with crystal (so its white, eh?); we did do some barefoot rock climbing, though, which was excellent. and we saw lots of fun formations, including random mountains that crumbled like chalk when we climbed them; mushroom-looking towers of stone; and a field of tiny broken rock crystal things that looked sort of like flowers.
we spent the night in the white desert; the evening mostly consisted of sitting around the campfire doing various things, but it also included a pretty good chicken dinner. i gave vegetarianism a break that night because we had seen the chickens alive that morning, so i figured they werent horribly mistreated and factory farmed. i didnt like it all that much, though, so there isnt much temptation to backtrack.
anyhoo, the things i did around the fire (im doing this in bullets because i have to catch the bus soon):
-drank gin (others drank wine but i dont like it so whatevs)
-smoked sheesha when another random bedouin guide showed up with one
-listened to mahmoud play bedouin flutes and the other guy play drums
-danced (slightly drunk and buzzed from the sheesha)
-gave massages to everyone who asked, including a random german girl who was part of the sheesha man's group
-wandered off and peed in the freezing desert
-burned my feet on coals that somehow got buried in the sand
-cuddled (after the fire died) because it was super cold
and then it was bedtime; the other four went to sleep pretty quickly, but lauren and trish and i stayed up and looked at the stars and talked, and i in general bugged them and kept them awake until all hours, and at one point in time kasey woke up and i proceeded to laugh harder than i have ever laughed in recent memory. the guy has this ridiculous southern accent (he is from knoxville, go figure), and... well, there isnt really a good way to explain this without examples and i cant remember any, but he is hilarious. the fact that it was three in the morning might have had something to do with it as well.
and the next day we went home and you will have to get the next chapter whenever i get a chance because my bus is coming.

stupid school.

sorry about the huge lack of updates, but ive been pretty incredibly busy for the past few weeks. i have about 30 minutes before my bus comes, though, and i have decided to be irresponsible for your sakes, so im writing this instead of *starting* either one of the two term papers that are due next week. quite frankly, i work really well under pressure, and thats totally what im banking on.
while we are on the subject of procrastinating term papers, though, i would like to say a thing or two about the auc library. actually, its not completely the library's fault; mostly it is some stranger's fault, but i dont know the stranger and i want to focus my annoyance on something, so the library gets the brunt of the blame. i am writing both papers on a sufi mystic by the name of ibn 'arabi. he is considered the "greatest master" of islamic mysticism, and he wrote a lot of really profound stuff, and the auc library just happens to have 2 copies of his most profound work translated into english: the bezels of wisdom. and i wanted it for my papers. obviously. so i went to the library like 3 weeks ago and it was checked out- no problem, ill give it a few days, surely whoever has it wont hoard it because tons of people are writing term papers right now. a week later it still isnt back, so i ask the library to recall it, that is, to bump up the due date and send an email telling the person to bring back my flipping book. another week later, it still isnt here (and its rather overdue), so i ask the library to start calling whoever has it to get them to bring it back. of course, no one answers, so i havent gotten the bezels and im surely not going to before this stuff is due. and there was another book in the same situation, and the librarian talked to whoever had it and told them to bring it back today, but, of course, no. so i lack all primary sources. whatever.
yeah, ive been super busy. i cant even remember what i did 3 weekends ago; if i think to ask someone, ill let you know because im sure it was entertaining. but 2 weekends ago i played in my first egyptian rugby game. thats right, i joined the rugby team (sort of), and we had a trip to alexandria and completely destroyed the 'alexandria gladiators.' then a couple of guys from the team, one guy's girlfriend, me and a friend who had come up with me, trish, stayed in alex and played tourist. so we saw some catacombs and i went to the library again (i should have thought to check out the bezels there! dang), but mostly the trip centered around eating because there is an abundance of really fresh and amazing seafood in alex. so yeah, i stopped being vegetarian for the weekend. we ate tons of sea bass, crabs, prawns, calimari, some other kind of fish... and everything always comes with rice and salads and tahini and bread, and its usually like 40 pounds a person (8 dollars, eh), so its undeniably the best food for the lowest price you are likely to find without going to some egyptian's house.
then that week i read books in preparation for writing this paper. i have read four so far, and i feel pretty much like an expert on islamic mysticism. but a better story begins on tuesday (i think) night. i asked lauren that day if she wanted to go with me to the market because i lost my scarf and wanted to get another one, and she agreed but said that she would be at school until sort of late. i didnt particularly mind, so that night i went out with corina and smoked sheesha and waited for lauren to call to say she was back, which didnt happen until about ten. but we went anyway because, hey, its cairo, who needs sleep? unfortunately, neither of us knew how to get to the market, so we just hopped on a subway train and hoped for the best. unfortunately we had guessed wrong, and we had half a dozen egyptian men explaining to us the error of our ways in varying degrees of english. finally this one guy, who turned out to be named mohammad, go figure, said he would escort us to the right subway stop, which he did. and then he camp above ground with us to help us get a cab. and then he came with us in the cab all the way to the market. and by this time it was past midnight and the subway was closed, so i offered to pay for his cab but he refused; if you havent noticed, this guy was super nice. and not even in the creepy egyptian way (at least i didnt think so... lauren rather did, and she didnt talk to him, but thats another deal altogether). since he was so nice, i couldnt really say no when he asked me to go to dinner with him the next day.
but then he finally left and lauren and i wandered in the market and bought scarves and smoked more sheesha until about three in the morning when everyone started cleaning up and packing in. but then we got another sheesha... so by about 345 it was just us and a bunch of egpytian men sitting in this huge square; we were talking and they were waiting for us to leave so they could clean, so we left. but for some reason we didnt feel like taking a taxi (even though we were several miles from anywhere we knew), so we just started walking in the general direction of downtown. a couple of hours later we arrived at a square that i knew where we got some food and decided on a course of action. it was almost dawn, so i suggested that we wander over to chelsea's house (no more than a mile away) to watch the sun rise from the top of her roof. the only problem was that i had never walked to chelsea's from that direction and, cairo streets being what they are, we got lost, so finally at about seven in the morning we gave up and went home, and then i got up at 830 for school.
then the next night (wednesday, i guess) i went to chelsea's to hang out and at about 830 i remembered that i had a date with muhammad! he had sent me a text earlier telling me to meet him at the downtown subway station, which was quite near, so i thought, cool, we will get food and chill downtown for a while, nothing to worry about. so i went and met him and he was like, okay, now we are going to maadi (he lives in a completely separate district of cairo). and i was like, sure, whatever. so we went and got food and talked about arabic and ourselves and why eyptian men make white girls uncomfortable, and then he invited me back to his place for a drink... it was seriously the closest thing that i have had to a date for several years. when we got back to his apartment, though, i had to bail, so i excused myself and left, but he came with me to the subway station (and bought me some juice on the way) and then bought my ticket for the train and then got on the train with me and rode all the way back downtown and then came back up to the street with me and then walked a couple of blocks back toward chelsea's house with me and finally i was like, muhammad, you have to go home! i figured chelsea would be mad if i brought a random egyptian home with me... so he left and i went and talked with lauren in the hammock until like 5 in the morning and then got up at 830 for school the next day. so thats three days, less than five hours of sleep.
and i have more stories about last weekend, but i really have to go to the bathroom and then i have to catch the bus home, so yall will just have to wait until after thanksgiving. sorry.
and happy thanksgiving, whoever reads this :)

november what?

i havent really done much egyptian stuff during the past few weeks. mostly i have been acting the part of the very worldly college student, which isnt usually a niche into which i fit, but its been fun nonetheless.
ive been doing a lot of fretting about school, but im trying hard not to let that put a damper on the rest of the semester. i have about six labs to make up (they canceled all labs during ramadan and then expect us to make them up on saturdays... retarded? i think so) and just these past two weeks i was assigned three papers that were all pretty much unexpected, so i will be writing a grand total of about 35 pages over the next 4 weeks. i know that in the grand scheme of things 35 pages isnt that much, but it is way more than i have ever had to write, so im a little daunted.
but other cool stuff has happened too. last weekend was halloween, as im sure you are all aware, and so dressing up was necessary. luke and lauren and i went to this unbelievably huge outdoor thrift store downtown to find cool clothes for costumes. luke bought a rather hilarious and surprisingly well-fitted pair of snakeskin pants and a matching shirt that was way too big; his costume was "snake-man," or something of the sort. i originally bought some flowery pants and a ridiculously printed top, but there wasnt much of a theme in the costume other than "bright, colorful person," and then i found this tiny purple and red vest and decided to go as aladin. i borrowed some of lauren's pajama pants that just happened to match and went to school dressed like an arab street rat, but most of my friends didnt notice that i was dressed up. they just thought i was wearing my regular clothes, which is sort of good, i guess, since acceptance of my ridiculous clothes is what ive been going for all semester.
that night was christiana's birthday dinner, so i got really dressed up (i hadnt yet had a chance to wear the hodge-podge suit that i brought), and i have to admit that i looked pretty stellar. we went to a super-nice restaurant out on a dock at the top of the island of zamalek. it was rather lovely, even though i did sort of spend a week's worth of food money, but ill try not to dwell on that :) then the group decided to head to a jazz club (this was at midnight or so, i think), and i was really excited about that because i was picturing the 'catcher in the rye' style jazz club with a really awesome pianist or maybe a horn player and a lot of dark, smokey tables, but alas, it was just a bar, and they werent even playing jazz, so i left to go to bed.
right as i got back to the dorm, luke and lauren were walking out, so i fell in with them and went downtown where we had a dance party in chelsea's apartment and her roommate john taught me how to play mandolin. then i slept in a hammock (!!) and... yeah, that was that night.
i dont remember what i did on that friday during the day. probably not homework. but that night there was a halloween party at chelsea's, so i donned my aladin suit again and bought a bottle of egpytian vodka and was ready to go. just for the record, that was a bad decision; egpytian vodka is really disgusting and doesnt sit well with me at all. most of the night was really fun; i only say that it doesnt sit well because i ended up being rather sick for a while. but over the course of the night i 1) loaded five people into the aforementioned hammock and broke it, 2) restrung it and took a nap, 3) traded pants at least three times, 4) sat topless in the kitchen and told people how to find clean cups as i threw up into the trash can, 5) washed all of chelsea's dishes and 6) spoke ONLY in a british accent. seriously, i refused to speak like an american. i dont know why.
enter allegra and aahoo. actually allegra came to siwa with me during the first week, so she isnt a new character. anyway, at like seven the next morning (after i had fallen asleep at around five) allegra called me and asked if i was on the way downstairs because they were about to leave for alexandria, and i was like, woah, i forgot i told aahoo i wanted to go to alex for the day... i woke lauren up while on the phone and she wanted to come also, so the two of us scampered to the train station and the four of us hopped a train to alexandria. the ticket was only 21 pounds, which i found super awesome.
we wandered around alex and looked at some palaces and a mosque and some tombs and the library, which is gigantic and really wonderful, and then, with a little difficulty, found the lighthouse. you would think they would put up signs; the lighthouse at alexandria is sort of historically significant, no? it was super hard to find, though. and then we had dinner at a wonderful cafe, very chic but also quite cheap, and they had the best pizza i have yet had in egypt. and then we went home, but the ticket home ended up, because of circumstances outside of my control, costing something like 65 pounds. first of all, we didnt go to the main train station but a smaller one instead, which is actually sort of our fault because we told the guy the wrong name... and also because i confused the arabic words for "restaurant" and "station," so i was asking him to take us to the train restaurant. but apparently the tickets are 45 pounds if you dont buy them at the end of the line. and then the teller only had three tickets left, so we bought them and planned to buy another from the conductor on the train. we had to separate, so lauren and i took one ticket and picked some seats and hoped not to get kicked out. when the ticket checker came, he didnt speak english at all, so i told him that i needed to buy another ticket and he told me that it would be 104 pounds. naturally i was like, wtf...? lauren kept telling me not to worry about it, but i didnt want to pay that much, so i was trying to figure out why the ticket was so expensive, but it was really difficult since my arabic sucks, so she just handed him the money and he gave me the receipt and left before i could get to the bottom of the ridiculous robbery. then i checked the receipt and realized that lauren hadnt given the guy her ticket and that he had charged us for two. simple, i thought, ill just go get the money back for one, so i chased the guy down and tried to explain what i wanted, but i couldnt even come close; luckily there was a bilingual guy nearby (who, i later found out, goes to auc) who translated, but the ticket guy told me he couldnt give me the refund because he had already recorded the sale and if he changed it the company would assume that he had stolen the money. i asked to speak to his superior, but it turns out that he ran the whole train, so i thought it was really weird that he couldnt decide on whatever rules he wanted, but that was that. so finally we resolved that he would try to sell my first ticket to someone else who had hopped on and then i could have that money. the only problem was that my first ticket had cost 45 pounds and the standing room tickets are like 30 so no one wanted to buy it and not get a seat; finally i found a guy to buy it for 30 and i went back and berated lauren for being retarded.
that was a really long story.
then school for a week, nothing unusual there.
on wednesday we did another faluca adventure; there were only about ten of us, and half werent even auc students but random egpytians that luke and i have met over the semester. it was fun, though, and afterward i went out with two indonesian friends i met in some mosque to smoke and have tea, and after that i went to a birthday party on top of the nile hilton. i arrived at about midnight and everyone was quite drunk but no one was dancing; they all wanted to take shots before going onto the dance floor, which i thought was silly because its way easier to dance sober. and also i couldnt afford to get drunk there because a shot was like 50 pounds. insane. location, location, location. after a while the dance party started, and it went until maybe three and then we drifted away and went home. there isnt too much else to tell about that night, except that someone stole my shoes. i took them off (they were flip-flops) to dance and put them next to the stage, but apparently flip-flops arent allowed on the nile hilton, so some waiter or host hid them. it took me like ten minutes of asking people in broken arabic if they had moved or seen my shoes, and i dont even know the word for shoe, so it was extra hard. i did find them eventually, though.
then last night i went to a reasonably nice pizza restaurant with luke, chelsea, and corina; i would have been a really nice restaurant except that they put mostly raw egg on top of their pizza, which i thought was gross. then corina and i went back to her building and hung out at her neighbors and listened to funk and smoked sheesha for a while, and then i had to catch the shuttle out to heliopolis because lauren and kira and sarah invited me to go horseback riding.
im definitely never going horseback riding in egypt again. (note that the first time i went riding in the desert, my horse fell and threw me over its head.)
they asked if i was a good rider and i said yes (mistake) so they gave me this ridiculous stallion who absolutely refused to walk. he tried to canter everywhere, and even with my full weight pulling back on the reins, i was only able to slow him to a trot. i kept him under control most of the way out, but on the way back he just sprinted out into the desert in the completely wrong direction. please remember that 1) its one in the morning, 2) its dark and im alone, and 3) its the freaking desert, complete with rocks and ditches for a horse to fall into and die and kill me in the meantime. so i was working incredibly hard to stop this horse, but i was mostly failing miserably. eventually i forced him back to the group, but when we were about a quarter of a mile from the starting point he stopped listening to me completely and i just had to hold on. he pushed past a canter and into a gallop; it was the fastest i have ever ridden on a horse before, and, just as i was starting to consider enjoying it, we rushed up on a concrete wall and a 90 degree turn at full speed to avoid it. long story short, i couldnt hold on during the turn, my left stirrup broke off, and i flipped onto the ground and did my utmost to roll away from both my horse and the others running behind. i walked the rest of the way back, covered with sand and blood (i sort of smashed my head on a rock) and dragging my stirrup, but i got lots of sympathy hugs, so it worked out okay.
then lauren and i went back to zamalek (this was maybe 230 this morning) with every intention of going to another apartment and getting drunk. when we arrived, though, they were out of alcohol and everyone who i wanted to talk to was pretty sober anyway, so i sort of lost interest in drinking and stayed up talking to the girls who live in the apartment until the party dissipated. we went to sleep at around six and got up at ten, and now im about to take a shower and go back to bed.
and dangit, i still have to make up a ton of labs tomorrow (yeah, saturday...) and write proposals for two papers. curse my sloth.

i really dont like the concept of a glass jar of honey.

im used to honey being in plastic jars. honey here is in glass jars, but i still treat it like plastic, apparently, which is why i have broken a full three jars of honey in the past week. three. thats three liters of honey. what a waste. and i cant even salvage it off the floor like i would if it were only spilled because the remnants are full of glass shards.
but anyway, ill try to remember what i have done since the last entry. i guess we are going like two weeks back- the details are lacking.
katie and sarah came back to cairo and we hung out some; they went on grand adventures and i went to school, but they told me about said grand adventures over dinner, so that was something, at least. and then they left, so thats the end of that.
at some point in time we did another faluca trip; this one was infinitely more successful. we had twenty-some-odd people and the boat was quite exciting. and someone made guacamole.
last weekend i found out just how much sheesha i can hold (although it was sort of a skewed amount since i drank a lot of rum along with it); i smoked until i **almost** got sick, so now i have a limit, and thats always useful to know.
luke and chelsea and i tried to go to this super nice park to play frisbee, but the cab driver took us to the wrong place and we decided to walk the rest of the way but we werent entirely sure where to go and when we found the park it was all fenced off and we couldnt find the gate so we wandered for a while and by the time we got there it was almost time to close, so that was rather sad. but that was last weekend, and we made plans to come again this weekend, along with lots of other plans that quite thoroughly fell through.
i really dont even remember anything else from the past 2 weeks. im sure i did stuff, but ill have to ask around to find out what.
i do remember this weekend, though, which was pretty much the best one ever. the players in these stories are no big surprise: luke and chelsea, and also introducing sarah and kira. huzzah. on thursday night, i dont remember what i intended to do, but it wasnt anything super special. and then sarah called me and asked if i wanted to go to a puppet show, and, naturally, i said heck yeah. so i met up with her and kira and their friend kelbie, and then we somehow found luke and chelsea and wandered around downtown looking for the puppet theater. we had no idea where to go, though, and no one knew the word for "puppet," so kira and i just wandered around making puppet shapes with our hands and saying "fen? fen?" (which means where? where?). we were being completely facetious about seeking directions like that, but it worked; some random egyptian laughed and then said some arabic words including "theater" and told us where to go, which just goes to show you that if you are white, no one cares if you act retarded.
so we found the theater (after a few more puppet imitations and "fen" queries) and went into the show, only an hour late. it was pretty stupendous, as puppet shows go. the stage was huge and filled with excellent neon-glowing props and all of the characters (except for two real people) were cute little marionettes with humans dressed all in black standing behind. and there was a guy in a dinosaur suit, too... and a huge creepy moon-face that looked like a woman but definitely talked like a man. im not sure what the show was about since it was all in arabic, and the only words i understood were 'yes, twenty-seven, big, and thank God.' then we left the puppet show, grabbed some food, and headed to the circus. actually chelsea didnt come because she was protesting the cruel treatment of the animals or something like that, but i figured it would be okay.
so we wandered up to this huge, brightly lit and colorful tent. there was a lioness sitting outside for pictures, but she was all drugged up and hardly even looked alive. we didnt take pictures with her, alas. inside the tent, it was a real circus, and by that i mean the kind of circus you read about in books starring gypsies. there werent any sound or light special effects, but there were acrobats and clowns and a dwarf. and there were knife throwers, and they asked for volunteers from the audience to have knives thrown at them and i tried awfully hard to get their attention but failed, unfortunately. but in retrospect i realized that they probably wouldnt have picked a white person anyway, since if they happened to kill me they would probably start some sort of revolution. and then the lions and tigers came out (after they spent 20 minutes or so constructing a very rickety looking cage). it turns out that chelsea was mostly right in refusing to come based on poor animal treatment. there were two times during the act when a helper outside of the cage held a lion down by his collar while the ringmaster beat it with a stick until it roared, so that was kind of awful. but the egyptians clapped quite a lot, so maybe that is cool here. they did some fun tricks, though, and were in general very cute and scary.
then we left the circus and kelbie wandered off somewhere, so luke and i went with sarah and kira to a birthday party where they had promised to make an appearance. the plan was just to walk in, say hi, and go, but it turned out that i knew a lot of people there, so we went in and left and found the girls a cab home and then luke and i went back upstairs. unfortunately, during that ten minute interlude the party had relocated; everyone was either gone or on their way out to some bar or other. there were a few people staying, though, including one girl who actually lived in the apartment, so i decided to stay, but then (and im not completely sure why all of this happened, but im sure that illicit substances played a part) all of this hostility broke out and these two guys came really close to fighting over what i interpreted as the stupidest reason ever and in the end we all got kicked out.
this was around 130 in the morning, i suppose, so i walked back to the dorm to go to bed. however, my friend heather (who has been sitting outside on the dorm steps every single time i have come home late this semester) was sitting outside on the dorm steps when i got back, so i sat and talked to her for a while and then her ride pulled up, and it turned out that i knew her ride so i went out again with them. we drove around and eventually found some place to smoke sheesha, and then went back to ak (the driver) 's apartment and hung out for a while. heather and the other people from zamalek went home at around 6, but i just went to bed because ak lives super close to sarah and kira, and i had promised to come with them to church.
so i woke up at about 830 (yeah, less than three hours of sleep, huzzah), still buzzed from the sheesha, and got some really shaky directions to the church from ak's friend who is only mostly fluent. i started walking through this strange neighborhood and pretty much just turned when the time felt right, and i eventually found the church. the story of that walk is actually really dramatic and sort of hilarious, but i dont want to put it down in type because its also quite embarrassing and a little disgusting and definitely doesnt need to endure forever on the internet.
i got to church and met kira and sarah; the service that particular friday was african themed, and not egyptian african but actual congo (when there was a congo) africa, so there were lots of really dark people clad in really bright clothing and there was a lot of crying out to Lord Jesus. it was entertaining but not at all what i was expecting when they invited me to english church. then the preacher spoke, and he was surprisingly good. i expected, well, the stereotypical african sermon about Jesus and sin and heaven, but the guy actually spoke about evangelism, and he had some useful things to say about it.
and then church was over and i went back to zamalek. between walking lost through ak's neighborhood looking for the metro station, riding the metro, and walking through zamalek to the dorm (which is on the side of the island opposite the metro station), it took about two hours to get home, and when i got there i took a shower and ate and left again, huzzah! remember, this is on 2.5 hours of sleep. but in the time that it had taken me to get home, kira and sarah had taught their sunday school class and eaten and were ready to go to coptic cairo, so luke and i hopped back on the metro and met them. we went into an abbey and saw an exceptionally beautiful greek orthodox church and then a huge cemetery with tons of broken tombstones and lovely greenery, and then we went into the cave where (supposedly) joseph and mary hid with Jesus when they fled from herod. it wasnt a cave, actually, so much as the basement of a chapel; it was actually quite nice and filled with paintings and shrines and stuff, but i assume that it wasnt like that 2000 years ago. then we went to the so called "hanging church," which apparently is suspended above some waterway, but you cant see the water or any of the suspension apparatus so it wasnt that special. and then we went back home and i took a nap.
and then we had a movie night. the plan was to do a disney movie marathon, but movie marathons never work out, eh? kira, sarah, luke and i went to chelsea's apartment and watched aladin, but by the end of it chelsea (bored) was in the other room doing homework and the other three were asleep. so i relocated, waking kira and sarah, and the three of us started kung-fu-panda, but sarah was asleep like 20 minutes into it and kira had to get up early the next morning, so the two of them left at like one, leaving me to watch the computer animated kung-fu animals by myself. it was a really good movie, though.
the house woke up at around eleven and we started making preparations for our picnic in that super nice park i mentioned earlier. luke and i went out and bought lots of fruit for a salad and chelsea made this rice-peanut-sugar concoction and, after lots of procrastinating, we left. there were seven of us, i believe: chelsea's roommate wolf (thats his real name, too) came, as well as trish, a friend from philosophy, and we met sarah and kira at the park. but then the guards wouldnt let us in because our pots were metal and you arent allowed to bring metal into the park... which i think is really stupid. so we sat outside and ate and luke started a frisbee game with some egyptian kids who were doing the same thing. we left our empty pots by the door and went inside where we played frisbee and hackey sack with more random egpytian kids; a huge swarm of twelve year old boys surrounded luke, wolf and me as we were kicking the hackey sack and they all wanted to play, so that was quite entertaining. language barriers can be really hilarious when they reduce us to pantomiming. and several of the boys got my phone number, i have no clue why, and one just called me a few minutes ago but he didnt speak english and i dont speak arabic so... yeah.
and then luke, chelsea and i went to christiana's with every intention of making a pie out of the pumpkin we bought sometime ago, i dont remember when. but then chelsea, the one who knows how to make pumpkin pie, went to sleep, so christiana and i carved masks from the pumpkin halves instead, and then luke and i went to the mall so that i could buy honey to replace the jar that i broke last week (2 jars for the price of one, what a steal). christiana and i watched grey's anatomy for a while and then went to sleep.
and then this morning, i was taking the jars of honey out of the wrapper that bound them together and somehow both jars ended up on the floor. i almost cried. and now i have no honey, but other than that it was a pretty stellar weekend.
i would proofread this for grammar and general coherence, but i have to go to class.

i havent slept in a bed in four days

this is the syria entry. get excited.
starting on the syria-lebanon border, we finally got visas. we had to find another cab to get to damascus because our first guy gave up after like 3 hours. we got ripped off by both of them, which is typical because, hey, white people are made of money. whatever. we got into damascus at about midnight and called our couchsurfer. much to our dismay, he was busy (who is busy at midnight...?) and he said he would call back in an hour or two, so we, having no idea where we were or where to go, found our way to some park benches and sat down. everyone else fell asleep pretty quickly so i stayed awake to make sure that we didnt get robbed, and then i called caesar (the couch surfing guy) at about 2. he said he was still busy and couldnt come get us and that he would call in an hour, but the girls were loathe to spend the night on a park bench, plus it was really cold so we found a hostel and crashed.
the next morning we met a guy staying in the same hostel who was from baghdad... it was sort of an uncomfortable introduction:
him- "where are you from?"
us- "america. where are you from?"
him- "baghdad."
...pause...
us- "...sorry..."
but he was a cool guy and he showed us a neat little sandwich shop, so no hard feelings. incidentally, eating in syria was just as pleasant as eating in lebanon. the street food is only a touch more expensive than that in cairo, and the restaurants have little pizzas and plates of hummus for like 60 pounds (about 1.20 dollars), and everything is quite tasty. and also, there are these lovely bars filled with hanging baskets of fruit on just about every corner and you can just wander in and pick however many fruits you want and the guy will blend them into a juice for you, or you can just grab a glass from the giant random mix blender, which is basically the dregs of everyone else's juice.
so we ate and got juice and then found our way to old damascus, which is, according to lonely planet and all other sources that i can think of, the only cool thing to see in damascus. it is basically a huge series of tiny alleys and shops and restaurants and baths, plus a huge souq (though not as big as the one in cairo). we went first to the souq, carrying all of our bags through the thronging crowds, and then emerged in front of the huge omayyad mosque. that is probably spelled wrong. christianna happened to be friends with some british guys who were in damascus, so she called them up and we met them at said mosque and tried to get inside, but the thing closed right as we walked up to the door. naturally they had no qualms selling us a ticket immediately before closing time... they said we could come back the next day, but we never did end up getting there in time to go inside. we also tried to get into an oriental bath, but they dont allow women during the eid holiday so that was scratched off the list too. (usually they allow women from like 10 in the morning to 4 and then men the rest of the time, but men only during the holiday.)
finally we hooked up with caesar, who told us that he still could pick us up because we were in the wrong omayyad square and he was super far away, but we gave the phone to a cab driver and finally made it to our hosts' place. we were to stay in his brother's empty apartment, and it was pretty excellent, albeit tiny; there was a living room with a few chairs and a little half-sofa, a bedroom (with one double bed), a bathroom, and a little kitchenette which we didnt really use at all. if you remember, there were five of us, so sleeping arrangements were interesting... ah, and also the apartment was inhabited by a very tiny kitten. everyone else freaked out at the sight of a kitten, naturally, and i put on my headphones so that i wouldnt have to listen to the high-pitched squeals of "youre so cute!" note that these were mostly emitted by luke; the three girls were much less vocal. sorry luke, but its true.
we went back to old damascus for dinner with the brits that night; caesar couldnt come with us because he had to work. he explained that he had been directing a dance troop all the previous night and that he was a writer slash director trying to get all his affairs in order so that he could report to the syrian army in ten days, so we forgave him for being too busy for us. anyway, we did our usual giant spread of stuff you have to eat with pita for dinner, plus some random vodka stuff, plus sheesha, which was all quite pleasant. then the seven of us went to a fair that we had spotted while riding the bus. there were loads of rides all along the highway, but it was about the sketchiest fair i have ever seen. nothing had safety belts or lap bars, and a lot of the rides were straight-up man powered; no engines necessary. we started out on one of those huge pendulum swings, and this one did have a motor, so it was able to swing the entire contraption totally vertical; i flew out of my seat on every apex, regardless of whether or not i held on. naturally i wanted to see what would happen if i didnt hold on, then, and sam (one of the brits) freaked out and grabbed me when i started to leave the seat with my hands up. altogether quite amusing. then i rode a mechanical bull, and, using only one hand, i did much better than most of the syrians who went before me, but that ride is really difficult, i must admit. then there was a ride something akin to the scrambler, the ride in the sandlot wherein all of the kids puke their guts out, only this one had no safety equipment at all so we were sliding everywhere and there were arabs trying to stand and dance and stuff all during the ride. i saw no serious injuries the whole night, though, so maybe all of the safety equipment in america is just crippling us for the real world :)
we stayed up really late reading and writing poetry and just generally being rather bohemian, which i approved of. of course, that meant that we slept ridiculously late; we made it into town for "breakfast" at about 4 pm. then we met up with the brits again (the girls all had super huge crushes on them because, lets face it, they were adorable and had cute accents to boot) and went to this really cute mosque that housed the remains of the niece of some holy imam or other. the whole of the inside was covered with spectacularly arranged, tiny mirrors, so everything was very shiny and sparkly. quite nice. then we went to a cafe just to hang out since we had all eaten quite recently, and we played backgammon and cards and smoked sheesha and ate ice cream for a long, long time until we were hungry again, so then we moved upstairs and ate dinner and... thats pretty much it. i guess mostly all we did in damascus was eat and hang out...
so yeah, thats about what we did on the next day as well. caesar came to town with us that day, but he couldnt hang out because he had to shop and have some time with his girlfriend. but he did take us to a bath that would accept girls, so luke and i dropped them off and headed to the men-only one. conferring afterward, the girls' and our experiences were very similar, but luke and i thought the whole process was remarkably cooler than they did. basically it went like this: you trade your clothes for a "towel," which is really just half a sheet, and go into a big, tiled room with faucets and basins all along the walls. you fill a basin with water and then take a little tin bowl and splash said water on yourself. then you take the soap and loofa (that smelled like it must have been made of horse hair) that they give you and scrub off all of your skin. then you go to the steam room, basically just a sauna, and then to another, smaller room with more basins where you pretty much just repeat the process. so luke and i washed each other and chilled with lots of naked arab dudes, and every time i tell this story it sounds more homo-erotic, but it was quite platonic and entertaining.
when we finished the bath part, we got full body massages which, for me, were the highlight of damascus. i just wanted to take a nap, f'sho. then we wrapped up in some dry sheets and sat in their lobby on these nifty raised couches and drank tea and imagined how cool it would be to live in a room like the one we were in. then we left and bought some pastries and went to pick up the girls. they told their story, and, like i said, it was basically the same as ours, except they didnt enjoy it at all. then we bought pastries since the girls hadnt eaten all day, and then we met up with sam who took us to the home of a friend of his. this girl, valeria, lived in about the most amazing house i have ever seen. fortunately she was about five feet tall because the front door was about the size of the door to a hobbit-hold, but inside it was all artistic tile and stone and super old wood with lots of random niches in the walls and lots of creaky staircases. the center of the house was a huge open garden slash patio where we sat and ate sunflower seeds, and then we went onto the roof and did gymnastics and played (lakeshore) games.
then we (the five from auc, 2 brits, valeria and one of her roommates) wandered around for a while looking for food. we ended up just getting street food by the omayyad mosque since we were almost totally out of money and we still had to get to the airport. so we ate next to the mosque and then, to kill some time before the flight, played mafia in the square for like 2 hours.
then a cab, a plane, and cairo.
and, to top off this hugely awesome and relaxing trip, i left my ipod on the plane. so dang.
we got back at like 6 in the morning and then off to school. katie (strickland) is visiting cairo from ghana at the moment, so i had dinner with her and her travel buddy on tuesday and then on wednesday i went to christiana's and cooked dinner and studied physics. stupid physics...
then on thursday, luke chelsea, christiana, katie, sarah (katie's friend) and i got on the midnight bus to dahab, a town on the sinai penninsula very near the saudi arabian coast. we arrived at around 9 in the morning (after sleeping very little on quite a loud bus; egyptians tend to play music and movies at obnoxious volumes) and walked across some stretches of desert, encountering a random roving camel, to the boardwalk. we walked toward the cheapest hostel, all along the way fending off egyptians trying to sell us scarves or get us to eat at their restaurants. luke, chelsea and christiana wandered off somehow, so katie, sarah and i stopped to wait for them (it turned out they had randomly decided to sit down for milkshakes, go figure) and were quickly surrounded by adorable little girls selling these really lovely bracelets, so we bought some, found the others, and dropped off our stuff at the hostel. i dont know specific timetables because i didnt write anything down since we didnt really do anything spectacularly interesting; mostly we just relaxed in the wonderful breeze.
there were tons of restaurants right on the water, but we easily found our favorite, that is, the cheapest one, and after eating we sat and talked with the owner, this 21 year old bedouin guy named, of all things, muhammad. he was super cool, though, and we spent quite a bit of time chilling at his place, which was basically a big pile of blankets and pillows right on the beach, so you can probably understand the appeal.
friday night we climbed mount sinai. this is quite a complicated process, we quickly found out, because you have to arrange for a bus to take you out to the monastery, then you have to buy a ticket to get in, then you have to hire a guide (as dictated by law, actually), but we got through all that jazz and started up. it was a really easy walk since 1) the monks built stairs on all of the steep parts and 2) about seven million people go up every night so its quite a well-worn trail. it was incredibly beautiful, too; the night was totally clear and, when some stupid european wasnt shining his l.e.d. headlamp in your face, you could see an inordinate number of stars. the view was, like i said, occasionally spoiled by the insane crowds and by people insisting on using flashlights, but it was without question lovely nonetheless.
our guide's name was muhammad, too, and he did a pretty good job of keeping the 13 of us together; my group was joined by some germans and norwegians and a couple of australians. so we made it to the top and, as the sweat from the trek up evaporated, understood why everyone tells you to bring warm clothes to the peak. it was quite freezing and, since we didnt want to pay for blankets, we made a big pile of people and huddled for a while to wait for the sun to rise.
and then it rose.
and it was really cloudy, so you couldnt actually see the sun. but the morning light spreading over the mountains was supremely beautiful, and the monks in the background singing hymns in coptic added mightily to the ambiance. the random koreans crying and singing their own hymns was sort of obnoxious, i though, but to each his own. and then we hiked down, the faster way this time, down a set of three thousand some-odd stairs made single handedly by some monk or other. and then we went back to the beach. we spent sunday in pretty much the same way, sitting by the beach and eating and smoking.
oh hey, i forgot; we did go snorkeling, which was quite excellent. there were loads of scuba divers right off the coast, which i thought was exceedingly silly because most of the reefs were only about 3 meters down, and some i could touch from the surface just by stretching out my hand. actually there were several times when i was floating on a receding wave and seriously feared that it was going to drop me straight onto a reef. but yeah, lots of fish and coral, very pretty, hooray. luke and i are definitely going back sometime in the not too distant future to do some real dives.
and then katie, sarah and i left; the other three stayed to celebrate chelsea's birthday, which was today, but i didnt want to skip more school, alas. so i got back at like 7 this morning and then to the new campus, which i why i havent slept in a bed in four days. i have either been dozing on buses or climbing mountains every night, and im tired.
thats all.

its rather late; ill try to get through lebanon tonight and tackle syria later

picking up where i left off:
i forgot my passport because im an idiot. luckily we left like 2 and a half hours early, so i darted outside to get in a cab to drive back to zamalek to pick it up. i called one of my roommates and he got my pass and gave it to another friend because i had the (brilliant) idea of meeting her halfway to save time, but alas, the language barrier impeded this plan; neither cab driver understood that i wanted to go halfway to zamalek and she wanted to go halfway to the airport, so i just went all the way and... yeah. i got back to the airport with like 40 minutes to spare, huzzah, and i went through security and went up to get my boarding pass (the others had already gone through, and actually i think they were on the plane at this point). unfortunately, the policy with egypt air requires you to pick up your boarding pass 45 minutes before the flight, so the guy was pretty adamant about not letting me on the plane. naturally that was unacceptable, so i (very uncharacteristically) politely and calmly bitched him out until his boss came over and told him to let the stupid tourist on the plane. then the dude got all hung up about the fact that i only had a one-way ticket; apparently you arent supposed to go to beirut to stay. so i whined and moaned about that for a while and again his boss let me in, so now i had about 25 minutes to get through passport control, find the gate and get on the plane (on which the rest of my party was already waiting). so they had a security person escort me to the front of all the lines and rush me through all of the paperwork and then take me to the gate and in the end i made it, yay.
quite a stressful way to start a trip.
ill take a moment now to introduce the key players in these stories: christiana, chelsea, christine, luke and myself. we also interacted with a smattering of lebanese and syrians (obviously), a few brits, some greeks, a german, a couple of italians, and one guy from baghdad.
anyhoo, christiana had some experience with something called "couch surfing," which isnt exactly what it sounds like; there is no water and in fact no standing on couches at all. but there is a website where you can put in your trip information and basically request a couch/bed/floor upon which to crash and people look at your profile and invite you to stay with them. so we had a connection in lebanon, which was ultra convenient; he picked us up and the airport and drove us out to his house in the mountains. his name was walid, and he was quite an excellent character.
walid is, for lack of a better term, an alcohol dealer, and he provides (in addition to various other brands) all of the bacardi to all of the bars and clubs in beirut. that might be a slight exaggeration, but he does sell a lot of alcohol and beirut drinks a lot, so he knows many club slash bar owners and has tons of connections.
we started at his house; first we just wandered around looking at his amazing setup, which included 2 and a half bedrooms, 2 and a half bathrooms, a den, a living room/dining room, a kitchen, and a huge balcony overlooking all of beirut and the med. it was all quite lovely and we took lots of pictures and said "wow" a lot. and then he opened his liquor cabinet and we said "wow" some more, and then we got drunk and had a dance party in his living room. then we went out on the town. he took us to bar after bar, just giving us the gist of beirut's nightlife (which is spectacular), and after a few minutes at every place he would say "shall we go?" and we would move on. but eventually we found a bar with a dance floor and salsa music, so we stayed and danced for a while. eventually we left and went to a rather exclusive club called "basement," which was reasonably small and included a tiny raised marble dance floor onto which we crowded. and then we went to the "hottest" club in beirut, a place called bo18, which is also underground, but the roof opens and its pretty amazing. unfortunately he couldnt get us in for free because the owner was gone (this was like 5 in the morning) and we didnt want to pay the ridiculous cover, so we just looked in the top and then went to eat. the saj restaurant was astonishingly lively considering the time and we had some utterly delicious saj, which is, in case you dont know, a sort of middle eastern version of pizza made with thin, extremely doughy bread and sometimes rolled into wraps. then we went back to his apartment for a nightcap and another brief dance party and we were asleep by eight. yeah, a.m.
we woke up at about eleven and slowly got moving again; we debated about plans but eventually decided to hit the beach. on the way we got some fresh lebanese bananas from a roadside cart, which was an excellent decision, and then we swam in the med. amazing water, gigantic (and slightly terrifying) waves, lots of rocks; all in all a spectacular experience. luke and chelsea and i went out like 100 meters and just treat water and chatted, which was quite pleasant, but then when we tried to swim to shore we were rather crushed by waves and pounded against the rock shore; chelsea tried her hardest to drown and my feet kept getting cut on the silly rocks, but we made it back and went to a lovely little cafe about 10 feet from the waterline. this cafe was probably the highlight of the trip for me, quite honestly; all lebanese food is amazing, but this place was particularly good, and having the sea and the salt breeze so near after spending a month in the tangible smog of cairo was hugely relieving.
then we went to the corniche (sp?), which is basically a huge boardwalk all along the med; its a great place to people-watch, and it also grants access to a place called, if i remember correctly, pigeon rock. this is just a random, towering island in the middle of the sea, but you can walk out onto a peninsula and peer down over the cliffs and see the surf crashing. chelsea and christiana and i sang disney songs as we watched the sun set, and luke found a random rainbow kite in a pile of debris so he darted around compiling pieces of string and ended up flying it fairly well. and then, for some inexplicable reason, the grass behind us caught on fire... but we made it back to the street and went to some art gallery in this dude's house.
walid is some sort of underground art connoisseur, so the "gallery" was quite modern, which im usually not interested in, but this was mostly photography of lebanon so it was quite original (to me, at least) and moderately fascinating. some guy was playing guitar in the background, only he was playing it with a file and he wasnt pushing any frets, so it was mostly just this eerie screeching, which sounds unpleasant, but it sort of improved the ambiance.
then we went to a random sandwich shop and got awesome lebanese falafel and french fry sandwiches, and then we went to walid's apartment and looked at picture books of pacific islands and played with his cat, and then we came home and watched a documentary about the 2006 war between israel and lebanon, which was altogether disturbing and made me question america's relationship with israel, but ill hold off on that judgment, i think.
the next day we went to a tiny town called byblos (sp?), which is extremely old and quaint and cute. we went through their little suq (market) and bought random stuff and then had another amazing lebanese lunch on another beautiful veranda. the owner of the place ate with us too (when he wasnt hurrying around serving the other tables) and he told us about lebanese history and culture and in general gave me an extremely good impression of lebanese people. then we explored a ruined castle complete with a small amphitheater overlooking the med; it was altogether lovely, despite the fact that christiana and christine wandered off and we seriously thought they had been abducted... then we visited this huge vaulted cathedral, and then we went to the caves. i have completely forgotten the name of the place, though i think it starts with a "j," if that is useful, but it was an enormous cavern filled with the usual gorgeous cave formations. we wandered for a while and then, since we were the only tourists inside and the place was about to close, we had a sing along slash dance party with some of the attendants there, and then we went down into the lower caverns and took a boat ride along the underground river; it was very eerie and a bit phantom-of-the-opera-esque, but the guy let us take pictures (usually forbidden), which was quite excellent. as soon as i get around to stealing them, ill put them on facebook, but luke posted his on that site i gave earlier so you can get a preview if you want.
the next day (i believe we are on tuesday now, the 30th of september, though my timetable may be skewed) we wandered in beirut, mostly along the corniche, and explored the american university in beirut, which is markedly more beautiful and appealing than auc. actually, everything in beirut was markedly more beautiful than its cairene equivalent, but lets not go there, eh? then we ate more delicious lebanese food and then we got crepes from a street vendor; they were so good that i have to mention them above and apart from the other delicious food. everyone got something different, so they were filled with combinations of cookies and cream, bananas, dark and light chocolate, and crushed snickers, but i think mine was the best- bananas and nutella.
my whole mouth seriously just filled with saliva...
anyway, then we went to an internet cafe to find out how we were going to get home; therein i discovered that a ridiculous number of middle easterners are addicted to world of warcraft, and also a fairly appreciable portion of them still play warcraft three. surely no one cares about this but me, but i thought it was neat; i used to love that game.
then we went to a cafe in a neighborhood inhabited by hezbollah, which sounds more exciting than it was. the cafe was rather like a castle, which was lovely and extremely impressive, but, contrary to the media-induced american stereotype, the streets were not rampant with wanton violence and the children were not armed to the teeth with automatic rifles and bombs. they were pretty ordinary people; the only thing that differentiated them as hezbollah was the t-shirts. you could have your picture taken and then scanned onto a shirt with a "lebanese patriot," aka "america's most wanted." no, i didnt get one.
the next day we had a lovely breakfast made by walid and luke; we ate lots of bread and raw stuff (olives, hummus, lebnah, random vegetables) on walid's huge patio. then we took a bus to balbek (sp?) and the other four went into some huge ruined temples, but i didnt feel like paying because they didnt look as impressive as the ruins in rome, so i wandered around this tiny town by myself for a while. i meandered into a field and was accosted by a kid with a rifle (a real one) and he told me to give him money, but i laughed at him and walked away because im very brave. actually that story comes across as much scarier than it was in real life; its just more interesting to tell it like that because the accurately detailed version is longer and less exciting.
then we hopped a cab to damascus.
we ended up waiting at syrian immigration for 7 and a half hours. here are the highlights:
-christiana showed a huge crowd of lebanese people a very impressive card trick and they all applauded her until the guards told them to leave the americans alone; apparently they prefer to keep people like us in isolation
-the only bathroom was in the duty-free shop in lebanon, so we had to re-cross the border every time; by the end of it, the lebanese guards didnt even demand an explanation, they just waved the stupid americans through
-after about 5 hours we bought a bottle of gin at the aforementioned duty free store and christiana, christine and i proceeded to get rather drunk in the syrian immigration building. needless to say, luke held me back from talking to the border guards when they finally issued the visas :)
and then we got a new cab and headed for damascus.
and that was lebanon. enough for now; im sleepy.

was this castle built? no, it was downloaded.

i have missed like 2 weeks of updating stuff, so this entry promises to be extremely long. however, i have been awake since about 11 am yesterday so im pretty tired (it is about 3 pm now), so i probably wont be able to get it all out in one go. im back from the lebanon slash syria trip, but i have some stories from the week before as well so we shall start there and see how far we get, how does that sound? jolly good.
lets see, today is sunday i think, which means that my first story takes place thirteen days ago. i went to the scuba shop with luke and eric and some new friends, chelsea and ron; the latter two started their open water certification that night, luke just wanted to check out the facilities, and eric and i were finishing up our course. i took the test and, despite lots of ridicule from the instructor, i got a 98%, so apparently im quite incredible at scuba diving.
the wednesday after that, luke and i had a date with ashraf (the guy who saved our lives the first day in cairo, if you remember); it was almost his last night before going back to germany and he wanted to spend it with us, such a sweetie. so he promised to pick us up and make us koshary at his house, so it was all set up that our whole room would have dinner with ashraf and i was very excited. or at least a little bit excited. but then like an hour beforehand the other two roomies bailed out, so it was just luke and me who walked out to meet ashraf and he was like, "i made so much koshary, we must fill up the car or i will be eating koshary for a week!" so i started calling people and luke went inside the dorm to recruit; ironic enough, the only person we managed to scrounge up at such short notice was this little romanian girl named corina, so we still did in fact have massive amounts of leftovers. but we had a really good night and ash made us milkshakes even though he is a vegan (on wednesdays and fridays only, religious reasons doncha know) and then let us have some of his licorice flavored vodka even though he doesnt drink, and then we hooked him up with facebook and made friends with him and it was all super duper. im cutting that story short because it is getting rather long and isnt so interesting. anyway, at the end of the night we made plans to meet up the next evening for dinner and a faluca ride.
so. luke and corina and i were quite thrilled about the prospect of cooking and bringing food out onto a boat to eat in the middle of the nile, and we assumed that everyone else would be as well. i invited like 30 people, which in hindsight sounds rather pathetic because we ended up with i think six including me, luke, corina and ashraf, but in my defense we gave extremely short notice and there were at least 3 other big auc parties that night. anyway, luke and i hauled our cooking stuff over to corinas building and started to make this giant dinner based on the number of people we hoped would come, which was about twenty. we made two huge pots of rice and another even more huge pot of potatoes and then some stir-fried vegetables and mushrooms and a salad and it was awesome. and then we realized that everyone who had said that they wanted to come was in fact going to another auc party instead, but we dedided to make the best of it anyway, so we took off with our little posse and our gross amount of food and met ashraf and sailed off onto the nile and had a lovely dinner. and we also finished the rest of the licorice vodka. by this time it was probably about eleven, but i wasnt tired so corina and i went to one of the auc parties. we bummed a cab ride off of a couple of her friends and ended up at auc's club rugby team's house (random, i know). i have never been to a frat party, but it was what i imagine one must be like; it was filled, standing room only, with white kids with very little rhythm all trying to drink and find someone of the oppose sex to "mack" on. needless to say, it was not at all my kind of party, and corina agreed with me so we left rather quickly. i just happened to know an egyptian who lived in the same neighborhood, though (which was super-fortunate since i had zero pounds on me, literally), so i called him and he came and picked us up and brought us to his party, which was much more my style, it was very laid back and rather quiet and we just talked and smoked stuff and played guitar and ate the delicious little honey dessert things. i got back to my room at like 3 in the morning and was very proud at my social butterfly-ness.
the next night, luke and i planned yet another social gathering; this time we only invited a few people, but all of those people said yes and then invited their own friends so we ended up with a group of almost 20. funny how things like that work out. anyway, the twenty of us sqeezed variously into several cabs and headed to islamic cairo to find the infamous egyptian pancake restaurant. we succeeded in finding it, but i dont think i will ever go back because as soon as a huge group of white people sat down they busted out the english menus and claimed that they didnt have any arabic ones. (some egyptian restaurants like to charge more for tourists so they print different prices on the different menus assuming that no white people can read arabic... but what the heck kind of egyptian restaurant wouldnt have any arabic menus at all??) we got various dessert pancakes, and they were all very delicious and covered with butter and filled with chocolate or sugar or jam or other delicacies, but like i said they were sort of jerks so no. and then we were right next to the giant market so everyone wanted to walk around, but luke and i sort of insisted that we break up into smaller groups to avoid further scams. so he and i and our friend heather wandered the market for a while and eventually got a bit lost and asked directions from a random old man who tooks us on this crazy ride on a mini-bus and eventually invited us to come have dinner at his house (even though he spoke no english and i speak no arabic... luke is getting to be a pretty good translator though). so we told the old guy that we would call him later and we came home, but once again i wasnt terribly tired and the debates were on, if you recall, at four am, so heather and i (luke isnt really a night owl, alas) went to a debate party. mostly people just smoked and drank and laughed at how silly those two guys are, but i did get bitched out by a girl because i scoffed at some military policies and her boyfriend is enlisted and yada yada... i didnt have the heart to tell her to stuff it, in going to be in that war too... anyway, not the point. and then i was in bed by five.
the main players in the stories over the next few days are as follows: myself, luke, chelsea, christiana, and christine. we also have various small parts played by some lebanese, some syrians, some half brit half egyptians, some italians, a german, and i think a greek, though im not positive. anyway, the next day we flew to beirut. i forgot my passport because im retarded and i always forget my passport, and yes, dad, im completely serious. i know. and right this second i have to clear off because im literally falling asleep on my keys. tootes for now.

of course someone took pictures. everyone there except for me had a camera, which is why i maintain that i dont need one. as soon as i get around to it i will steal pictures from eric and kat and post them on facebook, and there are about 80 from various other people posted there already, so just get on facebook and you can see. alternatively, luke posts his pictures on an open site, so you dont need a login to see them; the link- http://picasaweb.google.com/underageaoler/MisrAlQahira#
misr means egypt and al-qahira means cairo, fyi.
and i was going to do a real entry but i got lazy and distracted and now i have a plane to catch, so ill let you kids know how everything is when i get back on the sixth. or maybe ill find an internet cafe in beirut. anyhoo, no stories at the moment.

please dont antagonize the barracuda

longest weekend ever.
because eric (one of the 2 other people taking the open water class) had school until like 10 pm on thursday, we had to take the 1245 bus out of cairo to hurgada, which meant that we arrived at this filthy little tourist town at about 830 in the morning. seriously, hurgada is lovely when you are on the red sea, but the town is basically a long strip of nice looking hotels and condos along the beach with a huge pile of debris and trash in back. we called our dive instructor, osama, when we disembarked and he told our cab driver where to go; we arrived at the hotel, sorted out our gear, and were out to sea by nine. loay was there too (he was one of the guys who helped train us in the pool last week), and between the two of them they had like 12 years of experience in the red sea, so we were in pretty good hands.
id like to get the negative part out of the way first, just so that the whining doesnt come out through the rest of the story. i think im allergic to cairo; it is horribly polluted and everyone smokes, and this combination has given me a sinus infection that just wont quit (at least thats my theory, although it could easily be something completely different; who the heck knows, maybe im allergic to luke). in all of the diving dvds that i watched for my class, they stressed not diving with congestion or a cold, but i pretty much completely disregarded the warning despite the fact that my snot is a lovely shade reminiscent of shamrocks. and now my head feels like it just might explode; its like the worst hangover i have ever had, only i dont really get hangovers and i didnt drink, so its like i would imagine the worst hangover would be. infected snot and triple atmospheric pressure just dont mix. but anyhoo, thats all that was bad about the weekend. enough of that.
we were in the water at about ten and we spent the first half of the first dive working on skills: flooding and clearing the mask, removing and cleaning the respirator, achieving neutral buoyancy, etc. as the dives progressed, we spent less and less time on skills until on the last one we spent 50 minutes diving and 2 minutes practicing how to swim up fast if you are out of air.
the visibility in the red sea is amazing. even from above the water you can see all the way to the bottom in most places; where we were it was usually only about 12 to 15 meters deep, but still, thats some clear water. i will try to rattle off as many fish as i can remember, but the point of the matter is that some of these were the most colorful and arguably the most beautiful animals i have ever seen. we have the parrot fish (a weird blend of green and purple with a face that resembles a beak), soldier fish, angel fish, lion fish (yeah, the awesome one at the zoo that looks like it has feathers; i could have touched it), clown fish (yes, like nemo, chilling in the anemone), sea snake, blue spotted ray, barracuda (mostly small, but some as big as a meter; we avoided these), trumpet fish, some sort of eel (i didnt see it, but apparently i wasnt looking in the right place) puffer fish (un-puffed, alas), tiger fish (orange and purple striped, very beautiful), some crazy purple-and-green-striped thing whose name i forgot but which was my favorite, go figure, flying fish, um... thats all i remember. there were tons of tiny fish that osama didnt give the names of, too, and there were supposedly turtles, octopi, calimari, and dolphins, but accounts vary and i didnt personally see any of those. it was still rocking, though.
and, naturally, there was some coral in addition to the fish. there were several points where i was swimming through a fat canyon with walls of coral on both sides and underneath: quite breathtaking, which was unfortunate since i was underwater (little joke there, eh). the coolest formations, though, were the random 3 or 4 meter pinnacles out in the middle of nowhere. we would be swimming by some huge wall of coral and then out toward the open sea a ways there would be this little outpost of coral with its own collection of fish and everything. these tended to have the most colorful populations, but i dont know the names of any corals (except brains) so its sort of hard to describe.
and some random dude followed us around (including underwater) with a video camera and then tried to sell us the dvd of our first dive for 35 euro a piece (ridiculous), but eric and kat haggled him down and bought 1 for 150 pounds (like 30 usd) so as soon as i get a burned copy ill... i dont know. do something with it. im sort of technologically impaired, so i might just use it as a coaster, but luke will probably post bits of it on youtube so ill give the link out.
i honestly enjoyed the boating more than the diving. i mean, being underwater and looking at fish for an hour is all well and good, but nothing compares to sitting in the sun smelling the salt air and looking out across miles of clear blue (actually we could see land in 3 directions since we were in the northernmost tip of the red sea, wedged between egypt and sinai, but that didnt take away from the effect at all). our boat was surprisingly nice, too. i sort of expected osama just to take us to the beach so that we could wade into the water and swim around, but we actually got into a yacht-like contraption complete with three decks and a galley. i will probably halfheartedly continue to scuba dive just as an excuse to boat :)
another cool thing about hurgada is the fact that it is a pretty hardcore tourist trap which means that it was filled europeans which means that it was filled with eye candy. there were so many bikinis... and just as many speedos. the first day we were at a very crowded dive site; there were probably 30 boats out there, all at least as big as ours (that is, about 12 divers), and there were several that seriously unloaded like 30 snorkelers. so when we werent underwater, we were on the top deck checking out the scenery. eric complained the first day that we didnt have any hot chicks tanning on our boat, but i pointed out that the other boats more than filled the quota, plus our boat was also devoid of fat, hairy men in speedos, which i think balanced out the aforementioned lack. and plus the second day we did have two very attractive russians who tanned pretty much all day, so karma, i guess. and there was, believe it or not, a girl who snorkeled in a thong. that really just made me laugh because, come on, darlin- your bare butt is just sticking right out of the water for all to admire.
osama (the instructor) was a super cool guy, and not just because he was cool by nature but also because he let us crash at his house for free. he had about the most amazing house i have ever seen; the walls were painted ridiculous colors, including a pink and black checkered bedroom; the kitchen was covered with pictures of pink elephants; the toilet seat was filled with barbed wire (transparent seat, not painful, just weird); and he had what looked like a gigantic cut out paper slowflake woven into cascading rings dangling from the ceiling (i later discovered that this was a lamp). in addition to letting us crash with him, he cooked us dinner for iftar, so we broke fast with him and loay (not that we were breaking fast; it was my fourth meal of the day). osama swore that he didnt know how to cook, despite the fact that he has been living alone since he was like 14, but the next thing i knew the stove was covered with pans of vegetables and rice and chicken which was all delicious, so i called him out on being able to cook and loay admitted that everything but the rice was frozen and pre-made. alas.
its late; thats all.

ive been here a month???

in case you havent already caught on (and actually even if you have; its sort of odd to start a sentence like this with a conditional since the following statement is true regardless of your amount of understanding or attention, i.e. its not as though cairo is fairly conservative if you havent caught on and extraordinarily liberal if you have caught on, if you understand my meaning), cairo is a fairly conservative place. some of the women on the street are in full burka, covering their entire faces; most of them have at least shawls over their hair and necks; and even the ones who are uncovered are wearing long pants and modest shirts. even at school, where a surprising number of girls uncover and let their hair down, so to speak, no one wears skimpy shorts or shirts. the population of the egyptian museum, however, consists mostly of americans and europeans, and so, for me at least, after spending a month of seeing nothing but facial skin, walking into the egyptian museum was a lot like walking off a street in america into a strip club. (not that i have been to a strip club, but you understand the alalogy.) that place was filled with girls wearing the tiniest shorts i have ever seen, super-tight spaghetti strap shirts, no bras... you name it. there was even this russian chick who had on a blue bikini covered with some entirely transparent lace thingy. i know that reporting all this may make me sound like some sort of sexual predator, but some of these european chicks were dressed like sluts even by american standards. i totally understand why egyptians think that white women are loose; after 35 years of interacting with women in long dresses and hair wraps, a girl in shorts must appear scandalous indeed.
oh, and there were lots of egyptian artifacts there also. whatever.
actually the museum itself is a little overwhelming, even for me, and i consider myself a pretty experienced museum-goer. (i rarely consider myself thus out loud, but still.) it isnt a huge building- i could walk end to end in about five minutes, and i walk really slowly. but the place is comprable to a warehouse in some places. it is just chock full of tiny statues and sarcophogi and jewelry and mummies and weapons and chariots and giant statues and heiroglyphics... im told that if you spent a minute looking at every artifact in the place, it would take (a lot of) years to complete your trip. personally, i got my fill in one go because i dont really care about ancient egypt, but most people return many, many times. oh, and also, only about a tenth of the artifacts are labeled, and a lot of the labels are just note cards with arabic scrawl on them, so its really difficult to tell what anything is or what it did. fortunately for us, we brought an egyptology major along, so she was able to explain a lot of the carvings and statues and symbolism and whatnot. unfortunately, she was actually doing the "spend a minute looking at every artifact" thing, so most of the group ditched her pretty quickly. luke, jonah and i got our fill after about 3 hours; im not set for life on ancient egypt. huzzah.
on wednesday luke and i went to the downtown campus for a meeting with the scuba diving club. we wandered around for a while looking for the meeting, but it was nowhere to be found, so we finally asked the sports club manager, who also, it seemed, worked as a janitor at night, and he said that the meeting was the next day, so we sat around talking to hot chicks until the shuttle came to take us back. we were out in the courtyard in these lovely wicker chairs just relaxing when this guy walked up with a big stack of papers and said "scuba?" and we said yes and thus commenced the meeting. needless to say, it was pretty informal. but the guy gave me a packet and a price list and, after conferring with luke about prices in america, i decided to give it a shot (its way cheaper here, plus you get to learn in the red sea as opposed to some lame american freshwater lake). i went to the dive shop on sunday- i was alone, but i figured that other kids would show up and we would have a grand old time learning together, but no. i paid for the class and waited with the instructor for a while but no one else came, so i had my own private scuba tutor for the next 2 days. then yesterday (wednesday) luke (who needed to take a refresher course) and i went to the pool with this other guy, eric, who had taken the class at a different time, and we met the instructor for a confined water dive.
we reviewed all of the signals and went over putting on and taking off the gear, and then we suited up and "giant stepped" into the pool. it was rather sensational, despite the fact that my rental mask felt like it was going to devour my nose. we swam around and practiced emergency air sharing and learned to neutralize our buoyancy and just generally got used to breathing underwater. about halfway through, the swim team showed up (seriously), so as we were working on stills, kids in speedos and goggles were paddling by above us. i was really astonished at how lackadaisical everyone was about having practice on top of half a dozen scuba divers, but i guess that sort of thing happens all the time in egypt (??); at any rate, no one stopped and pointed.
the confined dive complete, we headed to the bus station to buy tickets to hurgada (sp?) where i will complete four open water dives to finish my open water certification. we leave tonight at 1130, so basically we will sleep on the bus, wake up in hurgada, and be out on the water by 8 am tomorrow. they dont mess around with scuba here :)
my last story of the moment requires a return to those guys who luke and i met at the arabic speaking contest. we met up with the one i was talking to, hassan, on tuesday and accompanied him, after 2 taxi and 2 subway rides, to his enormous and beautiful mosque. this was the first time i had been inside a mosque before so i was quite intrigued; it was nothing (to my ignorant Christian surprise) like a church at all. it was basically all open space, which makes sense since muslims spend most of their "church time" prostrate and praying. we walked into a great marble courtyard and then into a huge carpeted room filled with muslims praying. i felt sort of out of place, but there were random egyptians lying down and talking and sleeping in the back of the room, so luke and i sat among them while hassan prayed and few people even looked at us twice. then hassan came back and the three of us sat and talked for a while, and then he opened his bag and began to dole out muslim information books. im going to give the titles of the books because both the names and the sheer quantity of literature are rather amusing:
"women in islam"
"the Qur'an and modern science: compatible or incompatible"
"muhammad, the messenger of Allah"
"human rights in Islam and common misconceptions"
"Islam, the religion of all" (not Allah, mind you- "all," as in everyone. even you.)
"a brief illustrated guide to understanding Islam" (yes, illustrated)
"stories of new Muslims"
"is the Bible God's word?"
"the true message of Jesus Christ"
and finally, my personal favorite,
"the truth about Jesus"
so apparently i was right in thinking that mr hassan wanted to convert me.
but we stayed and talked for a while longer anyway and gradually we started to build up a little crowd; eventually luke and i werent even talking to hassan or to each other. luke was talking linguistics and language with two random guys (usama and ahmed, if i remember correctly) and i was talking religion with an indonesian guy named nadi, so we were both pretty much in our element and i found the evening very satisfactory.
and plus we set up a date with hassan for next tuesday; he is going to come to tutor us in arabic and we are going to "learn him" english. i think the first lesson will have to be days of the week, because setting up a date with this guy is neigh impossible. you cant just say "tuesday at seven," you have to start with today and work your way into next week or he gets lost. in his defense, though, i do the same thing with arabic days of the week...
and, insha Allah, luke and i are going to syria next week, along with whoever else wants to come, assuming that we are able to get visas, so between scuba diving in the red sea and exploring damascus, my next few entries should be pretty rocking.