maybe this will be the last one

its really time to finish this journal.
so.
back from israel, back to cairo, hooray. the next two weeks were super busy with school and exams and stuff; i had a couple of papers, one for Qur'anic studies and one for philosophy, plus homeworks and essays in physics and arabic, respectively, plus tests in all of the above except Qur'an, plus exams in all of the above except Qur'an (we never took tests in Qur'anic studies, we only had a midterm paper and a final paper). so i spent lots of time studying and writing, all the while trying to savor the last few weeks in egypt.
the wednesday after we came back from israel, ben and travis (my roommates from last year) plus joe (the guy who took my room), all delta brats with free tickets to spare, flew over to visit, so i had to try to entertain them while doing all this work. on thursday night of that week, we spontaneously decided to go to dahab since cairo is gross and smoggy and i didnt want to spend my last days there, so we got on the night bus and went to the coast. it was a pretty standard weekend, except that i was working on a paper, but then again that wasnt too unusual for dahab. we climbed mount sinai, my second time, and it was unbelievably cold, it being december and all. the boys did lots of snorkeling, and you can see ben's pictures; he brought his underwater camera. they also went 4-wheeling, but i say "they" for all of this because lauren and i spent most of our time chilling in beachside restaurants doing homework. we had a slightly tricky time getting home, mostly because we were sleepy and really slow in packing, and i really thought we were going to miss the bus (again), but we made it, so i got to my morning physics exam on time, and i ended up getting a b in the class, so hooray for auc.
exams ended, i got a's in everything except physics, and then school was over. this is obviously the abbreviated version, but most of the events of the last few days were just me talking to people and saying goodbye to everyone, which sucked, but its not really good narration. folk left on different days and lived in different places, so i had to track some people down, and lots of them i never found so i just had to say bye electronically, which was unfortunate. but anyway, eventually the 23rd came and i had to pack, and then i called a cab because i heard a rumor that that is cheaper than getting one off the street, but then he took me on this ridiculous roundabout way and it ended up costing like 15 pounds more, but i actually had only saved 60 pounds because i knew that would be more than enough to pay the driver, only it wasnt, so i ended up just walking away after giving him what i had.
then a flight, then a night in germany, then another flight to romania.
corina met me at the airport and we went to her house where her non-english-speaking mom presented me with almost a dozen random romanian vegetarian dishes. the thing about romanian cooking, especially around Christmas, is that there arent actually any vegetarian dishes; everything is pork based. when corina told her mom and aunt that her friend didnt eat meat, they both freaked out and went on a vegetarian-cooking binge, and, since they also cooked the usual stuff for the meat-eaters, i was the only person eating most of the vegetarian stuff. that meant, as corina explained to me, that in order to be polite i had to stuff myself with as much of everything as possible. it was all pretty delicious, though, so i acquiesced with gusto.
corina and i walked around downtown bucharest that night. it was more modern than i thought, with lots of western advertisements and new looking buildings. but there were random classic parts, too, in particular a little club slash restaurant that we visited. the place was this twisted collection of hallways filled with little nooks hiding tables; i liked it a lot. and then, of course, there were decorations all over town. they were pretty gaudy, and the best example was probably the giant neon evergreen in the middle of some random square.
that night we went to an egyptian restaurant, of all places, to celebrate the birth of corina's mother. unfortunately, once again, she didnt speak english, so i kind of felt like a jerk because corina spent most of her time talking to me and her random egyptian friends who owned the restaurant rather than talking to her mom. but we had sheesha, which was cool because i expected never to have it again after leaving cairo, and we had amazing hummus, which gave away the fact that even though the owners were egyptian, the food was lebanese. egypt, in case i havent mentioned this, has no good hummus, except in lebanese restaurants. and then this random gypsy band started playing, and, despite corina's rampant accusations of the horrible hygene and cultural depravity of the gypsies, they played their violins and clarinets extremely well. the only problem was that the volume was painfully high, so i politely asked to leave.
the next morning was Christmas day, hooray. time for my first ever romanian Christmas! ah, first a sidenote. i neglected to mention that the first thing that corina's mom said to me after heaping food onto my plate was, "something to drink? water? beer? wine? vodka? whiskey?" so i had vodka with lunch the first day. upon arriving at the aunt's house, basically the same scenario unfolded; they set out lots of appetizers, most of which were meat-free for my benefit, and then started pouring drinks. i had some of their home-made vodka, made by corina's second cousin or something like that and bottled in empty water bottles. not too bad. then we took lots of pictures, and then we sat down to eat. the people at the table (i know mom likes to know this sort of thing) were as follows: me, corina's cousin, aunt, uncle, mom, grandmother, grandfather, and corina, naturally. and lots of dead pig. and i ate a ridiculous amount of veggie food and drank a surprisingly small amount of homemade alcohol, and then they gave me random romania-themed presents and then corina and i left.
we went to the train station where we got a train to some town, i cant remember the name, where the other aunt and uncle have a spare apartment. apparently theyre rich; anyway, corina and i stayed there for four nights, i think, and it was nice, for me at least, not to have to deal with her family; i was too exhausted from the semester and too sad at leaving everyone to keep up a friendly american pretense for a whole week. im not going to give the play-by-play for every day for several reasons. first off, i dont remember the names of any of the little towns, so i couldnt describe anything well anyway. also, the days were all pretty similar, so that explanation would be really long and not too interesting. and mostly because i dont feel like it. its late.
so, for the next five days, we:
--hiked up a mountain and drank tea at the top and played in SUPER DEEP (as in thigh deep) snow on the way down
--rode lots of trains and buses
--saw a ridiculous car accident involving an suv driving off of a bridge onto the train tracks
--met 2 random romanian boys on a train; they subsequently followed us around and crashed in our apartment
--smoked sheesha and talked about life, love, religion and God every night with aforementioned romanian boys, plus corina
--saw the castle of VLAD THE IMPALER, also known as dracula's castle (vlad, a former ruler of romania, was the inspiration for stoker's dracula)
--saw another random castle after bribing a guard to let us onto the grounds
--drank tea and watched movies
--had snowball fights
--went bowling
--toured lots of cute little romanian towns
--slipped and fell on ice at least once every hour, sometimes more; that was the slipperiest country i have ever visited
--climbed another mountain with one of the random romanians and looked at a mind-bogglingly beautiful view of the carpatians from the top
--slid down aforementioned mountain on my butt. yeah, i know. it was crazy
--ate a chocolate and strawberry waffle
--drank tea and watched movies
--got really malnourished because of eating only cookies and bread for a week
thats all i can think of.
im so tired. but im going to finish this trip. only a couple of days to go.
eventually corina and i made it back to bucharest. we got back the night before my flight, so instead of sleeping i just stayed up all night talking on the phone and packing. and then i got on the plane, back to germany, back to chicago, back to memphis and home.
hey, that was easier than i thought.
and thus ended my trip and my semester.
thanks for sticking with my ramblings.

i found my notebook; the story continues. ill finish, i promise.

we left off upon the second arrival in Jerusalem. the following morning was wednesday, and our priority was palestine. i wanted to walk there; according to lonely planet, you can get there in just about two hours, and the hike is supposed to be quite pretty. but corina was punking out, she said that she had too much work to do so she had to get back to cairo, so we opted, for the sake of expedience, to take a bus. we got to the border, which was quite simple, really. we just walked up a path surrounded by chain link fence and barbed wire to a building; we walked through a turnstile and showed our passports to the lady behind the bullet proof glass and then arrived into what we affectionately called the maze. we wandered around this ridiculous compilation of hallways for a while until, totally turned around, a guard pointed to the correct exit door which, in fact, led to another outside walkway, this one surrounded by, you guessed it, chain link and barbed wire. then we walked across a parking lot toward a giant concrete wall, at least twenty feet tall and spaced with guard towers. this wall is a little despicable, but it was also one of the most interesting things about palestine because of all of the graffiti; there were words of protest and liberation, but also a plethora of messages of peace and tolerance. a huge number of the pictures that i have on facebook are of palestine and the wall (courtesy of my friend vicky), and lauren has lots more, so ill get those up sometime next week or whenever i get them.
anyway, on the other side of the wall we found a taxi and started doing touristy stuff. in hindsight, i sort of wish that we had walked around the city just to examine real life, but then we wouldnt have seen the sights we saw, so whatever. give and take. the driver took us first to the herodium, which is the remains of herod's castle. im told that there were lots of herods, and i think that this is the one from Jesus's age but im really not sure. it was atop a giant hill, which we climbed, and basically consisted of four towers connected by walls. everything was worn down to the ground, but there was still a lot to see because underneath the castle, in addition to a huge basement, there was a series of tunnels which we (minus chelsea) entered and explored. we actually climbed all the way down this giant hill inside of these windy tunnels, which was pretty excellent.
then we drove to the shepherd's field, which, as the name implies, is the field where the shepherds were "keeping watch over their flocks by night." the field wasnt much to see; you can probably imagine it. picture grass. yep, thats it. but there was a nice little chapel, and another set of tunnels that we got to explore. they were pitch black and we, lacking flashlights, relied on lauren's camera for occasional bursts of illumination. much to my dismay, the ridiculously dry dust attached vigorously to my black suede jacket. poor wardrobe choice, i must admit.
next on the list was the church of the nativity, a rather gargantuan structure originally constructed by the mother of constantine and subsequently augmented by, well, everyone. the catholic section is the most ostentatious, filled with gold and sparkly glass incense burners and silver chains and the like, but the orthodox are close behind. no one wants to be outshone in their display of affection for this hunk of rock. we went downstairs and saw the actual manger; this is one of the few holy places that we have any semblance of confidence about. it actually is, with, in my opinion, an acceptable degree of confidence, the location of the birth of Jesus. the "tour guide" herded us into the manger for a picture; not blatantly touristy at all. but hey, we are white, we have excuses. we also saw a really cool statue of st george (i think its saint george, anyway) slaying a dragon. and then we left.
we went to lunch in a cave. seriously. it was a restaurant, but the ceiling was raw rock held up by brick arches. the food was lebanese with an israeli twist, meaning that it was amazing (but all food associated with lebanon is amazing, no?), and during the meal we talked to our cab driver about politics and religion. well, the others talked about politics and i talked about religion. then he drove us back and, after taking more pictures of the wall, we wound our way back through the fences and barbed wire back into israel. it was only after getting on the bus to Jerusalem that i remembered that the cabbie had promised to take us to the milk chapel as well, but, since this site gives remembrance to mary's nursing of Jesus, i dont think we missed out too much.
back at the hostel, luke and chelsea went to sleep, but lauren really wanted to see the holocaust museum, and it was corina's last night in israel and she didnt want to spend it sleeping, so off we went. the driver we found to take us to the museum in new Jerusalem was kind enough to inform us (rather than taking advantage of our misinformation) that the museum would be closed by the time we arrived (it was almost 5 at this point), so, after thanking him for his general decency, we wandered the old city in search of other things to see. i read somewhere that the tower of david was cool, but, upon arrival, we discovered this to be closed as well... so we wandered some more. after a while we stumbled upon a tour group, so we followed them to the tomb of king david, which wasnt so special. it wasnt really even a tomb, just a gigantic stone coffin, a sepulcher, i suppose, draped with a very ornate cloth. then we climbed on some rooftops to watch the sun set, and then lauren set out to achieve her second goal for Jerusalem (the first being the holocaust museum); the grave of oscar schindler. following the trend of the evening, the cemetery was closed when we got there, but the wall was really easy to climb, so we sort of broke in. we didnt really break anything, though; the hill went almost to the top of the wall, and from there it was a short drop onto a (empty) guard's cabin, and he had left a ladder against the side of the building, so come on, they were pretty much inviting us inside. we found the grave and lauren left a rock on top of it, as tradition demands, and then back to the hostel.
we had finally connected with our israeli friends; remember muniir and sulafa from my first two weeks in cairo? they live in Jerusalem, and that night we met up with sulafa and smoked and talked and had tea. quite pleasant. and then back to that vegan restaurant, the village green, where we met muniir. not much to tell there, except that their cheesecake isnt as good as mine. then lauren and i, not having napped, went back to go to sleep. corina left for cairo, and the other two stayed out and eventually crashed at muniir's apartment.
we had signed up for a tour the next morning, thursday, so we met at some ridiculous hour and got in a van, complete with a tour guide, who took us first to qumran. at one time this was a monastery of sorts for ascetic kabbalists, but it is more famous for being the site of the caves wherein the dead sea scrolls were discovered. we couldnt go to the caves, unfortunately, due to time, so we just looked at the ruined jewish complex and moved on. the next stop was masada, a ruined fortress. the place is famous because the jews made their last stand against the romans there; the jews who began the great revolt in 70 which led directly to rome's destruction of the second temple fled the tenth legion and ended up atop this mountain. they entrenched themselves, and the romans, unable to scale the mountain (as lauren and i did) were forced into a three year seige. the only path up the mountain was known as the snake path; this is what lauren and i climbed, and it was challenging, even without armor and weapons, so i guess i understand why the jews chose the site for their last stand. unfortunately, rome employed some clever engineers, and the legion built a gigantic earth ramp on the far side of the mountain. using this, the legionaires (and tourists not adventurous enough for the snake path) achieved the summit. but the story holds a twist, because when the romans arrived at the top, they found only dead bodies. rather than surrendering into slavery, the jews had drawn lots. the ten "winners" were given the task of slaughtering their comrades, almost 1000 men, and then killing themselves.
the fortress itself was interesting, but ruins are ruins. much more worthwhile was the view; we could see huge expanses of desert, rock formations, random oases, and even the dead sea in the distance.
speaking of the dead sea, that was our next stop. the entire van unanimously voted for the free beach, which i found pretty reasonable, but the guide said that he had never been there before. apparently every other tourist group he had ever taken opted to pay to swim... im not sure why. the water was quite lovely, although it was super cold and i was shivering by the time i got out. floating was lots of fun, though. you can stand, or at least place your body vertically, and bob about chest level without treading water at all. you can lie on your back and put your hands and feet in the air and still stay above the water. the only catch is, if any water gets in your mouth, you will instantly cringe and maybe cry. its unbelievably salty, to the point of pain. speaking of pain **this story is for mature audiences only** luke pierced his penis thrice, plus both of his nipples, in tel aviv, only two days prior. they tell you not to get into the dead sea with any open cuts or scratches, and those stories arent exaggerated- he screamed a lot.
the salt caked on to the rocks, which was cool but also really pointy and painful. my feet were rather cut up by the time i got out. and there were a couple of people knocking salt off of the rocks and bagging it, i suppose for sale, but who knows, maybe dead sea residue makes good table salt. supposedly the mud is amazing and exfoliating, but we couldnt find any- the beach was all rock. we did, however, see a woman in a "burqini," which is a clever pun on berka and bikini. this is the incredibly modest, religiously appropriate swimwear for muslim women. it is basically a wetsuit with a skirt; google it.
the next stop was jericho. by this time we were all really exhausted and hungry, but apparently there is only one restaurant in jericho, and it isnt vegetarian friendly. so the four of us, plus one weird old guy who followed us around for a while, just climbed to the top of said restaurant and looked down on the remains of the oldest remaining city in the world. the ruins were pretty interesting for a couple of minutes, but no one wanted to explore, having been "ruined-out" for some days now. the tour group pretty quickly got back into the van, and we headed back to old Jerusalem. we drove up the mount of olives, which i had already done, but it was still nice since i got to see my favorite scene once more. last but not least, we went to dinner with sulafa and muniir again, this time to an ethiopian restaurant. the food was quite good, but the bread was quite gross. they brought out a tray draped in grey cloth, and on top of the cloth were several plates filled with corn and sauce. and then muniir broke off a piece of the cloth (grey, mind you; picture an elephant), dipped it in some sauce, and ate it. apparently it was bread. im not picky, though, and when in rome...
that was our last night. i wont detail too much our return since this tale is already quite long, but it does involve missing a bus. luke and chelsea stayed at muniir's again, but lauren and i stayed at the hostel with plans to meet them at the bus station for the 9 am bus. that didnt happen. but the next bus to eilat wasnt until two pm, which would put us there way too late to get back to cairo before shabbat (jewish sabbath, no technology allowed), so we went back to tel aviv and caught a bus from there. turns out, we still arrived too late to get back to cairo, so we stayed in an amazing little hostel. it wasnt really a building so much as a courtyard, but within the walls were three or four tiny little cabins. they were seriously like something a mall would put outside during Christmas for decoration, complete with reindeer on the roof. the next morning we got back to cairo.
and that is my israel story.
ill do the rest of egypt, plus romania, some other time.

so im in atlanta, but im going to finish writing about israel if it kills me. well, no, not if it kills me. but if its not too inconvenient to finish.

so.
we made it through egyptian customs and then got to the israeli border; they checked passports and then started examining luggage. i figured they were just looking for bombs, so i wasnt really paying attention when they started unpacking my bag. i did notice, though, when the girl, after trying to rip my Bible out of its case, set my Qur'an off to the side. i asked her if it was a problem for a student to bring a book into israel, and she was very reassuring, which was totally a lie. after a couple of minutes, some other girl called me over; she was holding my Qur'an and she asked why i had it. i explained, trying so unbelievably hard not to be sarcastic, that i was a student at auc and that i was studying the Qur'an, along with Islamic philosophy and arabic. this, apparently, is highly suspicious, so she started drilling me on the contents of my Qur'anic studies class. it was seriously like having a test in that class, only way more stupid and with no right answers. i told her about naskh and tafsir and tawil and abrogation and asbab al-nuzur, and she nodded right along but im pretty sure that she had as much an idea of what i was talking about as you do. satisfied that i was actually taking the class i claimed to be taking, she moved on to my other academics, including major and class at tech; she asked about my reasons for coming to egypt; she asked about my religion, and then got mad when i asked her why she needed to know; she asked why i was studying a religion that wasnt my own, and then got mad when i pointed out that only understanding your own religion is a pretty narrow-minded and selfish way to go through life; i explained about studying taoism and buddhism and Christianity, and she asked when i would begin my studies of Judaism and then got offended when i said i didnt know; i explained my desire to be a chaplain, which of course brought the military into the discussion, which wasnt particularly helpful. she asked about my family in the states, about where i was born, about where my parents were born, about where my grandparents were born, about all of their names. she asked who i knew in israel and about who i knew in cairo, and i told her that in cairo i knew muhammad and ahmad (two of the most common names in the world), and she didnt like that much either. she asked what i did in my spare time at school, and then got really ticked when i told her that wasnt any of her business, and then i had to bite my knuckles (literally) to keep from telling her that i host orgies and run a brothel in cairo. and this was all before she found out that i had been to lebanon. in a nutshell, israel doesnt like lebanon. so then she drilled me about my stay there and asked what i did, and i told her mostly i just got drunk in beirut, and then she asked if that was okay since that was a Muslim country, and i was like "have you ever been to beirut?" and she was like "you dont ask questions; i ask questions!" and i was like "i didnt mean any disrespect, i just meant that if you had been to beirut then you would know that its one of the biggest party cities in the world," and she was like "just answer the question!" so i was like "yes, its okay to drink in beirut, you stupid-face."
i didnt really call her a stupid face.
anyway.
eventually she decided that i wasnt a terrorist, so she let me in and i gave my passport to control to get a stamp. but then control saw my lebanese visa... and the fun started again. 75 minutes and two more interrogations, plus two background checks, later, the four of us walked into israel. we hopped a cab to the touristy town of eilat after picking up some russian vodka at the duty free store. we found a hostel, had some drinks, and went out to explore the town. unfortunately, it was pretty late friday night (that is, after sunset), so the Jewish sabbath, called shabot, had already started, meaning that pretty much everything was closed. lauren was tired so she went to sleep, and corina and marcus and i bought bread and hummus at the grocery store and ate in a parking lot, attracting lots of strange looks from the passing Jews who apparently thought we were acting quite suspiciously.
the next day, saturday, marcus left before i even got up. the girls and i eventually found our way to a cafe for breakfast slash lunch, and i texted luke so that we could meet up. we eventually found them, and they expressed stories similar to mine about the lebanese stamps, but they didnt have Qur'ans so they made it through much more quickly. (actually, as a side note, my entry didnt take so long at all; it was only a couple of hours which, when compared to the entry of my iranian and palistinian (sp?) friends is quite quick. and it was about a quarter of the time it took to get into syria.) the four of us shopped and wandered the corniche, and lauren and i did one of those flying bungee rides where you fall and yell a lot, and then we got on the 1930 bus to Jerusalem. i dont really capitalize city names, but i think that Jerusalem should be an exception. you might see why when i start to list all of the holy stuff that we saw. we arrived extremely late, found a hostel in the Muslim quarter, and slept.
on sunday, lauren and i got up early and found a post office so that she could get money, sent by her dad again via a different bank. she naturally forgot her passport, though, so we failed and went to meet the other three at the wailing wall. the spiritually inclined among us prayed there for a while, and i was blessed by a rabbi who then asked for a donation "for the Jewish people," which i interpreted as "for me" and thus refused, and then we walked up the ramp to the temple mount. this is the site of the temple, the big deal one that keeps getting destroyed in the Bible. its currently flat, which is why the place is rather controversial; some radical Jews want to take over the land, destroy the mosques there, and rebuild the temple for the third time. after walking over the mount, we came upon the dome of the rock. sadly we werent allowed inside (not Muslim, doncha know), but we circumnabulated and it was amazing. the ceiling is huge and glitteringly bright, and the walls are so intricately tiled that you discern a new and smaller pattern every few feet as you approach. i played soccer with a little Muslim boy in the courtyard and then made fun of a supremely white family in sparkly red santa hats who were taking their Christmas photo with the dome in the background. i considered throwing a rock, but they had small children so i decided not to.
the lauren and i went back to the post office and she got her money, which was fortunate because i was running low and israel is freaking expensive. (not really, its quite similar to the states, but compared to cairo it is exhorbitant.) then we went to the church of the holy sepulchre, again finding luke and chelsea and corina waiting. lauren and i went inside to see one of the stones from the tomb of Jesus (supposedly), and it was really moving to see supplicants crying and kissing the stone. the scene was only a tiny bit marred by corina, little heathen that she is, making fun of them in the background and telling me to hurry up. the church is gigantic and home to all sects of Christianity except the protestants and coptics (that is, catholics, orthodox, and ethiopian churches). we wandered and explored some beautiful chapels complete with huge mosaics, and then made our way to the sepulchur itself which contains (again supposedly) the stone on which Jesus actually died. even corina deemed it necessary to be respectful as i prayed, probably because there were several monks watching, and then we were herded out of the shrine because, as you can imagine, the line to get in was quite long.

now i have misplaced my notebook, so ill be going off of memory and lauren's pictures...

then we started to leave, but lauren got distracted by some chanting monks so corina and i went back in for her and the three of us followed the line of singers and incense up a little staircase into this unbelievably ornate chapel where we watched a service in latin. i read over the shoulder of a little nun, and i could understand a fair amount of the latin, which was kind of neat, but my pronunciation was atrocious, so i refrained from singing. we left the church and went to the via dolrosa, the road of sorrow (i think), which is, in case you arent aware, the road on which Jesus carried his cross on the way to golgotha. we walked it backwards to the garden of gethsemene, which still contains about a dozen unbelievably old and gnarled olive trees. the garden was closed, but that was nothing a little bribe to the doorman couldnt fix. we also saw the church of the agony, which contains the stone upon which Jesus prayed the night he was betrayed (supposedly). in the Bible, he sweated blood. but, like the rock in the church of the holy sepulchre, they sort of just picked a rock and decided it was holy.
after the church, we climbed the mount of olives and saw my personal favorite scene from the trip. we arrived at the overlook just as the evening call to prayer sounded in the muslim quarter, so we had an amazing view over old Jerusalem, with the dome of the rock only a few hundred yards away, while the call to Allah was resonating through the city. there are pictures, i guess, but they arent really representative.
then we walked (well, i ran because my shoes had no traction and it was unbelievably steep) down the mountain and back up the via dolrosa. we were tired of holy stuff by that time and just wanted to eat, so we started walking toward a promising restaurant found in the lonely planet called village green. it was a vegan restaurant, and it was amazing. it was a giant salad bar with everything that i had been missing in egypt, from tofu and stuffed peppers to quiche and roasted garlic. i ate a ridiculous amount, including one of the heads of garlic... lauren was mad at me about that for like three days. and then we walked the rest of the way to the bus station and got a ride to tel aviv. its only about a 30 minute ride, so we didnt get there terribly late, but we were all really tired so we found a hostel, checked in and crashed.
the next day we got up at a reasonable hour and headed out into the city. tel aviv is supposed to be a great party town, so i was only a little excited about it, but its on the med, and if you have been paying attention to anything i have written this trip then you know that i love the sea. we rented bikes and started riding around, but lauren was feeling sick so she went back to the hostel to sleep. luke and chelsea split off from us because corina isnt a very good bike rider, so thus formed the groups. corina and i rode down to the beach and along the corniche and then walked on some giant rocks right on the shore. we got splashed and watched kite surfers and talked about israeli occupation; quite a lovely day. we wandered over to the fountain of fire and water, i think thats what it was called, which is like the biggest tourist attraction in the new part of tel aviv. it wasnt particularly cool. then corina and i went back to check on lauren after stopping for food at a grocery store- even storebought hummus is amazing in israel. lauren was asleep, so corina and i just jacked some of her dvds and watched for the rest of the day. eventually luke and chelsea came around; they were moving to a cheaper hostel, so they got their stuff and left. i went running... and yeah, that wasnt the most interesting of days.
luke, chelsea, and corina were planning to go to helwan the next day, but lauren had missed tel aviv so i stayed with her. we left the hostel and started looking for a couple vegan places we found in lonely planet, but after wandering for like an hour in the rain and failing to find it we decided that lonely planet had screwed up; neither restaurant existed and we were quite damp. so we just picked a cafe, and i got a vegetable salad, which turned out to be the biggest pile of chopped cucumbers ever eaten by anyone. it was pouring ridiculously by the end of the meal, but that didnt stop us; we walked the corniche all the way up to the old section of the city, a place called jaffa which is filled with windy little alleys. by the time we got there the rain had let up, so we checked out some shops and bought a lot of fruit and then decided to go back to jerusalem instead of finding the others in helwan.
we got back to the hostel only to find that the others had decided the same thing, so we were all reunited in jerusalem. and i dont remember what happened after that- ill have to ask someone or find my notebook or both. anyway, this entry is already far too long.
oh, and i took about 600 pictures from various of my friends on facebook, mostly of israel and palestine. check them out.

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.