You Can't Make Mistakes.

I got an e-mail containing this link today:

On Being a Better Muslim

I will write more later, but this felt like I should report for family and friends Stateside.

A bomb went off in Khan al-Khalili a little over an hour ago. This is the big tourist souq in one of the older parts of the city.

What I last saw on al-Jazeera—there is no local news on the incident at this time—is that there is at least on French woman dead and a number of French and German tourists injured, along with a few Egyptians.

Here are some links to Reuters and AP coverage.

Two foreigners among four dead in Cairo blast: police (Reuters)

Blast in crowded Cairo tourist area wounds 18 (AP)

I’ll let you know anything more when I know it. But at present there is no need to worry. We’re doing just fine on the other side of the river from this. But we will keep our eyes open and avoid the touristy places for a while.

Sometimes things still surprise even me.

I was sitting on the balcony the other morning with Stacey having our tea, and suddenly she jumped up and screamed at the sound of a crash in the street. I stood up and looked on with her and saw that a mint green car had hit two guys on a scooter. They had jumped/fallen/been knocked clear of any injury, and were standing up, checking themselves to make sure that nothing was broken, rubbing bruised knees and elbows. The young woman in the car did not move but just raised her hands in exasperation and glared at them. They started shouting at her as another man stopped to help them extract the scooter from under her front bumper.

She got out of the car at this point, shouting at the two men that it was their fault and what did they think they were doing? They shouted back that she was crazy and needed to be careful what she was doing. The scooter’s seat had fallen completely off and there was a puddle of gas and oil leaking out of some newly disconnected hose or damaged casing. They pulled the scooter off to the side of the road as a police officer walked up from a nearby street-corner. She was already back in the car. Just as they had finished getting the scooter clear of the car, she tried to pull around them, honking her horn. The guy who had been driving the scooter shouted in anger and pounded the hood of her car with his fist shouting that she had to wait and take care of this.

Rather than doing that she honked her horn at him and when he and the other man refused to move she just drove forward a little as if to threaten. This had one of the guys incensed, and he raised his hands shouting at her. The police officer lit a cigarette and watched. By this time she was in the next “lane” over as she had been trying to squeeze over to get around them, refusing to take any responsibility for the accident at all. When the man further refused to budge, she just gunned the engine and hit him, sending him up onto her hood. He somehow managed to roll off to the side like a portly, middle-aged ninja and remained astonishingly uninjured as she sped away down the street at the full speed of her late-model luxury Citroen. The police officer threw his cigarette butt down with no regard for the puddle of gasoline in the street and sauntered away to his corner without a word.

The two guys managed to get most of the pieces of the scooter and limped it down the street while a bawwab on the street picked up a piece of the scooter which someone pointed out that they had missed. He looked down the street as if in an attempt to ascertain their distance so that he might run after them, then shrugged and chucked it over onto the sidewalk and shuffled back to his perch in the middle of the road.

We were both naïvely astonished, which quickly wore away. This is not the first time I have seen someone from the lower class here grossly mistreated by someone of the obviously privileged class, but it was such a perfect visual metaphor for the state of things here: a young girl in a new car runs over a man while an officer of the law looks on disinterested. The privileged exploit and abuse the disenfranchised while the state looks the other way. That is the reality of daily life here, and sometimes it seems like the winds of change are forecast a long way off.

Lord save us.

Egypt switched out of daylight savings time today. I didn’t know this until we were almost an hour early/late leaving for an appointment.

Oh, by the way, I’m back in Egypt now. Jeff and I arrived in Cairo this past weekend. Sorry about the lack of updates, but I’ve been jet-lagged to the point that I can’t seem to get out of bed before noon, if not 2 or 3. This does not make for very productive days. Regardless, I will write updates of this week’s adventures later.

Back to the daylight savings rules for Egypt.

Egypt goes to daylight savings time at 23:59:59 on the last Thursday in April when the clocks move forward to 01:00:00 on Friday morning, thus skipping an hour in the time-line. Egypt leaves daylight savings time on the last Thursday of September when the clock moves from 23:59:59 to 23:00:00 on the same day. Seems reasonable right?

This is, of course, unless the shift will occur during Ramadan. In years in which this is the case—2006, 2007, 2008—the time changes on the last Thursday before Ramadan. That was, of course, last night. So, I woke up this afternoon, thinking that I had gotten up terribly late, again. But this time I was rewarded with the new knowledge that I had managed to wake up a whole hour earlier than I thought I had.

You think you’re confused? Try being groggy in the afternoon in a hot apartment, blearily looking at your watch, mobile phone and laptop trying to figure out what time it is when none of them match. My watch had run down it’s wind from yesterday a bit, so it was off anyway—it winds itself when I walk, but I hadn’t done enough of that apparently. My mobile hadn’t shifted automatically, as it was supposed to. The laptop did, but offered no explanation.

I have never believed in Daylight Savings Time to begin with, and one day, when I have more power, I will require that my subjects adhere to whatever time is on my watch. Wait, that’s not very nice, is it? I just wish that humans had figured out that if they just shifted their daily patterns rather than shifting our whole time-system everything would run much better.

Indiana figured this out a while back. Part of the state doesn’t shift into DST in the summer. Why, you ask? Because if they shifted, then the chickens wouldn’t know what time to lay eggs, and the cows wouldn’t know what time to give milk.

Way to go Indiana. Good on you. Maybe the rest of the world will follow this shining example someday. We can only hope.

Here we come…

I just got word from the American University in Cairo that I was admitted to their graduate school today. So, it’s back to Cairo in a few months to do an MA in Arabic with a specialization in Islamic Studies.

Now I am just trying to revel in congratulating myself before beginning to panic about how much this is about to cost.

Then again, money isn’t everything. Not to mention the logistics of completely uprooting myself. This will be a little different than last time: I still had a sort-of home-base in the States last year. Now my home base will be my backpack.

Exploring the world, one taxi-ride at a time, I guess. Wish me luck.

Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the recent hiatus in posting. I have been a bit lazy and let-lagged this week. 10 in the evening in Kalamazoo feels like what I have been calling 5 in the morning for the past year. It has been as rough transition, but getting better every day. The best part about this, as I sit and write at 7:50am on a Saturday, is that my increasingly late wake up time in Cairo is nice and early here. I have reclaimed the best part of the day, and I usually have it all to myself.

It’s good to be back… at least for a while.

I suppose that this is why I left in the first place, after all. I could have stayed here in the States and written my thesis. I would have had access to a great many more resources—the university library, easy access to the internet, face time with professors, and much more—but I would have likely been bored stiff, trudged on, written, worked some shitty part-time job: you get the picture.

Had I stayed here for the last year, I would not be writing now about how much I enjoy the air, the trees, the cool 10°C mornings, Taco Bell, Miller Lite, American Chinese food, walking barefoot in the grass: so many things. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate these things before, it is just that I didn’t appreciate them that much. I won’t gush or wax poetic about the joy of mundane things, but I will say that living in a place where everything is difficult makes me appreciate living in a place where everything is easy.

It also makes cake out of those things which before seemed difficult: as in “piece of.”

Regardless of all of that, I am having a blast. It is also stunning to take note of the things that I have learned in the past year. For instance: I went to seen Iron Man last weekend. It was great. I love comic-book movies, I love movie theaters. I didn’t go to the cinema nearly enough while in Cairo. Something to think about for the future. The best part of the film, though, was not the popcorn and bucket of soda that I was endowed with upon stepping into the joint, but that the film had loads of Arabic in it: and I understood every word. Obviously, it wasn’t very sophisticated dialog—certainly no more than the dialog in the primary language of the film—but I got it. I didn’t even notice at first: then I realized that I wasn’t looking at the subtitles when I laughed at some little quip or joke. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased with myself.

Same thing when I noticed what an easy time I was having understanding Ayad—dear friend and former roommate—when he showed up late one night before leaving for Saudi Arabia for the summer. We could always talk before, but it is certainly easier now.

I continue to reflect thus as I sit here and wait for the installer to finish on my new low-energy, headless Linux server. A year ago, I didn’t know what a headless server was. In the past year in learning how to use Linux on my laptop for data analysis, I accidentally learned loads about how it works and how to use it. So, now, rather than just having a slab running Windows crap factory, I have a laptop running a scalable set of software which is tailored to my needs. I was particularly pleased when Jeff asked me to put Ubuntu on his laptop to replace the Windows Vista that it shipped with. It went from being a relatively slow, unresponsive, one-year-old system to being a blindingly fast, extensible, little mobile monster. He was/is very pleased by the improvement. He is still gushing about it, in fact.

But, to think, a year ago I attempted an install of Ubuntu on my old laptop—I have since upgraded in a very serious way—and ended up with a command-line laptop for a month. That was cool and all, but it must be noted that it is very difficult to browse the internet using the command-line terminal. Kind of fun though.

Incidentally, I just converted that laptop back into a command-line laptop, just for kicks.

All in all, though, this year was a complete success: I learned a great deal. Had I stayed home, I might not have. Or, I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself nearly as much while doing it.

Anyone else learn anything this year?

1 down, 2 to go

I am sitting here at London Heathrow waiting for my flight back to the States. There is no free internet in airports anymore, and since I figured that it would be nice to have access while I was in the airports today, I purchased some time on some hotspot service that will work Stateside as well.

And so, we have our first ever blog post from the airport. Nice.

Cairo was great this morning. It was nice to drive through the city just after dawn. There was no traffic and the city is really pretty at that time in the morning. I was also in a pretty decent mood because, for the first time in my life, I packed several days in advance—rather than several hours. That was a great idea. Usually I wait until about five minutes before I am supposed to leave to panic and jam stuff into cases. I have loads of books, though, that I am returning to the States with and I wanted to ensure in advance that they would all fit. They did, perfectly. I had two bags that were exactly the max weight limit. Sweet.

The flight this morning was alright. I got some sleep: a blessing since I didn’t sleep at all last night because I had to leave so early.

I had the misfortune of being seated in front of the two loudest and most boring wankers on the plane, though. They were a young Brit and a middle-aged American attempting to trump each other’s traveling stories. Boring. They were both the types who have sort-of been everywhere, but they have never drank local water anywhere. These are people who refuse to use squat toilets—unless there isn’t another one for a 100 miles; never eat vegetables or fruit—because they may have been washed in local water; make even their tea and coffee with bottled water—idiots; and generally follow all of the information they find in guide-books as gospel. I call them: misguided tourists, on account of the fact that they are perfect fodder for (mis)guided tour companies.

Oh yah, and the American was a proper racist, which is always nice. There was an Egyptian woman sitting next to who displayed the same wincing patterns as I did when this dude excreted such gems as: “Well, Arabs are generally easily excitable, sort of infantile, really” and “The best experience I had in London was riding the regular train early in the morning and seeing all of the street kids. It gave me a real sense of London and the culture.” I’m sure it did, buddy.

Thankfully after about an hour of saying these loud things for an hour or two, they both shut their mouths and slept, until the end, when it was right back into the swing. Unpleasant bastards. Thankfully they exist all over the world. I just don’t like being captive at 10,000m with them.

I was a little sad leaving Cairo this morning. It’s dirty, polluted, crazed, busy, sometimes scary—but fun. Everyone talks to everyone as well. I don’t get that at home so much. It was weird leaving the flat as well. It is like I am just going to be back there next week, a temporary thing. Which, really, is the case, since we are going back in the fall. It is starting to feel homey.

I woke up the other night from a nightmare that this has all be a weird dream. I was panicked to realize—in the dream—that I had fallen asleep while taxiing down the runway in Washington, DC and it was still last September. I am not sure it the panic came more from realizing that I had to do all of this over again and not wanting to, or that it would have meant that I wouldn’t be able to parse what was real and what was not about my experiences.

Thankfully, I then realized that I was dreaming, and woke myself up. Still, though, scary.

So, now here I am. Not a dream-me, not a hologram—at least I don’t think so: the jury is out on this theory still—real-John, John of the real-world, sitting in an airport, blogging.

And now real-John is a bit hungry, and would perhaps like a beer with his lunch. Ciao for now. See you tonight, America.

[Update: I just finished a vegetarian English breakfast—complete with FAKEN—and a Guinness. I have consumed neither meat-replacement technologies or Guinness for nearly 9 months. They tasted like ambrosia.]

But not for a pig.

I’m on my way to the souq today one last time before leaving the country for the summer. I used to hate going there, but that was before I discovered the real souq. Khan al-Khalili is the very tourist-oriented mess of tiny pyramids and sphinxes made of alabaster and various other trinkets and shiny things. The real souq is the whole area around it to the north and west.

It is excellent.

You can get anything there. Anything. My favorite is the spices market, though. I can’t take it very long before I start sneezing, but that goes for a lot of my favorite places in the city. It’s a dusty, smelly, glorious place.

There is a whole part devoted just to shoes. Another for clothing of various kinds. Fabrics. It seems sort of counter-intuitive that you would have a hundred shops selling the same things all in very close proximity, but for some reason it works. Shopkeeper monger and compete with each other. There is always a throng of people moving through the little streets and alleys like a river of humanity.

The best part is that there are no cars. There wouldn’t be any room for them. Everyone gets merchandise into the alleys on these little hand-carts. In a city with millions of people and millions of cars everywhere, it is not a surprise that a market thronged with people would be a relaxing alternative to a streets thronged with honking, noisy, smelly cars and trucks. Because of the lack of cars in the souq, the air is also a great deal cleaner, which is not even the case in most of the gardens in the city.

I never really go there intending to buy anything, but I always find something cool or interesting, or monstrously strange.

Today, though, I am actually looking for some things:

1. An Egyptian flag. Big, not too big.
2. A piece of jewelry from a baladi-dancing pro shop for a friend back home
3. Some prayer beads
4. And an inflatable baby

The inflatable babies are always out around the holidays. Today is Coptic Easter and this week was Shem al-Nasim as well, so I should be able to find one. They are these creepy, inflated, cartoon looking babies. Ghastly, but I have a friend who I haven’t bought a creepy, inflated object for a while, and he will be thrilled by this one.

Well, look at the sign, for starters.

I am often asked for directions. I am told that this is because “[I] look like [I] know where I am going”—I did an impromptu survey last week when asked where something was.

Now, as most of you know, I am a foreigner in Egypt. I should not know where I am. The streets are named things like “Mohie el-Din Abou el-Ezz” and Gameat al-Dowal al-Arabia,” and so forth, and they go off every which way, with no rhyme or reason. But, I am armed with a very useful tool: a map. Not just one map, a bunch of maps. I have loads of them. I buy every map I see in hopes that they will afford me a more complete picture of how the city is laid out.

This has caused me several problems.

First, before acquiring the maps, I navigated the city like everyone else: blind. Now, I actually feel obliged to answer when someone else asks me “How do I get to such-and-such place/street?” or the more common shouted demand from cabbies: “Fayn haaga? [Where is something?]” This holds doubly true, because not only do I know where stuff is usually, but I also know how to say where it is as well.

I don’t get to play ignorant that much anymore.

Second, when I am in a cab or driving with someone else, and they take us the terrifically long way, I am inclined to make a suggestion that we could/should/should have/could have gone a different way as well, and possibly saved ourselves some time—in some cases an hour. This is met with either: confusion, denial, indignation, ridicule, or—the worst—offense. It isn’t that I always know where I am or where I am going, either. But, I do almost always know what I am near, and how to get there. I’m just trying to help. Most of the time now, I just keep my mouth shut and see how things unfold.

It’s a neat skill to have in a city like this, but nearly useless unless you want to always want to be telling people where to go or pissing people off.

Other than the endless hours memorizing maps, I also often know where I am because there is a sign. Now, this is not the case everywhere, of course. There are parts of the city that have no signs. There are parts of Boolaq, very near to where I live, where the streets only have impromptu names because they are either too new, or no one has cared to name them yet.

But, in the vast majority of places where I am asked for directions, there tends to be a sign standing somewhere nearby indicating the information requested. The Metro is fantastic for exhibiting this phenomenon.

Inevitably, when you are descending the escalators in the Metro stations, someone will ask which way one or the other of the trains are. There are huge signs with this information in two languages all over the place. No one reads them, they just ask instead. Once on the train it is the same deal. There are line-route maps indicating the name and position of every stop in on that particular line above every door. Instead of looking to these for information, it is more customary to turn to the guy next to you and ask, then he will likely look at the sign, and relate his findings.

I know that much of this phenomenon has to do with relatively rampant illiteracy or partial literacy, but I can’t imagine that this is the only explanation. There must be more involved as well. It seems almost as though no one is sure of themselves to a high enough to degree to be happy with their choices as well. Maybe it is just a social thing—being sociable via feigned ignorance. Lord knows that American kids do that all the time, fearing perception as a nerd, geek, or know-it-all on account of knowing or understanding something. It’s probably all of the above. I don’t really care what behind it. It just cracks me up when someone looks at me and at the sign past me and asks, “Where am I?”

I had some great cabbies this week. Usually they can go one of two ways: 1) mean, and/or trying to get some more cash out of your because you are foreign, 2) really frigging funny. The latter were exemplified this week.

We had one guy completely cracking up. We were coming back pretty late from a pool match in Maadi, so the Metro was closed. We just grabbed a cab, asked Mohandessin, and off we went. Started chatting up the driver, who seemed pretty jocular and good-spirited anyway, and in no time we were cracking jokes with him talking about his kids. It was a blast. We over-paid in the end, but only because we had so much fun.

Today I grabbed a cab because I was running late—nearly a non-issue—and didn’t want to hassle with the Metro. It was a Yellow Cab, which are a bit more expensive, but sometimes cheaper.

I should probably explain that. See, when you get in a regular cab here—a black-and-white—the price is entirely variable. Depending on the traffic, the mood of the cabbie, your status as a noob or an expat in Egypt, whether it is Ramadan or not, etc. the price for the same cab-ride could be 3 LE or 10 LE, 10 LE or 20 LE. Like I said: variable. Completely.

The Yellow Cabs, though, have meters that work and are utilized. I am not sure how this is enforced, but it is. So, if I am going to Medinat Nasr or the airport—both lengthy rides—it is actually less expensive to take a metered cab and tip. This is doubly true to and from the airport.

Generally B&W cabbies want 50 to 75 LE to take you to and from the airport. A Yellow cab will cost approximately 33 LE, and you can leave a tip, and get all the way home if its a round trip for about the same price at the alternative. Much better.

For short journeys, the B&W’s are just fine. You also can’t usually find the Yellow Cabs, since they are a call service as well, but they hang out in packs on certain corners, and I know some of those corners.

Back to the story: I grabbed a Yellow Cab on the corner near my apartment. It was hot today too and I kind of wanted to sit in an air-conditioned car rather than the non-air-conditioned Metro or a B&W, which typically are free of such luxury. Plus, it is just nice to drive across the city sometimes. It is such a beautiful, strange and crazy place, which is very difficult to take in on the underground. At least, not in the same way, I suppose.

So, anyway, I’m in the cab, start talking to the driver. We’re laughing about the dumb thing that other people were doing—and have been doing—while driving recently. We talked about what has been going on in Egypt recently with the strikes and other madness.

I told him that I am leaving for the United States—that’s “Amreekah,” to you—next week and that I am pretty excited to see my homeland. He offered, no, insisted that I call him to take me to the airport.

My favorite thing today, though, was the conversation about his kids. See, small-talk in cabs goes like this:

1. “Where are you from?”
2. “What do you think of Egypt?”
3. “Here’s what I think of America, what do you think of America?” Politics
4. Religion
5. Family and children
6. Questioning of the politics of each others’ countries now that we’re friends
7. Exchanging of mobile numbers (optional)
8. “Great to meet you. Cheers. Bye.”

His son’s name is Abdel Rahman. But, he referred to him always as, “My little man, Abdel Rahman.” Of course, it didn’t rhyme in Arabic, but it was still really funny. He showed me pictures on his phone. Fantastic. I felt like I could be pretty honest with this guy, so when he asked me if I liked kids: “Not really,” I replied, “I am fearing them”

He laughed boisterously at this. I, in an attempt to defend myself as valid, could only say, “Seriously, they are like the small people. And they are always getting themselves into the danger.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing at my Arabic at this point—because we were really stretching the limits of my vocabulary—or at what I had said. This also led me to wonder if he understood that I was afraid of children or if he took it to mean that I feared midgets and dwarves—also sort of true, sorry Little People, more power to you—and therefore children as well, by extension.

He, after wiping the laughing tears out of his eyes, said that it was alright that children were always getting into trouble, because they were bl-blah-blah. I can only assume that the word I didn’t catch meant “kids bounce back easily” or “children are expendable and easily replaced.” Either would have made sense to me, in the given context. And that was that. He continued chuckling for a minute and the told me he was thrilled to have met me and he would see me on Tuesday and I got out of the cab.

It was great. The only time that I have ever had this much fun in cabs at home was the time that I got a cab in Chicago and the guy sang. I thought that it was just a cool thing that happened on the way to the airport, but apparently the guy is a legend. Finding that out made it less special.

All cab rides in Cairo are special in their own way. For that, I am thankful.