Photos from Cairo, Luxor, and Sinai Egypt and Granada, Spain
Friday, November 16, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Keeping Watch
When I went to Egypt, I gave my mom a geography lesson. Here's where Egypt is. No, I'm not close to Israel even though it's only half an inch away on the map. If I tell you I'm in Cairo, and something happens in Luxor, that means I Wasn't There.
But I can't blame her for worrying. Or my grandma for wearing out hte church floor praying for my safety. Or my Dad for freaking out at home because I took a taxi by myself in the middle of the day.
I think they are all overreacting a bit but I do understand and sympathize. For the most part, I let them off the hook. Now that I'm the one with friends far away, I'm guilty as well.
I Facebook stalk Marium in Karachi just in case. Jess' Word On Wales blog is bookmarked. I keep track of my friends to make myself feel better. I can't help them if for some reason they were to need me.
Perusing the headlines on Sunday, I saw that a man had been shot by the police in an incident of soccer violence in Italy. I took a deep breath, I thought my friend Marshall was in the area.
Odds are, if an American college student had been shot in Italy, I'd have heard about it already. But then again maybe not.
Marshall wasn't the headline. I talked to him today and remembered he was in Prague all weekend, nowhere close. My condolences to the family of the young Italian. May he rest in peace.
The real shock of the day came at 1 am after coming home from a night out. I don't know how I happened on the Facebook group "In Memory of Brian Volkerding" but I didn't want to see the page. Titles like that mean only one thing.
The only information provided was that Brian had died unexpectedly on October 27th at Ohio State University. His obituary was equally uninformative. Not that cause of death is relevant to the fact of death.
I hadn't talked to Brian in a couple years but I did know him. We played on an intramural coed soccer team for a year in high school. I remember him as quiet and funny, very nice.
I have no deep value judgments to make on these events. Simply the fact that people I know shouldn't be dying.
My magazine writing textbook had a chapter on leads and endings. For endings dealing with death it had this to say:
"Nothing more needs to be said. Nothing more should be said. End of a life; end of an article."
End of a blog.
But I can't blame her for worrying. Or my grandma for wearing out hte church floor praying for my safety. Or my Dad for freaking out at home because I took a taxi by myself in the middle of the day.
I think they are all overreacting a bit but I do understand and sympathize. For the most part, I let them off the hook. Now that I'm the one with friends far away, I'm guilty as well.
I Facebook stalk Marium in Karachi just in case. Jess' Word On Wales blog is bookmarked. I keep track of my friends to make myself feel better. I can't help them if for some reason they were to need me.
Perusing the headlines on Sunday, I saw that a man had been shot by the police in an incident of soccer violence in Italy. I took a deep breath, I thought my friend Marshall was in the area.
Odds are, if an American college student had been shot in Italy, I'd have heard about it already. But then again maybe not.
Marshall wasn't the headline. I talked to him today and remembered he was in Prague all weekend, nowhere close. My condolences to the family of the young Italian. May he rest in peace.
The real shock of the day came at 1 am after coming home from a night out. I don't know how I happened on the Facebook group "In Memory of Brian Volkerding" but I didn't want to see the page. Titles like that mean only one thing.
The only information provided was that Brian had died unexpectedly on October 27th at Ohio State University. His obituary was equally uninformative. Not that cause of death is relevant to the fact of death.
I hadn't talked to Brian in a couple years but I did know him. We played on an intramural coed soccer team for a year in high school. I remember him as quiet and funny, very nice.
I have no deep value judgments to make on these events. Simply the fact that people I know shouldn't be dying.
My magazine writing textbook had a chapter on leads and endings. For endings dealing with death it had this to say:
"Nothing more needs to be said. Nothing more should be said. End of a life; end of an article."
End of a blog.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Sangria Nights: Sleepless in Spain and Elsewhere
College is about three things: homework, fun, and sleep. But you can only choose two.
Traveling has made me an insomniac. Not simply because of jet lag, time changes, overnight flights and six hour layovers. I run myself ragged while abroad (and at home) because I just don’t want to miss anything.
I’m not sure that I ever saw the Cairenes sleep. Or even go to bed. They were always still out, at restaurants and ahwas, coffee houses, all over the city. Even children would be out until 2 or 3 in the morning playing soccer in the streets because it was so much cooler than during the day. My friend Gouda put it best – “nothing even starts until midnight.”
Spain represented for me a week-long true vacation. While Cairo was fun and exotic, I had gone there to work and study, not be a tourist, and there were responsibilities that I had to attend to. Spain had none of those.
I flew into Madrid, and met my friend Nick, who had been studying in Pamplona. My flight was two hours late leaving Amsterdam, which meant there was no way we’d be able to catch the bus tickets Nick had already purchased. Of course.
The plan was to take a week and see Andalusia, the southern region of Spain, visiting Seville, Granada, and Valencia, in that order, then jump back to Madrid for a night to catch our flights home the next morning. We only had a day or two in each city, so compromises needed to be made; sleep went first.
After arriving in Seville at 10:30 at night, we found our hostel, checked in, took showers, and promptly went out. We went to be around two, and got up at eight for a full day of sightseeing, walking around the whole city until dinnertime, about 8:30. Then we went back out.
The logic here is simple and deadly: we have to leave in the morning, and it’s a five-hour bus ride, so why sleep now? Sleep on the bus.
Brilliant.
In fairness to my traveling companion, I would like to make clear that we did significant amounts of sightseeing, and our exploits were in no way confined to the nightlife of Andalusia. We had a delicate balance. It was probably good we only kept it up for a week.
The quote at the top of this post is true in more arenas of life than school. It’s the rationalization I give to myself when I go see a 14th century Spanish palace over sleeping in. It’s also my justification for when I ate churros con chocolate and relaxed in the park instead of going to a museum.
Generally, my go-to sacrifice is sleep, the theory being I can sleep all I want when I’m dead. However what I have learned from this summer and fall is that not seeing one more famous painting will ultimately pale in comparison to the night smoking shisha and drinking Turkish coffee with my friends. People too, can be missed just as fiercely as places, and I have come to rely and value the relationships I have forged much more that I appreciated visiting the Sphinx.
The solution: sleep on the bus while planning the next adventure.
Traveling has made me an insomniac. Not simply because of jet lag, time changes, overnight flights and six hour layovers. I run myself ragged while abroad (and at home) because I just don’t want to miss anything.
I’m not sure that I ever saw the Cairenes sleep. Or even go to bed. They were always still out, at restaurants and ahwas, coffee houses, all over the city. Even children would be out until 2 or 3 in the morning playing soccer in the streets because it was so much cooler than during the day. My friend Gouda put it best – “nothing even starts until midnight.”
Spain represented for me a week-long true vacation. While Cairo was fun and exotic, I had gone there to work and study, not be a tourist, and there were responsibilities that I had to attend to. Spain had none of those.
I flew into Madrid, and met my friend Nick, who had been studying in Pamplona. My flight was two hours late leaving Amsterdam, which meant there was no way we’d be able to catch the bus tickets Nick had already purchased. Of course.
The plan was to take a week and see Andalusia, the southern region of Spain, visiting Seville, Granada, and Valencia, in that order, then jump back to Madrid for a night to catch our flights home the next morning. We only had a day or two in each city, so compromises needed to be made; sleep went first.
After arriving in Seville at 10:30 at night, we found our hostel, checked in, took showers, and promptly went out. We went to be around two, and got up at eight for a full day of sightseeing, walking around the whole city until dinnertime, about 8:30. Then we went back out.
The logic here is simple and deadly: we have to leave in the morning, and it’s a five-hour bus ride, so why sleep now? Sleep on the bus.
Brilliant.
In fairness to my traveling companion, I would like to make clear that we did significant amounts of sightseeing, and our exploits were in no way confined to the nightlife of Andalusia. We had a delicate balance. It was probably good we only kept it up for a week.
The quote at the top of this post is true in more arenas of life than school. It’s the rationalization I give to myself when I go see a 14th century Spanish palace over sleeping in. It’s also my justification for when I ate churros con chocolate and relaxed in the park instead of going to a museum.
Generally, my go-to sacrifice is sleep, the theory being I can sleep all I want when I’m dead. However what I have learned from this summer and fall is that not seeing one more famous painting will ultimately pale in comparison to the night smoking shisha and drinking Turkish coffee with my friends. People too, can be missed just as fiercely as places, and I have come to rely and value the relationships I have forged much more that I appreciated visiting the Sphinx.
The solution: sleep on the bus while planning the next adventure.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Bokra, In-sha-allah
In the grand tradition of the Egyptians, where everything is "tomorrow, god-willing" my complete blog post will be up tomorrow. I felt it appropriate to channel the procrastinating spirit of foreign lands because that legitimizes my own slacking, and it ties in (loosely) with my blog subject.
Two things prevented my lack of a well-developed essay for today: I haven't been particularly inspired this week, and more immediately, I was caught up with a friend. He and I were chatting about culture and foreign travel (again a relevant tangent) and I made a value judgment to focus for the afternoon to focus on the person rather than the computer.
Check back tomorrow, there will be a more comprehensively written commentary on life and wandering.
Two things prevented my lack of a well-developed essay for today: I haven't been particularly inspired this week, and more immediately, I was caught up with a friend. He and I were chatting about culture and foreign travel (again a relevant tangent) and I made a value judgment to focus for the afternoon to focus on the person rather than the computer.
Check back tomorrow, there will be a more comprehensively written commentary on life and wandering.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Short Fuse? Fly to Africa. . .or make an omlet
I am the second-most patient person in my immediate family. I am outdone in that department by my mom, who, with a large amount of grace and dignity, is almost always able to keep a level head. And when I've been on the wrong side of her finally losing it, I deserve it.
But in terms of length of fuse on my temper, I generally do pretty well. Patience, however, is something I'm constantly trying to acquire and keep. So far, I've found two tried and tested ways of doing so: living in Egypt, and cooking.
Living and studying in Egypt taught me more things than I have fully realized. The experience put me under significant amounts of stress for a prolonged period of time. When I came home, I rightly judged that pretty much nothing could phase me. I had already gone through the same headache, frustration or annoyance, and it was probably worse. Actually, there's no debate that it wasn't worse. Anything is worse when you add in a nearly impregnable language barrier, hundred-degree heat and long sleeves and pants, and layers of bureaucracy and ineptitude.
For an anal-retentive control-freak perfectionist like me, there's not too much that's more horrible than being in an environment where next to nothing is under your power. Conversely, it's also downright awesome. If I'm stuck in a taxi and a million-car traffic jam half an hour away from the place I'm supposed to be at in fifteen minutes, well, too damn bad. I might as well relax, enjoy the minute to myself and read my book, which I brought expressly for this contingency. Sure I'd like to get to my interview on time, but the person I'm meeting will be late and I'll have been misinformed as to the practice time by the coach anyway and will then spend another hour sitting around until I can get to work. (Yes this is exactly what happened.)
So I quit worrying. My mom has told me hundreds of times not to worry about what I can't change, but it finally sunk in. That's been happening to me a lot lately, and I feel it's fair to call her with my tail between my legs when it happens and let her know she was right.
Cooking also works wonders for both my sanity and my stress level. There's also the added bonus of getting to eat. The laws of physics apply in my kitchen: it takes me 15 minutes to boil water (for grits or pasta) and scrambled eggs just need time.
You have to let the pancakes cook before you flip them, and no amount of cursing or checking with the spatula will speed up this process. What it will do is drive me nuts and ruin what was previously on track to be a perfect flapjack, but is now maimed and deformed.
Therefore, I tell myself to wait, and just let the scrambled eggs cook, the onions sautee, and the oil get nice and hot before I throw the popcorn in. Not quite as grueling a strategy as flying halfway around the world for self-betterment, but cheaper.
As my arab-imposed self-restraint starts to ebb away, I force myself to remember what I've learned as I fight the urge to eviscerate random passers-by when they do something stupid. And then I go home, and in the piece de resistance, check my email while I watch the pot.
But in terms of length of fuse on my temper, I generally do pretty well. Patience, however, is something I'm constantly trying to acquire and keep. So far, I've found two tried and tested ways of doing so: living in Egypt, and cooking.
Living and studying in Egypt taught me more things than I have fully realized. The experience put me under significant amounts of stress for a prolonged period of time. When I came home, I rightly judged that pretty much nothing could phase me. I had already gone through the same headache, frustration or annoyance, and it was probably worse. Actually, there's no debate that it wasn't worse. Anything is worse when you add in a nearly impregnable language barrier, hundred-degree heat and long sleeves and pants, and layers of bureaucracy and ineptitude.
For an anal-retentive control-freak perfectionist like me, there's not too much that's more horrible than being in an environment where next to nothing is under your power. Conversely, it's also downright awesome. If I'm stuck in a taxi and a million-car traffic jam half an hour away from the place I'm supposed to be at in fifteen minutes, well, too damn bad. I might as well relax, enjoy the minute to myself and read my book, which I brought expressly for this contingency. Sure I'd like to get to my interview on time, but the person I'm meeting will be late and I'll have been misinformed as to the practice time by the coach anyway and will then spend another hour sitting around until I can get to work. (Yes this is exactly what happened.)
So I quit worrying. My mom has told me hundreds of times not to worry about what I can't change, but it finally sunk in. That's been happening to me a lot lately, and I feel it's fair to call her with my tail between my legs when it happens and let her know she was right.
Cooking also works wonders for both my sanity and my stress level. There's also the added bonus of getting to eat. The laws of physics apply in my kitchen: it takes me 15 minutes to boil water (for grits or pasta) and scrambled eggs just need time.
You have to let the pancakes cook before you flip them, and no amount of cursing or checking with the spatula will speed up this process. What it will do is drive me nuts and ruin what was previously on track to be a perfect flapjack, but is now maimed and deformed.
Therefore, I tell myself to wait, and just let the scrambled eggs cook, the onions sautee, and the oil get nice and hot before I throw the popcorn in. Not quite as grueling a strategy as flying halfway around the world for self-betterment, but cheaper.
As my arab-imposed self-restraint starts to ebb away, I force myself to remember what I've learned as I fight the urge to eviscerate random passers-by when they do something stupid. And then I go home, and in the piece de resistance, check my email while I watch the pot.
Friday, October 26, 2007
An Athens County Almanac
Environmental Literature was a way to skip out on taking a science class my senior year in high school. It was the slacker option for seniors, frequented by those lacking the grades or the motivation to take something more difficult. However, it was while reading Aldo Leopold, Ed Abbey and Annie Dillard that I realized how important my environment and sense of place is to me.
And I have destroyed it.
Not in the sense of global warming or deforestation, or any of the other pressing problems that need to be dealt with by the world community. No, I destroyed my sense of place through work, college, and travel, and in the process became, in a way, homeless.
A nomad is someone who “wanders from place to place” according to the dictionary; a person who is lacking a permanent home.
I live in a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. My lease will be up in June, when I’ll move into a three-bedroom house with the same two roommates. Our lease will again expire the next June as we graduate college and are thrown our different ways into the world.
My house in Dayton, where my family lives, is no longer my home. It hasn’t been since I left there in September of 2005 and moved into the dorms for the first time. It wasn’t simply that my parents knocked out the wall of my room and combined it with my younger sister’s, leaving me the guest bedroom in the basement, it was the awful foreboding sense that as soon as I walked out that door with my stuff packed, I would never be coming home in the same way again.
This summer, I spent two months living and working in Cairo, Egypt. It too, was a temporary home, one that I learned to love and hate as is common to every place. And then I left, to come back to the United States, back to Dayton, back to school.
And even now, when I am relatively settled, my work life and school life keeps me away from my apartment more hours than I am there. So it feels more like a convenient place to crash than a home.
I have heard from many people that Junior year of college is stressful, difficult, and hard. They haven’t being lying – more than once I’ve wanted to drop out of school and start working, if just for a change of pace. As a good friend of mine put it, by this point we’ve gotten good at school. We know how to handle the classes, how to study, how to write papers, how to procrastinate. Our classes may be hard, but school is no longer hard. In essence, we’re ready for a different kind of challenge.
The bottom line is that right now I don’t fit in. I’m happy to be back, but am also looking ahead to the next trip I’m planning. I hear my friends talk about graduation and jobs and the next step in their lives. And when I do I inwardly curse the extra year I have to flounder and feel frustrated.
The contemporary Bedouin of the Sinai bemoan the loss of their nomadic ways, having to settle in order to make lives for themselves and their families. I feel for them, because at the end of the day, after I work and I study and I sit down, there’s still something left. I’m still just restless.
And I have destroyed it.
Not in the sense of global warming or deforestation, or any of the other pressing problems that need to be dealt with by the world community. No, I destroyed my sense of place through work, college, and travel, and in the process became, in a way, homeless.
A nomad is someone who “wanders from place to place” according to the dictionary; a person who is lacking a permanent home.
I live in a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. My lease will be up in June, when I’ll move into a three-bedroom house with the same two roommates. Our lease will again expire the next June as we graduate college and are thrown our different ways into the world.
My house in Dayton, where my family lives, is no longer my home. It hasn’t been since I left there in September of 2005 and moved into the dorms for the first time. It wasn’t simply that my parents knocked out the wall of my room and combined it with my younger sister’s, leaving me the guest bedroom in the basement, it was the awful foreboding sense that as soon as I walked out that door with my stuff packed, I would never be coming home in the same way again.
This summer, I spent two months living and working in Cairo, Egypt. It too, was a temporary home, one that I learned to love and hate as is common to every place. And then I left, to come back to the United States, back to Dayton, back to school.
And even now, when I am relatively settled, my work life and school life keeps me away from my apartment more hours than I am there. So it feels more like a convenient place to crash than a home.
I have heard from many people that Junior year of college is stressful, difficult, and hard. They haven’t being lying – more than once I’ve wanted to drop out of school and start working, if just for a change of pace. As a good friend of mine put it, by this point we’ve gotten good at school. We know how to handle the classes, how to study, how to write papers, how to procrastinate. Our classes may be hard, but school is no longer hard. In essence, we’re ready for a different kind of challenge.
The bottom line is that right now I don’t fit in. I’m happy to be back, but am also looking ahead to the next trip I’m planning. I hear my friends talk about graduation and jobs and the next step in their lives. And when I do I inwardly curse the extra year I have to flounder and feel frustrated.
The contemporary Bedouin of the Sinai bemoan the loss of their nomadic ways, having to settle in order to make lives for themselves and their families. I feel for them, because at the end of the day, after I work and I study and I sit down, there’s still something left. I’m still just restless.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Some world Graffiti
"The old jokes are still the best
Who is playing with our children? by El Nino de las Pinturas
El Nino's House, covered in graf and street art
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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