i write to lafff: you and me = egypt 2005. you be the dj and i'll be the mc.
i write to jonathan: andreas and noah and i are thinking of taking a trip down to granada and then morrocco... ! i am wowed by the idea -- i had wanted to see granada but figured i'd end up doing it by my lonesome. but some great aussi girls we met at the hostel are down in morrocco and have sent word that there is an electronic music festival just outside of fez this upcoming weekend.
i need to write all about the mosques ( will everyone i know and hold dear please get themselves promptly to a mosque? they are wonderful and serene ) and the pyramids, the one museum, the taxi rides to raves outside of cairo, the two-story housewarming party, the accident on the way to the airport (don't worry, not mine)... but i must go eat tapas now. i am in spain again you know... i like it's streets even though it is grey and rainy. more later, more later. i bought a lot of time on this computer, so we will get to be good friends.
evrim writes: Yes is what my sweetheart said before I ate it.
okay, i've seen the pyramids and climbed inside them, and gone through the entire egyptian museum and taken pictures for you... i will write about it all but right now:
my stupid email has not been working. you maybe have been sending me things and i have not been getting them because the mailbox was full... even though i emptied it several times...
so please try contact again. i need it. i hope this has not made everything much more difficult than it should be... oh good gracious me.
In Dahab I showered in salt water. Here in Cairo I sleep with a palm tree at my feet.
I went walking yesterday, supposedly to a destination -- the egyptian contemporary art museum -- but once I found it I realized I had no interest in actually going in. Because, you know, I like walking and looking and seeing the best. So I bypassed it; it and the guy who was tentatively following my, trying to decide if I was a tourist to approach. But I was covered and quiet and it was great to see him disappear as soon as I walked past the museum with no hesitation.
I strode towards the market streets Harold had told me about. It was two o'clock and they were stuffed full of little students getting out of school and their mothers come to pick them up and the men selling them all things like candy and fruit. I was too tired and intimated to give a go at buying the lot of groceries I needed, so just looped around the crowded mess, heading home for whatever food I found and a rest. Three hours of walking walking walking.
At seven Reema showed up, out of class, and we ventured out together to the now desolate streets to buy whatever remained of the vegetables that existed there before. Bidigan, cosa, tamatim, khas -- eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce. The lettuce I salvaged from the concrete block there at the intersection illicted a confused look from Reema, but I said ateeni wahad anyway -- give me one. A kilo of strawberries, two bottles of water, a box of milk, and six cups of yogurt for poor sick Harold and we are on our way home where I will make the biggest lasagne ever, unbeknownest to me.
Eleven people show up, filtering through the apartment, while I work in the kitchen. The lettuce reviving in a bowl of cold water, the strawberries washed, the fresh tomato sauce cooking. Felix stirs the lasagne noodles and we add layer after layer to the lone enormous aluminum pan -- a party platter really -- that I could find at the Metro grocery store at the night before. It turns out to actually be a bit bigger than the oven, so we must bend the end up and tape the door shut. I serve salad to appease them while we wait, and it is so nice... everyone wows over the size and the taste, everyone is happy, I have made everyone happy, I am so happy about that. I feel well-deserved and worthwhile. Everyone is stuffed and amazed. They drift away, to study, to sleep and I climb up to my lovely room and my sturdy bed underneath warm wool blankets, put on my headphones and think about this being my favorite day, my favorite things, a good good life.
* * * * * * * * *
I am supposed to now go to the Egyptian Museum. It is bright pink and almost right around the corner from AUC. It is a big tourist attraction -- Tutankhamun's gold head, statues and mummies... you know. But all I really want to do is look up spanish language programs, or American University graduate programs, or ways to work that entail travel. Ugh. I will do both... appease myself and everyone else who always ask what it is I did today and always look kinda puzzled when I describe a little life. But, listen, of course I will go to the pyramids. I will go with Reema on Thursday. And Friday to all that stuff I talked about before, mosques and markets. And even finally Alexandria on Saturday and Sunday... and I will leave Egypt very early on Monday morning.
i'm so happy that a million billion people marched for peace just about everywhere around the world. it makes me feel better, feel safe. it makes me remember everyone on my side.
ohh, have i not written you? don't i owe you an email? i'm sorry... i'm sitting in here for hours watching the sun shine outside trying to get through everything... i will get to you.
Haha. So I am in Cairo. I am here in the American University of Cairo computer lab, looking out at the Midan al-Tahrir traffic, the black and green army trucks that always sit there full of silent soldiers, the Nile Hilton obscuring the view of the actual Nile. I hang out with all the AUC kids and read my Egypt guide, trying to get up the nerve to go to the Egyptian Musuem where nothing is labeled and there are so many artifacts that if you spend only a minute in front of each one, it will take you nine months to see everything.
I have seen nothing yet in Cairo. No pyramids, no mosques. No Coptic or Islamic quarter. It is weird trying to work up the excitement to see sites, especially since it seems I must go do it alone while everyone diligently studies. I'm so out of practice at this tourism thing -- all I really want to do is buy a phone card, help my little sister cope and suceed, and fix the washing machine at Ali's.
I am staying there with those four boys in Garden City -- Ali, Felix, Harold, and Justin. They are all gentlemen and I plan to make them lasagne tomorrow night as a reward. It was sitting there in the sun on their balcony yesterday morning that finally made me like Cairo. To be there alone, taking pictures of pretty things far above the city... it was the distance I needed to get accustomed to it all. Otherwise, it is all barely breathable air, honking cars all the time, trash -- piles and piles of trash -- everywhere, everything yellow and brown and loud, accompanied by mean looks from men you are trying to ignore, not to mention the occasional groping while in crowds on the street, and the heavily armed guards on just about every corner.
But I am getting it. I am getting the hang of this massive city by dwindling down its size by the habits I fall into. They involve the two apartments in Garden City, the walk from there to the AUC campus, the cab ride to Zamalek where Reema lives in the dorms aka the AUC Hostel, the walk from there to 26th of July Street for dinner. I've got plans to expand though -- I will hit Khan el Khalili, the main market, at some point to get a scarf so I can cover and go into mosques like the al-Azhar, which also happens to be the oldest existing university in the world. I will take a felucca down the Nile in the middle of this city to watch the sunset. I will somehow find the Citadel and the mosque of al-Hakim, which was never actually used as a mosque but rather a prison, a stable, a warehouse, a school, and a madhouse... which wow I should tell you a bit about Hakim right now:
Al-Hakim was only 11 years old when his father died and he became the third Fatimid ruler of Egypt. His tutor nicknamed him 'Little Lizard' because of his frightening looks and behaviour. Hakim later had him murdered. During his 24-year reign those closest to him were in constant fear of their lives. A victorious general rushing unannounced into the royal apartments was confronted by a bloodied Hakim standing over a disemboweled page boy. The general was beheaded.
Hakim would patrol the city's streets on a donkey called Moon and receive petitions and complaints from the city folk. He punished dishonest merchants by having them sodomised by a large black servant who accompanied him for this purpose. His death was as bizarre as his life. On one of his solitary nocturnal jaunts on Moon up onto the Muqattam Hills, Hakim disappeared and his body was never found. To one of his followers, a man called Al-Darizy, this was proof of Hakim's divine nature. Al-Darizy travelled widely preaching and founded the sect of the Druze that continues to this day.
Dahab is for diving, but it is a bit too cold for that and we don't know how to do it anyway. Still, it is very hard for me to resist putting on my bathing suit and jumping into the Gulf of Aqaba. But I do and instead Reema and I walk up and down this town, along the two streets and the beach front. We eat luxorious food and talk with the egyptian boys who want nothing more than to flatter you and get you to eat at their restaurant / buy their perfume, clothing, jewelry, etc. We run into friend after friend after friend, and we play backgammon and drink tea and beer with them, lounging around underneath palm trees that are too lazy to rise up fully out of the sand, but instead rest their long trunks on the ground and reach for the sky from there. It is nice to have such a break; it is the most vacation I have ever had -- it is good preparation for the return to big bad Cairo. Jonathan Arp, we will come back here and dive down the deep Blue Hole, ay?
We begin the walk down, all maybe one hundred of us, and it is really something to see what we passed in the night now lit up in the morning light. I've got to, um, just post those pictures. We are descending down the 3750 Steps of Repentence and even going downhill makes me want to confess and be forgiven. There is a West Point priest in his robes and backpack leading his pack of camoflaged soldiers down, there is the arab woman weirdly wearing pink puppy dog slippers down accompanied by her four full-grown and singing-the-whole-way sons. We pass the shrine to St. Katherine which is locked up like all the churches on the mount, but I climb up on stones to peak inside at what happens to be only plastic buckets full of plastic bottles.
We reach the bottom at 9am, take a taxi to Dahab, and by half past noon Reema and I are resting in a restaurant right on the beach, with the waves five feet away, in Dahab.
The mountain is full of people. Empty when we arrived, at some point during the night -- actually probably the early morning -- they hiked up and took over. This combined with my cold uncomfortable sleep puts me in a foul mood, but I finally venture out the kiosk and down the very narrow stairway between the old stone churches built on the peak to the overlook not everyone has found yet. My folks are there, all of us still bundled up in blankets. Ali and Felix picturesquely drink the last of the wine while standing on the stone wall in front of the horizon where very slowly the faintest rainbow of the thinnest pastels is spreading across the sky.
Tourists, other tourists (mustn't forget we are tourists too, ay?) find our spot and crowd in, and suddenly the morning changes from watching the sun rise with my new friends and dear sister to sitting isolated and alone while watching people from everywhere shout to one another and take pictures. An arab boy wears a red and green parka that proclaims on the back Legendary Power, an ad for a company that makes king-sized products. His friend is lieing down at his feet, this guy with his head against the wall, in the middle/in the way of everything, completely uninterested in seeing the sun. A japanese man with a big camera around his neck, making the peace sign with his fingers, a korean woman shouting hallujah over and over again, both of them shouting at their friends to take pictures, both of them with their backs to the rising sun, their bodies obscuring it.
It is pretty and all... no, really, it is amazing... it is just takes ignoring everyone else to appreciate it, and it is hard to ignore such a spectacle when you are tired and cold and not a christian.
It is dark, the wind is strong, and the pathway narrow. I am frightened with exhaustion and am thankful that Ali and Felix are gentlemen who will wait for struggling girls. The steep stairs to the peak take half an hour to climb and are the most difficult, most tenuous leg of the journey. I feel for the rocks with my hands in the dark and have no qualms about going as slow as I need to. This is scary, this is the closest I get to a spiritual experience up there -- fear.
At the top the wind is amazing, the cold impeccable. We pause to take in the accomplishment, the massive view even in the night, and then we huddle into the kiosk at the very top of the mountain, rent warm and filthy camel blankets and buy hot chocolate for all from the small good-humor bedouin man inside. A red wheel of cheese, fig jam, peanut, and bread comprise our brief but somehow incredibly delicious dinner, and then we all somehow settle into sleep in the tiny shack, except for Felix who sneaks out with the bottle of wine. It is 9pm. I curl up next to Reema but she curls up next to Mustafa. We sleep until half past four.
As we round the road toward's St. Katherine's, I say: It is really something to be walking on the same asphalt that Moses once did. We are all wearing many layers of clothes -- I am wearing practically all the clothes I have -- because we have been told assured warned that the mountain is cold. The idea is to catch both the sunset and the sunrise, which seems be an unusual plan as the camel path (the more gradual and thus easier climb up) is desolate. But the sun is unseen anyway and within half an hour our way is lit by only moonlight that amazes us with its strength... not even a full moon and casting shadows all the way.
We shed layers and tie them around our waists. We tell jokes about elephants. We stop and share fruit, bread, water, and chocolate. When we get to what we feel must be over half way there, we stop at the first open bedouin kiosk along the way -- there are a lot of these things, these shacks with coated in carpets and occupied by one lone man who will sell you expensive candy and beverages. We girls get hot chocolate and there is some picture taking and then we begin again. We promptly turn the wrong way, descending towards the rings of light we see underneath towering cypress trees. There, the guys all from Oklahoma point out the right path -- back up the mountain -- and on the way up our group tries to figure out who exactly suggested that a path going downhill would lead us to the top. We become briefly lost again, confused by forks along the way, but I squint and spot the right way -- my lone contribution is usefulness that night -- and we ascend past invisible giggling people towards the last 700 steps.
The bus ride through the Sinai is long and dark like a tunnel. There are mostly men and tourists on the SuperJet, all of us trying to sleep between the three ID checks and two loud movies along the way. The first movie was an arabic comedy, fairly stupid, but the beginning is worth noting: red credits roll as the camera follows an ambulance through streets and alleys to a hospital where an unconscious couple is unloaded, each on their own dolley, each wearing a t-shirt with a large ironed-on photo of the other one across their chest. That is love. Love and injury. I awoke only briefly during the second movie, which impressed me in how quickly and effectively it was able to lend itself to the surreal state of flux and travel I was in. Black and white images of outerspace were being projected while a narrator said There is not one universe, there is a multiverse.
We arrive in Sharm el Sheik just a little past dawn. Mustafa, Ali, Felix, Adeela, and Shyra meet us there and we all catch the 7am bus to Dahab at 8am. One more hour and one more passport check later we get to Dahab, or at least "Dahab City" which consists of a bus station, a bank, and a crummy "supermarket" where we bargin for a minibus (a taxi minivan) to take us all to St. Katherine's Monastery which lies at the foot of Mount Sinai. Two hours later -- Reema and I have been on buses now for 12 hours -- we are dropped off in the small gravel parking lot leading up to the monastery. An expensive mundane meal is eaten at the first place we find, we walk back to the Fox in the Desert camp we'd passed earlier, and rest until 5pm when we begin the ascent.
Al Qahira is the real name of Cairo and I am sitting here in Garden City in the emptied out apartment of four boys I do not know. They, along with the lot of western students studying here, have gone to Sharm el Sheik in the Sinai Penisula for the holiday. It is Eid here and everyone is breaking their fast and closing their shops, so Reema and I wander around looking for an open place to eat falafel, um... I mean tammiyya... and french fries after spending the night here by ourselves.
She and Samir the Egyptian and Mustafa from Pakistan were there to meet me at the airport that is just like the airport in Havana. They immediately took me to meet drink milky tea with Samir's mom, and when we were walking through the narrow alley up into the apartment, two men were dragging a big angry wooly sheep with a long brown face by its big curly horns out the other way to be butchered for the holiday. There were sheep all over the place last night, drapped over men's shoulders, roaming around manicured city parks, penned in under overpasses... and cows in the backs of cars, swaying. We drove around, poor hungry Samir drove around for hours looking for a certain open place to eat, and finally settled for Maison Thomas' for pizza, good pizza, that we ate over a conversation involving cancer and organic chemistry. Afterwards in the car on the way to Reema's huge hotel-like dorm, Mustafa listened to a song by the Beegees quite loudly and repeatedly that goes I don't wanna be alone... We drove past the Marriott that used to be a palace, and I looked at the big lit-up dinner ships sitting in the still Nile.
The apartment has two floors and is on the eighth floor of a building with a broken elevator. A lot of the time the water does not work and if you wash clothes in the machine here, they tend to come out all red. Each boy has a room and each wall has taped to it a good map of somewhere in the Middle East and a torn-out magazine photo of some near naked woman(s). Which makes me smile and think oh boys while I sit eating their apricot preserves, and I make good use of the maps anyway.
Today, though it is my first whole day in Cairo, is being spent mainly inside with Reema finally writing her essay for to get into her preferred major. Which is a-okay with me because I like to hang out and sleep and be comfortable and stand on the high-above-everything-else balcony in the sunshine watching not watching people. This evening we will take a night bus to Sharm. We will arrive early in the morning and sneak into the hotel everyone else is in and climb Mount Sinai that night in the full moon. You remember Mount Sinai, right? Where Moses got the ten commandents from the big guy in the sky... I hear you can buy candy bars on the way up. I'm looking forward to it.
last night i bought the bottle of wine, the loaf of bread and stuck them in my bag while i wandered around intentionally getting lost and eating my porros... fresh hot long sticks of donuts that sit in a pile of spiral in a large metal bowl in the stand by the supermarket -- you order four for one euro like amanda showed me and the woman who is always supremely unimpressed by you takes out her scissors and clips them off mercilessly, asks if you want sucre and you say, of course, mucho. mucho mucho, por favor. por supuesto.
after being alone enough finally i made my way home and promptly opened the bottle of wine across from the kid who'd been staying here for days but i had yet to introduce myself to because he was traveling with his dad. but this kid, he is immediately fascinating and we both almost immediately realized that of all the people in the place, we were the ones we wanted to talk to the most... to talk about things we weren't able to talk about with anyone else. free and open politics and frustration and feburary 15th and how weird it is that the weakerthans used to be propagandhi.
and then he left. within half an hour. and i thought we should exchange something, in some trade a way to keep in touch. but we hadn't even traded names until he had his pack on... so i watched as he and his old bearded dad left and thought about what it is to watch someone leave and to know you will never ever see them again, to realize how strangers pass through your life to remain only little more than that, to have connections that are temporary and to admit that, to remember all the people i have know in that way and had never thought of as such before... as unattainable. to think of ends and opportunities.
i got drunk. i bragged about my high tolerance and got so drunk i was quiet. we were all just waiting, passing time until midnight, then going out in one of those enormous heave-ho groups that i was suddenly more comfortable with. the streets were full of generations and we went to a bar with lizards on the ceiling and a dragon behind the bar to pass still more time until we could go dancing. francisco who is exactly twice as old as me and a computer programmer/salsa teacher from argentina took us all to a salsa club where i ordered a very potent cuba libre -- i very much appreciate the availability of my favorite havana club rum here -- and talked with yureine the sweet flemish boy who is pale and skinny and has glasses and is here to study as he drank only his three euro coca cola.
it was raining. we were trooping from place to place, always being spun back towards the hostel, with our numbers dwindling. i was hiding underneath my h+m hood and talking with andreas the boy with long black hair from greece about how we were both shy really and how that was why we had not talked before...
we never went dancing. we finally found the club, indiana, but they refused to let yureine with his unfashionable sneakers in, and it was nice to see how we all immediately had no interest in going in if we weren't going in together... so we turned around and talked about how ridiculous, how anti-fun dress codes are all the way home... retrieved our keys and fell into our separate little isolated beds.
walking back from the bus station that took amanda east to granada - the destination in demand - it was late at night and i was alone and thinking about what it is to be on your own, to decide to be that... i walked slowly, i smiled a little, i knew my way around.
it is something to begin to know a city. to begin to be able to contrast and compare more realistically. valencia i think of, in my mind it is triangles... lots of looping triangles. i end up finding my way unexpectedly after days of getting lost unexpectedly, and when i talk i end up describing things in terms of triangulation. which also has to do with my lack of hearing in one ear; my lack of triangulation.
i get weary of introducing myself to all the new rounds of people in the hostel... i like to stick to noah, the swedish/american/canadian boy who speaks yiddish/swedish/english/spanish and lives in east berlin and is traveling around the world by getting DJing gigs everywhere... like in cairo, where he just came from. he is going to get an apartment here and when i come back through valencia on my home i will be able to crash there... so i led him to the wonderful vegetarian restaurant amanda and i found on her last day here. ken and clint the two canadians, and varina the sexy german girl, and the boy from greece with long black hair came too... they all said they enjoyed it, but i didn't see enjoyment really on their faces and ken kept talking about how much he liked beef.
ken likes to talk about meat a lot... ken likes to talk a lot period... and i sit and watch him try to start a debate with me about it. i'll play along a little, but in the end really all i want to say is dude, meat's not cool.
aj from seattle and beautiful thomi from greece who has pants that zip down into a skirt left for granada twice today -- very early in the morning when the train actually wasn't, and then again at 11am with only ten minutes until it was really supposed to be. so they are in granada now and i hear granada is cool... i think amanda (hey you) should buddy up with thomi and ignore the nasty BLT (an acronym better left undefined).
that is a lot of talk about people and not so much about places, ay? maybe i will have more tomorrow... i am people consumed lately. the home hostel is too comfy and i sleep late. tonight i will go dancing dancing... tomorrow i will explore. more. i want to find the farm by the train station. i want to climb the mountain that is unlabeled on my map... that may not even be a mountain.
"In the mid-1950s, the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a 'Feed Thine Enemy'campaign. Members and friends mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quoting the Bible, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him." As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The President did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly; certainly, no rice was ever sent to China.
"What nonviolent activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a significant, perhaps even determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider U.S. Options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the U.S. feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons against them."
There is a grassroots campaign underway to protest war in Iraq in this simple, but potentially powerful way. Please do it -- and pass the idea along.
Place 1/2 cup uncooked rice in a small plastic bag (a snack-size bag or sandwich bag work fine). Squeeze out excess air and seal the bag. Wrap it in a piece of paper on which you have written:
"If your enemies are hungry, feed them. Romans 12:20. Please send this rice to the people of Iraq; do not attack them."
Place the paper and bag of rice in an envelope (either a letter-sized or padded mailing envelope--both are the same cost to mail), attach $1.06 in postage (three 37-cent stamps equal $1.11) and address them to:
President George Bush White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington, DC 20500
valencia. it has been a while, ay? and i am here now in valencia and have been for days.
at first amanda was wasting away and i was just walking around fetching things to make her flu better -- like chocolate ice cream -- finding the different markets and getting a bit lost always, though still having a perfectly terrific time. i was frantic for a while trying to find an affordable, or even existent, airplane ticket to egypt, scrolling about airline sites en espa񯬡 on expensive online computers. but finally one appeared and i grabbed it yesterday. the drawback -- it leaves from valencia, so in valencia i am here to stay until the 10th, excepting maybe a day trip here or there. i won't get to see robert cataldo in cadiz, i won't fly out of malaga, but...
...valencia is nice. there are a million billion cathedrals here that i am constantly running right smack into -- our wonderful home hostel is right behind one -- and i think that now amanda can walk we will go see every single one of them tomorrow. she swears she will fall to her knees in front of each one, cross herself and pray. i'm all for that.
before the long incredibly beautiful bus ride from barcelona to here, on one of those last nights in that northern town, amanda and i and lucy from florida who knows people (and dogs) we know in richmond and sam the surgeon from austrialia and this real quiet twin named jai from down under as well... we all went dancing. well, first we drank up a storm in the hostel until midnight, then we went to the free touristy place to dance. but we did not immediately find silly dancing music. instead we were in a catacomb of excellent jazz... all of us encased in old stone, blue light, and happy shadows of people from everywhere. frederico from colombia tried to woo all of us girls and made sure i watched the amazing enormous japanese boy rap to the jazz-turned-hip-hop. lucy and amanda discovered that the crazy dancing was going on right above us and we three had a terrific time shaking about to the silliest songs around, watching sam try to hook up with an alof dutch girl and laughing about this as if he were our brother.
we girls stumbled out of there with lucy demanding falafel, so we stop on the way home, only to arrive at the hostel to find sam out front proclaiming himself starving. we dutifully led him back to maoz, but they had suddenly closed. we dash around, pulling at sam who is yelling about how starving he is and lucy who is trying to get people to give her chocolate ice cream -- we must get them home, the hostel is about the close for curfew. the most super thing -- sam convinces a chubby brit to actually throw him the sandwich he's been eating up at his second story balcony.
it is terrific. it is ridiculous. there are more good people here in valencia and since i am staying i will get to know them more. yay!
