4 days and 15 hours

To start I just want to let everyone on the West Coast of America know that while you slept from Saturday to Sunday night I attended about 5 hours of Arabic classes. I've had, and continue to have, a tough time accepting the new definition of the weekend here in Egypt. I really don't like the idea that I have school on Sunday, for some reason it has made it really difficult to remember what day it is.


But, Sunday it is, and today marks the start of my last week here on the other side of the world. I have a flight that leaves Thursday night and I get back to the US on Friday morning. And get this, the second leg of my trip back leaves Amsterdam at 9:15 AM and I land in Portland at 11:15 AM. I find it hard to believe that anyone can hear that and not think of how amazing it is to fly around the world. I mean, I will fly 5000 miles and during that time, the sun will only move (for me) two hours. I get giddy just thinking about that.


But I guess stories about my flight back will have to wait until I actually fly back. (Spoiler alert, 5 hours in the Amsterdam Airport, I bet I can get in trouble). Instead, I want to talk about thanksgiving, an election and the Pyramids, also known as Thanksgiving weekend in Egypt.


I was pretty bummed about my missing thanksgiving this year. It's, by far, my favorite holiday. Someone once told me that the beauty of Thanksgiving was the low expectations. All that is expected is that you eat until it hurts and then you go to bed. It's elegant in that way, really the only thing that you can do to fuck it up is not make enough food and, in my experience, that isn't often a problem that us Brinich's have.


So I was a little peeved about missing the most amazing holiday ever, especially since my dad was going to Chicago and that meant that there would be no leftovers for me in Bend when I got there. But rest assured American's abroad rally together and I was invited to a dinner at the house of a friend/classmate. Turned out it was a lot of people who work in various aid agencies and other interesting places including a couple of election observers (they call themselves election witnesses). But none of them had good things to say about the elections. They explained (I use this term loosely, you'll figure out why in a sec) how the ballots are put together.


But before you hear about that you have to hear about how they set up the polling places. It's based on ID cards, which generally carry the location where you were born. That means that people have to go back to hometowns to vote. Moreover they also have a number system, which means that even after you go to the correct district you still have to go to a specific polling place. That is, you and your brother could have the same location on an ID card but he would have a different number so he would go to a different polling place. This doesn't seem like a huge deal until you hear about the average 5 person family having to go to five different schools at 5 different times, with one car, so that they can vote. It's unreasonable.


Then there are the ballots. I say ballots because each voter gets two. On the first there are some 140+ parties which everyone gets (i  think) two votes on. This means that the 4 parties that win a district gets to place their listed top tier candidate into the Parliament. However, as a throwback to the old commie days, there has to be as many "workers" in Parliament as politicians. The definition of worker is kinda vague but it seems to be someone who started their professional career by not going to college (although, they could go to college afterwards). Now here comes the tricky part. If all of the winners of a certain district have their top listed candidates as politicians then some overly complicated math equation is implemented to decided which two parties have to choose a worker as their new top tier candidate.


Then there is the second ballot. On it they get to strait up vote for someone, however, because so many people are coming from different districts to vote in their "home" district, there is no way for these candidates to share their message with the voters, so this will basically be another vote along either party lines or will end up being a random amount of check boxes.


All in all, I am super glad that I don't have to monitor these elections because there is no way I would have any idea when people started cheating because the system is so fucked up already.


After, a great meal, with really interesting company (I wish I could just steal some of the stories I heard) I headed home. On Friday I didn't do a whole lot. I walked around Cairo, saw a couple of districts, tried to buy stuff and failed (I'm really bad at buying junk apparently) and saw a lot of the Friday morning mosque services that were so full that people were praying on the street outside.


On Saturday I went to the Pyramids. They were cool, but more interesting than the pyramids was the total lack of tourists. I found an article that said 8 million people visited them in 2004, that's almost 22,000 people a day. When I went there were about 400 of us and the majority of the people there were Egyptian, it was wild. I posted a bunch of pictures but here are my favorites.


I hope to see a lot of you real soon.


Ben

Luxor and a touch with Tahrir

Well this weekend has brought some interesting events to Cairo, and I'll talk about what I did get to see, but instead of starting at the end, lets start in the middle. And the middle is this, In Luxor my dad and I hired a taxi for the day to see all the temples. At the end of the day the driver basically forced us to stop at his friends shop and drink a beer with him. It was awesome.

Okay, Okay this is going to work better if I start from the beginning. I went to Luxor on Friday morning. Well, that's kind of a lie I left for Luxor on Friday (late) morning and arrived on Friday afternoon. I took a taxi to the hotel where my dad was staying. It was a nice, really cheap place and, if you ever find yourself in Luxor, I suggest you stay there. The first day we went out to Karnack Temple which is a really really old Egyptian temple. Lots of hieroglyphs but the truly amazing thing is the size. These ancient temples built 3000 years ago are just giant, really, really big. 

So after that we headed back to the hotel. Found a restaurant and ate out (again thanks for coming to Egypt and buying me food dad).

Saturday we went to the east bank of Luxor. This brings me to an interesting fact about Luxor. It's a city of over a million people in it and it has almost no bridges across the Nile. The closest one to the center of the town in 12km south. So we took a ferry across the Nile in the morning. I hear about ferries in the north aftican countries sinking every once-in-awhile but I always think, geeze how shitty do those ferries have to be to sink? The answer is about as shitty as the one we rode on.

Also, I have noticed something about the egyptians, and because I'm american I'm going to attribute this to all north africans, they have a weird mentality about waiting. On the ferry we had people jumping off of it before it even got to the dock. THey would just get within jumping distance and people would take off. Its a little like the queuing situation. That is, no one gets in lines, they just jam towards the front and, eventually, it works out. But, the crazy part is these people are totally okay with sitting in a coffee shop or at an airport for 4 hours and doing nothing. They just sit there, I would be bored sick.

Anyways, on the other side of the Nile we ran into the usual onslaught of people offering to sell us shit. What we needed was a taxi but, usually, as you know, its better to walk away from the train stations, airports and ferries and get a taxi further on the road. We tried to do this but there was one particularly insistent driver who just drove alongside us until we relented and hopped in his cab. He drove us to these two statues that are just sitting in the middle of a field. The guide book said to get there early, "in order to avoid the army of tourists" there was no army and I don't think that there had been any for some time. For about 15 minutes at 10:30 on a Saturday morning my dad and I were the only people out there. 

Then we hopped back into the cab, negotiated with the driver to drive us around all day. It ended up being $24 and this guy just drove us all over the place and waited for hours while we explored, so that was money well spent (it also wasn't my money so its really easy for me to say that). We ended up going to the Valley of the Kings, The workers city and some temple that was just covered in hieroglyphs. It was really cool. Then Mahmoud, our driver, insisted that we go to one last temple. We tried to tell him that we were done but he really really wanted us to go. So far that day he hadn't let us down so we said, "okay." When we got there he told us to walk around for a while and to go to the cafeteria when we were done. The cafeteria was really just some old cafe like thing next to the temple. So we walked for a bit and then went to the cafeteria and Mahmoud sitting with his friends drinking a beer. We decided to get some beers as well and Mahmoud came out and joined us. Then we got the ferry back across the river and headed back to hotel after a long day of seeing ruins that were older than I can believe.

Today we went to one last temple before finding a taxi, going to the airport and catching our hour long flight back to Cairo. When we got in we grabbed a taxi and tried to get to my dad's hotel. It's about a 30 minute ride into downtown Cairo so we wern't really paying attention until the driver basically drives us to Tahrir square and asks where to go. At about that point there is some kid with a surgical mask who is trying to get the taxi to turn around because the Shabab (youth) had occupied the square (which is really just a big roundabout). We eventually worked out how to get to the hotel where we found Bob and Shannon. We all headed out to dinner at this place dangerously close to Tahrir. We got there, ordered and ate what was a really nice dinner. 

After we had mostly finished and were just talking the waiter came over to our table and said, "The kitchen and the bar are going to be closed, now." We looked at him like, what?, why? and he said "They are demonstrating in the square." That's about when we started to hear the chants. The waiter told us that we could wait in the restaurant for as long as we wanted so we waited for about a half hour and then braved the streets. It was mostly fine. there were a couple of streets that we walked by and just saw a cloud of tear gas and a couple other you could hear what sounded like flash bangs going off but all in all a relatively safe walk to the nearest metro station where I took the train across the river (because I couldn't talk any taxis into driving across). My dad, Bob, and Shannon went back to their hotel. And eventually we all made it home safe. Alhumdulala. 

There are some pictures but because I suck at using picasa you have to view them here.

Dad just took off the the airport. He'll be back early tomorrow and I will be sticking around for another 10 days.

waladee fee misar (Dad in Egypt)

Food

So my dad got into Cairo last week on the 9th. His plane came in at about 7:30 and with all of the customs checks, visa and crazy taxi ride from the airport to his hotel he didn't check in until about 9:45. That was after I wanted to try and explore Cairo for a hotel that it took him about an hour and a half to find so we decided that we would meet up the next night for dinner.

It was a good meal at a Lebanese restaurant that was suggested by trip adviser. I also got to see Bob and Shannon who where among the last people I saw before leaving the US on this trip. The food was excellent and not paying was excellenter (pretty sure that's not a word, but defiantly a feeling). We decided to meet the next morning to go to the Pyramids.

The next morning rolled around and I woke up to a phone call from the father in which he informed me that the pyramids were closed because of something or other (we later learned that it was 11-11-11 and apparently all of the crazies come out of the woodwork on that day). Instead we went to Coptic Cairo. It was nice, and by nice I mean it was really, really boring. I'm usually a fan of seeing old churches but these didn't do it for me. Couple that with, what can be described as, the worst audio tour of all time, and we were ready to leave Coptic Cairo awful quick. 

So we all piled into a taxi and told the driver to take us to the Islamic section. The driver immediately noticed that he had a car with 4 white people in it and decided to rack up his meter by giving us a, rather long, tour of Cairo. We spent about 45 minutes in the car and drove around the city of the dead (really poor section of Cairo) as well as a good bit of highway driving. At the end of it all the meter read 25 LE ($5) so we paid got out and went in search of the coffee shop we had just waited about an hour for. We found it pretty quickly but, unfortunately they only served coffee, so we had to find somewhere else for lunch. After walking around Islamic Cairo for a while (Dad and Bob wanted beer) we gave up and ate at a GAD (a chain type restaurant). 

Church

The "I'm not a guide" guide

View from the top of a Mosque

During lunch we read the guidebook, it seemed to indicate that going to a mosque nearby and heading to the roof would be a good idea. We weren't exactly sure where we were so we stopped to ask for direction and picked up an unofficial tour guide. He kept assuring us that he was a student and he was just being helpful and didn't want to get paid, but then he stuck around for a really long time and eventually asked for money so, he lied. But, whatever, I got to go to the top of a mosque that I wouldn't have been able to get to otherwise so, it was probably money well spent. 

After getting scammed a bit we went back to the hotel where Bob, Shannon and Dad were staying and hung out for an hour or two. Dad and Bob slept. Shannon left without telling me, and I goofed around on the computer. After the nap Bob came into the room holding a bottle of Bourbon, one of the items on my "doing as soon as I get back into the US list" so we all had a delicious helping of good Bourbon and headed out to the restaurant. I, again, got a great meal and didn't have to pay, so what I'm trying to say is, "Thanks for coming to Cairo so you could buy me some dinners, dad." 

He took off to Luxor to look at really old things for a couple of days while I work on my Arabic for the week. I think I might try to pull of Alexandria this weekend, I just have to get some people to join me.

Have a great week. I'll see many of you pretty soon. 

Egypt and a bit of Tunisia

 Good news everyone, I made it to Egypt and I have a place to sleep. So that is fantastic. The next time I board a plane I will likely be headed back to Oregon where I can shamelessly eat bacon and drink whiskey at the same time. 


My last couple of days in Tunis were fine. I got to walk around the city a ton, often for several hours at a time, I didn't really have anything else to do so I got to explore a lot. Unfortunately, an unforseen consequence of a country not having a government is all of the national museums/parks are closed. For example, today I went to the Bardo Museum to look around the front gate had a ton of razor wire around it and some APCs were parked out front so I walked around back, found an open gate and walked into the compound. I made it all the way to the back entrance, a couple hundred meters, before a soldier saw me and yelled "NO ENTREE" he had an automatic weapon of some sort so I decided not to push it. On my way out a cop saw me, made eye contact and just pointed at the exit without breaking eye contact. That was pretty par for the course around Tunis. All of the interesting places either were obviously closed or they had so much razor wire and army/police around that I decided it probably wasn't worth it to try and get in. 


My flight to Cairo was uneventful. As usual the plane out of the airport was about an hour late and I spent the time thinking about how I could have left the hotel so much later. When I checked my bag at the counter the check-in lady paged through my passport and then asked me where my Egypt visa was. I answered that I didn't have one yet and she handed me the passport back like it was no big deal. It turns out it really wasn't something that I needed to be worried about. At the Cairo airport you can walk up to a bank (interestingly that is an Arabic word) in the airport and buy a visa for $15 no questions asked. 


In Morocco the accommodations that the school had were broken up by sex. That is the boys had their own place that was far from the girls place. Here in Egypt they either don't care if guys and girls live together or they thought I was a girl because I am the only guy staying in an apartment with four other girls. I did this once before during my sophomore year of college and swore that it wouldn't happen again, so I kind of failed at that. But, it's only a month so I'll probably be fine. 


Anyways, its the Eid al-Adha which is a pretty big holy day in the Islamic culture so I don't have any school until Tuesday. That means I should study for my placement exam, but I probably won't.

How to tell when you land in Tunisia.

“Good evening, I have a room for tonight.”

“Sorry no rooms tonight.”

“Oh, no, no, I have a reservation.”

“No rooms for tonight.”

“No, see this says I have a room here tonight.” I show the counter guy the reservation.

“Yes you have a reservation for tonight, but there are no rooms.”

“Well where should I stay then?”

Guy behind counter shrugs.

“Okay but when I booked I paid for tonight.”

Guy behind counter shrugs.

“Who should I talk to about this?”

“Tomorrow the manager will be here in the morning.”

I look down at my feet, take a deep breath, look back at him and say, “Okay”

Then I proceed to walk down the street and find a shady ass hotel for $10 a night. Pay, leave my shit in the room while I go eat dinner and about halfway though the meal, get a little freaked out that I left all of my clothes in a hotel that costs $10 a night. Even if they aren't stolen, I'm pretty sure that I will bring Tunisian bedbugs with me to Egypt.

This story ends with a long night being eaten alive by misquotes in a cheap hotel. But, thats okay because nothing bad ever happened with misquotes and Africa, right?

One got me on the eyelid while I was sleeping and now I look funny because one eye opens only part of the way.

We'll see if they have a room for me today.