me: 1, airlines: 0

After lengthy fights with half a dozen airlines this week, I have emerged victorious. Things I had to do included:

1. re-booking my return flight to America while attempting to avoid re-paying for the flight (I win);
2.fighting with Orbitz for a refund on my trip to Israel after they rebooked me on a flight that would have caused to miss half the Seder (I win); and
3. re-booking myself on the return flights from Israel back to Cairo (win again).

I will now be going to Israel via seven-hour bus ride to Taba, but on the bright side at least it's all over and I am done fighting with various airlines and travel sites.

the future freaks me out

Firstly, a special blog shout-out to my amazing roommate Adrienne (previously referred to as A1) for getting into grad school. SAIS (school for international affairs at Johns Hopkins) is lucky to have her -- congrats!

Seeing my friends plan for their futures makes me think a lot about what's going to happen when I leave Egypt this summer. It's a challenge for sure, because I know that if I were to stay in Cairo with my journalism background I could have my pick of jobs, even in this rotten economy. In fact, I kind of already have received two informal offers, or at least had people express interest if I chose to stick around. But the problem is that if I accepted either of those jobs I would have to plan to commit to Cairo for another year or so, and I am pretty sure that's something I am not willing to do right now.

I have, as some of you know, been thinking a lot about law school. It's always been something I considered, though I pretty much put it on the back-burner in college to concentrate on journalism. Well, the journalism industry now...makes me really sad. That will be another post for another time. But suffice it to say that law school is looking better and better. Anyway, I have been thinking a lot recently about life post-Cairo (right now it's a pretty scary thought), and so that's kind of what those thoughts are looking like right now. But it's months away, so who knows!

Anyway, I realized I never really posted anything about last week either - sorry about that! I had a good weekend here. On Thursday night we went to a party at the American Embassy thrown by the U.S. Marines who work at/guard the embassy, this one a belated St. Patrick's Day party. We've gone to several of these parties before, and they're always a good time. Still no green beer, but at least we got to celebrate St. Patrick's Day a little. Otherwise, earlier in the week we went to a bar called After 8, where a man sang Irish folk songs for an hour before an Egyptian band called Wust el Balad took over. Although there was a huge bar fight at the end of the evening that night, and that felt very Irish. Overall, though, compared to festivities I have seen in Chicago, where the Chicago River is dyed green, Cairo seems pretty underrepresented when it comes to authentic Irish culture. And also actual Irish people.

Instead of a museum on Saturday, I went to the Ezbekiyya Gardens in Ataba, which contain a well-known book market. Though I currently have a good deal of reading material, I went just to browse. The offerings, though disorganized, are so much more diverse than what you would find at a regular used book store in America. In addition to your standard worn copies of American paperbacks (old copies of Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman and other types of typical airport bookstore finds), there are Mickey Mouse comics in Arabic, ancient copies of travel guides to countries all over the world, stacks of back issues of some truly random magazines (hello, scary fashion trends in Cosmo circa 1991), and, obviously, many copies of the Qu'ran. These are all on display in about 100 stalls, so it's best to just go wander. I quite enjoyed it; as someone who has been a lifelong book lover, sometimes it's nice just to wander and browse.

paint fight

One of the great things about having friends from such diverse backgrounds means the chance to enjoy many different holidays and celebrations. On Friday, my friends and I went to the Indian Embassy to celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of color. They were giving out packets of colored powder, which are smeared on others for maximum color effect. The powder can also be combined with water to make a paste, which is used to continue to paint your friends. We also "borrowed" boxes of water to use in a large water fight on the lawn, so that after about an hour we looked like clowns in a sprinkler. But not scary ones! There was also a bar, delicious Indian food for sale, and plenty of Bollywood dance music. (Photo above, more on Facebook.)

Also, later on Friday (after a shower to wash the paint off, though in retrospect it would have been hilarious to walk around Zamalek splattered in paint for the facial expressions alone), I went to an AIESEC event called Global Village. This is the event that most AIESEC chapters will host eventually, and it's kind of AIESEC's signature thing. I am a pretty bad AIESECer -- I have not been to an event in ages -- but I thought this one sounded pretty cool.

Basically, there are booths for different countries, and each one is manned by a trainee (what I am) from that country, who is supposed to bring along things that represent their country: posters, food, music, etc. The America booth (other AIESECers represented, I just stopped by as a visitor) featured some Obama paraphenalia, peanut butter sandwiches, etc. The Morocco booth had what were possibly the best cookies ever. The girls manning the Japan booth spent the entire day in full-length kimonos.

This happened to be a good time for Global Village since Egypt is currently hosting an international AIESEC conference in Sharm this week, so they had loads of extra people from more countries to be at the booths. It was held in these gardens along the Nile, and they had a few local bands playing music also. I stopped by with a few other trainees I am friends with, we browsed the booths, enjoyed the weather, and then left together to get dinner. Many of the Egyptian AIESECers I am friends with asked why I never go to events and made me feel sufficiently guilty, so maybe I will try to go to more things this spring. Does it count as a New Year's Resolution in March?

the chicken and the mushroom

I think we all know that I am not really the outdoorsy type, years spent at Eisner notwithstanding, but I did, in fact, willingly go camping this weekend. And it was fun! This weekend is potentially a long weekend: Monday is Mohammad's birthday and an official day off, so many people also took off Sunday and made it a four-day weekend. Since I just took off to go to Amsterdam with Michelle, I chose to work today (Sunday), though I was still up for a little desert excursion.

Since Cairo is so crowded, it can be a bit of a shock sometimes to remember how startlingly empty the rest of the country can be. Our base was the Bahariyya Oasis in the Western Desert (of which the Black and White Deserts are just a small part), and on the 4-hour drive from Cairo to Bahariyya we passed...nothing. Just vast open expanses of desert as far as the eye could see, punctuated by brief spottings of camels or a few reststops. I suppose beach is still my favorite, but there is something I really love about the innate peacefulness of the desert, and this trip didn't disappoint.

We departed Cairo at 4 a.m. Friday morning packed into a minibus, drove to the Bahariyya Oasis, where we ate breakfast and repacked our bags into two 4x4 vehicles for the desert trip. There were nine of us, plus three guides. They drove the cars, made the food, tea and fire, set up the camp, and even played some awesome drum music around the campfire. We first drove through the Black Desert, which is black because of a former volcano in the area. We continued on through some really beautiful scenery, and eventually ended up in the White Desert, where we camped for the night.

The Black Desert was not necessarily my favorite, though the volcano was cool. On the other hand, the White Desert was really freaking awesome. Everything is very lunar looking, and you really feel like you are walking around on the surface of the moon. There are these strange white shapes kind of rising out of nothing, all in this white, chalky rock. It looked to me like it had been snowing on a Dr. Seuss book or something like that. And at night, the moon was so bright and reflecting off the rocks, you could see perfectly even without a flashlight.

In the morning, we stopped at a few noteworthy formations on our way back to Bahariyya. This included The Mushroom (not pictured), and The Chicken, which is the photo on the top of this post. It looks like the chicken is facing a tree. Pretty awesome.

And a sidenote: I didn't even realize it, but this weekend at Northwestern was Dance Marathon, a popular NU fundraiser that I have participated in for the last three years. Hundreds of student dancers dance for 30 hours to raise money for a chosen charity, with even more students volunteering their time to take care of the dancers, raise money with alumni, organize within the university, count all the money, set the dancing area, be in charge of music, lighting and more. It's an incredible undertaking that, I think, really brings together the student body. I missed it this year.

Former volcano in the black desert

Pretty desert photo

This is the awesome place we stopped for lunch. Note the very zen-like stream flowing through the middle.

Our campsite in the White Desert, set up by our awesome Bedouin guides. This was the chill-out area, though we also had a campfire and tents for sleeping off to the side.

Ooooh, wide-lens! Fancy! White desert at sunset. You can see another jeep out there as well.

Another view of the desert in the morning.

leaving on a jet plane...or am i?

On this blog, I have previously complained about forms of transportation, like the microbus from Taba or the taxis in Cairo. But I still felt pretty good about planes, until this week. Last night (well, I suppose it was early morning, actually) I was attempting to book airfare to Israel for Passover. What a struggle.

I should note that figuring all of this out (below) took a few days, as I waited to hear back from various people and rearranged the days I was going to travel. I originally wanted to go on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, but that didn't work out at all so I settled on Tuesday during the day (which means I need to take an extra day off work). Better to be there early than to miss the seder. Throughout this whole thing, I was speaking with my family in Israel to make sure someone was available to pick me up at the airport and that I will have a place to stay if I arrive a night early. I was also coordinating with two different travel agents, since some Web sites don't list flights to Israel, and others don't exist at all (Air Sinai, I'm looking at you). I was also e-mailing with my dad to keep my parents updated on the situation. So I was juggling many options at the same time. But of course, there were several problems.

First, no one flies from Cairo to Israel in the middle of the week, apparently. There is Air Sinai, Egypt Air's "secret" offshoot which has no Web site; there are flights to Israel but you need to book them through a travel agent or in person, and they only operates a few flights a week and none of them are when I wanted to go. There's El Al, which, in addition to only having a few flights each week, mostly on weekends, is also much more expensive than you'd think (though I suppose Passover is one of their busiest times, so maybe that's fair). I finally resorted to Royal Jordanian, where I could connect via Amman. It just seems to silly to need a connection for a flight that is under two hours. Comparison-wise, this is like having a flight from New York to Boston with a layover in Westchester. But RJ does fly to Israel every day, so that's fine, and I have flown the airline before and it's all good.

But of course, it can't be that easy. The RJ Web site makes it possible for a customer to book a flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo, but not from Cairo to Tel Aviv. Why? You've obviously got flights to Israel. Why not make it possible to book these flights? So I turned to Orbitz, where they are currently acknowledging the Cairo-Tel Aviv flights, but not at the proper times. It looked like my options were: pay about $1300 for a flight that connects through Germany or France (completely ridiculous), or have an overnight layover that would give me a sleepover in the Amman airport. I eventually chose the second option, but will try and go standby on an earlier flight. If that doesn't work, I will stay overnight in an airport hotel and be in Israel really freaking early on Wednesday morning.

Anyway, it's all settled now and I have airfare, and I am really looking forward to going to Israel for Passover. I am not sure if it's for the joke potential (it's Exodus, people! Leaving Egypt for Israel on Passover? Too perfect!), or because it's just been a while since I was last there (Jerusalem in November). In any event, Passover is pretty much my favorite Jewish holiday (yes, more than Hanukkah), and I am excited. To be on the lookout for plagues and attempt to part the Red Sea. Just kidding. I really am excited!

Still, Egypt and Israel are neighbors. I've crossed the land border and it's open and fine. There is peace now. So why is still so freaking hard to get from one country to the other?! I know, I know, you all want to give me world's littlest violin right now. If finding airfare is my biggest worry, I should count myself lucky. But you know what, it's still insanely frustrating. OK, I feel better now. Rant over.

dam

Last night I got back from Amsterdam, which was excellent. I met Michelle there for four days -- she first went to Prague to see a friend studying abroad, and then we chose Amsterdam as something of a midpoint for us to meet up. We met in the airport Wednesday midday and took the train to our hotel. We had a great few days to explore the city, and only got lost a little (this was probably my fault... it usually is).

Some highlights included: a canal cruise to see the city (I really enjoyed the adorable canal houses), walking on many bridges (Michelle, the future civil engineer, has a thing for bridges), the Rijksmuseum (which had lots of artifacts and art, with many by Renoir, Vermeer and Rembrandt, including his famous The Night Watch), the Van Gogh Museum (including dozens of famous ones, like self-portraits, sunflowers and Starry Night), the Heineken Factory (no explanation necessary here!), the Anne Frank House, and plenty of walking and exploring. The above "iamsterdam" sign is outside the Museumplein, which is where the museums live. We thought it was cool and played in it for a while, in one of the sunnier parts of our long weekend (as you will see below, it was pretty cloudy most of the time and rained a bit on Friday).

There were some things we wanted to do but were not in season, like a nearby windmill village which is supposed to have like seven or eights windmills and other cute village-y things, but only one is open during the winter so it didn't really seem worth it to go out there. It's OK, I'll see the windmills next time -- it just gives me a good excuse to go back. We also saw tulips, but not to the extent I imagine we would have seen them during the spring.

Michelle turning the gears at the Heineken factory. This was before the beer taste-testing.

Outside of the Anne Frank House (the building on the left with the windows). They are pretty strict about no photos inside, but this is the street she looked out on every day for two years.

Canals and bridges all lit up at night. Pretty!

Michelle and I outside the Royal Palace in Dam Square.

Royal Palace (not open when the family is in residence, and it was closed to tourists when we were there)

More canal and houses, as seen from our canal cruise.

This is the Old Church as seen from our canal cruise. As you can see, it was a rather overcast day, which I think makes it look rather gothic.

I know it's a bit blurry, but here we are sitting in a giant wooden clog. It was about as awesome as you'd expect.

this is the worst deja vu ever

Last night, a bomb went off in Cairo. Police have already arrested three suspects, although no one has claimed responsibility yet, as far as I know. I am OK, and no one I know was hurt. The place where the bomb went off, Khan el-Khaleili, is a bazaar in Old Cairo, a place where I have been a bunch of times. This one hit pretty close to home -- not literally, more in the figurative sense that I know the place and it's a part of my life here.

But really, I guess my first thought when I heard about the bomb was, "I can't believe this is happening again." During the summer of 2006 I was interning at a newspaper in Jerusalem when the fighting with Lebanon started in the north. At first, it seemed to disrupt daily life just a little -- people I knew stopped taking the bus and avoided Ben Yehudah St. for a few days, since those had been previous targets. But it soon became clear that Jerusalem was a safe place. As the north of the country got evacuated, more and more people flocked to Jerusalem; there was a consensus that even if Hezbollah's rockets could reach Jerusalem, they would not attack the city.

Eventually that summer, I had to leave Israel early because of the fighting. Obviously this incident is different; it's an isolated event and not a conflict situation. The worst part I think is that Cairo feels like such a safe city. I am comfortable walking around downtown Cairo at night in a way I was not in Evanston, where muggings were fairly frequent in the areas near campus. Yes, women get hollered or whistled at in Egypt. But no one tries to beat you and steal your purse. It's comforting, compared to other big cities in which I have lived. Something like attack makes you question that.

I have to believe that goal of this bombing, like any other terrorist action, is to disrupt people's daily lives, to make them afraid. The best thing to do is not to give them that satisfaction, to keep living your life as you normally would. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.

european art for a change

The great Cairo Museum Tour continued yesterday with a visit to the Mr. and Mrs. Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Dokki. The museum is housed in the villa that used to belong to the Khalils, though it was also later used by Sadat as spare office space (his villa was next door). The museum is, I think, one of Cairo's hidden treasures -- it's full of European art and items (urns, perfume bottles, snuff boxes) from Japan and China. There are originals by Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. Overall, not the kind of thing I would expect to find in Cairo. But I think what made it truly great was that guided tours came free, so when we entered the museum we got a full tour by Mahmoud, an extremely knowledgable art student who was more than happy to show us around and give us lots of great background information on the paintings.

I took a class on European art when I was studying in Madrid, and have been fortunate to go see many great museums in Europe in the past few years. It was nice that I felt like I was able to identify a lot of the artists and styles of painting and all that in this museum in Cairo. Extra points for my profesora in Madrid -- looks like I learned something after all on study abroad.

Also this weekend, I had a nice Shabbat dinner with friends. We did potluck style, so I contributed this good pasta salad that I do with veggies and cheese. (It's not really possible to get Kosher meat here, so all Shabbat dinners are pretty much vegetarian by default. Though I did have some friends bring Kosher chicken from Israel in the fall, so that was nice. But anyway.) There's going to be a bigger Shabbat dinner next week that was organized by people at the Israeli Embassy, but unfortunately I will be missing it since I will be traveling. I am going to be meeting Michelle in Amsterdam, which I am really excited about. Look forward to many exciting posts about windmills, tulips, clogs and cheese.

non-violent protest

As many of you might have read a few weeks ago, a German-Egyptian activist named Philip Rizk was taken by Egyptian state security after organizing a peaceful march in support of Gaza. Read about it here. In any event, Rizk, who is also a blogger, made a documentary about Gaza after living there for two years. That film, "Palestinian Life: Village Stories of Sumoud and Non-Violent Resistance," was screened last night at AUC's old campus in Tahrir Square. Rizk, who was returned home last week, was missing for a few days when lots of people were speculating about his disappearance. His story is pretty well known in Cairo, so it was also noteworthy that he showed up to introduce his film and take questions at the end. He didn't endear himself to the Egyptian government too much with all his activism about Gaza. He criticized Israel for the attacks, but also the Egyptian government for not doing enough to help.

Anyway, he's obviously no Michael Moore, but I thought the film was interesting. The screening was packed (people were sitting on the floor and on the stairs), and there was a Q&A portion after the 30-minute documentary. As Rizk noted during the Q&A, the images that most often make it into the mainstream media are violent ones: Palestinian men with guns and keffiyahs, Israeli soldiers with guns, bloody shooting victims, homes reduced to rubble, the aftermath of a suicide bomb. He said he wanted to highlight the lives of ordinary Palestinians -- these are farmers and goat herders who live in small villages (or caves, in one example) and whose lives have been touched by a violent conflict they have done their best to avoid. The Arabic word in the title, sumoud, refers to a kind of steadfastness. It's a way of saying that their resistance is to keep living, to keep doing what they have always done and not led themselves be goaded into fighting. It's classic non-violent resistance.

And I, hippie-camp-attending, peace-loving, bleeding heart liberal that I am, thought that was a great focus for the film. A lot of the West regards Palestinians as nothing but jihadists, and Gaza as nothing but a breeding ground for malcontented future terrorists. I don't think the film made any points that were particularly surprising (these people have hard lives, have been screwed over by multiple governments including their own, and there is no real end in sight, etc.), but that doesn't mean it was less powerful.

I was particularly intrigued by one part of the film where Rizk highlighted the actions of B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. They have an initiative called "Shooting Back," where Israeli activists give video cameras (and lessons on how to use them) to Palestinians in the West Bank and then instruct them to film abuses by local Israeli settlers if they see any. One of those film clips is in the movie, and it shows a few settlers with sticks (or baseball bats or something) beating up an elderly Palestinian woman in her field for no reason at all. It's a little wobbly and grainy, but the images are pretty disturbing nonetheless.

Some parts of the film were a little funny, whether intentionally or not (one enterprising Palestinian family took leftover parts from bombs and turned them into festive flowerpots), but the real winners came during the Q&A. One questioner mentioned that he would be in Gaza for three days on business (what business trip takes place in Gaza these days, I have no idea), and asked what did Rizk recommend he see if he had only three days in Gaza? I don't know if he meant to be funny, but really...that's your question?

And most disturbingly for me, though this film was obviously made with the best intentions, for me it raises more questions than it answers. But those musings will be another post for another time.

at least they had bats

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to get out and explore Cairo more. Every time I live abroad, I always get close to leaving wherever I am and realize there is still so much I want to do. So to avoid having that happen here, I decided to be more proactive about seeing Cairo. I have been doing something each weekend for the past few weeks, and this week decided to go to the Fish Gardens, located nearby in Zamalek. Despite the confusing title, the Fish Gardens is supposed to be a nice park near the Corniche on the Nile, as well as Cairo's aquarium.

It was the worst aquarium I have been to, ever. First, there were almost no fish. OK, there were two that were alive. The rest were dead and preserved in oversized test tubes. Not kidding. Basically, the park has a series of man-made caves that have aquariums set into the rock. Almost all of the aquariums were empty -- some had water but no fish, others had no water or fish. Some just had garbage at the bottom, leading N to remark that one particular tank must contain the "crumpled-up chip bag species" of fish. In fact, we found one tank with two large, ugly fish, and another with four turtles. That was it. Then at the end, we found that a number of the tanks contained oversized plastic test tubes with the perfectly preserved remains of the rest of the fish in the "aquarium." Some tanks had like 7-8 kinds of dead fish in them. It was really depressing.

The only bright spot here was that N heard the caves also had bats. Sure enough, standing in the middle of one of the larger, fish-less caves, we did hear the squeaking of many bats up above. Some of them swooped occasionally. We didn't stay too long because none of us wanted to get pooped on.

Luckily, the gardens part of the Fish Gardens was lovely. We brought along some books/magazines/newspapers and spent a nice afternoon sitting in the grass reading, napping, chatting, etc. It was an unusually warm winter weekend here (even in the midst of what everyone is calling the mildest winter in Cairo ever, thanks Global Warming!), so it was great to go out in t-shirts and sit in the sun for a bit.

There is a zoo in Giza that I would like to go to eventually (it's on my list of things to do), but after the disappointment of the Fish Gardens I think I should wait a while before attempting more animals.