Made it back from Israel and Palestine.

Barely.

Much to say. Still trying to form coherent sentences...and failing.

Updates coming soon, to include:

• Border crossings and hostile IDF guards!
• Sneaking a Palestinian into Jerusalem!
• Sneaking three Jews into Ramallah!
  
• The shooting in Ramallah and hiding in an ice cream parlor!
• Bethlehem and the Wall!
• Refugee camps!
• Jericho, temptation, and a gondola!
• Checkpoints and even more border crossings!
  
• AND! 19 straight hours of bus rides home.

And lots and lots of pictures. And even some political commentary. Stay tuned.

Time to go to Israel and Palestine!

Plans have changed a bit, so hopefully our journey there is going to be a little shorter (no agonizing ferry, alhumdulilah). Cross your fingers that I don't get questioned too much about my Arabic textbook, and that the border into Palestine stays open... and that stuff like this can hold off from the civilian areas. Seriously.

Barring extraneous circumstances, I should be back Sunday night. Updates then!

xoxo

Sandstorm!

So, Egypt is in the middle of the Khamseen, its annual sandstorm season where hot dusty winds blow up from the Sahara and render the place basically unbreathable. Yesterday brought us the worst one so far this season, and apparently one of largest in a few years.

Cassandra Vivian’s The Western Desert of Egypt describes the Khamseen as such:

In the spring, from March to May comes the special sandstorm, the khamasin, (the 50). The season lasts for 50 days, and most storms are a few days in duration. Called siroccos in Morocco, qibli in Libya, cheheli in the northern Sahara, irifi along the coast and ouahdy in the central Sahara, the storms of North Africa each have their own special personality. Some, like the khamasin, are hot winds, others cold winds, but all are laden with sand and dust. The khamasin blows from the south to the northwest, in opposition to the prevailing winds. The harmattan in West Africa is a cold northeasterly wind that blows in November through February. The simum, ‘poison wind,’ is hot and dry and temperatures reach 55C or 130F. The habub is hot and moist and is prevalent along the southern edges of the Sahara and in Sudan. It carried sandstorms and duststorms, but can be the harbinger of thunderstorms and small tornadoes. With each storm lasting about three hours, the habub is mostly a summer affair. Its wall of sand and dust can be as high as 900 meters (3,000 feet).

Fantastic. Why couldn't I have chosen fall semester to come, where instead of fifty days of sandstorms there's a month of fasting, sleeping, eating and partying?

When I heard about the Khamseen, I expected something like this:

(taken by US Marines Gunnery Sergeant Shannon Aldredge in Iraq, 2005)

Not quite. It comes on much more slowly; as Neil Gaiman would say, like a migraine. You wake up in the morning to catch the shuttle to campus, and the sky is bit hazier than it was yesterday. Crossing the 26th of July Bridge, you can't quite make out the high-rise hotels in the distance along the Nile. Have they always been that far away? Walking to class, you smell a faint whiff of burning, or of something dusty. Take a deep breath in; it's a little harder to breathe now. Later, as the storm progresses, the sky turns orange and the sun blots blue, and it looks like the apocalypse. Dust gets everywhere, even inside--especially inside, where it falls in almost invisible layers on your desk, laptop and food.

Yesterday's Khamseen shut down the Cairo airport for awhile. Here's what it looked like:

(Getty/AFP)

Needless to say, I stayed indoors. Like I was going to go running along the Nile anyway.

How to Attract Attention

After three months living in Egypt, I have come up with a foolproof plan for all of you wishing to attract more attention and receive more comments on the street, in the market, or at any tourist attraction. Success guaranteed!

Follow these four easy steps:

STEP THE FIRST: Be obviously foreign (for extra points, wear flip flops or an iPod).

STEP THE SECOND: Be female.

STEP THE THIRD: Be blonde.

STEP THE FOURTH: Wear the FC Barcelona jersey you bought on spring break a week before their match in Cairo with Egypt's top football team, Ahly.

Sit back and watch the magic*, baby.


* And by magic, we mean even more stares from now both women and men, catcalls of "Heyyyyy BARCA," "Ronaldinho!! Messi!!" "FORCA BARCA," gesticulated death threats, and whispers of "...we will win..."

Vote Yes

Belated post about my AUC-sponsored tour to Old Cairo and the pyramids at Sakkara...with pictures!... and a bit about last month's amendments.

Old Cairo, also referred to as Coptic Cairo, is the oldest part of the city, with settlements dating back to the 6th century BCE. As Christianity took hold in Egypt, the area became a Christian stronghold, and at one time contained as many as 20 churches. Today, only five remain. The area, which is only about a square mile, is also home to both the first mosque and the first Synagogue ever built in Egypt.

We visited the Hanging Church first, which gets its name from its precarious location on the top of the southern tower gate of the Babylon fortress. The nave of the church is actually suspended above the passage between the two towers; while the structure has since been reinforced, just a few palm trunks formed the original bridge, and they're still there today. The church was most likely built during the patriarchate of Issac (690 CE), but almost entirely rebuilt by the patriarch Abraham (975 CE). By the 11th century, the Hanging Church had become the official residence of the Coptic patriarchs of Alexandria. It has undergone several other construction efforts up to the present day.

Only a short distance away was the Church of St. Sergio, a small church considered to be one of the places where the Holy Family rested on their flight from King Herod to Egypt. Historians place its construction somewhere in between the 5th and 8th centuries CE. The church has suffered some pretty serious water damage, and the cave where the Holy Family stayed goes through periods of being completely underwater. It's currently about half full, so of course we weren't allowed down there. We also weren't allowed to take pictures of this church, probably because the Egyptian government doesn't want people to see the state of disrepair. Restorations are ostensibly ongoing, but I didn't see much evidence of it.

We then went to Ben Ezer's Temple, the first synagogue in Egypt, erected around the 6th century CE. Pictures weren't allowed in there, but I took some surreptitiously since I couldn't hear our tour guide and didn't have anything better to do. Anyway, I don't really know too much about the synagogue, but in the back of it, you can see the well where the daughter of the Pharoah is said to have found baby Moses! Kind of cool, especially since the Nile has shrunk so significantly since then.

After that, we went to the Amr Ibn al'As Mosque, which was built in 642 CE by...you guessed it...Amr Ibn al'As, the commander of the army that conquered Egypt. It's said that the mosque is built on the site of his tent, and is the oldest existing mosque in all of Africa.

This is the first and oldest mosque ever built on the land of Egypt. Erected in 642 AD (21 AH) by Amr Ibn al'As, the commander of the Muslim army that conquered Egypt, the mosque is also known as Taj al-Jawamie (Crown of Mosques, al-Jamie'al-Ateeq (the Ancient Mosque) and Masjid Ahl ar-Rayah (Mosque of Banner Holders). I didn't know that we were going to a mosque, so I didn't bring the requisite scarf with which I could cover my head. No worries, though; they had green smurf-like capes to borrow rent.

The school took care of paying for that, but here baksheesh is even present in holy places, and when we went to put our shoes back on at the front entrance (you take your shoes off in a mosque), we were hassled pretty hard for some cash. Apparently it's very expensive to have shoes just sit there. I encountered this gauntlet in al-Azhar before, so I was expecting it, but I don't like it; it kind of sours the whole experience. You'd think of all places, a mosque would be free from that, that men would be compelled to give money of their own will. I'd gladly and sooner donate to the maintenance of the mosque than to grease the palms of the man who sits next to my shoes.

The group then went to some random tourist trap of a restaurant-cum-theme park, with a great buffet of Egyptian food, a baby lion and some random horses. Who knows.

After that, we went to the pyramids at Saqqara, 30km south of Cairo. These were kind of "practice pyramids" for the larger ones at Giza, and Saqqara is home to the world's oldest standing step pyramid. When the capital of Ancient Egypt was in Memphis, Saqqara was its necropolis. It was eclipsed in scope first by the necropolis at Giza and then by the Valley of the Kings in Thebes, but it is said that various cults and groups still used Saqqara as a religious site until well into Roman times.

We managed to convince our group leaders NOT to take us to Giza to ride horses around the Pyramids. It was getting late in the day, most of us had work to do, and almost all of us had already seen the Pyramids. Undoubtedly they had some random connection with a stable in Giza, but our collective flat-out refusal to pay any extra money for 30 minutes on horseback got us a one-way ticket back to AUC.

On the way home, I sat next to one of the Egyptian students who had helped to organize the trip, and I spoke to him about the upcoming referendum. In the coming days, Egyptians would vote on a package deal of 34 contentious amendments; Amnesty International has called the amendments the greatest erosion of human rights in Egypt in the last 26 years. Two amendments in particular drew scorn. The first, a ban on all religiously-affiliated parties, once and for all bars Mubarak's National Democratic Party's biggest opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, from politics. Analysts stated that this would help perpetuate not only the current regime but keep it in the family: Mubarak's son, a high-ranking member of the NDP, could be slated for the next presidency.

The second, an anti-terrorism package, is in effect the cementing of emergency security laws enacted after Sadat's assassination in 1981. That article would give the president the authority to refer terrorism cases to the judicial authority of his choosing, including military tribunals whose verdicts are not subject to appeal. The amendments, which had been approved by congress and then rushed to the polls a week later, had received worldwide attention and criticism. I was eager to hear what this student, a senior Engineering student, thought of the amendments. Would he vote?

No. And he didn't see what the big deal was; the amendments would pass no matter if he voted or didn't, and they weren't that bad anyway. I pressed him on the two more high-profile articles, and he seemed either ambivalent or uninformed. While he didn't mention much about the Brotherhood, he said that Mubarak's son was a very well-educated man. I guess this means he's fit to be president. He didn't know much about the anti-terrorism article. He kept stressing that it wasn't a big deal, but that it didn't matter if he voted or not. He then switched the topic of conversation to the contraband videos he had of Sadat's assassination, and spoke at length about that.

I have a difficult time comprehending anyone who can vote, but doesn't; even if you know a measure is going to win, you should still vote against it in order to continue and perpetuate the democratic process. And maybe there's the rub: it's hard for me to understand what it's like to live under something other than a democracy. Honestly, I don't blame Egyptians for not wanting to vote, as it's most likely a superficial nod towards a representative electoral system, but I do believe that apathy and ignorance about your own country is dangerous.

From speaking to a few young Egyptians about the referendum, it seemed like the foreigners were more concerned, informed and invested in these amendments. When we heard that there was going to be a protest one night in Midan Tahrir, a large contingent of Americans headed down to watch what would certainly be an epic battle between police forces and angry protesters. During the day we had seen battalions of police stationed at all the major street corners around the Midan dressed in full riot gear, or packed like sardines in huge trucks at every intersection; we were ready to watch a throwdown.

And...nothing. Seriously. We were the only people there. While the Midan was busy--a uniformed police officer was stationed every five feet or so, and the shops were buzzing with not-so-undercover plainclothes officers (HINT: I don't care if you wear a football jersey; carrying a radio gives you away)--there were no protesters. There were no groups of any kind, excepting the disheartened white kids trying to hide their cameras and wondering where the tear gas was at.

Apparently all the suspected troublemakers had been arrested earlier in the day, and we missed the small bit of action that had occurred in a separate location, which apparently amounted to a few men chanting something and being immediately thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. The day of the referendum a voting booth replete with huge "VOTE YES" banners, Mubarak posters, and a DJ spinning pro-Mubarak songs was erected across the street from AUC. I didn't actually see anyone go in to vote; every time I walked past the site, it was deserted. Photography was, of course, prohibited. Sorry faithful readers.

I only knew one AUC student who had voted (you can tell who voted by the neon pink ink used for thumb printing), and she had voted yes. The Americans in my class were shocked; I think we had all expected the voting youth to vote no, if no one else. Why did she vote yes? "I am a Christian," she said, "and I do not want the Muslims in politics."

Simple enough, I guess. The rest of the people I talked to that day said that it didn't matter, why bother, it was useless. And why did I care, anyway? It wasn't my country.

Guess so.

------

Read more about how Egyptians voted here.

SPRING BREAK MEGA-UPDATE: v.France and back

Time was running out. We had a plane to catch. And no viable way of getting to the airport in the dark hours of the Roman night.

But then we learned that there was a bus to the airport from the Anganina stop. My plan to follow the people with luggage worked well, and we went through a rat maze of tunnels until we emerged at a bus stop. There was a bus coming at 6:45, and we made it. After several agonizing stops in the countryside, we made it to the airport thirty minutes before our flight left. Woohoo! We were going to France.

Fast forward, and bienvenue. France was overcast, cold and windy, but at least it wasn’t raining. I was ecstatic to be in a country where I could read all the advertisements and warning signs. Two and a half years of Arabic hasn’t helped with most of the billboards, but my high school French still serves me well (merci, Mlle Williams et Mme Fulton).

Marseilles is a city apparently without hostels, so we chose the cheapest hotel on hostelworld.com (which was actually cheaper than our hostel in Rome due to it being Holy Week). Hotel Louisiana was about 2 minutes from the airport, and offered a free 24-hour shuttle to and fro. Pretty quaint little place. We had our own bedroom and bathroom, and the hotel had its own restaurant. No menu, though, so I had to translate for the waitress, whose English was probably on par with my French, but it all went okay. Good thing I paid attention during the food unit in 8^th grade.

Daniel was not doing so well, so he went straight to bed despite it being barely noon. Me, never being one to skimp on sleep, followed suit, and so did Kiana for the most part. Punctuated by a few brief stints checking my mail on Daniel’s computer, I slept as long as he did: almost a straight 24 hours. It made up for the lack of sleep I had been getting in Cairo, had gotten so far on the trip, and probably would get in the future.

The next day Daniel and I hit up Marseille. We had to take a bus, and then the metro, but it was worth it. A photogenic port town known for its seafood and African flair, we enjoyed wandering around the waterfront, eating the famous bouillabaisse soup and scrambling to the top of Fort St. Nicholas at the mouth of the bay. The weather was a lot better, so we sat on a bench for awhile and looked out at the beach—where were all those topless sun bathers we’d heard about?!—and enjoyed the sun. We headed back to our hotel, grabbed dinner again, and spent some time watching the French version of Fear Factor.

We went to Aix-en-Province the next day, for one reason and one reason only. No, it wasn’t the quaint provincial village feel we sought, nor the larger youth contingent there due to its university. It was something much more important, something we had been missing in Cairo, something so integral to our existence that to not attain it could be the difference between life and death:

They were showing 300 in English.

Of course, we traversed the city beforehand, giddy with excitement about our imminent movie/awe fest. We got lunch at a bistro, where I got a salad (another running theme) and Daniel got probably the worst duck paté I’ve ever tasted. Oh well. At least there was toast. But it really didn’t matter, because WE WERE SEEING 300. We killed time, bought Daniel some headphones, explored Aix-en-Provence, and then showed up ridiculously early just to be the only people there for the film, save a really smelly guy who came late and sat in the back.

I don’t really need to comment on the movie. Go see it.

We took a bus back to our hotel and prepared for another early wake up call, tempered a bit this time by our proximity to the airport. Back to Rome, where this time it wasn’t raining. As it was the day before Easter, all the hostels in the city were either booked or around €90 a night. We ended up at a wonderful, huge hostel far outside the city, where my only concern was how to get back to Ciampino Airport the next morning for our 6am flight: the Metro closed at 9pm and opened at 5:30am; the train station closed by 1am and the first and only potential bus we could take was at 4:30am; and we were in the middle of nowhere where catching a taxi at 4:30am probably wouldn’t be easy. Luckily, the wonderful people at our hostel arranged a taxi pickup in the morning, which, although expensive, alleviated my fears of missing our flight back to Barca.

Daniel and I sat out in a café for awhile—he did more Econ, I read Kafka—until we could check into the hostel, after which we—you guessed it—showered and napped. After that we hit the Trastevere, one of my favorite parts of Rome, saw some street performers, grabbed some coffee, and walked through Campo di Fiori back to the Spanish Steps, where we caught the last Metro (only 9pm!) back to our hostel. We hit a great restaurant in the ‘burbs of Rome, where I had Papardelle and he had a steak, and we both had ice cream, and we were both very, very happy.

We made it to the airport that morning after almost 5 hours of beautiful, beautiful sleep, quite on-time for our flight back to Barcelona. Not much to report there, besides that I wasn’t feeling too well but got better as the morning progressed, and my pen exploded on the plane.

Back to Spain, and this time we didn’t confuse any passport control officials. We Metro’d to our hostel, Gothic Point, a sister hostel to our previous one on the sea. The power was out for some reason, so we couldn’t check in. No worries; we dropped our bags in the luggage room and headed out to see the Sagrada Famillia, an amazing and funky cathedral designed by Gaudi which is still under construction. Daniel and I had a decent lunch across the street from our hostel, and sat for awhile and swapped stories.

We then went to hook up with the same group of AUC friends we had seen the first night; almost all of us were staying in the same room! We met some of them early in the day, and took the Metro to the outskirts of Barcelona to see a castle and the Magic Fountain. We took a tram halfway and climbed the rest, and spent a long time at the top looking out over the coast and the entire town of Barcelona. Daniel played with some cannons. Good times.

Our plan was to meet the rest of the group at 8pm in front of the aforementioned flower market, and like almost everything else on this trip, it fell into place. We had some more paella—something I plan on attempting to make when I go home—and then hit up the Dunkin Donuts across the street for some less traditional Spanish fare. Faaantastic.

That night we went out to a sangria bar and then back to Jamboree, the only club we could find that didn’t play house. It was still good. We wanted to get some sleep, so we headed back to the hostel early by European standards (read: 3:30am). Our motivation for waking up was the free breakfast, but I think a week of only sleeping for four hours at a time had gotten to me: I was awake by 8:45. Breakfast done with, we headed out to Parc Güell, another showcase for Gaudi’s crazy designs. It was way, way, way up on a hill, accessible by steep narrow streets tucked in between homes, punctuated by very welcome escalators. The park has the longest bench in the world. I sat on it.

We then went back to the city proper, and I had my second important cultural experience (after 300): I ate at Subway. I had really, really missed my 6” turkey on wheat. We stocked up on gummi candy and picked up our stuff at the hostel. To get to the airport, there was a bus at Plaça Catalunya, the major square in Barcelona. Finding it took a bit of time; standing in the long line to get on one of them took even longer. It was familiar by then, looking at my watch and wondering if we were actually going to make it to the airport in time, but, as usual, we did.

Leaving Barcelona was hard, I’ll admit. The streets were clean, wide and quiet. They had Subway. There was salad, and paella. And I could relax everywhere I went, free of the hassle of Egypt. So sitting there, eating my fresh fruit, looking at my gate…thank goodness my parents were arriving in Cairo the next day, or I might be working on my Spanish at the moment.

The flight back to Cairo wasn’t as baller as the flight to Spain, but it was predominately AUC kids and empty enough that most of us could take at least three seats to ourselves. I watched The Queen, slept a bit, and landed in Cairo reluctantly ready to haggle for the first time in a week and a half.

In less than 24 hours, I would return to almost the same spot to: be yelled at by at least three police officers for having the audacity to want to go to the arrivals gate by taxi, be told it was impossible to go to the arrivals gate period, be told I could go to the gate only if I had come in by bus, be screamed at in English to “COME HERE!!!” (To come where? The ground under my feet, of course.), take a shuttle filled with men who whispered at me, and, oh yeah, pick up my parents from the airport.

Welcome to Cairo.

…I miss Europe. But I don’t miss the exchange rate. Damn.

SPRING BREAK MEGA-UPDATE: v.Roma

The Spanish countryside rolled past. I thought I saw a cow. I looked at my watch, and promptly began to freak out. Girona, apparently, is in the middle of absolutely nowhere, but luckily almost as soon as I woke up I saw signs for airport parking.

We made our flight, but it was close. There was a lot of hustle. This was to be a common theme for the rest of our time in Europe.

Rome. First priority was registering for classes at Georgetown, which I did in an Internet Café next to the train station—again we had flown into some BFE airport that was only accessible by a bus or a €60 cab ride—while Daniel booked us a hostel in Naples for the night. After grabbing lunch in one of those red-checkered-tablecloth-accordion-player stereotypical Italian streetside cafés, we hopped a southbound train and promptly fell asleep.

When we got to Naples, we didn’t really know where to go. We had a street name for our hostel, but couldn’t find it on any maps; we called the hostel, but we couldn’t understand the directions. We had figured out that we needed to take the Circumvesuviana, the Napoli Metro system, but our vague approximation of what the stop had sounded like over the bad payphone at the train station could not be found. We got off at a stop that was more or less close in sound, and then looked lost until a very nice Italian man asked us, “Fabric Hostel?”

Apparently they get that a lot.

Through a mix of Italian, English and very demonstrative sign language (e.g. take a right at the THROWS HANDS IN THE AIR [fountain]), he gave us great directions and we miraculously found our hostel, which was very funky and fun. After an amazing shower and another nap (seeing a pattern here?), we walked around southern Naples for awhile. We found a small restaurant where we got the best pizza I’ve ever had—a €4 margharita—, got some gelato, and went to bed.

The next day was reserved for Pompeii, a 45 minute Circumvesuviana ride away. €11 got us a ticket, a map and a guide book, and we spent a few hours running around the grounds of the ruins. I had expected little tiny houses with ashen-colored outbuildings filled with mummified mothers in fetal positions or something, but the reality of Pompeii really surprised me. It was a surprisingly large city, with its constructs extant in a similar fashion to the Roman Forum: bases of temples, many buildings, roads and archways remain. It’s a lush historical site, filled with trees, flowers and thick grass. All the mummies have been removed, but plaster casts of some are on display. A lot of the city had been destroyed in a powerful earthquake just a few years before Vesuvius erupted, so even in its preserved form it was not at full strength. Daniel commented that he could see why they picked there to live: the whole right-next-door-to-a-volcano-thing aside, Pompeii is in the heart of a beautiful, mountain-ringed valley.

That afternoon we took train back to Rome, and found our hostel, which was four flights up in an old building on Via Cavour. Kiana, who had never been to Rome, left to see the Forum and the Coliseum; Daniel and I, both having been there before and beyond maxed out on ancient Roman historical sites, wandered through the streets of Rome to Campo di Fiori just as it started to pour. We spent a few hours huddled in a café—him doing Econ, me reading for my “book report”—waiting to meet up with Kiana at 8pm. When she didn’t show, we nixed our contingency plan (Trevi Fountain at 9, Spanish Steps at 10) due to the thunderstorm, figuring she would have headed back to the hostel, grabbed a quick dinner and sprinted back ourselves. She wasn’t back, however, so Daniel headed out on a run to the Spanish Steps to find her while I stayed in the hostel, damp and without any hot water for a shower. While he was gone, Kiana returned. She had bought an umbrella and wandered around the city during the rainstorm. Oops.

Daniel came back after his trek, soaked and exhausted, and passed out; he would spend a very long night shivering into a fever that would last him until France. These four-hour nights were starting to get rough.

We had another 8am flight to Marseille that morning, and I had looked up the bus schedule back to Ciampino Airport in the suburbs of Rome. Our plan was to take the first one at 5:52; we couldn’t force ourselves to pay the €60, so we would just cut it close. But after an early wakeup and a misty walk to the train station, we found the posted schedule was different than the one online; there had been one at 4:30, and the next was 6:45. We had to find another way. We ran over to the Metro station, which was just opening its doors at 5:20. Our new plan was to take the Metro as far as we could go and then either take a bus or a taxi. Time was running short as we sat underneath Rome and waited for the first Metro; it came at 5:55.