Pictures from Sinai

Ok, so it's taken me about an hour to get these pictures up here, so once again you will have to wait until tomorrow for the real blog post about our trip. For now I shall leave you on the edge with some pictures and captions. I hope you enjoy.


This is the sunrise from the first day of our vacation in "Shark's Bay," which is just a little north of Sharm el-Shiek, Sinai.

Here's Shark's Bay as seen from our breakfast table that morning. About four hours later we left and headed for Dahab.

This is from the night before, and I just thought it was kind of awesome. Understandably, so did Bill. We were staying in the "view huts" of a sort of resorty type place, and this is from the top of the resort complex.


Here is our home away from home in Dahab, "The Penguin Village." It was really great, and the people were just lovely.


Here is Bill reading in the little Penguin beach-front cafe...something we did a lot of.


Here's the sea as seen from the Penguin cafe. Pretty awesome, eh?


Here's a lovely Dahab sunset, aslo a view from Penguin


It was probably about 20 degrees F on top of Mt. Sinai, and we were quite chilly. I call this the caterpillar look.

But it was totally worth it.


Another vista.


The hoards descend.


Bill and some camel butts.


Bill touching the burning bush. I didn't see and flames.

Ok, hopefully this will tide everyone over until the morrow. :-)

Cornel West and Food Poisoning

Mild food poisoning (I asssume) being the reason I am not listening to Cornel West speak again tonight, although Bill is. More on that later....right now: why am I so sickly?? Seriously, I have not been healthy for more than one or two full weeks since we've been here. I blame the air pollution and the heat. Today, after what looked like it was going to be a landmark third full week of health, i found myself suddenly overcome by stabbing stomach pains and nausea. I am, for the most part better, but it would be really nice to be able to be fully functional for a while. Ok, my rant it done, and as your reward for bearing with me, I shall move on to topics of more general interest.

So, last night and tonight Cornel West is at AUC giving the "Edward Said Memorial Lectures." Two points of irony to point out for your amusement before I go into the lecture, one which is obvious, and one to keep in mind whilst you read the rest. a) The Edward Said Memorial Lecture was held in, I kid you not, "Oriental Hall." b) Whilst the lecture we went to was being held in said hall, in the main auditorium, right next store was a motivational lecture about "how to make yourself successful."

I will leave it to Bill to write about tonight's lecture, but I think that the talk we went to last night was hands down the best lecture I have ever been to. Not only is West incredibly intelligent, he is an amazingly charismatic speaker who manages to simultaneously channel "relentlessly intellectual professor" and "impassioned preacher." I will never be able to do justice to his talk, but I shall attempt to summarize a few of it's primary points. The talk was entitled "The Vocation of a Democratic Intellectual' -- rather provocative in a country under authoritarian rule. His main discussion was about what it means for "intellectual" to be one's calling. He was apparently good friends with Said, and so used his life and approach to intellectualism as a grounding for the rest of his discussion. His claim was that Said was one who regarded intellectual pursuit as a vocation/way of life, not as a profession. Most of the talk centered around an explication of, what West calls, the "three pillars of the intellectual" : the Socratic, the Prophetic, and the "blue note." The Socratic is the part that examines and scrutinizes life; the Prophetic is the emotion, empathy, and unflinching care for the situations of others; and the "blue note" is the sense of tragic comedy, or the understanding that you will ultimately always fail in your attempts at shaping the world, but that you remain hopeful, rather than becoming cynical.

As I said, I could never really do justice to his talk, but it was extremely provocative and inspiring. It really did make me think about what it is that I want my life to be, and why I want it to be that way. One of his (many) excellent throw aways was, in talking about those who would collect academic accomplishments for the sake of impressing others and who strut "like peacocks with all their feathers out," he remarked, "I come from a tradition that says peacocks strut because they can't fly." I liked that one a lot, and you see now what I found ironic in the talk next door.

Even the question and answer session was superb, something which, in my experience, pretty much never happens. It wasn't just that his answers were great, but the questions themselves were actually really good! I have to say, the whole thing made me really excited about going back to school next year. i am really enjoying the gear shift this year, but ultimately, I know what environment suits me best. :-)

I shall now return to my glass of sprite and moaning on the couch, but I promise another post from Bill, which I'm sure will be characteristically much more in-depth.

Cleanliness in Cairo

About a week and a half ago, we finally managed to hire a cleaning lady, or so we thought. The deal was that she would come once every week and to mop our floors, wipe down the bathroom, and beat out our carpets. Most middle and upper class Egyptian families hire someone to clean their apartments like this, and our landlord recommended this woman as competent and reliable. However, she didn't show up last week, she didn't show up this week, and she's not answering her phone. Apparently when we said, "You'll come every week to clean the place," she thought we meant, "nice to meet you, we'll never see each other again." Whatever, stuff like this is par for the course in Cairo. We have friends who live in an apartment down the street who have had a cleaning lady for several weeks now, so we'll talk to them to see if she wants another client.

Anyway, the upshot is that we spent about two hours cleaning the whole apartment yesterday, even though we had done a similarly huge cleaning operation only two weeks before. All of which is to say, Cairo is a very dirty city. First of all there is the air pollution, a cloud of which hovers over a different section of the city depending on the wind and the weather. Some days when the smog is to our West over Mohandiseen and Doqi, our drive to school in the morning is mostly clear, but other days we cannot even really see across the Nile, or even from one side of Tahrir Square to the other. Added to that is the sand and dust, which have turned most of the buildings in the city a dull brown-gray color. (The brilliant colors of the buildings was one of the first things we noticed about Alexandria). Claire has observed that when she first steps into the shower, the water from her hair runs brown for the first few seconds, and when we wash our clothes, the waste water is usually practically black. Since we leave our windows open most of the time, this dust coats the floor of our apartment within a few days, making it almost unlivable if we don't mop every week or so. (A classmate of ours is married to an Egypian, and told us that the expectation is that one should mop one's floors 3 times a week.) Another friend of ours has mosquito netting over his bed, and it has trapped so much dirt that if you touch it your hands look as if you have been working with greasy engine components.

Despite all of this dirt, however, the people and the interiors of buildings are extremely clean here. As you walk down the street, most Cairenes are well-groomed, wearing clean clothes, with shined shoes. One of the most common items for poor street vendors to sell are boxes and small packs of kleenex, which people use to mop their brows. Garbage men sweep the streets of trash and dirt every night (all by hand with a broom and a wheeled garbage can), janitors clean the floors of the university at least 3 times a week, and shop owners even wash down the sidewalks in front of their stores on an almost daily basis.

All of this makes for a strange dynamic of a very dirty city with very clean people living in it. At least part of it is cultural and religious, as ritual washing is an important part of Islam. (For example, Muslims have to wash themselves before they can pray, which is why most toilets here have a built-in bidet.) Apparently when Europeans first came to the Middle East, one of the reasons Arabs had such a low opinion of them was because they were simply so dirty by Arab standards. In any case, it does make dealing with the dirt a lot easier.

I don't really know what my point was anymore, but the upshot of all of this is that we are definitely getting a cleaning lady. Also, maintaining an apartment in New Haven next year is going to seem like a cinch after this.

City Stars

Thursday night we ventured forth to the neo-liberal triumph/monstrosity that is City Stars Mall in Nasr City, a suburb of Cairo. It was, well, interesting. After our hour long cab ride there, hooray Cairo traffic, we emerged wobbly-legged but ready for action. About four times the size of any mall I've been to (though I am sure there are plenty that rival it in the US), City Stars mall is located right off one of the "highways" out of the city and is connected, on one side, to a huge international hotel, and on the other to, I'm not kidding, a residential apartment complex.

To get into the mall you have to go through fairly extensive security, for a mall, where they apparently confiscated our friend Mae's pepper spray once, lest she go on a pepper spray rampage inside. Once we got inside, our jaws dropped at the scene before us. The mall is five stories of pure first world capitalism. Scores and scores of stores selling luxury clothes and technology fill the mall, and if it weren't for the fact that you are surrounded by Egyptians, you would never know that you were in Egypt. Walking into the stores, it feels even less so, once you look at the price tags. Here you can be jeans for a mere 1200 pounds (~ 200 USD). To give you some sense of the disproportion we felt, we pay our doorman 50 pounds a month.

After wandering around for about an hour looking at ridiculously over price clothes (which, also, it seems to me, would be difficult to wear any where in Egypt, seeing as mini skirts are not so much the thing) we finally hit the main reason for our visit -- the Mexican restaurant on the sixth floor. Prepared to be totally disappointed, this place totally blew us away. They gave us a ton of corn ships and salsa (both quite good) for FREE, and the service was actually fast and accurate....aside from one snaffu regarding my eating habits. In a very "Everything is Illuminated" moment the cheese enchilada I ordered with the understanding that it had no "meat" arrive covered in carne sauce.

"Is this meet?"

"No, no meat, cheese."

"Yes, but the sauce?"

"No, no, no meat."

"But I really think this is meat." I display what is clearly a large chunk of beef."

"Yes, beef."

"But I don't eat meet."

"Chicken?"

"No."


After dinner we continued our vain search for a bookshelf in "Spinneys," which is basically the same thing as Carefour, except a little less crazy. We didn't find any bookshelves, but we did find this excellent sign outside. What I like most about it, aside from the term "hypermarket." which is always funny to me, is the fact that it is designed exactly like an American road warning sign. "Danger, Danger! Hypermarket next 1.5 miles. Beware crazed shoppers and stray housewares!"

We headed home after Spinney's, completely exhausted by our adventure. (We never found the Starbucks, but apparently there is one). I was talking to our roommate about it the other day, and he was saying that it made him really angry when people say that the mall "doesn't feel like Egypt," because it is part of Egypt and it's all Egyptians who go there. I both agree and disagree with this sentiment. While, on the one hand it is true that it is a part of Egypt, I think the question of who's Egypt is an important one. Sure, the people that go to AUC can probably shop there, but they are maybe about 1% of the Egyptian population. The majority of Egyptians could never afford these prices, and in fact, though there were a lot of people there, I saw almost no one buying anything. So what is the place of things like City Stars and the satellite gated communities around Cairo in Egyptian society? I'm not sure, but I can't help the bad taste it leaves in my mouth.

This article is a good, though extremely basic, overview of the current class/economic dynamic in Egypt, and I think it's worth a read.



Though I don't usually go in for the cheesy effect of night blurring, I actually think this picture conveys something of the chaos of being in a cab in Cairo. (This was on our way home from the mall).