Autumn Walk

I love fall colors! When I walked out of the house on Spring Garden this afternoon, it was sprinkling and the skies were dull and gray. Bummer, I thought. As I walked into the city, though, I passed by a park with one tree gloriously ablaze with red-orange autumn leaves, standing among a dozen ordinary green ones. It was the picture of Vibrance, the tree of Life. L'Chaim!

The skyscrapers of Market Street were shrouded in fog, and umbrellas hovered and bobbed all around me despite the fact that it was barely precipitating. In front of me, one bright orange and yellow umbrella paced the sidewalk among a dozen dull, solid-colored ones, protecting a woman from the non-rain. She walked in silence among sharp, serious-looking businessmen, who walked in equal silence. Dreary weather makes city-folk so silent! I thought to myself while listening.

The aroma of bacon and eggs and sweet-and-sour sauce and other food truck smells wafted with the autumn breeze, assaulting our noses and making one girl behind me exclaim to her friend, "Oh my GOD, that SMELL! It smells so..." I crossed the street and didn't hear the following adjective.

As I was about to walk down the steps from Naked Chocolate Cafe, a small, square gutter caught my eye. It was ringed all around with bright marigold leaves like a lion's mane, the foliage, wet and bright, stuck to the stony ground- but it was not roaring! Just glistening in silence.

Early this morning, inside the house on Spring Garden, I shared a hot cup of black chai tea and Trader Joe's canned chicken soup with my "Mishka" before he had to dash off to catch a plane to China. I had stayed up all night to keep him company as he prepared for his trip. While he scratched his head- through his new Johnny Depp/Reverse-Mohawk haircut- trying to figure out what to pack and how to pack it, I made him three cranes imbued with messages about flying for good luck and he added these talismen* to his luggage, along with his GRE material and musty-smelling Dalai Lama Halloween costume. Before I knew it, he was gulping down soup and rushing out the door for his ride, and after a few hours of sleep, I was leaving for my autumn walk in the non-rain.

*It should be "talismen" for the plural form. "Talismans" sounds so ungrammatical.

Les Im-memorables & Where the Wild Things Are

This evening, I was browsing through the fiction section at Barnes, when I spotted Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on the shelf. "Ooh, I've been wanting to read that!" I said to myself.* So I grabbed it off the shelf, grabbed a couple other books, and then sat down to read. I turned over Les Mis and started reading the back. Wait...Jean Valjean? I knew that name! A couple lines later, I realized that I had already read this book!

This is why sometimes I think reading is such a waste of time. I gave that book hours of my life, and a few years later, it's like I never read it at all! WTF?! On the other hand, if I could do that with Harry Potter...man if only.

Before I left, I sat down with "Where the Wild Things Are." It's really quite an amazing book. While I walked home in the darkness and misty rain, I tried to figure out what made it so good, despite the fact that nothing much really happens in the story. I came to the conclusion that one major element was the moment when the world inside the kid's mind merged with the world we know as real. This merging occurred ultra-smoothly in two places:

1st: When the kid gets sent to bed without supper, and starts dreaming, only it's written in the kid's perspective: rather than writing "The boy began dreaming", the author wrote "That night in his room, a forest grew...and grew...until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around"; and

2nd: At the end, when he's still dreaming, he smells something delicious cooking, so he decides to abandon the monsters and return to his bedroom where dinner awaits him. Of course (in my opinion anyway), he was just waking up from his dream.

The transition between worlds is so seamless, it's breathtaking. Like transitions between real dreams, actually.

*In fact, it was NOT the one I've been meaning to read. I was confusing it with War & Peace, which I bought along with an anthology of spy stories

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 10: Sean Connery Takes Me to the Red Sea

I was quite dreading coming back to work after 2 weeks of vacation traveling, but now that I'm back and cruising through the highways of Erbil again, and getting laughed at by the Kurdish taxi driver who seems to find my Asian eyes and nose really fucking hilarious, I find I've actually missed this dusty ole place with its hole-in-the-wall restaurants selling fake pizzas, and gutter-lined bazaars displaying the tackiest clothes, and the highway picnics, which now include roaring fires because it is so cold these days, and the Kurds themselves who are very kind to us foreigners everywhere we go. Settled into my spacious apartment once again, I feel like I've come home- a feeling that had gone amiss during my vagabondish travels from hotel to hotel the last two weeks. Traveling and seeing the world is fun and interesting, but there is always that seed of loneliness that accompanies you every step of the way, no matter how welcoming the people are, and it really blooms when you're sitting alone in your hotel room on New Year's Day. 

Luckily, I met the kindest taxi driver at the Amman airport. He had the voice of Sean Connery minus the strange 'sh' lisp, and he disapparated my blues away by the sheer goodness of his heart. Before heading down to Aqaba, he drove me to downtown Amman where we stopped by at a kebab restaurant to grab a bite to eat. When I entered the restaurant, I saw a man laying down a small rug and then kneeling down on it to pray to the Almighty. On the way out, another man had taken over his spot and was taking his turn to pray and bow prostrate to the floor. Jordanians are a very religious crowd. It is hard to compare them to the religiosity of the Kurds because I am always in school during the day until 4 pm, but just the fact that I have met so many unreligious Kurds at this officially non-denominational school gives me the impression that Jordanians are the more religious, though by no means fanatical. In fact, from my chats with Jaser, the taxi driver, I get the impression that Jordan is a fairly peaceful bit of land in the otherwise torrid Middle East, where the inhabitants feel favorably toward their king and queen for the most part, where the currency is worth more than the dollar, where the poverty level is not bad at all, and where the cab drivers are gentlemen. But of course, this impression stems from one person's experience during one day in Jordan, so it is mostly meaningless, and very likely false. Read on, and dare to be misled! 

As we made the 3.5-hour drive down to Aqaba in the southernmost tip of Jordan, I was fairly quiet, but I asked him some questions and found out that many Jordanians do speak both Arabic and English, and on a personal note, that he had lived in Kuwait for 17 years, had a couple daughters- one of them married and teaching English in Amman, another still in college- and his wife had recently fallen sick and was hospitalized. I took a long nap under the afternoon sun, and woke up to find that the landscape had changed into something incredible- huge, red, jagged mountains rising from the flat desert plains. They reminded me of Kurdistan, the way the mountains just completely eclipsed and dominated the land for miles, and the way they filled me with awe, but they were different too- not rounded softly and dimpled, nor brown, but jagged, edgy and iron red. We passed by several signs pointing to Petra, and I was tempted at each one to ask Jaser to turn into one of them, but in the end, I was in the mood to chill so I let him drive on southward. Soon I saw a shimmering blue oval in the distance which was the Red Sea, and Jaser pointed out the cluster of buildings to the right. “That is Eilat, in Israel.” Wow, I was seeing Israel! I stopped to take a picture like a good tourist. 

“If we take this other road for about 20 hours, we can be in Saudi Arabia,” he added. Wow, how strange to be so close...

He dropped me off at a super-fancy “international” hotel and said he would grab a bite to eat and pray and then come back to pick me up. While lying on a lounge chair perched in the sand , mere feet away from the pristine blue Red Sea, I thought how unreasonable I was to have paid a taxi driver so much money to drive so far just to spend 2.5 hours at a hotel beach. I could have stayed at the airport and spent no money, or I could have gone to Petra for less money and seen an ancient rose-red city carved from the rocks. Instead, given 14 hours in Jordan, I chose to go as far south as one could go from the airport for 2.5 hours of relaxation and doing absolutely nothing at a glitzy hotel beach, without even a swimsuit to enjoy the sparkling waters of the jacuzzi and pools. The idea just screamed unreasonable and silly, and yet I felt no regret because this was the year I had no one to think of but myself, the year I had no one to answer to or follow except my own whims and fancies, no matter how unreasonable or silly they seemed. 

At the end of the 2.5 hours, I walked out the hotel and felt unreasonably happy to see my kind taxi driver waiting there for me just like he had promised, and during the 3.5 hour drive back, I decided to befriend him the best way I knew how to befriend a stranger in a foreign land- by asking him how to say this and that in his native tongue. I fancied the idea of learning the entire Arabic language during a 3.5 hour car ride in Jordan, though I knew that this was just as unreasonable as the rest of my ideas that day. How do you say “unreasonable” in Arabic? I should have asked him that...The language lesson eased into actual conversation in English, and he told me about his travels all over the Middle East and in Germany. I just loved how every time I asked him about each country he visited, whether it was nice there, he responded with the most genuine “Sure, sure” followed by some positive adjective or another like “wonderful” or “lovely”. I am drawn to people with monotonously (but genuinely) positive attitudes. I loved the way he said “Sure” because it felt like Sean Connery was sitting next to me, saying “Sure, sure” over and over again. Night fell long before we reached our destination, and I happened to look out the window at one point and was awed by all the stars that were visible in the desert sky. “I'll have to come back in the spring when it's warmer and go camping in the desert under these stars,” I told Jaser, “do you think that would be nice?” “Sure,” said Sean. 

We got to talking about religion and his married daughter. “You know why I like Islam?” He told me he liked Islam because Islam says daughters must bring their love interest home and he must ask the parents for permission to marry or date her. “It is not like that in other places. I saw this in Germany!” he insisted, “In Germany, I saw, they bring many boys home, and don't tell the father and mother.” I nodded, amused by his fatherly concern. I told him I was still as single as ever. “That is good! You are young, you should do other things.” I agreed but it would be nice to do these “other things” with someone by my side to share with. “I hope you will find a Muslim man,” he said, “Muslim men are good. You know, in the Qur'an, it says once you are married, you must never look at anyone else. You must look after your wife and no one else. And I- believe me! I never look anywhere else, I look only after my wife,” he insisted vehemently. I believed him 100%, thinking about his sick wife and how beloved she was by this man. “I hope one day, you will be with a Muslim man,” said he, “inshallah!” I nodded, at the very least pleased by his well-wishes. By this time, my blues were completely washed away by the grace and tide of well-wishes of this kind old man who cared enough to wish me a good Muslim man for a husband. I could not and cannot see myself with a Muslim man, but that was beside the point. Was all of Jordan's taxi service serviced by a league of extraordinary gentlemen such as my taxi driver? I wondered later at the airport. 

According to one of my Canadian colleagues who I ran into at the Amman airport, and who had spent several days in Jordan camping in the desert with the Bedouins and climbing Petra on a donkey, this was actually true: Jordan's taxi drivers are extraordinarily and unreasonably nice. She also said the Bedouins lied to her about how nice the tent was going to be, that it was really weird at first getting scrubbed down by another woman at the Turkish bath, and that Petra was “really amazing actually.” So there's a second point of view for y'all. I was so overjoyed to see her and all the Lebanese teachers who happened to share my flight. I had loads of fun telling them about my adventures in their home country- the Music Hall, Jeita, the shopping, the Mediterranean, the music, the people, my New Year's Eve at Dunkin' Donuts-, as well as about my trip to Egypt- the traffic, the donkeys among the traffic, the baksheesh, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the Nubian village, the racist boatman-, and about my unreasonable trip down to Aqaba with Sean Connery. One of the best parts about traveling comes after the fact- when you're telling stories.

That was the best part about coming home to Kurdistan. I loved sharing my stories and hearing all about the individual adventures of my colleagues who had gone elsewhere- Dubai, Thailand, Turkey, Jordan. And boy did I miss a lot of people here. I was surprised by how happy I felt to see some of their faces and by the genuine affection I felt for people whom I'd met just 4 months ago. Some were greeted with huge bear hugs where the feet momentarily left the floor, others with 3 kisses on the cheek (left-right-left; in the Jordan aiport, I saw Jordanian men do one kiss to the left, then four consecutive kisses to the right!), and others with just an overjoyed “heyyyyyy!” because some just aren't the touchy-feely type, though they were no less missed. So many ways of saying hello.

One was greeted with a handshake and introduction. We have yet another new teacher here- a young American girl fresh out of college, but already a globe-trotter. I'm grateful for her company as much as she is for mine, and we are together determined to make the most out of our last 6 months in Iraqi Kurdistan. Today right after school ended, we had an adventure trying to find a taxi out into the city, and ended up hitching a ride from a man posing as a taxi driver, who was clearly not a taxi driver because his car lacked the distinctive orange markings of an Erbil taxi. But hey, we were desperate. Then we roamed through the labyrinthian Lenga bazaar, shared a lahambajeen (the fake pizza I was referring to earlier), cabbed it back to the school and here is where I apparently provided endless amusement for the taxi driver just by looking Asian. Attempted to get hooked on The Wire (still not happenin'), and finally drifted off sleepily to our respective pads. What is the big deal with The Wire? I'll give it three more chances before I ditch it forever and move on to the John Adams drama or Arrested Development.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a much more successful viewing. It made me think a lot about getting old, about the intense similarities between babies and old people, about the beauty of ballet, and about my hotel stays in Lebanon and Egypt. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. It is long (because it has to be), and poetic, and reminds me of Forrest Gump. 

Jiro, one of our young school guards, stands in front of the stoops of our apartment complex. He often reminded me of a loafing hound: lazy and loyal.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 9: New Year's at Dunkin' Donuts

I spent New Year's Eve 2008 at a Dunkin' Donuts in Beirut with a group of strangers, drinking a wonderfully hot cup of green tea. How did this come to pass? It all began when I flew back into Beirut having no idea how I was going to spend the next two or three days, which also happened to be the very last day of 2008 and the very first days of 2009. I figured I'd just walk out and let things happen to me, come what may. I was very tired from having slept on a train the night before, and so I quickly garnered a hotel room on the Hamra for a decent price considering it was New Year's Eve, and crashed on the generous-sized bed without setting my alarm. 

I woke up a couple hours later and checked my watch: Yikes, it was 10 minutes to midnight! I was about to miss the coming of the New Year in an amazing city like Beirut, no less! I threw on a scarf and coat, and rushed out, throwing out a “happy new year!” to the hotelier at the reception desk. But where was I rushing off too? I hailed a cab and asked him to take me to the waterfront so that I could see the Mediterranean Sea by night one more time. Looking outward, it was dark and more space-like than ever, and the waves were angrier than ever, bursting into white ocean spray like the fireworks set off by a group of teenagers hanging out nearby. Shivering in the freezing night, I wandered down the Corniche and into a posh looking restaurant lobby. Anywhere to avoid frostbite. 

“Can I get a cup of tea?”

“Does it look like you can get a cup of tea right now?” the young receptionist pointed at the glass double doors that led to the actual restaurant. Inside, a mad drunken New Year's Eve party was shaking the house down. House music, confetti, and drunken ladies, short silver dresses and black suits, shiny black shoes and shaking stilettos- this was a party for the young and rich. I was young, but not rich.

“Each of those guests payed $200 just to get in.”

Jesus, they must be swimming in champagne.

“Go on in, the party's already started a while ago,” said the receptionist, whose name was Daniel, “You should have come an hour ago- the waves were huge then!”

So I walked in. 

Later, once Daniel was released from his work duties, he invited me to come hang out with him and some friends for his own New Years' celebration. In fact, he hadn't made plans because he'd been given the New Year's shift, so that's how we ended up at Dunkin' Donuts in the wee hours of the first morning of 2009. He introduced me to his friends- a brother and sister and their young uncle-, and we all sat down with hot tea or coffee. 

The young uncle, happened to have lived in Egypt for years, so I regaled them with tales from my Egypt trip. How we nearly died several times in the crazy traffic while bracing ourselves in taxis, and crossing the streets on foot. How, among the chaos of cars, bicycles, honking, and fumes, you just as well see a donkey's ass or a herd of sheep. Why not? If you don't have a car, but you have a donkey, why not? Anything goes as a mode of transportation in Egypt. And the hassling. Really, the worst form of marketing I've ever experienced. “Donkey? camel? Elephant? Helicopter?” I demanded, imitating the dozens of Egyptian hasslers we had encountered, with their outrageous offerings. I swear one of them offered me a unicorn. But I said no because I was never a fan of single-horned creatures. They will say anything, just to get your attention. They even hassle about not hassling! “No hassle, no hassle! No charge for looking! Just come into my shop, take your time, I promise, no hassle in my shop! No problem, no charge for looking, just come in, no hassle!” We even saw signs over the windows saying advertising “no hassle”. What a reputation these Egyptians have. 

“You have to understand, though,” said the young uncle, “Cairo alone is a city of 25 million- and 85% of them are poor.” In a nation in which poverty was the norm, begging has become a business, with the official name of “baksheesh”. Even the cops did it. Despite all the craziness, the young uncle claimed that he missed Cairo. “Compared to Cairo, Beirut is dead. Cairo is so alive! People never sleep, nothing ever shuts down.” Funny...this was exactly what I said about Beirut, compared to Erbil. Talk about relative!

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 8: Dancing With Nubians, Speaking in Idioms

The visit to the Nubian village in Aswan, a city south of Luxor, was the other high-light of the trip. We arrived in Aswan at night and had pizza and extremely tangy, deep-pink hibiscus tea on a wooden boat-restaurant that was forever moored. Already, I liked Aswan better than Luxor. It was late at night, and the atmosphere felt as tranquil as the waters of the Nile on which the boat floated, a lone cat wandered around the boat and between our legs as we drank our tea- tired from our trip, but happy to have arrived at last after a long 12-hour train ride. No other customers were around, and the waiter was friendly and open, bundled up in a thick coat and hat and earmuffs and rubbing his hands together to keep the chill of the Nile air from freezing even his girth. The next day, we took a ferry out and ventured onto Elephantine Island which took only a few minutes to reach by ferry. 

As we wandered through the narrow dirt paths of the village, between the low walls of the bright and colorful mud-brick homes, running into adorable wobbly-legged sheep grazing from trash pile to trash pile, I couldn't help thinking “This was Africa.” I mean, duh, Egypt was officially on the African continent, but Cairo is more Middle Eastern than African. Here on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt, the people were dark like Africans, their clothes were bright, colorful and cheery, the women were bold and not the least bit reserved even if they wore the traditional Muslim garb. During our exploration of this more “African” region of Egypt, we happened upon a preschool, and a minute later, found ourselves in the schoolyard, dancing with a bunch of 3- and 4-year olds to rhythmic music playing from a cheap boombox. They'd seen us peeking in and immediately invited us in. The boombox was switched on and the little 3-4 year-olds started doing their morning dance. It reminded me a lot of how I always started out the school day with “head and shoulders, knees and toes” or “itsy-bitsy spider” with my own KG's. The kids here were so much tamer, I thought, thinking of my particularly rambunctious boys back in Kurdistan. Also, they were allowed to lay around if they pleased, or to dance in circles hand-in-hand if this they pleased, and there was no concern about maintaining order in a classroom. The children were not shy, and did not hesitate to take our hand and bring us into their dance circles, and some of them were fairly good dancers. 

We took all this in stride and came, danced, paid and left as if nothing unusual had happened, moving on to whatever was to be our next adventure on this strange island. We wandered around and happened upon little Mohammed and his family of women- a mother and a bunch of aunts and sisters I think, or maybe just aunts. There, we had tea, played with the little toddler, saw some wedding photos, paid and left. At the end of our wandering through the small island, we stood at the top of a hill overlooking the water near where the ferry was to arrive and took photos of the village and the palm trees; of the woman in a black burkha carrying a pot on her head as she gracefully made her way down the dirt hill, barefoot and brown, old, yet back as straight as an arrow (or else how would she carry all those things on her head?); of the feluccas along the Nile framed like a painting by the whitewashed bricks of a window frame. Soon, we hopped into the ferry, boys and girls on separate sides, and headed back to the East bank of Aswan, which was so vastly different from this Nubian village, though only a short ferry ride away. 

Hot dog

A sheep studies its shadow

A cat roams the low rooftops of the mudbrick homes.

The cat was an animagus!

Picturesque felucca, visible through a glass-less window

The train trip back to Cairo from Aswan was much more pleasant because giant flies did not buzz around our faces all night. It would have been equally as miserable because the AC was cranked way up, though it was the dead of winter and freezing at night (yes, Cairo gets cold!), and I might have ended up like the Little Match Girl if David hadn't saved the night by pulling out his extra coats, bulky and snug and inviting in that meat-freezer of a train. Brrrrrr! I kept my legs crossed all lady-like almost the entire time in order to keep as much of my body heat trapped as possible, and refused to eat or drink anything for the next 12 hours in an attempt to avoid using the train bathrooms (- Success!). I can withstand many discomforts while traveling, but for some reason, I have an intense aversion to dirty bathrooms. Surprisingly, I got a decent amount of sleep on that long train ride, and this time without the company of a gaggle of giggly Egyptian girls playing violent hitting games, or a hobbit-haired French child who liked to repeat phrases like “ba-NA-na cake” and “un grand camion!” over and over again. (That was during the three- or five-hour trip from Luxor to Aswan. Not that I minded their company.) 

Back in Cairo, a local who spoke in English idioms took us to a kosri joint, which just turned out to be that macaroni-and-tomato sauce dish we had had just outside the train station to Luxor. Somehow we ended up paying for our unofficial guide's meal, too. Then he took us to an outdoor teahouse, where we sat around in the nippy morning downing hot, sweet tea and talking to our tour guide. He was of Bedouin descent, married with 5 children, and intensely studying the English language. He really loved idioms. He seemed to think idioms brought a conversation from a level 1 to a level 10 in terms of interest and intellect. We talked about the shoe-at-Bush incident, as we seemed to do with all the locals we ran into. After paying for the tea, we were thinking about heading back, but then the guy insisted we pop into a perfume shop. A perfume shop, as it turns out, is more of a theatre than a shop. The four of us and the tour guide took seats set up around the periphery of the small shop, underneath shelves of unlabeled glass bottles full of heady liquids. After taking the trouble to go out and buy us more tea (I had more tea during my 2-week winter vacation than I had during my entire lifetime, no joke!), the owner of the shop (who, coincidentally, was also of Bedouin descent) then put on a show which was really “the longest sale ever”, as David put it, at the end of which Alice and I felt obliged to buy something. I bought a tiny bottle of all-natural, alcohol-free rose petal perfume, and I think Alice got the lotus scent, made popular by Cleopatra according to our salesman. Our local guide made some randy comment about using the perfume to make an upside-down Pyramid on a woman, which turns men into Arabian horses. I don't think it was an idiom. Anyway, we left the perfume shop, said goodbye to our guide, and returned to our hotel Arabesque. 

........................

I had to leave the rest of the traveling group early, after our visit to the huge and well-manicured Al-Azhar Park, because my plane was to take off in the early evening. I said goodbye to the group before they headed to the Northern Cemetery, a bit disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go with them. After all, it seemed I was developing a habit of visiting cemeteries wherever I went- from the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings where King Tut had been discovered, to the humbler one in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. It would have made sense to top off the trip to Egypt with a visit to the space where the living lived among the dead. Anyway, I said goodbye and caught a cab, assuming that with the hotel business card in hand, it would be cake finding it even if I really had no idea where it was in the mammoth city of Cairo. What an assumption. We drove around for an eternity, asking for directions from cops, other taxi drivers, and other locals, but no one knew where it was. Then, when we finally figured out where we had to go, we got stuck in the one of Cairo's infamous gridlock traffic jams, moving at a snail's pace, if we were moving at all. Crawling in traffic, I burst out laughing as a man on a donkey suddenly cut in front of us, its big white donkey booty bobbing up and down, utterly undaunted by the sea of cars surrounding it. And then at one point, all the cars stopped for a sheep crossing, the shepherd herding his woolly charges through the cars with his stick as if this was all normal, which of course it is, in Cairo. 

What a city, so colorful and animated...chaotic, its dirty streets swimming with cars, donkeys, sheep and shepherds; men riding bikes with dining table-sized boards on their head, piled high with bread; shapely women using their head as a third arm to carry their groceries, wobbling not even once and swinging from the waist down with grace; men in dresses; destitute citizens demanding baksheesh left and right for every little favor, for every step taken, for every turn of a screw, and every fallen leaf. The cab driver was amused that I was amused. To him, it was all normal, but he knew that it was all foreign to me, a great circus act, with all the balance but no order. I had known it was going to be this way from the moment the plane landed: as soon as the wheels touched the ground, the entire plane seemed to rise as every single passenger stood up in unison (the last orderly act I witnessed until I got out of Egypt) and made a mad rush for their luggage in the storage areas above, some even making a mad dash toward the front of their plane, trying to get as close as possible to the front exit before the aisle got crowded, as if they'd been waiting with their bags ready and eyeing the exit door like an eagle eyeing its prey or a runner eyeing the finish line from his starting place, ready to bolt forward like a bullet as soon as he heard the pistol shot. This was Egypt: chaotic, dirty, and poor, abandoning all pretense and leaving every man for himself to survive any way he knew how, even if it meant making a living out of pestering people, day in day out for a felucca ride, as little Mohammed's father did while the little boy hung around the colorful mud-brick house on Elephantine Island, unbothered by the flies all over his face, charming tourist-visitors into coming in and having Nubian tea, and earning a bit of baksheesh of his own.  

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 7: The Book of Hussein

Luxor is the city in southern Egypt divided into the West and East Bank of the Nile. The two banks on opposite shores of the river are polar opposites, and I didn't much like the East Bank where the hassling was especially bad along the waterfront, and there was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the place, none whatsoever. And this is coming from someone who can see beauty in a junkyard [rf: “hidden gems” post]. The other side- the West Bank- was a stark contrast from this ugly and uninteresting East Bank, for it contained the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut:

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold everywhere the glint of gold.“

- the famous lines describing the moment of the most amazing discovery he would ever make. Gives me the shivers whenever I read it. Back in the days of ancient Egypt, people devoted a lot of time to attending to the dead. Also, there was a much more intense belief in the power of the written word, literally. The blue and gold paints were still in decent condition, and every inch of the tombs' rocky innards were covered with angular men and women, cartouches, and owls, ankhs, scarabs, quails, reeds, and other hieroglyphs that the ancients seemed to believe would protect and/or assist the dead just by being written- carved- into the stone walls of the chamber. We spotted several carvings of men with dicks erect at perfectly 90 degree angles, and in the coolest tomb (probably one of the Ramses, I forget which), there was an elaborate blue-and-gold painting of the story of the goddess who swallows and gives birth to the sun every day.

We nearly got into trouble with the police here because one of the unofficial guards waited around until he was sure we had taken pictures, then randomly chose Max to threaten with police action if he didn't give payment for the picture.

We were ALL taking pictures.

I just met another Egyptian here in Erbil, and mentioned the opinion that most Egyptians are poor, so this whole corrupt baksheesh culture should be considered in a sympathetic light. The Egyptian shook his head and said it was more than poverty; it was a social sickness. Thinking of this particular incident in which the self-appointed guard quite deviously walked away in order to give us time to sneak pictures, and then returned to catch us red-handed- makes me want to side with the second opinion. They can be nasty. They can be unpleasant. The corruption can be sickening. Perhaps it is a sickness that ought to be treated. The part that makes me mad is that he acted as if he had all the authority in the world to charge us, threaten us, snatch one of our phones without permission, and blackmail us, when in reality, he had not a shred of authority to do any of the above. It also pissed me off when I would go to the bathroom and have to tip someone just for handing me a paper towel, when I could damn well have gotten it myself. Did I ask for the service? Uh, no...Did the owner of the building ask you to stand at the door collecting coins? Uh, no! Well, I can't be too sure about that. And maybe I'm just being an utter snob.

After encounters like this and all the hassling, it was really nice and a huge relief to meet Hussein. Hussein was the taxi driver who drove us to and from Hetsepshut, the pillared structure built right into the face of a mountain, still somewhere on the West Bank of Luxor.

In his hand he holds an ankh, the symbol for eternal life. So much for that.

Dogs mirror the Colossi of Memnon

On the way to Hetsepshut, he showed us a little notebook he carried around with him in the cab, each page filled with a message from travelers from all over the world who had been chauffered by Hussein, messages in their respective languages, including one in Korean. I could tell this little book meant a lot to him. It was like his well-worn passport, except he never went anywhere; people came to him and brought their exotic letters and words and marked his book with them like souvenirs, as proof that he had seen the world through others' eyes, heard their stories, seen what they looked like, heard what they sounded like. On the way from Hetsepshut, I kept asking him where he lived, whether we had passed his house yet, how 'bout now? How 'bout now? Until he got the unsubtle hint and invited us all over for tea. I don't think I had aimed to get invited to his house, but now that I think about it, I guess that's what it sounded like.

We drove toward the road to Aswan. I remember low, colorful walls on either side and a long, straight road. It was around sunset. He parked on the left side, we crossed the street, and followed him past the wall and into his home. It was spacious, there were many rooms with colorful walls in sky blues and sea greens- even a good-sized guest room with piles of thick blankets like in the Princess and the Pea-, but it was all unmistakably poor. The stall-like bathrooms with holes in the ground for pissing and dumping were fulsome-looking, I remember, but the walls were a cheery sky blue. One room was being used as a barn to house his pigeons, chickens, and a cow that had given birth just days ago (so that would make it 2 cows). Pigeons were good for sex, Hussein told us. Was everything slightly exotic good for sex? I wondered. One side of the house was being built up into a restaurant. Rather than saving up a lot of money over a long period of time and then building the restaurant all at once, Hussein was building it up a few stones at a time, making small progress every week or every month, but progress nonetheless. I liked his patience, his self-created purposes. He was going to call his restaurant “Sunset” because just over the back wall of where the restaurant was going to be, the guests would have a great view of the sunset every evening over his neighbor's field of several acres.

During the tour, we'd met his adorable 2-year-old son whose name I can't recall, and afterward, we met the rest of his family- his daughter and his brother's family because his brother had died, or something. There were a lot of women there is all I remember, and they all came forward and shook our hands without hesitation, without the modesty or the downward gaze decreed by their religion when woman meets man, though the older women wore the black burkhas. In southern Egypt, it seemed, Islam took on a more cultural significance rather than a religious one. We sat with Hussein on a wooden bench propped against a wall in the sitting room. The women built a roaring fire right on the dirt floor for the nightly family gathering, and they served us sweet tea. He did not have lots of money, Hussein admitted to us, but he had a large extended family to care for, and that cared for him in return. He was rich here, said the taxi driver, putting his large palm over his heart. In the firelight, Hussein's little son danced around for us in the silly way that kids dance. I can't believe I still think kids are cute after finding out what devils they can be.  I wrote a short message in his little notebook and we all signed it, making our mark in the Book of Hussein.

The next day, I sat in a felucca with two Jews and an anti-Semitic, chauvinist boatman, waiting futilely for the wind to pick up. It never picked up. We picked up and left for the train station.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 6: Saladin's Kingdom

On Christmas morning 2008, I woke up in a hotel room with three Jews. The night before, while everyone else was asleep, I had gone for a walk around the neighborhood and happened to buy a box of Middle Eastern desserts like baklava and stuff from a sweets shop around the corner. We dug into these before heading downstairs for the usual hotel breakfast, which just barely passed the “edible” mark, despite all appearances. After the first morning, I pretty much just had tea or nescafe. I think this was the day we visited the Citadel of Saladin (12th century Sultan of Egypt and Syria and legendary military commander, who was actually of Kurdish origin!), where we entered several mosques, including the famous Mohammed Ali mosque, and climbed some old crumbling stone-brick structure with towers and steeply spiraling staircases and a beautiful view of Cairo's cityscape of pencil gray buildings that matched the grayness of the winter sky that day, and were hung all over with colorful laundry. I selfishly hoped that the dwellers of this city would never adopt automatic dryers; without the laundry hung over all the balconies, the Cairo cityscape would be dull indeed.

Keeper of Shoes

Modern Cairo through an ancient window

Dave and Alice make their escape

Max surveys his kingdom

Sitting precariously on a ledge

I want to climb a tree in every nation.

Denile is a river in Egypt

Another night, we visited the Cairo tower which was supposed to afford a most amazing view of the city, especially during sunset. We got there after dark, so decided not to go up that night. But I did get a picture of that black vulture-like emblem that adorns the front of the tower as well as the flag of Egypt.

Later, I discovered that this fierce-looking bird was not a vulture, but an eagle- the Eagle of Saladin, the symbol of Arab nationalism, also later adopted by Saddam's Baathist party* and the Nazis. Saladin is turning out to be a vastly interesting historical figure, and I'm now wishing I'd read more about him before going to Egypt, so I could have looked for the eagle carving on the western wall of the Citadel, if it even exists anymore. Anyway, we came back to the tower during our last night in Cairo before heading down to Luxor, but the sunset escaped us once again because the line for the elevator was so long. Nevertheless, the view from the top was pretty nice- like seeing Paris from the Eiffel Tower, except here we could see a huge soccer field, a tiny soccer field, and a swimming pool among other things, and the Nile of course. I dunno why it's the sports arenas I remember. It was freezing so we took a seat at the cafe, which wasn't terribly fancy, but had a small tray of little red stones on the table as decoration that Alice seemed to like. Alice and I had a nice long chat about books. Back at the hotel, as we sat around on the lobby couches, waiting to go to the train station, we played a game called “2 f***u's and a surprise”. Alice won the surprise- one of the little red stones from the Cairo tower cafe.

While waiting just outside the train station, we shared a bowl of macaroni-and-tomato sauce at a hole-in-the-wall macaroni-and-tomato sauce joint whose floor was covered with wood chips. I went exploring and passed many shisha-and-shai cafes full of men with smoke blowing out of their mouth and nostrils, and steam rising from their teacups. And interestingly, I discovered a large shisha-and-shai house where the men sat around smoking, drinking tea, and playing some hard-core chess. Before heading back to the train station, I picked up some sweet Egyptian bread, a bag of honey-roasted chestnuts, and a marriage proposal (I said no). We took a 12-hour train down to Luxor that night, accompanied by all these Egyptian men in dresses (I can't help thinking of them as dresses, even though they're just the traditional Egyptian garb for men) and turbans, a man who made a strange droning sound the entire time, a man who looked as old as the Pyramids who was unable to walk by himself and yet insisted on taking a walk through the narrow aisle every half-hour, taking about half the time it took to build the Pyramids to walk a single train-length. And flies. Welcome to 2nd class trains in Egypt, folks! It felt like the Septa in Philly- dirty, with the token crazy guy(s). The door right in front of me kept swinging open and shut all night because of the men selling tea and bread, and because of that ancient man who enjoyed taking walks. It was a restless night for me. It was a miserable night for one of my traveling companions. (Cipro anyone?) At one point, I woke up from my half-sleep, looked out the window, and saw a beautiful countryside view, of lush, green and golden fields and palm trees, the sky a pale yellow and white. At another point, I woke up, looked out the same window, and saw an amazing deep-pink and red sunrise. Surreal images between sleep, seen through a smudged window of a train chugging through Egypt.

*Months later, I bought a rusty Ba'athist eagle insignia for $5 at an antique shop in Erbil. To this day, I don't know what to do with it.