A blog I read, Living in Egypt,
recently linked to a satirical news site in Egypt called El Koshary Today.
Sort of an Egyptian “The Onion”.
Most of it won’t really be amusing or enlightening unless you have spent time in Egypt.
But it is a pretty good chuckle anyway.
Man I would love a bowl of koshary.
We just heard that another set of friends from AUC are moving on up.
They are relocating to Dubai.
Another couple has moved to Oslo.
Another couple has moved to Portland (OR).
Another friend relocated to the SF Bay area.
This is all since we left in August.
Of our “cohort” (which is the group of people that went through orientation with us) we can’t think of anyone that is still there.
Now I am sure that there is an influx of people coming in, and we do still have a few friends there. But from this end, it looks like AUC is emptying out.
There was also a recent article about a 30% drop in study abroad students this year.
All of these are bad signs.
Now it is possible that people coming in now may have higher retention. Mainly because they don’t know any better. I mean, we moved there when the campus was still downtown. There were lots of reasons to dislike or even despise the downtown campus. But at least it wasn’t in the middle of the desert.
People that came in when we did (or before) were (at least partially) drawn there to live _in_ Cairo. Many of them were unhappy with the move to new campus.
Some of our friends have made choices to stay for various reasons:
But it seems that people with options are leaving.
This AUC Diaspora is good in one way for us (and it _is_ all about us):
We now have friends scattering to the four corners of the globe. Which means lots of free lodging!
“The Stranger” weekly alternative newspaper in Seattle has a slightly….. artistic (autistic?) bent to it, as is to be expected (and encouraged) in an alternative newspaper.
They have a regular feature that retells selected entries from the police blotter.
Last week’s entry made me think of Cairo for 2 reasons:
It made me chuckle.
Re-acclimating to Settle brings with it a bunch of do’s, don’ts and don’t-have-tos, big and small.
Do’s:
Don’t
“How did you like it? Glad to be back?”. Again and again…
Don’t-have-tos:
“Where you from? How many children do you have? How many wives do you have”. again and again
What the hell are you doing? Don’t waste that in coffee! Don’t you know how hard it is to get that?!. My god we have to………………. uh, go down the street and buy another bottle. Never mind.
One of the nice things about living in Egypt is that I couldn’t understand the myriad of inane conversations that surrounded me.
Even when I learned the tiniest bit of Arabic, it was easy to tune out any meaning from the babble around me.
I could imagine that the people around me were discussing poetry, art and philosophy.
I could imagine that there was depth and texture to the discussions.
I am now surrounded by conversations in my native tongue.
I am no longer able to pretend.
Too bad, that.
We had lunch the other day at our favorite lunch spot, Salumi.
We have been going there for years. It was one of the last places we dined before leaving for Cairo.
Numerous friends that came to visit us in Cairo stopped at Salumi and picked up a few sticks of salami to bring us.
The friends that stocked our house with vittles for our arrival included a couple of sticks from Salumi.
God bless them all.
But the place, to us, is about more than the food (which is fabulous).
We finally made our first trip back in person in 3 years.
It was like going home to family. It wasn’t the big “NORM!!” kind of thing from the old Cheers sitcom. (We did get that kind of welcome at the Beveridge.)
The welcome we got at Salumi was more like the long lost family. But better. There was none of that awkward “so you’ve been gone for 3 years…. how you been… uh-uh. That’s nice…”, or the “you didn’t call” guilt trip that comes with some family reunions.
This was a warm hug and a smile. We sat and ate with Gina and caught up on each others lives. (Which is different from a lot of our reunions. Most of them are all about what we have been up to. We want to hear about what is new with you too, ya know…)
We talked about the business, what Dino is up to, remembered Izzy (RIP) and all the rest of the gang.
It was almost like we never left.
We left our lunch with a glow that had nothing to do with the wine consumed.
These places are the touchstones that help define “home”.
The hardest thing about being back for me right now is I that get no “jack time”.
I am used to working out of our apartment. I would have anywhere from 6 to 10 hours/day of quality time with myself.
Now, I am back in a cube farm.
Lots of noise, random conversations.
Today was tough:
I went “up the hill” for lunch. Sat down and ordered my lunch.
A crazy homeless guy sat down next to me, ordered a plate of fries and then insisted on talking to me.
I went to lunch to get some peace and quiet.
I am getting cranky…
For the last three years, it has been interesting to tell people that asked (in Egypt and elsewhere we have traveled) that we are from the USA.
We have received a lot of
America good, Bush bad.
And then Obama won and it was
Obama good man, muslim!
So that was fun.
Now traveling, the questions in Southeast Asia are a little different.
How old are you?
How many children do you have
Which are a little odd..
And then there is the
Where are you from
Now here, the response from that we are from the US elicits a desire on the part of the questioner to discuss everything they “know” about the US. Which, while more than the average American knows about SE Asia, is still limited to what they have seen on TV.
Which means either the movies, or the news.
[I am not even going to talk about the whole “Washington D.C. vs Washington state, oh there is 2 of them” bit. Nope.]
I have been asked if I have guns. [my usual reply is “not with me, they are in the hotel safe” which always make people a little nervous]
If I have a harley (sigh). Or if I have a horse. We usually tell people we live “near California” and then they talk about Hollywood stars and the latest “happenings” in that sphere of influence. [Which we never followed when we were in the US..]
The most recent discussion was about Mexico and how there are all these terrible drug problems and the fighting between the militias and the police and how all the killings are terrible.
[This discussion took place in Cambodia, literally across the street from the Tuol Sleng prison. And where I had, moments before, been offered marijuana and opium.]
He wanted to talk all about America. Which is fine up to a point. The first dozen or so times it happens in a day. But after spending a day visiting the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng prison, we had ducked into a shady garden restaurant to give our battered psyches a chance to recover from what we had seen that day.
After we extricated ourselves from the discussion, probably a little rudely, we decided that the next time we were asked we would tell people we were from Canada. Toronto is asked.
Nobody really wants to talk to Canadians.
So we have purchased some stuff to take home. Tshirts, small wall textiles, and some clothes we had made in Hoi An.
It was approx 7.5 kilos in weight.
So we had a dialog with the nice folks at the front desk of our hotel:
Is the post office open today? (it is saturday)
Yes until 9pm.
Is it far from here.
Oh no, only about 2 minutes by scooter.
Oh. We are walking, can you give us directions.
Oh no! You wait here. we call them, they come here.
That had to be repeated before I grokked in fullness.
They called the post office and we went upstairs to gather up the booty to be shipped home.
About 10 minutes later, two women pulled up on a scooter. They had boxes, bubble wrap, tape, a post office scale, forms and bar code stickers.
They gave us the forms to fill out to itemize the shipment and shipping labels.
She wrapped it all up and cut a box to size, taped it all up.
Pulled out a full size desktop scale, and weighed.
We paid them, they put barcode stickers on all copies of the forms (carbon paper!) and on the box and our receipt.
And they bundled everything up and rode off on their scooter, our box under an arm.
Elapsed time from the time the desk called to the time they pulled away: 30 minutes.
Gotta love it.
We are about half way through our vacation. It has been a lot of fun and challenges.
The challenges revolve around the weather. It has been very warm and humid. The heat we are used to. It is hotter on a regular basis in Cairo, but this humidity it a killer. The worst yet was 98degF with 80% humidity.
We decided against 2 side trips we were going to do: Halong bay and the Mekong delta tours because of heavy rains. It isn’t raining all day, but it is raining hard for a good 2-4 hours/day every day.
And kaddee and I have each had “a day”. A day where one or the other of us was just out of it from the heat/humidity and just sat around drinking water and staring slack jawed into space.
But this post is really a reminder of the “half way home” thoughts.
Most vacations, even longer ones, are different than this one. At the end of most vacations, you go home to your normal lives and pick up where you left off.
At the end of this vacation we are returning to seattle after being away for 3 years. There is much to look forward to at the end of this vacation.
But there is also much to dread. (you know me, mister happy sunshine)
So as I contemplate the half way mark, I look forward to the end. And I dread it.