jack's cairochronicles

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.

• Good friends
• good beer
• Bacon
• “stuff” just works

But there is also much to dread. (you know me, mister happy sunshine)

• We both have to re-integrate into our jobs.
• We have to reintegrate into life in a “civilized” country.
• We have to buy furniture to re-fill our house.
• We have to buy a car.
• We have to get the motorcycles road worthy.
• We have to get auto/motorcycle insurance.
• We have to make the rounds of the doctors (dentists, dermatalogists etc).
• We have to unpack our shipment within 7 days of its arrival (in order to make any claims for damages/loss).
• We have to relearn how to drive.
• We have to relearn how to shop. (what do you mean I can get everything in one store? What do you mean the prices are negotiable?)

So as I contemplate the half way mark, I look forward to the end. And I dread it.

We are in day 2 of our 5 week trip.
We purchased all the flights back in January.

Cairo->Bangkok
Bangkok->Chiang Mai
Chiang Mai -> Hanoi (via Bangkok)
Siem Reap->Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur->Manila
Manila->Seattle (via Honolulu)

We are gonna take 3 weeks to get from Hanoi to Siem Reap via ground transports

We made hotel reservations in every city that we fly into,since those are “hard” dates.

Every other date is soft: we aren’t sure when we will arrive, so we will make reservations a couple of days in advance after we our schedule firms up.

So this afternoon, we are in Bangkok. We leave tomorrow for Chiang Mai.
I was perusing our hotel reservations for Chiang Mai.

I noticed I have a pre-paid, non-refundable room for July 28 for 3 nights via www.agoda.com.

If you notice the date on this post you will notice that tomorrow (relative to the day this post was written) is not July 28th, but JUNE 28th.

My darling wife was sitting across the table from me when I gasped and said
“Oh you are fucking kidding me”.

Kaddee had just been saying that our hotel, Raming Lodge Hotel, looked like a gorgeous place, with a spa and how she was going to get a massage and maybe a pedicure while we were there.

It took a minute before I could summon the courage to tell her

Uh, honey.. we may not have a room.

I explained that I had obviously been suffering from teh dumb the day I made the reservation.

She got the guidebooks down from the shelf of the hotel we are staying at, Wendy House in Bangkok, and started looking for alternatives.

She is a trooper.

I went online to the agoda.com website and clicked on the “chat live” button.

I explained the situation and we waited.

and waited.

The online help finally came back and said

We can change your reservation, they have a room for the new dates, however the rate has gone up and you will have to pay the difference.

I held my breath and asked

how much.

The answer:

$5.13

I thought, well $5/night is really not much of a stupid tax to pay, sure.

But it was $5.13 total for all 3 nights.

Sign me up!

Agoda.com had become my first choice for hotel rooms the last time we were in SE Asia. This customer service really stands out and means I will use them whenever possible and recommend them to anyone that needs a room in SE Asia. (I believe they are also doing rooms in Europe now)

I am sitting in Bangkok drinking a Tiger as I type this.

In the depths of my “i really hate egypt” moods, I was convinced that I would not leave egypt alive.

I was sure that Egypt would have one more surprise for me.
Like my plane being hijacked, or crashing into the sea.

I did a small jig in the Cairo airport, but held my breath until we touched down
in Bangkok.

I made it out alive.

FYE.

I added another count down timer till our lockdown is over.

There has been some waffling on this date:

“we will re-test everyone in 2 days and if there are no more cases we may lift the quarantine”

But if they retest, and there are more positives….. I don’t really want to contemplate that…

Update:  To no one’s surprise they did not retest anybody.

And the kicker: The students that tested positive and were hospitilized have been released from the hospital and roaming the streets of Cairo. And we, who tested negative are still stuck in lockdown.

It is times like these when I think the egyptians deserve their government and vice versa.

Well it is official:

5 students from Seton Hall have tested positive for H1N1. They look fine (they had them coralled in a corner with surgical masks on).

The dorm is locked down till June 15th.

That means no Dahab trip for us.

It is going to be a loonnngg week.

I know we probably sound like whiners:

“Wah. I can’t go on vacation…”

while some folks are sick and hospitalized.

I would still bitch, but go along with the quarantine, if it actually does any good. But it doesn’t.

Doctors from the Ministry of “Health” come and go freely, with no masks, no gloves, nada.

So there is another disease vector.

And all the students are hanging around in the common areas. Not smart.

And some of the RA staff are wearing masks…. strung around their necks.

They have done throat swabs on every resident. I imagine if a single additional test comes back positive they are gonna lock down the entire place for at least a few more days.

Then guess what: there will be more cases! “Gee, where are all these cases coming from.”

Good thing they are killing all the pigs.

I actually walked the perimeter of the building yesterday, testing all of the fire doors. They are all padlocked (and have been for 3 years. Another genius move).

I eye balled the fence surrounding the basketball court.

There is one section of wall that is only 4 feet high, with a 4 foot fence on top of that. If one were to get over that, one would have to balance on top of a 12 foot high wall, with broken glass embedded into the top.  And then jump down from the 12 foot high wall into an alley. And hope that alley goes somewhere.

All while the guards on inside are standing around and the cops and Ministry of Health security personnel are milling about on the outside.

I am considering it.

So, here we are, still stuck in our little slice of heaven.

Still no news from the Ministry of Health about when or if we will be released.

There is now 15 hours until our plane leaves for Dahab. We are packed and our bags are by the door incase we get “permission” to leave the building.

The doctor (who normally visits the dorm 3 days/week for office hours and is stuck here like the rest of us) said that Insha’allah the Ministry officials will be here soon (it is 10:15pm now) to let us know the results of some of the swabs and hopefully a timeframe for their decision.

Now, their decision may be “48 more hours of quarantine”.

So it is looking unlikely that we will escape to Dahab for our vacation.

If it gets delayed by more than a day or so, it becomes less worth making the trip, what with having to buy new tickets and still having to get back here to meet our packing/paperwork obligations prior to our final departure.

The good doctor kd is taking this hard. I am used to spending 2 or 3 days in the flat without leaving. She is getting stir crazy, and the control freak in her is having trouble with not having control of her destiny.

Of course tomorrow may be a lot less rosy for me as well. I am currently drinking the last beer in the house! :-O

BTW: FYE is an acronym used by AUC (at least they used to) as part of their orientation for new students. It officially stands for First Year Experience. I have redefined it to express my more heartfelt emotions about living here.