Things that I have used as bookmarks

I can be OCD about some things.

I always eat quickly for example — it can be quite ugly to watch me get to it when I’m actually hungry.  I obsessively check the alarm clock on my phone at least thrice before going to bed to make sure that it’s on and will wake me up in the morning.

Of course, there are those things which I’m not extremely particular about. Future plans, time at which I wake up (if I don’t have anything in the morning), what I wear etc . . .

Then, there are some things which it seems I subconsciously make sure to surround with chaos and anarchy.

One is my inability to listen to someone speak for any length of time. Anyone who knows me, has seen that far off look that I will inevitably get at some point during a conversation.  It’s not that I like to ignore people, or even that I’m thinking about something. My mind just goes somewhere else. Can’t control it.

A nice physical parallel can be seen in the way I use random things for bookmarks.

Here is a picture of things that I have made use of  in the last month alone.

Starting in top-left corner moving right. 1.) Ticket to Uum Kalthoum Museum 2.) The story of Abraham in Arabic. 3.) My Phone. 4.) 25 piastre note — probably not worth the paper it’s printed on. 5.) Piece of bog roll. 6.) An orange felt-tipped marker. 7.) A postcard 8.) A bookmark with an Alligator on the front. 9.) A flashcard.

What does it all mean???

Unicycle erm . . . Journals part 2

A few weeks ago I rode, on a one-wheeled bike, from one side of my back yard to the other. I had given myself a week to do it, and surprised myself by practising every day for at least an hour in pursuit of my goal. Lots of brusies.

I decided to document the different stages of my unicycle evolution, and so the very first time that I tried to get on the thing, I had my sister’s friend Courtney come film my efforts. Then a few days later I had Alexandra, my youngest sister bear with me as I messed around on the roof. I kind of learned how to juggle as well.

The last thing I did was have Alex film me in the yard. Unicycling is a lot of fun. I’d recommend it to anyone.

 

Part of the inspiration for the middle section of the movie clip, was the movie Benny and Joon. If you haven’t seen it, it’s more or less a love story involving two slightly, uh, idyosyncratic people. One character, played by Johnny Depp, is a disciple of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin; throughout the movie he affects Chaplain and Keaton’s physical humour and puts on impromptou stage shows. For some reason, I found them really mesmerising. 

There were other parts of the movie that I related to as well. At one point, Joon, who is supposed to be schitzophrenic, pours Penut Butter Captain Crunch into a blender, adds  milk and creates breakfast. I paused the movie at that point–because I’ve defintely had that breakfast before . . .

Sunflowers – A’guz a tani

Well! My, my. Spring is here at last. This means that the weather will be getting nasty and the windy season will soon overtake us and will be heaping extra dust onto everything.

But, my sunflowers have started to bloom and that is consolation of a sort. The winter wasn’t particularly cold — perhaps that’s why I have been impatient in waiting for the flowers to show. But, now they are here, making life a little more pleasant.

They are as yellow as can be.

Two of them woke up very lazily one day and I expect the rest to follow their example. They are a very individualistic bunch though. Some are very tiny. Some are ten feet tall. And all from the same handful of seeds! The ones that have bloomed are the second tallest, and the second smallest. Also, they always seems to be pointed in different directions at the end of the day. I figure that after the sun goes down, they should all be pointing west.

But they don’t.

Elongated Coins

That’s what the Wikipedia heading for smashed pennies is. Elongated Coins.

I guess I never thought about what I should call the coins that I’ve crushed. It sort of seemed besides the point. I never showed them to anyone after I crushed ‘em. They were for me. 

I recall a time when I coerced my friend Tim into ditching out on classes so we could go hang out by the train yards in Tucson.

As I recall it was a spring day, maybe in early April sometime. Tim had a little white pickup truck whose very existence a good excuse to waste time. Once, we scoured what felt like the whole of greater Tucson in a doomed search for caviar . . .

So, I don’t remember if we were planning to crush coins or if the inspiration just unfolded — floated down; an escaped whimsy. 

We dropped in quick at a Circle K to buy a few provisions – tall cans and some smokes for Tim. The we drove down to an area by the tracks that was mostly warehouses, parked cars, and the ocassional truant.

We parked and walked to an area overlooking a pleasant underpass that commuters used to go under the tracks and towards the downtown area. 

On one side was a whitewashed cement balustrade, complete with midgity bowling pin balusters supporting a flat, foot-wide rail that seemed like it was designed  to be sat on. 

We made ourselves comfy on it, backs to the drop behind us, looking at the railways tracks between us and the scattered high rises of downtown Tucson.

We cracked open our beers and silently reveled in the glory of the day. A few trains went by before we loped down to the shiny rails and lazily placed a few coins on either side of two different tracks. We weren’t sure of the direction that the next train would come from.

While we were waiting we talked to a couple of bums and sipped our drinks and joked around with them comparing life notes and generally doing nothing at all.

A train, a never ending cargo job with yellow and red crates, finally came and went and we walked down to where we thought we left our coins.

We wandered around leaning over like people clamdigging on a some pebble strewn beach on the East Coast. We eventually found about half of them and decided put some more on the tracks for good measure. We then repeated the waiting ritual.

It was a good afternoon.

Fast forward to Egypt.

The other day I was thinking about that afternoon when I heard a train go by. There is a military train here in Maa’di that rumbles by our house at inexplicably odd hours.

I later mentioned to a friend (and fellow English teacher), Amy, that I was seriously considering about going down to the tracks to crush coins. She pulled out an Egyptian 25 piastre coin, handed it to me, and wished me luck.

And so, the other day I lay my piastre down and left it there for a few days until I heard a train go by. I then walked down to the track and surreptitiously searched for my coin. I was a bit worried that a guard would come shoo me away before I could find it. After a little while, I found it — it was pretty gross looking. The tracks here are really dirty.

 I cleaned it up and made my sister Hannah come get a picture with me and my coin and the tracks. I was pretty excited and so when I go home I got a little carried away and took a ton of pictures of the thing. Looking back I was sort of silly, but I tend to get really pumped up about weird things.

What to do, what to do.

 

 

Coin

Sunflowers . . . Arabic puzzle!

I was looking around online and found out that you can grow these flowers 20 feet tall!

 While mine are nowhere near that tall – - the stalks will never push the blossoms past the second story windows to greet us in the mornings — it’s really exciting to watch them grow.

In Arabic the word, phrase rather, for sunflower is : عباد الشمس

The word عباد comes from the three root letters: ع – ب – د

These three letters have the general denotation of “servant”. Therefore any permutation or arrangement of these root letters will give you a word that has to do with some aspect of servanthood or (sometimes slaveship.)

For example:

عبد        ‘abd  Servant, Slave, Serf  pl.  عباد

العباد      al’abaad  Humanity (servants of God)

عبادة     ’abaada    Worship, Adoration, Devotion

معبد      ma’bid   Temple (place of worship)

متعبد     muta’abid Pious, Devout

Can you see all the three root letters in each word?

So. If I were to tell you again that the Arabic phrase for Sunflower[s] is:

عباد الشمس  ‘abaad al-shams

 

What do you think the phrase means?

 

*transliteration was done on the fly and does not meet any scholarly conventions that I am aware of.  Also, this is obviously not meant for people who already speak Arabic.

 

 

Here are the pictures of my Sunflowers!

Something tells me that it’s all happening at the zoo

January!

This month I have: gone to the zoo, had an old friend visit, begun a job hunt, learned what a coordinating conjunction is and how it functions in a sentence.

 A few weeks ago, my friend Josh and his sister Alicia came to stay with my family. We have known them for about twelve years now, having first met them in Dubai, UAE, in that long distant year of our Lord, nineteen-hundred and ninety six.

I was excited to have a good friend visit.

Since I arrived in August, I have purposely eschewed any semblance of frivolous socializing. That mostly means just one thing: no English-speaking friends. My reasoning was that I was here in Egypt for very specific reasons, and that until I accomplished certain goals I should not get distracted. This might seem a little puritanical to some, but I am very easily led astray.

After a few months of this self-imposed mad-professor lifestyle, it was certainly nice to have a slew of meaningless conversations, reminisce a little, as well as engage in a couple debates and exchanges of viewpoint.

Josh had spent a year and a half in Khartoum, and so we had great fun comparing prices of similar foods like Ful (beans) and Molokheya (Okra soup), the virtue of different types of public transportation such as Tuk-Tuks, Microbusses, the Cairo Metro and differences between Egyptian and Sudanese dialects of Arabic.

The most memorable outing that we took was a trip to the Cairo Zoo.

” . . . I do believe, I do believe it’s true . . . “

It was interesting.

One of my Egyptian friends, Sally, told us a while back that because of poor conditions at the Zoo, it’s lost its accreditation with the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. I now have reason to believe her.

From Maa’di, the Giza (Gee-zuh) zoo is about a twenty-five minute drive. Since it is right around the corner from Cairo University, there was a ton of traffic. I probably have driven about six times since I have been in Cairo, opting for public transportation, as it is so much cheaper and more convenient. The trip to the zoo further reminded me of why I avoid driving. There was the usual traffic, and then there was the extra university traffic and then there was the zoo traffic compounded into one headache.

Finding parking at the zoo was not a problem. There were about three ranks of double-parked cars stretched about half a kilometer along the main road. All of them had been left in neutral, so that if someone needed to get their car out all one had to do was merely roll the blocking cars out of the way into the road (being mindful oncoming traffic) while another person drove their car out into freedom. Then the other car would be rolled back into place, and Viola!

Of course, the car that I had driven, was an automatic–there was no way to leave it in neutral. So, I gave the guy who had guided us to our spot my car keys. He wasn’t in a uniform mind you; he had a bunch of other sets of keys and so I felt that he was legitimate. I must admit though, I felt this little nagging feeling as we walked towards the entrance of the Zoo.

There were three of us. Josh, Yasser and I. Yasser is my Egyptian friend who first told me about the zoo. I had promised him that when Josh came, we would all go together. It was especially helpful to have him in the car on the way over because otherwise I never would have made it. Giza is tricky driving. He paid for our entrance. 17 cents apiece.

At first, I was surprised at how big the place was. There was a really good selection of animals. I’m not a biologist, or zoo expert, but everything seemed to be fairly decent. I had half expected to see cages with starving animals dying in lonely corners. None of that.

But… we were followed around the whole time by a photographer who promised to get us a picture with the lions. Like with the lions. Holding lions. This did stand out in my mind as a deviation from standard zoo procedure.

When we visited the reptile house, a shady looking, yellow-booted attendant whipped out a baby crocodile from off the cold concrete floor from beside his bucket and put it into our hands to hold. Our photographer snapped pictures, and then handed the janitor/keeper a wad of small bills. We could not help noticing that the animal didn’t have any teeth.

Later, we were indeed taken behind the lion cages to see the lions up close. The whole thing was a little disconcerting. We stood there while the lion keeper worked a Byzantine pulley system of metal wires which were connected to metal grates which in turn opened onto the long indoor corridor in which we stood. The corridor was lined with cages full of lions. We did not stay for long. It was also depressing.

Eventually, we went to a kiosk to get the pictures developed. The kiosk was in the middle of the zoo. There were lots of pictures of tourists and locals holding baby lion cubs and posing with other animals. It was laughable. The whole time, our guide, and the zoo hands acted like we were getting some sort of behind-the-scenes look at things. At one point we were rushed out of the lion area, because “the boss was coming”. As if what they were doing was against the zoo’s policy.

We ended up buying some pictures ’cause the guy had shot a roll of film. Ya, he was using film; he couldn’t erase the pictures he had taken. They were also kind of cool. Since then I’ve read a lot of online articles about the Giza zoo. Here’s a good one from the L.A. Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/07/world/fg-gizazoo8

It turns out that the zoo, while wonderful in its own way, is a pretty dysfunctional place underneath it all — a good microcosm of Cairo in general. One thing is for sure, if I were to go back, I wouldn’t do the picture thing again, being better informed.

Sundries

(The internet has been too slow to upload pictures mmgrr…They’re coming soon)

So, that guardhouse finally got built! The process was an adventure in and of itself. Here is a pic.

Notice how no one is actually in it. And how the soldier on the corner is sleeping.

 Also, I planted some sunflowers about two months ago. Here is an old picture of the flowers a few weeks after I planted them. I post new ones soon.

"Sunflower and Shadow"

 Josh and I with Mr. toothless.

:(

This and a little of That

First, This:

Over the past months I’ve become friendly with the military and police who are posted in front of the houses and the street corners around the neighborhood in which I live.

If you weren’t already aware; Egypt is a police-state. It has been operating under martial law since the assassination of President Sadat in 1981.

Yes, emergency law has been in place for a quarter of a century.

Quarter of a century. Quarter of a century. Quarter of a century….

Uh, oh. I’ve digressed.

So, as a result of this situation is that there are always scads of men in uniform wherever you look.

The guys who are posted on the street off of a corner of our villa’s orange and cream eight-foot walls just so happen to be pretty respectable chess players; I’ve spent quite a few hours out there representing Team America and practicing my Arabic.

There’s one officer in particular that I get along with quite well.

His name is Sayyed and is just one of those generally friendly people. He makes a whopping £300 Egyptian a month to sit along the road and really not do much at all. I’m not saying he’s lazy, it’s his job description is to literally sit or stand in his assigned area and keep a lookout for trouble-makers. And play chess with me.

(Three-hundred pounds converts to about sixty bucks by the way.)

There have been times where I’ve felt rather embarrassed at the relative wealth in which my family lives. Suffice it to say that I am able to see the glaring incongruities between how many Egyptians live and how the expatriate community and the local upper classes live in general. Egypt does not have much of a middle class; forty-percent of the population lives on under two dollars a day.

I should probably rearrange these paragraphs.

And so, continuing,

I was sitting and playing chess with Sayyed when he mentioned that winter was coming and that it would get colder and would probably rain. I absent-mindedly replied by saying something like:

“Yes, thank God”.

I remember that his face took on a sort an expression of mock pain as he  looked up and repeated himself:

“Yes, it will rain”.

Then I understood.

Most of the guard posts in the area include little wooden structures that look sort of like open-faced outhouses. When it rains, the soldiers and police can squeeze in and keep relatively dry. The only shelter in front of my house is a big tree with broad waxy leaves which are covered (like everything else here) in a thick layer of dust. When it rains, I imagine that the water must drip down from the leaves and cover the guys in a muddy soup.

Bummer.

My recent and ongoing project has been trying to figure out the best way to build some sort of lean-to or shelter for Sayyed and Co. I’ll keep any progress up-to-date here.

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Ok. You know that feeling you get when a long, much labored-over e-mail gets deleted because your computer crashes? I feel similarly now because someone deleted my picture of Sayyed that I was going to put up. I really had to convince him to let me take it. Oh well, here’s another picture of a different cop. I don’t particularly like him. He just sits around darning socks. Anyhow, you get an idea of what the area looks like. See the dusty tree?

Elenor Rigby....

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

And a little of that…

Thanksgiving was a nice homey affair with the family and a few friends. There were, I think, some Egyptians some Dutch and a few Swedes gathered around the dining room table. Some had experienced pumpkin pie before and some hadn’t.

Over the turkey, we did our best to answer all questions about the tradition Thanksgiving (Pilgrims) and other distinctly American phenomenon such as Black Friday. This is when we Americans have the traditional Wal-Mart stampedes and Toys R Us™ shootouts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/business/29walmart.html?_r=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/28/socal-toys-r-us-shooting_n_147032.html