Egypt by Mo

Dance off

2009-08-05T23:59:00.019+03:00

This is a quick post because I’ll let the pictures and videos do most of the talking for me. Otencia and her husband were going to attend one of the events that I missed with the school so they were kind enough to let me tag along. I had heard good things and Otencia said it was great, but didn’t know really what it was and what to expect. The location was a monastery that holds a Sufi dancing and music show every Saturday. Again like most of the things I see they don’t really come with a brochure or information, you’re kind of on your own to figure it all out, so this will be another thing I look into when I get home. My understanding is that it is a group of monks that put on a show through the cultural center to illustrate the traditional music and dancing. When you initially hear of monks dancing and singing I don’t know if you get excited but it’s not like the first choice of concert I would pick, but now I know why Otencia was so hush hush about everything because these guys could rock. It was kind of like watching a drum line or battle of the bands or something. There were about 20 performers most being musicians, a couple dancers and a singer. The performance was only an hour and a half, but it was full of energy. These guys were great and very entertaining. The dancers would just spin around, but one guy literally spun in a circle fast for about 15 to 20 minutes. They were making me dizzy but it was pretty cool what they were doing with their skirts. The pictures will show you more, but the big circles are actually cloth that they were spinning like pizza.

Note: a few more post still to come even though I will be back in the states. The connection was really slow so each of these post took about an hour to upload.

Inside a Mosque close by the Show

Outside of the Mosque

Inside the monestary where the show is.

The starting lineup. All the main instruments

This guy was good. playing the little finger symbols, feeling the flow.

Here come the drummers

This guy spun fast for literally 15-20 min without stopping

Finally done. I thought he was going to pass out.

The horns

Some more dancers

Spinning their skirts

More Spinning...

more spinning...

And some sideways spinning. There was a theme if you didn't catch it. the theme was spinning

These were not the loli pop twins

This guy was incredible, try to spin for 15min, I couldn't last for more than 15 seconds.

The Drum Line

Most entertaining musician, he loves this stuff

Day on the coast

2009-08-03T20:35:00.023+03:00

Note: every picture that was shot besides the museum were from someone elses camera. My memory card got loose so it didn't save a lot of cool shots, but thanks to Chris for the pictures.

Another week has gone by and I have a lot to talk about and have seen so many cool things. I apologize for not keeping this up to date a little more, but it seems that there is not enough time in the day to go to school, finish homework, explore Cairo and write about it to share, so with only a week left in this City I figured I should post a few stories and a lot of pictures that will hopefully hold you over and so stay tuned because with a week to go, I’m gonna rock it to the wheels fall off.

So now to the good stuff. School has been going great and I have learned so much it’s hard to keep it all straight. I also continue to meet a lot of great people both with school and around town. I have a guy in my class named Christian who is from California and who I’ve not only been going to school with but hanging out and exploring Cairo and other parts of Egypt. There is also a great lady that I met from Spain who is going to the same school and her husband are also staying in the same hotel as me so we have been going to dinners and planning trips together. That being said with the weekend approaching we decided to go to Alexandria for the day. I was going to go by myself and mentioned the idea to them and Otencia, her husband “Nacho”, and Christian all planned a trip last minute to the coast and to see the sites of Alexandria.
Now of course the story wouldn’t be complete without a little “hick-up” or something to detour us and that’s pretty much what happened this trip also. The original plan was to take a train in the morning and arrive in Alexandria after a two hour trip. Sure enough we go to get our tickets and they were sold out. Now for those of you who don’t know like we didn’t, August 23rd is an Egyptian national holiday like our 4th of July to celebrate independence so Alexandria is a pretty popular beach destination for the locals and travel by train is a popular form of transportation, so we had to take a time out and come up with plan b, which is pretty much what my life consist of so no big deal.

Here we are talking about what we are going to do and magically a guy appears out of nowhere and asks if we are trying to find a ride to Alexandria. Some crazy Jedi mind trick I guess but we were all for it and found a driver to take us out there for a small price of 600LE for the four of us. Now I’m sure by now most of you that are reading this have seen the post about the taxi driver and this trip was no different as far as speed and traffic only there were four of us crammed in the car together and it was a two and half hour roller coaster ride. I knew what to expect but Otencia’s husband just got there the night before so he was freaking out the whole time, and it was pretty entertaining although on the way back it finally was enough and I was able to brush up on my Spanish curse words when he started yelling at the driver.
We arrived in Alexandria about 10:30am and started at the museum to get a little history lesson in and although it wasn’t as big as the Cairo museum it had a lot of great info about the different cultural influences like the ancient Egyptian empire, Roman, Islamic and Ottoman (I think on the Ottoman part, could be Byzantine and those could be the same for all I know, I just look at the pictures). After the museum we zipped over to the old Roman Theatre that was right in the middle of town and even though some parts were reconstructed, there were still some dig sites going on and it was pretty surreal.

The next stop on our trip that we pretty much just put together in the car was the catacombs. This was the one place that I haven’t been able to take a camera in yet, which was a bummer, so I’ll go into a little more detail on what we saw. We got there and one of the guards got up and probably saw tourist dollar signs and took us on a tour. The roman catacombs were an underground graveyard and were one of my favorite things so far. You walk down a winding stairwell that is open in the middle like water well about 100 feet. When you get to the entrance at the bottom you find out why the stairwell is hollow and there is water at the bottom attached to a canal system in the catacombs. This well was to lower the dead and transport them to their final resting place via floating them to their tomb. This catacomb I was told was one of the biggest ever discovered and held approximately 150 people. Now my source on this might not be accurate since it came from a security guard that spoke very little English so I apologize. My thought process is that I can do all the research when I’m sitting at home some day, but there is limited time to see the sights so I encourage all of you to check out the web if you are interested in learning more about it, because I will definitely do that when I get back. So the catacombs were amazing. There were tombs which had all been excavated so there were no bodies, but you got to see a lot of the open chambers in the wall, where the bodies were kept. There was also a room that was for the families to pretty much have the funeral. We were told that they would have a feast down there and sit around and celebrate/morn. There were a couple of things that stood out and one that I thought was pretty interesting was that they had a horse catacomb in the same place as the humans for the horses of the humans that had past. The other thing that caught my eye was that even though it was a Roman burial ground there were a lot of pictures of Egyptian and Roman gods etched into the walls. Very cool site and all though it doesn’t look impressive on the outside if you ever get a chance to go to Alexandria, go see this.

The day was getting shorter and we wanted to pack everything in so after grabbing a delicious fresh seafood lunch we were off to go see the site of one of the ancient wonders of the world. The ancient lighthouse no longer stands, but there is the Citadel that sits overlooking the ruins. We got there around four just as the Citadel was closing so we didn’t get to go in but got some good pictures and just being there overlooking the Mediterranean was a cool experience. I did get some mango ice cream so it was all good.

With the driver wondering when we were going to leave we made a deal and told him that we were going to go grab a drink and some Sheesha and we would call it a day and head back to Cairo. We told him to meet us at the Library and after grabbing a drink we were standing outside the library we had originally tried to start our day there but being a national holiday we were told it was closed, but like most things in Cairo you can never believe what you hear the first time so make sure you ask a few times and take the majority answer. It turned out that it was open and we got a chance to go inside. The ancient library was long gone but this was pretty impressive and very modern looking. Now many of you are probably sitting there with your jaws hanging saying to yourselves “did he go into a library for fun” and the answer is yes! I’m all about the history and it was a very impressive thing to see. After an eventful day we headed back to Cairo around 7 so we were able to fit a lot in.

Greek Santa

Mosiac, each color is made up of little stones. thousands of stones to shade the face.

This translates to: "If you want to go to Alexandria grab your walking stick, it's safer than a taxi."

The original Pimp cup

This shield was detailed on every part. Scene of an angle and demon fight. Sorry for the bad picture.

Cofin...like you needed me to tell you that.

These are where the mummies body parts were stored. Brains, stomach, liver, etc. where stored in these. I think the heat made them boil out a long time ago, thats the black stuff...lunch anyone?

different layers of a coffin...that one you probably needed me to tell you.

This door had thousands of little pieces of ebony and ivory (not the Michael Jackson and McCartney album cover) put together in a wood door. very detailed, which you can't tell by my blurry picture.

The Roman Theatre

Chris, Me, Otencia

From the "nose bleeds"

The rest of the town around the theatre

On the boardwalk

If you pass "GO" you can collect $200

After a long day, just heading back to my castle. AKA Citadel sight of the ancient lighthouse.

The other muscle beach

Outside the library. next picture you can see the inside of the slope thats to the right.

The rebuild Great Library.

Proof! I have been inside of a library, and this time it was for fun. wow, how things have changed.

BYE BYE

We didn’t start the fire!

2009-08-01T22:11:00.002+03:00

I am waiting to get some pictures back from some friends of Alexandria to get caught up on the blog. I had my camera but I dropped it outside of the museum which was the first thing we did so the other pictures I took early on were not saved, so look for that post coming soon along with about three others I have already written, but I wanted to stay in order so they made sense. In the mean time I wanted to share a quick story about my hotel catching fire. I awoke to the fire alarm going off at around 2am the other morning and thought it might just be some false alarm…I was wrong. I waited a few minutes and decided to get out of bed to see what was going on and so I threw on some clothes and stepped out to the hall way. As soon as I opened the door I could smell smoke! Another guy walked out of his room and we both kind of looked at each other and then plugged our noses. Regardless of what language you speak that’s a pretty good sign to use when something stinks and we both looked down the stairway shaft to see a thin cloud or haze of smoke a few stories down with people running down the stairs. So if the fire alarm wasn’t enough to tell me to get out of there the people running for their lives were and I followed suit, but not without packing up my computer.

So I ran down the stairs and when I got down to about the 4th flour the smoke was pretty bad and I had to cover my mouth because the air was hard to breath. I got out into the street and saw the first responders on the scene. It was a guy standing on the top of a car with a fire extinguisher trying to spray inside the window of the room with the fire. I wish I would have taken a picture of that but the fire department showed up soon after. There was smoke coming out of the window in the second floor and it turned out that it was coming from the bank which shared the building with us. So with everyone in the street and about 6 fire trucks lined up, Egypt’s finest went to go handle business. This whole ordeal took about an hour of going down in the street, the fired dept showing up, putting out the fire, and waiting for the smoke to clear to go back in our rooms. The pictures that you see below are really bad because it looks like the building is blowing up, but I assure you those are the lights from the trucks. The fire that I saw was just a lot of smoke and I heard the fire dept breaking glass and hacking at the room, but it wasn’t all that bad, it just makes for one more story to add to the experience.

The Smoke was coming out on that first row of windows above the first truck

2009-07-24T23:40:00.022+03:00

The other day I had an awesome trip. To summarize the trip I rode a horse from Giza, which is the site of the big pyramids to the Saqqara Pyramids and the Abu sir Pyramids which are less famous but are some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt. Now I will say this, any time you take a 5 hour round trip horse ride, your ASS will hate you the next couple days and I’m not talking about if you have a jealous donkey at home (waant waaant, bad joke, that was for you grandpa and dad). I went with a buddy I met out here at the Arab Academy named Brian and being his last day he wanted to go on one last adventure. I agreed when he told me what he had planned not really knowing what to expect, but that’s pretty much how things go down here in Cairo. Now meeting up was an adventure altogether and involved a crazy taxi ride, which if anyone has followed the other posts already knows that’s inevitable. I said take me to the Sphinx and he took me to this restaurant in town and then I told him the pyramids and he did take me there but to the wrong gate about 5 miles away. Not completely the Taxi drivers fault on this one, so I’ll take the rap. Brian and I met up at the Giza pyramids after I got out of school and were going to try and find a stable and get a good price for the trip without having our horse die on us in the desert. I will definitely write about the Egyptian selling techniques or “hustle” in a later post, because I’ve seen a lot of them and I’ve been involved as well, and I will use this trip as a reference for sure for both the taxi ride over and the stables and our trip, but it deserves its own post for sure. Now getting back to the story we found a stable to take us out in the middle of the desert for LE 250 (Egyptian pounds) to look at these pyramids and to do some exploring on our Egyptian Cadillac’s as our guide called our horses. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, but we didn’t make it all the way to Saqqara due to a misunderstanding, but we did get pretty close and took some pictures and had a good time. We weren’t about to argue too much with our guide since he did hold our lives in his hand and if I was on that horse for another hour or two I would have regretted it, and I’m sure the horse was happier too since it try to turn around on me a couple times on the way out there. On the way back from the desert we took the “back way” home and saw a whole other part of Cairo that was really cool to see. This place is huge and so diverse and it really is fascinating. I thought Egypt would be all desert and although we were in dirt for most of the day we saw so much green on the way back. So take a look at the pictures below and definitely the videos. I probably should have taken a couple more pictures to illustrate but I’ll do my best to describe in the captions.

You would think that they wouldn't be that hard to find
(taxi ride there).

Our journey already begin by the base of these. I should have taken more pics
leaving the stables, but this is about an hour into it looking back.

The road ahead for the next couple of hours.

The next time I looked back at the Giza Pyramids.

Coming up to the first destination Abu sir. small but some of the oldest and
possibly the first. We ended up passing it and coming back by on the way back.

Half time, time for some photos. If you look very hard between me and the horse

you can see the Giza pyramids where we began.

Not to many people can pull this look off in the desert and I think I also fall into that

category. Abu sir behind us. If you look really hard about an inch to the right of the big one

you can see Saqqara's very top

The hotels close to mine in the far distance to the right.

I had to cut off the horse on the right due to the PG rating of this blog.

We went on a little bit more to get closer to Saqqara. The original plan was for the guide to

take us here and to explore a little, but do to a "misunderstanding"/we got hustled, this is about as far as we went. to get here we talked him into letting us go to the next hill (about another 2 miles) to take a better picture. The guide didn't mind, but my horse waaas pissed.

You smile you die in the desert. In the distance the Giza Pyramids even further.

Rhinesstone Cowboy, don't hate on the white "boots".

On our way back, going to pass back by Abu Sir

Cairo off to the right, pretty hard to see because of the polution.

Walking by Abusir. Not to far from this is the road and some really huge nice houses. In between these houses (where the videos were filmed below) is a man who lives in a shack, our guide stopped by and had a drink of moonshine.

I only have 1 horse power, but I was still moving. This was after we visited the guy in the shack. the guide filmed this while he was running next to us, if I could state the obvious. That's Brian with me.

Secretariat eat your heart out.

You can see some larger houses coming up behind us and when I say big I mean equivalent to $3-10 Mil American homes. Our guide said that at one houses we passed one of the horses the guy owned and kept there was a show horse worth LE 2 mil or about $360,000. We cut through to the street where you see the backside of Cairo pic about 2 miles up the way.

The "back side" of Cairo and our guide. I should have took more pictures but there were a mixture of really nice homes and as we got closer to Cairo, it turned into more like projects or poor housing. to the left about a mile is the desert we walked through and to the right is farms and homes.

Looking to the right of the road.

Cutting through some hood about an hour away. In between the buildings you can see the slant of the pyramid. It looks like the wall of that building, but its not, I just have bad timing.

Again I should have taken better pictures coming back to the stables, but the walls were lined

with horses and camels who were finishing up for the day. The Giza Pyramids were about 2 miles away and I should have taken a picture of them as well, but since I was visiting them later in the week I didn't bother.

A bit of modern Egypt

2009-07-21T21:08:00.008+03:00

I wanted to write a post on a couple of different activities that I thought were worthy of a combined post of things you might do in Albuquerque on a weekend lot of writing and not so many pictures but the good pictures will be coming. The other day after class I went to a mall in Cairo called City Stars. I must say the whole experience of traveling to and from the mall was worth a mention. I rode a cab. Now I bet your saying “WOW! A cab.” and I thought it was no big deal either since I’ve ridden a cab around my hotel and it was a pretty easy ride, but I should have known different when I got in the cab and the driver was counting a wad of cash. I soon put it together that that guy picks up a lot of people in a short day because he gets to his destination quick. City Stars is a good 30 min cab ride in traffic, but what I stepped in was not a cab, it was a roller coaster and for the cost of $6 dollars it was well worth the admission if you like those sort of things. The video I have down below is not very good evidence because I almost lost an arm putting the camera above the car, but you might be able to get a little idea. Long story short I made it safe and didn’t even have to use my barf bag, but I’m glad I didn’t eat lunch before that. The ride back was the same only in the dark. Don’t know if these guys are related but they had similar driving styles.

When I arrived at the mall I heard it was big but this thing was ridiculous. The picture below shows 7 stories and the top only having a few shops at the moment but each story was easily the size of Coronado with just as many shops as Coronado on each level. Each level had restaurants, one had a grocery store, and two had movie theatres. To give you an idea they had Fuddruckers, Macaroni Grill, TGIFridays, McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, Sabraaro and that’s just a few of the recognizable ones.

The movie theatre showed both Arabic movies and American. I saw The Taking of Pelham 123, but the hard part was getting in. I paced a little back in forth looking for what movies might be showing and at what times. It was a guessing game since there were no times posted anywhere and there were so many posters, it was hard to tell what was playing and what was an add I went up to the ticket counter and the lady helped me, took my money and pointed to an electronic seating chart and asked me where I wanted to sit. I couldn’t really tell which seats where occupied to I pointed to one about halfway down by the Isle. Found my way into the side I needed to be in and handed the usher my ticket to be seated. Now already you can notice the differences between this and your typical American theatre, but there’s one last thing. So I was seated and not knowing which seats where occupied initially I was sat next to this guy and probably wouldn’t have made a difference but there were only about 8 other people in this huge theatre. During the movie more people showed and his girlfriend eventually showed about half way through so I didn’t feel so awkward sharing the arm rest with him. Now the movie was going good and started getting intense and all the sudden the lights turn on and the movie stops. At first I didn’t know what to expect but after looking at everyone’s reactions and not being pissed off, I put two and two together and realized this was intermission. The movie resumed and turned out to be a pretty good one so it was a fun experience in all. After lunch and dinner and a movie as well as some purchases I was on my home.

Now the other experience I had this past weekend was going out to a club/bar. It was kind of late and since I missed coordinated a trip to the Suez Canal with a couple of other students I decided I had nothing really planned for the weekend. I was in my room all day and hadn’t eaten so that also prompted me at 12am to explore the town. I went to the Hard Rock Café by the Hyatt thinking it would be safe and close to my hotel as well as have good food with not too outrageous prices. I was right about the first three, but as far as the outrageous prices it was up there. To give you an idea a gin cost $20, beer was around $5 which is not so bad, and a Double Jack was $32…Vegas eat your heart out. When I got there the place had crickets and I thought to myself that noise of disappointment like “waant waaant”, but being the trooper I am and the fact that I slept in my room most the day I was willing to go the distance. It was fun just people watching and seeing how people interact in a similar setting that we might have back home. People slowly rolled in and about 2am the place was rocking to Arabic house music. Hard to explain the noise I heard but it was a combination of voice, horns, I think I caught a few accordions and a beat machine all put together. Different to say the least, but the background sounded like 20 screaming cats with a beat and a voice on top but that’s most techno no matter where you’re at and you zone out the music any way once you’ve been there for 5 hours. The DJ did play a couple of American songs by the end of the night but the dance floor would clear out a bit since dancing styles differ drastically. It was definitely fun to people watch. I would watch the guys walk up to girls numerous times and drop a line and the girls would literally shove the guys away! I was thinking of something I could say to not get pushed away and then I remembered I don’t speak Arabic, but it was entertaining to be a spectator. So at 5:30am the lights kicked on which wasn’t my only hint since I could see the sky start to get lighter out the window, and I was on my way back to my hotel to catch some shut eye.

Hard Rock

Moving quick, sorry.

Some Car shots of the town to the mall.

A very small sliver of the malls stories. looks the same on all sides

and each side goes back and into different squares or sections. I wish

our mall was as good as one story of this place.

This clip isn't doing justice

This one either

Egypt…once upon a time.

2009-07-14T17:44:00.017+03:00

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering when I’m going to actually post something somewhat interesting and not just more pictures of the Nile or talk about food, although both are important, today is your lucky day and the posts are only going to get better from here. Some things are not to be photographed because cameras are not allowed in the museum, but you know your boy, rules are made to be broken. Just kidding, I’m not a bad kid…thanks to mom and dad, but I know how to bend them although this time I didn’t know we weren’t suppose to take cameras in, because my guide was encouraging to take as many pictures as possible and I put my camera through security but I guess they missed it. The point was brought home though after I got kicked out of one of the exhibits for taking a picture of King Tut, but no harm done.

So, today after class I went to the museum with a couple people from school and a couple of the teachers/guides. First off, I will say that to walk through and see all of the ancient tombs, mummies, gold jewelry, furniture, sculptures, etc., is one of the all time best experiences in my life. I’ve always been fascinated with history and to be standing by some of those things was absolutely amazing and I highly recommend if given the opportunity go see it sometime. Also we were on the fence about paying another 60LE which is like $10 (damn I’ve gotten cheap) to go see the mummy exhibit of 24 past emperors, kings, queens, etc. but I am glad I did and if you ever find yourself in the same predicament whether or not to see the mummies or to buy a sandwich with that money, I think you know what I recommend. Shawermas (sandwiches) are good though. It was pretty surreal to be standing next to these people who lived about 4,000 years ago and that ruled one of the greatest ancient empires ever.

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking because I can’t really do the experience justice with my writing and unfortunately my pictures aren’t that good, but it was an undercover operation.

I can't tell who is more stiff? I do know I'm more chiseled though.

The entrance...right after you dodge security with your camera

A large sculpure

This is a gold tomb

Solid granite minus the part where you put the cofin and boby in.

My arm was stretched over my head so it was about 5' 7" tall

Silver Cofin
Horus is the Gods name

My piece and chain (fancy word for necklace grandma) wait that's King Tut's

King Tut

More of Tut. He died doing the Macarena, arms crossed an all!

Tuts mask, and than I got kicked out

I see dead people.
Mummies

I knew I should have got out of the sun faster.

This is Ramses III i think

Ramses II

Nile Cruise

2009-07-14T16:40:00.011+03:00

Once again it's me,

My first weekend night out and decided to hit the town. I wanted to go on a Nile cruise and do the touristy thing. Matt also wanted to go so our options were the Grand Hyatt or another questionable cruise my hotel was offering. Knowing what I know now I probably would have taken the risk and gone with my hotel, but we both opted for the $15 more Hyatt cruise due to the fact that the boat looked awesome and I knew the food would probably be safe to eat.
The cruise was a two our boat ride up the Nile in the heart of Cairo. It started at 830 and went until 10pm. We got there and found our seats and I felt kind of funny since we were the only same sex group in the whole boat. The ambience was definitely set to more of a romantic cruise, but that’s all right because the buffet was all I really cared about since I hadn’t had any healthy food in a couple of days and was scared to eat vegetables on the street, so this was definitely a good option. The food consisted of “world” cuisine. A little bit of this and a little of that but for the most part it was pretty good hotel food. After dinner we went up to the top deck and took some pictures of the city. Really pretty at night with a lot of lights from the city, other boats going by, and just to say you went on a dinner cruise on the Nile. After figuring out how to work my camera at night (still didn’t figure it out, see below for proof) and taking some snap shots of the city, the staff pulled us down below for the entertainment.

When I came back down into the dining hall I was welcomed by a belly dancer on stage. For as much as we paid you think the Hyatt could have done a little better, but again it was just the experience that was cool. It was however pretty funny to watch some of the guys look at the belly dancer in awe while their wives were all covered up in their veils next to them. So, after a couple dances, songs and changes of clothes, the two hours was up and he headed back to the hotel.

Pulled up to the Hyatt and said our goodbyes to the staff and paid our bill which wasn’t the initial 280LE pounds like I thought, but included a service fee (which every restaurant does), water and soda and came out to about 320LE which is still only about $60, so although expensive for Cairo not too much of a dent in my pocket book. After dinner my initial plan was to go to the Hard Rock, have a couple of adult beverages, but after a long day of walking the streets and a full stomach, I didn’t have the energy, so I’ll have to let you know on a later post about the real night life of Cairo.

Talk to you soon,
Mike

There is our Yaught! Half of it anyway.

Dusk

Just went under the bridge.

Pretty shot minus the guy on the left

What a show!

If you look directly in their eyes they will attack.

Americans!

2009-07-12T20:02:00.006+03:00

Assalaam ulekum,

Being that I’m in class by myself I haven’t had much interaction with any of the other students but the other day a couple of them came into my class during a break and invited me to dinner. They were with a program of about 10 college students who had just finished a 6 week stint in Egypt so they were going to celebrate. It’s definitely nice to have some people to hang out with, talk to, and share experiences. So far I’ve hung out with a few of them a couple times and there definitely have helped me out with becoming more familiar with my surroundings. So big thanks to Shawn, Martina, Bryce, Vanessa, and Q for the hospitality. They’re leaving this Tuesday but it was fun while it lasted. I will say I am thankful for them showing me this website http://www.otlob.com/. It’s a food delivery site, click on it and go to Garden City Cairo to see what other American influences are out here.

The same day I met those students I met another guy by the name of Matt. Matt showed me a place to grab a good authentic meal and the next night we went on a cruise down the Nile (more on that in the next post). Matt left the other day and just finished up a month out here, but he was a cool guy to talk to and again shared some “ah he’s” and “what not to do’s” while here in Cairo.

I’ve also met a couple of other guys through Matt and now that I started another class today I am with someone that just started the program and we are doing 101 together. All cool guys and willing to explore Egypt with me. Just wanted to post something quick about my new American friends and with a combination of Facebook, email, and phone, I haven’t been completely isolated. So until next time…

Take care,
Mike

Hyatt Regency, wish I was staying here.
Just walking around town.

Four Seasons Hotel...Very nice

Matt posing

An everyday kind of day

2009-07-11T21:24:00.010+03:00

Hello again,

It’s been a couple days since my last post so there is definitely some info I wanted to share with you all. I wanted to write about an average day for me in Cairo if there is such a thing. So far during the week has been pretty consistent, with this weekend being a little different. First off I have been starting off the day by waking up around 630 and going on a run down by the Nile (about 4 blocks from my hotel). It’s really nice in the mornings here being about 70 degrees and overcast most mornings, it makes running not to bad and since gym memberships are exclusive and expensive and haven’t seen any basketball courts yet, running is one of my only options.
After my run I get back to the hotel and get ready for school. The hotel provides breakfast buffet every morning and even though it’s the same every day it’s pretty good and healthy. The first day I tried a little of everything to see what was good and they don’t have a whole lot of options but those options consist of tea or coffee, orange juice and or milk to drink. The food spread is corn flakes(cocoa crispies), hard boiled eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, Tamaya (falafels), pita bread, French rolls, couple different cheeses, jelly and fool ( a lot like refried beans). I try to mix it up a little every day, but usually find myself making a Tamaya sandwich with pita, cucumber, tomato, cheese and I get a hardboiled egg, coffee and OJ.

I already wrote about school, but that takes up four hours every day from 9 to 12. I will give an update though. I have finished Arabic 100 and start 101 on Sunday. After school I usually go and grab lunch. I’ve eaten at different places everyday and they are all very good. Some are just little places open to the street and don’t look very clean but are almost like your street vendor cars you might see in ABQ or anywhere else just with a little place to sit. Everything I’ve had is really good and depending on where you go you can get a good meal that anywhere from a $1 to $10.

After my lunch I usually go back to the room and take a little nap, do some home work, or mess around on the computer. I usually get back to the hotel around 3pm because I walk around town to get to a new lunch place. I try to go in a different direction everyday to see whats all is out there. This has been my average day on the weekdays, but each day I usually meet someone new or travel to a different part of the city so it has been getting a little more adventuresome as each day goes by.

Till next time,
Mike

Tahrir Square

Walking into Tahrir Square

The Nile

The Rio Grande, just kidding the Nile again.

Walking the streets of cairo

She is carrying a baby!

Frogger anyone? View From my window.

Schoolin'

2009-07-08T05:40:00.003+03:00

Saba7 el7 eir (good morning),

Haven’t mentioned too much about school yet so I figured I would take the time on this post to give you an overview about the reason I came out here. I’m writing this three days into my schooling and already I have learned a lot, which so far is almost the whole alphabet! When I showed up the teachers put me in Arabic 100, since I didn’t know really anything. So in a couple days I have learned the alphabet, general sayings, like yes, no, good day, good morning, good bye, how are you, thank you, as well as basic nouns and verbs like cat, dog, etc. From what the teachers tell me, I should be done with 100 by the end of this week giving me three and half more weeks to learn 101 and hopefully start on 102. Below is a link of the school, and they actually also offer online classes as well. Their program is very easy to use, and you can see what I’m actually doing in class.

The school and teachers are awesome. I start class everyday Sunday through Thursday from 9am and until 1pm. Every hour I get a new instructor which I like because they all have different styles and put emphasis on different parts such as reading, writing, talking, etc. The part I like the best is that I am all by myself which helps a ton! I am able to ask questions and have all the attention on me and my needs too progress, which wouldn’t be the case if I were at UNM or probably anywhere else. I will say when you are speaking the language everyday and than having to take it out on the streets and use it really does start to stick. I can pretty much read any word in Arabic, write it, and spell it, now I just need to learn what they mean. Also there are two types of Arabic that I’m coming in contact with; Modern Standard and Egyptian Colloquial. ECA is spoken in the streets and MSA is used wide spread throughout Arabic speaking countries.

Below is a link that I was looking at before I came and I think it does a pretty good job of going over the alphabet, how they are pronounced and the different vowels. Arabic is night and day different from English where is Spanish has a lot of similarities. An interesting fact that Ahmed told me was that he said most Egyptians know 3 languages; Arabic, English, and French or German. Pretty impressive.

Ma3ah 2ssalamah (good bye),
Mike

http://www.madinaharabic.com/ Free website on Arabic

http://www.arabacademy.com/en/arabic-online My schools online classes

Here is my School down a back alley

and it's not the school of hard knocks

(I've already graduated from there).

Hit the ground running

2009-07-06T15:51:00.003+03:00

Still the first night: So after figuring out living my situation for the next month, Amhed and I were off into the night. We picked up another stranger to figure out where the school I’ll be attending was and after navigating through some back alleys, we came across the Arab Academy just so I would know where to go the following day. As you can see people are willing to help out pretty readily, you just give out a little baksheesh (tip money). After getting all the important stuff out of the way it was on to the fun part, which in my book includes eating.

Ahmed asked if I wanted American or Egyptian and as good as the KFC signs we saw looked (sarcasm if you couldn’t tell) I opted for some traditional cuisine (even though I ate KFC the next night). We went to this place that was five stories high and had some good ol’ Egyptian cooking. One of the traditional dishes is called Koshari. This consists of a bowl of macaroni, rice, lentils, dried fried onions, and a few chick peas. It’s topped off with tomato sauce, but not like Italian, you also poor a little lime and garlic juice and hot sauce is optional. It’s really good and a big bowl is about $1. I also wanted to try one of the traditional desserts, so they brought me a rice pudding called ros with labn which is rice with milk. A very good dinner and at a very good price.

On the way back to the car we stopped at a place to smoke what I and most of you probably know as a hookah lounge. It’s called a Sheesha and you smoke Salom which is Egyptian grown tobacco and it tastes awesome. After hanging out Amhed offered to drive me around for a while so I could see the streets. Amhed also suggested I buy a phone for people to get hold of me and just in case I needed it to call him or anyone else. The new phone with about 15 min included cost me about $28 bucks or 160ep. So if anyone feels like calling me its free for me to receive incoming calls, but not free for you. So just in case you feel like calling my number is +20 01 968 11471.

That pretty much summed up my first day besides the American movie channel I have in my room that I watch before I went to sleep. It was a busy day but, I was still able to get some good food in me and relaxing moments all while experiencing some of the culture. So far so good and I look forward to what may come

Good times,
Mike

Chillin with my new buddy Ahmed

Smoking the sheesha point of view

Welcome to Cairo! New friends, strange places, where to now?

2009-07-05T21:28:00.032+03:00

Wow! Longest days of travel ever. I left Albuquerque to Atlanta at 8:20am on July 3rd and after Atlanta it was on to New York for the last dose of the United States I would have for a month. I left NY at 11pm on the same day, and from there it was a non-stop 11 hour flight to Cairo. Surprisingly as long as that flight seems, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. After eating a late dinner on the plane at about 12am NY time, watching a bad movie (17 Again, don’t recommend it), reading a bit before falling asleep, I awoke to the announcement that we were about an hour outside of Cairo. They fed us one last meal on the plane at 4pm Cairo time, which they called breakfast to really confuse my already messed up body clock and we landed on the dusty runway on July 4th at 5pm. Cairo is 9 hours ahead of Albuquerque (MDT).

I found out quick that lines don’t really exist when trying to get through customs. It was crazy, but not so much from the crowd, more so from the lack of direction I got from the flight crew to anyone else in the airport. I did however have some good advice, thanks Andrew (more on him later) prior to arrival and it was spot on and made it much easier to navigate. So, I just followed the rest of the “cattle” and got my visa, some Egyptian Pounds (money), and luggage and I was on my way after about an hour to try and find my ride.

My ride Amhed, guide and now friend, is cousin to Andrew who I mentioned above. Andrew works with my uncle in Tampa, FL and has advised me and answered a lot of my questions the last couple days while in the States as well as set me up with his cousins in Cairo. I am thankful to both of these guys for making my transition very easy, welcoming and feeling safe throughout arriving at my destination.

Many of you have asked where I will be staying, and in true, last minute planning fashion the answer to that was unknown upon arriving in Cairo. I had an idea, but after multiple emails not being returned by the hotel and a possibility of getting an apartment, there was nothing set in stone, so when Ahmed picked me up all I had was an address to the hotel and we were on our way.

If you have ever been to Mexico City, Manhattan, or probably any other massively populated, condensed metro area you have probably seen bad traffic where not all rules apply and there is really no need for signage or lanes in the street, however this place puts the afore mentioned places to shame! There was people walking in the streets dodging traffic while cars where whizzing by at 30mph. Horns were steadily honking and three lane streets were about five cars wide. There were a couple times when I could have reached in to the car next to me and put my arm around the driver in the next car. I’ve never been to a NASCAR event and we were not going that fast, but there was definitely some bumping and rubbing going on from both cars and peoples body parts as we drove on.

Finally, after stopping a couple times to ask for directions we just picked up a police officer off the street and let him ride in the back of car like a human GPS. Very efficient tool because a couple of turns and we rolled up on the hotel to see if I really did have a reservations.

Well I didn’t have reservations, and I guess they never received any of my emails, but not a problem. The New Garden Palace was very accommodating and actually writing this post now the morning after I have yet to pay or negotiate a rate for my room, so that will be an experience today, but like everything else besides the traffic it’s a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Getting back to the action Ahmed and I inspected the room and off we were to experience the culture and my first night.

Till next time,
Mike

P.S. Sincere special thanks to all my friends who kept me up until about 4am the morning I was suppose to leave, you know who you are, it helped me sleep pretty much the whole time on all three flights.

P.S.S. Still figuring this blog stuff out so thats the reason the pictures are in a long string.

Driving into Cairo

I was in denial, I was right next to Da' Nile

Amhed dodging pedestrians

Home sweet home

Where the magic doesn't happen

Looking out my palace

The most important room

Egy...What!?

2009-07-03T04:02:00.000+03:00

Hey Everyone,

First post, giving this website a test run. I will first like to put a disclaimer for my poor punctuation, spelling, and use of the English language up front and hope this blog is informational and will be as entertaining as possible.

So like most of you already know, I'm on my way to Cairo, Egypt for a month. This trip came to a surprise to many and some (grandmas on both sides) jokingly tried to tell me to try and find some Arabic speaking community in the states, so I will layout the reason why I am making the trip. The purpose of this trip is to participate in a language and cultural immersion program highly recommended by the FBI, which is the ultimate goal for my future career(also looking into Secret Service and ICE). I had a former teammate in a similar situation as me after passing the first phase and did a program similar to show the FBI he was dedicated and that he was willing to make certain sacrifices to obtain a position to the FBI. Now obviously I won't be fluent in Arabic after a month, but the idea is to get an understanding of both the language and the culture, as well as create a foundation for further education.

The Arab Academy http://www.arabacademy.com/ is the school I will be attending for a month. The classes are five days a week for four hours a day, so I will be getting a heavy steady dose of Arabic The reason I chose this school is because the Arabic instructor at UNM recommended it and said I could get credit for 101 and 102 from UNM in a month as opposed to taking a year of it and that other students at UNM have gone there and live and work out there currently. Based on the time frame and the amount I would be able to complete the course work, I weighed my options and opportunity costs and felt this was my best option. On a side note there was a law suit called NCAA vs. White which is allowing me to get tuition reimbursement for the next three years with 2008 coming to an end in August, so I had to make a move and hope to get the credit for my trip.

Last I would like to say thanks to all my friends and family for the support. I wish all you could be with me, so I will do my best to share my experiences and update this blog often to show you pictures and videos along the way on my adventure. Below are a couple links about Egypt you might want to check out.

Talk to you soon,
Mike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1108.html

http://www.amcham.org.eg/