Burgesses Take Cairo

So, day....2.5? Of Burgess Extravaganza 2007: Cairo Edition, has been quite successful. Yesterday, we went to the Egyptian Museum and checked out all the cool old shit. After that, we picked up train tickets, lunched at Pottery Cafe, and proceeded back to my dad's (super pimp!) hotel. Seriously, that thing has a handle toilet flusher. Seriously. The beds are super comfortable, too. Post-lounging, we trekked on foot to Khan al-Khalili to mess around. We walked there through loads of crazy people, walking through the area that apparently isn't the 'bazaar' (some Egyptian scarf-selling lady told me this). My dad loved it. People loved us. We just harassed everyone, everyone harassed us, it was good times. I found some nice presents for people, although I really thought I had a good thing going with these scarf people, until all the Arabic chat was pushed aside and they tried to charge me waaaay too much. I really didn't know what they were trying to play at......oh well. I got them down from their ridiculous price, but I still ended up paying 5LE more than my maximum top price. Grrr. On the brighter side, my dad bought a galibeyya (man-dress). I'm so proud!

I also got more presents for my grandma and people like that, and we went to El-Fishawy for some delightful mint tea and shisha. My dad explored his first shisha experience, declared it crazy, and then decided it was not for him. He loved the place, though, so that was nice.

Post-tons of walking, haggling, and me having people attempt to rip me off (they did not succeed), we staggered out of there vowing to return another day. We then wandered over to Tabouleh for delicious and sleepy dinner, and then went back to Zamalek briefly, and then headed over to the hotel to sleep. I was spending the night there, because.....

The next day we woke up super early to go to Giza and check out the pyramids!!!! We got there really early, before they even opened, and had to wait on the street with all the tour buses until everything opened at 8. A tour bus guy took pity on us and took us with him in his bus, and took us with him when he jumped from the moving bus and sprinted over to the ticket office to buy tickets before all the other tour guys. Sweet!

We spent the next, like, 5 hours or so meandering around the pyramids, going inside some, checking out the sphinx, hanging about in the desert, fending off camel guys, actually getting on a camel for a spell and not getting ripped off, and generally having a good time. We also spent a lot of time mingling with the locals in the non-touristy parts (somehow all the tourists just stay in certain areas, and you find whole groups Arab people just hanging out in other areas).

Then we got felfela, and staggered back to our respective dwelling places. Now I am so outrageously tired, but we're leaving for Luxor on an 8:45 train tonight!!! Hopefully we'll get there bright and early tomorrow (in sha allah...) and hopefully we'll get a ticket back......and hopefully I'll finish my homework before then.....without falling asleep.........

Anyway! More about Luxor whenever I get a chance, and pictures will be up soon! Adios!

Team Burgess!

So today was a crazy day. I woke up late and had a nice shuttle ride into school whilst listening to inspiring music. My day was spent in varying states of despair, and the highlight was when Cassie and I decided to brave the Nile Hilton complex in search of the currency exchange place. We quickly got weirded out by the tourism and subsequently escaped, getting many stares and "welcome"s as we went.

I was falling asleep so hardcore in my foreign policy class today. It was a high point of absolute lows. Whatever that measn. I think that it means I am still very tired!!!

The best part was I got to go to the airport to pick up my dad! The taxi ride over was nice, and finally Senior Burgess is here!!! We went to his hotel, where he proceeded to charm the entire staff, practically. He also declared, as we were leaving the airport, that he loved "this place", and that Cairo was "his kind of town". He has not changed this opinion yet, and has already agreed with me that it will suck pretty hard to leave. We lounged in his (admittedly pretty nice!) hotel for a spell, and then we decided that some tammiyya was in order, and as such we journeyed to Zamalek via metro. Upon our arrival, however, the tammiyya dude told us that they were all out! Dejected, we briefly considered Euro Deli, but thought better of it and hopped in a taxi for Midan Tahrir. A trip to filfila later, the evening found us sitting in the nice little area in the Midan, enjoying our sandwiches and chatting of our plans. We parted ways, myself in a taxi and my dad disappearing into the metro after giving me a quite haram kiss on the cheek and hug right in front of two military police.

I'm exhausted, but this is the best part, I think. Being exhausted and having enough fire to make it work. And the next few days are going to be amazing! I am sure of this. Tomorrow we meet at 10 to kick off Official Egypt Extravaganza 2007 at the museum, and the craziness will, in sha allah, continue from there.

I hope you are all having a delirious and rewarding time also! Christmas is almost here! Illinois folks: our day of reunion is imminent!!!! Oh the excitement. Life is great.

Adventure?

I think I need to go to Africa. Let's make this happen. Summer 2008?

In other news, Egypt has caused my slippers to finally bite the dust. Oh that was a funny pun without me even realizing it! Oh, Egypt.

Tomorrow I will contemplate strategies for finishing my damn research paper whilst eating far too much and trying not to go insane. Finals are terrible.

Papa Burgess arrives in....3 days and 18 hours! Let the shenanigans commence.

Foreign adventure #2 starts in.....5 and a half weeks?!

I'm starting to love travel. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself in Austin next year. Plot more adventurous tomfoolery??? Perhaps.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

Ramblings about Egypt...

The following is directly cut and pasted from an email that I'm sending my mother. I would go through it and make it more general reader friendly, but my computer is being spectacularly stupid as of late, and plus it is midnight and I have gotten abysmally little done today. So, anyway, let the musings commence!!!

(background: I'm going to London in the spring! My mother is attempting to counsel me about it.)

But I don't want to go to London, I like it here.....everything will be so impersonal and expensive and cold there! What am I going to do??? I somehow enjoy the experience of being a person living here. I feel like the way you are expected to interact with people is much different from in a country where they speak your language. In London I'll just be dealing with mostly American girls (who I will distrust and think poorly of, due to the fact that they chose to do their study abroad experience in London...this is a terrible thing, I know, but it is basically going to be one element of triple-reverse-culture shock, and I've accepted it so that I can be prepared and head off any overtly obnoxious I-just-came-from-AFRICA behaviour on my part) and then with British girls, who will assume that I am American, and then I will have to impress upon them that no no, I'm British! And then I will have to deal with why I don't have an accent and legitimizing myself to them. Maybe I will pick up an Egyptian accent and insist on speaking English like Egyptian girls do, all throwing the Arabic equivalents of "like" and "um" and "then" into my everyday speech! I am seriously not going to know what to do there. I probably won't like living in a dorm, and I definitely won't like spending so much freaking money all the time. I know I'll probably lose Egyptian customs pretty quickly but I really don't want to! I sort of want to be the person who, in March, is still walking in the street instead of the sidewalk, and who answers every question with, "well, when I was in Egypt....".

I'm going to miss Egyptian food! I don't know what I'm going to do without Egyptian yoghurt, cheese, falafel, koshary, assorted strange salad items, and especially the bread. Mummy, the bread is absurd. I wonder if I could somehow find some fantastic country bread and bring it home still fresh-ish for you? This bread, you can only get on the street or in homes or in the country or in some similar situation. We got it the whole time we were camping in the desert. It is like pita, but not. It is chewier, and grainier, and just totally indescribable. A friend and I were talking about this the other day, about how we're going to miss all the sketchy Egyptian foods and their amazing pricing. I mean, in terms of drinks, you can get a bottle of Egyptian beer here that is pretty much 22 oz for 8 LE. It is the main Egyptian brand, and it is actually quite tasty. It is what people drink everywhere, and you always find yourself roped into going out for one. And since it is 22 oz, you are totally fine just having one! And it is 8 LE......which is over 88 British pounds.........I am going to be awful to go out with next semester! I'll be out with the study abroad people, trying to make friends, going into clubs, all, "man, in AFRICA I could get this entire menu for less than a pound!". I may consider seeking out Muslim neighborhoods and just hanging about, muttering in Arabic and staring and non-Arabs. (I pretty much already do that here, save the muttering part. Seriously, I'm almost as bad as the Egyptians! Everytime I see someone who I have never seen before and who is not Arab, I stare terribly and wonder, very seriously, what on earth they are doing here!)

I don't know what to do with myself. My last (a little over) 3 weeks here are going to be a total blur, I know it. It's so sad! I feel like I sort of slept through a lot of time here, and now I feel like I never got the chance to just go out and sort of wander around enough. Ugh. What am I doing. I was going to do some of that this weekend, but then of course I am a terrible student and cannot even commit to writing a damn paper or getting anything done at all except eating. What the heck. But! My dad is coming on Wednesday, and despite how i have tons of work to do that will not get done (not to mention classes that will not be gone to) while he is here, and not to mention that he is here for far too short a time, DESPITE all this, we will have a fantastic time. I am sure of it. We are sort of planing on going to: all the Pyramids possible, Jerusalem (random, right???), Luxor. You know what this means? Plenty of 10 hour train and bus rides! Yaaay.

I pretty much spent my last hour reading some blogs from various AIESECers who've been to Cairo. They've all led such interesting lives!!! Seriously, they all just finished up school recently, but they've already been to so many places and gotten so involved in AIESEC....I can only hope to be sort of somewhere close to how awesome they are. Here's hoping that this next semester carries with it a wealth of AIESEC opportunities....(international conferences, here I come! Faci-ing at any random conferences that will have me, here I come!!!). ANYWAY.

Gosh, I need to go to sleep or go to the bathroom or do something productive. Or, you know, work on my freaking paper! Or, work on my source list that is also due Wednesday...or work on my study abroad forms that are due Saturday...or book my ticket to London that is due Wednesday....man! It is time for me to chill out and attempt to get down with livin the dream (yes I may have just watched the intro video for my first and their last traineeship power hour from this past SSC.....).

Love and kisses, and I hope that Thanksgiving found everyone happy, stuffed, and right where they wanted to be. Ma'asalaama!

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing one of the most amazing speakers I have ever witnessed. Do yourself a favour and track down a video of Cornell West speaking, and you will not regret it. He was visiting my university for a two day lecture thing; the day before yesterday he talked all about Edward Sayid, but yesterday his topic was 'Race Matters in America'. It was beyond amazing.

He talked about slavery, and oppression, but not focusing on the actual acts. You know, some people talk about slavery and oppression, and they just discuss how slavery happened, and the horror of it, and the terrible deeds, and how things have been so horrible. Cornell West did all of that, to an extent, but he somehow made it more than that. He talked about all of humanity, and he talked about the American Civil War, and he talked about spirituality. He did not draw any noticeable black/white lines, he did not demonize the slaveholders, and he did not make any bland 'slavery is the cause of the lamentable state of African-Americans in the US today' arguments. He somehow handled the subject of race by transcending the subject, and instead discussing the human spirit and love. He kept bringing everything back to the fact that humans are capable of the most wonderful, loving, beautiful deeds, and they are also capable of alarming pettiness and horrible acts.

One of the most amazing things he said concerned the murder of Emmet Till in 1955. Emmet Till was from Chicago and was murdered in Mississippi while visiting relatives, and his body was found horribly disfigured and damaged. His mother insisted on bringing his body back to Chicago, and then insisted on keeping the casket open for the funeral. She basically got up in front of everyone at the service, stood up where she could look at her son, and said that this was her baby, and that she hated what had happened to him, but she could not hate the people that did it. She basically said that she could hate the deed but never the doer, and Cornell West expounded on this beautifully. (For a lot of what he said, he carefully avoided making normative statements or claiming that 'this is what I do, and it is what we all should do'). He went on to say that in this world he could not hate agents, he can only hate actions, and that love is the most important thing. He said that justice is the public form of love.

He also talked about what he liked to call the 'night' side of things. I'm not going to try and describe what he meant by that, because I'd probably mis-describe it. It had a lot to do with what is on the underside of things; in the building of America, this shining city on a hill, he wants people to look at the underside of that hill. He talked about the capitol building, and how it is the symbol of freedom and democracy but it was built by slaves. The way he phrased things was really moving, and he managed to paint this excellent picture of the underside of things, and how absolutely important it is. He also talked about 'the funk', into which he managed to tie so many things and concepts and so much importance. I really want to find a transcript of his speech, and maybe buy his books.

The most amazing thing was that, all content aside, this man was the absolute best speaker I have ever heard. The man is a master at his craft, he is an orator in the tradition of the most powerful, moving, inspirational dudes. Some people speak, and some people speak well, and some people even manage to give commencement speeches that are fairly moving and beautiful (Steve Jobs, I'm looking at you). But this dude has perfected the art of rhetoric, and he said words like some people play music or paint pictures. He would become quiet at moments and then much louder at others, he would accent his speech differently depending on the point he was making, and he would gesture perfectly with his hands and with is whole body; great oration does not stop at the voice. He played the words just right, using all those little tricks that Winston Churchill used to use--repeating phrases, using the same word to begin sentences, playing on rhymes....utterly amazing.

I am really carrying on, here, but there are a few more things that he said that I want to cover. He made the point that history is so, so important, because if you take it right, then your culture and your history (and by history he meant what happened to the people that ultimately resulted in where you are today) can be the wind at your back that helps you impact the world and shape your future so that it will not be a repetition of the present. He talked about how each and every voice must be raised, but to raise your voice, you first have to find it.

I thought this was so powerful, and such a good thing to say to people, especially at AUC. And, of course, I tied it back into AIESEC, because that is what I do these days. But really, Cornell West is on to something, there: one person cannot single-handedly reshape the world, but change is possible, and the groups that make up the movements that create the impetus that leads to change are by definition and default made up of individuals. Humans can do powerful and beautiful things, if we all raise our voices, but every single voice must be raised. Activating leadership is so important, as is awareness of who we are and where we come from, not just on a self-centered basis, but on a learning one, too. I mean that I have to be aware of not just where I come from, but where other people come from, and how history has brought us here. I always feel that I have to hold my history close; this has to be done carefully, because if you hold the wrong things too close, they end up holding you and keeping you locked up. This goes back to how we're capable of great pettiness as well as great love--if I hold my past dear and hold my history close, and if I keep aware of the bad and constantly remember the good, history really can provide the wind that pushes us to develop our potential to change the world.



That's all from me, for now. This all got me thinking so much about individual potential, and the possibilities of change that we all possess. It never ceases to be important to remind ourselves and others of this, and it seems like our duty as people (and moreover as AIESECers!) to raise our voices, and to help others find theirs. Love you all!

Such a perfect day

I've been feeling sort of weird lately, a little tired, a little cranky, mostly just really whiny and unsatisfied with the way I'm performing here. So, today I tried to get work done, and then headed to a two-hour colloquial Arabic class. I was dreading it, but it actually turned out to be pretty enjoyable. I think the problem is that my regular Arabic class is really bad, and so anything that involves actual good teaching and actual speaking in Arabic counts as really good in my book! We even got snacks in class! And I drank some tea, which I think helped.

After class I decided to walk home, randomly. It's about an hours walk back from school to my dorm, and I have to cross a bridge over the Nile. It was almost 5pm, and then sun was at that lovely stage where it hasn't set yet, but it has definitely made up it's mind to start setting. Everything was sort of pinky gold, and everything was beautiful. There weren't even too many men leering on the bridge! The bad thing was that I knew there would be more and more loitering guys as the sun went down, and I know that if I look around too much I'll stand out as a foreigner, so I had to sort of just look down and keep walking, sneaking glances to the side every now and then at the prettiness around me. It's weird, here. There's trash EVERYWHERE, and things are generally pretty crappy, but at the same time they're really really beautiful. It reminds me a lot of the time of that movie adaptation of Great Expectations, you know, the one with Ethan Hawke? Places here remind me of the house that Estelle and her crazy Aunt or whatever live in. All painted, wrought-iron fences and huge barriers of exotic foliage, massive walls of magnolia trees, palms and delicate tropical flowers, dark spaces between neglected foliage running wild. I kind of love it.

I've got to go to an AIESEC meeting tonight, hooray! I sort of love AIESEC, too. I'm such a convert. I hope that all of your evenings go as nicely as mine has so far!

Kisses!

All my friends were vampires

I went to the desert this weekend! More specifically, the Black and White Deserts! They are west of Cairo by about 4 or so hours. We were supposed to leave at 6am on Thursday, but that didn't really work out.....the thing was, everyone in our party except me went out to halloween parties the night before, and most of them were hung-over/still drunk the next morning. So, we couldn't even get ahold of 3 people, but we finally tracked them down. Katie was apparently adorable and not wearing pants, wandering the halls upstairs, and when asked if she wanted to come desert camping replied, "yeah! Let's go!" and proceeded to stand there not wearing pants. Good times.

So, we set off around 7am, and after a long and sleepy (and drunk) ride, we arrived in the Bahariyya Oasis (I think). We went into this hotel place and hung around for a spell, and then got in the 4x4 with our official driver and set out into the desert. It was really, really beautiful. He basically drove us to various locations and then stopped the vehicle and let us out, without very many words (sometimes he would mumble about the place we were at). We didn't really know what we were supposed to do, so we ended up just wandering around and taking pictures until he honked the horn or looked really impatient. We kept running into these random other groups of French or Italian people, which was especially hilarious at lunch. We lunched in this little hut that was basically build out of minimal stone and maximal palm leaves, and there was a little cement water reserve looking thing outside. Apparently it was a "oasis" and we were supposed to swim in it. We passed on that particular offer, and chose instead to wander inside the hut and proceed to pass out on the floor. Then we got to eat this really tasty meal and watch the Italian group have this ridiculous 3 course meal complete with 2 bottles of wine and a case of beer.

After lunch we checked out some other sites and headed towards the White Desert. It was definitely my favorite, full of mysterious white, chalky rocks and crazy looking shapes. We finally set up camp around sunset, and then our guide proceeded to throw down his mad cooking skills and whip up this fantastically delicious chicken/rice/veggie situation. It was crazy good.

Then we chatted and told some spooky stories, and then ended the night with a quality game of 'never have I ever'. Good times. It was a little strange, though, talking with my friends. I think that one of my biggest problems is being able to participate actively in conversations about things that I do not have in common with people. Like, if we're all talking about our brothers and sisters, or if all my friends are talking about Washington, D.C (they all go to school there, and all except one of the people go to the same school). Or, my all time favorite, if everyone is talking about the really American things that they did as kids. I don't know, I just find it really hard to come up with a way to contribute to conversations like that without coming off as just flaunting my difference or always trying to bring the conversation back to me. So that whole thing was awkward, because I really didn't say much. And don't get me wrong, because I really like the people I was with, and I don't presume to judge anyone or make claims about myself, but it's also hard for me to jump into the conversation. You know, when people are all talking, and even before one person is done, the next person jumps in with, "No, when I was in fifth grade...", or "last time my family went camping....". I know they are all listening to each other, but it feels like everyone is just too busy thinking up what they're going to say next. I can never find the moment to jump in, and when I do, I feel like everyone is just waiting for me to finish. Oh well.

Sleep was nice (there were so many stars!!!) and I woke up with some other people to see the sun rise. It was really gorgeous. I kind of love the desert. It was unlike anything I've ever seen before....I mean, I've been to Arizona, but it wasn't even like that. I just loved it, especially in the morning before the sun got too hot and when the sand was still cool from the night. The low sun on all the white rocks was absolutely lovely. And I came back so sandy!!! Seriously, after I showered, there was a pile of sand in the bottom of the shower.

We saw a bunch of other cool rocks in crazy shapes yesterday morning, and then drove back to the hotel to hang around until our ride showed up, and then drove back to Cairo. It was pretty funny, we were all falling asleep all over the place. Except for when we had, like, a 4 hour sing along extraveganza in the car on the way home. Good times.

I'll put pictures up soon, but right now I think I really need to go do some Arabic homework. I can't believe how crappy my Arabic class is....it's pretty depressing, seeing as how I came here for Arabic. Oh well. There's nothing I can do now, except study more. Ma'asalaama!