Cairo, Egypt

My advice to anybody visiting Egypt: if anybody comes up to you in the street and starts talking to you, punch them in the face and run like hell. If you talk to somebody for even 30 seconds, they will grab you firmly and drag you somewhere. Whenever this happens I get worried that one of two things will hapen: either a)I will have tea shoved down my throat and then feel obligated to buy shit I don't want or b)I'm about to get my head hacked off live on Al Jazeera. Thankfully it's been scenario A so far. The good news is that most people I've wanted to talk to have been very nice. All the Arabic I learned at NAU has started to flow through my head and I started babbling to the people. They still don't understand anything I say and vice versa, but it's a start. Last night I made the mistake of greeting the floor guy at my building with a "masa2 al-khair," and he wanted to talk to me for hours. Cairo is filthy but I like it. There's just trash everywhere because nobody knows what a trash can is for. It's hard to explain, but I don't mind it because it seems just to be the rhythm of the city - unlike somewhere like Rome which is supposedly beautiful but filled with trash because it's neglected. There is some actual beauty here as well. I've seen a ton of buildings which I THINK were the buildings I set out to see, but I can't be sure because there wasn't a single sign. Parts of the city feel like they haven't changed much in 1000 years and I could imagine frickin Aladdin flying by on a magic carpet. I've walked a lot along the Nile, only because I can orient myself with the river and if I stray just a few feet from it I get completely lost. When I first saw the Nile I wasn't impressed, until I remembered that the land I was looking out at on the other side wasn't actually the west bank of the river, but an island in the middle of it. When I finally saw it from east bank to west bank it was massive. One funny thing is that in this majority Islamic nation, the few Christian owned shops really want to advertise that fact - crosses all over the door and inside big pictures of Jesus and of course the Virgin Mary, making me feel for a second like I'm back in Mexico. Coptic Cairo, the Christian quarter, was very beautiful and ancient. There is even a synagogue here. Understandably, you have to go through a metal detector to get in here. It was funny to be standing next to a church, hear the Islamic call to prayer and see people nearby start praying towards Mecca. Also for some reason in this neighborhood a lot of signs outside shops were in Spanish, each one advertising that they were "Bueno Bonito Barato." The guys at my new hotel insisted that I look Egyptian, but obviously it's just their way of making tourists feel welcome because little kids on the street have shouted "alo" at me. I have also strangely been frequently greeted with "aloha," and the more elaborate "aloha yankee doodle how are you." I have been told that "all Americans welcome in Egypt except Bush" by a guy who later showed me his Obama 08 sticker. Eating has been fun since I have been confronted with several restaurant menus entirely in Arabic. Although I can read it, I don't recognize a single thing on the menu. In one place I just broke down and asked for "as-sandweetsh fee as-sura," "the sandwich in the picture." I've also confused a few payments because they make both bills and coins for 1 and 0.5 pound denominations. Bizarre. Everywhere around I see boxes of tissues. Every cab driver keeps a box and restaurants frequently have them at the tables for use as napkins. In the face of anybody who thought they would need a pocket pack here. I completed my goal of sitting in a real teahouse in the Middle East (and not a tourist one, a ghetto one off the beaten track) and smoking hookah (here just called "shisha," hookah is the Hindi word). I couldn't believe it when I finally found myself doing this, it was unforgettable. Tea and shisha costs 3 pounds - less than $1. I've heard the call to prayer 5 times a day and I've watched the Gaza crisis unfold further on Al Jazeera. I'm actually in the Middle East. It seems unreal.