Türkiye

First of all, really sorry this has taken so long. But no one's probably reading any more anyway, so whatever.

I'll start you off with the link to the pictures.

When we woke up on the train from Thessaloniki, we were still quite far from Istanbul, though we had trouble finding out exactly how far. We wound up finally getting into the city around 10 AM, I think, which was two hours later than expected. I was really shocked to see how unpunctual the trains were, as the vast majority of my experience with them comes from my time in Holland, where they're like clockwork. Once we arrived, we went to buy as many train tickets for our time in Turkey as we could. Unfortunately, the early ferry and train to Bandirma and then Izmir had been cancelled, so we had to settle for an afternoon one, which meant more time in Istanbul, but no time to see Izmir, which, while allegedly rather boring, is Turkey's third largest city. We didn't get too broke up about it. The bigger disappointment came when we learned that there were no spots left in the sleeper car for the train from Izmir to Ankara. But whatever... Oh! While buying the tickets, a couple came up to Peter and asked him if he was from Houlton (he was wearing his Houlton shirt). He said no, but that he has family there and is from Maine. Turned out they were from North Yarmouth! What are the odds!

So we left the station and headed for our hostel. After getting all our stuff set up there and eating some lunch, we headed over to the hostel where some of our friends from Cairo were staying. Our roommate Stoo and our friends Sam and Adam had all decided to spend their vacation in Istanbul, so we had hoped to meet up with them there. By the time we got to their hostel, however, it was one in the afternoon and they were of course out seeing the city. We moved on, hoping to meet up with them later.

With only one day in Istanbul, it was kinda tough to decide which sites to hit, but we went for the big ones. Our hostel was only about five minutes walk from Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The former was closed that day, so we hit up the latter, which is one of the most beautiful structures I've ever seen. It's funny to think back to when I was thirteen and went there. At the time, Istanbul was the most exotic place I'd ever been to, and the Blue Mosque was pretty much the only aspect of Muslim culture I'd ever encountered. This time, Istanbul seemed like Cairo on downers. It's a beautiful city, but it's very Europeanized and incredibly clean. I've decided Cairo is like learning to play an instrument for fun. As a source of entertainment, watching a movie is much easier, but learning an instrument rewards effort. Cities like Athens and Istanbul and really any Western city are awesome, but being in them doesn't give you the same feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, for lack of better terms.

After the Blue Mosque, we went to see the Hippodrome, which was very disappointing. We expected some sort of a big arena that you could go into. It turns out that nowadays it's basically just some part of town that they call the Hippodrome, or something. I dunno... it confused me. Anyway, there were some neatish pillars, one of which was taken from Luxor. All those countries just wish they could be Egypt. Give it up, guys. From there, we walked over to Topkapi Palace, the Versailles of Turkey. It was pretty sprawling and awe-inspiring, especially the Harem. We didn't get enough time to explore all the stuff, but we saw some neat things. Probably the most amusing part was a little museum that claimed to contain Moses' staff and Mohammed's footprint, as well as many other equally incredible objects.

After sitting outside the palace watching boats go through the Bosphorus, we left that part of town and took the (brand new) tram to the Grand Bazaar. This was another thing that overwhelmed me when I saw it eight years ago, but this time around it seemed tame compared to Khan el-Khalili. I didn't buy anything but some shampoo and toothpaste. It was I think at this point that we started to realize we might be getting into some real financial difficulties. When Peter called his mom the morning before (Sunday), she had said she'd put the money in my account as soon as she could, which meant Tuesday, as the banks are obviously closed on Sundays, and Monday was some sort of a stupid American holiday. It was now Monday evening, and we realized that at the rate we were going, if the money didn't happen to make it in the next day, we could run out very quickly. Matt's cash was running low as well, and we didn't know how soon his mom was going to be able to stick some more into my account. But we just crossed our fingers and assumed all would be well.

We took the tram back from the bazaar and while walking to our hostel, would ya believe it?, we ran into Stoo, Adam, and Sam. We walked back with them to their hostel and made our evening plans, and we also discovered that some of the girls we hang out with were staying in our very hostel! We went back and ran into them there, and after shooting the breeze for a bit, got our stuff ready for one of the most exciting experiences of the trip: a Turkish bath! Peter briefly described it in a previous entry, but I'll remind you. In a Turkish bath, you take off your clothes and put on just a towel, and then you go into a large stone sauna and sit for a while, exfoliating and whatnot. After that, you are given soap and a coarse rag to clean yourself, or if you pay a little more, a Turkish guy will do it for you. Matt wasn't quite comfortable with that part of the deal, but Peter and I were on board! It sounds a little weird, but everything we'd heard about it said that it was an amazingly relaxing experience, as well as a compulsory part of being in Turkey. And it was incredible. The sauna was very comfortable, and after laying there for ten minutes or so, we were motioned over by our respective bathers. They started by massaging our chests, backs, arms, and legs, which felt really good after a few days of carrying around heavy backpacks. Then they scrubbed our skin, which removed the last layer of the sunburn I'd acquired in the Sinai a couple weeks prior. After that they doused us with cool water and scrubbed us down. Finally, they rinsed us off again and we were allowed to sit around for as much longer as we wanted. The Turkish bath we went to, or hammam as they're called locally, is one of the oldest in Istanbul, from around the 15th century I believe, and it was incredibly beautiful just to lay on the warm stones and stare up at the dome. When we'd finally had enough, we went and changed into clean clothes and sat around drinking fresh squeezed juice. Fantastic. I've never felt that clean in my life.

We headed back to the hostel to meet the guys for dinner/festivities. It turned out they'd already eaten, but some of the girls were hungry, so we went to get some food. We found a cute little place in a side alley that was pretty decent. All in all a very pleasant time had by all. We returned to our hostel, which is apparently Istanbul's central partying spot for backpackers. There were lots of people out front drinking and smoking sheesha and generally having a good time. The guys were there, already pretty drunk, and believe it or not, Jay was there, too! He was in the middle of his own wild trip around the Middle East, had just gotten in to Istanbul, was taking a cab to his hostel, and he drove by the guys sitting on the street drinking. He jumped out of the cab long enough to say hi, ran back and dropped off his stuff, and then joined them. It was pretty ridiculous. Anyway, we sat around and most people drank or kept drinking, though I didn't really feel like it just then. There were so many Australians and New Zealanders, apparently because of Anzac Day, which commemorates the defeat of the Allied forces at Gallipoli during WWI. Every year, thousands of Aussies and Kiwis flock to Istanbul to make a pilgrimage to the site where many of their ancestors died trying to get supports past the Ottoman Empire to the Russians. Ataturk and his Ottoman troops, however, did a very good job at holding them off, though the battle lasted nine months and left a third of a million people dead. So there's your little history lesson. It would have been neat to go and see the battlefields, and they're right next to Troy, so we coulda hit that too, but I wouldn't have wanted to have done it at the absolute busiest time of the year. We didn't have time anyway.

So after our lovely night with the boys, we said goodbye for two weeks and went to bed. The next morning, we got up, had breakfast, checked out, and went to see a few more sites before our noon ferry. First we did the Aya Sophia, which is overwhelmingly impressive but much uglier than the Blue Mosque, which sits across from it. Matt liked it better, though. After spending an hour or so there, we headed for the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, which had lots of cool rugs and Quran stands and whatnot. Overall I found it to be a fairly boring museum though. And so we headed off to the dock to grab our ferry and bid farewell to Istanbul. We only got a day there, but I feel like we saw a lot of good stuff and got a pretty good feel for it. It definitely deserves a longer stay though. Oh well, next time.

The ferry was pretty boring once we got used to how awesomely fast it was, and it was awesomely fast. We crossed the Sea of Marmara in two hours and arrived in Bandirma around 2:30. Our train to Izmir was leaving a little over an hour after that, and since we were hungry, we decided to get some food. Reasonable boys, us. Peter's mom was slated to put the money in that morning, which means mid to late afternoon in Turkey, at some point while we were on the train, so while we were in Bandirma we had to make do with what little money remained to us. I wasn't even sure if there was enough left in my account to make another withdrawal at an ATM. Between the three of us we had a little over twenty lira, which should have been enough for lunch. We sat down at a restaurant in the train station and had a modest meal, but we foolishly did not ask for prices or check a menu. With about fifteen minutes remaining until our train's departure, we called for the bill. The waiter came over and began tallying everything up on a napkin. We watched him as he wrote the price of each thing we had eaten. All was going well, we'd reached maybe ten lira, until he hit our main courses, which totaled more than twenty lira alone! The three of us looked at each other, our faces written all over with "Oh shit," and we managed to communicate to the waiter that we didn't have enough money. We asked him to guide me to an ATM, and he pointed to Peter's watch. Thinking he wanted Peter to give him the watch in return for the meal, Peter shook his head. He just wanted to know how much time we had until our train left though. Seeing that we had a little over ten minutes, he motioned to me to follow him. We'd all expected him to take me across the street or something. Instead, we jumped in his car and shot across town to an ATM. There was no parking nearby, so he parked where he could and I got out and ran to the machine, where there was of course a line, though thankfully not a huge one. When it was my turn, I went to do the transaction, praying it would go through. I requested fifty lira, and the machine told me to wait. I listened attentively, and when I heard the machine begin to count money, it was the most relieved I'd been in a very, very long time.

So I ran back to the car and we rushed back to the train station. Jumping out of the car, I flashed the money at Matt and Peter, who in turn showed me faces as relieved as mine. We paid and got on the train in time. It wasn't until we were safely moving away from Bandirma that we started to lament how absurdly overpriced that lunch was. But oh well, we made it. People have since asked me if I was ever afraid in the Middle East, and I always say no. But that's a lie. That was the one time I was afraid.

The train plodded through northwestern Turkey for the next eight hours or so. It was pleasant enough, and the scenery was really beautiful. Instead of reading any of the many books I had to finish before my return to Cairo, I took this opportunity to digest just about every page of the background and history sections of my Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. It was good to get a deeper understanding of the whole region.

The train didn't actually take us all the way to Izmir. The tracks right around the city were being worked on or something, so it dropped us off about half an hour north, and we took a bus the rest of the way. At this point, we were just about out of money, and the walk from the train station to an ATM was a very tense one. We got there, and I decided first to check my balance, which the ATM was unable to do. A lot of ATMs in the Middle East don't take my card, so our first reaction was to leave that machine, thinking my card was unusable in it. We started to look for another ATM, which normally wouldn't have been a big deal, except that it was almost 10 PM, and Izmir wasn't our final stop. We had to get to our hotel in Kusadasi, which was still an hour and a half or so away, and we didn't know how late the buses ran. It was then that it occurred to me that perhaps that ATM just couldn't do a balance check. Jogging back over to it, I tried to take out a pretty big sum, thinking that this would let us know if Peter's money had gone in. When we heard the machine counting, we all squealed with joy (maybe not Matt) and ran to get a cab to the bus station. We caught a bus to Kusadasi that was leaving right then, and we got to our hostel no problem. There we were treated like kings, since it still wasn't quite tourist season, and we were some of the only people staying in the hostel. After having some dinner, we went to bed.

The next morning, we all threw on our bathing suits and walked to the beach to try for a swim in the Aegean. When I was thirteen, Kusadasi was one of the ports my cruise ship pulled in to, and I've always regretted that I didn't get enough time to go swimming in the beautiful beaches of that town. Eight years later, however, I had a lot of trouble even finding a beach. Instead we explored the remains of an old pirate castle on an island just off the coast. We headed back to our hostel after that to check out, but first I called a few places to find out about taking a ferry to Cyprus should we get turned away at the Syrian border. As our hopeful entry into Syria drew nearer, I became more and more nervous about not getting in. The places I called did not help my anxiety. The ferry I had hoped to take to Cyprus as a contingency plan would not be running until May, though they did give me the number for a ferry that ran from another town along the Mediterranean coast. This was better than nothing, but the more I thought about our alternate plan, the more expensive and difficult I realized it would be. Ferries from Turkey to Cyprus are pretty cheap, but they really don't exist from Cyprus to Israel, and while I believe there is one to Port Said in Egypt, that one is rather pricey. To make matters worse, Cyprus is divided into halves based on political disputes between the Turks and the Greeks over the island. All Turkish ferries go to the Northeastern half, Turkish Cyprus, a country which is unrecognized by every other country in the world save for Turkey. Therefore, all ferries and cruise ships to Israel and Egypt obviously leave from Greek Cyprus. We'd have to cross a disputed border in order to get out of the country, and while the border is becoming demilitarized and easier to cross, it just didn't seem particularly fun. At this point I began spending every spare moment praying that we would make it into Syria.

We also went to an internet cafe that morning in Kusadasi where wrote an email to my mom letting her know what had happened and asking her if she could put a little more money in my account to help us get through until everything got worked out. After that I checked my online banking to confirm that Peter's mom had in fact put the money in. I found that money had indeed gone in, but only $500. That was more than enough to get us out of the rut we were in, but Peter had asked his mom to transfer $2000 of his money to the account. Assuming the $500 was from Peter's mom, he wrote to her asking her to put the rest in at some point fairly soon, and we kept going.

After checking out, we took a minibus to Selcuk, another big backpacking town, and the closest spot to Ephesus, our big destination in the region. Though we only spent about half an hour in Selcuk proper, two pretty hilarious events took place. The first concerned our luggage. Every place we'd go, we'd find a spot to leave our backpacks because, as I mentioned in the Greece entry, they were a bitch to lug around with us. We asked the folks where we purchased bus tickets back to Izmir for that evening if we could leave them there, and they motioned toward the back of the office at a spot where we could put them. Peter and I had no problem setting our bags down, but Matt somehow lost his balance as he got rid of his. Reaching out toward a curtain hanging from the wall to steady himself, he soon discovered that there was in fact no wall behind said curtain. The curtain was instead covering a little nook within which there were more bags. Matt started to fall into the curtain and he lashed out at anything around him to keep himself up. As he fell farther in, he tripped again over the bags which were inside. Finally after about fifteen seconds of delayed falling, he hit the ground somewhere behind the curtain. I saw the whole thing, and by this point, I was laughing so hard I was crying. My laughter and the noise of Matt's fall drew the attention of Peter as well as the Turkish guys working at the bus station. As soon as every one realized what had happened, they were laughing just as hard, and the Turkish guys were all explaining it in laughter-riddled Turkish to the others who hadn't been around. Matt got back on his feet and walked out proudly. "Laugh it up, asshole!" he said to me with his hands in the air. And laugh it up I did. It was probably one of the five funniest things I've ever seen in my life, and I laughed all the way down the street to the ATM where the next hilarious thing happened.

Actually this one wasn't nearly as hilarious, and at the time, it was somewhat frightening. I got some money out of the ATM, only to forget to take my card as I walked away. Fortunately there was a group of nice Turks behind us who got our attention and I retrieved my card without it being eaten by the machine or, heaven forbid, stolen. That was pretty stupid, but once we were in the clear, it was pretty funny. If I'd lost that card, then we really woulda been up shit creek.

So we walked from Selcuk to Ephesus, which was only a couple kilometers. On the way, we stopped at the remains of the Temple of Artemis, which was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Unfortunately all that remains of it is some rubble and one column, but I actually found that really awesome, and it led to some musings about what American ruins tourists will be exploring two thousand years from now, and what will be left of them.

Ephesus was just as awesome as I remembered it, and Peter and Matt had a grand old time walking around it too. It was a beautiful day, and in spite of it not being tourist season yet, there were a shitload of people there, especially Asians. So many Asian tourists in Turkey! We left the main center of Ephesus and continued walking around, exploring some of the other ruins nearby which I'd missed eight years ago. It was a really nice time, and we even snuck into the off-limits section of some ruins, though they didn't make it very hard for us to do so.

We decided to start heading back to Selcuk to catch our bus. We thought we had plenty of time to do so, but we had to walk around the hill against which Ephesus is set, and it took us longer than expected. If we'd walked, we probably would've made it, though it would've been close. Initially we decided to get a cab, but there were none to be found, so we decided to hitch-hike. I'd read a little about hitch-hiking in the Middle East in the Lonely Planet, and while the book didn't recommend it, it said that it's most of the time very safe and much more common than in the States. So we stuck our thumbs out, or rather we pointed at the road, which is the way you hitch-hike in the Middle East since putting your thumb up is considered vaguely offensive. After a couple cars went by, a family in their truck pulled over. I leaned in the window and said "Otogar," which is Turkish for bus station, and the driver motioned to the bed. We hopped in and off we went. It was awesome! The best part was there was a little kid who was making faces at us from the cab the whole time. We got to the otogar with plenty of time to spare, and we felt oh-so-resourceful too.

Getting back into Izmir, we grabbed something to eat before our overnight train to Ankara left. Once again we had to take a bus to the train, but once we were on, it was pretty comfortable, though we were all still a little miffed that we'd failed to nab spots in the sleeper. We made it though. The train was of course a couple hours late, but we weren't too upset. What I was upset about was the fact that the Lonely Planet has maps of tiny ass little towns in Turkey that no backpacker would ever have to deal with and yet it has no map of Ankara, the capital of the country and it's second biggest city. Needless to say we had a little trouble finding our way around, but once we got the metro worked out and found the center of the city, which turned out to be very close to the train station, we were okay. First we went to an internet cafe, where we discovered that Peter's mom hadn't put any money in yet, and that $500 that had saved our asses in Izmir had been my mom just putting some money in because she was concerned and wanted to make sure I was doing okay. I hadn't told her anything about Peter's issue, and the money had gone in before I sent her that email. Of course, that morning, she got the email and thought that the $500 hadn't been enough, so she rushed over and put another $500 in. Peter's mom, it turned out, wanted to wait for his father to get back from a trip out of the state before she dealt with Peter's money. I guess Peter didn't make the gravity of the situation clear enough to her. He did after that though, and the email he sent kept her up all night worrying. It was definitely a bit of a SNAFU, but we made it out alive and stayed liquid and after that, all of our parents, Matt's included, were so worried about us that we had plenty of money. Pretty ridiculous.

So we went to see a couple of Ankara's sites. We started with the Museum of Anatolian Culture, which basically chronicles everything that has gone down in the region from the dawn of humankind onward. It was really sweet actually. There were cave paintings and goddess mother statues (the fat little fertile chick), Hittite reliefs and relics, Greek pottery, Roman statues. It was probably my favorite museum of the trip and one of my favorite museums I've ever been to.

From there we headed up to the Citadel, where Matt got hassled by kids for money and we were afforded a beautiful view of all of Ankara. When we first entered the city, my opinion of it had not been very high. It seemed kind of dingy and fake compared to Istanbul, but after the museum and the citadel, I liked it a lot more. So we headed back down the hill to the metro, which we took to Ataturk's Mausoleum, which looked really sweet, and I felt like we owed it to the guy after seeing his picture so much all over the country, but we were too late and it was closed. We got some dinner and went to wait for our bus to Goreme, our gateway to Cappadocia. I sat in front of two very friendly Dutch women who were also going to Cappadocia, and I got to speak very terrible Dutch to them and talk to them a little about travel in Europe and the Middle East until we were hushed by the "flight attendants," for lack of a better term. The buses in Turkey are ridonk. They really have flight attendants, or people who basically fulfill an equivalent function. You get a snack and some water, and they come around with disinfectant with which you wash your hands and your face. Also, they always show a movie or the news. Crazy! We got to Goreme pretty late and went straight to our hostel, where we were staying in a cave! I had been really excited about this, but it proved to be somewhat disappointing. It seemed more like a damp basement than a cave. Oh well. It was nice enough.

When we woke up the next day we found ourselves totally unequipped to resist the temptation of renting mopeds, so we did. And it was probably the best decision we ever made. We each paid thirty lira and got the scooters for five blissful hours. First we rode them over to the Goreme Open Air Museum, which is the region's main attraction. Cappadocia is tough to describe. It's kind of a place you have to see and experience to appreciate, but basically the terrain looks like something you'd see in a fairy tale. It's the kind of place that makes you wish you understood geology. There's all these weird natural rock spires and caves and stuff, and about a thousand years ago or so, people started carving churches and houses into these caves, and so now it really looks like something you'd see in a fairy tale. I just pictured all these midgets and fairies running around the place. It was pretty cool. It may have deserved more time than we gave it, but we were really excited about getting back to the mopeds, so we left after maybe forty-five minutes. Cappadocia is a huge region, and we decided just to drive around exploring. The roads were pretty empty, so it was just very relaxing cruising around and looking at the whacky scenery. We also took the mopeds off-roading a little. Probably not the best decision, but we had a great time, and we didn't break anything, neither on the bikes nor on ourselves. After driving around for a couple hours, we decided to climb some of the whacky looking hills. It turns out that part of the reason the rocks are molded into such strange formations is that they're very soft and easily broken and shaped, which made climbing the cliff faces incredibly difficult. You'd grab onto a rock to pull yourself up and the rock would just crumble into a million pieces, and then you'd start sliding down. Plants were the key, as they gave the soil some integrity, but many of the plants were sharp and pokey, probably to keep people and animals from dislodging their root systems while climbing them. Peter and I had some trouble as a result, but Matt scurried up the hill like he was born and bred on it. I gave up after a little while and I wanted to get more out of our mopeds before we had to return them anyway, but Matt went for the summit, which turned out to be farther away than he had thought. He made it though. On the way back out, we had to do a little off-roading to get back to the on-roading, and Matt made a turn too fast and fell off the moped. Not a huge deal because we were all falling off here and there, but just as he did it, a big tour bus packed with people drove by and they all laughed at him. It was great.

So we kept driving and saw a few more things before returning the bikes. We were pretty exhausted after a day of driving and climbing in the hot weather, so we went to get some dinner before the most dreaded commute of the trip... a twelve hour bus ride to Antakya, right on the border with Syria. Originally we'd planned to stay two nights in Goreme, but I'd thought Antakya was closer than it in fact was. When we found out how long it would take us to get there, we decided to take the overnight bus. There was some misunderstanding with our tickets when we transfered in Kaysari, but we got that cleared up. The bus ride was of course pretty uncomfortable, though I was surprised by how much sleep I got. We got to Antakya around 8 AM and hopped on a bus headed to Aleppo, our first destination in Syria, should we get that far. Of course, since we were Americans, we had to forfeit the Syrian part of our journey because we would take so long at the border, and there was a chance we might not get in, though it was heartening to find that the ticket salesman and the drivers batted no eye when they saw we had American passports and we were going to Syria without a visa.

It only took forty-five minutes or so to get from Antakya to the border. Oh, and by the way, Antakya is the biblical Antioch, where Christians were first called Christians, so there you go. We got to the border and said goodbye to Turkey, got our exit stamps, and I was relieved to read the terms of the visa and see that we had thirty full days since the issue of our Turkish visas to return to the country and use it again, which meant if we got refused entry to Syria, we wouldn't have to buy a new Turkish visa. And so we walked to the Syrian border and into the offices to apply for our visas. Our time in Turkey was over, so we hoped.

Almost Done...

We've arrived in the Holy Land. Petra was unbelievable yesterday... really quite cool. And to top it off, we ran into our roommate Jay for the second time on this trip. Out of nowhere! Once in Istanbul, and once at the top of a mountain in Petra. Pretty ridonk. That same night we crossed into Israel and stayed in Eilat, a resort town on the Red Sea. Unfortunately we got there too late to do any swimming or sunbathing, and it was the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day here, so everything was shut down, but it was still fun. We got up early this morning for a 7 AM bus to Jerusalem, and Casey was kind enough to meet us at the bus station. We were originally planning to go to the Sea of Galilee this afternoon, but it's another five or six hours on a bus altogether and, quite frankly, we're getting a little sick of buses. We're gonna wander around the old city now instead. I get my mom at the airport tomorrow, and Peter and Matt leave on Saturday to go back to Cairo. I won't go back until Sunday though. It's been an unimaginably crazy trip.

Wahlkomm... to za MUHSSHEEEN!!

Cairo's hottest new band.

Yo yo yo everybody. Here's a quick update, but don't expect too much, cause the last week has been kinda slow. Here are the highlights (and some other stuff I added just for fun!):

The minaret at Ibn Tulun.

Last weekend, my room- mates Stoo and Ross, our friends Matt and Sam, and I all went to the Mosque of Ibn Tulun. It's the oldest mosque (9th century, I think) in Cairo and the biggest as well. It's definitely one of the most impressive things I've seen so far here. The architecture is very simple, and the central open area (there's probably some proper term, but I don't know it) feels like a desert with the sun (and the smog?) beating down from above. The spiral minaret is another highpoint (no pun intended!). Allegedly, Ibn Tulun, the man for whom the mosque was made, was idly spinning a piece of paper around his finger when someone caught him. To disguise his time wasting, when asked what he was doing, he replied, "designing my minaret!" It worked out pretty well, cause it's a sweet minaret, and it has great views of the city. But it would've been nice if Ibn Tulun had designed some guard rails as well. Being at the top is a little terrifying. Meh.. who needs 'em!?

Me putting the "Tul" back in Ibn Tulun.

Later that day we decided to check out the City of the Dead. A good portion of east- ern Cairo is covered by graveyards and tombs. In a city with a housing prob- lem like Cairo's, it's no surprise that those graveyards serve a dual purpose. About half a million homeless Cairenes sleep in the City of the Dead each night. In the day they leave and wander the city, but they return every night. It's a pretty creepy thought, to live and sleep by your

A tomb in the City of the Dead.

ancestors. It's nothing like I imagined it. Of course, hearing that people lived in cemeteries, I imagined the traditional expansive and green American cemetary. The Egyptian style is totally different. It's a maze of mausoleums and above-ground tombs, mostly. The cemeteries stretch for miles, with a mosque thrown in here, a mound of garbage there. Wandering around the area was pretty surreal. We went in the day, so none of the homeless were there yet, but nevertheless, it felt a lot like voyeurism. Not just of the living, but of the dead too. Many of the mausoleums, while they're dark inside, have large windows through which you can look. You can't see much without additional light, but I took a few pictures with my flash on, and I half expected to see a ghost or something in the exposure, silly as it may sound.

A "satellite city" of a different color! HA!

That was prob- ably the big- gest event of the last week or so. Other than that, we've been hanging around mostly. Matt's friend Dave and his girlfriend Jen just left after spending a little over a week here. They were both very nice and it was fun to have some visitors, even if they weren't mine. A lot of the roommates are getting visitors soon, so the apartment is going to be a little crazier than normal. This weekend Stoo has a good friend coming. Ross' parents are coming in around the same time. I think next weekend Jay's parents are coming. I don't even know after that. My mom bought her ticket though, so she's coming for sure! She's going to meet us in Israel in May and hang out there for a

Ibn Tulun.

few days, then take the bus with us to Cairo. The last weekend she's here we're gonna hit up Alexandria. I'm really excited to see her. I miss people, especially my parents, a lot more here for some reason. It probably has something to do with dist- ance and security and whatnot. Whatever. Oh, and speaking of Israel and visitors, the only other people who I thought were gonna visit me bailed out a little while ago. Losers. Sari from Oberlin and her boyfriend Casey are studying in Jerusalem, and they were going to come sometime in April, but because they don't want to take the bus and they couldn't find a satisfactory flight, they've decided not to. Personally, I don't think they looked hard enough for the flights, especially since my friend Hannah just got visited by a friend of hers studying in Israel who flew direct for the price Sari and Casey wanted. Oh well. Their loss. And Peter and I will still see them when we're in Israel, so there's that.

OH! Last Wednesday we went to see... get this, an Egyptian Pink Floyd cover band! It was hilarious! But only a little. It was actually quite good. They had the arrangements perfect, and one of the guys did the most amazing David Gilmour. The other guy had a wicked thick accent, which I thought added to the experience. "Hay! Taichur! Leave zose kidz aloaan!" Peter plans to include something about them in his forthcoming entry, which has gone from being a quick discussion of the symphony to encompassing everything there is about music in Africa's biggest city, judging from the amount of time it's been kicking around in his head anyway. "Hey Peter. When are you gonna write your next entry?" "Oh, I wanted to wait until we'd gone to [insert concert here] so I could include it." Oh, and then I throttle him, usually.

More Ibn Tulun.

This past weekend was pretty low-key. Thursday night, Jay, Peter, and I decided we wanted to eat something other than Egyptian cuisine and American fast food, so we went on a long sojourn to track down a Chinese place. We didn't find one, but we did happen upon a very good Korean restaurant. I'd missed the taste of MSG. The next day was laid back as well. Peter had a big test to study for, so he was out of commission. I discovered that Phil enjoys cribbage, and we had maybe the closest, most intense game I've ever played. He won by one peg. ONE PEG! After bumming around the apartment for a while, Stoo, Sharif, Phil, and I all went out with Hannah and her aforementioned friend (Michelle) from Israel. We went to Sequoia, an upscale restaurant in Zamalek. My god... it was one of the nicest places I've ever been in my life. It's right on the Nile, and the atmosphere is perfect. Even the music isn't too loud. The food is excellent as well, not to mention the shisha. Really, it's like the Cheesecake Factory of shisha. They bring out a giant tray with probably forty different flavors. I went for cola, which wasn't the best. Sharif's rose was quite nice.

Our Felucca coming in to port.

After that, we went back to Hannah's apartment and got into one of the biggest, most intense debates I've wit- nessed in a while. I say witnessed because I wasn't as much a part of it as the others. It was over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I just don't know as much about it as my friends here do, nor am I quite as invested in it, I don't think. Sharif and Stoo are both Arabs, and Hannah and her friend Michelle are both Jewish, so their interest needs no explanation. Phil just knows his shit, but it was mostly an argument between those first four. Finally, at 4AM, we left and came home... and stayed up until 6 doing absolutely nothing. On Saturday, after Peter finished his exam, we hung out for a little while before going on a felucca ride with Matt, Dave, Jen, Martha, Hannah, and Michelle. It was a really beautiful night, and even though we didn't get on the boat until just after sunset, it was still a great time. The next day was once again pretty lackadaisical. We'd been craving some good old fashioned steak and taters, so Martha and Sarah, one of Martha's friends from Maadi, came over and we had ourselves a nice little dinner. Unfortunately, I started feeling really sick afterwards, and I wound up going to bed around 9:30. I didn't fall asleep for several hours, however. I was freezing at first, but after pumping the heat for a while, I started to get really hot and sweaty. At some point I entered a half-dream,

Peter and Martha relax on the felucca.

half-awake state in which I believed that I had discovered an alternate method of sleeping which somehow involved flying all around the world at absurd speeds. I was legitimately convinced of this until I had been awake for about an hour or so the next day. When I woke up, I felt good enough to go to class, but after sitting there for twenty minutes or so, I started feeling pretty sick again. I went home early, bought some Advil, and took a long nap. After I woke up, I felt a little better, but I was still a little off, which was too bad. My St. Patty's Day was, consequently, not too exciting. The good news is I felt right as rain this morning when I woke up. I'm still a little funky... stuffy nose and whatnot, but other than that, I feel great. I think it might have been food poisoning or something. Or AIDS, if I wanna believe WebMD. Hypochondriac's nightmare.

In other news, I got a house for next year back at Oberlin! I'm living with Liz Segroves, Eric Gibbs, and Big Rachel. We got a place on Pleasant St, which is over by the Art Museum. Not the best location necessarily, but with a bike it won't be a big deal. Plus it's sweet just to have a house! All of us have terrible, and I mean terrible lottery numbers, so we were praying for an okay apartment on Union St at best. It was nevertheless a pleasant surprise to get our own house. You can see a picture of it here.

So we're off to Europe tomorrow morning, bright and early. We are of course wicked excited, though we didn't anticipate quite the level of SNAFU that skipping a few days of class might elicit. I have a paper due the day I get back; Peter has a final. Also, two days after we get back, we leave Cairo again to go to the Sinai for a weekend with some friends. Crazy! Hopefully we'll get a chance to post something about our trip to Europe before then. Hope all is well.

The call to prayer at Ibn Tulun. We hear this all over the city, from our apartment (less so) and from classes (oh yeah), five times a day, every day.

الهرم (The Pyramids)

We went to the Pyramids yesterday. It was an amazing trip. Here's a slideshow. You can click on it at any time to navigate between slides or view the whole album.

Houston, We Have a Light

From left to right: Peter, Sharif, and Phil in the living room.

In short, the apartment ex- ceeded all of our wildest dreams, which isn't actually all that impress- ive, since I didn't really have any preconceptions and Peter was intentionally imagining it as a dingy and undersized piece of shit. But yeah, it's pretty incredible. We don't even have to lug shit up the stairs! There's this sweet old-timey elevator that we can take to our floor. On the ride over, we met two other students who were to be living in the same apartment, which meant we didn't in fact have a double. No big deal though. One of our fears was having everything at our fingertips and therein becoming homebodies, so we were excited about living with others. We arrived and found that there were to be eight guys in all, which sounds like a lot, but, as you can see from the pictures, it doesn't matter, 'cause the place is effin' huge! Eight roommates and five bedrooms: that's three doubles and two singles. As you enter the apartment, you come to a large dining/living room with a couch, some chairs, a big dining table, some bookcases and closets. Off to the left is Peter's and my double, which is also pretty big. It has a nice window overlooking a busy street. The next room belongs to Stoo and Matt. It's probably a little bigger than ours, and it has a balcony, which is excusable since it's a double. The following room belongs to just Ross. He definitely got the best deal, since he's got a balcony, a couch, and his own room. Sheesha! After that is Phil's and Sharif's double, and finally comes Jay, with another single. Everyone is American, though Stoo's parents are both Iranian and Sharif's father is from Alexandria. They all seem cool and nice and pretty agreeable. Matt is from Long Island and is reserved but very friendly. Stoo hails from Needham

Our third toilet.

, Mass., and he's incredibly outgoing and funny. Ross comes from Woodstock, NY (right near Bard!), and he's quite down-to- earth and easy- going. Jay, we've decided, is John Carr meets Jon Hyman, which, in case you don't know those two, means he's approachable and happy-go- lucky. Both he and Phil are from the Detroit area. Phil is a nice presence, as his appearance is a real throwback to Oberlin. He has long hair and a big beard and always wears a bandana (I guess it might be a little early to say "always"), and he's incredibly laid back. Last but not least, Sharif is from Chicago and he's the eldest. He's wicked helpful and expressive. Maybe it's because I know he's older, and also since he's already spent a semester here, but he seems like the most mature of the group. Anyway, there's the apartment in a nutshell. Oh yeah, and there's a kitchen, two bathrooms, two showers, three toilets, a washer, a drier, and we can climb some stairs to hang out on the roof, which is also amazing.

Peter's nut card. It translates literally to something like "An allergy is belonging to me regarding almonds and hazelnuts and pinenuts and pistachios and walnuts."

When we showed up there were already five of us here. Two more showed up within an hour or so (everyone but Sharif), and after a little unpacking and unrestrained disbelief at the awesomeness of the apart- ment, we headed down- town to get some dinner. We passed AUC, and it is indeed quite close to where we live. There are tons of shops and restaurants around. It really is a great location. After getting lost a little, we found a little place recommended by one of my travel guides. We walked in and were immediately welcomed and ushered to seats. The place only serves one meal: kushari, which is pretty much Egypt's national dish. It's macaroni, rice, chick peas,

Meaty Petey in our room. Of course, it's already a mess.

lentils, fried onions, and hot sauce. That might sound weird and maybe even gross, but it's pretty damned good actually, not to mention filling. I imagine it's fairly nutri- tious as well. Unfortunately, we didn't know how to say that Peter had a nut allergy, so he was pretty nervous about eating it. He went over and asked a man, and despite some communication difficulties, the fellow managed to understand him enough to let him know there were no nuts involved. Plus, he was superbly friendly, which is really the way to be here, apparently. Everyone we meet or ask for help or encounter in anyway is just so happy to be of help. It's pretty awesome. So anyway, the dinner was great, and for the seven of us with food and drink, the bill ran to LE60, or a little over ten dollars. Pretty freaking incredible, eh? After that, we walked around some more, getting lost again and being dragged around by helpful Cairenes, though a few of them were surely just trying to get some money out of us tourist types. It was only 10 when we got back to the apartment (which was just as amazing as we had left it), but after being awake for about thirty-five hours, we were very ready for bed.

Cairo skyline across the Nile.

After ten hours of weird-dream- filled sleep, we got up around 8:30, and thanks to jetlag, I still felt very tired. It's affected Peter a lot less so, but I felt tired pretty much all day. After laying around until noon, we walked downtown, to get some food ostensibly, but we were sidetracked by a friendly man who somehow got us to buy perfume from him, despite our best efforts. We have of course sworn to avoid that at all costs for the rest of our time here. But he had a picture of himself with Mohammed Ali! How could we not give him our money?.

Feluccas on the Nile.

We had a traditional Egyptian meal of Sbarro since Peter was still a little hesi- tant about his allergy. But fear not: using a phrasebook we prepared him a card stating in no uncertain terms that he cannot eat them. After lunch, we trekked down to the Nile for a cool dip... er, walk, I mean. It was pretty whacky to see that water which had flowed thousands of miles from the lakes of Rwanda and the mountains of Tanzania and the deserts of the Sudan, only to empty out a hundred or so miles north in the Mediterranean. That's right, I waxed poetic. Deal with it.

The Cairo Tower.

Then we came back to the dorm to finish unpack- ing and setting every- thing up. It was quite a shitshow. Within an hour, we had broken three fuses, two transformers, a circuit breaker, a power adapt- er, and a chair (Peter's fault). Needless to say, we sat down and worked out exactly what would be required to get our electronics up and running properly. After a surprisingly successful jaunt around Cairo's electronics district (which is, like everything else in this town, conveniently located!), we came back and got everything working fine and dandy... except for the speakers. That's where the power adapter blew, and the universal adapter we bought to replace it turned out to be the wrong kind of current. But nevertheless, a pretty good save.

The rest of the night we spent hanging out with the roommates, playing a little poker, talking politics, and then wasting time on the computer. The other guys went out on the town, but we were exhausted and, personally, if I'm starting over, I don't want to develop a terrible sleep schedule too early.

Our humble little kitchen.

Of course we wound up staying up until 3 AM anyway and not getting up until 3 PM. As a result, today got cut a little short. We basically got up, farted around for a bit, went to Pizza Hut (I don't know why... please don't think we're already missing shitty American food, but I guess we figured that with four months, we'll wind up getting plenty of local stuff), and bought cell phones ($40 each! see sidebar for numbers).

Anyway, everything has been incredible so far. Sorry I'm so long-winded, but you'll all just have to wait.

Cairo from our roof.