Monday, May 31, 2004
For people that know Jimmy, he safely returned from his first stint in Iraq, al-hamdu lillah alaa salaama. He didn't sound like he enjoyed it too much, to put it mildly. He was working as a guard at a prison between Falluja and Abu Gharib (the "Ghraib" transliteration and pronunciation is just completely nonsensical). Jimmy said that military intelligence wasn't too friendly to him, since he's a Muslim, and intervened if he talked to the prisoners. He also said that 80 to 90% of the prisoners there were innocent of any wrongdoing, they had just been picked up on speculation because they had been in the neighborhood where snipers started shooting at American patrols, or at most had been found in possession of more than one gun in their family home. He's scheduled to go back to Iraq in early 2005.
Ryan will be arriving in Cairo tomorrow evening, followed by myself Thursday morning, then John Thursday night. I'm not going to be coming back to the US for Alicia and BenBen, Christmas, etc, until sometime in the summer of 2005.
I will continue to heckle the Bush administration's inferior Arabic and English skills after getting back to Egypt. So long.
Ryan will be arriving in Cairo tomorrow evening, followed by myself Thursday morning, then John Thursday night. I'm not going to be coming back to the US for Alicia and BenBen, Christmas, etc, until sometime in the summer of 2005.
I will continue to heckle the Bush administration's inferior Arabic and English skills after getting back to Egypt. So long.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
I've been chilling in Murfreesboro for the past two weeks, since a wild Sittende Mai celebration in Philadelphia (Megan said that her grandparents were voted King and Queen of the Sittende Mai parade in Stoughton, Wisconsin this year, which is also my grandparents' town and possibly the most Norwegian town in the country). Since I'll be in Egypt for the next year, probably not going to the US for Christmas, I've been gorging on the foods that won't be easily available in Cairo: Mexican, Indian (there are no cheap buffet places in Cairo), and pork to a lesser extent.
My parents have been coveting my room, too, so I cleaned it thoroughly, throwing out the stacks of class notes from high school and college that I had held onto. Even if I knew deep down that they would never serve any useful purpose, I hadn't been able to bring myself to trash them. Just in case there's a comprehensive final at the end of my life, I guess. And I uncovered various ancient relics such as a diary I briefly kept while eight years old and had completely forgotten about, and a compact survival kit from Boy Scouts. Those beef cubes got pretty rank in the last decade, but I would have appreciated them if I was ever trapped in my closet by a landslide of old class notes and grungy tennis-related t-shirts, forcing me to rely on my wits and the kit to survive.
My parents have been coveting my room, too, so I cleaned it thoroughly, throwing out the stacks of class notes from high school and college that I had held onto. Even if I knew deep down that they would never serve any useful purpose, I hadn't been able to bring myself to trash them. Just in case there's a comprehensive final at the end of my life, I guess. And I uncovered various ancient relics such as a diary I briefly kept while eight years old and had completely forgotten about, and a compact survival kit from Boy Scouts. Those beef cubes got pretty rank in the last decade, but I would have appreciated them if I was ever trapped in my closet by a landslide of old class notes and grungy tennis-related t-shirts, forcing me to rely on my wits and the kit to survive.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
For those of you out there studying Egyptian Arabic, here's the Bible, as told in Cairene dialect:
I'm back home in Tennessee for a little, and get back to Cairo with John and Ryan on June 3rd. I'll have an apartment downtown near AUC, and will be studying Arabic in the CASA program for the next year.
I'm gonna go eat some pork. Mmmm. Sacridelicious.
I'm back home in Tennessee for a little, and get back to Cairo with John and Ryan on June 3rd. I'll have an apartment downtown near AUC, and will be studying Arabic in the CASA program for the next year.
I'm gonna go eat some pork. Mmmm. Sacridelicious.
Monday, May 10, 2004
I'm spending a bittersweet last week at Al-Ahram Weekly and in Abu Sir. After flying home to the States on Saturday and returning June 3rd, I'll have a new occupation (studying Arabic) and new apartment (still looking on that one). It's been hard knowing that I'm not going to get to see the kids, Um Ahmad, the cousins, etc much, even though I'll try to go down for visits every 2-3 weeks.
In other news, Joel Scholtz '97, the Swattie visiting Egypt for ten days, left for his job in China the day before yesterday. We both somehow got a really nasty stomach bug, which I'm getting over now thanks to Cipro. I weighed myself this morning at AUC, and discovered I lost ten pounds in the last six days. I should import a new diet technique, perhaps in the form of bottled Nile water, to the US. The ads, I suppose, would feature a "before" black and white picture of me, looking fairly skinny but frowning, wearing ugly clothes, and slouching. Whereas the "after" picture, in color, would show an unhealthily underweight, and hence better and more attractive, me, classily dressed (I'm not sure where I would dig up nice clothes though). Also, the Egyptian diet might not kill everyone who took it, unlike PhenBenBen.
So I'll have to eat well in the US to make up for the last week. I'm especially looking forward to all-you-can-eat Indian food in Philly and loads of pork BBQ and red velvet cake at the Friday night buffet (yaa haram!) at the Front Porch Cafe in Murfreesboro.
In other news, Joel Scholtz '97, the Swattie visiting Egypt for ten days, left for his job in China the day before yesterday. We both somehow got a really nasty stomach bug, which I'm getting over now thanks to Cipro. I weighed myself this morning at AUC, and discovered I lost ten pounds in the last six days. I should import a new diet technique, perhaps in the form of bottled Nile water, to the US. The ads, I suppose, would feature a "before" black and white picture of me, looking fairly skinny but frowning, wearing ugly clothes, and slouching. Whereas the "after" picture, in color, would show an unhealthily underweight, and hence better and more attractive, me, classily dressed (I'm not sure where I would dig up nice clothes though). Also, the Egyptian diet might not kill everyone who took it, unlike PhenBenBen.
So I'll have to eat well in the US to make up for the last week. I'm especially looking forward to all-you-can-eat Indian food in Philly and loads of pork BBQ and red velvet cake at the Friday night buffet (yaa haram!) at the Front Porch Cafe in Murfreesboro.
