Mule

As of last night, the Central Desk at Al-Ahram Weekly, a long-standing source of employment for English-speaking foreigners living in Cairo for a few months or years, is no more. So John among others is out of work, which he doesn't seem to mind too much. He'll just take an intensive Arabic course instead of a regular course next month, and is okay financially now that he's scrapped his plans to travel in Europe for a month after leaving Egypt. Ryan's still got a job, since he's a proofreader not a copyeditor, as does Ian, but they're about the only native English speakers left at the paper.
John, Ryan, Melanie, and I are taking off in a couple hours to go visit Siwa, an oasis near the border with Libya, meaning about ten hours in buses, but it's supposed to be gorgeous.

Ryan, John, and I got back last night from an awesome five-day weekend in Luxor and Aswan checking out Egypt's non-Pyramidal Pharaonic ruins. It wasn't as unbearably hot as we thought it was going to be, with a high of 45 most days, which sounds colder than it is. In Luxor, we rented bikes to avoid joining a tour group, and covered the 14 km between the Colossi of Memnon, some house in the middle of nowhere where a guy tried to patch up John's flat back tire, the Valley of the Kings, a restaurant, and Medinat Habu. We might have done a little more but John was riding on rim for the last 10 km.
Aswan was more laid-back, without the annoying Luxor hustlers mobbing all foreigners as they walk out of the train station, and really cheap. We got a triple with air-condition, a fan, and a private bathroom, with breakfast included, for a total of $1.20 per person. We got up at 2:45am for a three-hour drive to Abu Simbel, the Aswan High Dam (which was pretty boring, and not even very high at all), and Philae Island (which was moved, stone by stone, from a neighboring island where it was being submerged beneath the waters of Lake Nasser).
That's about the news from here. Oh yeah, and we went to the Red Sea for four days the weekend before, whereas you are sitting at home on your computer surfing through weblogs, eating Doritos. Kiss it.

I've been done with classes for almost two weeks now, and haven't had much to do (but still haven't made the time to blog). That changes tomorrow morning, not the blogging part I mean, when John, Ryan, Melanie (a Utahan friend from the Amman program), Hani (a cousin from Abu Sir), and I go off to Dahab on the Red Sea coast for four days of snorkeling, swimming, hiking, and great, cheap food. Then the weekend after that will be in Luxor/Aswan checking out awe-inspiring old Pharaonic junk, with subsequent weekends seeing then Mount Sinai/Sharm El-Sheikh, and finally Kharga/Dakhla oases in the Western Desert.

John's mom, Mary, just got back to the US on Saturday after a hurried but fun five days in Egypt. It was her first time out of North America (the US?) and a very emotional experience for her. Still waiting to hear if she's fully recovered.

My Norwegian identity survived two narrow scares in the past few days. I was at a Greek restaurant near our apartment, meeting this Egyptian intellectual crowd that Melanie has fallen in with. None of them knew Norwegian or had been to Norway (although one woman rightly expressed surprise that not all educated Norwegians spoke English well), but immediately after I introduced myself, one of them asked what Khalid (Immortal) means in Norwegian. After stalling for time saying that Norwegian didn't have a "kh" sound before getting to what he meant, namely the Norwegian for "immortal", I had to make up something reasonably Norse-sounding, and that I could remember in case they brought up the topic again later. And so I am Thoran.