Saturday, April 28, 2007

Voyage to the Hidden City, Pt. 1

My adventures for this weekend revolved around visiting Petra. Strictly speaking, however, most of my time was spent in transit - an experience, I can assure you, was a bit less than exemplary. As a study in how the Middle East basically seems to work, however, it was pretty invaluable. So I'm going to drag you through every excruciating moment of it. I will, however, refrain from using the phrase "Rose Red City," throughout, because I'm thoroughly sick of that epithet.

We set out from Cairo late Tuesday night to take a bus to Nuweiba, a little port city on the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula. The plan was to take a ferry from Nuweiba to the Jordanian port of Aqaba and from there another bus to Petra, about two hours inland. There's another way to get there, by cutting through Taba in Egpyt and Eilat in Israel, but that involves getting an Israeli stamp on your passport, which is the kiss of death for trying to enter any Arab nation except for Egypt and Jordan.

Little did we know that Nuweiba is pretty much the sphincter of Egypt. It wasn't quite a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it was pretty damn close. Apparently the tourist part of the town is actually quite nice, but the port authority area is a sprawling mess of dirty cafes, loading docks, shipping offices, and filth. This place was seriously disgusting even by lax Egyptian standards. We spent most of our time in the shaded courtyard of the ticket office, which was the least awful of the available locations.

Don't even get me started on the cement-block hole-in-the-ground Egyptian squat toilets. The most foul truck-stop restroom in America wouldn't even be able to hold a candle to these - in fact, if they did there might be some sort of explosion. I will never be able to understand how an Islamic culture which places such a high value on personal cleanliness and regular ablutions allows its streets and especially its washrooms to become such vile cesspits.

The bus which we had taken was actually chock-full of AUC students, but most of them were going to Israel, so they got off in Taba to head north to Jerusalem. There were a couple of others with is in Nuweiba, including two crazy guys who planned to visit Petra, Amman, and Damascus all in one weekend. And even though it often takes 8+ hours to cross the Syrian border - if you get across at all - they still probably spent less time in transit then us.

Joe and Ben - another guy visiting Jordan - and I chilled in the ticket office until they finally decided to start boarding the "fast ferry." After being shuffled through six or seven different waiting areas, having our passports and tickets checked innumerable times, and being put on buses that sat idling for 10 minutes to travel no more than 500 ft. from the terminal to the boat, we finally boarded the ship - only to have our passports confiscated for "processing."

Now, being out of control of your passport is a worrying state of affairs at the best of times. Giving it over to the grimy hands of the Jordanian/Egyptian state port security services would be enough to give the Dalai Lama an aneurysm. But, we bore it with admirable patience, and after finally shuffling everyone around, the boat took off from the dock. And it was a fast boat - the "slow ferry" was still boarding trucks when we arrived in Aqaba an hour later, around 6pm. We were optimistic that we would be in Petra by 8, and happy that our investment in the "Fast Boat", about twice as expensive as the regular ferry had paid off. So we pulled into port...and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more. We sat in our seats, with no one telling us a bloody thing about what was going on. A few other foreign nationals were let out but they weren't letting Americans anywhere. Mind you, they still had our passports during this whole ordeal. Finally, over an hour later, they relented and let us out of the boat and put us on another 500m bus ride to the Jordanian customs/arrival terminal.

Where they didn't have our passports. Now, I'm used to Egyptian bureaucracy and official stupidity, but I have never before encountered a customs bureau that had simply vanished our passports. For almost an hour, I couldn't get a straight answer out of any of the duty officers as to where they had gone. People walked back and forth. There was shouting in Arabic and a fair amount of gesticulation. We were repeatedly assured that the wait would be "10 more minutes." Some of the Americans' passports emerged, while others inexplicably remained hidden in the bureaucratic void. It finally emerged that they were "processing" each passport for security, a process which appeared to take about 5 minutes per passport. They trickled out over the course of the hour, emerging in small, illogical batches - one guy got his while his girlfriend didn't, while a Korean family was handed all of theirs - except for their 5-year-old daughter.

Finally, having determined that Joe and I and two middle-aged travelling companions from Ireland and Oregon did not represent pressing security risks to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, we were allowed out around 9pm - to get a bus to Petra. At this point, Joe and I had been travelling for 24 solid hours, with only brief naps on the bus and boat. But we got a taxi, and after being shunted between four different drivers and twice as many arguments about something - Allah only knows what, although it undoubtedly involved money - we were on our way to Petra.

I was honestly only conscious for the first bit, where our driver pointed out the world's biggest damn Jordanian flag flying over Aqaba port and bought jerry-cans of petrol from a station run exclusively by eight-year old boys. Then it was off into the Jordanian countryside. Fortunately, Joe was able to make conversation with the middle-aged couple who had gotten stuck in the same trap as us, and I was able to lie back, sleep and have my head repeatedly slammed into the doorframe of the car by the squealing hairpin turns that led to Petra.

We got to our hotel, and found that two other groups of AUC students were already occupying it, so that was an interesting surprise. Fortunately we had booked ahead of time, and through the incompetence of the hotel staff we were for some reason given a four-bed room for the price of the two-bed room we had booked - not particularly useful, but it at least gave us clean linen for each night we were there! They briefly tried to charge us the 4-bed rate, but we were so thoroughly fed up that we took our bags upstairs and told them we expected the right rate when we returned. They obliged.

That was the end of our voyage to Petra - or strictly speaking, to Wadi Musa, the village just outside Petra. The next day brought all of the good, awesome, and beautiful stuff. Stay tuned...

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Best Laid Plans

Well, the initial plan for the weird Sinai Liberation Day (or as Joe puts it, "The Israelis Kicked Our Ass Day) was to go to the beachside resort of Dahab on the Red Sea and do some windsurfing. Unfortunately, the weather does not always provide - so it goes. In this case, the wind is going to be a measly 6-8 knots all week, barely enough to get the stupid thing moving. I really can't be bothered to go rent some fantastically expensive kit if the wind isn't going to cooperate and I end up sitting in the middle of a - shark-infested? - sea.

So we changed our plans, and the new idea is to go to Petra. If you're a classical history buff, you'll know the city as the ancient Nabatean capital carved out of the walls of a canyon in Southern Jordan. It's pretty incredible stuff. You might also recognize it as the home of the Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Basically, an awesome place.

I'll bring back lots of pictures and hopefully stories, and I'll be gone until Saturday.

Friday, April 20, 2007

But It Pours...

The weather went from strange to utterly mad. On the one hand, sand blowing out of the sky is bizarre and peculiar phenomenon. But you sort of expect to get sandstorms in the desert, even if you have no idea what they are going to be like. Yet for the next day to bring rain is just too odd. At first I didn't even believe it was raining - I thought the pattering in the courtyard was the fountain being rinsed out or someone gardening the bushes.

So it rained, coming down and washing away the dust and grime that had been deposited over everything. Part of me wished it would come into the room and wash away all of the accumulated sand in here. Another part of me wanted to go out and sit in the rain and feel washed off, but of course here rain is just as dirty as everything else. It will actually leave brown marks on white clothing.

Nevertheless, there is something psychologically cleansing about rain, so I decided to write a quick haiku about it. Why? I don't know, it's just something I do.

Spring raindrops carve out
patterns in the swirling dust
and holes in my heart.

Also, the weather made me think of this song:
The sky is crying the streets are full of tears
Rain come down wash away my fears
And all this writing on the wall
Oh I can read between the lines
Rain come down forgive this dirty town
Rain come down and give this dirty town
A drink of water a drink of wine

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Sandstorm

Well, I hear Boston has been having thoroughly wretched weather for the past couple of weeks. I'm sorry to say that we've got that beat over here in Cairo - yesterday it was 35 degrees in the shade while a sandstorm raged through the streets. It was a truly surreal experience.

On the bus to school, I could barely see the far bank of the Nile over the bridge, and everything was cast in the weird yellowish-grey light of the storm. There's a statue at one end of the bridge and it was nothing but an eerie silhouette.

And the sand gets into everything. You open your mouth and it gets stuck between your teeth. I found it pooled in the bottom of my bag after walking outside for only a few minutes. But the city rolls on, just like it would after a rainstorm in Boston. It's a commonplace event, I guess, and for all its bizarreness no-one really seemed to notice or care that much. I did feel envious of the veiled women, for once, as they could just wrap their scarves tighter and not breath in the sand. The kaffiyeh really does make sense over here - keeps off wind, rain, sand and sun, and can be used as a pillow or a towel in a pinch.

In other unrelated news, our friend Nick departed yesterday, leaving the Egyptian Museum to go back to the States and then to study German in Hamburg or Frankfurt - I can't remember which. That time of the semester is fast approaching when we will all have to say our goodbyes, unsure of whether they are final or not. It is easy to make promises to visit, stay in touch, etc. In truth, very few of these friendships survive the distance barrier. I only hope we can all keep in touch after the semester ends.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Glimpses


News remains slow here, but what can you do. I apologize that I can't get mugged by Turkish pimps every week - although that might get old. Anyways, here are five or six of my favorite photos from the trip. Hope you like them! Click to see them in all their full-res glory.

Stairway in Cairo. I like it because it sums up the physicality of the city.


Bizarre volcanic cones in the Black Desert. Looks like an alien landscape.


The beginning of the white desert and its bizarre cones and whorls.


Footprints in the White Desert.


Old man in prayer at the Suleimaniye Mosque, Istanbul.


Ceiling in the Roman Temple at Baalbeck.
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Friday, April 13, 2007

As The Crow Flies

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." - Voltaire

And as there's no news in my life now, it was necessary to make some up. So a short fictional vignette, instead. I stress fictional because that is what it is. Small bits are based on reality but basically that's what it is - a story.

I hope you enjoy it!

As the Crow Flies


Ink glittered for a brief moment as it slid onto the paper. In moments, it dried as a matte black snake of words. I watched it as I wrote, paying more attention to the shapes than the words themselves. They had become little more than crumpled heaps of shed emotion. The paper was stiff and its crackling annoyed me as I wrote. With a final sigh of frustration, I tossed the pen aside and watched as it rolled along the margin, tiny drops of black spattering the page.


A month here had worn me down to a raw stub of frustration. My computer, stolen on the plane, had been my one link to the rest of the world, a lifeline to modernization. Plunged into the daily chaos of Cairo, these papers were the only, tenuous connection to everything I had left. One a day to my family; one a day to my friends. And one - a hopeless, futile gesture to the woman I had left waiting for me, written in an unsteady hand that grew shakier with time.


This was the last one. The final letter. It pounded the last nail and rolled the coffin over the edge of the boat. We had been on shaky ground when I left. I was nervous over so many months apart, with temptation always beckoning. Our trust was worn thin and the arguments had always bubbled just below the surface. In my letters, the tone grew increasingly strident. This final communique was the product of the past weeks, throwing my words into the void. I told her it was finished – I was finished. I could not stand another month of raging silence.


I stood on the balcony and watched the balletic madness of the street. A taxi made a mad swerve around a bus of children to offer an old woman a ride. She waved her cane and shouted something in Arabic – curses? Greetings? At this height, I couldn't tell. The restaurant across the street from the Algerian embassy shone with lights and music. Uniformed guards lounged at the entrance as well-dressed guests filtered in. There were two sets, actually. The Cairo police leaned on their battered Kalashnikovs while the Embassy security stood in shadows. The latter were hulking men in black suits caressing submachine guns.


And the guests! A month in the grey dust of the streets made their luxury look like a djinn's palace. Women in shimmering cocktail dresses, men in dinner jackets and black ties. Long parades of luxury cars that snaked around the block. I saw one man enter flanked by two blonde women in white dresses – sisters? Wives? What was the party for, anyways? It could be a wedding – there was one of those a week, at least, and the celebration never ended before sunrise. Or just revelry for its own sake – the excitement of being rich and privileged.


I contemplated sending my letters to one of those women, just addressing it at random to a Yasmin or Rasha and seeing what happened. It couldn't be any more frustrating than my current plan. A month's worth of letters, one each day, and not a single response from her. Thirty-one pages of endearments, questions, demands, poems, news, and finally pleas.


The silence nagged at me, like the dull buzzing that filled my ears when a room was totally quiet. The slightest event would set it off – a young couple entangled in the back of the library, a man smoking on the 6th October bridge while he waits for his liasion, even the sight of someone writing on the shaky metal coffee tables in an ahwa. It intruded on my sleep with dreams of drowning in a sea of ink leaking from my pen.


Frustration propelled me down and out of the apartment. The lobby was empty and my boots echoed on the scuffed marble floors. I hesitated briefly at the door, than turned heavily down the street and towards the ahwa that I had adopted as my second home. On the way, I sent my last letter off at the post office. My hand shook slightly as I handed the money over to the veiled girl at the counter, and she looked at me oddly. I could hardly blame her – hair slightly disheveled, three days of stubble and a faint aura of disreputability. But it was done. I thought of Caesar at the Rubicon, and that gave me a brief moment of amusement before I realized the pretension of the thought.


The floors were dirty but the mirrors were clean when I got there. Some days, it was the other way around. Nothing was ever really clean, as Cairo dirt and car exhaust coated everything in a layer of blackness. Only the glasses shined, and that was among the reasons I came. Abdel, the owner, croaked out a hoarse “Salaam aleikum” - Peace be upon you - through his cigarette-and-sugar-rotted teeth. As alarming a figure as he cut, he was a kindly and welcoming man who didn't object to my long hours sipping tea and coffee while scribbling away. With his head of crazed white hair, paltry collection of teeth and hands like sandpapered bronze, he was half an Orientalist-cliche and half everyone's peculiar old uncle.

Wa aleikum salaam,” I replied. And upon you, peace. Did he have peace, I wondered? I was convinced he was gay, as many Egyptians are but refuse to admit. His ancient three-piece suits, the unusual cleanliness of his store and the hanging portraits of the former royal family's handsome young princes all pointed towards that. So did his clientele – dandily dressed elderly men, to a man, sporting such eccentricities as rosewood canes and umbrellas.


I imagine him spending his whole life offering nothing more than little hints and gestures – telegraphs in code, sent out to the cruel unfriendly world. Did he ever hear a response? Did he want to? There are ways to outflank society's walls, but they are long and tortuous paths. Or is it just a whole castle of cards that I build in my mind?


I sipped my coffee, letting the aroma of cardamom fill my nose. After a month in Cairo, I couldn't smell much, but this one scent was too powerful to loose. As I reached the bottom of the glass, Abdel sat down next to me with a shisha, his own personal one rather than the many he kept for customers. It had been painted with a picture of King Farouk. He offered me the pipe and I took a few drags. The tobacco was heavy and perfumed, and it left my head spinning.


We chatted quietly for a while. My Arabic was rough and his English fractured and interjected with French. But an hour passed, and eventually I wandered back. As midnight approached, the streets grew lonely and the river mist settled over the island of Zamalek. The streetlamps glowed with faint halos, and even the guards' cigarettes seemed to float in the darkness.

I shuffled into the lobby and was halfway into the elevator when I realized the bawab was calling me. I turned reluctantly. He was standing in front of his desk, waving his arms. In my daze, I had walked right past him. He proffered a battered package to me. “Sunduq, yaa Basha.” He always says that – basha, officer. To each and every foreigner, without fail. I wish I could talk him out of it but I can't.


A box, stamped from America. Probably a package of cookies or books or some other little token from my family. I slouch in the elevator, picking idly at the worn brown wrapping paper. My door squeaks as I open it and I grit my teeth against the sound. Inside, I pour myself a measure from the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the counter. It isn't particularly good, but it fills up that little space inside.


I open the box with a knife from the Khan al-Khalili bazaar, a cheap tourist trinket. There is another smaller bundle inside, tied up with rough twine. A letter is laid out on top, in a familiar, loopy hand done with red pen.


I'm so sorry, love! The postage went up and all of my letters got returned at once! But here they are...


Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Dance of the Veils

The past three and a half months in the heart of the Islamic world have blasted my preconceptions on the hijab straight out of the water(or sand). When I arrived, my view was simple: clearly it represented a form of patriarchal, Arab-Islamic oppression that ought to be fought at every turn. You might know me as a cynic about many of the manifestations of modern feminism, but this was my own personal line in the sand firmly on the side of feminism. These weeks with literally hundreds of women who wear the hijab in all its forms have complicated my opinion, in multiple directions.

First, a little vocabulary exercise. Hijab is a complex word and concept. Basically, it is the Arabic word for "veil" or "cover" and more broadly represents the concept of modesty. Colloquially, it is usually used to refer to the head or head-and-neck most often associated with Islamic women. Abaya is the long, shapeless black overcoat worn by conservative Muslim women and a legal obligation in Saudi Arabia. Burqa is a single-piece head-to-toe cloth peculiar to Afghanistan and that region, with a thin mesh for vision and breathing. A chador is a Persian garment similar to an abaya. Niqab is any of a number of forms of face-covering veils, usually with a vision slit.

There are all sorts of other terms, variants, and subtleties to these terms peculiar to Arabic, its various dialects, and all the regions of Islam, but I am neither qualified nor interested in discussing this. Basically, before I came I didn't know and didn't care about the difference - the Islamic requirement of "modesty," however it might be interpreted, was sexist and wrong.

Now, having met a large number of hijabis, whose interpretation ranges from a simple head-wrap to the full neck-covering shawl, I've pulled the proverbial 180. Their reasons range across a broad spectrum: modesty, piety, a desire to fit in, social pressures, family orders, and simple tradition. The most insidious examples are of those girls who said, as one of my friends did - "If you don't, they call you a slut and spread stories" - or something to that effect. This is a social problem in the Arab world, as prevalent among women as men, and it needs to be addressed. Many girls just want to be protected in some measure from the leering eyes and comments of the men on the street, another social issue which will take time and energy to remove - if it indeed it ever can be. From personal experience with months in a mostly-veiled nation, the sight of a woman's hair is enough to turn my head every single time. Needless to say, I developed a severe neck sprain in Lebanon!

Nevertheless, the religion of Islam - or an interpretation thereof - saying that women's hair needs to be covered is not particularly harmful in and of itself. I used to object on the grounds that men had no similar restriction, but that's not strictly true(although the men's rules are far less stringent). But anyways - men don't have to cover their chests on the beach in the West, and we're not allowed to wear skirts and dresses in an social setting(Eddie Izzard notwithstanding). Norms will always be different for the sexes, and although I don't think the Islamic ones are a particularly good idea, I respect the difference of opinion. I love wine and might die without pork, but its fine if you want to declare it haram - just let me keep it!

A note, however - going to Turkey and Lebanon was incredibly refreshing for me, to see all of the women walking around looking, happy, healthy and mostly uncovered. Even the covered ones appeared more at ease, smiling, talking, and generally seeming better-adjusted than all but the must affluent hijabis in Egypt. Whether this a function of religion, society, or something else - I have no idea. Of course there was no self-interest at all in this observation...:)

Yet with regards to the niqab and the burqa, I've become if anything more radically opposed. You don't know the meaning of hypocrisy until you've seen an Arab man in full Western suit being trailed by 1 (or more) woman wearing a head-to-toe black garment with only a thin mesh to see and breath. It drives me berserk and I want to scream from my lungs every time I see the poor women struggling to walk, wear glasses, or even eat. It is a horrible, disgusting practice and no amount of cultural relativism will change that. Maybe its their choice, I don't know, but I think it does so much more harm than good that it becomes irrelevant.

Humanity is manifested in the face. Hair and skin and revealing clothes are a vanity. The face is where our inner selves manifest, how we greet the world. To hide that, to be told that God and Men demand that you hide that, is dehumanizing in the extreme. Can you imagine living your whole life without ever feeling the sun, the wind on your face? Worse yet, to feel it until your first period, and then be denied it ever again?? It is beyond cruel, and I cannot condone it in any circumstance whatsoever. The niqab and its various forms do irreparable damage to society, to freedom, and to individual women.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Ghosts in the Cedars


Perhaps it was inevitable that Lebanon would be more affecting in many ways than Istanbul. The Turkish city is much more European in its nature. It is more happily - even smugly - contemplative of its glorious Ottoman past and its modernizing present, and both the relics and the cutting-edge seem smoothly integrated into the city's life. In Lebanon the feelings of both historical and modern tension are much closer to the surface. You can see them in the almost frenetic pace of Beirut's nightlife, the beautiful girl in the drop-top Porsche racing by Hizbollah protests, the bored shopgirls smoking outside their stores in the abandoned downtown, and even the grandeur of Baalbeck's ruins. It whispers through the mountains and curls like fog around the bombed-out bridges of the Israel war.

Baalbeck was particularly affecting to me. All the antiquities I have seen in the East are either settled in cities or turned into massive tourist attractions. The Pyramids, Luxor, the mosques of Istanbul - all of them are in one way or another streamlined and modernized for tourist audiences. Baalbeck is different. It is the best-preserved Roman temple in the world, yet its remote location means that few tourists venture there these days. For 2000 years, it has been the greatest structure as far as the eye can see down the Bekaa valley, and it may well stay so for the next 2000. Surrounded by acres of farmland and snow-covered peaks, it must have seemed one of the wonders of the world, and yet it was no more than a backwater of an Empire that stretched from Arabia to Scotland.

The temples' stones and pillars were used by Justinian to build the Haga Sofia, by the Arabs to fortify the temple and the Crusaders to bolster the walls, by the Ottomans to build a castle and now they lie shattered in green moss. The broken colossus of Ramses inspired Shelley's Ozymandias but I find the cyclical destruction and rebuilding of this vast complex much more affecting.
I can't help but reflect, as I stare at the six pillars which are all that remain of Jupiter's temple, on the futility of human ambition. And yet I return to Beirut where people are stubbornly, urgently erecting new towers of steel and glass and concrete to replace the buildings shattered in fifteen years of war. Lebanon and the Levant are littered with the wreckage of human civilization and the scars of man's cruelty, yet they struggle on. The Lebanese are sick to death of war and it is hard to blame them. There are so many bullet-scarred buildings on the former Green Line that 20 years later, they still haven't finished replacing them. But you can still go to one of the hundred best restaurants in the world, visit the regions chicest clubs and bars, and talk for hours with strangers on the bus. They want to live and they want to be great, in spite of their troubles, and even Hassan Nasrallah says that 3 more years of stalemate are preferable to anymore civil war.

The irony is that I thought Lebanon would be the most dangerous leg of my trip, yet it was in Istanbul that I found myself in danger, while I know people who were on the Greek ferry that sunk this week, and a Turkish plane was hi-jacked today. The world is un-predictable and you never know what will come each day it turns. Whether the answer is silent prayer or joyful partying, one way or another we all have to find an answer.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Turkish Delight

Istanbul is hard to sum up in words. It acts one way and then, without warning, surprises you with hidden delights. The tiny alleyways with children playing soccer, the cluttered houses and gleaming boutiques, the bars, cafes and restaurants tucked into side streets and lining broad avenues - you could wander this city for a year and see a new mosque and eat in a new place each day.

Yesterday, we saw both the Blue Mosque and the Haga Sofia, and the contrast could not be more apparent - as was intended. It was a grey, rainy day, and the Sofia was a cold, almost brutal marble structure with a soaring dome - unfortunately somewhat obscured by scaffolding. There are massive pillars and the remnants of old, gilt Byzantine mosaics. Even the remains of the Islamicization that took place after the conquest are massive wooden wheels with the names of Allah, the Prophet, and the first four Caliphs.

By contrast, the Blue Mosque is an almost weightless structure of thin, gold-topped minarets with an airy, lofty interior. Carpeting and careful lighting make it seem far more delicate and open, and from the exterior it appears to be made of porcelain or glass next to the heavy brick and stone of its Christian counterpart.

Today, on the other hand, was sunny and gorgeous. We wandered the streets of Sultanahmet, visiting a number of other major and minor mosques. Ottoman architecture is very regular and elegant on the outside, so we began to get a sense of deja vu as we approached each, but the interiors differed wildly. The lovely weather meant we had some great views of Istanbul.

The greatest sight I have seen was last night as I walked back to the hotel by the Blue Mosque. Fireworks went off over the Golden Horn, glittering in the rainy night sky. They startled the flocks of seagulls that nest around the Mosque, which took off simultaneously, and were lit up by the Mosque's floodlights so that it looked like hundreds of golden arrows soaring over the spires.