Contextless Quotes

I recently came across my old travel journal from my nine-month backpacking trip through Japan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, India, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. Reading through it left me very, very amused. From it, here are some quotes for your enjoyment, taken completely out of their original context:

‘I’ve got the shits and I’m tired of traveling: Why I’m not cut out for this’

‘That was a terrible, terrible idea.’

‘My hotel (read: rooftop littered with rubbish costing a whopping $10 to lay a mattress on) is a dump but it’s all I could find.’

‘She was driving me crazy. Hopefully that thought will be a comfort once the solitude starts getting to me.’

‘The highlight of the night was probably me trying to say in Arabic, “My dear, you are so beautiful!” Instead, I managed to say, “My dear, you are so beautiful and big!” Ktiir vs. Kbiir. God…’

‘Loon was our raft captain who seemed either perplexed or offended when I tried to explain that he shares his name with our state bird.’

‘I’ll write more later about the moral conundrum going through my head at that moment.’

‘I met an 82 year old woman today who has been a Peace Corps volunteer three times – all after retirement. At one point she was the oldest current volunteer on the planet.’

“I just had a psychosomatic stress reaction to the Lao music coming from the bungalow next to mine.’

“Phnom Penh’s been great – almost too much fun, seeing as how a large part of our time was spent at a genocide museum.’

‘The hammock: I believe I’ve found my soulmate.’

‘I asked the weird Chinese girl in our hostel if she still had the tarantulas in the plastic bag up in her room. “Uh, I think so!” was her response.’

‘Suddenly serious, she told me, “Walking this path made me believe in God for the first time. It’s too beautiful, too incredible.”‘

‘I woke up at 4:30am to the sound of an explosion muffled by earplugs and a quick shake of the building.’

‘We danced to horrible techno music and took a “hard man” shot (snort salt, take tequila shot, squeeze lime into your eye).’

‘There’s something profoundly tragic about a people fighting justly to get back what was stolen from them even as there is little to no hope of success…It saddened me immensely, that rally. I walked away with a heavy heart and a bruised faith.’

‘”Are those nunchucks you got there?” I said absentmindedly toward, but not to, a rather pudgy but bulldoggish man on a sidewalk near Beirut’s waterfront. His posture snapped up immediately, as if he had been strolling along, just daring some ignorant fool to comment on his ‘chuks. “Yes,” he said. “Because I am master.”‘

‘I’m so lucky to be doing what I’m doing. It’s amazing, really.’

Goodbye, Damascus

I left Syria a few days ago after a year and two months of life there. The week before I left was difficult, but in the midst of the all too dramatic and drawn-out goodbyes I had a chance to briefly reflect on my time there. Like any time I start to write on an experience, I began with a list:

Things I’ll miss about Syria:

1. My many friends here. As I think about it, I’m realizing that my favorite thing about living here has been the opportunity to meet so many people from around the world (Damascenes, Iraqis, Palestinians, Americans, Europeans, the list can go on) who live extraordinary lives.
2. The old city. Its winding cobblestone paths swarming with meshwaar-ing youths, annoying shabab (young guys who stand around staring at girls), beautiful old houses, the Omayyad Mosque and its layers of history, the spice and coffee souqs, the cheese and muhammarah fatayer from the place in Bab Touma, Ninar Art Café, the park by After Seven, my old landlord’s shop (where I probably tripled my chance of getting diabetes with how many cups of sugar with a splash of tea that I drank), and the anonymous alleyways I didn’t spend enough time getting lost in.
3. My walk to work down cobblestoned Shatta Street, with overhanging green trees and birds singing above me.
4. Mistakes in English translations on signs or menus, like ‘tequila shat’ in good old Ninar, ‘chicken with herpes’ from a restaurant on Qassioun Mountain (meant to be ‘with herbs,’ of course), and the sign above a clinic that reads ‘Dr. Shit, proctologist’. I’ve never actually seen this unfortunate oversight myself but I have seen pictures and heard the story from too many not to believe it. The doctor’s name should have been transliterated to something like sheet or shayt. He left it up for fifteen years before realizing his mistake.
5. Moments in class where my students get whatever it is I’m trying to teach and I feel like I might actually be doing something worthwhile.
6. My tutor and our twice-weekly ‘lessons’ in which we sit for an hour talking about our lives in Arabic. The conversations almost always end up focusing on the latest drama among our friends and any new news regarding her special ‘friend’ or whichever girl I happen to be interested in at the time.
7. All my ISP students and our time together. I’ve never loved teaching before like I loved teaching them.
8. Some of my ALC students.
9. Cheap life. It’s going to be painful to be in Europe from September to October.
10. The chance to be a part of a culture completely different from my own and see the human side of a place that very few in my own country understand or even care to understand.
11. Arab hospitality, although it gets overbearing at times
12. The chance to travel every three months. While I was living and working in Syria, I was able to see Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, France, and the UK, not to mention parts of Syria that even most Syrians don’t get to see.
13. Syrian food.

Things I won’t miss about Syria:

1. The oppressive, corrupt, inept government and the sometimes feigned, sometimes genuine admiration it inspires among Syrians.
2. Having to talk in code or censor myself when conversations about the government, Palestine, or anything else politically sensitive came up.
3. Some of my ALC students.
4. The constant staring and whispering by people in the street, ‘Ajnabi! Ajnabi!’.
5. The traffic.
6. Everybody smoking everywhere.
7. Nobody having change, ever. Even for a note as small as 500 Syrian pounds, the equivalent of about $10.
8. The lack of diversity in just about everything – especially food. Eat Street, Minneapolis, I’m coming for you.
9. The lack of things to do on a weekend other than get a drink (or two) with friends. After Seven, Ninar, and Qishleh Park, I love you all but I think I’ve had enough for a while.

At the time of posting, I’m currently in Nablus, the West Bank, Palestine, working with my friend’s NGO called Music Harvest. We’re trying to set up music lessons at some of the different youth centers around nablus. I had my first set of drum lessons today. My three students (all Palestinian children) were utterly bewildered at the fact that playing a simple beat could be so difficult.

I’m happy to be doing something different, and to be doing it in such a beautiful place. Tomorrow, for the second time, some friends and I are going to play Irish music at Jaffa gate in Jerusalem. We made nearly $130 last time (mostly before we put on t-shirts that read ‘free palestine’ and ‘end the occupation’).

Lastly, here are a few photos of my week spent saying goodbye:

My favorite students, soon to be studying in the US.

Good friends.

My tutor, who will be sorely missed, and I.

The two lovebirds, Rima and Yaser, and I (see: A Good Weekend).

More good friends.

A Good Weekend

It’s been far too long since I wrote something substantial here, especially considering the many great experiences I’ve had over the last two or three months. I won’t write about all of them, but I’ll give you a quick summary:

From Paris, I got back to Syria after a brief stop in Lebanon, which, due to bad planning (sometimes flying by the seat of my pants backfires), proved disappointing. My old Irish roommate, Kevin, came back to Syria the day after I got back and moved in with me again (a lucky thing for me; he’s an excellent cook). The next big trip was April 17^th, Syrian Independence Day, which happens also to be the only day of the year that the small piece of the Golan Heights not occupied by Israel is opened to the Syrian public for a very bizarre festival. I took a bus filled with a mix of foreigners, Syrians, and Palestinians down to Quneitra and spent the day barbecuing and observing the commemoration of Syria’s loss to Israel (or what some say is a victory in getting a small piece of the Golan back in ’67).  The weeks afterward were pretty quiet; I continued working, studying, and volunteering like usual until a somewhat hastily planned trip to northeast Syria. That weekend deserves a bit more detail, which is coming below. I took a three-day trip down to Amman last week to meet up with my friends Josias and Aaron, both friends from college. Being with friends from home was nicer than I even expected it would be. Josias and I especially have a very similar, unique sense of humor and, as there are a lot of things to chuckle about in this region, we laughed a lot. It was way too short, however, mostly because I had to get back to Damascus to start practicing for my band’s gig. My band, named Rabbit Fire, developed from a group of friends that just wanted to jam into a semi-serious combo over the last five months. The gig went better than I could have imagined. Over 70 people showed up to the basement bar we played in and, though the sound system was horrible and the owner of the bar seriously ripped us off, I had more fun playing with my friends that night than in a long, long time.

Stylish young guys in Quneitra on Syrian Independence Day

Dancing men in Quneitra

Shabab celebrating Syrian Independence Day

Old college buddies in Amman

Josias on Rainbow Street in Amman

Helen, Giac, Becca, and the crowd

Phil on the bass

The band between songs

Rabbit Fire at Massimo Pub, Damascus

After the show

—

It started with a three-day weekend at the end of April. I decided I wanted to travel somewhere, especially while the temperate spring weather still hadn’t been overtaken by the slow-killing death heat of summer. Opportunity knocked when Rima (I’ve changed her name here), one of my favorite and most diligent students, invited me to her village near Tartous to help volunteer with her environmental conservation society. I’d been interested in volunteering for ages; environmentalism isn’t really something popular in Syria so I wanted to see what her organization looked like and support it if I could. I gathered a few friends and got on a bus to Tartous with Rima and, to my surprise, her boyfriend.

Rima met Yaser in my class. One could say I played cupid the first day of class when I happened to put them in the same getting-to-know-you group. They fell in love and quickly became a fixture in the right-hand corner of my level 1B classroom.  Most outside of Syria can imagine that male-female relationships are quite different here, but it’s probably not nearly as black and white as some may think. Syria isn’t Iran; in fact, it’s one of the freest Arab countries in terms of social mores. Nonetheless, rigid social roles and family structures make dating pretty difficult for young Syrians. Rima and Yaser have it much easier than most, as they live away from their families most of the time, but in order for the relationship to have a future (read: marriage – the only real option here), Yaser’s got to win over Rima’s family.

'Rima' and 'Yaser' looking a little bit annoyed at me

Kevin playing beach badminton

—

We arrived at a primary school in a beautiful mountain village named Mashta Al-Helu about forty-five minutes outside of Tartous at 10am. There we were surprised to find a group of about 30 people already hard at work clearing underbrush out from a forest next to the school’s basketball court. The day was full of surprises; the first being the fact that we actually cut down trees instead of planting them as we had expected. We went to work right away, pulling huge tangled masses of underbrush up from the steep slope and onto a big pile that would be burned later. We met some really interesting people, mostly from the surrounding villages, who were thrilled to have some foreigners volunteering with them. One of them, a man we all called Dr. Maher, told us passionately about the group’s mission. Tartous’ ‘Natural Protection Society’ (it sounds snappier in Arabic) has succeeded in saving huge amounts of land by planting protected indigenous trees. By Syrian law, the presence of certain species of wild, indigenous trees bars developers from building. The Society also works with schools like the one we worked at to clean up grounds and help make more walkable parks. Kevin, Shilpa, and I switched intermittently between helping drag underbrush up to the bonfire and picking up bag after bag of cookie, chips, and cracker wrappers from the grounds. The second big surprise of the day was seeing the dozen or so trash bags we picked up thrown onto the bonfire. Like I said, environmentalism is still a growing concept here in Syria. Another more poignant moment that morning was when a young student from the school came up to me with one of the other volunteers and said she wanted to thank me for coming to help her school. The volunteer told me later that at first the student refused to believe that two Americans would come to help pick up trash at her school.

—

Arab families are, in my experience, some of the most hospitable, welcoming groups of people in the world, Rima’s family being no different. We were welcomed at her house the morning of our day volunteering with coffee and a healthful breakfast of cucumbers and fruit. Rima’s sisters flitted around Kevin, Yaser, and I, asking lots of questions and casting lots of furtive glances.  The atmosphere changed quickly, however, once Rima’s father showed up that evening, after we got back to the house following our day working with Rima’s conservation society. He hadn’t been told that Yaser was a suitor, but he definitely had figured it out. He walked in, smiled at Kevin, Shilpa, and I, and then turned to Yaser with a steely look and a stiff handshake. Yaser had a lot to be worried about. Even forgetting about the normal criteria for husband-to-be, he has the added stress of not only being in a different sect of Islam than that of Rima’s family but also being Kurdish, a people group that Rima’s father apparently isn’t too fond of in general. Yaser kept telling Rima’s family that he’s from Damascus when in fact he’s really from Qamishle; but for him to have been honest about that fact would not have gone over well. The lovebirds have a pretty sly plan in motion: slowly introduce Yaser to her family, getting them to like him as much as possible, and even more slowly let it slip that he’s actually Kurdish and Sunni. All this is a surprisingly romantic endeavor considering the restrictions in place over their relationship.

We ate dinner at Rima’s, nervously watching Yaser and silently cheering him on. At a few different points we gave him covert thumbs up, trying to make him feel more confident. In one conversation with Rima’s dad, he strayed into politics and the three of us behind them starting making the cut it out motion with our hands. Yaser quickly changed the subject. The whole experience was thoroughly entertaining and, even more so, fascinating. At the end of the day, Yaser was exhausted. The moment our bus left Rima’s village, he let out the relieved sigh of someone who had just ran through a gauntlet. He had done well, though. Rima told me in class a few days later that Yaser made a very good impression. But he’s still got an almost impossibly long way to go; although he’s madly in love with her, he doesn’t expect that the relationship will work. Yaser simply doesn’t think Rima’s dad will ever be persuaded to allow their relationship. But without her father’s approval, the only other option is eloping together and probably never seeing her family again, something she could never live with.

—

We left Yaser and Rima in Tartous on Friday night, from where we traveled to Samra beach, the northwestern tip of Syria. We met up with some friends there who had rented a cabin only ten minutes’ walk from the beachfront. With eight people in a cabin meant for five, we were hanging out until dawn, when we grabbed a bit a sleep and then headed down to the beach. We whiled away the day there, playing a game similar to badminton but without the net and without any real points system. After grabbing a grilled fish dinner in a restaurant overlooking the beach and mountains, we set off on the long way home.

Breakfast at 10am after going to bed at 6am

On the way to the beach

The beach.

There are a few more photos to come here…

Ma’alula and the Dead Cities

Michael, Patrick, and I in Ma'alula

Ma'alula Panorama

'Throwing Shapes' in Ma'alula

The Many Crosses of Ma'alula

Ghhharrrrr!

Our Hospitable Captors

Shilpa Shamefully Jumping on Thousand-Year-Old Ruins

Shilpa took this shot right after my new friend Mohammad pulled out his handgun unexpectedly and asked me how much I thought it was worth.

The eeriest of the dead cities.

One of Ma'alula's two massive ridges that jutt out of the desert like they were

The preceding photos are from two trips I took in the last few weeks; one to Ma’alula, a Christian village 45 minutes from Damascus, and the other to Allepo and the Dead Cities. I enjoyed the company of my friends Shilpa, Michael, and Patrick on both outings.

Ma’alula is famous for being one of only two places left in the world where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken as a mother tongue. It’s a beautiful place, especially in the winter when the little green there is stands out against the stark desert. The Dead Cities are ancient villages about an hour north of Aleppo that for one reason or another were abandoned in relatively good states and due to Syria’s dry climate have remained in remarkably good condition. They’re eery but super fun to walk in, on, and around, as you can see above. It was after our brief visit to Serjilla, one of the dead cities, that we were half-captured by a neighboring Bedouin family. After being ‘offered’ tea (if the meaning of ‘offer’ is amended to take out the part where the party being offered something has a choice whether or not to accept) we were separated immediately, Shilpa to the ladies’ tent and me to the (smoky) men’s tent. While she was treated to tea and a dress-up session, I was enjoying tea and a gun sling (complete with a real handgun tucked inside) photo shoot, not to mention a cascade of questions about my life and (most importantly, to them) what I was doing hanging out alone with a girl I’m not related or married to. Despite the semi-interrogation, however, we were treated with over-the-top kindness and humor. It was far more fun than Serjilla itself and a welcome breath of fresh air; getting treated with such genuine human interest was nice after being used to the somewhat colder interactions in the capital.

I’m off to Paris tomorrow morning to meet my folks, see some sites, and visit some old travel friends. Should be a good time. Photos will come soon!

Land of Touts and Old Stuff

Check out the best photos from my time in Egypt here. Let me warn you that this post is long.

Egypt: Cairo, Dahab, Aswan, Luxor, Cairo

You know you’ve had a good time traveling when you feel as though you could write a novel about two weeks’ time.  Things were a bit slow the first couple of days in Cairo. After meeting up with my friend Krista, who flew all the way from Minneapolis and remarkably didn’t show any signs of jet lag, we explored some of Islamic and Coptic Cairo and managed to miss the closing of the Giza pyramids by about ten minutes. Seeing Al-Azhar University and the adjacent mosque was fascinating for me considering it’s one of the oldest continually functioning universities in the world, though after living next to the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus for three months the architecture was a relative let down.  But after being turned away at the entrance to the Giza pyramids, we were mobbed by touts trying to sell camel rides around the pyramids. They jumped on the back of our taxi and tried to stick their heads through the windows while screaming, “Camel ride cheap price!” and “We take you around the pyramids! I give you good price!” Our portly driver was forced to stop the car, get out, and threaten them with his pork chop hands before they left us alone. Best quote of this leg: “What is this, a kneecap sandwich?” Krista nearly shouted this while we ate a Shish Taouk (like barbecued chicken) sandwich just before realizing that pieces of the chicken were only half cooked. We raced back to our bags to take some pre-emptive antibiotics, which apparently did the trick as neither of us became violently sick.

Next, we took a relatively nice night bus (but with a driver who seemed to think his AC had only one setting: freezer truck) to Dahab, which is on the Sinai Peninsula just north of Sharm El Sheikh. There, time slipped away unnoticed while I went snorkeling, drank fresh guava juice at seaside restaurants, and lay on the beach like an uncommonly pale sea lion. It was heavenly for two days but like all things it had to come to an end; after two days we left for Aswan. Dahab’s crazy moment: New Year’s Eve at ‘Friends’ restaurant where we were promised a ‘fire show’ (be very wary when an Egyptian invites you to such an event) when the clock struck 12:00. The show consisted of two fools with cans of cooking oil and jet lighters, throngs of spectators not more than three feet away, including half a dozen children under the age of six, and fireworks. Big fireworks. I thought Kansas on the Fourth of July was bad but those folks in Dahab definitely win the ‘Who can put more people in unnecessary danger for no reason whatsoever?’ contest.

After another and much worse night bus/refrigerator truck ride, we arrived in Aswan, southern Egypt to enjoy the sunrise over the Nile and commiserate with new friends and a few cups of coffee and tea over our suffering the previous night. I felt vindicated in all my struggles with Arabic when the tea man tried to charge us double what was written on the Arabic menu. One of our new companions, a hilarious German guy named Daniel, became a great friend for the rest of our trip, not least because he’s a planning machine (while often I would rather wander aimlessly than actually read anything other than the maps in my guidebook). It was in Aswan that I first felt like I was really in Africa. The market, though touristy in most parts, included many goods that apparently had traveled up the Nile from central Africa and the Nubian people that inhabit Aswan, though they speak Arabic, are culturally distinct from Arabs from North Egypt. We had a great day exploring Aswan and planning the next few days’ Felucca (Nile sailboat) journey up toward Luxor, including a walk across the desert from tombs of Pharaonic nobles to an ancient Coptic monastery.

Our Felucca journey was great fun and relaxing, though a bit boring at times. We traveled up the Nile for two nights and three days with Captain Ruby and his first mate Ziggy, who were, in the most positive sense, stoners. Daniel, Krista, and I were the first ones to arrive at the boat, where we waited for two hours for the rest of the passengers to show up. Before they came and while I was gone picking up some snacks Daniel and Krista witnessed Ruby smoke the first of many massive joints. I’m no expert on spliffs but these were big. Really big. This may or may not have been the reason for when, after the seven other passengers finally showed up and the supplies were loaded, we ran into a rock leaving the riverbank. We spent a good twenty minutes getting freed from it and then ran into another one.

After that, the journey continued without a hitch. Well, except for later that night when Captain Ruby poked his head out of the tiny cabin in the front of the boat and croaked in his tubercular smoker’s voice, “You have chewing gum? Chiclets? Gum?” We had just heard them bailing water out of the bottom of the boat. Luckily, all was fixed (somehow) and we made it to the docking point the next night, which we spent in part listening to Ziggy singing his own creative version of the popular children’s song: “She’ll be drinking Johnny Walker when she comes/She’ll be smoking marijuana when she comes/She’ll be drinking Stella beer when she comes.” We began to think that ‘she’ wouldn’t be making it after all and was instead more likely passed out on the side of the road.

We arrived in Luxor, our travel friends group now up to seven (we’d added a Lebanese-Australian, an Argentinian, a Greek, and a South African who lives in Brazil), and spent a day recovering from the sloth-like states we achieved on the Felucca. We spent that evening on the rooftop of a hostel listening to Jimmy, the South African-Brazilian guy, play blues music wonderfully….that is, until a Slovenian Rastafarian named Yuri decided he would join Jimmy by playing guitar solos out of tune and out of time. When Jimmy prodded him to use his auto-tuner, Yuri said indignantly, “I always tunes by ear.” Jimmy took a well-deserved break for a minute, which Yuri took as his chance to get his Rasta on. “Jah,” and “Mon,” popped out between every line and after a collective cringe, we started to enjoy the absurdity of it.

The next day we (sans Yuri…he wasn’t invited) went for a bike ride to the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings, where King Tutankhamon’s tomb was found. It was an exhilarating ride and a ton of fun despite the heat and the relative disappointment of the Valley of the Kings, which was completely overrun with scantily clad Russian tourists I can only describe as redneck-ish. We stopped for dinner after a solid five hours of riding and exploring next to the impressive Colossi of Memnon. The night ended with more fantastic blues music, this time without any Rastarruptions.

Our friends all left town that night or early the next morning, so we spent the next day exploring Karnak Temple on our own and walking around the market behind the tourist market, which as always was much more interesting. As we walked through the narrow alleys, I accidentally stepped on a bladder. What kind of bladder I don’t know, but in the surprise of stepping on it I then stepped in a bright red puddle of blood. Apparently a sheep or goat had been slaughtered not long before and I was the fool oblivious enough to miss the acrid stench of a fresh kill and the flow of people parting to avoid the mess.

After a sleeping train back to Cairo on which we barely slept more than an hour or two, I had what I reluctantly admit was one of my worst lapses in travel judgment. We arrived at Giza station in southeast Cairo, not too far from the most famous site in Egypt, and I had the brilliant idea to take a cab ride around the pyramids at sunrise, not to go inside the complex but just to take some photos and enjoy the view. Exhausted, we walked out of the station to the usual gang of taxi drivers waiting to pounce on their innocent and unsuspecting victims. I started to talk with them in Arabic and English, explaining what we wanted and bargained them down to a price that in hindsight was way too high (mistake #1: when you accept a price that’s much too high, those ripping you off will assume you’re ripe for yet more ripping off).

The Syrian slang for ‘rip off’ is kharruf, which is the same word used for the slaughtering of livestock. It’s even more apt a term in Egypt where, this time anyway, we were led off to slaughter like wide-eyed sheep.

We soon made our second mistake. A taxi driver accepted our price a little too excitedly (a taxi driver in the Arab world should never look happy with the price you give him, if he does it means you’re paying too much) and walked us out to his car. I say car because it wasn’t a taxi. He even had to clean a few things off the seats before we got in. If I were in my right mind, meaning not delusional from lack of sleep and physical exhaustion, I would have refused it immediately. It should have been obvious that he was just some dude with a car that wanted to make a bit of extra cash. But alas, we got in as trusting as sheep about to be strung up on a butcher’s hook. Soon after we left the station, Krista said something that I would realize later was incredibly insightful: “It’s really foggy.” What’s that? Mistake three? Four?

It was foggy. Really, really foggy. So much so, in fact, that we could barely see fifty feet in front of us on the road. I, all doe-eyed, asked the driver how we were going to see the pyramids. He said in Arabic, “I know a special place behind the pyramids where you can get a really good photo.” That should have been enough for me but no, instead I said “Really? That’s great!” Whenever a taxi driver or a man on the street or any stranger at all in the Arab world tells you they know of a ‘special place’ with such and such interesting thing it means they have a friend who will sell you something worthless for an exorbitant price.

We soon arrived at a camel pen. The fog was still thick so we had no idea if the pyramids were close or not. A short, older man wearing a red and white scarf greeted us enthusiastically and began explaining the good deal he had for us. It was here that I reached the apex of my foolishness. After being assured that we would be able to see the pyramids and take some good photos despite the fog, we accepted a half an hour camel ride for $13 each (way too much!). It was a combination of hope beyond hope that despite the obvious indications otherwise we’d be able to see the pyramids as the sun rose and the thought ‘well, we’ve come this far’ that led us to accept such an absurd and false offer.

On the camel, our folly quickly became apparent. A sleepy and grumpy young kid, not more than fourteen and probably the son of our scruffy old camel man, led the beast without once looking at us. I tried to get to know him. “How are you?” was met with a simple and pointed grunt. “What’s your name?” with, “mumble…”. And, “Are you sleepy? You want to go back to sleep, don’t you?” with, “I was sleeping.” As we continued to walk through what looked like a trash-strewn field of dirt, I asked the boy which direction the pyramids were in. He said, as if there was nothing remarkable about it, “I don’t know.” I accepted at that moment that I had just gotten kharruf­-ed and geared myself up for the battle that was surely to come; there was no way in hell I was going to pay for that camel ride through the fog.

We returned to the pen cold, pissed off, and trying to stay calm. I (rightly) felt stupid, humiliated, angry, and still, exhausted. I was planning to be civil and calmly tell the camel man and my taxi driver that we weren’t going to pay for anything because they blatantly lied to us. But that was before the man, with a shit-eating grin on his face, came out and asked, “Are you happy? Did you like it? I think you’re happy!” It was then that I lost it. I yelled at the man, calling him a liar. He claimed that he never said we’d be able to see the pyramids. The taxi driver said, incredibly, it was too foggy, why did we think we’d be able to see the pyramids? I told him we thought so because that’s what he said to us. I called both of them liars. We argued for a few more minutes before Krista and I took our things from the taxi and walked away, catching a ride with an English guy in another taxi back to the metro station. I don’t like to admit it but this was one of my worst travel blunders, not least because it was so easily avoidable if not for my stupidity. But as always, I can’t really lose when traveling. Bad travel days become good stories to laugh about and learn from and good days are, well, good days.

We went to our friend Ceci’s apartment in downtown Cairo, where we were staying for the night, for breakfast and to recover a bit before heading out again to see some of the lesser known pyramids. Incredibly, we found a good, honest taxi driver named Khaled to take us. The pyramids at Saqqara and Dahshur were very impressive and not very crowded, which is just what I wanted. Unsurprisingly, we’d given up on Giza by that point.

***

I got home in Damascus about 10pm the next day, exhausted and happy. Egypt, while frustrating at times, was just the adventure I needed. I’ve been back at work for about a week now. I just started volunteering with an organization that gives scholarships and English training to Iraqi refugee students and right now I’m in the process trying to figure out some kind schedule to be able to study Arabic, teach, volunteer, and have a social life all at the same time (the latter is the only one I have figured out pretty solidly so far).