goodbye egypt, hello ondrej

returning to cairo was wonderful. it was like coming full circle - completing the journey and finding out finally how all the parts of the story fit together. i turned up at my old hotel and they had big smiles on their faces and gave me my old room back. i wandered through the streets, stopping at stalls, bantering and picking out far too many things to eat. i could see how i'd adapted to life in this country and what i'd learnt.

and now the sun has set on my final day in egypt! i've got a plane to catch at 3am, so i'm just burning off my last hours. above is a picture of today's sun-set over the nile. i apologise for the atrocious quality, but it has meaning.

my last few days in alexandria were relatively uneventful - i ate, ate some more and then ate again. it was horrendous. i could barely get out the door of my hotel room when my time was up. one absolutely wonderful thing happened, however:

i missed my train to cairo (probably on account of all the icecream i was gorging myself on...) and i had to wait a couple of hours in the park for the next one. when i was there, two 15 year old girls came up to me and just started chatting, hoping to improve their english. they were laughing, punching each other when they got embarrassed, and one sat right next to me so that our legs and arms were touching. they leaned in so close that we were almost kissing.

this may not sound like the most brilliant thing in the world, but it was. in other parts of egypt, the muslim culture is so strict, that women are not even seen. you could walk around the streets all day and see only men.

the fact that these girls felt comfortable enough to approach a young male foreigner in a park (and by themselves!), was such a reward for me that it had me smiling for hours afterwards. alexandria was more liberated than any other place i'd been to - there were women with exposed ankles, women sitting together without men in coffee houses (unheard of elsewhere) and (my favourite) heaps of female students (that i could see) at the university. it made me feel warm inside.

i came back to cairo last night with the intention of having a lazy day before heading off.

i went down to 'islamic cairo' and wandered through the markets - tiny streets absolutely jam-packed full of people selling and buying anything you'd care to think about, and many things you wouldn't care to think about. one thing led to another, and before i knew it i was giving blood at a mobile red crescent blood donor station.

in australia you're not allowed to give blood if you're a filthy homosexual, so i haven't donated since i was in high school. they're not so picky over here. i was led into the back of a bus parked on a major intersection. i sat down on a black recliner, and after triple-checking that everything was sterile and 'single-use only' (i was paranoid), a woman came at me with a needle large enough to be an oil drill. it must have been a 2 gauge or something. she shoved it in and the blood poured out like niagra falls. had it been linked, it could have been used to power a small third world country's hydro-electric scheme for the day. naturally, i went into a vaso-vagal free-fall, and had a bus-load of egyptians pampering me no end. i was rewarded with a plastic watch and a bottle of calcium/vitamin D syrup for my efforts. most satisfactory :)

i suppose the end of this chapter requires some sort of retrospective general commentary.

there were times during the last month when i hated egypt so much i thought i would never come back - and even make it my mission to tell everyone how shit the place was. after leaving the (upper) nile valley region, i changed my mind about that, as sinai was wonderful, and alexandria and cairo have been great in their own ways too. and so it was only a week ago i stumbled upon a way to make a trip to luxor/aswan more enjoyable, and i think it's my most brilliant plan yet: i call it 'the super-soaker 2000 plan'.

does anyone remember the super-soaker 2000? a massive lime-green water pistol with purple water reservoir and pump-action air compressor so you can keep hosing down your victim long after they've learnt their lesson? it would be the perfect accessory for your trip to egypt's pharonic past, turn your voyage into a bag of laughs, and square the score once and for all! 'give me baksheesh': hose! 'come into my store for some fake papyrus': hose! 'where you from, where you from, where you from?': hose!!! you could run through the marketplace spraying people at random with your eyes filled with tears of joy! and to polish it all off, a special, separate little water-gun for the old ladies. this one's filled with lemon juice. and when one of them asks you for baksheesh for taking a picture of a fucking sand dune, you can squirt the old hag right in the eyes!

anyway, enough about that.

in certain respects, i've learnt far less and far more about islam and egypt than i might have thought i would. i'm not in the right sort of mind-set to give this topic the attention it deserves at this stage - and it does deserve a lot - so i'm going to leave it until next time, or until we meet if any of you are interested in discussing your opinions too (as many of you have been doing on email).

it's march already! i can feel my stomach churning at the thought of having to come back to australia in only 5 short months (oh no!) and i wonder where this last month went. i'm already looking back at my time in egypt with fondness, but there is really only one thing on my mind at the moment: china. i'm so excited i haven't been sleeping, and i'm almost climbing up the walls with anticipation of arriving in a few days' time!

for now it's time to get out of this internet cafe and have a final wander through the streets of this city and say a proper 'good bye cairo', 'good bye egypt'! (hello ondrej)

xxx