cairomaniac

In 4 hours we're heading to the airport to endure a stupidly long trip and a 4 hour layover at Charles De Gaulle Airport. We'll be back in Houston at 1:40 PM Friday, and I'll be in Austin around 7 or 8. I have more luggage than is probably allowed, and my carry-on bags are hefty. I think that maybe if I bat my eyelids like a woman and smile at the ticket agent, they will still charge me money. That's ok though.

Today was the last day of the hospital, and it was filled with picture taking and goodbyes and "we'll miss you's" and all that. The best part was when Hossem, the premature resident, gave me a hug and started to do the kiss on the both cheeks thing and everyone started laughing because they thought I was uncomfortable. Its ok, really. They keep giving us tests of our American-ness, like trying to induce gastroenteritis by making me eat/drink various street foods. Not donkey meat, but the latest trial was "Koshari" which is a seemingly innocuous mixture of rice, pasta, garbanzo beans, lentils, and fried onions with some spices, topped with a salsa and some suspicious colored water. I ate this as Jenny suffered at home with a stomachache, and laughed in the face of disease as my stomach punched through two bowls of the stuff. I washed it down with sugarcane juice from a street vendor. I want to take some of that juice and plate it out on a petri dish to see what might be flourishing in my bowels now. I am invincible, so surely it won't be a problem.

Today we went to the home of our friend Mohammed Khalil with Ossama, to visit Mohammed's new baby Laila. She was small and peaceful and over here they keep babies in these really awesome basket things that look like duffel bags. Baby-duffels. They're square and they look like something I would definitely want to sleep in if I was a tiny babe. She slept and slept while we watched some show about fishing, and in the backyard there was a pool shared by people of the neighborhood. Some Swedish kids were there playing on a water-trampoline. I don't really understand the concept of having a pool so you can put a giant trampoline in it and not swim. Wait, I do understand this concept. It's totally awesome and I want to have one and put it in the ocean.

Later we drove around Cairo and got some coffee. Ossama and Jenny are looking for some last minute souvenirs for her, and then we are going to buy books to read on the plane. It's been a good trip.

Things I've eaten that my stomach accepted like a friend:
- Hawawshi (the thing that may or may not have been donkey)
- Koshari
- Fteer (weird tuna pizza that I didn't really like and tasted like farts but I ate anyways)
- Reyesh (a good meats)
- Kofta (other good meats)
- Kebab
- Molokheya (a green oily soup that you put on rice)
- Sugar Cane Juice
- Lots of fresh mangoes. So many of these.

It was a good foodventure. Also, I met lots of good nice people. Saw some sick babies. Saw some temples, museums, arts, musics, sites, weird bumper stickers, and good underwater fish. I saw the most insane traffic ever, and I saw people running across the highway dodging cars (what).

I think I will recommend Egypt to everyone. Just learn how to dodge traffic.

It is gross there.

We just returned from Sharm-El-Sheikh, a popular summer vacation spot for rich Russians and English people. It was ridiculously beautiful, but my only complaint is that the town itself was a homogenous tourist-style resort land, all the way down to the prices. I think we paid around $30 USD to get into a club one night, but that is neither here nor there. Driving the 5 hours to the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula was a good part of the trip. Crossing the tunnel across the Suez Canal was almost as fun as explaining to every checkpoint armyguard with a machine gun why I had an American passport instead of an Egyptian I.D. Every explanation was met with a tiny laugh and them motioning at my face and then their face and saying "..but...you look like us..."

It is magic that there are billions of people that happen to look vaguely like other people.
It is magic that they are from different countries maybe.

Anyways, Jenny, Ossama and I showed up around noon, and the sun was melting our spirits, so we checked into the cheapest hotel with a beach and air conditioning. We wound up at some place called "Palermo Resort" which was the equivalent of a really seedy motel with a nice pool and rich lounging European families walking around. We deposited our stuff and went to the beach, which was behind another hotel. It was beautiful and the water was all kinds of good blue colors. There was a long rim of coral, and snorkeling equipment was cheap.

If you've never been snorkeling, go somewhere and do this. There were blue fish, neon fish, little yellow fish, jelly fish, big fish that surprisingly didn't eat other fish, and schools of goldfish. Disturbing a school of fish resulted in an organized exodus by all of the fish from their current spot to a new spot 5 feet away. This was my favorite thing that they did, so I snorkeled around and disturbed as many fish schools and fish universities as I could, because it is cool and because I am a bad person.

We then ate a pizza that looked/tasted like someone took a steamroller to a Totinos and put it on a nice plate. Good trick hotel.

The evening ended by us going to CLUB BUDDHA BAR, which is a generic dance club filled with terribles from every country of the world (Russia). I spent the better part of the evening dancing and avoiding making conversation with anyone, while Ossama and Jenny were slightly more gregarious and talked to a couple people. Ossama took a horrible cowboy hat off the head of a Swedish girl who was so offended that she could do nothing more than to point to herself and say "mine MINE." Her panties were surely in a bunch so tight that she could have fit 12,000 pairs in a tiny suitcase or other Swedish personal effects bag. There were also lots of people with linen pant/short combos, and lots of terrible terrible Eurofashion, mullets, and cool old people. I made the comment "I hope that's her dad" many times to myself.

Ossama and Jenny were hungry after we left this place, so we went down the street, across the Na'ama Bay complex (which has all the charm of Kemah) to a McDonalds, which was undistinguishable from another nightclub, save for the burgers and milkshakes and uniforms that said "McDonalds." The walls were white and the floor was white and they were playing techno music and there were more European terribles there. I liked this place the best.

The next day we found a hotel that wasn't so diseased, and lounged on the beach for a thousand hours. There's only so much time one can spend devoted to looking at a view and saying "OHHH THATS SO BEAUTIFUL" so I stayed inside and read a book while Ossama and Jenny went to Camel Bar to see some band called "HeadCandy." The story I am told is that there was FOAM at this party. There are some things that you can't really even feign regret for missing.

Our final day in Sinai was spent in the town of Dahab, which reminds me of a beach town in a video game. Everyone was either going diving, talking about diving, walking around aimlessly, or eating. Everyone was also Australian. Some camels walked in front of a sign that said No Camels. We took a jeep to a place called Blue Hole, which was good for snorkeling. The driver kept asking us if we thought Obama would take troops out of Iraq when he became the president. I don't know friend, I'll call him up. He also told us the story of how he was driving some people to Blue Hole and suspected that they were Israeli. He said he caught them and found out there were Israeli Spies? I don't know why he told us this, but HE'LL NEVER CATCH ME (ALIVE). The Blue Hole had even more spectacular snorkeling than Sharm-El-Sheikh, and there were tiny swordfish type guys that swam dangerously close to my eyes. The jellyfish were also menacing. I understand how people can drown here. There's something inexplicable that makes a person want to keep swimming deeper and deeper, because surely there must be crazier fish down there.

We ended our trip at an Indian Restaurant owned by some English guy who said he'd "move some of those sunbathing yokels so we could sit down." I had a hard time explaining to Jenny and Ossama what yokels were, so I gave up. The food was too spicy for them, so I got to eat extra. A small cat and a huge dog and a small dog came and stared at me until I gave them my chickenbones. I took some pictures with the cat.

Intermission: Some guy just walked into the internet cafe wearing a shirt that says "WITHOUT YOU I WILL DIE" in Halloween fonts. They're playing some violin Phantom of the Opera on the speakers here, and that is that.

Anyways, the cat kept eyeing my food, and was not satisfied even when I threw her some bones (which she ate with such completeness that even fat people would be impressed by). When I went to the bathroom, I returned to find the cat had taken my place, and was finishing everything I didn't eat. I think more restaurants should have stray animals eating from people's plates.

Now we are back and safe and poor. We land in Houston on Friday at 1:40 PM. Maybe I will make 1 more entry before we leave.

Only $700 US Dollars! Only because you are student!

Thanks, jerk. I did not want to buy your items anyways.

We just got back from our 5 day cruise on the River Nile from the city of Luxor to the next largest town to the south, Aswan. We made stops in Esna, and Edfu and visited a lot of places in between. The cruise itself was fun, but what we didn't know before booking was that we were on an "old French and Dutch people" cruise, which meant that not too many people were speaking English and all the "fun" activities were in French. This is ok, because they were all part of some huge tour group, and Jenny and I had our very own guide, Mahmoud. Mahmoud was a pretty cool guy who said "sure?" after anything we said, and then made secret deals with all the store owners. He also tried to get Jenny to send her sister his pictures so that he could have a girlfriend. I don't understand this part. We flew to Luxor in Business Class which was nice because they gave me some guava juice and a good breakfast. There was also nobody else in that cabin. LUXURY.

When we got to the boat, they fed us some breakfast, which was a thousand cakes. So many cakes constantly on that boat. They were all croissants with custard or something like that. The view from the deck was amazing. There were these insane palm trees all over the place, and farms and people doing work and cows and goats and camels oh my. We visited the Karnak and Luxor temples, the former being the largest temple in Egypt. The entrance is the "public courtyard" which had altars for offerings to the god Amon-Ra. After leaving this area, we walked to the hall of gigantic towers covered in heiroglyphics, which apparently only high-priests (there were maybe 2 or 3 at a time) could enter. Mahmoud told us that this area was for "magical spells." He said "magical spells" so many times. There were also smaller areas for prayer and whatnot, and a big scarab beetle statue. If you walk around the statue seven times, apparently you will get married soon. There were tons of tourists just walking around and around. Maybe they will all get married to each other and visit more tourist-traps-of-the-world together. Me describing the temples more may be boring, so the pictures at the end would be more fun to look at. Luxor temple had more of the same types of heiroglyphics and also in the entrance some giant statues of some pharaohs. Needless to say they were huge and awesome and made me do the "oh wow how could they have made these things" reaction that everyone probably does when they look at this sort of thing.

The best temple that we saw was Edfu temple, dedicated to my favorite Falcon-God, Horus. Horus is the god of all Egypt, and he looks like a little bird guy. This is why he is the best. Also the story of his birth is pretty good. I will write a little bit about it here, but let it be known that the story sounded much better coming from Mahmoud, who would refer to Horus only as "The God Hohhhruss" in his accent. Like "magical spells," he repeated "The God Hohhhruss" many times. It did not get old and I think I tried to get him to say it more times as a tiny game in my mind.

Anyways, a long time ago in Egypt, lived the god Osiris and His wife Isis. Osiris had a brother, Seth, who was an evil god. They had all sorts of zany battles together, and one day Seth killed Osiris and put his body in a sarcophagus and pushed it down the river. If he thought that was the end of Osiris, he was wrong because the cat came back the very next day and they had even more battles together. Seth decided that the best course of action now was to kill Osiris again and cut his body up into 14 pieces and spread them all around Egypt. Isis, being a loving wife, found 13 of the pieces, all except the penis. The penis was supposedly in the Nile somewhere and according to Mahmoud "eaten by the fish...because I think maybe they were hungry, yes?" So instead of giving up she made a golden penis out of some mud or something and then helped make a baby using this dead godhusband. The resulting creature was Horus, God of everything that is awesome and pure and birdly in this world. Horus had a wife called Hathor who he would see sometimes at their "honeymooner" once a year.

So back to the cruise, we also visited The Aswan High Dam, which was built by Egypt and Russia from 1960 - 1971 to control the yearly flooding of the Nile, used 80 times as much material as was used to build the great Pyramid of Cheops. It wasn't that fun to go to, but it sure was huge. There was also a Russian-Egyptian friendship monument which is a nice thing. It was big, like their big friendship together! Yes!

The best part of the cruise was the visit to the Nubian Village. The Nubians live in great sand-floored houses that are mostly outside. They are kind and invited us in for tea and sheesha, and showed us their pet crocodiles (they had 2). They poked them a little with sticks and the crocodiles jumped a little bit. This is a good thing to see sometimes, especially in someone's house and not at the zoo. There's a few pictures of the Nubian House we went to, and some more pictures of the camels that bring people there. The camels are ugly, I think.

Other than visiting these things, we also watched a "Nubian Show" which was some dancing and a crazy spinning man wearing a weird parachute dress. He spun continuously for 15 minutes. I think that if this guy has the power to vomit out of other people's bodies, that someone else somewhere is STILL vomiting. There was also a "wear Egyptian clothes" party. My "Egyptian Clothes" that I bought was huge and illfitting. I still will keep it and lounge around and drink teas on some large couch one day.

Now we are back and going to Sharm-El-Sheikh with our friend Ossama tomorrow. This place is supposed to be like Ibiza and a lot of Russians go there. I think.

As always http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix

there's 100 new ones.

We'll be home in a week. Hooray.

Today, after a long wait, our friend Ossama took us to see the Great Pyramids of Giza, which were exciting and huge, but maybe better in pictures than in my writing. When we got there, as warned, there were plenty of scammers who wanted nothing more than to separate us from our money by helping us take pictures and then demanding BAKSHEESH (tips) for their services.

Before I write anymore, I have to make note of a ridiculously attired Frenchman in the internet cafe wearing a stupid denim hat, stupid denim jacket, stupid bedazzled shirt, and likely not a shred of dignity inside his stupid French body.

Anyways, after I got conned into tipping some guy for "helping" us take a picture, we haggled with an annoying dude so we could get a ride on a horse to the sphinx and around the pyramids. The ride was around $15, but was worth it because a nice man and his son took us around and made the horses gallup a little. This was not fun until I was told you have to straighten your legs in order for the horrible bouncing and pain to stop. Our friend Ossama was having less of a time on the horse, as he looked like he was ready to get dishonorably dismounted from the horse. Maybe it would have been honorable. The Great Pyramids were huge and intimidating, and like any other great thing in the world, swarming with Japanese. PHOTO!

The Sphinx (which we didn't really get any up close pictures of) was large, and impressive because it was made of only one piece of stone. The tour guide told us that Napoleon stole the nose. What's he going to do with that? It was not as huge as I thought it was going to be, and the actual cool sculpture was just its head, the body was not much. There's tons of camels running around in the desert around the Pyramids. They are all trained to take you to the perfume shop to buy some overpriced stuff so that the tour guides can earn a hefty commission. If the average salary in Egypt is 250 L.E. per month, These guys are the richest ever. I wonder if they have golf courses in this desert.

Tomorrow morning we are heading to Luxor, where we will see some cool stuff and get scammed into giving some dude money for no reason at all. I have high hopes that this will not happen, but I have high hopes about a lot of things.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix for all the pyramid pictures.

Maybe a more exciting entry when we visit Luxor and Aswan, and later the Ibiza-style resort beach on the Sinai Peninsula called Sharm-El-Sheikh.

Excite.

The power adapter to Jenny's laptop is messed up, so we're here at SIGMANET internet cafe listening to pan-pipes Celine Dion and instrumental Celine Dion. Today has been a day of good music. We went to Hardees to eat a burger (I know), and they were playing some uncensored Tupac. I liked that. Then they played a Sisqo Thong Song Michael Jackson Billie Jean mashup that was also good. How come American Fast-Food can't do that?

We also went to the Nile Hilton to eat on their rooftop restaurant. I finally tried a Stella, and its pretty decent and cheap. They had doritos and some weird ketchup salsa and peanuts also.

They have a candybar here called "Bros". It's the greatest candy I've ever eaten. I think I'd like to bring back some Bros. BROS!

Tomorrow we're visiting the pyramids and then we're going on our cruise. The next time I post, it will be filled with pictures and stories about getting some kind of diarrhea or visiting something old.

stop looking at my wife!

This would come in handy when people creepily stare at Jenny, but I think I am not a bad enough dude to say it. I think its because people would say something back, and then I would have no recourse. Sorta like thinking you're awesome when you order some food in Spanish, and then shrinking to nothing when they ask you if you want it cooked a certain way. QUE? That's ok though. Knowing a phrase or two is still helpful.

Today we tried to go to the pyramids, but it was after 4 PM, so the official road to the pyramids was closed, and the entrance was littered with shady dudes who tried to get in the car to help us get to the pyramids without a ticket or something. They wanted 60 L.E. from the Egyptians (about 12 bucks) and $60 from the Americans. Right. The little lonelyplanet book said something to the effect of "there will be shady dudes who try to con you into paying them to take you to the pyramids when they're closed." and there were! Thanks lonelyplanet, but you didn't save us the drive there. The drive IS spectacular though, because the 3 gigantic pyramids are visible from the street, and there are all sorts of vendors of strange fruits and gross looking watermelons and American Football-themed steering wheel covers. Taxi drivers also like to keep a sheet of fur on their dashboards.

Because people here like to make us "feel at home" and try to convince us to do "American" things (and we are too big of babies to say no), we went to see the movie "10,000 BC" yesterday (Our friend who went with us spent a good deal of time trying to convince us that this was not an accurate depiction of Ancient Egypt, and would not believe us when we kept saying OK WE KNOW, IT IS A MOVIE OF FAKES AND LIARS. He also liked the movie though, and talked very loudly the whole way through, which wasn't a big deal because everyone else was talking loudly too. Explaining what was happening the whole way through..."OK, see now they are building the pyramids...Like we have in Egypt. Are you amazed by this? The depiction in the movie is very negative of Egypt! Like we are savages! We are not savages!!"). They aren't savages, I know this. Everyone is very nice and friendly. They drive us everywhere and take us to good places. Today we went bowling at a nice little place on the Nile. We almost went ice skating too, but the place that our friend had remembered from his childhood was abandoned (and looked like it had been for many years). That's ok though, because I don't like to do that.

The other day we visited the Egyptian National Museum. It was huge and disorganized and amazing. They just threw a million really old gigantic statues together and people can just walk around and check it all out. We saw the mask of King Tut, and his other finery, as well as gigantic statues of Kings and Queens, and Pharoahs and Mummies and Tombs and little awesome boats that were inside the tombs, and tiny cat statues, and tinier cat statues. There were lots of alabaster statues as well as granite. There's tons of great red granite here. They use it for floors and walls and counters and everything and it gives stuff a stately feel. I like it.

I think that we're getting more used to the hospital as well. Everyone knows we are students and don't know any Arabic, and everyone's pretty ok with that now. They smile and are helpful to us, and even the elevator guy in the hospital that we never go to recognizes me and smiles. We got to help transport this little guy from one hospital to another (just by pushing his wheelchair across the street) so he could get to the Kidney ICU. He has Nephrotic Syndrome, which makes you, among other things, very swollen. It usually makes you moderately swollen in your abdomen, around your eyes, in your legs, and also in your genitals, but this kid had it all in his face and also all in his neck, which was kinda horrible because he couldn't breathe. Apparently he was a normal 9 year old boy right before this all happened. He probably had a stroke or something from all this, and was screaming and crying. Hopefully he is doing better now. It was the most dramatic thing I've ever seen on a person. Except for the picture of the guy who had those weird trees growing off him in Thailand or something. That was worse but I never met that guy. In good news though, there were lots of babies to make faces at today. Babies love faces more than they like flailing around aimlessly.

I think the rest of the week will be easy, and Saturday morning, we're heading to Luxor so we can go on a cruise. We have a tourguide arranged, and its going to be the most awesome thing possible. We make frequent stops in and around Luxor and Aswan, and we'll go in neat temples and ancient places. Very touristy, but we're tourists, and its awesome. We have still not stooped to the level of eating at Cairo Chilis and eating an Awesome Ramses Blossom (I don't know if its called that but it'd be nice if it was). Cleopatraburger.

It is late now, and time to either
1) Go to sleep
2) See if Walker, Texas Ranger is on somewhere on Dubai TV or Al-Jazeera or MBC ACTION 1!!

We also ate tuna pizza. It tasted like the ocean and smelled a little like farts. I ate 2 or 3 slices.

PS can someone help us make a user icon from any one of the pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix ? THANKS.

Means "Thank You"

I say that after I laugh nervously about anything. People appreciate when I try to speak Arabic.

Yesterday, we saw an Egyptian Chilis. Its the exact same as American Chilis, except its more exciting to go to over here. Rest assured, we didn't go there, but instead to the adjacent Studio Misr, a fish restaurant. This is a chain restaurant too, but its in Egypt, so I still have street cred. When you walk in, you pick all the fish you want and tell them if you want it fried or grilled. I picked a grouper and a crab and we also had a lot of clams and shrimps and baba ganoush and hummus and breads. I have a good picture of the fish that I got, but I didn't put it on Jenny's computer yet. The food was really good though, and maybe the softest crabmeat I've eaten.

Later, we drove through the suburbs, which have the most beautiful luxurious houses in Cairo. Our friend Khalil told us that this suburb that we were in wasn't even the "nice" one, and that it used to be nicer. You can see the pyramids in the distance in these suburbs. At home, I have a view of the gross man that lives across the street, and sometimes Austin segway tours. No pyramids. There's a big Costco-style grocery store in the mall (DANDY MEGA MALL) where we got soaps and rice and stuff so we don't have to go out so much. But we probably will anyways, because there's lots of things to see.

We visited the Hossen Mosque (or the outside of it...it was nighttime) and the open-air market that was next to it. The mosque was huge and ornamented and spectacular, and there were children playing soccer with bouncyballs outside, and little girls sitting on rugs next to the park. Jenny didn't get stared at as much here, because there were plenty of other tourists to look at. The market had tons and tons of items to get, like sheesha and scarabs and little paperweights and Arabic Oud Guitars (I forget what these are actually called and how its spelled, but they sound nice. We saw a live performance at another restaurant on a boat. We were the only ones clapping and the performers smiled big at us everytime we clapped. No one else was even paying attention). In the market was the Fishawy Coffeehouse. This is a place where people smoke sheesha and take tea. Old men play backgammon and its intensely overcrowded. I took a good picture of the place, but I only noticed later that it was (partially) ruined by a creepy looking guy in some computer shirt sitting around in the middle of the picture. Our friend H took us there, and told us about different monuments that we'd walk/drive past, like the Mohammed Ali Mosque, which is huge and beautiful like all the others, The Citadel, which was a training ground/base for Egyptian soldiers while they were preparing to take back the Sinai Peninsula from the Israelis. It looks like a medieval base. I liked the way it was.

Today, we went to the "casualty" day of the hospital, which is basically a "crash" ER room for the sickest children. Its a 15'x10' room that had 25 people in it at any given time. 3 kids were coding at a time. There was one child that came in with what was likely a massive brain hemorrhage. We were helping with the CPR and ventilation. The residents here do CPR really aggressively and do a million seemingly ineffective chest compressions in a minute. It brought the kid back most of the time, but after an hour of doing that, he kept arresting and then he died. We had no monitors, no ICU team to come down, just the bag and some ampules of medication and stethoscopes. In the end, none of that stuff would have saved the kid, but it still makes me wonder what they could have done if they had more stuff and a more open room. They were hyperventilating the kid and told me I was doing it wrong when I was giving air every 5 seconds like you're supposed to do. After the kid passed, he was handed back to his mother, and she hurried out of the room to somewhere I don't know. That was the most disturbing part of the whole ordeal. We went home after that. It was definitely the most different thing I've seen in my short week here. This was very very regular for all the residents that work at the hospital. They do 24 hour shifts in this tiny ER room with barely any breaks. We asked Yumna, one of the nicest ones there, how she copes with it. She said "It is hell." and smiled.

Tomorrow we're going to see as much of the National Egyptian Museum as we can. It will be bigger and grander than the modern art museum, which we saw yesterday. That place was pretty good, even though some of the drawings and paintings really looked like college art student projects (no offense to college art students).

Time to go home and do laundry. There was mud in the machine before we used it. I wonder when the last person to use it was. Probably a long long time ago, when mud was OK to have in washing machines.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix as always. mostly jenny's pictures, but when we leave EINSTEIN KAFFEEHAUS today, i'll put some of mine on the computer. jenny's pictures are better anyways.

Today was the first day at the University of Cairo Children’s Hospital. It is a huge crazy hospital with 700 pediatric beds. For perspective, the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, which is one of the larger hospitals in the US, has about 400 beds. The full university hospital stretches over a mile long from the OB/GYN department to the pediatric ward. We showed up after a heavy admission night, so all the residents were busy checking on the kids that came in overnight. We quickly rushed through maybe 25 patients. We saw heart failure, seizures, lupus, dermatomyositis, weird congenital syndromes, lots of pneumonia, bronchiolitis, and various immunodeficiencies. Oh, and there was also the case of tuberculosis. It wasn’t “confirmed” yet, so we didn’t have to wear a gown or mask or anything. The only protection we had from contracting TB was a mask that they put on the patient, so I stayed as close to the door as possible. Now that I have tuberculosis, I’ll be sure to give everyone a big hug and a kiss when I come home. You’re welcome.

The pediatric hospital does not have air conditioning, but each room has its own balcony and screen doors for temperature regulation. The flies in Egypt take advantage of the open doors and it is not uncommon for the patients to serve as a docking station for them.

After a noon conference on invasive heart procedures, which was mostly in Arabic, we got a little buffet lunch of cheeses and croissant pizzas and small biscuits. There was also a guy passing around sodas. Schwepps tangerine soda is the best orange soda that I’ve ever had. We ran into the chairman of the program at the noon conference; she is really nice and started making fun of one of the new residents calling him a “premature doctor” because of his small size. He was a tiny dude who said that he didn’t do anything for fun. Jenny found this especially funny. I found it especially funny that everyone just kinda nervously laughs for everything here (especially when they don't get Jenny's "jokes").

When we finished with rounds, we had one more task: a little guy with suspected meningitis needed a spinal tap. Sure enough, they were nice enough to let the American guy do it. Everyone was staring at me while I was doing it, and by some magical miracle I got it on the first stick and CSF came pouring out into our tubes. The nurse holding the baby was eating sunflower seeds and showing us pictures of her husband on her mobile phone while I was doing this. She was really friendly, and pointed to our bags and said “WHAT?” and wanted to see what was inside. She was especially tickled that I had asthma, and she tried to put on some of Jenny’s lip gloss (one of the nice residents took it away from her before she could contaminate it).

The best thing about the hospital here is that all the parents are very curious and involved. Before we did the spinal tap, the kid’s mom gathered all the supplies and delivered them to the resident call room. Some hospital rooms had up to 6 patients inside, and they were all talking like a nice family. The residents were administering all the medication themselves. They’re the smartest people I’ve met, and extremely welcoming.

We also got to visit the clinic. The outpatient clinic at the Moustachfa Aboureesh is probably the most insane place in the world. There's hundreds of people sitting in the waiting room grabbing anyone in a white coat and handing them papers and asking something about something. The residents here try hard not to look annoyed. The actual exam room still has a ton of patients in it, and they all stand in line waiting to get to the exam table. They plop their kid down on the table, the doctor looks and makes sure the kid is not going to die or explode, writes a prescription, and then carts them out the door. They're pretty good at spotting things fast. We saw a kid with honest-to-god rickets today (rickets = vitamin D deficiency). Two kids in fact. Crazed. One of the residents examined about 20 kids before this one baby came in...and the resident checked for his sucking reflex by sticking his dirty used finger in his mouth. This wouldn't be as repulsive if they washed their hands between patients here. THE WORST.

After we were finished at the hospital, Haythem, the resident that was teaching us, took us to get something to eat at a food stand. We had “howshi” (at least that’s how it sounded), which was some cheap meat with spices rolled up into some kind of breaded caloric mistake. We told Khalil what we ate later, and he said “don’t eat that again, I think you ate donkey meat.” I’m not worried for the time being, but I think my foodventourousness is going make me exhaust my Imodium supply before we’re gone.

We did eat at a trendy restaurant which had beer and sheesha afterwards. I had more meatpiles and Jenny had some Stella beer. I didn’t know that beer was Egyptian. Now we’re back home and I’m writing this on Word and will post in the FUTURE. I want to go to Dubai, which a commercial told me was the city of the FUTURE. In the future everyone will be obscenely rich.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix

We're in Cairo now, and we are alive.  Its Sunday evening, and we arrived here at what I think was around midnight on Saturday.  After a pretty comfortable flight where we were served "the seafood meal" (which consisted of some rice and some weird green sauce covering a square fish patty that actually tasted pretty good, along with some shrimp salad with the tiniest shrimps that I, or anyone in the seeing world, has ever seen).  After eating this, I watched We Own the Night; with Joaquin Phoenix and MarkyMark.  That movie looked pretty awesome from the trailer, and was pretty dumb in real life.  Don't watch this film.  Then I watched Enchanted, which was actually really stupid and really entertaining and good at the same time.  Watch this one (if it is on TBS).  I slept on the plane, even though a horrible baby made horrible sounds.  Nobody liked this baby, or so it seemed, because no one was doing anything to stop it from making the horrible crying sounds.  The mom just sorta stared at the horrible baby with quiet resignation and acceptance of the fact that she produced the horrible baby.  

When we arrived, we had to go to the bank to buy a Visa, which was $15.  I didn't know you could buy such things from the bank, but at Banque Misr, you can do WHATEVER YOU WANT (by whatever you want, I mean buy a visa).  After the easiest go-ahead through customs, we were greeted by about seven million people, who all seemed to be related in some way to Dr. Aly, the professor who set up this trip.  We met with some other students, Khalil and Omar, who were pretty nice and offer to do nice things for us constantly.  I feel a little bad that we don't have a good way to repay them for this, but one day we will give them a ride to the hospital on some insanely crowded traffic-mad street in a city that they are unfamiliar with.  They drove us back to our new apartment, which is on the island of Zamalek in Cairo.  Zamalek is in the "older" part of the city, and as it is an island, has plenty of accomodation which overlooks the Nile.  We were lucky enough to score one of these apartments, and so we spent the rest of the evening in our 1500 square foot 11th story marble/wood-floored furnished apartment looking at the little kitchen and the two bathrooms.  Then we got tired and watched Al-Jazeera for a long time.  Al-Jazeera seems awesome because its very editorial and they talk about how some people are a little bit terrible.  I like that.  MTV-Arab is also a good thing.  Instead of infomercials for juicers and magic-blenders and Tony Little Gazelles, Arab satellite TV shows a lot of prayer shows, and also a Chinese show about different types of pipe moulds (Now you can get V-fit triangle moulds and also Triangle-fit V moulds.  I don't know what this is.)

This morning we woke up and visited the hospital where we'll start work tomorrow.  It is a 2-MILE long hospital and they see over 1-million patients every year.  Everyone that we met was extremely nice, and they grabbed some unsuspecting resident out of the hallway and told him he was in charge of us.  He did not seem put-off by this, but I hope we're not a burden to him.  Every clinic in that hospital sees about 650 patients every morning.  I want to see how this works.  "YOU. You look sick.  Go stand in that pile." "You over there, that rash is gross, put a cream on it and leave."

Surely it won't be like that. 

Later, we went to an Italian restaurant of all places, and ate some pretty good pasta and some salad (uh-oh.  I ate the salad.  Look out in a couple days for my post about how I am jaundiced and dying).  I had the highest assurances that the salad was clean.  We will see about this.  We also got cellphones, and my new Egyptian # is (+002) 0163925054.  I think this should work by tomorrow and it is free for me to recieve calls.  I also have an address, but I don't think we can recieve mail here.  At any rate, we live on Abu Al Feda Street in Zamalek, Cairo, in the Nile Tower.  I mentioned this before, but the Nile Tower is awesome.  The elevator doesn't have a real door on it, and it looks like a refrigerator.  Highway to the Dangerzone everytime we want to go upstairs.  We would take the stairs, but there are thousands of feral cats that cat-call (how appropriate) at us and ready their cat-weapons to attack should we think about walking by.  No offense to the cats reading this, as I really think that these Egypt Cats are pretty cool.

Now we are in Einstein Cafe, where the menu says to "Free Your Talents."  I don't want to free my talents right now, so I hope we don't get kicked out.  Soon we will start to walk home, get lost, fumble through some Arabic and ask someone how to get to our street which is probably right next to where we are standing, and then go up the scary elevator to the luxury flat.

Will post more after more awesome things happen, or we see some kids that have diseases that are awesome (for us, but not for them).

Ma'as Salaama.

PS There are pictures, just look on http://www.flickr.com/photos/helectronix and there is an "Egypt" folder.  Cheers.

Today I'm leaving for Egypt.  I'll be spending some time at the University of Cairo Children's Hospital.  I don't know what the internet situation is over there, but Jenny is bringing a laptop so maybe we'll figure something out.  Maybe I'll find an internet cafe.  I wonder if there's dudes there that spend 24 hours a day playing some terrible game.

I've ordered the seafood meal on Air France.  WE WILL SEE ABOUT THE QUALITY OF SAID SEAFOOD MEAL.  You will know about it.

I'll write on the internet again, WHEN I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD.