The World is Round: Safe in Chicago

I landed, extended my arms upward, turned 90 degrees and extended again. I'm here at my brother Tim's house just in time for Thanksgiving. It's beyond wonderful to be here. More details coming soon.

Egypt: Floating Down the Nile (updated!)

(At last, blogger worked out their bugs. Here's the long-promised first batch of Egypt photos)

Our time in Egypt began in earnest on the second day. The attendant on our sleeper train brought us breakfast around 6:30, and we pulled into Luxor about a half hour later. Eschewing the taxis and touts, we shouldered and dragged our bags into town and towards the Nile, on the assumption that our boat was more likely to dock there than downtown.

Logic was with us that morning, as after a short time we found the Nile Admiral, which would be our home for the next three days. Since the building of the great dam (more about that later) the Nile is ideal for small cruise ships, and they are so popular that the Egyptian government recently placed a ban on new vessels- over 500 of these tiny mobile hotels now ply the great river, mainly between Luxor and Aswan. Since there are a few noteworthy sites between these two cities, big stretches of not-much-to-interest-the-tourist in between, and vast desert on either side of the river, having a hotel that moves you to the various sites is ideal.

Here you see us on the sun deck, delighted to have found our berth and eager to hit the sights.



Let me immediately confess how positively decadent it felt to travel this way, especially having come from the teahouses of the Annapurna in Nepal less than two weeks earlier. The ship had wonderful rooms, decent food occasionally drifting towards good, a full bar and swimming pool. Afternoon tea served promptly at 4. Nice ping pong table, too.

Nathalie and I headed to the Luxor museum, which of course was smaller than the incredible and exhaustive Egyptian museum in Cairo which we'd be seeing a few days hence, but contained several incridible artifacts, including a large cache of breathtaking statuary discovered in the 1980's during renovation work on Luxor temple: dozens of huge religious statues in the classical styles that looked like they were completed yesterday.

We also took in the mummification musuem, a minor sight but a good one, and very fun. All sorts of sacred animals were mummified, too, it turns out. My theory is the fish were done just to let the newbies practice.

In the afternoon, our tour with the ship's guide began. Our first stop was a tour of the ruins of Karnak, now a village just north of the city of of Luxor, but once the religious center of Egypt. The original temple structure was begun during the reign of Ramses III (1184-1153), but various rulers added to the complex over the next 1500 years- in some cases struggling to obscure or minimize the works of their predecessors and former rivals.

The approach to the complex is dominated by two great pairs of pylons. These are the rows of ram sphinxes between the first and second pairs of pylons. The pylons themselves are massive. The ancient Egyptians built these by creating huge dirt mounds behind the structures and slowly adding to the mounds as the pylons climbed higher.



Below we see the great Hippostyle hall of the temple of Amun. I must have taken fifty photos of these columns, but nothing could come close to capturing what it feels like to stand among them. They are perfect, graceful and intimidating, and they are so clearly very, very old. They’re contained in what, on their scale, is a confined, enclosed space, so there’s no angle from which you can capture their grandeur, and of course, that’s the point. You’re supposed to feel small. It works great.
This time with Nathalie, not just for scale:



There are tons of magnificent structures at Karnak, enough that I could easily fill a blog entry on this site alone. Here you see one of the two great obelisks. There’s other temples, chapels, statues and a small artificial lake, too. But the day was not over, as we headed back into town to Luxor temple itself.

Here’s Luxor from the outside.


And just a few minutes later after the sun went down, here's the interior:

Then we went back to the boat for dinner (competent if not inspiring) and blessed sleep. We'd been on the go since before 7 and had taken in two museums and two major temple complexes that day. Also, did I mention Egypt was hot? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 F and sunny. There were a handful of wispy clouds in Luxor, but they'd be the last we saw until we were back in Europe.

The Valley of the Kings was of course one of the highlights of the trips, where we headed early the next morning. This is (with good reason) one of the spots where cameras are forbidden, so of course I have only exterior shots to show you, which is a shame because the real attraction is all underground. The tombs here were very impressive, and the starkness of the desert valley walls seems impossibly bleak. If anyplace so bathed in sunshine could make you think of death more, I wouldn't want to go there. There are dozens of tombs here, and most surprising to me, more are being discovered all the time. The Egyptian government's head of antiquities has said he believes that three quarters of Egypt's ancient treasures are still under the sand somewhere. If you've never seen the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, they've already got a lot of amazing stuff, much of it from here.

We only had time to tour three of the tombs. Here's where being on the organized tour from the boat began to sting a little bit. Despite the excellent guide and convenience of not having to arrange all the transporation, it's bitter when you've travelled this distance and you only get a short time in a site like this. I can see why many people like to spend an hour here and no more. To be frank, there is a fair amount of similarity in the various tombs. But all the examples we saw were fascinating and beautiful, and unique enough to make me wonder about the next ten or twenty. It's especially frustrating when a half hour that day was wasted on opportunities to spend money. Ah well, travel is a series of compromises, I think.

After the valley we saw the nearby temples of Hatshepsut, one of the most fascinating characters in Egyptian history. As queen, she outlived her husband and sat as regent over the empire while her son grew, then stayed on the job even after he'd become old enough to run affairs himself (that decision would cause her grief later). But she was a strong ruler, and started many important public works, including this large temple near the Valley of the Kings.

The structure is set amongst a sheer wall of imposing rock, which frames the temple's columns like a frame around a painting. Many of the temple walls here depict her diplomatic and trade missions to neighboring lands.


Here we see the 18-meter high Colussi of Memnon. Its believed that these are the only surviving structures of a much larger complex, now given over to papyrus fields. The descriptions of that temple complex (built by Amenhotep III as his funerary temple) make it sound like a lost wonder of the world: doors of electurm and floors of gold and silver.

Then back to the ship for a night of cruising down the mighty river. Our next port of call would be Edfu, to see the great temple of Horus. The eighty kilometers to the south wouldn't take long to cover, but the wait at the locks was substantial as a seemingly endless parade of cruise ships waited their turn.

Safe in London

I've made it to London, one of my favorite cties on earth, to see Bene, one of my favorite people! She's living in a big group house just east of the city center that reminds us both warmly of our(dearly departed) commune at 116 College Ave in Somerville. Then, Wednesday, back to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving and the Busiest Travel Day of the Year at O'Hare, just because I can't do things the easy way.

Off to the Tate Modern!

(I'm excited about art!)

It is safe to come home

Two notes: First, this post is one of my soapboxes. Those of you only interested in travelogue may defer. Second, Blogger recently changed their software and I'm having a devil of a time uploading photos. Still working on it, but as I'm headed to Chicago in a week in may be at least that long before the Egypt photos make it up.


I haven’t been a fan of the party for a long time, but out of some kind of paternal deference I often find myself biting my tongue about the Democrats, not really fearful of the wrath of my father’s ghost as much as eager to avoid the mental image of him shaking his head at me. He was something of a pragmatist, a charge yet to me leveled at me to my knowledge, but the Democrats were his party. He was also a child of the depression, though, so for him the party evoked FDR, a colossal, supernatural figure so far from my mind when I think of Hillary Clinton or Harry Reid that he might be from another planet, not only another century.

Of course I’m delighted that a significant slice of the American electorate has woken up and smells the IED smoke from Iraq: there’s certainly no shortage of it. I think our armed forces have deserved much better than Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush - or Peter Pace for that matter- for a long time, and most hopeful of all is the fact that the majority of voters actually thought that Iraq was the central issue of the election.

Why not celebrate, then? I guess I’d be breaking out the Karl Rove Piñata I’ve been rat holing these past six years if I felt the Democrats had won for some positive trait of their own. I like Barak Obama’s joke: “People say the Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s totally untrue. They do stand for anything.” For the party out for power, and especially one for which the forthcoming accession battle portends to be so very bloody, its difficult to have a cohesive foreign policy: they don’t speak with one voice. But it is possible to have a foreign policy, and they don’t.

At first my knee jerked predictably when some rightwing blowhard said during his Wednesday morning postmortem that the Democrats didn’t win, the Republicans lost. “How egotistical,” I thought, “it just has to be about you.” But on more sober reflection he’s quite right. The Democrats have been handed power- considerably, decisively- by simple virtue of not being the Republicans, and that depresses the hell out of me, for a couple of different reasons.

First, it justifies a very passive political strategy. I think the better minds in the Democratic party saw the Iraq war’s unraveling well ahead of this past election cycle (those of you inclined to irony may pause here for laughter). They knew that this thing would go to pieces sooner or later. In retrospect it’s obvious: all the best advice from the pentagon was to go in with no less than a third of a million troops, but the people who insisted on that were quietly fired and replaced with Rumsfeldians, while half that number marched toward Baghdad. “Don’t do anything,” the Democrats seem to have learned, “say as little as possible, and when the house of cards comes tumbling down, they’ll turn to us. Any port in a storm.” They remind me of Prince Jeffrey in the classic film The Lion in Winter, who conspires brilliantly to smear his two more favored brothers so that his father will name him heir by default, then in his moment of triumph is shocked to learn that nobody likes him much or thinks he’d make a good king. Well, the Dems may not be smear artists, but all the same Jeff got his crown this time, and that is cause for concern. Whether any politician will see the benefit in taking a stand on anything in the foreseeable future is doubtful at best: he’d have to have spent the last six months under a rock.

Second, it was a missed opportunity. Why not use this chance to point out (just to choose one of many possible examples) the staggering growth in the rich-poor gap in America over the past six years, and the direct, undeniable role Bush’s tax policies had in it? This was the chance to saddle all the best horses in the Democratic stables: good old fashioned pocketbook issues. People were dying to vote against Bush, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have something to vote for, too. James Carville says the Democrats should have got fifty seats in the house, and he may be right. Or leave that aside, and merely mention that, gee, it sure looks like fighting preemptive wars is a bad idea, or, maybe spreading freedom and democracy with a sword in hand doesn’t make sense.

We could have used the election to articulate something other than “Bush Bad.” I feel like the Incredible Hulk’s effeminate and sarcastic PR man crafting spin after one of the green giant’s more productive rampages. “Good job, big fella. But if ‘Yeee-hah’ isn’t a foreign policy, ‘Hulk smash little Texan’ isn’t one either, mmm-kay?”

Third and perhaps worst of all, it makes me fear the Democrats for the same reason I fear night swimming in an unlit Jacuzzi with a ninja. What you can’t predict can hurt you. I don’t know what the Democrats will do or what they take their mandate to be: keep on not being Bush? Without a mandate other than that, without a campaign promise to keep other than that, their newfound power seems not just a blank check, but a gargantuan stack of small bills (pun intended).

Given the choices they were handed, the American people did A Good Thing in this past election, and if I’m complaining that they could have done A Better Thing, well, that’s a nice problem to have. Twenty-first century elections, given our sample size of three, tell us things could have been much worse indeed. A buddy of mine wrote me a six word email last week: “It’s safe to come home, Peej.” It’s safer, I’ll give you that. But the Patriot act (that many of these would-be savior Democrats voted for) is still chipping away at the “Freedom” at home that Bush is supposed to be spreading abroad. Gitmo is open for business and any future adversary of ours who thinks they have an obligation to live up to the Geneva accords when dealing with US soldiers is either a saint or an idiot.

Most important and underreported of all is the recent Lancet (think Britain’s New England Journal of Medicine) report that as many as three quarters of a million Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. Many republicans have denied the study’s conclusions, but to the best of my knowledge, none have scaled an assault on its methods or data. Where was this powerful fact in the Democratic talking points? Where’s the outrage? Do we not think the blood of foreigners matters to the American electorate? If we don’t, all the more reason to make a stink about it.

And the IEDs are still going off under American soldiers, for what reason no one can say.

I wouldn’t expect any political party to solve these things overnight. But a political party that can only define itself in opposition to someone else on the most pressing issues of our lifetimes is a frail peg on which to hang your hopes. And yet, home here I come. I would beseech the old man’s ghost to look after his party along with the rest of us, but I think that would be an insult to his pragmatism. Besides, that’s our job.

Cairo: friends now

No photos for this entry, but a story worth hearing, I promise.

We arrived in Cairo in the early afternoon, and immediately ran into trouble. The tour company that was supposed to meet us with our train and boat tickets was nowhere to be found, so we took a cab to the main train station in Ramses Square. Cairo was, as advertised, big, noisy, dusty and dirty, but we were thrilled nonetheless.

The thrill ended when it took almost three hours to sort out our train tickets: we planned to take a sleeper train overnight to Aswan, where we would board our boat for a three day cruise down the Nile. Our efforts were complicated because this was not only Friday, but the final Friday of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Although Cairo is a fairly secular city in what (by the Islamic world’s standards) a fairly secular country, you can expect the world to grind to a halt come sundown on Friday. Add to this the fact that, like every day in Ramadan, most everyone has been fasting since dawn and people are generally short of both energy and patience. Our travel company office had apparently shut down early, also not uncommon this time of year.

To our rescue came a young officer of the tourist police named Mohammed (who else saves you during Ramadan?), who despite a limited grasp of English was able to ascertain our problems and steer us to the correct office. When everything was resolved, it was after five, and what we had hoped would be a day of tourism in old Cairo had instead been spent navigating the bureaucracy of the train system. We weren’t going to waste our nearly three hours before departure, though, so we headed out to explore after stowing our bags in a locker.

Directly across the square stood a large mosque, and we headed inside, leaving our shoes with the minder at the door. Normally women aren’t allowed inside, but westerners like Nathalie are regularly given a pass (we later hypothesized that with her short haircut and the right shirt, we could and perhaps should have made her appear a young boy). The space inside was the size of three basketball courts, and covered in a thin but soft green carpet. Perhaps a hundred men sat around the columns or walls reading the Koran or talking quietly. As soon as we found a spot to sit, several men came up to us offering dates or date rolls (fig newtons but with date filling), the later of which we accepted. Muslim tradition, I later learned, teaches that the Prophet broke his fasts with dates.

A few minutes later the light outside began to fail, and the muezzin came to a microphone at the front of the room, faced the wall (which of course faced Mecca) and began to chant. Everyone around the room eagerly unwrapped their dates as the call went out over the loudspeakers outside the building. Other men gathered around large water coolers, drinking deeply (the especially devout do not even drink water while the sun is in the sky).

A moment later men began queuing at the front of the room, and to my surprise, they began beckoning me to join them. I extended my lower lip, pointed dubiously at my chest and shrugged in what I hoped was the international sign for “I seriously doubt you mean THIS white boy.” They seemed to understand, but were insistent. Nervously, I handed Nathalie my fig wrapper and walked to the front to take my place in line.

Having been raised Catholic, I’m no stranger to calisthenics during a worship service, so I was comfortable following the motions, and if my silence during the call-and-response portion was awkward, no one acknowledged it. We bowed, put hands on knees, and of course touched foreheads to the ground multiple times. After about ten minutes, the service concluded and the line dispersed, some staying behind to pray further. It’s a powerful practice to experience even when you don’t understand the words.

My neighbor stopped me as I moved to stand, and clapped me warmly on the shoulder. He started speaking rapidly in Arabic, smiling and pointing alternately at me and the sky. I have no idea what he said, but whatever it was, it was full of affection and piety, probably just an expression of joy that I, clearly a nonbeliever, was there sharing prayer with him. It was wonderful: I was so nervous that my participation was somehow inappropriate or rude, and my new friend had banished that fear. Now my only regret was that I hadn’t gone to the bath under the mosque to cleanse myself first. I wish I could have conveyed to him my gratitude.

I walked back to Nathalie and we gathered our things to leave. As I tipped the shoe minder and we recovered our sneakers, a bearded young man began a fervent argument with the shoe minder (who also acts as the doorman), gesturing disapprovingly at Nathalie. The minder shook his head, unfazed, and though he listened attentively to the young man’s rant, he gave no ground in approving her presence. It was an interesting lesson for my first day in an Islamic country: purists exist, but the moderates win, at least this time.

We headed out into the city at random looking for food: Nathalie had determined that during Ramadan she wouldn’t eat or drink in public during the day, so both of us were starving. After walking a few blocks we came upon a modest street café in a side alley, where we were able to point at several dishes that looked promising. The owner showed us to a table and brought us round little loaves of bread, stewed vegetables, pickled veggies in a pink vinegar, plump-kerneled bowls of rice, and Egyptian felafel, called ta’amiyya. It was delicious. When we took out our money to pay, our host refused to take it; broad shakes of his head brooked no argument. It suddenly dawned on us that this was Ramadan, on a Friday, when the wealthy are obligated to feed the poor. It at least one Muslim home, it seems, this extends to travelers. He turned to Nathalie and said the only English we heard from him: “Friends, yes?” He then grabbed my shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks, smiling into my face with perfect affection. Welcome to Egypt.

An hour later we were checked into a comfortable two-berth cabin headed down the length of the lower Nile to Aswan. When we woke just at daybreak a few miles short of the station, we looked out our window to see the hot air balloons greeting the dawn over the fields of papyrus.

Geneva

Geneva sits on the shores of Lac Lemain, known somewhat erroneously to the outside world as Lake Geneva. Geneva sits at the point where the lake empties into the Rhone river. Not a big city; less than 200,000 people in the city proper, and only a little more than a half million in the surrounding area, but its footprint is larger because of the international institutions that call it home: The World Heath Organization, International Labor Organization, the International Red Cross and the European headquarters of the United Nations, just to name a few. I thought that the cafes of Cambridge sounded like the tower of Babel, but that's nothing compared to Geneva, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born.

This was by far the longest I've ever spent in a French-speaking country, so I enjoyed getting to use my meager language skills in navigating the town. It was thrilling that after a week I could suddenly recognize four words in ten instead of one (Listening is always harder for me than speaking. We will refrain from further psychoanalysis of the preceeding sentence).

What brought me to Geneva is my friend Nathalie, who recently took a job with the WHO working on reproductive health problems in the developing world. I came here straight from Nepal, and it was wonderful to be in the home of a friend instead of hotels and hostels. Nathalie is also the best cook I know, and at last I was not under the tyrrany of the wash-it-peel-it rule. This led to a week of wonderful dining on amazing fresh food. Geneva is Swiss, but culturally and linguistically French, so food of less than exceptional quality is simply not tolerated.

In fact, France is twenty minutes away, so one always takes the passport along, in case you end up on the wrong bus. One day we went to a farmer's market (where I bought the most expensive cheese in my life, and thought it a bargain once we got it home) in a suburb across the border, where in a cafe a man in a black and white shirt was serenading the passersby with an accordian, at the corner of Avenue du Stereotype and Rue de Cliche.

I stayed in Geneva with Nathalie for a week before we headed to Egypt for our magnificent week touring that country. More on that soon.

Geneva sits at the southwest corner of the lake, where the river begins. The waters of the lake come from the glacial runoff of the alps, and as such are magnificently clear and very cold. As such, water is so abundant in Geneva that the the public fountains in the parks bubble continuously with delicious water, distributed at heights for canines and humans alike. Water is also used spectacularly for decoration:

This is the REAL photo of me in front of Jet D'eau, the largest water fountain in the world. More than 140 meters tall, it shoots water at over 200 kph, high into the mountain-ringed Geneva sky, such that there is more than seven tons of water in the air at any given time.

But my favorite fact about the jet is that you can use it as a landmark when navigating some parts of town, in particular the old city. If you look carefully at the photo below, you can see the jet peaking up near the right edge of the green treeline in the foreground.


One afternoon we toured the grounds of the UN in Geneva, the former home of the doomed League of Nations. The complex is magnificent, but seems almost a bit tragic, as it was built to house the organization that failed to prevent the Second World War.


My favorite part of the UN complex was the small flock of peacocks that roam the grounds, a gift of the Thai government.
The Promenade des Bastions was particularly beautiful one morning as we walked through the park of the same name, which borders Geneva's small university and several of the old city's cultural landmarks.


After Egypt, I stayed with Nathalie a few more days before acquiring a Eurail pass and heading north to Amsterdam via Paris to meet my friend Sharon. It was awesome to see Sharon for the first time in almost five months, and we had a great time touring Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Hamburg together before heading back to Switzerland to spend a couple days together with Nathalie. While walking around the old city of Geneva, I persuaded Sharon to splurge on a little black hat I thought she looked fantastic in.


Next up: northern Europe.

Photo Omnibus

After much frustration with how slowly I've been posting photos of my most recent destinations, my friend Tom Raymo (of Where's Peej fame) decided to take matters into his own hands. His creations are too good to keep to myself. Enjoy.


First up, Geneva's famous Jet D'Eau, the tallest water fountain in the world:


The Pyramids of Giza, Cairo:


The narrow streets of Amsterdam:


Finally, Copenhagen's famous little mermaid statue:


Next: the real thing.

Safe in... Copenhagen?

Hey there! I know I´ve been bad about posting lately, but I´ve been in more-or-less constant motion since Nathalie and I left for Egypt. I´m writing you now from Copenhagen, Denmark!

On Thursday the 2nd I met my friend Sharon in Amsterdam and we had a fun three days exploring the incredible museums and beautiful canals of one of my favorite cities. This is the second time I´ve gotten to enjoy Amsterdam in the Autumn, and it was magnificent as always.

We´re here in Copenhagen visiting an old roommate of Sharon´s, Alex, who was gracious enough to give us a place to crash for a couple days. We spent the last 24 hours taking a complex series of trains here from Amsterdam (through Rotterdam, the Hague, Brussels and Hamburg, and taking a train-boat across an inlet of the North Sea). Eurail sleepercars is definitely the way to travel. For less than the cost of a hotel for a night, you get where you´re going, too, and a nice man brings coffee right to your bed.

Now that we´re here we´re going to slow down for a day or two and I hope to get some blogging done, but probably not as much as I´d like. I don´t know when I'm going to get completely caught up, especially if I keep moving. Maybe I´ll set up some temporary mini-posts on my various locations, as doing thurough ones on Egypt alone would take some time.

Next stop is probably Berlin, but that may get axed as we head on to visit my pal Liza in Hamburg.

Back in Geneva

I'm back in Geneva after eight amazing days in Egypt. I'm going to get working on the blog entries for that amazing country in the next couple of days before I head out of here. Several hundred photos between Nathalie's camera and mine that need to be sorted through first.

I have no idea what the next two weeks hold for me: some combination of time here and in northern europe before I head to the British Isles in mid to late november. A lot depends on the schedules of friends with whom I hope to meet up.

Photos of Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Cairo, the Nile, and much more coming soon.