Monthly Archives: April 2007

Cattle class comedy

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I just returned to Cairo from a short trip Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Nothing too exciting, but the flight back was great.

A guy in the seat in front of me was a first time flier and scared shitless. He kept jumping off his seat and shouting things like “There is an oxygen shortage..I am suffocating…excuse me..is there is enough Oxygen in the plane? ARE YOU SURE?!!”. At one point he looked out a window and declared “The plane has stopped!! WE ARE NO LONGER FLYING!! WE HAVE STOPPED!!”. He finally hurled the contents of his stomach over the people seated in front of him.

The woman in the seat across the aisle from me kept checking the overhead baggage compartment every five minutes. I am not quiet sure if she was checking if her luggage is still in there or was hoping something else would magically materialize in the compartment. I think it was the 107th time she was opening the compartment lid when a plastic bag with something heavy inside went “klunk!” on the head of the poor guy ahead of her, then further obeyed gravity to where his food tray was located, spilling hot coffee on the passenger next to him. I actually laughed out loud when I saw that. I mean, you can’t possibly repeat this series of events if you tried to do it deliberately.

The couple in the seat behind me had a heated argument, loud enough for people all the way in first class to hear. The woman finally called a flight attendant and asked to change her seat.

Too bad it was only a two and a half hour flight. Its like when you’re watching a good movie and someone suddenly turns off the TV.

You see, now even if I ever get the chance to fly first class, I would still fly coach. Way better in-flight entertainment.

Twitt

Description de l’Egypte now online

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Description de l’Egypte, which is a set of volumes containing an exhaustive description of ancient and modern Egypt (modern at the time of authoring, that is) that was prepared by scientists accompanying Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, is now available in an online version, courtesy of Bibliotheca Alexandrina and The International School of Information Sciences with morphological full text search at http://descegy.bibalex.org

That’s over 9000 pages documenting all aspects of Egyptian history, antiquities, state, geography, and culture of the period. Pretty cool huh? Its all in French of course, and the last time I tried reading any French was in high school (i.e. my French sucks) but it is still cool to just browse it and look at the drawings. I am into that stuff. Check those out:





 


Twitt

Fun with airport customs staff in Dubai

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When you travel, there are always certain hassles which are part of the whole experience: late flights, missed flights, idiots ahead of you in check-in counters or metal-detector lines, in-flight screaming babies, etc. After a while you kind of get used to all this, and it just becomes regular annoyances that you learn to cope with and (try to) ignore. Its obligatory “trip static” that has to be there. This week I went to Dubai for the third time in an eight-week period. In Dubai airport its usually a straight run to the exit after clearing passport control. Not this time though. I passed through the scanner thing beyond passport control, and the customs man motioned for me to step aside and put my shoulder pack over a small counter. He then proceeded to methodically empty the entire contents of my bag, meticulously examining every single item. Again, its just one of those things you have to endure when you travel, and its for everyone’s safety and everything, right? So I am cool with that. So far.

I was still cool with it after 12 full minutes of this crap. The guy totally gutted my bag. He opened my notebook, ruffling its pages downwards, scraps of paper and pictures that I keep inside falling everywhere. Then he started reading through my notebook. I am still cool with it. He removed my cellphone battery, then removed the laptop battery, then tried in vain to remove my iPod’s battery, but couldn’t of course, but I was too amused watching him that I didn’t bother telling him it can’t be removed (by hand that is). He then asked me to remove it, to which I said that I don’t know how to remove it because “I am a techno-moron, just like you”. Apparently this was a bad idea because he got pissed off and sent me to his friend for more searching. I was still cool with it. The guy led me into a small dingy room and instructed me to remove my pants. He then proceeded to put on a pair of medical rubber gloves. At this point I was no longer cool with it.

Okay..I have never been searched this thoroughly, but it doesn’t take much to figure out the next step in this series of actions. I remove pants+guy puts on rubber gloves= rectal examination. I said to myself %#&@ it, if they’re really going to do this, I am not going down without a fight. I assumed battle stance (which I am sure looks GREAT when you’re stripped down to your boxers), bared my fangs, and in my most intimidating voice possible I slowly said “What..the..#^@$..do..you..think..you’re..doing?”. He just smiled and frisked me, then he emptied my bag again, taking out every single banknote, coin and credit card from my wallet. “Do you smoke?” He asked. “No, but I am going to start smoking right after I leave this room”. They were looking for drugs of course.

Later I learned that Dubai was experiencing a sudden surge of smalltime drug trafficking, so they decided to tighten the noose a bit, and innocent travelers are picked at random. It’s all cool though. Like I said, its just part of the experience. If you decide to go anywhere, then grin and bear it. Just don’t easily give in to a rectal exam.

Twitt

The rest of Euope Summer 2006 entries (its about friggin time)

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Okay, just in case there is the remote chance that anyone is interested, here is the rest of my journal entries during my trip to Europe in summer 2006. A full six months later, but better (too) late than never. they are retroactively dated:

Switzerland:

Arrived in Bern at 8:20 and met Bettina, one of my hosts from CouchSurfing who was waiting at the station as agreed. We went to their apartment and I met with the rest of the flat mates: Nils, Simmy and Andrea (3 siblings). They were a really cool and hospitable bunch… read more

Bern to Paris:
I was just thinking how much I hate long flights and how I don’t mind excruciatingly long train rides (especially in Europe). Rail travel in Europe is a pleasure. 10 hours of good scenery, a good book, my music and plenty of time to think about anything and everything. On a plane you’re just curled up in the fetal position for 5 hours with crying babies surround sound and @$$holes who hog the elbow rest… (read more)

Paris:
First rule of budget travel: make advance hostel bookings in the high seasons to avoid unnecessary hassles as exemplified below…(read more)

Belgium:
Spent the day wandering the streets of Brussels. Well at least Central brussels. The Grand’ Place-Grote Markt area is awesome. The architectural attention to detail in the Gothic buildings is mind-blowing. You can just stand there and stare for 20 minutes. Checkout the pictures…(read more)

Holland:

Second rule of budget travel: If you intend to extend your stay, pay for your hostel bed in advance the night before. I got kicked out of the hostel in Amsterdam (the following day because, unbeknown to me, you can’t extend your stay in the morning during the high season. I hauled my backpack and walked to the tourist office in the train station…(read more)

Amsterdam to Berlin:
After checking out a little more of Amsterdam, I went to the train station 90 minutes early. I met two American girls who seemed to be hopelessly lost, had the backpacker conversation and showed them where to validate their rail passes. On the train I sat next to a friendly Dutch guy who was on his way to Hamburg to see one of the World Cup games with his firnds. He talked non-stop for the duration of the train ride to Berlin…(read more)

Berlin:
I had breakfast with Marc and Angela and decided to go down to the Fan Mile stretching the length between the Brandenburger Tor to the Victory Pillar. The weather was great. The games of the day wre Britain vs. Portugal and Brazil Vs. France. The place was packed. or at least I thought so until later Marc told me there was close to one million people here yesterday during Germany’s game. I walked around, took some pictures and watched parts of the games…(read more)

And of course, it all started here


Twitt

My digital camera just resurrected itself!

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My camera resurrected itself


The following is a true story that proves a theory of mine that I kept under wraps until now for fear of public ridicule and embarrassment. The theory is that broken electronic gadgets, if left untouched for a long enough period of time, autofix themselves.

My first digital camera was a Casio Exilim EX-z50. It was a good – and expensive at the time – camera that was a gift from my dad. It took great pictures, the battery lasted for days and hundreds of shots before you had to recharge (perfect for travel), and it was a true ultra compact. I had minor gripes with it, but that was just me being a gadget connoisseur who’s picky about the little design details that make objects of electronic wonder, but nothing to belittle the awesomeness of this little shooter. The point is: it was a good camera. That is why my eyes watered when my sister one day returned it after borrowing it for a couple days, casually threw it on the coffee table saying “Its broken”. The two words every gadget lover fears most and when heard curses the day he let his friends/siblings/parents borrow his stuff.

At first I couldn’t really take what my sister just said at face value. You know how women are with that kind of thing. “Its broken” is a generic statement that can mean any number of things from “I can’t find the ON button” to “I dropped it from the third floor office window” (now I will probably be receiving hate mail from feminist groups). On closer examination, I found out that my camera was not completely kaput, but sort of brain dead. I’d hit the on button and the zoom lens would expand and then it beeps in pain and instantly retracts, not even allowing me to get into the menu. A quick googling revealed that my camera was suffering a common syndrome known as the dreaded Casio lens error . I took it to the local Casio dealer who advised that the whole lens assembly needed to be replaced, and that it will cost close to two thirds of the original price. With a broken heart, I repacked the camera into its original box and stowed it away in the gadget cemetery corner of my room. A month later I bought a new one (a Kodak P850), which was bigger, had an image stabilizer and a great 12x zoom, but I still missed the little one which died before its time. A friend of mine who was also a Casio owner suffered through a similar ordeal, and I decided to give him mine for the purpose of electronic organ donation . But alas, the different models had incompatible parts.

Yesterday I needed to quickly transfer some pictures from the Kodak to my PC. The Kodak’s battery was dead and I don’t have a card reader, so I dug up the Casio to use it as one. Instead of pressing the PLAY button, I hit the ON switch and lo and behold, the lens expanded and did not retract, the camera beeped happily announcing it was ready to shoot!. The battery was even almost fully charged. I tried it a few times, snapped random pictures, and removed and reinstalled the battery and it still works. A miracle! Maybe not, maybe its just the hot weather we’re getting in Cairo these days is causing the innards to expand and somehow fix the problem on a temporary basis. Maybe the lens assembly was never actually fully broken and the good people at the repair shop wanted to rip me off, and a few months of storage in that cold, dark, desolate corner of my room caused the camera to automagically reconstruct its own parts, Terminator style. But that’s besides the point. My camera has miraculously brought itself back from the dead! I had tried to make it work hundreds of times and took to the “experts” to no avail and now it just decides to come back to life. Explain that.

I will be reporting later if the incredible recovery sustains or if it was just a futile attempt by a wounded gadget to hang on to dear life.

Twitt

Spring cleaning

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As you might have already noticed, my blog has received something of a digital makeover to clean up its begrimed facade. Just to make myself feel better about the Friday afternoon I spent fixing things on my website, I am going to dedicate a full post to listing what I did:

  • Updated to the newest version of WordPress

  • Installed a new theme.

  • Designed a new header (admit it…the envelope looks cool)

  • Relocated the picture galleries to Picasa web albums (can’t beat 1 GB of free storage…no more resizing!),

  • Installed a slew of plugins, most importantly an anti-spam plugin . Comment and trackback spam was driving me crazy. Now only spammers who are proficient in math will be able to spam me.

  • ...next up is a moblog plugin so that I can post short entries from my cellphone while traveling (yes, I still have a cellphone).

This is weird, but now my website feels much cleaner than my room.

Twitt

The last word on country counting

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This is going to be my last post on this topic. PROMISE!

A few days ago I revisited the argument on the country counting criteria, and wrote about Lee Abbamonte, who is trying to be the youngest world-most-traveled person. Lee read my post and commented that as long as you are at peace with what you did in whatever country you’re visiting to qualify it as “countable”, then it does count. There are no travel gods who will strike down upon you with a thunderbolt if you cheat. Quoting him:

I have been to certain places for just a few hours and count them but I have always done something worthwhile in the country. Some countries are very small, Luxembourg, Andorra, Swaziland, etc. There is no need to spend a night if you don?t wish to but I believe that just counting countries is not enough, you need to get the most out of your experience in each place and the criteria is up to you. Nobody is checking over your shoulder to see if you?ve done enough to count a place as a visit but you need to be happy with yourself and your visit.

Right on man. You don’t have to spend the night or get drunk. Its all about the “cultural interaction”1, what kind of cultural interaction is totally up to your creative self.

Twitt
  1. Suggested by Mike during a heated discussion on the subject involving him, Jason, and yours truly. [↩]

On blogging

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This blog has been online since October 2004. At times I had even forgotten I had a website, and my blog has almost become an endangered species of the web, slowly going into virtual oblivion as Internet dust piles on it due to myself being too lazy or too busy to update it. Why should I even have a blog when I sporadically update it? The answer: Why not and who cares? Seriously though, I did ask myself that question: Why do I keep a personal blog? Yes, I know that nowadays everyone, their mother and their pet lizard has one, but do I really need one? Before I started blogging, the majority of personal blogs I usually came across (of people I personally know or don’t know) were just the digital manifestation of ye ol’ pen and paper diary, except now you think that everyone is suddenly interested in what you had for lunch today and how your dog is having a sudden bout of separation anxiety. And there is really nothing wrong with that, because it is what it is, just an online personal diary. There are the personal blogs with “debatable” content of universal interest on things like politics, religion and current affairs, with their authors getting into flame wars easly ignitable by these kinds of issues. Again, its just personal opinion, and you know the famous saying on personal opinion, don’t you? However, the advantage an online personal publishing medium gives those authors is clear: It gives them time to think, research and strike back. In a real life discussion/debate you often don’t have the time or the means to effectively organize your thoughts and come back with a strong counter argument. Not so with blogging; you post something that someone doesn’t like, s/he counters with a strong argument, you go grab a cup of coffee and spend a couple of hours researching before you reply with all kinds of links to “trusted” internet sources that flattens the peremisis on which s/he built his argument. Or so you would like to think.

Back on the topic of my personal blog. I do keep a “traditional” diary in one of these. Its a travel journal, but not strictly confined to that. I have started journaling in 2002, when I started traveling semi-frequently. When I started traveling with more regularity being a student recruiter and avid summer backpacker, my journal entries increased in number. When you travel, there is plenty to write about. In fact, it would be difficult to not find something to write about or note. An interesting person, an amazing place, an awesome event, a memorable moment, etc. Not everything can be recorded with a camera. I am often a lone traveler, and that’s fine by me, but sometimes there is the “this is so great I need to let everyone know!” moment. You snap self-portrait of your mug with raging bulls running after crazy Spaniards in Pampalona in the background, and an hour later your friends back home are reading your blog kicking themselves for not getting off their fat behinds and joining you on a one month trip to Europe because you told them that you were going to be “roughing it” in dingy hostels so that you can travel for four weeks instead of spending all your money on a 5-day package trip and ending up a miserable lonely bastard in Paris (this story needs a whole separate post). You can’t do that with a paper notebook. Well, you can, but its gonna take paper, ink, glue, a printer, an envelope, a stamp, and at least a week before your friends can see it. And what a hassle that’ll be do send it to all your friends. And thus the convenience of a blog.

What about you? Why do you blog? Don’t give me the obvious, overused, cliched reasons like “journalism for the masses” and all that. Dig deep, why do you really blog? Are you really an aspiring journalist? Is it just your online diary? Or are you just practicing your speed typing skills?

Twitt

Country counting revisited

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Not to stir up the dust already settled around the country counting criteria conundrum , but you can blame this guy . He is trying to be the youngest person to visit all 315 countries in the world, which is cool, but I wonder what his take on the counting criteria is. He’s 28 and currently stands at a count of 115, well over the requirement for joining the bunch of travel brag rats known as the Traveler’s Century Club (yes, I am just bitter). Speaking of which, apparently anyone can join this club, their application form doesn’t require any form of verification. Even if they did have a verification criteria, it would probably be based on passport stamps, which has been – after a great deal of debate, discussion and consideration- generally agreed upon as an inadequate method of counting a country as visited.

Bah! I can be the youngest person to visit all 315 countries, I just need to sell everything I own (which is not much) and cancel all major plans for the next few years and I am all set to go.

In another life maybe.

Twitt