I think I'm doing pretty well at adapting to life here in Paris. Really upped the inefficiency, cut back on the inappropriate jokes and yelling, stopped smiling so much, feign coughing fits as a result from 'smoking too many cigarettes' in order to cut the queues. But there is one thing I have fucked up on a weekly basis for three weeks now, and this is the fine art of remembering to BUY your food for the weekend on Saturday. Because Sunday sees an entire Paris shut down, no stores, no markets, no grocers. No nothing. And for somebody like me [View Full Entry]

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Did you know that in France they don't actually call it 'Bastille Day'. It's referred to as 'la Fête Nationale' and it consumes an entire weekend which can basically be summed up with two words exploding with heat and action: fireworks and firemen. To cover my bases, there are many things to love about Paris. And I do. I love many things about Paris. From the Eiffel Tower (as cliche as that is, looking at it, at any time of the day, just makes you want to have sex with that boulanger, patisser, or the bum with the "j'ai faim" sign [View Full Entry]

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Sure, you and I run around all day yelling out to the heavens like silly children, "Paris je t'aime, Paris je t'aime!" But have you ever stopped to wonder if you ever hear back "Hey Amy, Paris t'aime! (I don't even know if that's grammatically correct yet.)" Because I sure don't. There are many things to love about Paris. And I love many things about Paris, but we've all probably heard this crap too many times so I'll move this to the back of the post. More interestingly, let's first talk one thing so far that I DON'T love about Paris [View Full Entry]

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So I can't really do Cairo justice. We only have exactly one day (7am-7am) in Cairo and part of the morning is spent recovering from the overnight bus from Dahab. I don't take many pictures. Maybe it's a shame, maybe it was all for the best, but maybe I'll just use this as an excuse to only write about 2 topics: the disappointment that are the Pyramids and an extremely creepy Belly-Dancing experience. I'll save the fun stuff for last and first give a quick rant about the Pyramids. As the last standing wonder of the ancient world, you expect this [View Full Entry]

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There must be something in the water in Dahab. Something that makes your tongue tingle and dance, that makes your mouth curl into a constant smile, something that makes you want to forget everything else in the world and just coolly high-five every living creature within a 5-meter radius. It's funny though, I can't say that it was so much of a spectacular place descriptively; I've been to nicer beaches, dove better sites, seen better sunsets - and there are no real attractions. But perhaps if you were to look up "ambience" in Websters, it would be defined in one word: [View Full Entry]

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If I ever hated anybody enough I would wish upon them a border crossing via ferry from Aqaba, Jordan to Nuweiba, Egypt. A knee in the nuts and voodoo dolls frenzies just don’t cut it once you’ve seen this. Picking up from where I left off last leaving Wadi Rum, my brother and I get to Aqaba an hour and a half late. Our timetable says there is one daily fast ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba at 11am and we had heard from a ton of people that this was an extremely painful all day process. Hey man, that’s cool. Life [View Full Entry]

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The only way to see Wadi-Rum is with a guide. We book a 4x4 tour from the hostel in Petra but unfortunately it seemed like nobody else was going so we had to pay a slightly higher 45 JD per person for a private car. When we got to Wadi Rum however the guide had a Japanese couple that was to be in our group, but since they couldn’t refund us any money we decided to demand a private car anyways. We justified it by thinking that we would want to hike around and take our time all day at the [View Full Entry]

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After a day or two of Petra, you will have developed a few new skills. You will be able to take on anybody in a camel-and-donkey-shit-dodging relay race. You can say “no” to cute 5-yr old children faster than they can approach you with useless pieces of rock. However your tolerance for fat but scantily-dressed foreigners will have regressed as you probably haven’t seen exposed, cellulited muffin tops in 3 weeks, and you certainly haven’t seen sunburnt man-boobs (yes, some men take their shirts off here...) in too long. I mean what is this, a Six Flags? Your eyes will need [View Full Entry]

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I admit that two years overseas have definitely compromised my competencies in a few “Americanisms.” I can’t tell you who won the Rose Bowl and my March Madness bracket was unfathomably pathetic. I probably couldn’t even tell you what MLB even stands for anymore. I don't know which agnst-filled popstar did what, where last week. Anchorman is affirmatively the last movie I can confidently quote. My iPod hasn’t been synced in something like a year; I had to have a Jordanian cab driver identify Chris Brown’s “Forever” yesterday which I painstakingly proceeded to locate and play on repeat in a sad [View Full Entry]

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The serviced taxi ride from Damascus to Amman was looking to be a disaster. Picture a big-bellied driver, a big-bellied Jordanian riding shotgun, and me in the back riding thigh-to-thigh with two Jordanian men. Throw in a lack of AC in the Middle Eastern sun and a permanent stream of cigarette smoke, the next 3 hours of my life crossing into Jordan were 3 hours I would have paid to skip. The man in the front made no efforts to acknowledge my existence, the man to my right was thinner than me and also seemed glued to his cell phone. After [View Full Entry]

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