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Published: November 12th 2008
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Nadi, me, Jon and Ali
Nadi is Tarzan (see next picture for animal print skirt), I'm a space cowboy, Jon is a Secret Service agent, and Ali is a gardener. We celebrated Halloween in Cairo on October 30th. The day before, I went shopping for a Halloween costume with my friends Luke and Andy. Under the 26th of July bridge and continuing down the road are vendors with racks of clothes out on the streets and hanging on the walls in little shops. The first place we came upon my friend Luke was trying on a pair of pants and handed his own pants to one of the Egyptian vendors. When he got them back, he realized that the 30 LE he had had in his pockets was gone. When he asked them, in Arabic, "Where's my money" they replied that maybe it fell on the ground, and proceeded to look for it there. Then they checked in Luke's pants pockets- while he was wearing them. While Luke was being felt up, I was being proposed to. This is nothing new, but when the Egyptian man decided that him and I were friends and as such I should come over to his place, and started tugging on arm to pull me away, I grabbed onto Luke. Luke held onto me and we quickly left. That first place was the worst, but
Oh, boys...
Tarzan, mime, boxer, Secret Service agent. after that it was fine. I found a pair of pants that had a pattern of wanted posters for cowboys- Jesse James, etc. and that was when the space cowboy was born. The next day we wore our costumes to school; I was the space cowboy, Luke was a snake, Andy was Aladdin, and Christianna was the Birthday Princess (as it was her birthday). We got stared at hardcore by the Egyptians, although there were a couple of other costumed people, and a Halloween celebration on campus.
That night I went over to my friend Ali's apartment, and from there we went to the American Embassy for a party hosted by the Marines. When we got there, there was a crown of hundreds outside, Egyptians and Americans both. People were standing around, but there was also a line behind a rope, like it was some exclusive club. When we had been standing there for 45 minutes and the Marines started yelling, "You have to know someone upstairs to get in! This is not an AUC party!" we left. The group that I had come with had wondered off somewhere, but everywhere around me were people I knew, so I
Wanna be a cowboy, baby.
These pants are amazing. And that is Steve Irwin behind me. found another group on went with them. First we tried to get into this bar/dance club on top of the Nile Hilton called El Mojito, but my friend Christopher was dressed as a boxer(no, not the same one from the picture, another boxer) and wearing athletic shorts, and they weren't letting in anyone wearing shorts. Then we cabbed it back to their neighborhood, Zamalek, and we tried to get into two different bars, but both were smokey and crowded, so we decided against it. Ultimately we ended up at Hardee's for milkshakes. By this time it was about 2am. Then we walked back to the Zamalek dorms and they went inside, while I met up with some other and we went over to Chelsea's apartment and had a hoedown while John played mandolin. Chelsea's apartment is excellent because you can go on the roof her 10 story building, and she has a hammock. I slept there.
The next morning I woke up and came back to my hotel. I showered and was thinking about doing homework, when Sarah my Resident Director asked if I wanted to go on a free felucca ride with free dinner. The answer was yes,
of course. A felucca is a sailboat on the Nile that you rent for an hour or two and while an Egyptian man sails it, you hang out and eat and drink. It was quite nice. When I got back from the felucca I went back over to Chelsea's apartment for a three-way (heh heh, if you end the sentence right there, it sounds much different) birthday party/Halloween party. Party was fun, crashed at Chelsea's again. Andy had asked me the night before if I wanted to go to Alexandria the next day, and I said sure... I had fallen asleep at 3? 4? in the morning and woke up to a cell phone alarm. Andy, who had fallen asleep on the other side of the couch rubbed his eyes and asked me if I wanted to go to Alexandria. I said sure. It was 7am.
We went back to the Zamalek dorms so Andy could change and also to meet his friends Aahoo and Allegra who were going with us. I slept the whole way there on the train. When we got there everybody had to pee, but what we found was the jankiest, foulest bathroom I have
ever been in in my life. I won't describe it, but give me a tree and some leaves any day. Leaving the train station, we walked to the harbor. It was so nice to see and smell the ocean again. From there we toured a mosque, and then walked to see some tombs. The tomb site was so typical of the way antiquities are cared for in Egypt. After paying the woman at the gate, who is there in the ticket room with her two children, you walk into a walled area. There are no tours, you are allowed to simply walk into tombs that date back to the Ptolemaic period, which is just after 332 BC when Alexander the Great drove the Persians from Egypt and became pharaoh. There is still ancient art on the walls, yet people could easily desecrate it. There is trash all over everywhere except inside the tombs themselves. Yet, it was very cool. There were several tombs that you could go down a set of stairs underground to explore. When we were done with the tombs, we went to the Library. The Library was incredible. It's modern of course, and built by Germans, so
it's not Egyptian nor an antiquity, but it is enormous, and beautiful. Long story short, it was 10:15pm when we finally boarded the train home, and I didn't get back to my room until 2:30am, where I proceeded to crash until it was time to get up for class.
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