Outside Dubai

The UAE is a lot more than Dubai, and we set out to see it. We took a bus tour across much of the country -- the fact that this could be done in a day shows how small it is. We drove through the conservative, overtly Muslim emirate of Sharjah that is becoming something of a cheaper suburb of Dubai. We paused at what our guide called the "Little Grand Canyon," a huge river dry river bed, and at a market with an astonishing diversity of produce given its location in the middle of nowhere. And oases really are strange phenomenon. The highlight of the outing was the couple hours spent in Fujairah where we got to swim in the Indian Ocean! We agreed that the sand on this beach was the nicest our feet had even encountered.

Dubai

Each year Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac; they celebrate by sacrificing animals (often sheep) and giving all extra food to the poor. We hear that in Egypt the sheer number of sacrifices leads to blood literally flowing in the streets... But we didn't see it because we left the country and spent four days in the United Arab Emirates.

Most people have heard of Dubai, which is one of UAE's 7 emirates -- the most Westernized, commercial, and touristy -- and is where we stayed with family friends. It's a city full of superlatives. In 2009 the Burj Dubai will be open for business as the tallest building in the world. Elevators to the 164th floor are expected to reach 40mph.

The whole city is one big construction site.

Behind me is the world's only "7 star" hotel. It's on its own little island and no one is allowed entrance except guests with reservations. It starts at $1,200 per night, so a bit out of our price range. But we got in anyway ;)

A few of the lesser suites.

The view from the restaurant on the top floor. The bar there has trained "mixologists" who will concont a special drink catered to your taste preferences.

Perhaps king among Dubai's ridiculous offerings is the indoor ski slope. Yes, skiing. In the desert. They have decided the best use of their resources is to create tons of artificial snow.

At the end of a long day...

Christmas!

We wish everyone a very merry Christmas! We hope y'all enjoy good food and good company. We wish we weren't so far away, but are having a great Christmas here in Egypt. Our French friends invited us to a nice dinner party last night, and tonight we're joining a couple new friends from our church. And we recently got back from a great trip to Dubai, where we stayed with new family. All in all, nicer than we ever expected.

This this first (and perhaps will remain the only) time we did not get up Christmas morning. We slept past noon =)

Forget the commercialism I mentioned in the previous post: this is all about Jesus, celebrating the God of the universe and the irrational love that would cause him to live among us. It is in that spirit that we say again:

Merry Christmas!

Christmastime?

We downloaded some Christmas songs and have listened to a Christmas radio station online. We've gone to a couple concerts, one of which featured Christmas songs. We've made cider and cookies. We decorated our building a little bit with some Santas and a "Merry Christmas" banner we found. The little kids at our church did a pageant last week.

But for some reason it still doesn't feel right... We think it's the commercialism we miss. There have been no commercials about presents we need to buy. There are no displays in stores, no ridiculous songs about reindeer. No one ringing a bell outside the grocery store. Our Arabic tutoring place has a (fake) Christmas tree, but they're rare. They actually do sell them here, though -- imported from Holland! -- for several hundred dollars. Yes, $300. Fake ones are significantly less, at around $10, but they're horribly ugly. I saw one with cotton balls on it. "Snow," I suppose.

All this to say, we will be happy to spend Christmas in the States next year. Besides the obvious up-side of being with family, we'll have all the media bombardment we've apparently come to expect. We hate it, certainly. But we also love it.

Phone jockeys

It's rather absurd and fetish-like how much people here love their mobiles. Almost everyone has one, in their hand or not far from it, all the time. People answer their phones everywhere: during lunch, during meetings, during church. And no one puts them on silent or vibrate, always loud; we went to an Egyptian church service last weekend and heard at least a dozen phones ring during the service.

When not talking on their phone, people on the train will fiddle with it or pull it out periodically to make sure no one has called. Or they play games on it. Or flip through the pictures they have stored on it. Or -- our favorite -- they'll play music with it, with everyone else on the train obliged to listen along with them. Once I was waiting in a deserted train station and someone came and sat right next to me, music blaring; he could have sat anywhere else, and yet he apparently wanted to share the moment with me.

Our phone hardly works and we rarely have it with us. We don't even know what the number is.

Amid saints

I recently went on a trip with a work colleague and 20 or so Copts to the Monastery of St. Mina near Alexandria. (Just me, Milli didn't go.) It was built by the beloved Pope Kyrillos VI, who is almost as revered as Mina, his patron saint and the monastery's namesake.





























This monastery was hardly an oasis of calm and meditation. People were everywhere -- and they told me it was a light day. Praying, chanting, singing, taking pictures with their camera phones... Here you can see a bit of that activity.















People praying over the pope's coffin.















The monastery was nice, and it was fun to meet and hang out with people, but my favorite part of the trip was a solitary vigil over the Mediterranean at sunset...

In the barber's chair

I finally gave in and submitted myself to the stylistic whims of a barber who understood no English. The conversation was rather like one between two-year-olds: I would haltingly offer Arabic words I knew, like those for "please" and "short" and "here," to which he responded with hand motions or nods of apparent understanding.

My hair ended up being a little different than usual (parted on the side! at least until I walked outside...), but wholy passable. And it only cost me $2.15, including tip.

In a suburb called Giza...

The only surviving wonder of the ancient world is less than 20km from our flat here in Cairo. And we lived here for over three months without paying the pyramids a visit.



Here's Milli looking for the public bus we took to get there. It didn't stop, so we ran across 4 lanes of traffic, knocked on the door, and hopped on.



Isn't globalization great?



The Sphinx looms large in the public mystic, but is rather small in person.



You can count a few of the 2 million blocks.

Facebook

Since moving here, I've gotten a series of friend requests from completely random Egyptians. Most recently, I got requests from Ahmed Al-Khilefat, Jack Jabbour, and Emad Emad Emad. Many send me messages too, mostly filled with "words" like "ru" and "4". My favorite so far, from Honko Momo, an Egyptian, 26 year-old, male:

i ll gonna to send to u a 3 angels ,
&
i ll aske them to :......
surround u with love ,
touch ur face with a rose ,
kiss u r head ,
&
finally whisper in ur ears "hi"

Really, what do you say to that?

The joys of travel

Much of our day yesterday was spent trying to get a Nigerian entry visa for our supervisor at work, who has a business meeting there in a couple weeks. A few other people at CEOSS had been jumping through hoops and red tape for two weeks prior to our involvement. We seemed to be the last ditch effort, the rearguard.

This was the story: To obtain an entry visa, one must fill out the online application, pay through on online server, and then physically walk a printed copy of the application over to the embassy. Problem: the website didn't work. One woman claimed to have filled it out the online application 30 TIMES, only to have it stall or malfunction. An emissary sent over to the embassy was told (rather snottily) that the Nigerian government does not accept hardwritten applications, and that the website DID work. Or, if it didn't, "Try again tomorrow!"

Now we enter. The application asked for all the normal things: height, "visible identification marks," contagious disesases, drug busts on record, how much money you were bringing into the country... Y'know, normal stuff. But our favorite was this innocent question: Colour Of Hair? The options: black, white or grey.

The first two attempts to fill it out failed. On the third, we made it to the payment page (!) only to discover an insurmountable issue. In the drop-down list of countries in which the applicant's credit card was registered, Egypt was not a member. It had Vatican City and Trinidad and Tobago, but not Egypt. They did not accept credit cards from Egypt. We tried fooling them and listing different countries, but they called our bluff. And then the website got stuck on Yemen for a while and wouldn't let us change it.

Finally, after many demonstrations in front of other staff members and assurances that we'd be paid back, we used our credit card. The Nigerians sure as heck allow those. And it worked.

"What about Egyptians who need to go to Nigeria but don't know any foreigners?" one of our colleagues asked.

What about them indeed.