New York, New York

I've spent most of the last two weeks hanging out in New York City, a product of my post-trip restlessness, a desire to catch-up with long-lost friends, and a smattering of interesting job leads. As I am a lady of leisure right now, my days are mostly going to be occupied with sitting at Starbucks on my laptop anyway, so I figured I might as well change venues for a little while and keep myself entertained with an exciting new city. And I do so love New York.

Last week I caught up with my friend Justin from Dartmouth, and in between joint GMAT study sessions and gossip fests at -- you guessed it -- Starbucks, we squeezed in some fun Manhattan jaunts. First was a visit to hole-in-the-wall speakeasy, whose location and name I will not be disclosing because it's just so much cooler that way. The bar was tucked away inside a hot dog restaurant, and accessible only through an inconspicuous phone booth inside the restaurant. While we were waiting to be granted entrance to the secret bar, we sat and enjoyed some of the best hot dogs I have ever had. I highly recommend the teriyaki hot dog, topped with sauteed pineapple chunks!

We later made a pilgrimage to Serendipity, where I had been sternly instructed to eat a delicious Frozen Hot Chocolate for my sister. I did, and practically put myself into a diabetic coma, spending the rest of the night in my hotel room with a cold sweat and the shakes. But it was so delicious.

On Wednesday, as fate would have it, my aunt Genie and cousin Madelin were arriving in New York after moving Maddie out of her freshman dorm room at Bard College in Westchester. We met up in Grand Central Station and had a really nice (though noisy, of course!) lunch and coffee break, and had a chance to catch up on college stories, travel stories, family stories, and all the important updates. It was really nice to see some family for the first time since coming back into the country, and thoroughly helped on my way to restoring a sense of balance.

I spent the weekend in Boston, mostly preparing for the dinner party I hosted on Saturday night for a couple of co-workers from my last project at Oliver Wyman. In December I had donated a four-course Alaskan dinner for four to the OW charity auction, and it was the winning bidders who were coming over to cash in for a tasty feast of fresh Alaskan seafood. It took me all day to get everything set up for what was my first official dinner party, but it was well worth the effort. We started off with a wild berry salad (a recipe I stole from Simon's), and a hot appetizer of steamed Red King Crab legs with butter. My guests were already pretty impressed with the enormous crab legs, and the delicious crab meat, fresher than any they had ever had courtesy of 10th & M Seafoods and FedEx. For the main course I served a surf'n'surf entree, with halibut sauteed in white wine and salmon cooked in a brown sugar-Jack Daniels sauce, and whipped sweet potatoes on the side. The meal was rounded off with a sweet dessert of rhubarb crisp and vanilla ice cream (my personal favorite!). I think I did my part to convince my guests that Alaskan cuisine really has no equal, and hopefully they'll all be making a trip up soon.

Back in New York this week, I'm hanging out at Starbucks, working my way down the Wall Street Journal's 'Best Burger' list, and trying out some fun Midtown bars. Last night, I caught back up with my friend Justin to go to a fabulous event hosted at Radio City Music Hall: a debate between James Carville and Karl Rove, moderated by Charlie Rose. Obviously I wasn't going to pass up a chance to go to this. In case you do not share my obsession with all things political, as a debater and policy wonk this particular match up is like the All-Star Game of the Professional Debate Society, the Ali-Frazier fight of the modern political era. Even Charlie Rose was billing it as the Heavyweight Championship of the World. Justin and I grabbed our front-row balcony seats and talked excitedly about what we thought they would cover in the debate. We decided to turn it into a bet, with me predicting that the first question would be on North Korea (I mean, obviously) and him predicting that the first question would relate to Obama's selection of Sotomayor, the wager being that the loser had to buy the first round of drinks at Fireside after the debate. And, much to my disappointment, as Charlie Rose took his seat and pulled out his notecards, the first question he popped out was to Karl Rove: will Sotomayor be confirmed? Damn. Manhattan cocktails are so expensive.

I have to admit (though grudgingly) that Rove completely swept the floor with Carville. Clearly they don't call him the Ragin' Cajun for nothing: whatever you have seen of him on CNN and Meet the Press, I assure you that James Carville is ten times more out of control and unrestrained on the live stage. So much so that he often didn't make sense, shouted incoherently, was constantly interrupting Rove and Rose with inane and immature comments, and getting completely off topic. At one point, as he practically screamed about Hurricane Katrina, he somehow got shouting about Waco, Proposition 8, and Oliver North. Justin and I kept looking at each other in total disbelief, a bit disappointed that our representative on stage was not posing particularly good arguments. Karl Rove, by contrast, was incredibly poised, confident, and intelligent, backing up everything he said with quotes, statistics, references to articles, studies, and polls, taking the time to quote directly from David Brooks' latest NYT column, Bill Clinton's stump speeches, and Obama's inauguration address. Most of his arguments, though I personally believe them to be politically flawed, were rhetorically compelling and well reasoned. Moreover, he directly addressed every question asked of him by Charlie, never wavering on the topic at hand, while Carville rambled off on tangents and rarely answered direct questions. As a debater myself, I was actually really frustrated at the lack of clash in this debate, and felt that the clear win went to Rove. I'd even have given him like a 26 in speaks. Carville acted like an overzealous but lazy freshman debater, who loves to hear himself speak but refuses to take the time to do solid research. (And I would know.)

Alors, it turns out that an auditorium full of Manhattan politicos is about as rowdy and uncontrollable as a stadium full of Irish football hooligans. I was surprised to find that, upon questioning by Charlie Rose, about half the audience aligned themselves with Karl Rove politically and half the audience aligned with James Carville -- not exactly what I would expect in a part of the country that is so famously not "pro-America." When audience members heard an argument they agreed with or thought was clever, they cheered and stomped their feet. When Karl Rove started saying that the party responsible for the catastrophic hurricane damage in New Orleans was Mayor Ray Nagin, most of the audience booed and hissed. A group of students stood up in the middle of the debate and started chanting "Torture is a war crime -- arrest Karl Rove!", and several people tried to run across the stage with hand-painted signs displaying similar messages. The whole event was a chaotic display of political emotion and democratic noise, and it really did feel like some sort of sporting event. I was just waiting for someone to throw a shoe.

I'm heading to Bliss this afternoon for a spa pedicure, then planning to meet up with some more Greenies for drinks tonight. I love this travel momentum, which is causing me to do so much more than I used to, and makes for never having a dull moment. And I love New York.

A girl who wears many hats

As I started going through all of the photos from my trip, I was amused to notice how many different types of headgear I found myself wearing in the multitude of interesting and unusual situations I was in. In fact, I decided it made for a pretty funny slideshow, especially since most hats and helmets of any kind make me look absolutely ridiculous. So here is a look back, in headshots, at the three and a half months of traveling solo that forced me to continually adapt, modify my behaviors and expectations, and, of course, perpetually meet the challenge of finding appropriate attire for the circumstance:

The first 100 days

It's taken me a little while to be able to process the complex intensity of my trip around the world (figuratively speaking) since I got home. I've been back in the U.S. for two weeks now, earlier than I had originally planned, a return consequent of a lower-than-expected tax refund and a mild, growing and grating frustration and exhaustion from traveling alone. And it's taken being back in the country I love, where the entire world is at your fingertips without going further than your front door, where there is a Starbucks every two blocks and free wifi everywhere, where everything makes sense and just fits together as nature intended, to work out how I feel about the experience of being in so many foreign places in such a short (and yet so long) period of time, processing everything in a weird sort of solitary confinement.

I have long been a proponent that two people should not get married unless they have traveled together; truly, I think you never really know someone until you've seen how they behave under the stress of being in a foreign country, a land where you don't speak the language and can't understand directions, don't like the food and never know what you're ordering, and for the life of you can't find the simplest of over-the-counter medications at local pharmacies. There is nothing like travel to help you get to know somebody, their annoying idiosyncracies, their ability to rise to occasions, their resourcefulness, their irritability, their emotional reactions and overreactions to unexpected situations. And I also believe that no matter who you spend your time with, there is always an upper limit of how long you can be in their company before they start to make you crazy. For some people, that upper limit is about five minutes; for others, it could be months on end. But you will always reach that limit eventually. All of this is just as true when you are by yourself. Traveling solo is the most concentrated and intense way to get to know your own self, to understand and observe, in a virtual social vacuum, how you feel, how you behave, how you change, how you react, how you sleep, how you move from place to place, how you have fun, how you grieve, how you digest, how you roll with the punches, how you deal with disappointment, how you teach yourself to just freaking settle down and relax. It taught me amazing things about my body, how much stress I could take from physically strenuous travel, from nights on end of sleeplessness, from eating foods whose names and ingredients were utterly unpronouncable, from being away from everything familiar to me for over a hundred days. I have never felt more in tune with my body than while I was traveling, I think because, outside of your real life, there are few of the distractions and "lurking variables" of corporal understanding. If I started to feel sick while I was traveling, I knew it was from the last thing I ate. If I was tired, I knew it was because I wasn't sleeping. If I was restless, I knew it was because my travel plans were making me anxious. No distractions, no confusion, just one goal at all times: to keep going. Traveling taught me surprsing things about my emotional well-being as well, about my threshold for social isolation (three days), my concrete limit for alcohol consumption (six Guinesses, or four glasses of white wine), my daily emotional rhythms (mornings are always rough and full of anxiety), and the way I process difficult situations and stress (a tangled mess of confusing, conflicting, emotionally-charged thoughts until I finally sit down to talk to someone and untangle all the knots). None of these characteristics were as clear to me in my previous life, when the way I was feeling at any particular time could be a result of any combination of caffeine consumption, work deadlines, relationship stresses, eating habits, financial strain, physical activity (or lack thereof), career anxiety, household chores, and, of course, lack of sleep. (NB: Okay, I hear you scoffing, so to be clear: yes, household chores do stress me out. That's why I don't do them.) But in the travel scenario, the only stresses are travel related. Remove from the above equation work, friends, boyfriends, family, chores and errands, and there's not much left except eating and sleeping. So if something goes wrong, you pretty much know where it's coming from. To me it was the most fascinating part of self-discovery, living without the distractions of daily life and putting yourself into completely foreign and unpredictable situations, pretty much not knowing how your body and mind are going to react. Startlingly, I tended to find that I was much more capable, much more responsible, much more reasonable and competent than I thought I was before the trip. As I read back through some of the blog posts that were simultaneously the most entertaining and the most crazy, I feel a little bit shocked that I managed to get through those situations unscathed. It sounds so much crazier now, looking back, but I guess at the time I had a mechanical determination to keep my head up, walk tall and with a purpose, and assume that everything would turn out for the best. And, it always did.

I will say now that one of the most valuable lessons I learned as I traveled through Europe and the Middle East was in response to a question that I, and probably six billion of my contemporaries at some point in their lives, have wondered a lot: are human beings fundamentally good, generous and selfless, or are they inherently self-interested, sinful, and bad? Given the chance to do so, would everybody rob, loot, and destroy the lives of others? Or, given the chance, would everybody choose to help, comfort or save someone else? This question gets into some much deeper philosophical concepts, those of law enforcement and mutual accountability, religion and biology, social psychology and and cultural anthropology. But over the course of fourteen weeks, traveling by myself as a vulnerable young woman, through nine different countries and a million different worlds, I could only reach one conclusion: that ninety-nine percent of human beings are good, selfless, and incredibly generous people. From Fatima in Rome to Sayed in Cairo, Gabor in Hungary and Elizabeth in Ireland, two Turkish students in a supermarket and an old Greek woman on her way to church, I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of people in this world, or at least the ones I have come in contact with, have a genuine desire to help other people. Given the chance, these people, who had no obligation to me, no relationship to me, except the common bonds of humanity, went out of their way to comfort me, feed me, guide me, talk to me, help me and advise me. It gives me a comfort I can't express to be returning home from seeing so much (and yet, shockingly, so little) of the world, with a renewed faith in humanity and the universal good of people. It's naive, of course, to feel this way in a world that is rocked with violence, indecency and injustice. I'm not blind to those things, and seeing some of these cruelties of life firsthand on my trip makes me even more upset and discouraged by them. But I am more hopeful than ever that the underlying generosity, kindness and selflessness of human beings will prevail over the evilness and madness of that last one percent. And that confidence was worth everything.

To the second point, when you are traveling alone, as if you were with anyone else in your life, spending time exclusively with yourself for long, long stretches eventually comes to a point when you get really effing sick and tired of her. You spend so much time in your own head, with no real release valve, and you only get to experience things through your own eyes, without ever having the joy of seeing anyone else's reaction or enjoyment of the same set of experiences (the latter is perhaps the most depressing part). You spend a lot of time talking to yourself, giving yourself pep talks to keep your spirits up, making lists and keeping running tallies on your budget and expenditures, people you've met and things you've done, or planning for your future, which sometimes means figuring out where you're going to sleep that night and sometimes means wondering what city you'll be living in ten years from now.

Now generally, none of this would bother me. As it turns out, I really like myself. Probably more than is reasonable, because, while common sense would tell me there are likely things about me that are flawed or annoying, I don't really see them. I am my favorite person to hang out with. Basically, I have long felt that I'm just awesome, and was never really able to shake that view for long. (Thanks a lot, Dad.) And in recent years it became very obvious that I am also a really introverted person, in the purest sense of the word: I derive energy by being by myself. Certainly I really enjoy being with other people, and I think I'm pretty social and outgoing, but those things drain energy from me, whereas lying in bed in a dark room with nothing but my thoughts is the most energizing, entertaining and enjoyable thing I can do. (What can I say... I'm just awesome). Which is why, I think, I was able to make it over three months with pretty much just my thoughts to keep me company. But even I have my limits, and after three months I was sick of the running commentary, sick of the bad mental jokes, sick of the internal monologue and the incredibly predictable yet totally irritating responses to situations, and sick of not having anyone else's voice in the conversation. It was a surprising revelation to me to discover that the difficulty in traveling alone is the same as the difficulty in traveling with a partner: over time, you just get tired of the company.

I spent my last week of the trip in Sharm-el-Sheikh, an entirely tourist-based resort town in the Red Sea Riviera. I stayed for six days, and never once left the hotel compound. I was staying in one of those huge, all-inclusive resorts, which was filled to capacity with Russian couples on their honeymoon. When I went out to the beach to sunbathe, the entire coast was packed with beach chairs, lined up in pairs as though they were about to march onto some patio-furniture-version of Noah's Ark, each set occupied by some beautiful, sunburned blonde couple holding hands and drinking pina coladas. At dinner at the hotel restaurant, I would take a seat by myself and be surrounded by these same couples, gazing into each other's eyes over lit candles and practically eating off the same fork. I was, by no stretch of the imagination, the only solo traveler there. And I didn't really mind this. My week on the Red Sea felt exactly like I was taking a long, romantic honeymoon -- by myself.

That in itself was a really interesting experience: the relaxing, romantic, beach vacation, where you're pampered and luxuriously accomodated in every way, but have no one else to account for. I had no responsibilities at all, no need to repack my bags every night or memorize train schedules, no worry about where my next meal would come from (well, actually, I broke into all-out war with the room service staff by day three, so there were occasional concerns), and no worry about whether I would have to share a room with some horrible, snoring beast. All there was to think about was how this resort, this vacation, this experience compared to my idealized fantasy of my true honeymoon, and how it compared to all of the preceding chaos and madness of my three months in transit.

God help me if my real honeymoon involves a snoring beast.

No, wait. God help him.

This really was the perfect place to decompress and try to start processing all of the overwhelming experiences and emotions of the trip. I knew at this point that I would be heading home after Egypt, having reached a point of emotional and financial exhaustion that I didn't think would make for a particularly fun African safari. With difficult choices like lying on the beach or swimming in the infinity pool, pina colada or mango martini, Swedish massage or Balinese seaweed wrap, I had the perfect atmosphere for thinking, relaxing, and slowly working through all of the complex emotional hangovers of such an overpowering trip. And by Saturday, when entrenchment had created a stalled war of attrition with room service that I knew would have no easy armistice, I was completely ready to head home. Home... America. What a crazy concept.

I knew there would be a moment, some undefined, infintesimal point in time when I would know, spiritually and emotionally, that I was back in the United States. I had no idea what it would be. Getting into an American taxi? Walking into my apartment in Boston? Seeing the Citgo sign? That moment came, unexpectedly, when I stepped off the plane after a twelve hour flight from Cairo to JFK. Taking my first full breath of non-recirculated Delta plane air, I smelled America: the sweet, rich, intoxicating smell of Cinnabon. I was home.

There were two things I wanted to do immediately when I got back to the U.S.: sit and talk with someone I know, and eat fluffy buttermilk pancakes at a greasy spoon diner (not crepes... pancakes.) I had to wait until the morning after I arrived, but I got exactly that. And from that point on, I realized that I was working with some incredible momentum from my trip, a momentum that inspired me to be social, active, and high-energy all the time. To meet new people, and make plans with old friends, and try new things and be busy and productive all the time. Not wanting to lose this momentum, I capitalized on it by making plans to hang out with friends in Boston every single night of the week, something I never used to do, and hosting wine and cheese parties and dinner parties and girls' night parties at my apartment. I packed my schedule with classes and events and social functions, and found that I was living in Boston with the same "tourist" mentality that I had lived with for the whole trip, seeing it in a different light and experiencing a dozen different sides that I never knew where there, and had just taken for granted.

In a lot of ways, it feels like my trip hasn't ended at all. (After all, I'm not back to work yet, so everything is still a vacation at this point.) I'm out doing things every day, new and different things, trying new restaurants and seing shows or sports games, or just walking around and stopping impulsively at little locally-owned fashion boutiques I never even noticed before. But mostly I'm spending a lot of time with people, friends that I know and love, people who add a new but wonderfully familiar voice to the conversation that was for so long completely one-sided. And this is why it took me so long to sit down and write a blog post about my transitional re-entry into life in America. The blog, afterall, was just an extension of my imprisonment in my own head for so long, and having reached the point of total exasperation with myself, I desperately needed some weeks of not thinking about me, not talking about me, and not writing about me. All I wanted to do was talk about someone else for a change, about PowerPoint presentations and ordering Chinese takeout -- to go out and be American, to drink Bud Light in noisy sports bars and go to cheap restaurants where I'm offered six different varieties of sugar, and to relish the fact that nothing ever looks as good as America when you've spent a long time anywhere else.

And the trip is by no means over. My African safari wasn't officially cancelled, just postponed, so I look forward to heading back to the Dark continent for that upcoming adventure in October. One of the amazing things about international travel is that is really makes you feel that the world is so much smaller, and so much more accessible, than you might have thought before. True, it was a twelve hour flight from Cairo to New York, and that's a long damn time to be on a single plane. But it used to take me seventeen hours to get from Anchorage to Dartmouth, a trip I made dozens of times throughout my four years in college. Really, how far away is Africa anyway? Why couldn't I just pack up and go? And Australia? In less than a day I could be on Sydney's sunny shores. Why wouldn't I go? I will keep updating this blog as I slowly tranistion and unwind from my trip, prepare for the changes of life going forward, and, of course, make new travel plans.

I feel not at all hindered in my wanderlust, my travel bug is still alive and well, so I will be taking every possible opportunity to travel anywhere and everywhere I can up until I start work again (and maybe after that!). But now, at least for a little while, I don't think I'll go traveling alone.

My friends in Egypt

Two days ago, to my happy surprise, I got an email from Shereen -- the daughter of my cab driver in Cairo. She was wondering, along with her family, how the rest of my trip went and whether I had returned home yet. I was so excited I replied right away, told her that I was doing well, and then asked the one thing I was dying to know from my friends in Egypt: what did they think of Barack Obama's speech?

Here is what she said:

"hi moira

i'm very happy becuse i send to you i`m fine and me family also.

thanks god becuse you are ok.

here in egypt we love Barack Obama becuse he is very simpel. do you remember cairo universty which we saw when we went to the mall? that where barack obama vist and say his speach

we hope to see you again in cairo soon, becuse we loved you soooo much

whith my best wishes

shereen"

:-)

It's a small world

In a previous post I made the analogy of traveling in a foreign country to doing your normal workout at the gym but with a much higher weight resistance. If that's the case, then this week I'm benching like 350.

My best friend Colin and I have had a lot of interesting conversations about religion in the many years we've known each other. I'm a liberal Catholic historian, he's an athiest ecologist with a Relgion minor -- there's obviously lots to talk about. But my favorite discussion was when he revealed to me his true thoughts about Hell. "If I'm wrong about the whole God-doesn't-exist thing," he said, "I know exactly where I'm going. To WalMart. A big, endless WalMart, where you keep looking for the exit, but every time you come close, more and more aisles appear. Horrible muzak is playing in the background, and if you walk up to an employee to ask for help, they just stare at you blankly and shrug their shoulders, leaving you as lost as ever. Endless, eternity, wandering around WalMart, unable to escape. That's Hell."

I've thought about that concept a lot since then, how Hell is such a personal idea for everyone, even for those who don't really believe in it. And WalMart is definitely pretty bad. But it wasn't until this week that I figured out what Hell would be for me. If it turns out that I'm wrong about the whole, well, whatever-it-is-I-believe-in thing, then I know exactly where I'm going: Cairo.

Specifically, I think I will end up in the customs and immigration line at the Cairo Airport. Let me explain: after a disturbingly unpleasant plane ride with a lot of inconsiderate and unhygenic Arab men, coughing and sneezing all over everybody (and worse, but I won't detail it here), you arrive at a large, sprawling airport complex that's dirty and run-down, hot and smelly, and absolutely packed with unwashed masses. Customs officials greet you, wearing face masks and holding metal detectors, and without saying anything begin to frisk you from top to bottom. Once this is finished, you are physically pushed into the next section of the entrance, where a line of people 400 meters long is waiting to have their passports stamped. For forty-five minutes you stand and wait, your heavy luggage on your back, as screaming children and angry Egyptians try to push and shove their way in front of you, yelling, smoking and practically brawling in the unbearably hot waiting room. Finally, you arrive to the front of the line, and hand your passport to the immigration officer. He scowls at you: "Do you have a Visa?" Confused, you start to pull out your credit card, but then -- "No, your travel Visa! You need a Visa!" Even more confused, you ask, "Where do I get it?" and he responds, "Back there! At the bank!"

He gestures to the bank that is against the wall, small and hidden, back where you first entered. Another enormous line waits in front of it. Defeated, you turn around and walk back, and stand again in an insane line for close to an hour before you are able to buy a $15 travel visa to enter the country. Then back to the immigration line, where they give you no assistance if you already waited in this line once. Another forty five minutes until you meet the same immigration officer again. He takes your passport, and your visa, then scowls at you again. "Immigration card?" he asks, pointedly. "What?" you ask. "Where is your immigration card?" he demands.

"I don't have one. Was I supposed to get one?"

"Yes! Go get one! Fill it out! You cannot enter without an immigration card!"

At this point he's yelling at you, and you're close to tears. For fuck's sake! Why doesn't anyone explain this to you at the beginning? Why don't they, like EVERY OTHER COUNTRY, hand you an immigration card on the airplane before landing on an international flight? Why don't they, like EVERY OTHER COUNTRY, have signs that point you towards the visa desk, so that you can buy it before waiting in the goddamn immigration line?

Totally pissed off, you backtrack, find an immigration card, and fill it out. Then you wait another forty-five minutes in the hot, smelly, crowded immigration line. Finally, more than three hours after your flight landed, you are allowed to pass by the scowling immigration officer, and "free" to go to Cairo. Yes, this is Hell all right. It's clear to me now that Hell for everyone, no matter your fears and discomforts in this world, has to have a Sisyphian quality to it. There is nothing more horrible than trying to do the same thing over and over, and failing each time. (Especially when that failure is due to inefficient bureaucracy.)

But Cairo hardly got better from there.

Everyone I talked to who I told I was going to Cairo told me the same thing. "Ew, Cairo. It's so dirty." Okay, okay, sure, it's dirty. It's a big city. I've been to a lot of big cities (London, Paris, New York, L.A.) and I know what a dirty big city is like. It's not great, but I can deal with it, especially if I'm staying in a nice hotel, away from the dirtiness of the city. And besides, Cairo has so many cool things to do! The busy marketplace bazaars, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Nile... how could it not be amazing?

Yes, Cairo is amazing all right. It is amazingly dirty, amazingly disturbing, amazingly horrible. In my calculations about my probable comfort level here, I did not account for the fact that while yes, I have been to big, dirty cities before, I have never in fact been to the Third World before. And make no mistake, Egypt is the Third World. Cairo is exactly like I have always pictured India -- and, for the record, for all of the reasons that I intended to never go to India. The city is so crowded, there are people practically falling over each other; dirty, poor, naked, sweaty, sick looking people. Everywhere. Being in Cairo is like looking at the world through brown colored glasses: all of the buildings are crumbling, brown and dirty, the streets are basically just dirt, the people are covered in filth, and the air is so polluted you can never see more than half a kilometer in front of you. I was afraid to touch anything, and with a heightened level of germ consciousness as a result of the global flu outbreak, I was constantly paranoid about contracting some unspeakable disease. People are shouting all the time, horns are honking, children screaming. It's like a nightmare.

I wanted to find an economical way to make it from the airport to my hotel, but with signs only in Arabic and a competely chaotic baggage claim area, it was impossible to find anything. I was approached by someone offering me a private car service, but I was really skeptical, since I figured this was just some sort of expensive scam, and I really just wanted to find the train or something. He finally convinced me to take the car ride though, since it was only twenty euro, and I figured it would be a lot more hassle to find and take public transport. I was escorted outside to a clean, air conditioned white Mercedes, which was a welcome relief from the total discomfort of the last few hours, and a pleasant looking Egyptian driver greeted me in perfect English and helped me stow my bags. It took about an hour to get to Giza and my hotel, bumper to bumper in cacophanous, dirty Cairo traiffic, a motley amalgam of jalopies, motorbikes, horses, donkeys (yes, donkeys), scooters and what they call "tok-toks," the Egyptian equivalent of a rickshaw. But as we left the airport I got a glimpse of the "public transport" system, with piles of bodies crammed into a rusty, dirty "tram" that rattled slowly and painfully into the city, people pressed up against the windows like they were in a cattle car on their way to Birkenau. I had made the right choice.

My driver, Sayed, chatted easily with me the whole way into the city, pointing out a lot of the sights, and I tried to hide my complete disgust with the city. I was basically just holding my breath until I could get to my hotel, a five-star Le Meridien that overlooked the Pyramids, where I was sure to have a nice little sanctuary of a room. Normally while traveling I can be sure of one thing: no matter how bad of a situation you're in, or how bad of a place this seems to be, you can always rise above the bad parts with enough money. And though staying at Starwood hotels is free for me, I tend to believe that the same principle applies if I'm there -- that I can escape whatever horrible things have happened or exist in this place by hiding in an upscale American hotel chain for a few days. But nothing is the same in the Third World. First of all, there is no such thing as a "nice neighborhood" here. So while my hotel was indeed pretty nice, it was, like everything else, nestled in between wide expanses of slums, with open sewers and tiny shacks of corrugated aluminum fabrication, falling down upon themselves. And second of all, there's no escaping the noise and the crowds of a city like this. So even inside the hotel it was a constant barrage of screaming, music, smoking and elbow-to-elbow pushing. I knew immediately that I would find no sanctuary here.

I had a private room, obviously, and it was relatively quiet, with a balcony that literally looked out on the Pyramids (although in between here and there was about a kilometer of slums, collapsed houses and impounded cars, completely ruining the view). But I was constantly on edge and uneasy, knowing that just outside my room were the crowds, the smells, the horror of the city of Cairo. There really was no escape from it. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. I was sorely tempted to just spend the next two days in my hotel room with the shades drawn watching CNN and ordering room service.

But I didn't. I tried to be brave. I went down to the concierge, battling a mass of wedding guests that crowded the lobby, and asked for suggestions for tours and things to do, hoping that I would find a tour company that might pick me up in air-conditioning comfort and take me around Cairo with a large group of other, equally shocked Western tourists. Apparently, though, that's not how Cairo works. The concierge explained to me that yes, there were such organizations, like Thomas Cook, but that it would cost me something like $500 a day to be a part of that kind of group. The real way to see Cairo, and the way pretty much everyone else does it, is to hire yourself a private taxi cab, who will, for a set price, drive you around town all day and tell you about the sites, sort of like a private guide. He could call and arrange this for me, and it would cost about $50 a day, plus entry to any of the sites I wanted to go to. I told him I'd think about it.

Fuck. Is that really how Cairo works? As if I wasn't uncomfortable enough, I was going to have to be driven around in a taxi cab, all by myself, with some barely-English speaking driver chauffering me? This sounded awful. I collapsed on my bed and felt utterly anxiety ridden. Maybe I should just stay in bed.

I quickly remembered, though, that my nice driver from the airport had left me his card, and told me to call him if I needed a driver for anything else while I was in Cairo. Well, I thought, if I'm going to have to be chauffered around all by myself for two days in order to see Cairo, I might as well be in a really nice car with a really nice driver. So I called Sayed, and told him that I needed a driver for two days, could he come pick me up in the morning? "Of course, Madam," he said, "I am at your disposal."

Problem solved. I laid back down and settled in for a comfy night of chocolate cake and Sanjay Gupta. (Mmm... Sanjay Gupta...)

In the morning I was awoken by the gritty and unhalting sound of Cairo traffic outside my window. The car horns, the yelling, and just the general din of big city dirtiness was enough to rouse me, unhappily. Interestingly enough, most of the cabs in Cairo have fitted their cars with customized car horns. As I laid awake in bed, I heard angry cabbies hammering on the wheel, creating unpleasant and unharmonious renditions of "La Cucaracha" and The William Tell Overture. One car passed right by my window and slammed on the horn, serenading me with a tinny version of "It's a Small World." Oh great. Now that's going to be stuck in my head all day.

I spoiled myself with breakfast in bed, took advantage of the (unbelievably crappy) hotel gym, dressed, and got ready for my day in Cairo. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I thought. Afterall, I was going to be traveling in style, and with an extremely amicable guide. When I exited the lobby of the hotel, Sayed was standing there waiting for me, right on time, and we started to walk over to the taxi. But I didn't see a white Mercedes anywhere; there were just a couple of shuttle vans and old, corroded, cheap Eurocars in the parking lot. Sayed stopped in front of one of them, a black and white Renault with rust all along the wheel wells, that was probably twenty years old, at best. He opened the door, and gestured for me to get in.

Oh my God. This is not what I was expecting. I didn't know what to say, because I didn't want to offend him, and he was so nice. Plus, apparently this is the way everybody sees Cairo, so maybe I should just suck it up and enjoy the "real Cairo"? But this car terrified me. I took a deep breath, and climbed inside. The vinyl seats were torn and dingy, and he had laid out a blue bedsheet on the side of the car where I was sitting, to cover it up. The dashboard was entirely manual, nothing digitized, not even a clock or an AM radio. As Sayed got into the driver's seat, he began to apologize. "I'm so sorry about the car today -- this is my taxi. The other car is far more expensive, and I knew I could give you a better price with this one. I'm so sorry." I felt bad for having been so judgmental, and for his embarrassment, so I shrugged and told him insincerely that it was totally okay, I didn't mind at all. (Then I quietly pulled out my alcohol wipes and washed my hands, which I continued to do each time I got in or out of the car.)

I wanted my first stop to be the Pyramids and the Sphinx, so he drove off in that direction. Along the way he stopped a couple of times at places he called "museums", but which were apparently just upscale souvenir shops run by one or another of his friends, and where I was taken around and shown all of the kitschy products, then pressured into buying something. I had to keep firmly telling the shopkeepers that I didn't buy souvenirs, but thank you, and then finally put my foot down with Sayed and told him I did not want to stop at any more shops, or "museums", just the Pyramids. I'm so sick of being asked to buy things, of being unctuously approached by Middle Eastern salesman desperately wanting to con me out of whatever amount of money they can manage. Enough. Sightseeing only.

I quickly learned, however, that the story of Cairo is of getting conned out of your money, or at least pressured into that outcome. Sayed took me to a place that offers camel rides of the Pyramids area, something I was very interested in doing (and which also appeared to be the only real way to get in to see the Pyramids, since going on foot was rather impractical), but before we got there he gave me this warning: "Always you must negotiate for a camel ride. Always. Do not pay the price they say, you will be cheated. Remember this, because when we are there, I cannot say anything to you. They will get angry with me." We got out of the car and he introduced me to the owner. The man quickly launched into his rehearsed sales pitch, telling me about the two different trips they offer, the quality of the camels, the informativeness of the guides, etc.

"How much?" I asked, pointedly.

"The small trip, it is 320 pounds."

(That's Egyptian pounds, by the way, so around $52).

I have never been in a negotiation before, so at this point I really didn't know what to do. I wasn't about to pay $50 for a camel ride, it was honestly way more than my budget allowed for, but I feel uncomfortable trying to name my own price. It always makes me feel like I'm cheating. So I went for the one strategy I could remember my mom teaching me about buying a car: take your time. Make them sweat.

I asked if I could use the restroom, and he politely showed me the back room where it was. I stayed in there (vigorously washing my hands, as there had been at least half a dozen handshakes in the last hour), for about ten minutes, hoping that this would make them think I wasn't so excited about a camel ride that I absolutely couldn't wait. (I also learned a valuable lesson about the facilities in Cairo, and will take this moment to publicly thank Carmen Olito, whose most emphastic piece of travel advice to me was "Bring toilet paper -- you never know where you're going to need it." The answer to that, of course, is everywhere in Egypt.) When I finally walked out, the owner aggressively said to me, "Okay, you ready to go? Let's go."

"No, I'm not. I'm thinking about it."

He frowned, and sat back down, while I slowly looked through the pictures he had hanging up of other camel rides with other tourists.

"No, I don't think I will go on a camel ride, but thank you," I said. "Sayed, I would like to just walk."

Sayed nodded and began to stand up, and the owner looked mildly panicked. Was I doing this right? I had no idea.

"I can offer you 280 pounds for the camel ride."

"No, thank you. I'm really not interested," I confirmed.

"But why?" he asked, apparently trying to discern whether I was being strategic or genuine.

"It's far too expensive," I explained. "Maybe 200 pounds, then yes, but I'll keep my money."

This went back and forth for a little while, me trying to hold my ground even though this entire interaction made me really nervous and uncomfortable, until we finally agreed upon the price of 220 pounds. I thought $36 was reasonable for a camel ride, so I was satisfied, and got ready to go get on a camel.

(NB: Dear readers, please heed my advice. Do not go on a camel ride if you are wearing a skirt. It creates very unpleasant rug burns. That is all.)

The camel ride was a little less than satisfying. The guide who came with me spoke pretty unintelligible English, except to at one point tell me that the reason why the bugs were such a problem for me was because I looked like a whore.

"Like a what?!" I demanded.

"Like a whore!" he said again.

I decided to give him one last chance to clarify, or to hang himself with his own rope, and he responded again: "You -- look -- like -- a -- whore."

I have no idea what this guy was trying to communicate to me. Was this lost in translation? Was it meant to be a compliment? Did he actually think it was appropriate to tell a woman she looks like a cheap prostitute? Regardless, I spent about ten minutes verbally abusing him until he (maybe) got the point, and apologized. I felt better after that. All of my frustrations about interacting with poor English speakers came out on this idiot asshole for calling me a whore.

We rode our camels (well, he was on a horse) through the streets of Cairo for a short distance, passing unwashed children, covered in flies, running through the streets practically naked and playing in rancid street water by the side of the road. I was so thoroughly disgusted, I couldn't contain it in my voice as I spoke to the guide, who turned out to be just as obnoxious, aggressive and irritating as all of the Turkish men I had met (and, though I didn't know it yet, all of the Egyptian men I would later meet). But the real kicker was the fact that this scene of urban nightmare didn't end once we entered the Pyramids area -- the entire place is actually covered in trash. Wide expanses of desert, completely littered with garbage. Plastic bottles, hamburger wrappers, lipstick tubes, aluminum beer cans. A UNESCO World Heritage site, a 4,000 year old archaeological gem, totally trashed. The guide explained to me that this was because of the winds and the sandstorms, which made it virtually impossible to really clean up the area, but whether this was true or not I didn't care. It was disgusting. We stopped to take some photos (you'll notice that Egyptians are really, really into "perspective" shots: "Look, you're as big as the pyramids!", "Look, you're squishing the pyramid with your hand!" which I think are really stupid and embarrassing. But there you go). But then I just wanted to go, so we took the camels past the Pyramids, past the Sphinx, and then back into the dirty streets to return to the camel shop. For the last ten minutes of the ride, the guide incessantly pressured me into giving him a tip, explaining that if I had a nice time, I should "make the guide happy" and give him some money. Over and over again he told me this, obviously not getting the point that I don't tip people who call me a whore, until we arrived back where my taxi was waiting.

I thought it would be a straightforward matter of just paying the owner, but I had another thing coming. I used the restroom again, then was told to come into a back room (very far back, and full of tiny little glass perfume bottles -- weird) where we would "discuss the matter of payment." What the fuck? So I sat down, was offered a glass of tea, and then was joined by another man who I hadn't seen before, who sat on the couch across from me. He gently told me, "This is our office, this is where you pay. But please, just relax and enjoy your tea." I had a really bad feeling about this. So, trying to be a prudent girl who is acutely aware of her surroundings, I demurely avoided taking a single sip of tea. I just blew on it for about twenty minutes, pretending it was too hot to drink. What if I was about to be drugged and robbed? Or raped? Or kidnapped? Better not to drink anything you didn't see prepared.

We chatted, this guy and I, about his growing up in Cairo and Egyptology and Barack Obama. (I asked him why he liked Barack Obama, and he explained: "Because he is African -- like me!" I found this really surprising. Do Egyptians really think of themselves as African? Like, in the same way that Obama is? And is that why they like him? How interesting.) Then I just bit the bullet and asked, "What exactly are we waiting for?" "Nothing," he said, "just for you to finish your tea, then you may pay at your leisure." Oh. Okay. "The price we agreed upon before -- outside -- was 220 pounds. Yes?" I inquired, somewhat nervous. This man hadn't been around for the negotiation out front.

But he nodded his head. "Yes, 220 pounds, that is all." Okay. Maybe this wasn't as weird as I thought. I paid, exhaled, and was very, very ready to leave this place. Before I left the man wanted to give me a gift. "A gift?" I asked. "Like a real gift?" He laughed, "Yes, it will be free. Don't worry." He picked out one of the little glass perfume bottles from the back, wrapped in fancy tissue and cotton, and handed to me. "To remember Egypt," he said. How nice. I thanked him quickly, then ran out of the shop. Once more the guide tried to hassle me to give him money, even as I was climbing into my cab and shutting the door, until Sayed yelled at him in Arabic to leave me alone. And we were off.

But where to next? I was really, really feeling sick of Cairo, and Egypt, and didn't even have any desire to see any more of the sights. I told Sayed that I was quite tired, and could use a nap, so maybe he could just take me back to the hotel. "As you wish, Madam," he responded, politely, "I am at your disposal." On the way back we talked about the camel ride, the museums, and my impending trip to Sharm el Sheikh. He told me about his job, and about his family. "I have two daughters. You remind me of them!" he said. "How old are they?" I asked, and he told me: "Twenty-three and twenty-one. They are both in college, here, at Cairo University."

I don't know what I was thinking at that moment. Maybe I was succumbing to the feeling of isolation that had been building up for the last couple of days, maybe I was hearing Rick Steves' voice in my ear about experiencing countries through the locals, or maybe I was just curious. But I blurted out: "I'd like to meet them!"

Sayed looked at me in the rear view mirror, surprised and a little flattered. "Really?" he asked, "You would like to meet my family?" I thought for a minute. "Yes," I said, "I really would."

He took a few minutes to think about it, smiled, and then said, "You would like to come over for dinner tonight?" This was not exactly what I was expecting, but as I considered it, I had the thought that I have had so often on this trip when strange possibilities arise for me: why not? Of course I said yes, I would love to have dinner with his family, and we arranged for him to come back and pick me up at 5 o'clock to take me to Shobra, a suburb about 5 kilometers north of downtown Cairo.

And, right on time, he came to pick me up. He informed me that because of traffic, which is always horrific in Cairo, the 5km trip to Shobra would take about two hours. But that was okay. I had brought my headphones, so I plugged in my phone, turned on a relaxing Matt Nathanson album, and just laid back to enjoy the ride, observing visually, though thankfully not aurally, the chaos that is driving in Cairo. A little over an hour later, we arrived at his mother-in-law's house in Shobra, where his daughters and wife had been spending the day, and they stood waiting for us on the sidewalk. We pulled up and the three headscarved women climbed in, introducing themselves to me in turn with broken English. The oldest, Sharee, had just graduated from Cairo University with a degree in Social Services, but was currently working as a pharmacy assistant. Her sister (whose name I can't remember, and probably wouldn't be able to spell anyway) was still a student, studying Education and hoping to be a schoolteacher after graduating next year. The mother spoke no English at all, but smiled a lot and nodded vigorously as the three of us girls chatted in the back of the car.

Another half hour later we came to their home, an apartment building as shabby and uninhabitable as one you might expect to see in the projects in Queens. Maybe worse. It was an exercise: there have been a number of times on this trip where I have had to learn to work really hard at not letting my face convey my reaction (usually strongly negative and surprised reaction) to things that are... shall we say... unexpected. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. I had been in Cairo for a day at this point, I knew what the city was like, and I hadn't imagined that life for a cab driver was going to be particularly luxurious. I just didn't really know what to expect, I suppose.

We climbed up the stairs, unlit, grungy, and falling apart, and came to the fourth floor and the door of the family's apartment. I took a breath. But once inside, everything felt totally different. It was like walking into a cozy, three-bedroom apartment anywhere: clean, well-appointed, comfortable and friendly. Nothing about it screamed "Third World" the way the entrance had; a result, I imagine, of the fact that landlords here must have no incentive to keep up the common areas of buildings, but families such as this have a strong incentive to keep their homes nice, and maintain a pride of ownership as well.

So here I was. In the Cairo apartment of my airport cab driver, talking with his two daughters about city life and boys and dating, flipping through his wedding album, drinking hot tea. It was surreal. I definitely didn't feel like a tourist anymore.

I asked the girls what it was like in Egypt, and as a Muslim woman, meeting boys and dating. They explained that they were not allowed to see boys alone, in private, so there was really no such thing as "dating." Mostly you meet boys at school, or maybe at your work after you graduate, and if you like each other then you might sometimes hang out -- but both of your sets of parents would be there. Dinner at his house, maybe dinner at your house, but you would never be alone together. Then, if he really likes you, he'll "engage to you."

"With diamonds?" I asked mischievously.

They laughed. "Sometimes, yes. But we like gold. Just plain gold."

Sharee's little sister, the college junior, was apparently getting quite serious about a boy as of late. They had met in class a year ago, and had met each other's families, and hopefully he would "engage to her" after graduation. I asked how much time they had spent together, and she explained that they talked a couple of times in class, and had had dinner together (with their families) three times, in the last year.

Three times. Three dates. And they were considering marriage. Whoa.

When her father left the room, Sharee leaned in and told me a little more about the boys of Cairo. "They are not all nice boys like hers. Actually, most of them are not nice. Sometimes they act like they like you and want to be with you, and say really nice things to you. Then if you meet them somewhere alone, and kiss them, then they are done with you. They change their mind. They don't like you anymore. None of us knows why."

I just nodded quietly. Yes, indeed. Les hommes sont les hommes...

And that, apparently, is why the girls of Cairo have no problem adhering to the tradition of not meeting with boys alone until they have been vetted by their families and "engaged to them." Sort of a winning strategy, right? Then you know you're not just being played. But how could you really know someone after just three dates -- dates in which you weren't even allowed to have a private conversation? How could you know them enough to commit your entire life to them? You win some, you lose some, I guess.

I don't think I have ever been treated with such hospitality as I was in Sayed's house. I got the impression that they thought I was some sort of movie star or something, the way they treated me with such deferential pleasantness, almost reverence. It was slightly unnerving, to feel like I was perceived as some sort of royalty. In retrospect though, for these three women, it must have been really strange to have me there. Some red-haired American girl, in what they might have thought were "chic" Western clothes (but let's not kid ourselves, folks, my travel wear consists mostly of cheap chinos and unflattering button down shirts), who talks really loud and really fast and is traveling around the world all by herself, staying in five-star hotels, and just happens to be in Egypt this week. I must have seemed like a pretty shocking character. They didn't say anything about it, they just acted like a movie star had randomly come to visit their apartment, and I tried to act as normal and un-movie star as I could.

After browsing through photo albums for half an hour, we sat down to dinner in the main room of the apartment, which served as dining room, parlor, TV room, and laundry room. Dinner was delicious: stewed beef with tomatoes and green peppers, and a rice and pasta mix that was incredibly tasty. The girls joked about the dinner serenade of the "Cairo Symphony," the unharmonious clamor of car horns honking, donkeys braying, and cab drivers yelling in the street below. In the middle of dinner, one of Sayed's other children (he has four), his youngest son, came home from his job at a nearby body shop. He was nineteen, tall and dark, but with a face that made him look closer to twelve than twenty. He looked like someone who had just worked six shifts in a row, and without saying a word to anybody, marched straight to the wash room to have a shower. The girls just laughed.

When we had finished dinner, and I had thanked Sayed's wife profusely for the great meal, although I'm not sure she understood me, we sat around and had Turkish coffee in the main room and Sayed and I planned out my next day: a grassee matin, an 11am pick up, then a tour of the Nile by boat and a trip to the Egyptian museum, before heading to the airport. He was preparing to get up and take me back to my hotel, when the girls started talking very fast, pleading with him in Arabic. After a few minutes of what I assume were negotiations, he consented, and then informed me that the girls would be coming with us, since there is a great mall over in Giza, and if he was heading that direction anyway...

I was totally delighted by this. I wasn't ready to stop talking to the girls (cross-cultural insights about men and dating fascinate me) and I thought it would be great to see what an Egyptian shopping mall looked like, so I asked if I could tag along on the shopping trip. Of course! they said, and we all piled back into the car, this time with younger brother as well, so it was a bit cramped in the backseat.

On the way to the mall, Sharee's cell phone went off as she got an incoming call from a friend of hers from work. The ringtone? "It's a Small World." I was so surprised I almost choked. This Egyptian girl, a young Muslim woman, wearing ultra conservative, heavily-fabricked clothing, complete with a headscarf, who had never in her life been outside of Cairo, much less her home country of Egypt, and whose family didn't even own a television until two years ago, was advertising herself, trademarking herself, with what I might consider to be the most representatively Western song you could come up with. Disney, capitalism, corporate America, the English language, things that are so annoying they get stuck in your head and make you want to shoot yourself -- all concepts that I so strongly associate with the United States, and which seemed so far from this girl's world that I balked at the incongruity.

But this song felt like a multi-layered allegory as I listened to it in tinny monophony. Wasn't the fact that this song had made its way from Burbank, California to Shobra, Egypt, manifesting itself through a technology that probably came from somewhere in Cupertino, then South Korea, before coming to Cairo, evidence that it really is, indeed, a small world afterall? Wasn't the fact that here I was, a backwater girl from Alaska with a little bit of money and a whole lot of time, sitting in the back of a cab in Cairo with two of my Egyptian counterparts, sharing a musical moment that took all of us back to vague memories of our childhoods, an indication that the world is really just as small as our own backyards? As different as we were from each other, and as shockingly different as Cairo was from any of my previous life experiences, I had to wonder at this point how different we really were. After all, at a certain point, we're all just girls, texting and talking with our girlfriends, going to the mall to buy clothes, fighting to unravel the mystery of boys, and ultimately find our place in the world. This very, very small world.

The Cairo Mall turned out to be nothing particularly special. Equivalent to the kind of cheap suburban mall you would find in a not-so-great neighborhood in the U.S., with no-name stores and bored teenagers popping their gum at the cash register. It was like the Northway Mall of Egypt. (Sans Orange Julius, which I really always felt was that mall's sole redeeming quality.) But there was a little ice cream stand, and, having not had dessert back at Sayed's, I brightly suggested that we all get some, my treat. The girls refused, I think because they were made uncomfortable by the offer of having me buy them something, but little brother didn't seem to have any problem with it at all, so I bought two chocolate ice cream cones and handed one over to him. I took a bite of my ice cream -- it was delicious -- and then glanced over to see that Sharee was giving me a really weird look. I asked her if everything was okay, but she turned away, and instead started speaking rapidly with the ice cream guy. He looked at me and laughed, and gave her three napkins, which she in turn handed over to me.

Alors. I guess my messiness while eating is something else that transcends all language and cultural barriers. I wiped my face while Sharee giggled, and then continued to haphazardly enjoy my tasty, tasty treat. Maybe they didn't think I was such a movie star anymore.

After about an hour of browsing, trying things on, checking price tags, and quiet bickering, little sister finally found a skirt that she wanted and that was affordable, and we headed back outside to meet Sayed by the parking lot. We piled into the car once more, and drove to my hotel.

What an incredible night. What a crazy experience. I felt like I learned more about the world, about traveling, about culture and family and life, and about myself, in this one night than I had throughout the whole trip. (That may be an overstatement, but I was really overwhelmed at the time.) As I stepped out of the car and prepared for re-entry into the world of luxury travel and Western life, I hugged the girls, exchanged email addresses, thanked them extensively for showing me such a great time, and, quietly, thanked myself for being ballsy enough to go through with this wholly rewarding experience in the first place.

The next day was another lame day in Cairo. We went to the Nile so I could take a ride in a faluca, a traditional small riverboat, which was really just an opportunity for me to see from another angle how dirty, polluted, and poor the city was. There were impoverished masses living on the riverbanks in tiny, hollowed out boats, washing themselves, their laundry and their animals in the river water. A small tire factory was situated on the banks, churning out big plumes of black smoke and visibly dumping what was probably hazardous waste into the water. My romantic images of tall, white sailes cruising down the blue Nile with swaying palm trees in the background was nothing like the reality of Cairo. I was just even more disgusted.

And the Egyptian museum was... I'm not really sure how to describe it, actually. Very heavily guarded. ("What do you think they've got in there, King Kong?") The Egyptian museum was, to me, a poignant lesson in imperialism. Having been to the British National Museum just a couple months ago, the Egyptian Museum gave me the distinct impression that the British left for the Egyptians only those items that they weren't particularly interested in keeping for themselves. Aside from the (pretty breathtaking) King Tut exhibit, everything else was a watered down or lower quality version of the artifacts you could find in London. It made me sad, but also just annoyed with Cairo for being lame, dirty, and not worth the hype.

Finally, I was ready for the airport. Please God just let me get out of Cairo. Sayed drove me there cheerfully, letting me stop on the way to get a hamburger at a Carl's Jr. that I saw in passing. (Sometimes it's really weird which American businesses you find in certain places. When I was in Vienna I walked by a Midas brake shop, the only time I had ever seen this business in Europe, and was totally stupefied. Why would Midas exist internationally in the first place, but why would they exist in Vienna and nowhere else? Not in Paris, or Rome, or London? Then on the Greek Island of Paros I saw The Body Shop, the only non-Greek store on the entire island. Why The Body Shop? Why not the Gap? McDonalds? Starbucks? And here in Egypt, we frequently passed Carl's Jr. and KFC, two restaurants that I hadn't seen anywhere else on my travels. Why? A mystery.) As we approached the airport, I realized at some point I was going to have to have the uncomfortable conversation about payment with Sayed. We had never actually talked about a price for his chauffeur services, and since he did so many additional things for me, I was a little worried that this was going to be a very expensive price tag. I really didn't want to have to negotiate with Sayed, since I was both exhausted from haggling everything, and since I now considered him a good friend. But I also didn't want to get completely robbed, because I was still a girl on a budget. So I sweated it out in the backseat until we arrived at the domestic departure terminal. He got out and started pulling my bags out of the trunk, and I decided to bite the bullet: "I think 600 for two days, is that good?" as I started to pull out my cash. He nodded quietly and said, "That is up to you. I consider you as one of my daughters now. My third daughter. It is entirely up to you."

I was floored. Whoa. His third daughter? That's pretty heavy. And incredibly flattering.

In earlier conversations I had learned that Sayed's apartment costs 350 Egyptian pounds per month, and that he typically makes about 800 pounds per month. (I often ask people questions about their lifestyle, especially cab drivers, because they are surprisingly happy to talk about it, and because it gives me a really good gauge of what life is like in the place I'm visiting. Eight hundred pounds is about, oh, $130.) So I felt that 600 pounds was more than fair, I didn't think that I was cheating him or that I was being robbed.

I paid him, kissed him on both cheeks, thanked him for showing me a wonderful (cough) time in Cairo, and went to board my flight for the exotic resort town of Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea Riviera.

Goodbye Cairo!

A day at the beach

Warm blue water, light ocean breezes,
Mango martinis and red sand beaches.

Just another day in paradise!

In a galaxy far, far away

The trip to Mos Eisley was much shorter than I expected. When we met our captain he boasted that he could make the kessel run in under six parsecs, and he was as good as his word: just eight short hours later on the overnight bus from Antalya, we arrived in this bustling, otherworldly spaceport.

It was clear from the start that this planet was like none other I had ever seen before. A vast landscape of moonstone and lava rocks, every dwelling was carved into the rocks that rose up from the ground like bizarre, conical stone teepees. As far as the eye could see, there were miles of these caves, nestled in valleys of red and black rock created by volcanic explosions five or ten million years ago.It was early in the morning when our transport arrived, and the sky was just beginning to lighten in the East where the sun was starting to consider getting out of bed. I hadn't slept all night, (the regulations in this galaxy don't seem to prohibit smoking on transports, and I had chosen to eschew the express service, meaning we were perpetually stopping along the way to pick up other travelers), and was wondering if I should try to find some lodgings to get some sleep. Standing outside a local cantina, I was approached by a surly looking local, who enquired as to whether I would like to come inside for a moment and have some apple tea (a local specialty). I consented, hoping a warm drink would help me get my bearings. As I sat there, the man asked me how long I would be staying. "Just two days," I replied, "then on to [Alderaan] Istanbul." He recommended that I take a ride in an airship that morning, to enjoy the panoramic views of the area, something I had heard was very popular in this part of the world and was intending to do tomorrow. But he insisted: "You are already awake now, no sense in waking up early tomorrow too!" I thought this was a compelling argument, and anyway he could arrange for the airship pilot to come and pick me up from there in forty five minutes, so it seemed like a good idea. A couple glasses of apple tea later, I climbed into a People Mover full of other tourists and headed to a nearby field, where they were preparing our airships for a sunrise launch. The trip was not disappointing: seeing this planet from the air was breathtaking, and I was constantly awestruck by the incredible and implausible geological formations. Miles of cave dwellings, pigeon houses, towers of rock carved into deliberate looking shapes by hundreds of years of wind and water erosion. I have never seen anything like it. Certainly it is like nothing that exists on my own planet. I wondered if perhaps I had landed on a small moon on some undiscovered part of the universe.Our convoy landed many miles away, and celebrated our safe and beautiful trip with some champagne and cookies (the breakfast of champions). I was then taken back to a small hotel nearby, a family owned inn with eight quaint rooms carved into the rock of one of those imposing stone towers that filled the landscape. But there was no time to sleep -- after a quick hot shower of thermal spring water, I was picked up and taken by landspeeder on a full day tour of this great planet. A vacationing American couple and I were taken by our tour guide, Mehmet, who was a local and had actually been born and raised in a small cave here, and told us all of the stories and secrets of the area. (For reference, this guy also later offered me $400 to have sex with him. Yeah. Ew. Way to go, Turkey.)

We travelled around the valleys and canyons just staring out our window at the amazing "fairy chimneys", these impossible looking rock formations that give this area of the world it's distinctive fame. It was beautiful, and so weird, so alien to everything that is familiar to me, it was hard to know how to react.

The area was a hideout for persecuted Christians during the first centuries after Christ, and the mountains were full of labrynthine caverns that once housed hundreds of families, small churches devoted to St. Simon (of course), some even with their original wall paintings still preserved inside the cool, stone chambers. We walked through these old houses, (more like apartment complexes, really), to see how they stored and cooked their food, where they slept, and what life was like hiding from the advancing Roman armies. We toured a factory that specializes in the production of beautiful, handmade rugs, and I even got to try my hand at making a small piece of one. There were many opportunities to try the local food, like tomato mint soup and creamy rice pudding. Later in the day we visited a family that has been making porcelain and pottery in a small workshop for over four hundred years, and who then fairly aggressively tried to push us all into buying something to take home. (I had to explain very firmly that, as a backpacker, it really was impractical for me to buy something porcelain to carry around with me.) Later we came to the home of a kind of strange, old hermit, living out past the Dune Sea. It was a long trip in our landspeeder to the isolated area, and dangerous as well. On the way we frequently came across those most dangerous of enemies: sand people! But the banthas were no match for our landspeeders, and we sped past them to meet the old man living in this wilderness.

At the end of the day I was obviously exhausted, having not slept in about 36 hours, but was totally excited at how I had spent this first full day on a new planet. The next day was another tour, although thankfully we had a different guide who did not solicit me for prositutional services. She took us on a two hour hike through the Red Valley, where we had the chance to climb into some of the "pigeon houses" that were carved out to provide a place for pigeons to leave their droppings, and for local farmers to come and collect it later to use as fertilizer. Then, the crown jewel of the trip, was a visit to the Underground City. During times of all-out seige of the Christians here, the entire community would retreat to this Underground City, a sort of Helms Deep of the Byzantine times, sometimes for months at a time. Again carved out of the soft volcanic stone that penetrates hundreds of meters down into the earth, this city contained eighteen floors of houses, passages and rooms. Archaeologists here estimate that 2,500 people could have lived there at once, along with hundreds of horses and other animals kept in the underground stables. We got to climb all through it, down winding stone staircases and through dark, narrow passageways into living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and pantries that served hundreds of hiding refugees. It was really crazy, and felt like something out of a dream. There were even military defense mechanisms built into the complex: as you walk down spiral staircases, you notice that there are long, narrow holes carved into the side. Once you get to the end of the staircase, and look around the wall, you see that there is a large stone wheel on the other side, with a hole carved into the middle. If the city dwellers were being chased by invaders, they would run down the staircase, then quickly roll the stone wheel into the way so that the staircase was no longer passable. Using the small hole in the middle of the wheel, they would then shove spears and arrows at the invaders, killing them from the other side of the stone. Very Indiana Jones.

So that was Capadoccia. A crazy, bizarre, dreamlike and otherworldly place that I couldn't possibly compare to anything else I've ever seen. I've never been to the Grand Canyon, and maybe that's pretty cool too, but I seriously doubt anything in the world, geophysically, is as cool as this. (It is also, for the record, where the first Star Wars was filmed.)

I think the concept of geological tourism is interesting though. Instead of coming to visit a place for its culture, or history, or because of its recreational activities, you come just to look at what God and nature have done to it over the course of thousands of years. Actually, this is a nice way to see the world, to just sit back and gape at the amazing things that exist with no help from anyone else.

From Capadoccia I took another long overnight bus to Istanbul. Actually, the overnight buses are not that bad. Certainly not as comfortable as an overnight train, because there are no beds, but the bus system in Turkey is something they take very seriously. All of them are clean, comfortable air-conditioned coaches with reclining seats, and, although people do occasionally light up when they need a nicotine fix (this problem gets worse and worse the farther East you go, both with the ubiquity of smokers and their lack of consideration for others), by and large the ride is very comfortable. With the right mix of music and sleep drugs, you can actually have a reasonable night on one of these.

I did not, however, plan to have enough time in Istanbul to really explore it. We arrived at 6am, and after two hours of hassle trying to get into the city with a pair of Kiwis who were visiting for ANZAC Day, I wound up at a hostel that happily let me store my bags for a couple hours and go out and explore the city. But I needed to be at the airport at noon to catch my flight to Cairo, so that left me minimal time to visit just the top sights, take a quick picture, and then ramble down to the other areas of town. A lame way to be a tourist, and I didn't particularly enjoy it. But I was starting to get really sick of Turkey at this point, specifically, Turkish men. God. They are ridiculous. Just walking down the street, they will call out after you "What's your name?!" or "Wherru fromm?!", two questions that I am so freaking sick of right now I would be glad if no one ever asked me that again. I hate that they just start asking you those questions without any introduction or conversation at all. They just see you walking and yell at you. For a while I would be polite and stop and talk, but it became too much after a couple days in Antalya, because it's everyone. Dozens, hundreds of Turkish men, constantly yelling at you to stop and tell you their name and where you're from. And whether you do or not, as you walk away they will yell after you again, "You want my phone number?!" Most of them don't even speak English! For Pete's sake, you don't even speak my language, what kind of interaction do you expect to have with me?!

Oh. Right. That kind of interaction.

Gross. I hate them. I am so sick of it. At this point I mostly just ignore them, but sometimes it's really hard. If you sit down by yourself for one minute, a man will come and sit next to you and say "Wherru fromm?". So if I'm in a position where I must respond to this question, I just say, "Turkey." They then give me a very perplexed look, and are disarmed just long enough for me to quickly get up and walk away. If I must continue talking to them any longer, I just respond with the same word over and over again: "Turkey."

"Wherru fromm?"

"Turkey."

"No, really? What's your name?"

"Turkey."

"What?"

"Turkey."

"How long you be in [Antalya/Goreme/Istanbul]?"

"Turkey."

Sometimes I mix it up by adding different inflections to the world. "Tur-KEY!" or "Turkey?" or "Tuuuurrrrkey." They get fed up with it pretty quickly, laugh uncomfortably and then leave me alone. But I hate being hassled so much all the time. I hate that I can't sit alone somewhere and just have peace and quiet. They are like mosquitoes, constantly buzzing around you, mostly harmless but whiny, horrible, irritating and unfazed. You can swat at them as much as you want, but they will always return, usually in greater numbers. I actually can't wait to get back to a country where the men ignore you in favor of watching a football game. How nice would it be to go a whole day without being asked for random sex by a gross, sleazy Middle Eastern guy?

So three hours in Istanbul was enough. It was time to get out of Turkey, time to get something new. Besides, I had a lovely Starwood hotel waiting for me in Cairo, and after two nearly sleepless nights on a Turkish bus, I was ready for a Heavenly Bed.

To Egypt!