Me, Ramsis, Trains, and Egypt

Another trip back to Alexandria after a week of work in Cairo. A metro trip to Ramsis station. Another sad look on my face watching the marvelous steel ceiling of the station being shadowed by an ugly steel structure that destroyed the beauty of the irreplaceable old structure. Huge columns of welded steel boxes that will apparently be covered later in a completely out of context marble cladding.
An urge inside me to take some photos of what is spared from the ongoing “renovation”. I got out my camera and started roaming the station looking for good angles and shots, something of a rarity after all the small ugly book booths and other meaningless plastic cubes scattered around the station. People bearing the usual sad Egyptian face, the smell and roar of the diesel engines pulling the renovated yet still old carriages. I’m suddenly stopped while taking some photos of workers trapped in a huge cage of scaffolds creating an interesting texture of horizontal and vertical lines.
An “undercover” nformer in civilian clothes asking me for my I’d and giving me this look as if I made a huge crime. I was thinking not another place in Egypt where you need a permit to take some pictures, an addition to a growing list to the list of such places which now seems to be almost everywhere. I’m dragged from one officer to a higher ranking one until I found my name being logged in the station’s police outpost’s log book for taking some freakin pictures! Or “elteqat magmoo3a men el sowar bedoon tasree7″ as the undercover agent kept saying. I was surprised by the amount of informers all over the station wearing civilian clothes. I signed in the log and went to platform 3 to get on the 1919 9:00pm train to Alexandria which was now due in 10 minutes.
As soon as I get in my seat happy by the fact that my chair was next to the window. A place that I prefer over the isle chair cause I can rest my leg on the little area between the chair in front of me and the wall. A woman starts arguing with her voices getting louder with every word. I assume my usual state in the train, headphones in my ears, book at hand, completely oblivious to what’s going around me. It’s been a while since I decided that I don’t have to listen to the dumb arguments going on around me.
The woman’s voice was still getting louder hitting a very high pitch at points to the point that I stopped doing what I was doing, pulled off the headphones and waited for this crab to finish and choosing not to look at her like all the passengers in the car are doing now and wearing a disgusted face looking out of the window watching the train now moving out of the station.
All the conductors now gathered in the isle with their supervisor calmly watching the situation and standing in the little space in front of the chair next to me.
The woman kept blaming the guy who booked her the tickets for booking her on the 9:00am train instead of the 9:00pm trying to throw the ball on one of the train’s conductors to find her a solution and sticking to her chair not permitting the guy who’s supposed to sit in her place, and who’s interestingly calm throughout the fight. The lady and her daughter finally decide to move to another carriage where they found her empty seats after making the child sitting with his mom across the isle from where I’m sitting start crying and making me wish they charge her double the fare for the seats she got.
As soon as I thought the fuss was over, music starts coming from somewhere to the front of me. I raise my head and see that two laptops are on on the other side of the isle. I decided that the music was coming from the laptop two rows to the front and stood up and politely called the guy and running the conversation in my head to let him either stop the music or put some headphones on and not start yet another fight, a completely normal consequence of asking anybody in Egypt to respect your personal space. I was surprised by the woman in front of me and telling me that it’s actually coming from her phone and quickly turns it off. Not five minutes later I start hearing an old tune by Amr Diab whom I have nothing against coming out of some other asshole’s cell phone in the back. I concentrate to figure out where the music is coming from and to my surprise I found that it was coming from the seat right behind me! The dude must’ve heard me asking the woman to the front to turn the music off and started to think that he’s only doing this to bother me, still didn’t prevent me from asking him to turn off his music too.
Rested my head on the seat and started paying attention finally to the book at hand. 10 or so pages later, the sounds of a football match starts coming from the previously wrongly accused laptop dude in the front watching a replay of the Ahly and Zamalek match which just ended an hour or so ago. I decide that this’s too many people for me to solely handle and ask the conductor to ask the guy to turn his speakers off, the man says that he can’t ask a passenger to turn his speakers down and if it’s bothering me I should ask him myself! Getting himself out of the trouble of dealing with another snappy passenger after the woman’s incident in the beginning.
Furious, I immediately step up to the laptop dude, spending a lot of effort trying to prevent myself from punching him in the face and managing to speak as calmly as possible, speakers off, round three won.
Back on my seat again, I start thinking that Egypt needs a solution, incidentally the title to the Fahmy Howaydi book I’m reading.
I put the book down, knowing that there’s no solution, and fall asleep.

So Why The Fuck Am I So Bored?

Fianlly, after 40 days at the freakin army, I get a vacation. You'd expect I'm spending it all out hanging out with the guys and having fun especially that the first day of the vacation was new year's eve but for some reason, that isn't the case.

By the way, before you read this to the end and then discovering that you've just waited some precious time reading what a depressive whiny dude is blabbering on his blog then just leave now cause this post isn't meant to be informative or useful at all, it's just a way for me to let some steam out and/or try to see what the hell is the problem here.

Maybe its my depression kicking in again, but somehow, I'm avoiding leaving home and I'm pinned to my laptop watching videos about UFOs and conspiracy theories and checking my e-mail. At the end of every goddamn vacation I take the same decision that the next vacation I'm not going to stay at home at all even if I'm just going to roam the streets alone doing nothing, but let's face it, that's not exactly "having fun" either!

The way I see it, there are more of a couple of reasons why I'm feeling this way. First of all, I don't really have "friends" here. I do know some guys but I'm just avoiding calling anybody for some reason. At the end, all we're going to do anyways is just sit at some place have a cup of coffee and consume half a pack of cigarettes and laugh a little. Maybe that's all you need, but I don't know, may be I'm expecting too much, but that kind of stuff doesn't really amuse me anymore.

The second reason is I'm on a limited budget, and I just hate it. Me just spent like three quarters of my allowance -I know its a shame to admit that at 25 I'm still getting an allowance, but, I'm in the army now, how the hell am I going to get money anyways?- fixing the goddamn car. You might say that thats a good cause, but do you think I'm using it? Actually my bro is the one who's using it and he's the one who ruined it in the first place and believe you and me, I have no idea why the hell did I have to spend money fixing it... I don't even have a driving license -which according to Ahmad, is why I'm "not allowed" to drive it- fuck it.

Anyways, I barely have enough money to get the stuff I need in the army so I'm choosing to stay at home instead of having fun which for some reason, always seems to require spending cash.

I've been saying for a very long time now that I need a girlfriend. It's moments like these that you'll know why people still get married, cause loneliness is fuckin unbearable! I wish they invent some pill for that or finally develop the technology for having some kind on a virtual girlfriend gizmo that you put in your pocket and when you need her you just press a button and -as my orientation year english language teacher used to say- voila! she's there. I bet ya that when they invent such a device you're going to see a dramatic decrease in the number of marriages.

I'm a No. 4

You Are 4: The Individualist

You are sensitive and intuitive, with others and yourself. You are creative and dreamy... plus dramatic and unpredictable. You're emotionally honest, real, and easily hurt. Totally expressive, others always know exactly how you feel. At Your Best: You are inspired, artistic, and introspective. You know what you're thinking, and you can communicate it well. At Your Worst: You are melancholy, alienated, and withdrawn. Your Fixation: Envy Your Primary Fear: To have no identity Your Primary Desire: To find yourself Other Number 4's: Alanis Morisette, Johnny Depp, J.D. Salinger, Jim Morrison, and Anne Rice.

What Number Are You?

First Impressions...

First impressions: nothing seems to have changed much since the last time I've been here, but starting to talk with anybody you immediately see that everybody is angry at everything, everybody says that there's no money, poor people are getting poorer and rich are getting richer. From my personal experience, people are becoming more blunt in asking for tips, bribes to be accurate. Tips are what you give to a waitress, but every where you go people are asking your for money to do what they are actually required to do, and when you give them what you think should be enough they look at you like an alien or something and tell you "e7na mesh bnesh7at ya basha", the get the fuck out of my face! The only solution with this kind of people according to my brother is to "eddaken" -derived from the famous word "dakan" coined by Marwan Nabarawi and meaning "to be dakeen" or "to exercise dakan on others"- and treat everybody like shit, which seems to be working with him quite well. According to Ahmad's theory, all Egyptians are cowards with really loud voices and as soon as the feel that you're capable of doing them physical damage the back off, and if you are not convinced here's a story...

Two days ago I was sitting with Ahmad and one of his friends on "gawharet stanely" a nice little place on stanely corniche, when suddenly from the far end of the street, and this was around 3:00 am, a little white car with a guy and a girl which was being chased by two other cars filled with guys, the white car stopped right in front of us and the guy came to us followed by the girl who we found out that she was actually his wife and they were being followed by these ravages and asked us for help, as soon as we stood up and looked at them -since they were still at the middle of the street waiting to see what we're going to do!!- they disappeared! The guy and his wife still obviously traumatized from the experience.

Back to my first impressions:

Trains take almost an hour more to reach Cairo than they used to do, and they're not getting any cleaner too but are still dependable, at least their departure times are accurate!

The best news paper here is "el dostoor", although I heard much more about "el-masry el-yoom" but it didn't rise to my expectations, but el-dostoor is just full of good material from the beginning to the end. I spent three hours in the train reading it!

Everybody is trying to rip you off, even your family. Money seems equally capable of pulling families together -as long as there's something for everybody- and tearing them apart -as soon as one of them knows how to rip the others off and go undiscovered-.

Unveiled women are a minority, especially in Cairo, and especially in Cairo University where I saw only 5 unveiled women, and i paced the whole campus that day, twice. What was even more interesting was the amount of girls wearing the saudi-type abaya or wearing the niqab. I have also seen the weird new types of hijab, the spanish hijab and the latest advancements of the "sexy mohaggaba" which now appears to allow for short skirts, and extremely tight clothes that I doubt even unveiled girls dare to wear. But so what? Isn't her hair covered?

An old observation that still holds: no craftsman does what he's required correctly or faithfully, and in many cases doing something faithfully meant nothing more to him than cutting a piece of textile horizontally instead of vertically!

Egyptians still don't understand the concept of "queues" or even "numbers". I was happy to find that my favorite place for a coffee in Alex, the "Brazilian Coffee", has got a face lift, so I went inside to get a cup of cappuccino and I got a computer print-out with my order and a number, till now everything was fine but thats until I discovered that you have to push through all the people standing on the counter, give your ticket to the person making the coffee -who by the way is the complete opposite of what a customer-friendly people-serving person should look like or behave like-, tip him, and then of course shout a little with the occasional re-arrangement of the crowd in order to allow the lucky fucker who got the coffee to pass through spelling half his coffee in the process. A fuss that could be avoided by simply sticking to the FREAKIN NUMBERS ALREADY PRINTED ON THE FREAKIN PIECE OF PAPER!

Of course I was so frustrated that I decided to go back home on-foot, a 50 minutes walk on the corniche that ended in an awful cold that hit me for four days -thanks to our locally manufactured antibiotics that seems to do nothing and indeed according to doctors here does absolutely nothing-.

A lot of people are getting either engaged or married, and even more are doing the opposite. There's so much stupid things that happened with a lot of people I know that I really care about when they got married that I'm going to write about later.

Everybody is expecting a "change". The government is aware of it and is spreading its forces and tightening its hands on everything in anticipation. Security in Alexandria is not tighter than ever according to everybody here.

Everywhere smells like urine!

I know some of these observations might sound stupid to somebody who's been living in Egypt for a while, but I hope these don't become the norm.

My Last Post From Saudi Arabia

With 18 hours left, I think this is my last post from KSA. The only major thing in my life that didn't happen here was being born. 25 years, with all it ups and downs, happy times and sad time. I went to school here, I graduated from college here. All my friends and memories. I admit that I wasn't the best friend and I truly appreciate the few of that kept up with my weirdness -especially recently- and I hope they will always remember these times because my brain is doing its tricks again and all of my memories from school are already lost and of college already fading.

It is hard to leave the place where you've lived for a quarter of a century especially if you're leaving for a place thats totally new and much more complex, but after 25 years here I've decided its enough. I know that a lot of people will not fully understand my choice especially that I'm leaving a great opportunity here -according to almost everybody in Egypt I have discussed this with- for getting an M.S. degree -which I have already started- but some point during the past two years it stopped being about getting good education and became an issue of personal development.

A lot of people like living in KSA, my folks love it here. But circumstances changed a lot since my dad first came here almost a year before I was born but yet a lot of stuff also remained exactly the same. My folks may like the slow rhythm of life, every day here is almost exactly the same as any other one, nothing major ever happens, the perceived lack of troubles etc. But living in such a place for so long makes you awfully aware of the emptiness of such life and of the limitations to how much you could grow. I feel that at 25 I have missed a lot of experiences in life -but I only have myself to blame for this since it is I who chose to come here in the first place- and the choice I have is either continue living here and hide from the troubles or face it right on and go back to Egypt and try to finally reach the emotional and social maturity I'm sure I'm never going to reach living here. This issue became so important to me lately -and it should- that it overthrew everything else from my priority list even if it meant the suspension of my post-graduate studies and even the probability of not ever completing it.

Every time I go to Egypt in the summer I spend a couple of weeks in a sort of "cultural shock". Life there goes so much faster its hard to keep up with. Stuff that happens in one day there could be spread over a whole month here. The number of people you have to deal with on day-to-day bases triples or even quadruples, and its not only the number of people, but also all the different types of people that you have to deal with. I feel that I have to be on-guard 24/7. Everybody recognizes from the first moment that I'm from the gulf area "khaleeg" somehow -well, not somehow, I know its obvious :)-. Its a weird situations, how much should I give the taxi driver, who and how much should I tip in a cafe. The money stuff alone is enough, your perception of the value of money totally changes when you live in Egypt. The price of a cup of coffee in a coffee shop here could keep you full for a whole day in Egypt, but I admit that the only cheap thing in Egypt is food! Clothes are way more expensive in Egypt.

I'm going to miss studio-1 FM, I'm going to miss mishwar's shawerma and of course "Ganoup Modern Cafe". And of course I'm going to miss all my friends here who were the only reason I kept on going this far without suffering from a mental break down and making it that much more bearable. Thank you Naji and Jawad, you'll always be my best friends. Thanks to all the people from the diwaniya who during the past two months helped me -maybe without them knowing- get out from my summer depression phase. Thank you Ali, Faleh, Basil, Rashid and everybody else. I know I've been a little weird in the beginning but it was out of my control, ask Naji about it. Thank you Muthanna, Dodo, Sherbini and Noami. I'm really sorry I had to go without telling you but it has been awfully hard for me and I know that you will understand, someday. You were and always have been my closest friends. Thanks to Tawfiq, whom might be surprised to when he knows that I'm leaving KSA, you've been my safety valve and always been a joy to be with in my lowest moments. Thanks to all my friends from kfupm, to Khaled, Ali and Ehab and all the crazy things we've done together, you were the only people who I've been so close with from my college years. To Faisal, my fashion advisor, to Ahmad Bukhari, to Abdulhakeem, Abdulkareem, Said and Alaa. And to Bukhari and Alaa especially since I'm going to miss their weddings.

Thank you all. And wish me luck.

end note: after settling in Egypt I'm planning on writing about the experience of living in Saudi Arabia for so long, all its ups and downs and good and bad things, about the people and the country. It is after all a unique experience, with people from all over the world, I don't think that living in Egypt I would've met people from all over the World, to appreciate the difference between a Syrian and a Lebanese. I've me and been close friend to people from all over the arab world and have been exposed to their cultures and this is one of the greatest experiences of living in Saudi Arabia.

I've always wanted to write this down in a book. I've even chosen the name of the book: Esm Ommak Aih - اسم امك ايه. classy, huh?

1000 visitors

My blog reached 1000 visitors today, a huge milestone for me considering I've been writing for only a little more than a month right now!

I started finding out about blogs after reading the report on the events of the 25th of May, 2005 and for the first time I thought that I could be part of something that is in no way under the influence of our outdated leaders -or so called leaders-, something thats purely Egyptian and by people who carry hope for a better Egypt. Luckily, this coincided with me getting a DSL connection and the nearing of my final return to Egypt from my exile and I started reading everything like crazy and I fell in love with it and decided that I have to be part of whats happening.

I have chosen to write this blog in English for a couple of reasons, and no, its not because I'm that guy with the American accent because I admit it right here that my English accent is not that good but its comprehensible at least. And although I love the American accent I've always hated people who think they're cool because they talk in English. The main reason is because I could type up to 40 words per minute in English plus my laptop's keyboard doesn't have Arabic letters and every time I have to write something in Arabic I have to open the windows "On-Screen Keyboard". The other reason is that I think that there are a lot of people who are writing in Arabic who are far better and more experienced than me. And when it comes to writing in Arabic the style is really important cause I discovered that in the blog world you could get bored from a post really fast, I think that most people wont read this far in this post either! But do you write in "fos7a" or in 3ammeya or in the arabic-english style, its just a huge burden, besides, I've always thought that I could express myself much more clearly in English because its a "primitive" language, its not a fancy language at all, not as much as Arabic at least.

Another main reason is that if I write in Arabic, I know that only Arabic speaking people will read it, and since I'm an advocate for reaching the "other" I thought that English will do the trick, and it did. People who read my blog, according to my statcounter, come from almost all over the globe, and mostly from Europe and the States, I even have people from Chile, Iceland and Korea accessing my blog! How cool is that?

Anyway, I have to thank everybody who visited my blog or left a comment, thank you all...

The Uniform

Sometimes to change from the inside you have to change from the outside.

All Egyptians now know that their country is being controlled by a few corrupt figures whose corruption spread through the entire community that corruption has become the new norm. But, knowing the problem is still only half the answer, an answer that is becoming increasingly difficult, how do you save the country?

Every time I watch an American high school on TV in a movie or a series I feel that I missed a lot of things. The school I have been didn't make us wear a uniform, but thats something we had to fight for every single year until a couple of year after I graduated they finally won and made it compulsory. I have never understood the reason behind the school uniform and short hair. Why do they want everybody to look the same? The image that comes directly to my mind when I see uniformed schoolboys in the street now is that of a military school with an oppressive authoritarian figure on the top of it, somebody screwed enough in his head that he hates everybody else to the extent of ruining their individuality and personality. Brainwashing, we are all being brainwashed, just like the Nazis brainwashed the Germans we're slowly being brainwashed into thinking that we should obey our leader and not question him, we are being taught to be all the same and not to think for ourselves because authorities know whats best for us, even in what we wear.

To me, school uniforms and short hair is a sign of oppression as anything else. I believe that schools is the ticket to solving all of Egypt's problems. Maybe American schools are not much better than ours only because they have colorful well-printed textbooks or because they have chemistry labs that rivals those in our engineering schools, maybe its because their students are taught to think for themselves and to ask questions, they're not given answers they're required to look for them and this is the foundation of scientific research that our government thinks that only by building labs we're going to produce science.

Their students have a "student governments" and these are not the "top students" the 4.0 students who well automatically be assigned to these position just because they study hard -the Egyptian model-, no, they are elected, and this is the foundation for your democratic country.

It all starts in school people. And schools are not the tables and the chairs and the textbooks, schools are much bigger than that. Schools are where we learn to be people, to learn, to tolerate the other.

I had a very close friend in primary school called Zein. Zein's mother was Australian and he himself looked very much Australian too, and this was his mistake. Just because he looked different everybody automatically hated him, just because he doesn't fit in their built-in image of what a normal person should look like and because we were all taught to look the same -I'm not talking about the school here cause I already said we didn't have a uniform, its the image by society of what a normal person should look like, and if you don't get what I mean go out to the street and see for yourself how 90% of the people look almost identical- because they were all taught to look the same he was treated like a freak!

This post is running long, continue later...

I'm Che Guevara Goddamnit!

Check out the results of my "Famous leader test" at similarminds.com

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

More results coming as soon as I get them! By the way, I DO have a picture of Che in my room! Freaky huh!

AlJazeera International

I just love it. Put aside all the prejudice everybody has on the Arabic Jazeera channel, this is something completely different, I guess. It is so well presented, very professional, I especially love the show . There's simply no better looking channel with this diverse and wide range of programing that are shown -or yet to be shown- broadcasting from an arab country. I love the way it looks too, very clean, very smooth, with thier news band at the bottom much less prominant and annoying -and actually similar to that of the BBC's- than thats of their Arabic version or of Al-Arabiya's for example -don't you just hate it?-. It looks very professional and mature that I don't believe it just started less than a week now.

Having such professional and well-known -to the western audience at least- presenters such as Riz Khan sir David Frost, I just loved his show "Frost around the world" is such and intelligent move on their part, this would give them much more credibelity to a western audience than say, another Al-Qasim talking in English.

I know its still too early to tell, but if you could judge a book by its cover, then I'm willing to put all my money on it. Now we do have a channel specifically made for channelling our point of view to the west, weather al-Jazeera is the best person to do so or not is yet to be seen but at least its a start.

Things I Hate

I hate when our Imsms talk about if cloning is allowed in Islam or not when we don't have a single scientist who's working in that field -applies to a lot of other stuff too-

I hate it when windows gives me an error message with only one button saying "ok"

I hate it when there's nothing good to watch on TV

I hate the lumps of undissolved of powder milk at the bottom of my coffee

I hate that a decent cup of coffee in any cafe now costs me more than 10 pounds

I hate to cut my hair, I hate going to the barber, even better, I hate my hair all together

I hate it when a bearded dude thinks that he's a better muslim than me -gross generalization-

I hate it when I walk on the streets and nobody's smiling anymore

I hate that everybody thinks that there's nothing going right these days and they're doing nothing about it

I hate people who drive insanely fast

I hate people who drive painfully slow

I hate cars I'm never going to be able to buy

I hate the fact that my little brother doesn't have fun at school anymore

I hate people calling TV or radio shows and asking "momkin asharek?"

I hate people who talk on TV and radio until the presenter asks them to stop

I hate that nobody respects time anymore

I hate anybody who says that "the Insider" is a good show

I hate Kazem El-Saher and anybody else who sings in "fos7a"

I hate the lack of green in my city

I hate anybody who thinks that he's better than all the others

I hate that I wasted too much time doing stuff that I didn't really like

I hate not pursuing my talents to their fullest extent

I hate actors and actresses who think that they perform art to convey a "message"

I hate not being able to speak my mind out loud

I hate being afraid

I hate hating so many things in my life