Week 7: Near Death. yours and mine

Congratulations me, I finished my diving certification.

I'm not going to lie; I've been freaked during all of the classes. Each of the classes involved some kind of panic attack on my part.

Last Friday, I "learned" the remaining necessary skills needed before our open sea dive. This translates as I faked one of the breathing skills, and was taught the rest of the skills by an Egyptian pool boy with no English speaking skills.

Quite obviously, come Saturday's open water dive my confidence was high.

I arrived an hour before my dive mates and waited. The water was choppy, the current was ridiculous, and the visibility was zero until 2 meters below the surface.

We were motored out past the bay on this dingy wooden boat, which handled the waves by throwing us from one side to the other.

I'm pretty sure the instructor, Mahmoud, decided he had enough of being in charge that day and spent most of his time focusing on sitting on the bow smoking, then yelling "Yala" (Let's go) and "Be Strong!" at random times.

A friend* who is a certified dive master tagged along to make sure I didn’t die. He kept trying to go through safety protocol, like "Hey guys, check your gear, make sure it works," "If you get lost, look around for one minute, then surface," and "Do actually know how to swim at all Megan? My god, you’re going to die."

Every time he started a sentence Mahmoud would drown him out with a "Yala, Yala” and throw in a "Be Strong" here or there. I heard about four words of my friend's safety instructions. Clearly, when things malfunction while I'm submerged in 8 meters of dirty salt water, all I need to do in order to breath is be strong, then Yala it to the surface.

Mahmoud is the diving equivalent of an Evangelical preacher or faith healer.

No Food? Jesus will provide. No legs? Jesus will Carry you. Herpes? Jesus has a cream for that. No air coming through your safety reg? Be Strong!**

We all eventually tumble into the water. No surprises here; Dody's vest isn’t quite working and his normal regulator isn't allowing air in. Mahmoud yells and disappears below the surface leaving Dody struggling against the tide. Finally the little risk-taker is all set up, breathing off of his safety regulator instead of the primary one. He and Ziyad grab the rope leading down to the contingent of divers below and disappear.

Suddenly, it's time for me to follow. I'm the last one left on the surface. Being me, I can’t even eat a meal without spilling, I don’t know why I thought could manage myself underwater.

Of course my mask leaks and my fin falls off in less than a minute. My highly trained response was to flail around for a little while and swallow some salt water.

A pretty good sign that I will likely die.

The divemaster friend gets me outfitted with a better mask, Mahmoud's below the surface signing to everyone to "be strong,” and I’m off.***



To be honest, the underwater museum was meh. The historic points were all chunks of ruins, indistinguishable from the chunks of rock surrounding them.

Still, it was pretty awesome, mostly because I felt just like I was the little mermaid. Which as we all know, wearing a seashell bra and communicating with crayfish has been a longtime ambition of mine.

Now, if only there were some underwater musical numbers or actual marine life in Alexandria my dream would finally be complete.

It was exciting all the same, and though I am poorly trained and am as likely die while diving as I am playing with cleaning solvent (chances of death are high on both counts given I eventually try to eat everything), I am certified.

It's time to start flashing that C-Mass card at networking events and see if I can't land myself a nice power-broker.



*I wasn't sure how to handle names on this site, I don’t know who would care about me using their name in the blogosphere, so my rule of thumb is this. If your blog is on nomadlife, I will use your name. If you don’t have a blog, I'll refer to you by stereotypes based on nationality (its racist in me, can't help it) or defining characteristics (ie. Kate = this one girl I know who won $50 in a pole-dancing contest)

**Fuck you Mahmoud. I'm sorry it had to be said. Oh, and girls don't like to be looked up and down then told they need a bigger weight belt because "While you are small, I think you weigh alot. Yes, you are small but heavy."

*** I have no proof of this. I was on the surface ignoring the divemaster telling me to go back to the boat and forget diving. That’s what I envision was going on down below, Mahmoud, sly little bastard. (Some divemaster you are, Aussie! I’m American, we don’t quit just because it’s highly unsafe and we have no idea what we’re doing. Have you ever heard of the Bay of Pigs, chump!)


Story Two, I witnessed a kid get run over by a bus. We're not sure whether he fell off the bus, or stepped off the sidewalk and the bus ran him over. But his foot was definitely swollen. The street vendor who dropped his tray and rushed to watch, walked back a few minutes later to pick up all the donuts he dropped under the wheels of the bus, put them back on the tray, and sell them. Oh, Egypt

Never good at goodbyes

Hey, I left without telling any of you.

Sorry about that, I guess I'm half-assed living every ugly middle school girl's fantasy about moving without saying anything at school and have everyone feel really bad that they didn't invite her to the popular kid parties.

That or the one daydream where our unrequited crush saves us from a terrible downhill skiing accident, and we ride the ski lift down together cuddling. What? That was just me? Oh.

Anyway it's all going down at

activeculture.nomadlife.org

Biting into the Upper Crust

So I have officially moved to nomadlife.org, an elitist little project started by Dody under the veil of "keeping in touch." It has now morphed into something the State Department uses to keep tabs on us Salaam Trainees.

Don't worry Condoleezza, your government provided health insurance remains untouched by me.

Either way, I'm moving up a step in the world of blogging fame by actually allowing people who aren't my parents to know the URL.

Hello Nomadlife! I hope you're ready for daily posts listing everything I've eaten so far that day and what I hope to name my future babies. (Pendleton!)

City Limits

This weekend's activities were mostly inspired by lack of sleep, rooftop sunrises, sing-alongs and long talks. All these things sound lovely as long as we leave out the details, so that's what we're going to do.

In actuality it was a tough and emotional weekend for me, but it had some worthwhile moments.

On friday afternoon I embarked on a metro adventure.

the rules are: get on the Metro and just go. We picked the blue line, and headed out of town. My friend told me to count the number of stops from Sadat (our stop) to Shubra (the end), I gave him the option 1 to 10; he picked 9.

Around stop number 7, a young Egyptian with limited English approached us and said "I think you are heading the wrong way."
How do you explain to someone you got on the metro just to go somewhere? That you have no idea what kind of neighborhood you're heading to and you don't really care?

We didn't bother. We just told him it was okay, and asked his name.

We got off and started wandering. In Cairo proper people are jaded, they see tourists all the time, and to them we are walking dollar signs. It's all about the profit. Out in Koliet El-Zaraa we were the only non-Egyptians there. Little kids ran up to us and asked us our names, where we were from, if we wanted to play. Everyone said hello and no one tried to sell us anything. At one point one man laughingly shouted "tourists" in Arabic after us as we climbed a unused rickety overpass leading no where.

Eventually we found a little concrete loading dock along the Nile. We sat down next to two boys fishing and watched a few older girls gut fish, while their male counterparts worked on a partially constructed boat.

The young fisherman offered to let my friend borrow his rod, and one of the girls came up to ask our names, and tried to force cigarettes on me. My favorite part is that was I wasn't smoking, and it's atypical for Egyptian women to smoke. I wonder where she got the cigarettes from; since it's unlikely they were hers.


About 5 yards away, 70-some people were loading themselves onto a river boat and a large sailboat. Women boarded the river boat, and the men climbed onto the sailboat. As the boats filled up and the dock emptied, the sailboat took notice of the two white kids sitting along the Nile. One guy started waving, which led to seven guys waving, which led to someone pulling out their taba (an Egyptian drum) and starting up a call-response song for all twenty of them. The boat was singing to us.

I watched the riverboat pull the sailboat across to the opposite shore of the Nile.
There were two teens swimming in the Nile, which you do not see downtown. The Nile is filthy. One of them started talking to us, you could tell he was making fun, everyone else was giggling. A lot of people tried joking with us. The intent was evident, but the punchline was lost on the two foreigners who spoke twenty words of Arabic between them.

Eventually the riverboat came back, still dragging what was now an empty sailboat, and I would've liked to ask where the men had gone, but with no language, there was little chance that we could've figured it out.

It wasn't until later on when I was recounting my day over dinner that I realized it was the first time I've been in Cairo and seen people engaged in an activity that wasn't selling me something. In the immediate Cairo, everyone is a vendor of everything. I had forgotten that boats are made somewhere. It served as a nice reminder.

Week 5: Extreme Sports, I guess.

Dody is an Indonesian with a knack for convincing me to take up extreme sports I'm bad at as hobbies and Ziyad, is a Moroccan who dances straight out of John Hughes' movies, and only understands one-eighth of the things I say. (In my defense, Wisconsin, I've taught him the 'Boo.. Hiss!' How's that for cultural assimilation?)

Since meeting these two people, my weekends have gotten exponentially more interesting. I've been introduced to the Egyptian late-night equivalent of "make-out point" except it involved more veiled girls silently staring out at the city and sexually frustrated men holding their hands than the USA version. Oh, and poor children selling flowers and raver glow sticks. You don't see that at America's make-out spots. I've eaten the head of shrimp, beans in a sauce of cheap oil, sat bitch in a car while 4 men over the age of 25 sang along to All for One's "I swear", they knew every word to the second verse long after my middle school memory failed me, took horse riding lessons where the 'gentlest' horse in the stable totally kicked my ass, ran the Alexandrian cornice at 7:30 a.m., got stale shit-ridden toilet water splashed on my heels courtesy of a three hour bus ride, slept in a office chair with no arms and ate really good mango ice cream.

This weekend they talked me into their latest adventure- Scuba Diving.

I don’t know if you know this, but Scuba Diving is scary.
The first two hours of the lesson consisted of some very simple points of information.

If you hold your breath your lungs will explode.

If you go down too quickly your sinuses will explode.

If you rise too fast, your lungs and sinuses will explode.

All in all, it sounds pretty fabulous doesn't it? While completely terrified, I'm also extremely excited at the idea that I can walk around and flash my scuba diving certification to men at parties.

"Hey there handsome, you want to dance with a girl who can breathe regularly and evenly, ensuring the necessary amount of oxygen reaches her lungs at even intervals?"

Okay, maybe it won't be as useful as I thought.

At least I'll be able to see the ruins under Alexandria. I might be sobbing with fear and trying to claw off my suit while submerged in 16 meters of dirty salt water at the time, but there will be a decrepit lighthouse!

A little bit of jungle in all this concrete

I spent last night sitting in a room, giggling with people whose only link to each other was they had all met me at least once, and they showed up when I invited them out.

At 3:30 a.m. everyone dispersed from the host's house, and I found myself walking home on what is usually the most crowded square in the city. But, at this early in the morning it was deserted. There are few green things in Cairo, but this block has an amazing climbing tree. Whenever I travel outside the city, I am always surprised by how amazingly fertile the Nile is. Over time, you forget what vegetation looks like, just like you forget that there are constellations somewhere past the light pollution.

But at 3:30 a.m. in a city of 22 million people, there was nothing. It was just us, three police officers and this tree. My friend stops and laments, and just stares longingly at the tree. Eventually we start walking again and the police officers flag us down. We don't speak Arabic, they have guns. It always makes me a little uncomfortable. Eventually through some gesturing on their part of binoculars and some climbing pantomime from us, it's been worked out- we can climb the tree, if they can watch.

Within minutes I am in the branches of one of the few trees in my neighborhood, and it felt good.

There I was, 50 yards from the Egyptian museum on a sidewalk usually packed with more than a hundred people, gripping bark and breaking twigs as I scramble to get just a little higher, and all I could think was "only in Cairo."