hugging the imaginary Sphinx

blood on the tracks...

my shoes got a little bloody...



yeah!!!!!!!!!

... and then there were bones...

christmas trees vs goats (part 1)

Eid al-Adha was yesterday.

It was hard not to think about New York, and all the christmas trees laid out for the slaughter in the weeks before Christmas. only here, the slaughter is literal.

And now the internet won't let me upload any more pictures, so the streets running red with blood will have to wait another day....

CIB involved in unsafe mating practices.

Aside from the fact that the slogan "confidence breeds success" seems more appropriate for a stable than a bank, its hard for me to trust in Confidence's animal husbandry skills when the bank's entire computer system has been down for 2 consecutive days.

This would be the point in the post where i link to an article explaining Confidence's apparent inability to coax Success into fruitful copulation, but that would require a newspaper to consider this an important enough setback to write about.

I mean, shouldn't this be a vaguely big deal? Considering that Egypt is an almost exclusively cash economy - with major transactions literally being conducted with paper money - the inability of the largest private sector bank in Egypt to dole out cash ought to be news. What if i was supposed to buy a house today? I'd be fucked, that's what.

Whatever, i guess if your vision is as concise as "To be the best financial institution in the Middle East and Africa by 2020," you needn't worry too much about the small details of actually being able to give people their money.

nomadic misopaidea

Ugh. I want to write about Egypt, i really do. But there's a problem.

In Korea, i had nothing to lose by fixating on the bizarre and the different. Korea was not my home.

But home intimates normalcy, and if i want to 'live' in Egypt, to actually unpack, (if only for a while) - it means ignoring the differences that before would have intrigued, upset, and infuriated me. i can stay here as an abject foreigner, observant but uncomfortable, or i can try and let a little go, for the sake of actually living somewhere in the present for once.

Basically, its hard for me to justify expressing all the subjectively peculiar things i see without accepting that I'm just a nomadic misopaidean, (a 'hater of cultures', if my Wikipedian Greek serves me correctly) or an accursed nostaphile...

This is, I've realized, why i had such a hard time writing after returning to New York City. It wasn't that i didn't have anything to say, but rather that the admittedly acerbic humors of differentiation began to feel a lot less funny or meaningful as they began to hit closer to 'home.'

Or to put it another way, i began to appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase "don't shit where you sleep."


That being said, i would like to briefly point out that Egyptians seem to sweat a lot...

from their butts.
Maybe everyone does this. Maybe the real story here is that i notice it. Clearly it's irrelevant to anything, and even i can't come up with a good way to make this representative of some broader cultural distinction.

But you know, its been on my mind. And its good to be back.

Alexandria Zoo

This tiger was not happy... i'm still trying to decide if the handlers were genuinely nervous, or whether this was some sort of elaborate show meant to edge on the tiger for the sake of onlookers. Wouldn't be too surprised either way...

Can someone please tell me why the video quality always sucks once i upload to youtube??? i have more, but i'm too disheartened by the degradation of quality (the degradation of the animals, not so much.)

what $361.50 can get you in Alex...

not exactly the most profound of returns...

Egypt hasn't changed. Lee and i went back to my old neighborhood last night. They're building some sort of amphitheater on the grounds of the old ruins next to my house, and my old doorman was nice enough to sneak me in.

more to come...

destroying the Home-myth

Let us approach travel as dualistic, defining it by what it is not. Travel is, most importantly, not being home. This is to say, travel can be differentiated from Nomadism in that there always exists a 'home' from which one has left, and to which one will presumably return.

(In the modern world, travel is usually Defined by Home; one leaves for a set, usually predetermined, period of time, wherein one is 'traveling,' and then returns.)

It is clear that Travels' significance derives from it's foreignness. One can only recognize foreignness (and therefore travel) by having a frame of reference - here 'Home'- for which to make comparisons. Like movement in general, foreignness is relative; we need the fixed road to determine speed, we need Home to determine Other.

But here we reach a problem, because Home is conceptual, a thing we carry with us in our heads.

Whereas velocity is measured by fixed, physical constants, in travel we are comparing the experienced with the remembered - two unstable and subjective sources of comparison.

A concept of Home is multi-faceted and holistic- it is composed not only of location, but of relationships, smells, events, memories, - in short, a collection of unverifiable 'feelings.'

Travel has always been viewed as an opportunity to evaluate and take stock of these collected Feelings, which together may be said to compose a "Home-myth." Travel, simply by putting distance between oneself and the Home-myth, changes it's dynamic, forges doubt and introspection. Like seeing a map of a familiar place for the first time, The Home-myth from a distance reveals previously unknown problems, values, and truths.

In small doses this distancing is inarguably healthy. While the lucid nature of the Home-myth
makes it fragile, a week or month of traveling is hardly enough time to force a shattering.

But prolonged travel causes something else to happen. First, the concept of Home, like anything held in the head, becomes faded, altered, changed. Second, people back home die, get married, and grow in ways that render the concept flawed, no longer a representation of the still-there, but rather a memory of the left-behind.

Time and distance make the Home-concept cloudy, while change renders it inaccurate.

And here the problems begin.

With the original Home-concept fading, the constantly traveled person struggles to find new frames of reference... new ways to judge the newly foreign he encounters. Suddenly, the references for locating foreign become prior foreigns, and travel takes a step towards Nomadism.

But if travel has the effect of unveiling the Home-myth, then further travel acts to paradoxicaly unveil the Foreign-myth without displacing one from the foreign. The effect is a forced state of detachment. Foreignness gives unfamiliar objects meaning - it defines them as other and lets us relate to them, whether that be in joy or disgust. But unmasked objects just present themselves, like photos without captions. The constant travel cannot judge what he sees, and so travel degrades to mere movement.

This loss of the Home-concept is neither tangible nor abrupt. It is an inevitable, gradual forgetting, a process where the familiarity of the original Home-myth is replaced by a familiarity with the foreign, but without the motivation (or ability) to internalize it, to transform it into un-foreign. TO accept the foreign as normal is to accept a new home.

But travel, as we have already said, always has a return in mind The foreign must remain foreign, internalization prevents return. What could be worse than returning to that faintly flickering memory of Home, only to find that YOU, that YOUR concepts of normal, changed more than hers?

Internalization in movement equals Nomadism, in stagnation it is expatriateism. There is no middle ground.

what have we learned?

...next question.