You Can't Make Mistakes

These are just a couple of little unrelated things that happened this week which made me smile, or wonder, or both.

Giddyap

It is pretty common to see guys walking up an down at intersections selling flags—as well as hats and wigs colored like the Egyptian flag—especially around the time of a big sporting event.

I saw something this week, though, that I couldn’t make any real sense of.

There were guys, in several different parts of the city that I wandered through, selling great stacks of cowboy hats. I don’t know what that is all about. Though, I am tempted to buy one whenever I see it and then give it to a guy with a donkey cart. It would start a new trend, which would be sweet.

Gold-Digging

Picking one’s nose in public is very common here. Walking to the metro today I started counting the number of fingers in noses that I saw. By the time I reached my destination, I had counted 47.

200 Pounds

Walking into the Metro station I pulled my wallet out to get out the tickets that I had purchased earlier in the day. Without my noticing, a poorly secured 200 LE fell to the ground. I turned around because I heard a guy yelling, “Ya Captain” after me. He had my 200 Ginay in his hand and was waving it at me. I took it and thanked him profusely. He smiled.

Now, 200 LE is about $40 (US). Not a lot to lose, really, but still kind of a lot. For Egypt, though, its a lot. There are people in this country who make 200-300 LE a month. Not to mention that if the same happened in the States, no one would have said anything.

It made my day.

Victorious!

We won our doubles game this week at pool. I was thrilled. I played, strangely, very well in that game. It was nice for a change.

Shiny Keys

Have you ever noticed that after a while, the keys on your keyboard get shiny? They are being worn down by your fingers, of course, tap tap tapping away on them.

Usually it takes years for this to happen to me. I have had my current computer for a mere two months, and the keys are already starting to shine. I can attribute this to several possible causes.

1. I am writing more. This is good for me, as it hones my skills.
2. I am typing in the command line more. This is also good, as it hones my skills.
3. My keyboard is crap. Obviously, this is bad.

I will go with the first two and leave the last one to pessimism.

Sleep Schedule

I have been having a terrible time sleeping on any kind of reasonable schedule recently. I stay up way too late working on things or hanging out with people and then get up late, and so on. I decided that I needed to do something about this and had planned to start forcing a correction in my sleep patterns.

Then I realized that my sleep schedule is actually perfectly optimized for returning to the United States and being on an early-morning, get-work-done type schedule. That means: no jet-lag. Fantastic. I am not going to change a thing.

Watch out Amreeka. I will see you at 6 am.

“Clang, clang, clang went the hammer…”

It seems, and do keep in mind that I live in a relatively well established residential neighborhood in the middle of the city, that there is continuous construction around me. I can look out my window and see no less than nine new apartment blocks being constructed. More to the point, moments ago, I awoke—again—to the sound of a hammer pounding on something in the alley. This means that someone is getting a new railing on their balakon or closing it off altogether to extend the space in a particular room. What amazes me though is that it seems to be happening all the time. Except in the early morning hours, which is, thankfully, when I sleep.

Continuous construction is a major theme in this country though. I remember a a few years ago when I came to Cairo for the first time. There was the city, there was the Ring Road, and there was the desert. Now it is very different. Past what used to be the edge of Giza—which used to be mostly sand and hills, there is a sea of red-brick as far as the eye can see. This only subsides when you continue further out toward the desert highway and you can see the Pyramids to the south. Here now, instead of sand, is even more development. This used to only be home to a gigantic swath of palms. Thankfully, the continuous construction hasn’t damaged or encroached upon the palms, but they are very cozy neighbors.

It is like this in every direction as well. The city keeps expanding in this way. There are little suburbs that are set up—like 6th of October City to the north-west of Giza—and then blammo, before you know it the space between what used to be the city and what used to be a suburb is eaten up by new construction.

Back to downtown, buildings are getting taller. I live in a relatively short apartment block. It has only six floors. Those around us, though, average about eleven to twenty. This is one of the shorter parts of the city. Not for long though. Shorter buildings are always being torn down to make way for taller. On a street adjacent to mine, I noted over the course of several days a lovely two story villa being torn down and the lot upon which it had stood being cleared out. It stands empty now, but diggers and cement trucks are soon to follow and likely a 15 story apartment block will be erected in its place.

To further demonstrate a point that I made earlier, note that I just referred to my district as “downtown.” Mohandessin and Doqqi used to be considered suburbs of Giza. Now the whole thing is referred to commonly as Cairo, which doesn’t really help anyone know where they are.

The one major saving grace of the city is that there is a great deal of green-space within the city itself. The medians of many of the streets are planted with trees and low palms. There are huge parks and clubs dotted throughout the city. I live next to the Shooting Club, which is situated next to the Ministry of Agriculture facility. Both take up several city blocks each and are filled with trees and other plants. The net result for me is that my apartment overlooks a giant green-space which stretches almost all the way to the river.

Now, this is not to say that most of these spaces are publicly accessible. No, no. Many of them are private clubs—like the Shooting Club— and almost all of the “public” parks have an entry fee, which varies depending on where you are from, of course. Even so, it is still reassuring that there is greenery at all here. In the States in many places, we have been forced to retrofit greenery instead of building around it—or, gasp, incorporating it—in the first place. That is not very sustainable, now, is it? I am by no means indicating that the situation here is sustainable, but at least I never feel as though I am really in the concrete jungle, since there is often real jungle just a stone’s throw away.

What is the name of this thing?

I am sitting here this morning eating a grapefruit for breakfast and musing on that word. Guess what the word for “grapefruit” is in Arabic.

Come on, guess.

See, my rule for language acquisition is this: if I don’t know the name for something and how to ask for it, then I can’t have it. It is less of a rule and more of a self-imposed limitation to overcome, I know this. However, it serves me well as it gives me incentive to learn things. I have a logical loop that I run on myself before I leave the house every morning or make a phone call. I will give you an example:

Situation: I am going to buy light-bulbs and the local light-bulb shop. Taken as given: Knowledge of daily interactive words (Hello, How are you?, Goodbye, etc.), knowledge of numbers related to money.

Query: What words/phrases do I need to be able to say to complete this transaction?

Output: light-bulb, fluorescent, compact, how much are they?, too bright, not bright enough, how many watts?

Query: Which words do I know already? Which which do I need to obtain?

Output:

Words known: lamba (light-bulb), bi kam? (how much are they?), Sagheer (small/compact), kam Watt? (how many watts?)

Unknown words: fluorescent, too bright, not bright enough

Query: What are possible responses to my questions? Do I know the words for these responses?

Output: I don’t have those (mafeesh), how many do you want? (‘aayz kam?), numbers for prices (this is a given)

Now I go to the dictionary or phrasebook—Lonely Planet is the best for this, if you are coming to Egypt, buy it—and accumulate these words. So today we find: neeoun (fluorescent), mushri` kiteer (too bright), mushri` shwaya (not very bright). I also could say "flooreessant" for fluorescent.

And there it is.

Whenever it is something that I feel like I should know before going out, the word in common usage ends up being a loan-word from English. Whenever I say to myself, "Nah, I'll just wing it," the word end up being something like 'umla ma'adaniyya (coins).

So, when I went to buy this grapefruit that I am now enjoying, I didn't know the word and so resigned myself to not having it until I went home and figured it out. Stacey said, in her wisdom, "Just ask the guy what it's called." Of course! I asked him, "We want this, but what is it? How do I say the name of this?"

"Greeb," he replied, looking at me like I was an idiot, "greeb froot."

Reporting on the technological forefront of asses

I’ve talked about the donkeys and horses in the city before. I still can’t help smiling when I see a donkey: the are just so pathetically adorable. Unfortunately they are often mistreated and underfed here. Then again, so are a lot of people, and I have to prioritize my sympathy. We all do.

Regardless, Stacey and I saw a donkey on our street the other day. The ass in question was attached to the cart of our regular bikiyeh guy, pulling it through speeding rush hour traffic in the left lane. He apparently was not hoofing it fast enough, because the guy switched the reins to one hand and then, with full arc arm-swings and an open palm, he just started slapping the ass—the ass of the ass, that is—with gusto. The donkey sped up, though only a little. The guy stopped when he realized that we were staring at him, and the donkey slowed.

I dubbed this “the donkey accelerator.”

Warning: memoir material ahead

I had one of those creepy, sappy moments last night that I always wince at when I hear from someone else. However, it left me with a warm contentedness—something that usually only a Xanax and two whiskeys will do for me before I get on a flight—so I felt it was worth relating.

I was sitting on the Metro, returning from Heliopolis, staring out the window at the city rolling by and suddenly felt completely at home. This came as a shock to me because I’ve been here for a while and it doesn’t often take me very long to acclimate, but there it was.

I’m not talking about some weird sort of assimilation. I can’t really assimilate here. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It involves too much compromise. What I can do is live here, by my groceries at the local places, speak Arabic in an attempt to increase fluency, and learn from everything I see and hear.

I think I just finally, about two weeks before I am set to depart for the States for the summer, realized that I live here now. I think that it may have something to do as well with increasingly solid plans to return and live here for a few more years in the fall.

Back to the feeling, though. It wasn’t like anything suddenly made sense or that I understood something new. It was just the utter normalcy and mundanity of that situation: I was exhausted, and just brain-off gazing out the window at recognizable buildings in familiar parts of the city. I suppose that this is when I should know that I have finally arrived, right?

Just when your marriage, job, academic course, mode of artistic expression, home, etc. becomes a little bit boring, THAT is when you know that it is actually working. When the new-puppy feeling wears off, that is when you have what you really want. Unless, of course, you are the type who wants to always feel like you are experiencing something new and different.

I am not. I prefer the boring train-rides to the helter-skelter variety. They stay on the tracks and you know the stops.

YOU want mint.

I was walking today and saw a kid standing in the street shouting and waving something in one hand. As I approached, warily, I realized that he was yelling—indeed bellowing—the words: “Who wants mint? YOU want mint! Who wants mint? You WANT mint?” I went out on a limb and assumed that he must be waving mint in that hand.

He spotted me coming down the street and ran right up to me saying “Mister! You want mint?” He was little, his head was at about the level of my elbow. I told him that I didn’t really need any mint, but he was persistent. He shook the mint and then shoved the whole bunch right up under my nose, instructing me, “Smell it. The smell is very good. You want mint.”

I couldn’t resist. I asked him how much, doubled it, and crossed the street before he could try to give me change. Little things like that make my day. It’s not everyday that you can feel that good after having succumbed to a sales pitch.

Sold.

Curious, thoughtless sentencing practices

This article outlines a recent series of arrests here in Egypt.

Let’s just take for granted that the the persecution which is outlined in the article is pretty terrible. Let’s take for granted that these were citizens minding their own business and not hurting anybody. I am not really interested in all of that. What I am interested in is this: if you are going to sentence gay men who are HIV positive for a crime, how can you justify sending them to prison?

It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution: place these men in an environment in which they will regularly be raped by prison guards and other inmates, exposing all participants to HIV infection.

Now, as my roommate pointed out—quick, she is—because these are high profile cases, this will likely not be the case: everyone will know that they are positive and go nowhere near them. “Or they will more likely just be beaten to death,” I replied.

Our favorite part was the condition that these men would be required, after the end of their sentence, to sleep at the prison, from the hours of 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning. This would, ostensibly, ensure that they are not out in the night performing acts of debauchery. Right, exactly, because you can only have debauchery at night. Silly me, I had forgotten.

It seems that a better solution to the problem of HIV is education and taking precaution. The current solution everywhere in the Middle East and North Africa—remaining quiet and pretending like there is no problem—seems to be failing. Not in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia though: they have a zero HIV/AIDS infection rate! [Only 0.002 percent lower than Egypt!] Amazing! I wish that they would publish more information about how that has been accomplished. It certainly isn’t through education on safe sex—I base this conclusion anecdotally on the information provided to me by Saudi friends back Stateside, data which was not collected in a rigorous study.

In Egypt as well, when applying for a student or resident visa, one must supply the negative results of a blood test for HIV. If the blood test is positive, then a visa will not be granted at all. I assume that this is done in order to keep that low, low infection rate down. Maybe it works, to some degree, but it certainly could be augmented by a wider effort at sexual education. Public service announcements even.

Don’t even get me started on public service announcements.

Maybe things are changing though. I recently noticed, during a stocking-up trip to Carrefour, that there were now a wide variety of condoms available on the general merchandise shelves. This is new. It use to be the case that if you wanted to condoms in Egypt, you had to go to a pharmacy and then sort-of trick the pharmacist into selling them to you. You couldn’t be too overt about why you wanted the condoms—as if there is any other use for them: “These make great water balooons!”—and simply explain that maybe you needed them for a friend. Often, pharmacists would—after putting an individual through the embarrassment of asking in the first place—simply indicate that they did not have them, and direct you down the road. This is apparently changing. I have now seen them in plain view in a number of pharmacies, especially in expat parts of town, and then at Carrefour, which is obviously marketed toward expats. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t Egyptians buying them.

I would call this a step forward. Another step would be transparency about actual infection rates for STDs, but I feel that this might be a long way off. In the mean time, a word to the wise traveling in Egypt: keep it in your pants.

Saves the day for me when I
would least expect it.

This was a belated birthday greeting which I recently sent to a good friend. I was forgiven:

I missed your birthday
because I am a jackass.
Still love you much, though.

Last week I mentioned my deep-seated love for haiku, but I didn’t really qualify that properly.

When I was younger,
my friends and I had a game:
to utter nothing else.

We would spend whole days in high school speaking only in haiku. There were no other rules really, just that if you said something, you had to use the form, which meant that you had to mull your words over in your head before saying them. Not to mention that you are forced to use your entire vocabulary in order to fit in words with more/fewer syllables.

What I didn’t know
was that we were teaching our
brains to think quickly.

Not to mention accurately. If you are to speak in a poetic form, you really have to think about it a great deal before you open your mouth. But in a normal conversation, there really isn’t that much time to think about what you want to say. It must all be very fast.

Many hours practice
goes into this discipline.
No tongue slipped is spared.

I guess that I have never realized—at least not so starkly, until now—the value of doing things simply for the sake of doing them. Maybe because they are interesting, maybe because they are odd. It doesn’t matter at the end.

Sometimes I do it
and never realize that
I speak poetry.

I’ll bet you can’t wait for sestina day.

Now with less salt!

In case you hadn’t heard, I now have high-speed internet in my flat in Cairo. It was remarkably efficient this time, taking only TWELVE WEEKS. But I will not dwell. I have it, I will use it, and when I come back in the fall, inshallah, it will still be cranking away.

It is blissful though.

And in my state of bliss, I have stayed up many a late night this week—after finishing my other work—in order to update and improve the site. Here is a small list of the improvements, for your enjoyment:

1. First off: the Gallery is back!

   This is something that I have been just waiting to do because it took a bit of tweaking and finagling to get it to run without conflicting with other features that I have implemented. Everything works fantastically well now, and there are four new galleries of pictures from the past few months. Now you can navigate the gallery with the buttons at the bottom of the page. Clicking the pictures will bring the image up in a larger format. Click on the thumbnail on the right to try it out.

   

   I will also be posting a great deal more photos from my recent adventures and placing the old set of galleries back up where they belong, fully restored and polished up.

   You may visit the new galleries by following these links:

   Khan al-Khalili February 2008

   Sand and Camels

   Around Cairo

   On the Farm

   You may also click on the “Gallery” tab at the top for a listing of all of the galleries.

2. New domain name: http://youcantmakemistakes.com

   

   We have fully migrated now to the new domain. Welcome. “Why a new domain?” I hear you asking—I’ve also added mind-reading support to the blog. Well, for a long time I was just using this site to keep my CV and some photos, but the blog has started to pick up steam, I’m really enjoying writing, and I managed to land the sweet domain. It’s a brand now. Next: t-shirts. Damn, I want a t-shirt now.

   This change does not mean, however, that your links to http://johndmartiniii.com will not work. Thanks to the genius of WordPress, the will magically work forever and ever.

3. Social networking, blog style

   

   You may now use the icons at the bottom of every post in order to share the post on Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Sphere, Slashdot, MSLive, Google, and others. The first icon is also a simple “mailto” link which will allow you to send the post via your native e-mail client (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.) This allows you to share me with your friends and loads of people you don’t even know! Mostly it is just shameless self-promotion for me, so help me out.

4. Glossary

   You may have noticed that the Glossary is also back. This should come as a relief to those of you who can’t drag yourself to get out the dictionary. What a pain in the ass these past few weeks must have been. The reason for the Gallery and the Glossary going down at the same time was that they were competing for your attention and causing each other to fail.

   

   The problems have been ironed out now, though, and you can again mouse over obscure terms which are highlighted just like other links to have an explanation presented to you in a newly polished tool-tip format. Enjoy, and if there are words which are obscure that I have not placed in the glossary either write me a comment or send me an e-mail and I will be sure to define them.

5. New podcasts coming soon

   I have several podcasts in the works as we speak. They need to be cut together and have some voice-over recorded, but rest assured that the podcast will be returning for your listening pleasure tout de suite.

6. [Update] New Blog Logo

   

   I nearly forgot a pretty important upgrade. We now have an actual logo for “If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, You Can’t Make Mistakes.”

   Click on the thumbnail to the right to view it big-style.

   I really can’t wait now to get some t-shirts. Watch for a “Buy t-shirts” link. Maybe we can have coffee mugs too. Whatever you want. Just tell me.

Well, that is about it for today. I will update when I post new galleries so that you can share in the fun. Please e-mail any suggestions or comments. I love to hear what you all think would make the site better or easier to use. Thanks in advance.

Things are getting crazy around here

It turns out that I was wrong about what happened the other day. Indeed the police squashed a strike, but not without a great deal of violence. I heard of this from the BBC yesterday afternoon: Voter turnout low in tense Egypt

It turns out that the BBC correspondent and camera crew were arrested and detained on Sunday and then set free on Monday having been relieved of their equipment and recordings. At least, this was the story that I heard from one of the regulars at the British club last night, so its veracity may be in question. However, this would explain why there wasn’t quicker coverage on BBC.

Again, as I mentioned the other day, I get most of my news about what is going on right here in Egypt from foreign sources because journalism here is not free, which leads to a very compartmentalized awareness of what is happening in the country.

The elections yesterday were interesting. Apparently NGO election monitors were arrested yesterday and relatively few voters even turned up. This is not a surprise though. On a brief poll of a couple of folks yesterday we found that no one voted, having various excuses: not interested, busy, working, traffic, etc. Some of my friends here, as well as their parents, believe the election system here to be so flawed that they view voting as completely pointless. So, they never vote.

The protests continue though. Loads of people are pissed off right now, but it is still business as usual everywhere. The daily grind continues in the city as everyone goes on with their daily lives. I do have to say, though, that the streets of Mohandessin have been quieter than usual all week: especially at night.