Transit and the Transitory

From Alexandria we traveled by train to Cairo, where we spent New Year's Eve and Day, and parts of the day before and the day after. On the train, I was seated next to an Egyptian woman, and after about half an hour of reviewing the "Making Conversation" part of both the Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic sections of the phrasebook (as she glanced over my shoulder), I worked up the courage to start a conversation in Arabic --- which she graciously tolerated for about four sentences before switching to English. She, a Cairo university instructor, was overwhelmingly kind and when she learned that I'd be traveling on my own for a bit, she gave me her number in case of need --- and an hour's conversation later, when it was time to detrain, extended it into an earnest invitation to come eat Egyptian food and meet her 13 year old daughter. It made my day, this kindness of a stranger, and I'm hoping it might be able to work out the night I have a layover in Cairo, before flying to Aswan to take a 5 day boat trip on the Nile.

Tim and Katy and I spent our days in Cairo and outlying areas peering into pyramids and wandering around museum galleries, mostly, but we also traversed on foot and by car several parts of the city, including some town squares and the row of embassies and the neighborhoods of a couple universities, which put us not far from some of the things described here:

www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/world/middleeast/03egypt.html?_r=1&hp

And now it's back to work, which is very refreshing after days of not being able to because I lacked internet access (by the way, the Google blog allows you to put whatever date you want on the post, so I've been backdating a few entries previously written in Word to make them appear chronologically in the blog).

Onward . . .