Hunker Down

This morning, on the bus from Maadi to The American University in Cairo’s new campus, located in posh and remote Katemeya, I sat next to John, a teaching colleague and buddy.  The two of us spent the forty-five-minute trip—traffic was good and never got snarled, not even once, or we would have had an even longer conversation—talking about the current political situation in Egypt.

I prefaced my remarks to him by saying I thought this little piece of northeast Africa was on the path taken by Libya and Syria, meaning that it was headed toward a bloody civil war.  My friend wasn’t as pessimistic as I was, though he seemed, as we bounced along on the city’s potholed roads, to find a lot of what I was saying quite convincing.

For the past five days, Egypt, especially Port Said, Suez, and Ismailia, right on down to its massive capital, has been wracked by ugly protests and riots.  The two-year anniversary of the revolution against Mubarak and the court ruling on last year’s football massacre at a match in Port Said, were the sparks that got the bonfire raging, but days later now, the anger has become more diffuse.

Watch Egypt's Morsi Hoped Violence Would Burn Out, Spreads Instead on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The video provides a pretty good overview.  What it doesn’t address is Morsi’s recent attempt to call for dialogue with the opposition, an offer that was unceremoniously rejected.  Now, the country, quite literally, continues to burn as the political sides sit and stare at one another across a great divide. 

The Western media is actually missing a lot of the story.  The local Egyptian TV news coverage is much more immediate and clearly shows the scale of the unrest.  For the past few nights, Azza and I have been sitting together, in front of our flat screen, and watching events unfold in real time.  We’ve seen it all, and heard it all too, as a variety of pundits, mostly “liberals,” relentlessly bash Morsi and his Brotherhood.     

Egypt’s failing economy is the backdrop to all of this craziness.  The currency is being devalued as I write this.  (A month ago, it took 6 Egyptian pounds to buy a dollar, and today, it takes 6.6.)  We’ve seen the results of this devaluation with our own eyes.  When we tried to buy dollars for our Italy trip, we had to go to several currency exchange shops before we could find any greenbacks in stock.  There was panic buying on the street and black marketers were taking advantage of this mood of uncertainty.  My wife, who is a caterer of fine Italian cuisine and thus a serious shopper, has seen a spike in food prices recently.

Things just feel like they’re spiraling out of control or coming unglued, whatever metaphor you want to use.

And now, there’s this sobering pronouncement by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.     

On the Half Shell

I’m on break from work right now.  We don’t go back into the classroom until the thirtieth of January.  That leaves me lots of glorious free time.  To fill it, I’ve been traveling, writing, doing other creative stuff, reading, surfing the www, and indulging my varied whims.  I’ve also been listening to music.

I have this huge music collection on the hard drive of my Acer laptop.  There must be several hundred albums stored in that brain that’s not a flesh-and-blood brain.  Heck, my machine’s probably got more memory capacity than I do, low-tech gadget that I am.

Lately, I’ve been making an effort to listen to stuff I haven’t heard for awhile.  A few days ago, I noticed that I hadn’t double clicked on Blue Öyster Cult for a long time, months actually, or maybe even longer than that, so I quickly made amends for this oversight.  (By the way, this site, the band’s official web page, provides a really good history of group.)

I’ve decided to blog a couple of tracks from two of my B. Ö. C. CDs.  The first one is “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot,” a tune with one of the greatest titles of all time.  It’s from their self-titled debut album, released in 1972.  The second one, “I Love the Night,” is from the 1977 release, Spectres.  Both are as groov-a-licious as all get out!

I’ve got talented ears, but I don’t know how to write about really good music.  There’s just too much beauty and wonder there for me to be able to say anything that sounds the least bit sensible.  Instead, I’ll just talk about what I think about when I hear rock like this.

I’m reminded of my long-haired and wild-haired youth.  I’m reminded of West Texas and warm summer nights.  I’m reminded of fast cars and pretty girls and good friends and hard partying.

I’m well aware that this probably makes me sound really old and nostalgic.  I guess that’s apropos.

    

Mea Culpa

I’m totally embarrassed about how long it’s been since I last posted here.  In my self-defense, I’d like to point out that I’ve been busy working on a number of writing projects for a variety of publications.  That said, I promise—hand over heart as I type this—to be a more regular and dependable blogger in 2013.

About a week ago, Azza and I got back from a ten-day trip to Italy, a country fast becoming one of my favorite European destinations.  For this first-posting-after-a-long-hiatus piece, I’ve decided to write a little about our travels and to include a few of the more than 300 photos I took with our trusty Nikon Coolpix digital apparatus.

There were so many pictures to choose from that I immediately had to establish some criteria that would make the selection process easier.  After thinking long and hard, this is what I came up with.  I decided to post only photos of myself in which I didn’t look like a complete dork.  (Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot that met this basic requirement.)  Because Azza is so much more photogenic than yours truly, I had a larger pool to choose from.  For her, I decided to include those which made her look “European” or “cosmopolitan” or just plain “cool.”  (It helped that she was often wearing a hat that was very similar to a beret.)  The remaining photos were selected because they helped tell the story of our trip.

I’ll get my pictures out of the way first.  This first one shows me standing in front of a picturesque canal in Venice.  (By the way, we Cairenes just about froze to death in chilly Italy.)

  

In this second photo, I’m riding a merry-go-round that was located in one of the lovely piazzas in Florence.  (Azza didn’t initially want to get on the thing because she thought it was only “for kids.”  Quite ironically, most of the riders were fun-loving adults as we discovered during our five-minute spin.)

Like I said, Azza is pretty easy on the eyes.  In this first photo of her, again taken on our first day in Italy, she is beautifying an already attractive Venetian waterway.

This one was taken five minutes after disembarking at the train station in Florence.

In this photo, Azza is standing next to the carousel after we’d finished our ride.

In this picture, taken quite late at night during our wanderings in magnificent Florence, Azza is standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore.

During the first five days of our trip, we stayed with an Italian couple, Lorenzo and Monica, in their apartment located in Mira, a village not far away from Venice.  In this image, the four of us are having coffees and hot chocolates in a bar in Treviso.

We finished up our trip in Rome.  While there, we met up with Beshir and Noel, Egyptians who’ve been living in Italy’s capital city for the last twenty years or so.  The two are some of Azza’s dearest friends, going way back.  Here we are in front of a Roman shopping mall.

This one was taken in Venice at night, overlooking one of the hundreds of canals that crisscross the city.

I captured this image with the Nikon’s telephoto lens.  I pointed the camera up at the painting that adorns the inside of the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore.  I didn’t notice the Grim Reaper until I zoomed in and focused on this part of the scene.

In Europe, I always feel so creative, so the following images, taken at a variety of Italian locals, are a touch artsy.  I’d like to include them as a way of wrapping things up.