Eyes in the Skies

I’ve been away from this blog because I was busy completing a few other pressing writing projects.  I’m back now and plan to make up for lost time.

Azza, my new Egyptian wife, recently made a travel request in relation to our holiday plans for next summer.  This past June, on our way to Texas, my birthplace, the two of us stopped in Europe—in Rome, to be more specific—to do a little sightseeing and to visit two of Azza’s nearest and dearest old friends.  The stop in Italy was also a way of breaking up the long-haul flight across the cold Atlantic so that we wouldn’t fall down dead from jetlag along the way.  Next summer, she has asked that we do things differently.  She wants to see New York City, which means that we skip the layover in Europe and visit the Big Red Apple instead.

Life is full of wonderful coincidences.  About a day or so after Azza told me about her desire to see NYC, I was sitting in a work-related meeting.  All of us at this gathering had laptop computers.  The fellow to my right was surfing the net when he should have been listening to the speaker standing before us.  I just so happened to notice that he was looking at a live-streaming webcam of Times Square.  I peeked at the URL and made a mental note to visit the same site later that day and to share it with Azza too.

These recent events have helped renew my interest in looking at webcams on the internet.  I used to spend a lot of my online time searching for interesting ones and then bookmarking those—like this one and this one and this one—I’d managed to locate.

I’ve long had this strange wish, a sort of internet fantasy I guess you could say.  I’d love to witness something embarrassing happen to someone on a webcam.  For example, to see a stranger, his back turned to me, walking down a street or a sidewalk in some faraway place.  Suddenly, his shoe will come untied or he’ll drop whatever he’s holding, and then he’ll have to bend down to lace back up or retrieve the item.  At the instant he does so, he’ll rip out the seat of his pants, exposing a pair of white underwear in the process.  Of course, he’ll be mortified and will reach around to check, with the fingers of one of his hands, to see if what he thinks happened actually did.

I think it would be such a wonderfully postmodern experience to observe something like that happen.  And I know what my reaction would be too.  I’d smile to myself and then shiver with the realization that I’m living at a moment in history when miracles really do take place.   

  

Crossing Borders

First of all, kudos to Bill Moyers, a fellow Texan and someone who’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.

Midway through this interview I hit the pause button, opened up a new Firefox browser window, went to The American University in Cairo’s webpage, and did a search to see if the library, at the place where I work, has any of Luis Alberto Urrea’s books.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t.  As soon as I made that sad discovery, I vowed that I would—by hook or by crook—get my hands on some of his work, in the very nearest future, and take a look.

Like the author, I am very much interested in borders.  As a frequent traveler and longtime expatriate, I often cross them.  Doing so takes me to places where people speak languages that are unintelligible and behave in ways that are unfamiliar.  Of course, this exposure to “foreignness” is jarring.  It is also terrible refreshing and very educational. 

Over the years, I’ve published lots of writings, in all sorts of places, lauding the value of travel.  It may sound like an exaggeration, but joining the Peace Corps, back in the mid-90s, saved my life.  It certainly saved my sanity.  Those two years in Poland was my first exposure to life outside the confines of my home country.  The experience opened up my thinking, provided me with the opportunity to grow in all sorts of ways.  It also turned me on to a style of living that was very addictive.      

My American family—as opposed to Azza’s kinfolks, my Egyptian family—lives in Texas.  I go back, once a year, to the Lone Star State to visit everyone and reconnect.  I cherish those trips back.  They give me an opportunity to cross borders—to move between what some might call “the developed world” and a place that’s “developing.”  I always learn more about myself when I move through space and time this way.

Speaking of travel, I see that I’ve made it to the end of this particular entry in my blog.  So, until we meet again… 

On the Streets

I’ve got culture shock again.  I’ve just returned to Egypt after spending weeks in America, visiting family and friends.

Azza met me at Cairo International Airport on the morning of my arrival.  Of course, I was very happy to see her and immediately began telling her about my trip, especially about the flight across the Atlantic and the days I’d spent in Madrid.  I recalled how I’d felt like yelling “hallelujah” as soon at the big Boeing had touched down on the runway at Madrid-Barajas Airport.  The ride across “the pond” had taken place in the middle of the night, and about mid-ocean or thereabouts, hundreds of miles away from the nearest land, we ran into a storm.  With nothing but deep blue beneath us, the jumbo jet buckled wildly for what seemed like forever.  I’m not a good air traveler even during the best of circumstances.  When the circumstances are the worst—I can’t imagine a more turbulent and scary trip than the one I just had—I become an emotional basket case.

The three days I spent in Spain’s vibrant capital were just enough to whet my appetite.  Had I stayed there longer, though, I probably would have gotten exhausted.  One often hears cities being referred to as places that “never sleep,” but in Madrid’s case, it’s more than a cliché.  The metropolis seemed eerily uninhabited during the day, but then exploded with activity an hour or so after sundown.  The Spaniards also struck me as proud, impulsive, and wildly inventive.  One way the latter most clearly manifested itself was in the number and quality of street performances I ran across while walking about.

I used my Nikon to record some of these.  Unfortunately, my camera battery went completely dead on me at the moment I wished to capture the most impressive of all those I witnessed—it involved levitation and those participating must have employed some sort of very effective optical illusion to float the way that they did.  I had a hard time choosing which video to embed here.  I finally settled on this one, which shows a performance that took place in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, one of the city’s iconic locations. 

I eventually dropped a Euro into the tip jar and promptly got the bejesus startled out of me when the three lunged forward.  My face immediately reddened and then I faded back into the crowd as nonchalantly as possible.  A few minutes later, I left the scene to see what else the city had to offer.

Later that same day, I discovered that some of Madrid’s buildings also like to perform, as you can see from the following clip. 

 

Not by the Book

In less than two weeks I’ll be leaving Texas and my family to return to “Um Al-Dunya.”  On my way back “home”—a wanderer like me has to put that word in quotation marks—I’ll make a brief, three-day stop in Madrid, Spain, to break up my trip.

I’ve already spent time in Madrid’s Barajas airport, but that doesn’t count.  Thus, this will be my first time in the land of bullfighting and flamenco.

If Spain turns out to be anything like Portugal, a place I visited a couple of years ago, then I’m in for a treat.  As a matter of fact, I’d put Lisbon on my list of favorite European cities.  I’d add Amsterdam, Krakow, Prague, Valletta, and Bucharest to that exclusive group.  Wait.  Throw Istanbul in too.  (The interesting parts of that Turkish behemoth are in Europe, albeit just barely.)

I’ve already reserved a room in Hotel Meninas, a four-star facility that’s located in the heart of the city, walking distance away from palaces, squares, museums, parks, eateries, bars, shopping districts, and you name it. 

In the world of travelers, there are those who consult guidebooks and those who don’t.  I’d definitely put myself in the latter group.  Before jetting off, I read just enough about my destination to make sure I can get from the airport to my hotel without too much hassle.  I also want to learn enough to get a feel for the sort of city I’ll be visiting and its basic layout—I might carry a map with me or get one soon after my arrival.  Other than that, I like to wander, turn down narrow alleyways, get “lost,” and make accidental discoveries.

My trip to Romania, several years ago, epitomized this sort of travel.  To get there, I went on a twenty-hour train ride from Istanbul to Bucharest.  I didn’t have a hotel reservation upon disembarking but managed to find an atmospheric place, near Revolution Square, after a bit of trial and error.  I then spent the next few days stumbling upon many beautiful spots, like the Cişmigiu Gardens.

Of course, this approach also has its risks, and I occasionally find myself in a dodgy neighborhood in some unfamiliar city.  This happened in Bucharest, and I was accosted by three robbers, pretending to be police officers.  We wrestled around for awhile, and they nearly ended up making off with my wallet and all its contents.

Yes, they nearly enriched themselves at my expense.  Actually, in some strange way, I feel like that whole episode enriched me.  It certainly made my visit to Bucharest that much more memorable. 

    

Killing Time

Azza flew back to Cairo a few days ago.  Her trip was an arduous one.  She went from Austin, Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia, and then on to Europe.  Her first stop in the Old World was Milan, Italy.  She then had a short flight to Rome and finally, nearly twenty-four hours after she began, she made the last leg into Egypt’s capital city.

We’ve been talking, daily, on Skype ever since her arrival, and I frequently take snapshots of her while we’re chatting.  This is one of my favorites. 

 

I’ve been reading as one way to keep myself busy during her absence.  Luckily, in my mother’s house, I’ve got a whole stash of books I’ve been meaning, for the past several years, to look at.  Many of them are memoirs, my favorite.  Two nights ago, I started one by Julian Barnes called Nothing to Be Frightened Of. 

In his memoir, Barnes writes about his thoughts on death and family and religion and refers to himself as an “agnostic.”  There’s a scene, early on, when he views his mother’s body, at the hospital, not long after her demise.  He admits that he went to see her there entirely out of curiosity, the sort that writers necessarily have.

The book makes me think about my own aging parents.  For years, my father has been talking about dying and his own coming END.  This, I think, is extremely healthy, though it makes some uncomfortable.  For example, he said something on the subject around Azza, during our visit, and she shuddered and then covered her ears upon hearing his words.  These are very hard things for some people to listen to. 

By the way, my father is an artist, and I wanted to include a couple of photos, the first one of him working and the second of a finished piece.  What I’m about to say might sound strange, but I think some of the beauty of his creations comes from the fact that he knows his time, on this planet, is limited.  

It just so happens that my father and stepmother’s house, in Georgetown, Texas, is located near Odd Fellows Cemetery, the place where my paternal grandparents now “rest.”  One evening I took a walk to Odd Fellows—that’s a perfect name for a graveyard—with the sole purpose in mind of locating their grave sites, which I managed to do.  The proof can be found below.

Be Still My Beating Heart

My father is the quiet philosophical type.  Once, while I was road tripping with him through an especially picturesque part of America, he turned to me, as we were ginning down the highway, and said, “The really interesting thing about traveling is that it gives a person the opportunity to realize that the place he’s from is not all that special or pretty.”

I recalled his comment during a recent trip I took with Azza to Rome, Italy.  As my father had aptly noted all those years ago, The Eternal City is the sort of place that could make any traveler see his hometown in a new light.  Every city I’ve ever lived in pales in comparison to Italia’s capital.

When one family member asked me to sum up my feelings about the city at the conclusion of our trip, I replied, “Walking around Rome is like taking a stroll on a movie set, one built for the most romantic film of all time.”  The experience of visiting the metropolis is somewhat unreal.  How could a real place, where real people live and work and do all the mundane things that real people have to do, be so outrageously beautiful?

The pictures I’ve included here don’t do the city justice, but that’s not a surprise because travel pictures can never capture what the photographer was thinking and feeling about his subject at the moment the image was forever captured.