Bambling

Friday is the Muslim holy day. A day of rest and prayer and all that kinda crap. Among other things, this means it only takes ten minutes to find a safe break in the traffic by which to cross the road, as opposed to the normal hurl strategy: hurling yourself into the stream of cars and motorbikes and the occasional horse-drawn carriage an praying to your fuzzy lord that none of the drivers are trying to rewire their radios instead of watching the street at exactly that moment.

My way of describing the past week in Egypt: “It was a lot of fun. Never go to Cairo on vacation.” This may sound like a negative view of Cairo -which, generally speaking, it is- but don’t let that give the impression that I’m not glad I went. I am. Glad. Very glad. Hell, I’m strongly considering returning one day. Preferably with a fixer. In a situation where I’m working. Only working. Maybe being paid. Being able to truly embrace all the ways in which this self-hating tourism bastion of a country is collapsing. In short: it makes good pictures, but not a great vacation spot.

This sounds harsh … possibly more so than I actually intend it to (though probably just as harsh as I intend it to). I did, to reiterate, actually enjoy the trip. There were good people, pretty pictures, pleasant locations. But I’m more articulate when I bitch than when I’m talking about how some shit is nice and junk, so … I don’t know. Blame the filter. Blame the medium.

Technical detail: I’m going to try and break the trip up into multiple posts. Because I’m lazy, mostly. I may even do something crazy, like link them all back through here. Although that seems somewhat random, seeing as all the posts will be higher than this one … hmm. It’s still tempting. An urge for interconnectedness, perhaps? An attempt at balance and organization? Well, likely more of an egotistical desire to make this thing easily navigatable for when I invariably attract millions of readers as a star of the blogosphere. Make it simpler for all the “n00bz” to skim through the early days where I toiled away as an unappreciated genius, before I was written up in some respectable print publication due to my witty commentary and chronicling of … something.

Okay, time to get to work on posts that actually have content.