Quik Thinking

Having alternated between cultural and outdoorsy experiences during our time in Egypt so far, we continued the tradition by spending the last couple of days in Dahab. After a few initial hiccups involving a defective key at the Red Sea Relax hostel, we were thoroughly impressed by the feast they laid out for breakfast.

With our bellies full, we embarked on a snorkeling trip in the Red Sea itself at a spot called the Blue Hole. The goggles I was given were loose so seawater kept getting into my eyes and I had to take a break to find tighter goggles. On my next attempt I got better at using the flippers, although it was still a tiring experience. That said, looking at fish and coral underwater was quite an amazing experience.

Having worked up a hearty appetite, it was time for dinner. The boardwalk was lined with overpriced restaurants all competing intensely but with pretty much the same fare. After comparing prices and haggling a bit, we somewhat arbitrarily picked one. The food was actually delicious, although we weren't the only ones to think so as our dinner was plagued by cats, all hoping to get some of it.

The next day Luke, Dave and I decided to get a professional shave at the local barber. It was amusing to watch Luke's reaction when his face was threaded! I ended up looking strangely Egyptian after they were done.

We spent our last night in Egypt scaling Mt. Sinai. I prepped by drinking a cup of coffee; the first I'd had in years. It took about two hours to drive to the base of the mountain and then another 150 minutes to ascend it in the dark using flashlights. But we managed to snag an excellent spot from which to watch the sun rise. Once that was over, however, we had to contend with a zillion other people who all wanted to descend along with us. Going slowly was just as well though, since I found the steep descent to be hard on my joints.

Once we made it to the airport, getting from Cairo to Luxor was a relatively painless operation, as was finding our hostel, where we reunited with Yvonne and Luke, who had been exploring other parts of the country while we camped in the dessert. The hostel was offering guided tours of the West bank so we took them up on it the next morning. After our excellent experience with Hani in the dessert, we were greatly dismayed to discover that this guide could barely understand English; each time we asked him a question, he answered a completely different question!

The first stop was a temple that had been destroyed by an earthquake in 37 BC. Only a pair of giant pharaoh statues survived the quake, each of which has a miniature statue of his wife beside him. Apparently that was the thing to do back then. The second stop was the Valley of the Queens, so called because no kings were buried there, although sometimes princes who died in childhood ended up there as well. Before we could look at the burial chambers, the guide made us watch a crummy documentary whose sound was barely audible. While looking at the tombs, the guide fed us some outlandish tales about the queens, including one about a queen who fabricated a myth about her mom being impregnated by a god so that she could hang on to the throne without having to cede power to a husband.

The third stop was at an alleged artist workshop, where we saw how they make alabaster jars, although we came away with the strong feeling that the guide just took us there in the hopes that we would buy lots of overpriced crap that he probably gets a cut on. 

With that out of the way, it was on to the fourth stop: the Valley of the Kings, where we had only enough time to learn about three kings. Ramses III had 42 wives but still slept around with others and Sety II died young so they did an astonishingly sub-par job on his tomb. The highlight of this stop was a descent into the underground burial chamber of Thutmosis II, where we had a chance to examine very early hieroglyphs done is a style far simpler than anything I'd ever seen before.

Stop five was another temple, featuring two engravings of particular interest: one was a series of engravings of the fertility god, whose limbs were chopped off as punishment for impregnating a bunch of women; the other was a queen who swallowed the sun in the morning and expelled it through her vagina in the evening. The last stop on the tour was the residence of some old British guy that was only marginally interesting. The guide also tried to make us go through a sketchy papyrus factory but we refused unanimously.

That evening we visited the Luxor temple, which contained some fascinating relics from the Greek and Roman conquests of Egypt, including statues of Alexander the Great as a pharaoh and some Roman paintings that covered older Egyptian engravings. Outside the temple was a large courtyard lined with massive stone columns, many of which had statues of Ramses II beside them. But the most striking feature of the temple was a giant stone obelisk that rose several dozen feet from the ground.

On our final day in Luxor we visited the Karnak temple complex, this time ending up with an awesome guide. He explained that the complex had started out fairly small as the venue for the annual wedding ceremony for the Thebian trio of gods but had been successively enlarged by waves of pharaohs until it was the largest religious structure in the world. He also cleared up the fragmented stories we'd heard from the previous guide about queen Hatshetsup.

This is the long-delayed post about our dessert-camping experience from November.

Unlike the car that was supposed to take us to the pyramids but never materialized, our guide for the Sahara camping trip arrived slightly early. His name was Hani (or something that sounded a lot like that) and he spoke English fluently, which put us all at ease. He'd brought along somebody else to drive the van, which initially seemed inefficient until I realized that this specialization of duties was quite effective; the driver zipped along at close to 150 mph while Hani was free to answer our numerous questions about the Sahara. In fact, we even picked up a police officer and gave him a ride to the police checkpoint in the dessert, which facilitated getting us through it without any hassle.

Once we were in the dessert, we stopped at the El Bahriya oasis and switched to a land rover that allowed us to roll down sand dunes without much ado. I was soon mesmerized by the sheer quantity of sand surrounding us; there was often nothing else to see in any direction! The first time we stopped to take photographs of the sand dunes, we struck the clichéd "walk like an Egyptian" pose, only to have Hani inform us that Egyptians no longer walk like that. I'd always assumed the pose was entirely fabricated for dramatic effect but he went on to explain that it was once used during religious ceremonies in ancient Egypt.

At lunch time we ate in a rest stop while surrounded by flies. I hate flies so much. After lunch Hani took us down a road built by the Brits during WWII to see the black sands formed by volcanic ashes. We even saw the flat-topped dormant volcanoes that had once spewed all this ash. Next we went to the "white dessert", which is composed of chalk. There were some very odd chalk formations that usually resembled mushrooms, although one of them actually looked like a chicken. This is where we set up camp for the night.

Hani and the driver cooked us a fine dinner of BBQ chicken and potato stew over a fire that also kept us warm once the cold dessert night set in. After eating, we slept under camel fur blankets. Although we'd been hoping to see stars, the full moon pretty much crowded them out. Aware that it is made of cheese, Don tried to eat it but to no avail.

Our second day in the Sahara devolved into a hellish amount of driving. But first we had to sit around for a long time at the oasis while the seats in the land rover were replaced. We killed some time by wandering around in some Coptic ruins from the 7th century. The Egyptians weren't too excited about those because they were "only 1300 years old", a sentiment only possible amongst people whose recorded history goes back for millennia.

With the new seats finally in place, we headed off in search of the Valley of the Whales. Unfortunately, Hani got a bit lost and we could not find the valley before nightfall so we just camped in the white dessert again. Such is the downside of navigating via old tyre tracks instead of GPS. On the plus side, this time we were able to see more stars before the moon came out in force.

In the morning we finally made it to the valley, which was dotted with fossils and striated rock formations, having once been a sea some 40 million yeas ago. Finding sea shells in the Sahara dessert is truly an eye-opening experience. Once we'd had our fill of this oddity, Hani took us to see a massive artificial lake that had been created from treated agricultural runoff and is now stocked with fish. That too was a bit surreal.

It was then time to leave the dessert, although we stopped at Imhotep's step pyramid on the way back to Cairo to see the first pyramid ever built. Unshockingly, it was far less impressive than the great ones at Giza and in a far worse state of disrepair. More interestingly, I noticed that there was an enormous difference in the quality of walls used to build dwellings for the pyramid workers VS the temple, although both were built by the same people at around the same time.

Once in Egypt, we needed to take a cab to the airport. Dave assumed that the cabbies would all speak English but after getting into one, we discovered that he thought we wanted to go to the Sheraton! I tried miming an airport but it only left him bewildered. Fortunately, he had the resourcefulness to take us to a police station where somebody could translate and we then headed for the airport.

On our first proper day in Cairo, we attempted to take a cab from our hostel to Coptic Cairo. We were thwarted by our complete inability to communicate in Arabic, since none of the cabbies knew any English either. In the end we were forced to have one of the hostel staff members haggle with cabs for us.

Coptic Cairo wasn't nearly as exciting as we'd hoped. Perhaps it would have been better with a guide. Actually, in what would turn out to be a portend of things to come, a random Egyptian attempted to weasel his way into being our tour guide. We paid him what his information was worth: 17 cents. One interesting thing we did encounter in Coptic Cairo was a series of paintings that date back to around 18 A.D. Most of them seemed to have been preserved remarkably well, prompting me to wonder about the accuracy of whomever dated them.

Given our previous failure at catching a cab, we decided to try the Metro instead. That turned out to be a good idea because the Metro in Cairo is frequent, fast and dirt cheap. It cost a piddling 17 cents per ride, encouraging us to use it often during our stay there. In addition to taking the Metro, we also walked around a fair bit. While most street-crossings were tests of will and bravado, the few traffic signals we saw were delightful to watch because the little green walking man on them would speed up as time went by until he was sprinting at a good clip just before the sign changed to the red hand.

The reason for all this subway-riding and walking was our quest for lunch. But not any old lunch; we were searching for the best kushari in Cairo (and therefore the world). Kushari is a dish that originated in Cairo and is made from a combination of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, browned onions, garlic infused vinegar and tomato sauce. The word on the street was that the best place to eat it was a restaurant called Abou Tarek, which served nothing else. It took us a while to locate that place but we were rewarded by what I consider to be one of the best meals I've had in ages. I badly wanted to chow down a second bowl of the stuff but somebody else's better judgement prevailed.

Now sated, we ambled over to the Egyptian museum, where we got a guide to show us around. He was pretty good, although he kept telling us how he had recently discovered rather momentous facts about ancient Egypt, which made me suspicious about the veracity of his tales. But then I've never been one to let facts get in the way of a good story. The museum was quite interesting but after walking around in it for a couple of hours we were worn out so we headed back to our hostel for a rest.

That evening, I decided to get a haircut at the nearby barber. He didn't speak any English but the previous customer did and translated for me. To my surprise, after cutting my hair, he whipped out a length of thread and proceeded to thread my face with it. Having never experienced this before, it was an interesting sensation, albeit slightly painful at times.

With my newly coiffured look, we set off to watch the whirling dervishes or, as they are known locally, sufi dancers. The sufi are a mystical sect of Islam who believe that by whirling around they enter into a divine frenzy. Sounds vaguely like Thupasam, minus the sharp hooks! To our pleasant surprise, the event was free, having been sponsored by a cultural grant from the government. In addition to the dancing and whirling, they also played music on horns that had only one volume level: loud. The dancers wore brightly coloured skirts that looked awesome when they whirled around.

Having gotten our fill of mystics twirling in gaudy skirts, we ventured into the surrounding bazaar, known as the Khan-el-Khalili. I had been curious about a local spice called gad and at one point we found some for sale at a spice store but the proprietor evidently had better things to do than talk to a bunch of tourists so we moved on. We hadn't gone very far, however, when an English-speaking local who claimed he was a doctor offered to show us around the spice store. He seemed harmless enough so we took up his offer. He certainly did show us all manners of curiosities in the store, including dessicated and shrunken animals. In the end we bought some spices, only to discover that we'd paid an order of magnitude more for them than the going rate. 

No trip to Egypt would be complete without a visit to the great pyramids of Giza (and the accompanying Sphinx). Conveniently, Giza is right outside Cairo. Our original plan had been to hire a car to drive us there and back but the car broke down the morning we were to go there. Ever resourceful, we thought it would be a good idea to take the Metro to Giza and then either take a cab or microbus to the pyramids. Our guide book warned us that many locals would try to scam us into entering through the gate designated for Egyptian students and then make us shell out for a camel ride across the dessert. Sure enough, as soon as we got off the subway in Giza, we were set upon by a small horde of annoyingly persistent cabbies all trying to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students in order to pay the much lower entrance fare. We must have lost half an hour trying to get them off our backs before we found a microbus that took us to the pyramids - but not before they also tried to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students.

The pestering didn't end once we finally reached the pyramids; it just changed form. Now we were being offered horribly overpriced bottled water and camel rides. Between all these fascinating offers, we managed to sneak a few glances at the 4500 year old pyramids. Although the were a bevy of tourists around, none of them ventured to the far side of the pyramids so once we got there, we had relatively unobstructed views of the giant structures. Despite being so close, however, we did not touch them because doing so is forbidden in order to protect them against further decay. There are guards stations to enforce this rule, although, based on what we saw, their loyalties can be swayed by filthy lucre.

Later in the day we went for a cruise down in a Nile in a felucca. Having been conditioned to bargain for everything, we were dismayed to realize that the felucca owners had no interest in bargaining. Eventually we realized why: they were all situated across the street from a clutch of 5-star hotels whose patrons probably couldn't be bothered to bargain for anything.

We ended our stay in Cairo by visiting a hookah bar where Luke and I schooled the others in the fine art of nasally exhaling smoke.

Getting my TN work permit at Dorval in Montreal was nice and simple. They were even happy to let me pay for it by credit card. On the other end of the flight, the cabbie who drove me to Williamsburg from LGA kept whining about how short a distance I was riding in his cab, as though I should feel guilty for it! And then he turned down a $5 tip on a credit card in favour of cash fare that was almost a buck lower than what the meter demanded. So weird. I couldn't stay at my sister's place because they were hosting a French juggler but I did get to have dinner with them on my first day in NYC and he entertained us by juggling random fruit, including a banana. The guy was amazing: he could juggle under his leg and behind his back!

My primary reason for moving to NYC a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to start work was to find a place to live. I had already been combing through Craigslist for the past week and lining up appointments to see places in Williamsburg and the East Village, the two affordable areas within convenient commuting distance. I only ended up looking at one place in the East Village and it was half a living room that had been partitioned off for use as a bedroom, which I didn't like. Funnily enough, I ended up living in the 2nd place I saw, which is only a 5 min walk South of the L train and comes with an awesome roommate.

Although the NYC subway system is supposed to be one of the best in the world, I had a poor experience wth it during my first week in town. On the first day there was smoke in the tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, causing service on the L to be suspended for 2 hours. A few days later there was a nasty tornado that toppled trees onto the track and delayed the L in Brooklyn again. And on the weekend when a friend and I were taking the L with our bikes, the driver was a jerk. Hopefully things will be better once I get back from SF.

Another thing I'm looking forward to in NYC is games night, when a bunch of awesome people get together weekly at Google to play board/card games. They've been doing this for the past 3 years now and I've had a great time on both occasions when I've attended.

Upon moving into my new room, I thought it'd be a good idea to paint the boring white walls a more pleasant colour. Having already tried a sandy colour in SF, I opted to use green this time. There's a paint store a few blocks from my new place so I picked up a gallon of paint and a set of painting gear there.

Before busting out the paint, I covered the entire floor with a tarp. This was not as simple as I'd expected because the tarp was 9x12 but my room is a little larger than that so I had to extend the tarp with another one to ensure complete coverage. I also taped the edges of the trimmings.

What I forgot to do was tape the door jambs and ceiling edges. Due to that oversight, I had to later get some primer and cover up the splotches that got on them. The other mistake I made was deciding to use a similarly light colour to accent the light green. This ended up looking awful and I had to buy another gallon of green paint to fix it. In the end, however, I'm fairly happy with the way my room looks now.

For the past several years I'd been wanting to spend a summer in Montreal. This year I finally did it. Even though the summer did not turn out quite like I'd envisioned it would, I did enjoy my time in Montreal. Although the Metro has a good subway system, I found that it was nearly always more convenient (not to mention fun and cheaper) to get around by bicycle. At the beginning of the summer I found a used road bike for just $100 and, despite getting five flat tires in my first three months, it served me well. And I learned how to patch and change a flat tire, a skill that I had managed to avoid acquiring in my previous 4 years of daily biking. At one point my derailer broke but I was able to get it replaced quickly and cheaply at the Belleville Bike Co-op in old Montreal, which cemented its place as my favourite bike shop in the world.

Another thing I'd been meaning to do for years was get laser eye surgery. Having worn glasses to correct myopia and astigmatism since I was 12, I'd grown tired of having my glasses knocked off my face during sports and my brief experiment with contact lenses ended when I realized that I'd been scratching my cornea while putting them in. After waiting years for the technology to mature and my vision to stabilize, I finally decided to take the plunge this summer. Nearly four months after surgery, my vision is now effectively flawless. And compared to the ordeal that was Invisalign, Lasik offered far more bang for the buck.

During the three years I lived in San Francisco, I subscribed to a CSA program run by a local farm called Capay Organic, who delivered a box of seasonal produce to my door every week. I'd been hoping to do the same thing in Montreal but discovered that Montreal does not offer quite the same array of CSA programs as SF does. After a few weeks of shopping at regular grocery stores and being frustrated by the dearth of local organic produce, I was introduced to an alternate solution: local farmer's markets. I ended up being a regular volunteer at a biweekly farmer's market. The would generally give us volunteers a random assortment of produce to take home with us when we left and I often supplemented that with particular items that I purchased at the market.

Later in the summer I expanded my culinary repertoire by learning how to make casserole. After extensive reading and a week of practice, I can now make tasty casseroles quite reliably using whatever ingredients happen to be on hand. I'd been relying on a rice-cooker for the past few years but towards the end of August the one I'd been using all summer abruptly stopped working. Loathe to buy a new one just before I left Montreal and stuck with a large bag of rice that wasn't going to eat itself, I finally learned how to cook rice on a stove-top without burning it or producing a soggy mess.

Finally, just days before leaving Montreal, I got one last item off my bucket list. I watched the original Star Wars movies. For years, whenever I'd reveal that I hadn't yet seen them, people would first express astonishment and then declare that they had them on DVD and would watch them with me soon. But nobody ever did. Until a few days ago. The fallout from this experience included my acquisition of something I'd been lacking previously: the ability to critically judge movies. My lack of taste in movies had become something of a running joke because I would happily watch nearly anything and enjoy it. But comparing the characters in the original Star Wars with those in the prequels made me realize one very effective means of distinguishing good movies from bad.

While living in San Francisco, I'd been apprehensive about living in New York City because I'd grown accustomed to the mild climate and perceived NYC as being very materialistic by comparison. However, a variety of events over the past several months persuaded me to give NYC a shot. Although I'd be fibbing if I didn't admit to mild trepidations about the cold winters and high cost of living, overall I'm feeling optimistic about this new phase of my life. In particular, there seems to be an even better farmer's market culture in NYC and I look forward to exploring it until the snow falls.

If you've been following my adventures since I left SF, you might be wondering what became of my experiments with developing mobile apps. Here's the short version. I learned a lot about the technologies behind them, wrote a few apps, realized that I didn't enjoy writing software entirely on my own, and decided to join a startup instead, as had been my fallback plan all along. I certainly don't regret my decision to give it a shot and someday I will probably try starting my own venture again. But next time I'll make sure I have a partner.

Last weekend Anita and I decided to spend a few days this week visiting the Eastern Townships as a break from city life. With a bit of effort, we found somebody in Magog with whom to couch-surf for 3 days mid-week. Our intention had been to take our bikes on the bus and use them to get around once we were there. Unfortunately, Anita forgot to lock hers up for a few hours the night before we were supposed to leave and it was only while packing that she realized she still had the lock with her. By then, of course, it had already been stolen. Faced with this last-minute hiccup, we figured we could just hitch-hike our way around instead.

Much to my surprise, the bus was packed. I had no idea so many people would be going to the Eastern Townships on a Tuesday morning. Upon arrival in Magog, we ate lunch at a little place called Chich Taouk, which our hostess, Marthe, had recommended. Anita even had some meat! After lunch we hitched a ride to Marthe's house, where she told us a few things about the town and then sent us on our way to the lake. Walking down the street, I was puzzled to notice that the traffic lanes had been created using wet toilet paper!

The lake was cold. Not so cold that we didn't immerse ourselves in it but cold enough that we had to keep moving around in it to generate heat. After we'd had our fill of swimming around, we lay around on the grass to dry off before playing frisbee and then returning to Marthe's for dinner. We helped Marthe make a casserole type dish. It was fun cooking with her because she had so many culinary gadgets. Marthe regaled us with fascinating stories until it was time for bed.

I joined Marthe for brekki around 8:30am. Although she doesn't eat fruits because the citric acid makes her fingers hurt, she had bought some just for us. I cut them into little pieces and proceeded to eat them very slowly until Anita eventually joined us and took over that task. Energized for the day, we were driven by Marthe to Mont Orford so we could hike up it. 

Despite stopping a few times for some impromptu bouldering, we made it to the summit, where we enjoyed a view that extended as far as Vermont. There were several yurts around, which are probably used by skiers during the Winter. I'd never been inside a yurt before so was quite enthralled by them. We took a gentler route down but, even so, I had to walk backwards to relieve the strain on my toes. It took a few tries this time but we were again able to hitch a ride back to Marthe's for dinner.

This time we followed dinner with some Coaticook ice-cream, which is made in a little town near Magog using the traditional method. It started raining while we ate but we decided to go out anyway because Marthe had told us about a free concert going on nearby. She drove us there and we enjoyed performances by 4 different string quartets playing pieces by Hadyn, Shostakovich and Beethoven. There was also some lovely vocal music by an opera singer but by the time she went on all the carbon dioxide in the church hosting the concert was making me sleepy. But not so sleepy that I didn't eat a bowl of porridge when we got back.

I ate porridge again in the morning and then Marthe drove us downtown so we could stroll through the marshlands. There were a few informative signs about the local fauna but of course none of them were in English so we made hazardous guesses at translation. Once we strayed far enough from the edges of suburbia, the marshes made for some gorgeous views. But the best part was when we discovered wild blueberries growing in them. We tried to offer some to passers-by but only one family accepted them.

By the time we got to the end of the marsh trail, my feet were pretty sore and I wanted to take the shortest route back to the city so we could grab lunch and rest. Sadly, we got lost trying to find the lake. After buying snacks from a dep, we managed to hitch a ride back into town, only to discover that Chich Taouk was closed for an hour between lunch and dinner and we'd just missed the lunch shift. We spent the better part of an hour looking for another place that offered reasonably priced vegetarian fare but in the end we just came back when it reopened for dinner. After we hitched yet another ride and packed up our stuff, Marthe kindly dropped us off at the bus station.

Interestingly, the bus we took back to Montreal was nearly empty.

The fire alarm in my apartment building went off while I was cooking lunch today. It had been raining earlier so I grabbed a raincoat and my keys before heading down the fire escape. On my way down I found that several tenants had been using the fire escape as extra storage, blocking it with chairs, empty beer bottles and various other crap. Fortunately, I seemed to be the only person using the fire escape, which mystified me somewhat.

Upon reaching the lobby, I was amazed to discover that not only were there no other people there but the doorman was MIA too! A quick glance at the alarm console told me that it had been pulled on the 10th floor. I live on the 5th floor I would have been pretty far removed from the action if there was actually a fire. Nevertheless, I figured it wasn't worth the risk so I walked to the grocery store, intending to return in 20 minutes or so and see if the situation had been resolved.

On my way there I did see a fire truck with sirens blaring heading toward my building and by the time I returned the alarms had been shut off, although the elevators hadn't been turned back on yet so I had to walk up. Not very exciting at all.

"Hey Jenny, ya ever wonder why there aren't any trees in front of me?"

"Oh George, must you bring that up again? I've told I don't mind handing you leaves from the tree behind you. After all, if you starved to death, I'd miss you terribly."

"I know, Jenny, and I do appreciate that you always feed me too but I just think that, you know, it'd be nice if I could return the favour now and then. If only there was some way I could make myself face the other direction..."

"That's crazy talk, George, and you know it!"

"Why must you always be so dismissive of my ideas, Jenny?"

"Well, for starters, you'd have to stick your head sideways out of the plate to turn around and that simply isn't possible."

What makes you think there isn't a 3rd dimension, Jenny?

"Hush, George! What if somebody heard you talking like that?"