Zombie Feet

New Year in Mazatlan

2009-01-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

I've been living in Mazatlan for about two months now. It's a steamy port city at the entrance to the Sea of Cortez, directly east from the tip of the Baja peninsula. From high places in any part of the city, you can always see water on three sides, as its curving half-moon bay is pinned by two deep harbors, where two rivers make their way down from the Sierra Madres to the east. In the shelter of the islands at the north end of the bay, where the beaches are broadest and the swimming is best, glitzy hotels and high-rise condos elbow for space with nightclubs, jewelry stores, and american chain restaurants. La Zona Dorada, "The Golden Zone". No one ever found El Dorado, but the Mexicans seem happy enough with this place. Walk the streets or the sands around there looking remotely like a tourist, and you will be assaulted with offers for taxis, timeshares, diamonds, city tours, cowboy hats, parasailing... all in various approximations of English. I get this almost every day.
At the south end of the bay, the old city pours over three hills, and runs up against the ocean on two sides, and the harbor. Here, the crumbling old spanish buildings, with their graceful high windows and ceilings and ornate ironwork, are hidden on narrow streets among more utilitarian cinderblock houses. Some, nearest the beach, the theater and the two old cathedrals have been well cared for, and are beautifully painted and surrounded with trees. Others, especially near the gritty riot of stores and street vendors surrounding the market, are covered in graffiti and falling in on themselves. Between the two main parts of the city, a boardwalk along the water. And a maze of cinderblock buildings with unevenly paved streets around the southern harbor, giving way to more ramshackle buildings and dirt roads in the outlying parts of town.

My apartment is in the old center, perched on one of the hills above the market. From the terrace on the roof, you can see most of the city. To the east the Pacifico beer factory, hulking cruise ships in the harbor. The old town, cathedral, and a glimpse of the lighthouse to the west, three islands in the bay and La Zona Dorada to the north. Three airy rooms and a small balcony of white walls and red tile on the top floor, all mine for $150 dollars a month. I have been enjoying having space all to myself for the first time in my life. The sink nearly fell off the wall last week, I've only managed to furnish it with an air mattress, a mat, and two plastic lawn chairs, and every once in a while, the lock jams my door closed and I have to dangle shoelaces or pens through a crack in the door panel until I can pull the catch open from outside... but that said, I love it. It's always full of light and fresh sea air. And I've never lived anywhere so peaceful.
Every morning, I wake up and do some yoga watching the sunrise from the east facing window in my room, then throw on some clothes, lock all three locks on my door, and drop down the stairs and the steep hill I live on to the market. All the busses stop at the market. Vendors are just opening that time of morning, so its too early for the delicious street tacos and fresh coconuts, and you have to dodge puddles of filthy wash water, and men carrying buckets of vegetables and pigs heads into the market building. But the juice stand on the corner of the market opens early, so I'll grab an orange juice or a liquado for breakfast, and then hop on the bus to La Zona Dorada to go to work. Recently, I've been biking there down the boardwalk on the clunker bike Silvestre lent me, or picking up tourists at the cruise ship docks as well.
My work is with an ecotourism company in the heart of tourist-land. The building has fake mayan sculptures, an artificial waterfall, and a climbing wall in front. It was the climbing wall that made me poke my head in and ask if they needed guides when I first walked by. And three days later I was working there... belaying kids up the climbing wall, sending people down the zip line to the beach, and more recently translating all kinds of things for their website and guiding kayak tours on the islands as well. It's been fun, if not exactly what I expected. I've been spending more of my time trying to keep them organized doing the most basic things, recently, instead of developing new programs. But I'm learning a lot about how business works, in the process. And after work, I am free to swim and watch the sun go down. I've been doing a lot of reading, and I still drop in for dinner with Silvestre's family. He's been teaching me how to drive his motorcycle, and I've been teaching him English. My other good friend in Mazatlan, Issac, just sold the supermarket he ran near my work, so I can no longer drop in on him at any hour... but we've gotten out fishing by the cliffs of the lighthouse a few afternoons, and I think that might be worth the trade.

Chihuahua and Copper Canyon

2008-10-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I convinced Ashley and Jarret from the crew to put off their flights home and come to Mexico with me when work finished up. So this tuesday our crew parted ways in El Paso, and three of us headed south. El Paso is a wasteland of chain stores and freeways, much like LA but without the grace of trees. You can walk across the border from downtown. It starts to look like Mexico before you actually cross - all the signs in the stores are in spanish, and all the people stop to stare at you with your white skin and big pack. There's a forbidding looking concrete bridge over the Rio Grande, a sad muddy trickle no more than six feet wide, with political graffiti on its concrete banks. So this is one of the mighty rivers of America. Men in fatigues with machine guns on the other side just wave us past to the touristy main street of Ciudad Juarez. There are tons of pharmacys, doctors and dentists there for those who cannot afford such things in the States, intermingled with bars, strip joints and kitshy shops. But it took us more than half an hour of wandering around and not understanding directions in rapid spanish to find an immigration office and get our passports stamped. We got some pesos and took a taxi to the bus station as soon as possible.

Our taxi driver Arturo turned out to be quite the resource. He had run a mechanic's shop in San Diego for ten years, and had a daughter who was a citizen, but returned to Mexico in order to finally get the proper papers. He had been building a taxi business in Juarez and trying to get together enough money to get his papers through. Mexico, he said, was hopeless. The men with machine guns at the border were actually from the Mexican army. Like in Tijuana, the army had come in and disbanded a hopelessly corrupt police force, but was having little success in combating the drug cartels. Arturo's favorite restauraunt had been bombed the day before for failing to pay protection money, he said. We took a bus out of Juarez in another hour, heading for the relative safety of Chihuahua.

We rode a cushy airconditioned bus for five hours, through a sweeping desert of blonde grass with dark mountains rising like islands above it. In Chihuahua, we couchsurfed with three uproarious bachelors that Ashley contacted for us with her couchsurfing account. Koko, Polo, and Gusano, as they called themselves, were a photographer, a professor, and a radio show host respectively. They had opted out of the traditional early marriage and were having a great time sharing a house and hosting lots of travelers. Their house was a simple affair, with smooth brick floors, basic furniture, mattresses on the floor for us, and a few pictures of scantilly clad women. We had a great time with them, drinking and joking and playing puzzle games and taking silly pictures for two nights. It was hard to leave, but Chihuahua itself has little more to offer than a few shady plazas in front of old churches. Gusano said goodbye to us on the radio before we took the bus west into the mountains.

The last four days I've been in a cute little town called Creel, exploring Copper Canyon country. It's been fun meeting travelers at the hostel here. We've adopted Priska, a beautiful swiss ski instructor into our trio, and managed to drag various other travelers out to the bar and riding around on rented mountain bikes with us. Last night we got together a crew of seven to go camp at a hotsprings in the bottom of one of the canyons. We rented bikes and rode the twenty two kilometers out of town with packs. At the bottom, Priska and I were last and we caught a ride with a truckload of raucious police for the last stretch. Ended up having an uproarious evening drinking and joking and singing songs with them in the many hottubs by the river. I had convinced one of the guys who had a bike rack to jerry rig my guitar to the back of his bike and bring it down (yes, I brought the guitar. It was easier than trying to mail it home, and now I'm glad). As soon as I brought it out, all the various groups of people in the tubs were shouting me over and asking for songs and singing along. I met everyone! After sunset fireflies came out above the river, and the hills around us were covered in little blue points of light that turned out to be caterpillars with luminescent eyes. It was lovely.

Tomorrow, I'm headed into the canyon again with Jarret. Ashley twisted her ankle pretty badly a couple days ago and can't come backpacking with us. She was really sad about it until we realized that it just meant she would have to go hang out on the beach with Priska in Mazatlan for a few extra days.

Texas (aka - one month living out of a barn)

2008-10-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

West Texas was absolutely stunning. Guadalupe Mountains National Park is a steep reef of limestone cliffs and canyons that towers over the northern Chihuahuan desert, to the northeast of El Paso. It is surprisingly lush - green grasses intermixed with chaparral, spiny agaves and cactus. Green even in September! There were many maples and oaks in the canyon bottoms, and a sparse forest of juniper and pine at higher elevations.

My trail crew spent four weeks camped in a meadow at the bottom of Dog Canyon. We had the use of part of a barn, with refrigerators, electricity and running water. I felt like I was swimming in luxury after doing the backcountry crew in Idaho, where we had no fresh food and all our water had to be carried half a mile uphill. The stars out there just overwhelm the sky, and there were dozens of deer that came down to our meadow in the evenings (we tried to get some of the bucks to stop fighting each other and take on Salas, with an improvised rack of antlers made of tools, to no avail). Everyone on the crew was great in their own way. We had a lot of fun together! . Our trail project turned out to be in a wilderness area, so I didn't get to use anything cool like dynamite, but we did have an awesome three mile hike up the canyon and out onto a ridge to get to work every day. Thanks to hiking six miles a day and moving so many boulders to make stone steps I'm in the best shape I've been in in years. That's why I love trail crew!

Half Dome

2008-06-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

So I'm almost done with my lab work for Dr. Herbst, and I had a few days to stick around Monterey before going up to the San Lorenzo river for another two weeks of field surveys. I've never climbed in Yosemite before, and so Dave and I decide to go for an extended weekend.

We drove out thursday night when I finished working. Traffic isn't bad on weekday nights, even where they are rebuilding the washouts on highway 140 east of Mariposa. We climb out of the heat of the central valley with the windows open so we could smell the night and feel the warm wind on our skin... Dave is playing mandolin in the front seat while I drive and sing harmony to his songs as we wind along the Merced river canyon. We get into the valley past midnight and crash with Dave's ex. Josie and her group from the Naturalists at Large. They had a campsite in the valley for taking schoolgroups.

Josie is a fantastic trad climber. We share her rack and go cragging at churchbowl on Friday. I love how solid granite feels, and I am glad to get a chance to get used to it. We don't have a place to camp that night, but Dave knows everybody in the climbing community. We roll into Camp 4 and immediately run into his old friend Ton, who offers us both dinner and a place to sleep. We have a great evening trading stories and playing the blues around a neighboring campfire until the rangers come and ask us to quiet down. Ten o'clock quiet time. People go to bed early in the mountains.

The hardest thing about climbing half dome is not the climb itself. On the sloping west face, the climbing is relatively easy, but before you even start to climb you will have hiked 6 1/2 miles and gained 2000 feet just on the approach. And once you've conquered the rock, there are still almost ten miles to descend back to the valley floor.

We start early. 4:00 am we slip out of Camp 4, grab our waiting packs, and hit the trail. Stars give way to grey morning as we walk. Vernal falls is full from all the snowmelt this year, and it throws up so much spray onto the trail that it's like being in a storm. And it's eerie to have the whole place to ourselves. We leave the trail above Nevada falls and cut cross country through a shallow valley, around a marsh, and then up a long series of granite slabs to the base of our climb. Several parties had camped above the falls the night before, and are ahead of us when we get there. It's one of the more popular routes in the park. The Snake Dike is a vein of quartz knobs about two feet thick that runs almost 2000 feet up the west face of half dome, and offers nothing worse than a few five seven slab moves. Which is good, because I've never climbed so many pitches before, and certainly not with a pack. It's prety easy climbing. Dave leads, I follow, and we make steady progress. Eventually the grade lessens and we run out of anchors, so we unrope and scramble up and up seemingly endless slabs on our aching feet until finally a tall cairn, then another and we crest the dome, looking east across miles of rugged snow-capped granite. We take our time on top, and are hiking late into the night, down the cables, along the river, and down many wet stone steps by the falls. Yosemite always fills me with wonder.

Sunday morning Dave and I sleep. My feet are pulpy and painful and my body aches. Dave wants to go all the way to the east side for hotsprings, and I don't want to drive that far. We compromise and go to Tuolumne for afternoon of reading and jumping in the river before heading back through central valley heat to Monterey.

I chopped off my hair again.

2007-06-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

It took me a few days to get used to it, but I like it. I'm living outside again, so I've been cutting down my material existence. Sleeping in the back of my truck or under the stars, these days.

Times are a'changin. And fast.

Well, I done graduated. There was this frenetic flurry of finals and parties and packing and parents my last week at school. I left the day after commencement to start my new job. I didn't really want to go. I've been so happy in Portland. So many of my friends are staying there. And we were keeping that beautiful old wood-stair house. Starting a garden. I hope it is growing well for everyone back there. I am sad I can't be there to tend it with you.

Commencement was sort of surreal. So much formality for a place that I love for its anarchy and iconoclasm. Well, I wore the gown and all, but I put a big bucket cowboy hat on the president's head when he handed me my diploma. Best to go out the way you came, I'd say.

That night friends passed in and out of the house for dinner and goodbyes while Scott and Lizard built an awesome rack to hold milk crates in truck for me and I finished packing. I left, feeling like my whole life to that point was boxed and stacked in the basement of that house.

I have been driving slower, recently. Oregon and Scott have taught me to take a little more time with things. Go the speed limit. It took me the better part of two days to get to Monterey that way. I had a wonderful stop for dinner in Ashland... started playing with a couple street musicians. Slept in the van on a dirt road somewhere and then kept driving.

The job is with an ecology lab in Monterey. They're basically doing a state-wide survey of how sediments are impacting the physical habitats and the biological organisms in streams. This is important because no one knows what exactly happens with river sediments when you dump a bunch of road fill, or mine tailings into a watershed, or when you log or graze on the slopes above a river. We have a crew of eight... all guys, all with masters degrees, and all but one over thirty. And me. They're good guys, though. I am starting to get to know them. The work itself is simple enough. Every day is five or six hours of standing in a stream and measuring several variations on how wide and how deep it is, and how big the rocks on the bottom are. Then driving to the next river, stopping for burritos in whatever town we pass. Getting to camp after dark and sleeping out under the stars. Bless you beautiful California weather. I haven't needed a tent yet.

The best part is how much of California I have gotten to see. We've been up and down some amazing roads around the coast. I'll be heading out to the Sierras tomorrow... more news from there.

Anyway, for the last week I've been at home. We had a break from sampling, so I went back to see friends and hang out with the family. It's been relaxing and rather lazier than I would like. But I have done many things I needed to do.

Mom and Dad and I did go out sailing to Catalina Island for two days. That was fun. Easy sailing in a light wind. It was a little too cloudy for the snorkeling to be good where we anchored, but the kayaking was great. We found an old wrecked boat on an empty beach. The hull was all buried and filled with gravel. I saw a sea lion eating a leopard shark. And dolphins, crossing the channel.

A Beautiful Day

2007-02-18T12:03:00.000-08:00

I went up to Mt. Hood yesterday. The sun broke out this morning and stayed all day... and Oregon glowed green and gold and blue in it the whole day. I woke up early and biked to school to do a day of avalanche school, and we went up blessedly above treeline to ski and dig test holes and practice tranceiver searches. It hasn't snowed since January and the skiing was icy and hard, so we mostly sat and basked in the surprising warmpth. You could see all the way across central oregon, and south down the cascades a line of jagged snowy crowns thrusting above the trees. Mt. Washington. Jefferson. The three sisters. Broken top. Mt. Bachelor. Black Butte.

The sun is setting later these days. We were back in time for me to climb out on my roof with my guitar and watch it. It was beautifully warm and the people on my street were out on their porches eating dinner. If you ever read this, Vimal, I wrote you a song.

And because it was Saturday night, and we had planned it, I treked up to Laurel's house to work on our sculpture. A bicycle powered contraption... complete with water wheels, noise makers, and umbrellas. It is joyfully absurd... and it's coming together nicely. The two of us glued and cut and pounded things until two in the morning, when I finally layed myself down.

I couldn't have asked for a better day.

I'll be home from Christmas...

2007-01-10T18:14:00.000-08:00

Just got home to Portland today. I had a quite hectic packing experience, planning on leaving early the next morning. I managed to actually leave two hours later than I had planned, after mom had stuffed my cooler with food and given me lots of huggs and money, and dad had checked my engine, replaced the cooling fluid, gotten my brothers to wash the car, and replaced two of my hubcaps. They love me.

Andrew and I went up the coast highway to San Francisco our first day. Once we got towards north LA it was spectacular. There was a big sailboat race off the coast in Malibu, with hundreds of graceful boats filling their colorful sails. We stopped frequently, standing on rocky bluffs, wandering down along tidepools for quick breaks from driving. We had a red sunset over the water, then cut inland to speed up our late drive to San Francisco.

Andrew's sisters share a very nice house in Oakland. They put us up in fold-out couches with high threadcount sheets, took us out to a nice but very delayed breadfast and then convinced us to stay one night more. I wanted to go hiking in the redwoods on the way back, so I agreed, and we embarked on a short hike through redwood regional park which, disappointingly, was full of oak trees, with a handful of small secondgrowth stands. It was good exercise, though.

We got a nice early start the next morning, and made good time up the I-5. Stopping to buy olives from a farm, goggle at Shasta Lake, and play frisbee in Ashland. There is a big pass on your way into Oregon. We came all the way up from San Francisco in brilliant sunshine, and coming over it, we saw a thick bank of grey clouds stretching away below us. We descended into it and haven't come out since. Welcome back to winter.

Yesterday, a hike up the salmon river canyon with Chris Black and his folks. We spent lots of time looking up plants in field guides and seeing how many people it took to reach around each huge old growth tree. I love that hike. I've been there every year since I moved here, and I will take you one day.

Seattle

2006-11-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

Now for a post that's actually on time!

I got to nerd out at the Mariott last weekend. There was a Western Society of Naturalists conference up in Seattle, and I got a grant from Reed to go. Basically, its a whole bunch of marine biologists getting together and giving talks about their research. (That is.. by day. By night there is rather more fun and debauchery than I expected out of old people. I guess it bodes well for my future that scientists have fun.) In all, totally awsome.

Things I learned:

Since Boneville Dam holds up the salmon migration, salmon gather in huge numbers at the dam every year, and there are sealions that have learned this and started swimming 200 miles up the Columbia river every year to feast! When the salmon are late, they can pack-hunt and catch full-grown sturgeon (that's like 10-foot long fish), much to the chagrin of local fishermen.

The barnacle has the largest penis-to-body ratio of anything in the animal kingdom.

Deep Sea research is really cool, and REEEEAAALLY expensive. They have meter-wide crabs down there.

I also got to see Ross and Rick, since I didn't visit either of them on my way back from Montana. Ross has an awsome appartment with his girlfriend, on the corner of Bellview, Bellview, and Bellview. The view, needless to say, is pretty. And Rick, being from Seattle, gave a little tour of the city to me and Ginger (another reedie... she's the one in the picture) and James (a cool dude from Berkeley we met). Seattle is a pretty cool town.

A Last Gasp for Glacier

2006-11-18T17:34:00.000-08:00

Ask me for the story about how I first saw the Grizz... and I will be more likely to go on about WHERE I first saw one. It was hiking alone on the highline trail from Logan Pass, on my last day in Glacier.

It was strange how quickly people dispersed from the Bio Station, after being so close-kint in that little community. Classes ended, and I had a week of burning the midnight oil to write up and present all my research. The other REU kids and I presented on a thursday morning, and by 2:00 that day, everyone but me had left Flathead Lake. It was suddenly a lonely place. But it's a place I love, and I took my time to say goodbye. A thunderstorm was rolling in from the East, and I went running a long ways along the lake before the wind picked up and then, because I had the lake to myself, I stashed my clothes under a log and swam out alone and naked far out into the middle. Farther than I had ever gone before.. so that I could see the station on the peninsula, with the bay behind, above the trees and the near hills, rows of mountains, and sky. I took a long shower to warm up again, and when I came out the sun was setting and a storm was blowing up from the east. One last sunset on the lake. It rained on all my stuff as I packed.

Tait had invited me to stay at his cabin, and I took him up on it. The place is wonderful. Tait's extended family owns land all across the south slope of a mountain near Columbia Falls, and he built the cabin with his father and brother on their chunk of it, all from logs they felled themselves. It's still part-way unfinished. The father passed away, and both the boys are in school and were left with his debt. But they were also left with the land and the cabin. It is a simple place. Functional, and not beautiful, but warm. I got a good safe feeling from it, like somehow it's been imprinted with the love of the strong, stern man who built it.

Tait kept it well filled with beer bottles and dirty dishes and friends sleeping on the floor, but he also took good care of it. He plowed his own road and chopped all his own wood for the winter heating, and was constantly talking about what he would build when he had time to finish the place. This is part of why I liked him.

I got there late, and slept for the whole next day while Tait was at work at the rafting company. He had to work all weekend, so Saturday I went out to Glacier on my own to do some exploring.

It was a stormy day, and I was alone so I decided to take a popular trail. The highline leaves from the main visitor center on the main pass in the park. You follow twelve miles of rimrock, with barely a tree to block the view, descending slowly to the next place you reach a road. I parked at the bottom and hitched a ride to the pass with two women from Missoula. The trail was magnificent. Clouds were blowing in and alternated rain with occasional brilliant sunshine. I saw my first Grizzlies. A mother an cub crossed the trail far away from me and ran down the slope below while I was picking huckleberries. I took a detour and climbed an extra 2000 feet to a pass, and was rewarded with a glimpse of the east part of the park.. a string of lakes below a glacier, changing color and stretching all the way out onto the planes. Needless to say I was happy. Put me above treeline with some wind in my hair, and I won't ask for more.

I got back to the cabin tired and aching, but with my soul filled up. Tait had a big drunken party with fishing buddies that kept me up grudginly late and nearly bored me to tears. Happy as I was in Montana, without the Bio Station kids I was lonely, and I knew it was time for me to go.

I had elaborate plans to go explore Canada, and then visit friends in Washington on my way back, but the thought that I could be home in Portland by the next day was so appealing that I dropped them all and went. Sunday I said goodbye to Tait and the cabin, filled up a last growler from the Flathead Lake Brewery, and bought fifteen pounds of fresh-picked cherries to take home with me. I didn't make it all the way to Oregon. That night I stopped somewhere in eastern Washington and slept on a hillside under the stars. Feeling free, feeling ready, I woke up at dawn and drove the last way home.

O-Week Climbing Trip

2006-11-18T16:41:00.000-08:00

When I got home from Montana, unpacking was a disaster. Somehow the screws that held my bookcase together got moved separately from the bookcase, and I spent two days opening every box I had, exploding notebooks and coathangers and clothing all over the room, until I finally gave up and bought more screws. It took the better part of a week to dig out my room, and I was be scrounging couches and scrubbing cabinets and chasing cobwebs out of the basement for another month after that.
I was just starting to get glimpses of the floor when I took a brake from the business of organizing life to take a gaggle of ten starry eyed-freshmen on an O-Week trip. We spent two days out at Smith Rock going climbing, and another two rafting and hiking around on the Dechutes River.
Smith, as always, was radiantly hot. We baked to the rocks and climbed till we couldn't unscrew water bottles or tie shoelaces. Matt and Rodney, two awsome outdoor dudes who run climbing trips with Reed, came with us to do the technical setup. They were excellent company. There's something so down to earth about people who make the outside their living. I hope I'm that cool if I grow up.

My freshmen were great, also. I got them to sleep out under the stars in a big group with me, and to wear silly hats(I brought the collection) and eat peanutbutter-cheese sandwiches. The one moment they're going on about the grossest thing they ever ate with cheese... the next they're arguing over the merits of the Faegles vs. the Lattimore translation of the Illiad. Pure Reedies! Even before the meat-grinder. I love it! I am friends with most of them still.

After two days on the rock, we headed over to the wet side of the Cascades for two days on the river. It was cold and rainy out there, but the river was high. Rafting on easy rapids is actually not that interesting. At least to me. But it is relaxing. And conducive to veeery large water fights. We went hiking to some really cool waterfalls to brake the monotony a little. And best of all... you could raft right up to the world's most succulent blackberry patches. I've never been so full of berries!

When we got back to Portland, I brought them all to my house, where we made four pies from what little we had managed to save. I like the new house. It has big windows and wood floors and a winding red staircase... only one little bathroom for the five of us. Enought pie, and it started feeling like less of a disaster after all.

Group Oog!

2006-09-10T03:18:00.000-07:00

So this is a bit belated (HA! Considering the uber-belatedness of the Eurafrosia posts... oops), but for this year's Outdoor pre-Orientation trip we headed to the San Jacintos! A nice wilderness area, though perhaps not at its peak of pleasantness this time of year, as we found out... the hard way, unfortunately.

I got the dubious privilege of driving the rations-laden U-Haul down from Claremont to Palm Springs and up the mountain. It was actually pretty fun to drive, since I got to learn how to drive a big truck (not my hobby of choice, usually), and I was allowed to demand that other people get out, shuffle around, and wave their arms in amusing ways to help me park, back up, unpark, and make 3-point turns on narrow, rocky unpaved "roads" during our forays of the lostness variety on the way up. Camille was my 2nd in Command, and she and I seriously toyed with the idea of calling up Becky in the other van and just running off with the vehicles to Vegas or Sequoia. After all, we had all the food we'd need, right?

In any case, we were given hurried driving directions no less than 2 minutes before departure, and no gas money, and passel of boxed lunches that a particular student coordinator had neglected to take along on the student bus. This was merely the beginning of the program's organizational woes.

It turned out that we weren't even supposed to meet up with the other vehicles in the place listed on our driving directions, which partly explained how lost Camille and I got, though we did eventually find them. Our base camp was then about an hour's drive away, over even rockier unpaved roads, and the campers had to be shuttled in by the only two or three people authorized to drive Scripps' vans, a grueling process that took something like six hours, and left the drivers literally prostrate with motion sickness.

Claire and I sorted all the camping food so the backpacking groups would be able to take all us when we left, and discovered that we had ridiculous amounts of TVP, which, for those of you who are gourmetly unenlightened, is basically granulated soy jerky. Except it rehydrates. It doesn't taste like much, and is a lightweight, nutritive additive to camping food. This factors in later. Claire and I unpacked something like 35 one-pound cartons of the stuff from the U-Haul, which was stunning, considering about half a pound will be more than enough for one meal for a group of 10 girls, even ones who are backpacking. This is even more stunning considering each group was planned out to have no more than three meals with TVP, and all totalled, we certainly had no more than 75 people camping with us.

Nonetheless, the food was painstakingly sorted, portioned, repackaged, and laid out for the backpacking groups to distribute in the morning. The Base Camp food Claire and I left alone, since we didn't know what meals had been planned for base camp.

The next morning we set out (my group was the earliest with a 6:30am departure), refreshed and ready for some wilderness lovin'. The going was tough, considering we were already at 7000ft elevation with only one night to adjust, and we were set to gain about 3000 more feet before the end of the hiking day. The terrain wasn't too bad, but the weight combined with the elevation, combined with the fact that simply living in Cairo for the last six months has been the equivalent of me converting into a sedentary, fast food junkie smoker, meant it was slow going.

Our girls had been given a woefully inadequate camping gear list (which didn't even include rain gear!! aaghh!), and so were all supplied with a mere two nalgenes, which would at minimum have to be refilled twice a day. We kept an eye out for water along the trail as we hiked up, as we'd been promised that the trail passed any number of small but perfectly acceptable creeks and springs. The first "creek" drainage we passed had a damp patch, and the second had a fetid puddle, but we were confident that this small increase in water would continue well enough that we would be able to get more water soon. We'd plotted out (based on the compass-string method taught to us by Shannon) the distance we'd travelled on our map, and estimated that based on the distance given us of 5.3 miles for our first day of hiking that the place we ought to stop for lunch was a trail junction about 2.5 miles up the trail. We found no water along the way, so when we finally stopped for lunch we desperately began asking all the hikers we saw whether they'd seen any water sources along any of the trails that converged at the junction.

We finally found a pair who told us they'd passed a small but flowing creek about a half mile down Skunk Cabbage Meadow trail, the opposite direction of where we were supposed to be heading. It was our only lead, however, so we scooped up my sexy, sexy MSR filter and all our empty bottles and headed down the trail. This detour meant we had to take a 2-3 hour long lunch break. We got a late start back on the trail in the afternoon, and started gaining elevation fast. It was a grueling hike, and when we finally took a break for our afternoon snack, we calculated that we'd gone nearly 5 miles, not counting the extra mile detour we'd done before for water. We were again nearly out of water with not even a fetid puddle along the way to encourage us.

It was at this point we met the Crazy Man, who wore camo and carried a small pack with lots of dangling, empty water bottles. He leapt at us from behind a boulder (note: off the trail), stomped over to the trail, and disorientedly asked us where he was, where we were, where the water was, and where was the trail? Well, I already had the map out, so I brought it over to him to show him where we thought we were on the map. He seemed unable to make the connection between me pointing at the map and saying "so, we're here" and the actual trail under his feet, so we eventually just told him to go downhill.

We picked up our gear and headed off again. Not fifteen minutes later we encountered another group of hikers who were headed back down the trail. By this time it was pushing 6pm, but we were convinced that we had no more than a mile left, and that though we'd be setting up camp in the dark, we'd best just push onward. The hikers seemed surprised that we were still packing so late in the day, and asked us where we were headed. We told them which campground we were aiming for, and they just laughed. Confusedly, we asked them what was so funny, and were informed that we in fact had something like three miles ahead of us before we reached the camp. This sounded outrageous! We were told we had a hike of no more than 5.3miles, and we had certainly gone nearly that far. One of the hikers busted out his (much nicer... with actual mileage marked on the trail) map and showed us. The hike we'd had laid out for us was actually closer to 8 miles than 5.3. He told us also where the nearest water source was, wished us luck, and continued on.

Well, this was certainly a wrench in the gears. We made it a little bit farther up the trail before I decided that three miles was simply not walkable before it got too dark to be safe for packing. We were on a ridge at this point, so there was relatively flat ground, so we decided to just guerrilla camp right where we were for that night, and just get to the campground the next day. This would require some small itinerary changes, but no big deal, right? Illegal camping or not, it just wasn't safe for us to continue, so there we were.

We set up camp and Camille took a few of the girls and headed farther up the trail sans packs to get water. I set a few of the remaining girls to preparing the kitchen to cook dinner and bouldered up to the nearest high point to see if I could get signal for one of our emergency cell phones to report the glitch we'd had, and to ask for some logistical support, as if we had a much longer hike than promised, we weren't sure if we could stick to the weeklong schedule they'd given us and get back in time to be picked up and driven the hour or so back to base camp. The signal wasn't the greatest, and my phone nearly died after just searching for what signal it did get, but it only cut out a few times... I thought. I climbed back down the mountain to reach the girls, only to find them anxiously asking whether it would be all right for them to make a hot water nalgene for Nora. I wasn't really sure, first of all, why they thought they needed permission to do such a thing, and second of all, why Nora would want one NOW. I told them it was fine, though, and was about to get down to the business of headlamps and dinner when they all started chipperly joking about how silly the situation was now that Nora couldn't walk, and they had to help her put on her warm pants.

Wait.

Nora COULDN'T WALK? This is problem. How and when had this happened? Nora explained that she'd been born with dislocated hips, and that to this day, they were easily dislocatable. Well, it certainly hadn't said anything about this on her medical form, but here we were, and here she was, not walking, and we would just have to deal with it. We fed Nora and sent her off to bed with a hot nalgene. She didn't seem particularly distressed with this state of affairs, so it didn't seem like a medical emergency... though, obviously, how do you get off a mountain if you can't walk?

By this point, Camille and her bunch had returned, and I borrowed Camille's phone for the necessary second emergency call of the night. By now it was completely dark, and Camille was afraid of heights and... most things, so I nabbed my (borrowed) headlamp and set off bouldering again. Bouldering in the dark is actually fairly awesome, I've discovered, but officially I'm not allowed to say this because it's not safe.

I put in a call saying that we had no medical emergencies, but that since Nora was having hip problems from the strain of carrying a pack and because the trails were longer than reported and there was little to no water, we would be heading back down to the trail junction the next day (where we at least knew we could find water) and would just STAY there until somebody came to get us.

There was much drama with the critter hang that night, but otherwise all went smoothly, considering. The girls were actually almost shockingly cheerful given our state of affairs, an attitude for which I am eternally grateful.

The next day we packed up and distributed the bulk of Nora's gear between the rest of us and headed down off the mountain. Nora was walking fine by morning, but why risk it? Everyone was pretty damn happy to leave, even me, and ended up singing songs from more musicals than I've even heard of to serenade us on the way down. We made incredible time, and spent the rest of the day plopped on a big rock at the junction, holding group readings of Frankenstein, feeding and spoiling some of the trail horses and dogs that came by, and just lazing about in the sun, which was probably the nicest part, after my hectic summer.

We waited all day, and finally set up our guerrilla camp for the second night, this time in a much flatter spot, though with at least as much critter hang drama as before. We woke up early the next morning and set about preparing for our second day of waiting and lazing in the sun... which may have not been so sunny, as a storm was definitely portending for that day or the next, and the girls were rather less than enthusiastic about Lightning Drill.

It was early afternoon when a baseball capped man with a pair of dogs came into the junction clearing and with a look of dire seriousness approached us and told us that there was someone farther down the trail who was coming up, looking for a group of 10 women. We burst out in cheers at having finally been "rescued" and gathered up our gear. Not five minutes later, Shannon burst into the clearing, relieved to have found us, as, apparently, the first two messages I'd left had come through at their end as little more than static with a few syllables thrown in, and the second set (after I'd found out about Nora's injury) had cut off before the part where I'd mentioned where we were headed and when. We happily headed back to base camp, only to find it in the quietest chaos I've ever seen.

It turned out that due to bad planning there was simply not enough food for the base campers, and the bad attitude and ill temper of the head student coordinator had led the campers to seek refuge in either sunbathing far away from camp for most of the day, or in making friendship bracelets for about five hours at a stretch.

Our increasingly appalled Group Oog (named for Nora's squatting around the whisperlite and grunting "Oog want food! Oog want food now!") set up camp and set about our own camperly duties. One of the things the base campers complained to us about was the fact that what food there was made them really sick. It turned out that said coordinator hadn't bothered to read the TVP instructions about the necessity of proper rehydration before consumption, and had decided that since they had tons of the stuff and "Didn't need to stretch it that far," it was fine to simply pour a cup of water on it and serve, rather than allowing it to rehydrate to its full doubling-of-volume.

Essentially, Group Oog fended for ourselves, and we were much happier for it. We found out later that one of the other groups had found a pair of camo pants on the trail, downhill from where we met Crazy Man. Crazy Man had some interesting ideas, that's for sure.

We ended up having a great time, playing tent catch, cards, and 10 fingers, though we felt bad for the base campers. I wouldn't recommend the San Jacintos in August though. Beautiful otherwise.

Many Mountains

2006-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Hey there! I've been keepin' myself buisy. There are two more weeks left for me to finish my research project, so I've spent most of my time in the lab these last few weeks. The deal is this: Coal mines are bad for aquatic ecosystems. Why? you ask. Well.. coal used to be ancient wetlands, and it accumulated all kinds of toxic stuff, like wetlands do. Dig it up and dump tons of sediments in the river and bring lots of people and machinery into a place... you cover gravel beds with muck, you load the rivers with too many nutrients, change the species assemblages and you poison things with bioaccumulating toxins. "Prove it!" says Canada. "Fine," sez me. So I got a bunch of algae samples from Canada - on the North Fork of the Flathead river (which is incredible! Hundreds of miles, no people, no dams, roads that tried to eat my car - saw lots of moose... even a wolf, and was twenty yards from a bear, in ten days.) And then I sampled in the Elk river, which drains the other side of the mountain where they want to build the mine. There are already five big mines in the drainage, so you can see what it's done already. The algae is only a piece of the picture.. but I think it's worthwhile and pretty cool. Thus, I've been slaving away in the lab recently taking biomass and chlorophyll measurements and trying to identify diatoms. I have been running and going swimming in the lake in the evening, though. Lots of sunsets.

Weekends, of course, are sacred. That's adventure time. There are already too many stories to tell, so mostly I will just add more pictures and let you make up stories for yourselves. I have spent them, in this order, like so:
1)Backpack to lake. Damn it's wet. You heard about that one.
2)Monster truck rally.. cowboy bar.. Glacier.
3)Backpacking in the swan range - climb a mountain, lose trail twice and end up going 19 miles in a day and hiking till midnight. Loved it.
4)Bluegrass Festival in the biterroot valley. Music and beer.

5)Canada. Campfires.. moose. Standing in the river in evening watching all the mayflies hatching. There's this creek that goes through the road and I hope we don't get stuck! Sunday we are hassled at the border and listen to Freebird eight times on the drive home.
6)Last weekend... hiking again. We found a ridge trail into the Bob Marshall wilderness and were going to visit a lake, but between high 90s heat and hangovers we only make it five miles. This turned out to be a good idea. We camped on top of a point with an amazing 360 view. Probably the most beautiful night I have ever spent.

Evil plans..
This awsome guy gave me his old Schwinn. I must fix it. And there is a cute rafting guide who works in the lab.. I will probably go floating with him and make some pathetic attempts at learning to fly fish.

If I didn't love Portland so much I would never leave this place.

Because Glacier Rocks My Socks

2006-07-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Raisin Toes

2006-06-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

I have been running around a lot these past few days... pictures sometime. Really! I got dragged off to a sketchy-ass karaoke bar in Polson Thursday night. It was underneath a chinese restaurant and full of old bearded men wearing ACDC tshirts and smoking. Enter twenty biology students who thought drunken karaoke would be funny. It eventually relaxed and we started playing pool and Jenny (my awesome roommate) and I drank dollar beers and danced to shitty music. We managed pretty well to elbow away the skeevy boys who thought they would try to rub their crotches on us as an excuse for a social interaction. Peter and Eric were not so lucky and got felt up by drunken tooth-missing women. Welcome to Montana, I thought.

After that mild trauma, we went out to a great one on Friday night. It is across the street from an award-winning microbrewery, so we went to the brewery first. Their beer is amazing, and the owner Terry gave us a tour of the brewing room and told us his whole story of starting it before closing. Then across the street to the Raven, which is a colorful little place right on the lake. No smoke in there, and they had a live bluegrass band (they played that Cake song you gave me about the bucket seats with banjo!) and lots of friendly people. I am never going back to Polson!

We had the weekend off, so Jenny and I, and some of the other kids doing research here went up backpacking in Glacier. It had been very cloudy and hard to see out there, and it sprinkled on us yesterday.. but the real damage was to wet all the waist-high plants in the trail so they could wipe on our pants and to fill all the streams. For most of the eight miles, the trail was the stream, so all our toes turned to swollen achey raisins. It was worth it though. We stumbled our tired way into camp at Lincoln lake, and there across the lake is a 1500 foot high waterfall, full to the brim with all the rain and snowmelt, tumbling down blocky sedimentary layers to the east. The next morning it cleared up and we could see a big snow-covered peak behind the falls too. Fucking awesome.

So, for the week I am running off to Canada to take samples on the River. Should be back fridayish. For now, I'm gonna take a much-needed shower and go lay this achey-ass body down.

Montana!!

2006-06-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Got to the station yesterday. I had a great time in Steamboat. Met a bunch of Casey's friends in the big lively house of his. Janna came up from Fort Colins too. She brought her awesome new boyfriend and we all went hiking while Casey was at work. The boy is doing really well for himself. He has a job he likes and a house full of awesome people and he's going to school to become a nurse. I'm so happy to see that.

From Steamboat, the drive up was hellishly long, especially the middle of Wyoming.. just this great flat desolate basin. Once I got to the west, though, I drove past the Wind River range and the Grand Tetons. They're incredible. The kind of mountains that make you want to pee your pants and get out of the car and start running to get into them. I took my time through them for exhilarated ogling.. then got to Yellowstone exhausted from so long driving and too late in the day to get a campsite. Sucked it up and just whizzed through the whole park. It's a shame, but I needed somewhere to sleep, and just parking somewhere in the park was illegal. I would have done it anyway if there weren't so many rangers in cop cars patrolling around. They had sirens and everything. Bastards. Policing around bothering people instead of taking care of the land. I guess there are a lot of dumb tourists. But still.. cop cars? I suppose it's the government's fault, not theirs.

So, anyway, I slept in a campsite just outside Yellowstone and then came up here. It is pretty. It's greener and smaller and closer to civilization than I had expected. I guess I will have to go climb to get up to the real mountain country. This is more of a long, low valley. The station is all on a peninsula in the lake (which is huge and beautiful and very cold). I have a little 15-foot cabin to share with a nice girl named Jenny from South Carolina. There are thirty-some students here total between the research projects and the classes. They seem like cool kids.

Everyone is pretty friendly. I'm not sure how to describe the vibe. I'm definitely one of the only ones from the west coast, but it's a little more relaxed and less pretentious than the east coast feeling like I had with the students in Costa Rica. Not that that was bad - just different. Does that make it midwest? I dunno. Looks like I will be doing a research project on diatoms.. putting together an index of biotic integrity for the north fork of the flathead river. Apparently the Canadians have permitted a coal mine upstream, so there is a big project trying to figure out what the chemicals and sedimentation is going to do to the river. It seems pretty exciting. I will be spending lots of time looking at little blobs with a microscope. Woot.

Canyonlands

2006-06-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

I left for Montana the day after my twentyfirst birthday. It was drunken-floor-tastic. I managed to get home that night, and then even to wake up at 7 am to say goodbye to my brothers. Then went right back to sleep till noon before getting on the road.

Road tripping is awesome. I wish I had someone else to share the driving, but I still really like seeing so much of the country. And cruise control is my friend. I got myself all the way to Utah and then up a hill just outside of Zion by sunset that day. I was going to go camp in the park, but I figured, why pay? so I threw down a sleeping bag on a flat spot on top of the hill and slept out. It makes me so happy to be out in high country again. I was starting to get antsy out in the city.. and I didn't really get to much time in the mountains last summer. It's been so long since I just laid myself down on the ground like that. It's delicious.

Mmm.. so next morning I went to Zion. The park is amazing. It really looks like all the pictures... just thousands of feet of vertical sandstone, with twisted pines growing in all the cracks and a turquoise river at the bottom of the canyon. They've banned cars, so even though there were lots of people it didn't feel crowded. I didn't get to stay long, but I did a hike that morning up angel's landing. You climb about a thousand feet up a slot canyon, then it opens out onto a 20-some foot wide
ridge with thousand foot drops on either side. Follow the ridge out towards the middle of the valley and there is a little peak with views for miles. God damn. I didn't want to leave.

The scenic route out of there is very pretty, but it took four hours where my map said one. The rest of Utah went by in gorgeous sweeping deserty blurs as I did 80 down the interstate. Who know it was so damn big. Past dark and ten hours into a supposedly 8 hour drive I gave up on making it to Steamboat and found a dirt road to park and sleep for the night. Just got to Steamboat this morning. I got about half an hour of Casey during his lunch break, so now it's just bumming around town for me. It's gone even more upscale in the last two years. But there are good memories here. And cool people. I'm glad I came to visit.

Oh.. I have an address.
Write me letters! Send Me Cookies! YUM.
Jessica Thompson
300 Bio Station Lane
Polson MT 59860-9659

Mt. Baldy

2006-06-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

Hey Kids! Despite all appearances, I haven't fallen off the planet yet. Life at school has been slightly more boring than Egypt. I did have the incredible luck to go to AMSTERDAM!! over spring break.. more on that somewhere else.. anyway, I've been at home back in Irvine these last couple weeks catching up on sleep and seeing people and preparing to drive out to Montana. I got a job through the University of Montana doing field research on river ecology this summer. I should be putzing around the backcountry of Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes (the Canadian park that connects to Glacier) all summer. On the drive up I'm stopping by Steamboat Springs again to go see Casey and some other RMYC folks, maybe Janna if she drives up. It looks like I can camp a night in Zion and a night in Yellowstone between marathon 13-hour drives. I'll try to post drool-worthy pictures.

Other awesomeness.. I climbed Mt. Baldy at sunrise with Kibler and Martin last Sunday. In true alpine fashion we woke up hella early and got to the trailhead by 4:30 am. It was beautiful, climbing in the dark high above Riverside county's spread of lights. The sunrise hit the upper atmosphere before anything else, and from up there we could see the layers of color descending slowly down to light the valley. We crested a ridge just as the sun started hitting it, then just stood staring east over the desert for the better part of an hour, shadows and colors shifting on receding lines of ridges. We followed up what turned out to be a fire break, then cut over to the actual trail, which switchbacked up and ran along a razorback ridge to the base of the summit. There were mountain goats there. A pair of slim shaggy bucks that came skittering up one side of the ridge and stood, looking picturesque, a moment before disappearing down the other side. I've never seen them wild before. The whole mountain is just absolutely beautiful.

Sneak Peak Egypt, Part 1

2006-05-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

So what's the use of being a student of Egyptology in Egypt, you might think, if you don't get any geography-related perks? Not much use, really, so of course I went for the perks when they presented themselves. One such perk was one of Dr. Ikram's annual "Middle Egypt Trips," for which the itinerary is never the same, as she seems to use these student trips as an excuse to visit sites that even she has never been to before--which are by and large sites which are not (and may never be) open to the general public. This is not to say that in Egypt's baksheesh-based economy that if you are particularly interested in any of these sites you couldn't get there yourself; nonetheless...

Woohoo! No tourists!

This year the trip was a three-day extravaganza during which Dr. Ikram personally sanctioned nearly the entire Egyptology department skipping a full day of class. We piled into our bus and took off southward, ending up in the quaint city of Minya. We went first to our hotel, where we checked in before a quick tameyya and foul lunch and immediately rushing off to the occasionally-touristed site of beni hasan, the site of a number of Middle Kingdom nobles' tombs, all in rock-cut, courtyard style. The tombs here are known particularly for the richness and unusual content of the paintings they contain.

Some of this content includes extensive representations of the animals and habitat that existed at the time--extremely useful to archaeologists because they are detailed enough to reveal exactly what species were present. Other unusual content includes scenes of wrestling and "Egyptian Yoga", as well as one of the exceedingly few depictions of sexual intimacy present in ancient Egyptian art, as Lucy enthusiastically pointed out.

Our next site was the also occasionally-touristed Fraser Tombs, a site known for its highly unusual style of "rock-cut mastabas", a type of tomb architecture combining the more popular cave-like rock cut style with the more old school freestanding brick mastaba style. The tombs at this site were considerably less well-preserved as those at Beni Hasan, and frankly quite a lot less interesting, but they did contain some nice examples of mortuary chapel portrait statues and false
doors.

False doors, for those of you not in the know, are (often elaborate) carved representations of doors that are meant to act as a portal of sorts for the ba* of a person to emerge from the tomb and take refreshment from the offerings left before it. A few examples (which I only know from slide lectures and textbooks) even have a carved image of the tomb occupant halfway out of the door, which is actually a pretty creepy and zombified concept, but nonetheless nifty.

The site we visited immediately afterwards is called Tihna el-Gebel. An astoundingly beautiful site, Tihna el-Gebel is centered around a giant freestanding stone outcropping, out of which a small temple of Hathor was carved. There are very exactingly shaped alcoves in the outer sanctuary carved into the walls to house the mummies of two enormous crocodiles done up as offerings for the goddess, and the site is untouched enough that these mummies are today housed along with many other artifacts in a side chamber gated off from the public not only by metal bars, but also by the presence of a huge, open burial shaft which leaves mere inches as the platform to stand on and reach the gated chamber. This explains the photo of me as acting Chief Photo Slave of Dr. Ikram--she's got her feet up to keep me from falling backwards into the shaft while I balance and take pictures for her. I actually have good enough balance that I don't think this was necessary, but it does make for a funny picture.

Off to the side (and actually, pretty high up on the side of the cliff) of the main temple is also a fertility chapel prominently featuring the god Min, an "ithyphallic" fertility god, who is usually portrayed as having only one arm. I use quotes on "ithyphallic" because no authentic depiction of him has ever struck me as particularly tasteless or obscene.

In any case, the chapel is high up on the cliff, so the rocks leading up to the chapel have been worn completely slick and dangerous by millenia of women climbing up to the chapel to perform a pregnancy rite of sorts: legend has it that if a woman enters the chapel from one side, exits from the other side, then climbs to another ledge where (I believe...I didn't climb to that part) an anointing basin of sorts was carved, she is guaranteed immediate fertility.

The temple is also surrounded by a vast complex of mud brick ruins, which have not been thoroughly studied, so it isn't entirely known what sorts of buildings were there, but it is clear that the site was used as late as the Ptolemaic period, as there is a very clear Greco-Roman influence on some of the art that is there. The site even contains the remains of the largest ancient Greek inscription ever found. There was not enough of it remaining for our two resident Greeks to translate anything of substance, but it is an impressive site nonetheless.

*A person's ba was only one portion of the "tri-soul" that ancient Egyptians believed each person to have. The most commonly known soul-part is the ka, the essential being of the person in question. Kas are generally portrayed as the image of the person who is dead, but wearing a "hat" in the shape of two upraised arms. The next part, the ba, was a more physical manifestation of the soul, which could interact with the world of the living. Most commonly represented as a bird with the face of the dead person, the ba was thought (even in Amarna times) to be the soul-part which would leave the tomb in search of eternal sustenance for the soul, which would ideally be found in the offerings left to honor the funerary cult of the individual dead. The third part, which may not have even been a part of Egyptian belief until the New Kingdom, was called the akh. The akh was the portion of the person's soul which would transcend death and the tomb, and reside with the gods in heaven, trailing forever the solar barque on its journey through the sky and underworld. In the New Kingdom, commoners often practiced a form of ancestor worship in which they would create household shrines dedicated to the akh iker ("wise soul"), the collective spirits of their household dead. The theory behind this was that if Grandma was up in heaven hanging out with the gods every day, then maybe if you prayed to her instead of the gods themselves, who were obviously too busy to hear everyone's prayers, then maybe Grandma would be able to put in a little good word for you and get your prayers answered faster.

To be continued...

Oh no! I got the Rabies!

2006-05-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

In light of my recent rabiesification, I thought I'd do a little post in honor of the feral kitties that we here at AUC know and love. (FYI, none of the cats that appear here were the one that forced me to become extremely familiar with the Vacsera medical facilites).

Cats are everywhere in Egypt, and so far as I can tell, few to none of them are actually "owned," and even fewer are "owned" in the sense that pet cats are owned in most of the Western world. Most of them dig through garbage or beg for scraps, though a few are habitually fed by kindhearted people. None of them are fixed, so there are kittens everywhere; how long any of them survive, however, is not terribly certain.

The cats on campus have very distinct personalities, and most of them are named... though the ones that people don't like tend to get named earlier and more often. Several of just such cats don't appear here (they tend to be a bit lower in the campus territory cat ranking and get driven off more often... hence, harder to take photos), but with names like "Yucky" and "Stupid," you can guess how beloved they are.

One particular favorite (and I'm serious) on campus is named "Fatso," or, alternately, "Nimmer". Fatso is the queen of her little corner of AUC. She's one of the least damaged, one of the more well-fed, and amazingly, one of the most affectionate. I have my suspicions that this particular cat may have once been actually owned, but it does seem to be the case that cats living in a situation such as that at AUC tend to be far more affectionate than domestic cats because they've learned that mewing cutely and allowing themselves to be petted tends to get them more food.

Another well-known cat on campus is named "Vampire." From the photo you might be able to tell exactly how such a name was acquired. True to his name, Vampire keeps to himself, hides in the shadows, and doesn't like people much.

The third most distinct cat-personality on campus is called "Ogre". Ogre is about the saddest kitty ever, and shows very plainly the drawbacks of a feral life. She's tiny and malnourished, and at some point during the semester was hit by a car, leaving her with a broken jaw and badly injured mouth. After this she became even smaller and more malnourished because she couldn't eat properly, and extremely filthy because with an immobile tongue, she couldn't clean herself. Sadly, she's also one of the sweeter kitties on campus, and had to learn that after her accident most people just didn't feel her affections were terribly welcome anymore.

Other popular kitties live in the dorm, located in faraway Zamalek. One (I couldn't get a photo of her because she was very pregnant and off in hiding) was named "Mango" by several dorm residents. She is the prettiest (probably purebred) Mau I'd ever seen, and was tolerant if not openly affectionate. She'd had another litter of kittens earlier in the semester, one of whom she allowed to live in the dorm lobby with her even after he'd grown large enough to fend for himself.

Her son's name was "Custer," or, according to others, "Mr. Skitters." Custer is also an extremely attractive cat, gray and white instead of Mau brown, but with his mother's distinct spot pattern still visible--particularly on his face. Custer is fickle, but likes to play with anyone who's willing, and is extremely jealous of the attention given to the latest addition to the dorm cat family, a litter of black and white kittens, mothered by an affectionate black and white cat who lives in the planter near the dorm's front entrance.

They're all very cute cats, all of whom would be comsidered very adoptable in a place where it was culturally normal to own cats.

I've considered sneaking a few of them home in my luggage with me, but somehow I didn't think they'd do too well given my further travel plans. If any of you out there would like to help out some of Cairo's kitties, I would refer you to here. Like I said: just about the sweetest cats in existance, and meh, if I can take a few jabs, you can too.

Zany Education.

2006-05-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Bones smell icky.

I've spent the last few days working with the famed Dr. Salima Ikram to learn the tricks of the zooarchaeological trade.

This means that I've been elbow deep in plastic bags full of dirt, dirt, dirt, and random chips of bone that may or may not be from one animal, that may or may not be from the same species, may or may not be from the same millenium, and may or may not actually be yet more dirt.

My job consists basically of figuring out which amorphous blobs are dirt, and which are bone, then sorting them into piles based on... well, the way Dr. Ikram describes it is "It's just like Sesame Street: which of these things is like the others, or not?"

Furthermore, the bones may or may not be from Sais, a delta village that served as the (non-Nubian) capital of Egypt in the 26th dynasty. And the bones' presence in Cairo may or may not be with the approval of the SCA (Supreme Council of Antiquities). Ahem. Surely a mere minion such as I am not privy to such details.

I'm supposed to be working my way up to actually identifying what animals each bone is from (in the cases that such an identification is possible), and which particular bone each fragment is from. The only thing I've had much success with so far is teeth--of course, as anyone who dinks with dead bits can tell you, those are the only particularly readily identifiable...anything.

It's been really interesting working with Dr. Ikram. She's--an intimidating lady, to say the least, but as one might not know from watching her on Nova or the Discovery Channel she has a very intense personality... she swears a lot, and has a real flair for the dramatic.

Some typical quotes:
"*muttered under breath* Oh, holy fuck. That's disgusting. ew. ew. ew. ew." (in reference to the really tiny, hideously unidentifiable bone bits)

"First, we need to let this girl [me] into my office. She's going to play with corpses." (addressing the guest speaker for our class)

"Don't touch that. Stop stroking it. ...Sex fiend!"(addressing a wayward tourist at the Egyptian Museum who couldn't keep his hands off a sarcophagus)

Anyway, so far we mostly have bits of cow. Bos taurus. I'm seriously evaluating my desire to be a zooarchaeologist. Such a thing was never particularly high on my list of life goals, and now, hm.

Uf, the smell. x(

Spanabic, the new Spanglish.

2006-05-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Learning to be trilingual is a pretty perplexing affair. Language number two always has a nasty habit of resurfacing at exactly the wrong time.

Today in Arabic class:
Sarah: " ﻓﺼﻞ (fasl) means 'easy,' right?"
Me: "uh, fácil means 'easy' in.... Spanish."
Sarah: "oh. ....oops."
*For the curious, fasl means "season," as in Summer, Winter, Spring. And... also "classroom."

Oops, I hope ﺍﻠﻛﺘﺎﺐ* didn't just ruin Nader's political career.

2006-04-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Attention: To all students: Please contact home regarding the Dahab bombing, because many parents have been calling the New York office looking for information. Thank you. - AUC Student Housing Office

I have several posts in queue, waiting to be finished up and posted, but I think I should take a break from our regularly scheduled program to briefly comment on the latest Middle East drama, as per the recommendation of just about every formal body of authority hereabouts.

As a lot of you know, April 24th is my birthday, and I celebrated it heartily (or, not so much) by wading through godawful Arabic drills like the eternal classic fill-in-the-blank: ".ﺭﺍﻠﻒ ﻧﺎﺪﺮ >> ﺃﻣﺭﻴﻛﻲ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺼﻞ ﻋﺮﺒﻲ >>" ...Ralph Nader, American, (is) of (descended from) the Arabs.

It was fairly late in the evening when I received a text message from my friend, Keli. "Do we know anyone who is in Dahab now?" she asked. Ohoho, I thought, that zany Keli has gotten herself stranded somewhere in the Sinai again, but I didn't think I knew anyone there who could give her a lift. I texted her back a negative, and didn't give it a second thought.

The next day I awoke and stumbled sleepily to the bathroom, only to be confronted by a flier, imploring students to let their parents know where they were, as many parents were anxious about the recent bombing in... Dahab.

Life continued on, much as it had before; and, to my knowledge, though it was the end of Spring Break, and though many students had used their free week to travel to and through Dahab, no AUC students were actually in Dahab at the time of the explosions.

Less than 48 hours later, we were informed during a class lecture that yet more bombs had been detonated in the Sinai, and that there were unconfirmed rumors of a shooting or attempted shooting at a police checkpoint somewhere nearby.

I don't feel like I'm well-informed enough to really comment on the political situation involved in this, but I do have to say that having lived here as long as I have (not long, really) and having seen a few other parts of the Middle East (Jordan and Israel, both extremely briefly), I'm not terribly surprised at how much resentment some bear towards Westerners and Israelis. Israel, especially, is an inconvenient anomaly--a tiny pocket of non-Arabs (this was quite startling when we travelled through on our way to Jordan) and comparatively extreme wealth. It's like a little slice of America: the same paranoia (though, really, with more direct threat to them, probably theirs is more justified), the same shopping malls, the same vapid new age "Pure Moods" CDs. In fact, as I think Alycia put it, Israel is America's trust fund baby.

I suppose it could be envy that drives the few and the zealous to want to wreak destruction on us, but we certainly can't exonerate ourselves--little love is lost between the West and Arabs of any kind. In fact, for the most part we seem to treat them with little more than condescension and fear. Can we blame them then for feeling that we are undeserving of our little self-made molehill of superiority?

All violence thus far has occurred very far from ﺍﻠﻗﺎﻫﺮﺓ, al Qahira, Cairo. There should be no immediate danger for any of the students here, in spite of several class trips planned to assorted locales in the Sinai (Mt. Sinai, and two or three monasteries). We, as "tourists" are extremely well guarded, since our comings and goings and travels are carefully supervised by both the university and the heavily armed police escorts they send with us everywhere. I trust the Egyptians to do everything they can to keep us safe--not only do they depend on their good reputation with foreign tourists for the majority of their economy, but every time there is a bombing or any other sort of violence, the Egyptians seem to end up with the short end of the stick, racking up a much higher tally of dead and injured than anyone else for all that they receive the least press.

On another note, enjoy your air while you can. Thanks to our not-so-dear Presidente, you all back in the States may soon have to adapt to the most picturesque sorts of mists we enjoy here in Cairo. Environmental regulations exist for a reason. IMHO, they should be inviolable.

*ﺍﻠﻛﺘﺎﺐ (al Kitaab) means "The Book," aka The Arabic Textbook of Despair.

Alycia, part 2: ﻣﺪﻴﻨﺔ ﺑﺘﺭﺓ (sp?)

2006-04-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Enter medinat Betra, the city of Petra:

We were indeed the first tourists to arrive that morning, as the man at the ticket booth hadn't even bothered to open up his ticket window yet. We bought our tickets and headed on down into the beginning of the as-Siq gorge that acts as the labyrinthine entrance to the ancient city. We passed a massive obelisk-capped tomb carved right from the rock, and a number of strange rock formations that had clearly been modified by the city's ancient inhabitants for some purpose or other.

Petra was built by a group of people called the Nabateans. Apparently they were an ancient Arab tribe who built an empire from south Jordan to Damascus and
the Sinai using the profits derived from the "caravaneering" trade, which is to say, levying tolls and "protecting" caravans of traders travelling through their territory. They were eventually conquered by and absorbed into the Roman empire, which is why you might notice some rather heavy Greco-Roman influences in Petra's architecture.

In any case...

The air was cool in the soft light of the rising sun, but the sky was already a ridiculous shade of blue, portending a toasty afternoon. As we wandered further into the rising walls of the massive gorge, we could hear birds singing everywhere overhead, and the echoing clack-clack of the janitor sweeping up the remains of the previous day just out of sight ahead of us. Otherwise, nothing. It was incredibly beautiful and serene, and you could sense almost tangibly precisely why this site had been considered sacred for so long. It also looked like a great place to bring young kids, as Leah (from Arizona, and the only other person in our little group besides me who had ever been to Disneyland) and I could not stop drawing parallels between the little niches and cavelets in the rock and the awesome "rock" maze on Tom Sawyer Island.

We dawdled along the way in the lull of the first peace and quiet any of us three AUC students had experienced in a very long while and took probably thousands of photos of the rock walls of the gorge soaring up above us. Petra is easily the most beautiful place I've ever been. Seriously. Completely without warning the narrowing gorge made a final twist to the right, and there we were--the Treasury, the most famous site in Petra, and one of the settings in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There were many camels camped out front, awaiting the tourists later in the day who would pay a pretty penny for the dubious privilege of riding them. We took our fill of photos there as well, then wandered farther down into the city (which seemed mostly, at that point, to consist of lots of massive tombs), pausing at a few salesmen's tents along the way to poke around at the items they were selling. Jordan is definitely the place to buy semiprecious stone and silver jewelry.

We went a little further to the massive amphitheater in the middle of the city, and camped out in some niches in the rock across the way from it to eat an early lunch before we headed back out. We clambered into one of the rock-cut chambers there and discovered the rock inside had some of the most amazing colors we'd ever seen. We immediately set out to take ourselves some "glamour shots" in front of it. Handily, my pants were exactly the same color. It was probably 9am by then, and the stone walls that enclosed the city were beginning to echo back the raucous noise of the first ranks of the all-pasty, all-too-short-shots-wearing tourists. We decided it was time to leave.

On the way out we noticed that the masses of people completely destroyed any sense of magic or peace the place had, and decided that we could not possibly get out of there soon enough. We returned to the hostel, finished repacking, and met up with Tarek. We were largely unconscious (again) for the trip back to Aqaba.

The border crossing back through Israel was significantly quicker than we thought it would be, though they detained my passport yet again. I'm starting to think I must be on some kind of CIA international terrorist list. I mean, I always knew I was a bit... left of center, but is this really necessary? I consider Alycia more of an instigator, and she had no problems. Nonetheless, we still ended up at the Taba end of things nearly two hours earlier than we were expecting to.

What to do with all this time we magically had on our hands? Well, on our way to the bus depot, a couple of men in galabeyyas came rushing at us, trying to persuade us to take their taxi service instead of the bus. They claimed it would be the same cost per person as the bus tickets, and that it would be much faster because we could leave right away, and the taxi wouldn't stop in such detours as Nuweiba and Suez as the bus would. We did have a lot of time to kill and I (and maybe one other person) had a midterm the following morning, so we figured it would be best to get back to Cairo as soon as we could in order to get some more studying in.

We bargained down the price a bit, accepted their offer and climbed into their minibus. The apparent lead guy told us it would just be a few minutes and went off to confer with some of his comrades. Fifteen minutes later we still hadn't left, and Mr. Lead Guy seemed to be trawling for more tourists to pack into the bus with us. This should already have been a tip-off, that they weren't following through with their stated intent to leave immediately, but we decided we'd get things done if we threw our weight around, and started to get out of the van. Mr. LG saw us immediately and ran over, desperate to not lose our money. He assured us that yes, yes we would be able to leave right away, but then noted that if we did, the four of us would have to take a different minibus (which was a serious junker) and pay an extra 25LE apiece. That TOO should have tipped us off, but we really wanted to shave off the alleged three hours they told us we would save, not to mention that being exposed to near-constant sketchy situations for the last few months had somewhat desensitized us, so we decided to go along with it anyway.

We got in the van and off we went. Hyewon and Leah took turns sleeping, and Alycia and I chatted as we zoomed precariously through the desert. It was getting dark when our driver pulled over into a gas station and informed us that he would not be driving us all the way back to Cairo as promised. Startled, we demanded to know why. He refused to say, instead assuring us that there was another driver, "his friend," who would take us the rest of the way. He promised us that he would pay "his friend" the proper share of our money so that we wouldn't have to pay any more money than we were already going to. Being four young females completely alone in the middle of the Sinai, we didn't have much choice but to warily agree with this arrangement. We drove on a little further until we reached a town (Suez, to be precise, so that's yet another promise they didn't follow through with) that had a large taxi depot. Our driver pulled in and began asking around. Finally he found "his friend," aka the first random taxi driver that was willing to accept Driver A's offer.

We made sure he paid Driver B, then paid our share to Driver A. We piled into Driver B's even junkier taxi, and off we went, again. By now it was fully dark. As we sped along, Alycia and I saw Driver B fiddling around with some weird mechanism where his stereo should have been, that turned out to be a mini TV screen. Were we to have "in-flight entertainment," then, we wondered? Well, not exactly. Not only did the driver blatantly not watch the dark road (with no headlights, I should mention) as he fiddled, but once he got it working, the logo "WWF Championship: Women's Division" came onscreen. Now, WWF is torment enough as it is, but this "Women's Division" consisted of nothing more than a pair of busty, scantily clad bleach-blondes squealing and tearing off each others' clothes while a horde of rednecks whooped it up in the background. Essentially, it was as close to porn as one could legally get in Egypt. That's right. Here we were, the four of us huddled in the back of a barely-running cab, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, more or less completely at the mercy of this strange man who spoke virtually no English, and he decides it's a great idea to watch PORN. I think this was the singular most degrading experience I've ever had as a woman.

Leah pretended to sleep, Hyewon pleaded with him to turn it off, or at least to turn down the volume, and I glowered at him in the rearview mirror for the entire rest of the ride. Alycia cracked jokes to me, en Español, about me being the Godfather.

We began, finally, to approach the glimmering lights of civilization. We'd just barely reached the outskirts of wherever-the-heck-we-were when Driver B pulled into yet another gas station and popped his hood (that's right, his hood) to have his gas tank filled. He returned a few minutes later and told us that he wasn't going to drive us any further as promised since he allegedly lived in the area and just wanted to go home. Of course, he told us, he would get "his friend" to drive us the rest of the way. We were pretty riled up by this point, and even moreso when he returned from trying to find us a willing cabbie and told us that he'd only found one, and that this guy was demanding that we pay an extra 50LE. We piled out of the cab as quick as we could and started arguing with Driver B. The agreement had been, after all, that we would be delivered where we wanted to go in Cairo, without paying any extra money. Driver C got involved in this also. He spoke even less English than Driver B, and was somehow convinced that he wasn't going to get any money at all. All of the gas station attendants decided that this argument would be the most excitement they'd have all night, so they all crowded around and joined in, with our argument by this point involving almost fifteen people and devolving into practically a shouting match with massive misunderstanding all around.

Eventually we managed to work out a deal wherein we would only pay 7LE extra for Driver C to take us to Zamalek instead of Ramses Square, since that's what the total extra fare should have been. The fight broke up, and the four of us got into Driver C's cab. It was about as junky as Driver B's, but much smaller. We were pretty relieved to no longer be in the presence of the dirty old man anymore though, so we were relatively satisfied with the way this had worked out.

We drove on for awhile longer, and I began to recognize some of the landmarks of Cairo's afueras from the various field trips I'd been on. 40 minutes later we were back in Zamalek, safe and sound if a little shaken and nearly two hours later than we would have been if we'd just taken the bus.

No more intercontinental taxis for me. Ick.

Alycia, part 1: ﺃﻫﻼ ﻭ ﺳﻬﻼ ﻣﻥ ﺍﻷﺮﺪﻦ

2006-04-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

Ahlan wa Sahlan min al Urudaan (assuming that's grammatically correct), Hello and welcome, from Jordan! Sorry for the delay, but things have been busy busy busy around here. I don't think there's any way to make a "short version" of recent happenings, so I'll try to tackle the catching up one bit at a time.
Alycia dropped by for a visit, so the instant her plane landed, we (we being myself, Hyewon, and Leah, both from crew) whisked her away for a sunny holiday skipping across three countries and two continents twice in two days.

Alycia's arrival was in of itself a bit of an adventure, since her plane arrived from a layover in France nearly three hours late, meaning our little band missed our bus out from midan Ramsis to the border of Israel at Taba. I discovered while making my way to pick Alycia up, that when the ancient Egyptians said that souls that were condemned in the afterlife, they weren't actually eaten by the Devourer, they were damned to a much worse fate--to be lost forever in Cairo International Airport, the ultimate in purgatories. Even with the assistance of a native taxi driver, who parked and accompanied me to the terminal, we still got lost in the airport for a good two hours, before finding the arrival gate Alycia was supposed to magically appear at.
I discovered during the lengthy wait for Alycia's monstrously late plane one of the major infrastructure problems of Egypt--they don't like admitting when things go wrong! Which is to say, on the screens in the terminal where flight arrivals and departures are supposed to be displayed, her flight was not listed as delayed... in fact, it was not listed at all. It was completely wiped from the list and reinserted three hours later as being "on time." To be fair, however, Alycia reported that the airport in Paris did exactly the same thing.

In any case, with a bit of finagling, we managed to reschedule our trip to Petra for very early the following morning. The bus station at Ramses square was probably the sketchiest place I've found myself in the entirety of my stay here, and one of the staff members tried to put us on the wrong bus even though he knew our destination was Taba, and knew that that particular bus did not go to Taba.

We did eventually end up in the right place, however, and off we went. The majority of the people on the bus (including us) were blessedly unconscious for most of the 6 hour ride, and arrived finally at Taba, not really refreshed, but ready to get a move on, in any case.
We'd had to switch buses part way through the trip, as the particular bus we were on actually headed farther down the Red Sea coast to Nuweiba where the ferry departed from, and during this confused, barely-conscious migration, we caught sight of "the guy in the green shirt," who would later inadvertantly give us some very valuable Middle Eastern travelling tips.

We finally exited the bus at the border station at Taba and confusedly tried to figure out the schedule of buses departing Taba for Cairo for the following day. At this point, Enter Travis, "the guy in the green shirt," an American backpacker of unknown origin and only vague inclination towards motives. He'd been on the bus with us the whole time, but the bus was crowded enough that we hadn't had the opportunity to meet him. He was, however, the only other person there who was travelling to the Israeli border, so we quickly joined up with him, and headed off on foot to the border crossing. We made it to the border quickly enough, and crossed over with no problem. The border crossing entrance point to Israel, however, was a completely different story.

At the Israeli security checkpoint, a young, slender, hard-eyed woman with close-cropped dark hair stopped us and asked us why we wanted to enter Israel. We answered her quickly that we were only passing through on our way to Jordan. She let us pass, but it was not so easy for Travis. We waited for him just beyond the security point so we could all go through customs together, but it was not meant to be--Travis made the mistake of telling the hard-eyed woman that he didn't have a set itinerary for his travels in Israel... he thought he might as well go to Jerusalem first, but after that was anyone's guess. After nearly 15 minutes of interrogation, our little group was prompted onwards to the baggage check, forcing us to leave Travis behind.

At the xray machine, the security checkers took Hyewon's passport and rubbed it down with a cloth to check it for traces of undesirable chemicals--probably explosives and drugs. We were asked many, many times whether all of our luggage items belonged to us, and whether or not anyone had asked us to take anything to deliver to Israel. We were all told to open up our bags for close inspection, but after the near-constant bag searching at all university locales in Cairo, it wasn't much of a big deal. By the time we'd all finished and moved on to the line where our passports would be examined and stamped, Travis had finally been let through by the hard-eyed woman, and was undergoing rigorous examination by the baggage checkers. He was forced to remove every item he owned from every bag or container it was in and spread it all out on the table. At this point we lost sight of him.
We handed over our passports to be stamped. When it was my turn, the woman behind the desk asked me bemusedly whether I really have four names, and asked me to confirm what they all were. She then told me that there was a problem, and that they were going to have to send my passport "down to the office" to be checked out.

They had me waiting for nearly 30 minutes, maybe more. In that time I found myself perched on an airport-style bench next to an Israeli woman who was acting as tour guide for a massive group of Nigerians who had gone to Egypt to climb Mt. Sinai. I talked with her for a little while. She said it was shameful of me to travel through Israel without seeing the sights, and decided to hold me personally accountable for the horrors of poverty in the U.S., though other than that she was perfectly affable.

After Ms. Israel took off with her horde of Nigerians, I settled in with Alycia to wait for my passport to be returned to me while Hyewon and Leah went off to exchange some currency to pay for our cab from the Taba border crossing to the Aqaba crossing into Jordan. As we waited, Travis made his way finally to the front of the passport stamp line. As with me they decided to detain his passport, but as he was such a shady character, they took him along with his passport into a back room, and we never saw him again.

The crossing through Israel all the way through to Jordan was fairly uneventful, though we paused just long enough to be awed by the prefab restroom units at the Israel crossing in Taba. They were absolutely the nicest bathrooms we'd seen in months. We even took a souvenier photo, though it was on Hyewon's camera, so I don't at the moment have a copy. We mostly slept during the 2-hour taxi ride between the Aqaba border crossing into Jordan and Wadi Mousa, the village near Petra.

We made it finally, and brokered a deal with our taxi driver, Tarek, to come back and pick us up the next day. We arrived at our hostel--The Orient Gate Hotel--quite late in the day. We made immediate friends with the desk guy at the hostel (as Alycia said, "The manager/front desk attendant at our hostel, the Orient Gate Hotel, has to be one of my favorite people. Clearly, I can bond with a guy who mentions, as we walk in, that he just got up.") He was a friendly guy in an Average Joe gruff sort of way, and tried to coerce us into practicing our meager Arabic skills with him. He enlightened us somewhat as to the interrelations between the various countries in the Middle East, saying that we shouldn't learn Egyptian Colloquial Arabic because everyone outside of Egypt thinks the Egyptian accent is hilarious and laughs at them behind their backs. He also told us that Jordan is a more culturally and morally liberal country than Egypt, and also a more respectful one--for example, he said, he himself would be perfectly willing to drink a few beers, but he would more than willingly refrain if he happened to be in the presence of someone religious. It might have been nationalistic claptrap, but it's true that Jordan seemed, from what I saw of it, like a much cleaner, rockier version of Egypt, with more goats.

Our new buddy advised us that it was too late in the day to visit Petra, as we had originally planned, and that we should head down early early the next day. He even offered to pack us lunches (for a fee, of course, but what are hostels for?). We were a bit worried about seeing Petra the next morning because we'd agreed to meet Tarek at 11am the next morning for our trip back to Egypt so we would be in time to catch the bus back to Cairo. We resolved to be at the Petra ticket office immediately at opening time at 6:30am, and instead spent our evening wandering Wadi Mousa, studying in the hostel's common room, and badgering our new buddy (I wish I could remember his name) to follow through with the sales pitch on the hostel's business card which advertised that they showed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade every night.

The next morning at daybreak we packed up our gear for the morning and picked up our lunches and headed off down the hill past the massive tourist resorts to the entrance of Petra, the Rose Red City.

(To Be Continued...)

Brief.

2006-03-23T06:52:00.000-08:00

Lo siento for the slowness of updating of late. 'Tis the season for the midterms and the major one of this week was generally considered no less than a massacre.

That said, if anyone still wants to send me postcards or anything, my (much belated) mailing address is:

(Student Name)
AUC Student Residence
16 Mohamed Thakeb Street
(next to Meraashly Church)
Zamalek
Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt.

This one has been tested out a few times already. Letters and cards not including "next to Meraashly Church" have not arrived, those that have included it did arrive. Please include it.

One last thing before a whirlwind tour of Petra--

Monica Sez:
"List of things in Cairo that must be imported to the U.S. by June in order for me to even CONSIDER coming home: 1) 20 cent ta'amiyya (for TWO, mind you), 2) Khan el-Khalili, 3) Taxis which lack meters but play "It's A Small World" and "My Heart Will Go On" when their drivers brake, 4) Koshari, 5) Freshly-squeezed mango juice whenever you want it, 6) Free delivery of everything and anything at any time, 7) The Friday afternoon call to prayer, 8) The men whose job is to stand at the side of the road and push the cars out of the way (and more than likely to a point where they're bumper-to-bumper) whenever someone wants to parallel park, 9) Egyptians, 10) Men comfortable enough with themselves to wear ridiculously tight jeans."

Amen.

ﺻﺒﺎﺡ ﺍﻠﺧﻴﺮ

2006-03-07T04:16:00.000-08:00

sabaH al-Kheer. Buenos días. New experiment: Arabic script. Does it work? Can you see it properly? In any case, Jess was wondering how the sunrise looks on the Nile, so off I went to take more photos. The pictures here show a series of typical sights from crew practice. In the first, (L->R) Ryan, Maple (one of us Katies), Mari, and Leah wait to catch a pre-dawn taxi. The taxi drivers have started to realize that if they happen to drive by the dorm at exactly 5:45am they are almost guaranteed a fare from one of our little groups heading to the rowing club, so we've started to get the same drivers over and over. We practically don't have to tell them where to go anymore (yimeen at the Sheraton Cairo, heena kuwaisa at the Vodafone sign.)

In the second photo, some of the team ergs as warmup before the coach ("Capitan Amr") arrives. I think Liesl, Adrienne, and maybe Sas (another Katie) are also in this pic. Maybe Hyewon also. It's hard to tell. People are blurry.

After erging for 20 minutes or so, enough other people have usually arrived at the club for us to get out the oars and boat. The boat is a monster since it has to hold 9 people, and usually it takes the whole team plus three or four bystanders to help us get it off the rack and into the water. The team rotates between three different sets of oars, seemingly at the whim of Capitan Amr since the AUC women's team is usually the first team to launch from this particular rowing club each morning. There is a set of green-and-yellow striped feathering oars, a set of green-and-yellow striped non-feathering oars, and a set of black feathering oars with little white stickers on them that spell out AUC.
Capitan Amr has been somewhat at a loss as to how exactly he should train a cox who has never rowed on crew before, so mostly I've been getting left behind as the team goes out for practice and told to erg for up to 40 minutes at a time. It's good exercise, and it helps keep me awake during the day, but it gives awful blisters and my Grand Canyon tendonitis has been resurfacing intermittently.

In the third pic, (L->R) random bystander, Leah, Salma (doesn't go to AUC, seems to be a friend of Nancy's), Maple, Adrienne, Nancy (who shows up whenever she feels like it, and is allowed to get away with it), another random bystander, Capitan Amr, Sas, and Liesl.

In any case it seems like none of this team drama is going to apply to me anymore because I'm being forced to quit the team. Sad. :'(

Not because of any particular fault of mine or anyone else's, but because of a simple massive conflict of scheduling and interest. My Society and Culture in Ancient Nubia class is making a once-in-a-lifetime Egyptology-department-subsidized field trip to the Nubian frontier itself (which is to say, Aswan, with a side trip to Abu Simbel) on the exact same weekend as the big competition that the AUC women's crew is being groomed for. I offered to keep showing up to practice (Cairo's quite nice in the early, early mornings), but as it seems Capitan Amr has already found a replacement for me in Salma, there's not much point.

Oh well. Maybe now that I don't have to go to bed so early I'll actually have time to do my readings for class. :P

Dejehj, Dejehj, Dejehj

2006-03-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

Well I found out what that protest last week was all about--chickens. According to the AUC newsletter, The Caravan, and my observations of Cairo in the last few days, poultry will soon be nearly impossible to find in any form in the premises of the city.

We went on a stroll with Dr. Ikram in the Theories and Methods of Archaeology class last week in order to learn how to observe the taphonomy of cultural detritus. We poked at "unofficial middens," thought up a variety of causes for differences in the color of tile on the sidewalk, and generally drew a crowd wherever we went because nobody could imagine why a bunch of students would be staring at a mere pile of garbage.

Another thing we noticed on our little jaunt besides what styles of plasticware people around here use and how many flavors of Chipsy packets there are was the massive numbers of shops that had once sold poultry, but now stood empty--their stacks of poultry cages and mounds of sawdust unused, their neon chicken-shaped signs unlit, and nothing more than a small crate of sorry-looking ice-packed fish out front as the shopkeepers' only present means of livelihood.

While I suppose I should be glad that the Egyptian government has so quickly and effectively put a stop to any potential human infection with the Avian Flu virus, by getting rid of nearly if not all poultry in the city, it seems very unfortunate that so many local people have to suffer by this policy.

And just as a note for those of you who, like Ryan, were not certain of the magnitude of the problems Avian Flu presents for the local population, and the size of the effect of the new poultry ban will have on the local economy, the vast majority of the meat available in Cairo is slaughtered on the spot or only an hour or two before sale. There are many butcher shops and poultry shops all over the city, several within less than a block of AUC's Greek Campus. Nearly everyone passes within breathing range of still-living meat fowl every day, and the numbers of local poultry salesmen and butchers are vast.

It also presents an additional problem for me--and my non-eating of red meat. Due to Islamic law, pork is generally not available here, and now poultry is not either. Lamb tends to be a bit expensive, so beef is all that is left. Maybe it'll actually be good for me, and I'll have a reason to make myself go veggie, though it's much harder to eat here healthily here as a non-veg much less as a vegetarian.

Besides, what will I do without my chicken fahita sandwich every day? One can only eat so much foul or tameyya. I'm probably going to end up so anemic that I'll just keel over some day soon.

Enjoy the cartoons. They're also from The Caravan. For reference about the 2nd cartoon, the original Egyptian flag looks like this.

Scavenger Hunt

2006-03-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

The day before yesterday--guess what? Randomly, out of the blue, Dr. Ikram invited all the Egyptology/Archaeology majors to come to the Museum for some mysterious important event. One girl, Keli (2nd pic, on the right) and I arrived there a little early. We'd been told to convene in room 39 of the museum. Of course, room 39 wasn't listed on the map, so off we went a-hunting. We headed upstairs for a better view, but eventually decided that in true Egyptian tradition, the completely random ordering of room numbers hid Egypt's antiquities better than any Pharaoh's tomb ever did. We did eventually stumble upon the room we wanted, but there was nobody in it. We were by that point a little late, so we were kind of worried.

Keli and I transcribe together for the Museum, so we decided eventually that it might be a good idea to head down to the cataloging room and see if Janice knew where Dr. Ikram had got to. We got to the bottom of the stairs and ran into Ahmed (He of the Peach Pants), and his sidekick Sotirios (From Greece. Center and Left in 2nd pic, respectively). They weren't sure where Dr. Ikram was either, but Ahmed gloated that he had Dr. Ikram's mobile number, and called her to find out what we were supposed to be doing. Dr. Ikram said to spread ourselves out to collect any stray students and to convene at the Narmer Palette at 4:30. Keli and I wandered off and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a typhoon of journalists and cameramen. Amazingly, all the nearby tourists seemed unfazed. Curious, Keli and I fought our way to the center of the crowd where we were soon joined by an Armenian student, Arto (people usually call him something else, but I'm not sure what).

We saw an older man with a distinguished-looking beard and a gray suit having lots of lights being shone in his face and microphones stuck practically up his nostrils. We fought our way towards him to see if we could overhear what he was saying and figure out what was happening (we'd realized by this point it must have something to do with the reason we were there). We couldn't hear him, of course, but shortly thereafter el Sr. Zahi Hawass paraded into the room, his entourage trailing. Most of the press people were so caught up in whatever else they were doing that he made it all the way to the one doorway completely obscured behind the crowd before the cameramen realized they ought to be focusing on him.

And so there we were--not 6 feet from el Sr. Hawass and he was talking to the cameras. We couldn't tell what he was saying either, but it was clearly something important. The doorway behind him was cordoned off. Turns out he was there to kick off the opening of a new exhibit at the museum. Also, he has good taste in ties. And he looked really bored with the whole hullabaloo.

After soaking in the shock of standing so close to the man who for all intents and purposes is the entire field of Egyptology, Keli, Arto and I realized it was nearly time to meet Dr. Ikram. We fought our way back out of the crowd and headed to the Narmer Palette's case. There we met back up with Sotirios, Ahmed, and a few others. We waited for a few minutes, but Dr. Ikram was a no-show, so Ahmed called her again.

He spoke to her for a few moments, and looked perplexed. When he hung up he told us all that we were supposed to meet her at the sarcophagus of Hatshepsut. Well, that was easy enough, we thought (except that it's, ahem, unlabeled) since the Narmer Palette is atop some stairs overlooking a large gallery filled with royal sarcophagi. It did seem a strange request, however, considering how close the sarcophagus must have been to the Palette. So we split into two groups and headed down into the gallery. Ahmed's group paused at every sarcophagus to look for the royal cartouches on each one (essentially none were labeled) so Ahmed
could decipher them. Keli and I followed Arto around on a speedier route, Arto spotting Hatshepsut's cartouche at the end of the gallery closest to the Palette. Ahmed's group caught up, and we waited for Dr. Ikram once again. Then once again, the phone call to her mobile.

This time she told us to meet her on the stairs closest to the Mummy Room. We headed to the stairs we thought were the correct ones, then debated whether we were supposed to meet her at the top or bottom. We decided on the top, so we headed up. Turned out we were actually at the stairs near the royal mummy room (under construction), which wasn't the correct one. We started across the second floor in the direction of the correct stairs, but were interrupted by a call from Dr. Ikram, this time telling us to meet her in the animal mummy room. We stampeded towards the animal mummies, getting a bit impatient.

There was nobody in the animal mummy room, so Ahmed confusedly called Dr. Ikram once again. This time Ahmed took off immediately after hanging up without informing us of the next set of instructions. The rest of us scurried after him, book bags flying. When we finally caught up with him, he was at the top of the stairs near the mummy room and Dr. Ikram was berating him for not being able to follow directions.

In any case, we'd found her, and she led us to an upstairs room that was most definitely not room 39, and bade us peer down through the balustrade to the room directly below us. Right below was the room which had been until then cordoned off. It was a new exhibit celebrating the contribution of American archaeologists to the field of Egyptology. She pointed out to us, up above the crowd, various important pieces on display, and important facts about each of them, for example the sphinx of Hatshepsut, done in the style of Amenemhet III--as a means of propagandically recalling the "glory days" or the Middle Kingdom as established by Ryan's favorite Pharaoh, Mentuhotep Nebhepetre (try saying that five times fast).

Once the crowd had mostly cleared, we made our way down to the exhibit hall and were allowed to poke around for awhile. Many famous archaeologists (the Americans being celebrated in the exhibit, I asume) were there, and we got to follow Arto around as he shmoozed with Janice and debated with her the quality of the hieroglyph translations.

Finally the museum emptied out, Ahmed mysteriously disappeared, and we students headed to Felfela for a quick bite of tameyya before heading our separate ways. As those of us in the dorm waited for our shuttle to head off, Sotirios told us how great the Greeks were, and then told us about how the modern Greeks make fun of the fat, scantily-clad Russian tourists that seem to frequent the Grecian shores. Uf.

Cairo Travel Tip #2: Crossing the Street.

2006-03-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

Cairo street-crossing is actually quite simple once you accept a single fact: big metal things are going to come hurtling at you, and that's ok.

I've heard it said that traffic law in Cairo is really more like "traffic suggestion," and this really seems to be the case--lane markings are generally ignored, crosswalks don't actually mean anything, headlights and horns are reserved for asserting one's presence, and taxis frequently play this tuneless tinkly music that makes them sound like giant musical greeting cards on wheels.

Nonetheless, traffic does have some semblance of sanity once you become familiar with it. For instance, the lack of defined lanes gives the traffic flow more flexibility. This means that if you cross the street and the taxi hurtling at you has enough room, it will simply drive around you. Lack of lanes also means that drivers tend to be much more aware of what is going on around their vehicle than in other places. In fact, the incessant honking you'll hear in the streets is a not indiscriminate warning from the drivers to pedestrians and other drivers that they should get out of the way.

The basic method of safe street crossing is as follows: ignore intersections and "crosswalks" as places to cross streets. If possible, find a portion of the street that is double- or triple- parked on one or both sides, because the stream of traffic you'll have to cross will be much narrower. Once you've picked an ideal spot, wait until there is a break in the traffic. Any break will not be large, and might only be a break on one half of the traffic stream and not the other. In most Cairo streets, traffic is only one-way. This will make it easier, but if you happen to find yourself on a two-way street, expect to cross each half of the street separately.

When you see a break coming, start walking--don't wait until the break reaches you, because by then it will be too late to get all the way across. Begin by approaching the traffic stream one or two cars ahead of the break. Don't be afraid of getting within a foot or two of the car(s). As long as you're careful, you won't get hit. Once the car you've approached has passed, cross as quickly as necessary to get to the other side and find refuge in the parked up curb.

Bear in mind that there is generally a sort of unofficial "pedestrian lane" just inside the parked cars on either side of any street, as the actual sidewalks are either so crowded with people, debris, and random trees that it's usually less difficult to to simply walk in the street. Once you cross, you'll be safe as long as you're within a few feet of the nearest parked car.

Be alert, learn to walk fast, and cross under the subway when you attempt giant midans like al-Tahrir. That's it. Yay!

P.S. See picture 2 for good technique.

Khamseen?

2006-02-26T05:47:00.000-08:00

A weird fog has settled across Cairo. It's thick, white, a little dusty, but also... damp. It rained again, which always takes me by surprise because, well, the edge of the Sahara is one of the last places I'd expect such weather.

Mostly though, the air's been strangely dead. There's no wind, but still a fair amount of dust and grit in the air, so there have been confused rumors that this might be the beginning of the Khamseen, the alleged fifty days of sandstorms. (This is a fallacy, Ray says--the Khamseen is more like a 50-day season in which it is more likely that there will be sandstorms, but no guarantee of it, and certainly not fifty straight days of the stuff.)

In any case, the fog has been so thick for the last two days that from the middle of the 26th of July bridge, one cannot see either bank of the river.

Also, there was some kind of massive protest near campus today. A horde of people (mostly men, many in traditional galabeyyas), carrying signs and chanting loudly, strode right down the middle of Kasr al Aini street towards al-Tahrir.

All this happened in the middle of my Arabic class, and the sounds of chanting coming in through the windows made the whole class so agitated that everything ground to a halt so we could crowd together at our fourth-floor room's two tiny windows.

Despite having learned the whole Arabic alphabet as of today, none of us were able to make out the slogans on the banners being carried, and our teacher refused to translate them for us, because she was upset that our hysterics forced her to stop teaching for five minutes.

Other than that, not much to report. Sarah, Monica, Stephanie, and I went to City Stars Mall (gargantuan!) out in Heliopolis and bought ourselves some Amr Diab albums.

Only Pass Feluccas from Behind

2006-02-23T13:47:00.000-08:00

Amazingly, I don't have a photo quite appropriate for today's post, so instead you get a Proconsul africanus. Cute, isn't he?

I found out today what the sunrise on the Nile is like. Emphasis on on the Nile, because I have somehow been roped into being the coxswain for the AUC women's crew by all the other Katies, who make up the majority of the team.

Practice was at 6am sharp this morning, so up I was at 5, and in the taxi with Hye Won and a girl named Mary (Mari? that's how the coach pronounces it...) before even the first hint of light from the eastern banks.

The coach took me out in his motorboat for the majority of the time to show me what I am supposed to be doing from now on. I did swap places with the more experienced cox the team has been using (he doesn't speak English which is why they want to replace him with me) for a few minutes at one point, only to quickly realize I had no idea what to do. I asked the coach how to steer, but he wasn't sure, and the other cox (his name was Samy I think?) only made vague hand gestures at me.

I put the boat on a collision course with both a cliff on the eastern bank and, later, one of the giant concrete supports for one of the major bridges just south of al-Gezira (the island with Zamalek on it, where the dorm is). I had followed what I thought were the directions Samy had given me, but I couldn't get the boat to turn at all.

I realized later it was more the fault of the decrepitude of any and all technology in Egypt than my own because on the way back in to the team's boat-house houseboat Samy steered right into a big yacht moored on the west bank.

I fell asleep in both my classes today. I think my sleep schedule is going to require a little reorganizing.

As to the henna, I'm not dead yet, so here's hoping the coast is clear. I swear though, if I get sick one more time, somebody's going to get hurt!

I'm Screwed!

2006-02-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

Tonight was "Girl's Night" in the women's wing of the dorm, and there was tons of too-loud music, dancing, allegedly free food, and henna-making, done by a local woman hired by the dorm.

One of my friends, Hye Won, had just had henna done on her palm when I arrived. The design was very nice, but she expressed concern that it would quickly turn ugly, because a friend of hers had had a similar henna pattern done only to have it turn into an amorphous black blob in a few days. I'd read up on henna a while back, and vaguely recalled something about black henna being made with hair dye, which made it a sketchier substance than regular henna paste. I told Hye Won that it being made with hair dye might be the reason why it got blurry, and she agreed.

Shortly afterwards I got both of my hands done in a symmetrical floral pattern. When I returned to my room, I couldn't do much with my hands without ruining the patterns, which were still drying, so I went online to mehandi.com, which was where I'd researched henna before. Turns out that black henna is a much more malific substance than I realized.

Natural henna is made up of the ground up plant Lawsonia inermis, as well as a few other harmless substances like lemon juice, tea, and tea tree oil. As a paste and powder it's greenish in appearance, smells like cut grass or hay, and leaves an orange or reddish stain. "Black henna", on the other hand, is not actually henna at all, or, at best, is mixed with a bit of henna to give it the right consistency for applying designs. Black henna is given its color by the chemical para-phenylendiamine (PPD), which "Is a strong sensitizer [it can cause severe allergic reactions very quickly], transdermal toxin, and potential carcinogen," according to mehandi.com and most other websites that pop up on google when searching for "black henna."

Incredibly helpfully, not a single site listed symptoms to look out for for allergic reactions (except for posting alarmist images of huge bleeding open sores), possible treatments or ways to alleviate symptoms (besides "Go to a doctor!!!" which I'm not sure would be too helpful here, based on the experiences of myself and other non-Arabic speaking students at the local hospitals and clinics), or statistics on how many people end up having severe reactions. One site even more helpfully told the story of a mother her took her son to a doctor after having a reaction to a black henna "tattoo," and listed the various kinds of medication the doctor recommended only to blank them out with something to the effect of "the name of this product is being ommitted."

I'm not really sure what to expect now, because none of the Egyptian girls seemed at all fazed by the henna-related goings-on, so I assume that whatever was involved seemed normal to them (but then, how often do they get "henna" done? do they realize actual henna is a different color?), and that none of them have had horrific past experiences, or else they wouldn't have been having so much "henna" put on themselves as well. On the other hand, my wrists were starting to get a bit itchy while I waited for the stuff to dry, so maybe it's the beginning of something worse.

Hindsight is really a terrible thing. It would almost be better if I had no idea that I could potentially sustain severe liver damage, an autoimmune disorder, or get chemical burns and be scarred for life thanks to this crap on my hands. Then I would be able to tell if I actually have symptoms, separate from the general low-level malaise I constantly have anyway, and don't risk giving myself psychosomatic symptoms from my lovely paranoia.

I guess you'll all get some updates from me in the coming few days (it sounds like the beginning of manifestation for the really bad types of symptoms occurs within 3-4 days) regarding yet another illness for me. Boo.

Why does everything I do in this country result in me potentially getting sick? I can't drink the water, eat the food, breathe the air, visit the markets (avian flu), or practically talk to people. Maybe I should just hole up in my room and eat chocolate digestives for the rest of my time here. At least then I know I won't die.

Coolest Job EVER.

2006-02-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

I had an appointment today at the Supreme Council of Antiquities. You know, the one where Zahi Hawass works. Yep, THE Zahi Hawass. I got to hang out in the ante-Zahi-office office, which is to say, the office of Dr. Janice Kamren--an egyptologist not nearly as widely known as Zahi, but probably at least as important (she's his lackey, and lackeys do all the dirty work, right?).

The reason for this appointment (there were maybe 10 other people there too, so unfortunately I'm not that special) was because thanks to my Theories and Methods of Archaeology class with the famed Dr. Salima Ikram, I have an opportunity to become her lackey and volunteer to grub around in the Egyptian Museum catalogues.

It won't be glorious work, clearly, since they're trying to finally build an actual database for the items they have there, and the grubbing will mostly consist of data entry and cross checking the data between the several current cataloguing systems to make note of any anomalies. This will be especially challenging because there are over 120,000 objects in the museum, fewer than 10k of which have been catalogued properly. This 120k also represents a mere fraction of what exists in the museum's basement, most of which is of unknown origin and type.

Heck, the museum itself is not in all that great shape. Though, on the plus side, Janice says this means that if we're extra good little minions (meaning we basically give over our entire lives and school time to data entry) and she decides she trusts our English, she'll let us help write some of the labels for the museum exhibits! Yay.

If Scripps doesn't let me count this Theories and Methods of Archaeology class as one of my upper-level HEP anthro classes (i.e. in lieu of, ahem, "Theory and Method in Archaeology"), I will be sad. But I don't think this is much of a risk. The head of the department is Sheryl, after all. A jollier woman never lived. :D

More later. I get the database software from the curator's office tomorrow!

P.S. The photos are from the Egyptian Museum. The Supreme Council of Antiquities building is more of a drab rectangle. A rectangle with a fence.

Field Trip #1

2006-02-18T22:17:00.000-08:00

Today we headed off on a very special field trip for Theories and Methods of Archaeology. Our destination was the pyramid field at Saqqara, home of the stepped pyramid of Khufu. The pyramids, however, were not our intended focus. We were there to look at a number of tombs that were in fact in the process of being excavated, analyzed, and to some extent reconstructed for possible future tourist access.

Just over the hill from the Khufu's pyramid complex we found the Dutch excavation underway (for some reason the egyptology professors never mention who exactly is excavating anything, they just refer to them by country, like, "The Germans this, the Germans that." I'm not sure if this means that there is only one archaeological team allowed from each country or what--I will have to ask.) the morning we arrived they had uncovered a set of four ushabtis, which they had lined up on a table near the area where the prototypical workmen were scooping up sand in their plastic-bag-patched baskets and lugging it out to a convenient nearby dune, where they unceremoniously dumped it.

There were potsherds literally everywhere, all dynasties mixed together, and even a number of bones sticking out from the various hillocks and depressions in the ever-shifting sand. Dr. Ikram pointed out that they were human in origin. I didn't believe her at first, since all I could see were a few tips of longbones emerging from the sand in a few clusters. We moved on to a different part of the area, however, and came upon the right cheek of a definitely human skull with the bicuspids and a molar or two still attached.

We visited the tombs of a man named Maya and his wife Tiya, as well as a man named Meri-Neith, and that of one other important woman, all of which were locked up behind big metal grates. A lot of Egyptian history was spouted at us rapid-fire, but I don't think most of us absorbed very much due to the howling winds and accompanying pelting of grit that we had to endure. One tidbit I remember was that the egyptologists discovered Meri-Neith lived contemporaneously with Akhenaten's reign, and in fact had outlived him because "Neith" was an old religion goddess, and with the rise of the monotheist king, Meri-Neith had been forced to change his name to Meri-Re, to include the name of the sun god that Akhenaten liked so much. You could see this on the tomb because everywhere that Meri-Neith's name appeared in the tomb, a sun disk had been carved over the glyph for "Neith," and the long, curling ends of the Neith glyph had been filled in with plaster. It was also obvious that Meri-Neith had outlived Akhenaten because the plaster had at some point been removed and the hieroglyph for Neith was reinscribed. Also, all the images of the Pharaoh Akhenaten had been chiseled away, as Egyptians were wont to do when somebody they didn't like died.

Cruelly, my camera decided that its batteries would be dead this day, so I experienced an artistic crisis on the bus on the way to Saqqara because the countryside and bits of the city we passed were exceedingly picturesque, with technicolor murals of sinuous snake-like images and pink camels on all the houses.

I also attended a show at the local opera house with Bob. They played a double feature of Pagliacci and Cavelleria Rusticana, both of which (I don't know why I found this surprising) they had altered somewhat to allow them to be set in Egypt, even though the program still read "a Calabrian town" and "a Sicilian Village". The Egyptians have an interesting sense of stage costume. The chorus women were wearing gingham muu-muus and florescent orange scarves. The chorus men wore street clothes, and in both of the operas the male protagonists and antagonists were both cast with men with similar builds, similar facial structures, and... practically the same clothes. Despite having seen Pagliacci before, I had a hard time telling what the heck was going on, especially since the surtitles were in Arabic only. Still, decent show.

Ay Caramba.

2006-02-18T06:04:00.000-08:00

Por algún razón, no podía acceder ningún website de blogger hasta tres o cuatro días. No sé porqúe, pero es un problema muy molesto. Ahora misma, cuando quizas es posible, pruebo aprender a fijar a este blog usando el servicio "blog-by-mail." Me deseen buena suerte.

También, cuando puedo fijar por otra vez, tengo algúnos correos (no sé si "correos" es la palabra correcta) para unos días pasados que voy a fijar.

Hasta...nadie sabe. La futura.

"Izzayik? Mish Kuwayisa." --A vignette.

2006-02-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

Cairo is a strange place. It's a massive, bustling city, teeming with millions upon millions of people, and yet somehow, everybody knows you. You can visit a random little shop one day and be entreated by the owner to "Come back tomorrow, no problem," on your way out. You can completely forget about said shop for weeks and weeks, then walk by it again completely by chance. It doesn't matter if the shop sells tameyya or anubis-headed lighters, it doesn't matter that you are wearing different clothes, walking with different people, or even speaking a different language (I've conducted a number of transactions here in español, suprisingly), the shopkeeper will recognize you.

"Come in to my shop, my sister," he will say. "I just give you my business card, no funny business. You like perfume? No problem." And what do you do? Well, unless you particularly enjoy spending twice as much money as you might have to at Khan al-Khalili for perfume you don't want anyway... you flee.

It's almost worse on campus. For no reason that I can yet define, it's embarrassing and irritating to be recognized, even if there's nothing but sincere pleasantry behind it, like overtures of friendliness from Achmed, who is the head of the Egyptology club and "The Guy in the Peach Pants," as Bob describes him. Or the shy smile and the mumbled "Happy Valentine's Day" from the security guard at the campus book shop who knows me as that weirdly-dressed, clumsy crazy girl who comes into the book shop at least 10 times a day because she forgets things.

Of all the things I miss most about the U.S. so far, it's not Mexican food, or even potable tap water--it's being anonymous, or at least being allowed to pretend like I am.

Psh, Superbowl? What Superbowl?

2006-02-10T22:50:00.000-08:00

Pork rinds? Beer? Cheesy commercials? Scuzzy, overweight, doped-up men in padded spandex crashing into each other? I think not. The American "pastime" may be pigging out and yelling at a TV, but the Egyptian one is much more involved. Heck, get a load of this Consulate Warden message:
The Africa Cup of Nations soccer (football) tournament concludes on the evening of Friday, February 10, when Egypt plays Cote d'Ivoire in the finals at Cairo International Stadium in Nasser City. While the Embassy wishes the host team all the best in their run for the cup, it would like to remind American citizens in Egypt that large groups of passionate sports fans always have the potential to become unruly. Americans should be especially vigilant -- on Friday evening and into Saturday morning -- to the possibility that they could be mistaken for supporters of the opposing team. Americans should avoid large crowds of football fans gathered to view the game at locations throughout Cairo. In addition, Americans should be aware of potentially heavy traffic at Ramses Square, the vicinity of Heliopolis and main routes to Cairo International Airport on Friday evening. They should be especially alert to exuberant fans joyriding in vehicles before and after the match.

Feh, you might think, all sports fans are a little off in the head sometimes. Not in Egypt. In Egypt-- well, let's put it this way. On the day of the final game, a few friends and I headed down to the Khan (Khan al-Khalili, open-air market and tourist trap extraordinaire). The weekend before my friend Sarah had attempted to get to Khan only to be deterred by rioting over that touchy Danish issue. That riot eventually quelled itself without intervention. This weekend however, in light of the upcoming game, there were more than 600 riot police lining the streets near Khan. Also, in the stampede to buy tickets for the game, several bystanders were trampled to death.

So, which issue do you think is more important in Egypt?

In the hours leading up to the game, young boys ran up and down the sides of major streets selling Egyptian flags on bits of PVC for people to hang out their car windows, or just wave around. Every second or third car (in Mohandiseen, anyway) honked out the rhythms of popular go-team cheers as they drove along. Girls made up special hijabs of layered cloth so they could sport the Egyptian colors.

They set up a huge projector screen in the lobby of the dorm, and every Egyptian student in the area crowded in to watch. After nearly an hour of impassioned screaming and near-orgasmic cries of "yalla! yalla!" (the Arabic equivalent of "git yo' ass in gear!") the game was still tied. After a round of overtime, still not a single goal had been scored. Finally it ended up in a shootout, and Egypt won on the very last kick. Intense.

Immediately afterwards, the entire city took to the streets, cheering, playing drums, setting off fire crackers, and, indeed, joyriding.

Caught up in the overwhelming electric joy of the city around us, Sarah and I went skipping, dancing, and shrieking up and down the streets, while our two other companions, Stephanie and Monica, tried to keep up. We returned to the dorm just in time to witness a "honk-off" by two cars piled up with chanting Egyptians. As former bandos, Sarah and I found this to be a fitting end to the night.

As you may notice from the photos (Monica took them), not even Egyptians are immune to funny hats.

Fi Iskindereya

2006-01-31T13:50:00.000-08:00

Part of our study abroad orientation here at AUC was a three-day trip to Alexandria, Iskindereya in Arabic. On the way we stopped off at the Desert Development Center where we got a glimpse of the Egyptian countryside, in which life has changed little for what has likely been millenia. A lot of the countryside was dry, dusty, and flat, but a fair amount was somewhat vegetated and populated with small agricultural villages.At the DDC they fed us a very traditional breakfast of aysh, mankoush, foul, "black honey" (molasses), and something that was explained to us only as "old cheese." The aysh (pita), mankoush (pastryesque flat bread), and foul (stewed fava beans) were very good, but the black honey was a little strong and the "old cheese" was positively overwhelming and... quite frankly, pretty atrocious. In fact, the serving shared in the middle of my table had a couple of maggots in it. From this we learned that maggots can jump a fair distance. Not too appetizing.

When we finally arrived in Alexandria we learned that the ISSO (International Student Services Office) was putting us up in the 5-star Hilton Borg el-Arab Mediterranean resort. It was a beautiful (albeit hideous shade of pink) hotel, and the rooms were spacious and much more comfortable than our dorm rooms. We realized pretty quickly why the ISSO was able to afford to house us there, as Alexandria was very, very cold with a bit of rain, and the Mediterranean (which was literally only a few hundred feet from our rooms) was downright freezing. It was beautiful anyway though, and the food was incredible.We also discovered an interesting cultural tidbit when we realized that each of our hotel rooms came equipped with a plaque pointing out the direction to Mecca so Muslim tourists would be able to orient themselves properly in time to pray. Another tidbit is that everything is alphabetized by first name here, so I've met and know fairly well all the other Katherine/Kathryn/Kate/Katie(s) here, as well as the one Catherine (who goes to Reed!), who happens to be the roommate of one of the other Kathryns.
The first two days of the trip we spent not doing very much because the hotel was actually very far from the city proper, and the sea was too cold to go swimming in. We had a couple of actual orientation meetings (useless, as they waited until we'd been in Egypt more than a week to tell us various tips about getting by on transportation systems, shopping areas, etc.) in which we learned that our advisor from the ISSO office is literally the scariest, haughtiest woman that most of us had ever met. The tips she gave us were also useless because she doesn't actually know how to get by in Cairo--she's wealthy enough that she's never had to do it herself.

On the third day we had a ridiculously whirlwind tour of the city of Alexandria. It was whirlwind to the point that we were given less than 10 minutes to visit one of our destinations, and only drove past another one. We saw the Catacombs of Kom el-ShoKhafa, a Roman amphitheater, another thing that I think was a Roman amphitheater but couldn't say for sure because we only drove past it, a massive Moorishly-styled Roman fort, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

In the library was an exhibit overviewing the life of famous MiSri (Egyptian) artist Shadi Abdel Salam, whose work I found very appealing, only to sadly discover that the library bookstore didn't sell posters or prints of his art.

Alexandria was a lot of fun, but I would have preferred to get more than a half-glimpse of it. At some point I will need to head back there for a weekend to take a better look, and replace the nifty mug I got from the library bookstore that lately got smashed, thanks to Al-Kitaab (my Arabic text book). Argh.

Edit: I meant to mention this, so I'll do it now--no matter where you stay in Egypt, whether it's a five-star resort in Alex or a $5-a-night hostel on Tal'at Harb, be wary with your valuables! Carry them with you at all times if you can, use the lock box provided by your hotel, or at the very least keep them out of sight and not easily accessible (i.e. at the bottom of your bag). Even at the five-star Hilton Borg Al-Arab, several students cumulatively had two cameras, an iPod, and several thousand LE stolen from their rooms, probably by the cleaning staff. Even more foreboding, the guy whose iPod was pilfered stopped by the local Alex Radio Shack at the mall in the city proper to see if he could buy a replacement. He was told by the employees there that they did not carry iPods at their store, but that he could buy them for pretty cheap at a little shop out by the Hilton. The hotel only begrudgingly offered compensation, but it was not equal by any means to the value of the items lost, and they did not reprimand any of their employees--and this was with a native Egyptian doing the negotiations on the students' behalf.

Cairo Travel Tip #1: Taxis!

2006-01-31T12:46:00.000-08:00

For tourists (and despite my extended stay here, I think I will always be considered a "tourist," even by myself) there is one primary way of getting around Cairo--taxis. Speaking from personal experience I'd say that Cairo traffic is initially one of the most horrifying things about the city. Despite whatever markings, signs, or crosswalks exist on the street, nobody believes in traffic lanes, everyone uses their horns constantly, and headlights exist solely for the purpose of asserting one's presence. I'll go into all this in more detail in Travel Tip #2 when I explain how to cross a street in Cairo.

The taxis themselves are pretty horrifying, even after you've become more accustomed to life in Cairo. There is a very particular political situation in which the Egyptian government has refused to give out new taxi licenses for a very long time. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I believe they are waiting until some particular technology (think basic, not high-tech) becomes widely available enough for them to reform the whole taxi system and bring them all up to par.

At the moment, however, taxis belch noxious gasoline fumes, the passenger doors sometimes swing open when the taxi takes a leisurely turn to the left, and few if any taxi meters function.

Nonetheless there are ways to mitigate the unpleasantness of taxi riding in Cairo, and this basically comes down to research, research, research. If you can't be or think like a native, the least you can do is know some of the basics they already know. A lot of tourist guides recommend that you negotiate the taxi fare before you get in the cab. This is all well and good for the complete novice, but you have to know how to do it properly, and a lot of guidebooks don't let you know all the gory details.

Many novices make the mistake of telling the taxi driver their destination, then asking "bikaam?" (how much?). This single phrase will give you away as an easy dupe, and be duped you will. The taxi driver will generally quote you twice the actual going fare for the destination you want. If you're not here for very long and/or you've got money to burn, this may be acceptable, but if you are a student or just don't want to be ripped off, you have to go about it a little differently.

Do let the taxi driver know your intended destination before anything else. Do your research and find out exactly where you want to go. Not a specific address per se, as these are often hard to come across, but figure out which midan (plaza) is nearest your destination, or which major landmark or intersection you can direct your driver to. Expect to have to walk a few blocks to get where you actually want to go. Also find out what the "common knowledge" fare to your destination is. Cairenes have unspoken understanding of how much fares are or ought to be, so if you have to, ask a policeman or student. Watch out for people that you can't clearly place in either of these categories because they may be rogue shopkeepers or beggars.

When you actually flag down your taxi, make sure you're on the side of the street on which traffic is heading towards your intended direction. You will be charged extra otherwise, because there's aren't always many places for the cab to reverse direction. When a cab pulls over, state your destination, then state the price you expect to have to pay. It's best if you use Arabic for this entire exchange because the cabbie will be less likely to try to bargain your price up. If you have a full cab's worth of people (four), expect to have to pay a pound or two extra.

Once you get really good at this, you won't have to negotiate price at all. The expert's version: flag your cab, state your destination, climb in, arrive at your destination, hand your cabbie the expected fare, and leave.

Here's a practice dialogue:
Taxi Driver: *pulls over, looks at you*
You: low samaHt, midan al-Tahrir? (If you please, the plaza al-Tahrir)
Taxi Driver: *nods*
You: Khamsa? (five LE?)
Taxi Driver: *frowns and points at your three buddies*
You: sab3a? (seven LE?)
Taxi Driver: *nods*
You: *get in cab, off you go!*

Al-Hamdo Lilah, Things Get Better.

2006-01-24T05:15:00.000-08:00

Day 1 in Cairo, I tag along with a group out to get mobiles and other necessities of life. The group split up and I ended up with two guys--Christer (Chris) from Norway, and Bob, from Sacramento. We attempted to find downtown Cairo where, we were absoulutely certain, there had to be a store that sold cell phones. We hailed a cab and asked the cabbie to take us to a particular intersection in Bob's guidebook that looked promising.

We quickly learned one of the most important rules of travel in Cairo--half the time, especially if you're a foreigner, cab drivers don't know where they're going. After driving us through regions unknown for a good forty minutes, we attempted to recheck with our cabbie that we were headed to the correct destination. The man spoke confusedly to us in Arabic, trying to suggest various popular tourist destinations that we might mean when we said "Tal'at Harb Street." Eventually we just showed him the map, he got out to ask for directions from passersby, then got back in the cab to drive us mysteriously around some more before dropping us on a random street that was closer to the dorm than it was to down town. We gave up on cabs at this point, and walked.

The most important measure of an adept Cairene is their ability to cross traffic unscathed. Less than 24 hours in Egypt and we were attempting to cross a massive highway interchange. Long story short, we made it mostly alive. Not too much in Cairo is scary after that. We did find cell phones.

The next day I came down with the "Pharaoh's Revenge" from what I suspect was a bad bowl of kushari, and had to go to the hospital. I had some relatively unusual symptoms, including a bad fever, shaking, and mild delirium. I suppose one positive end of that is now I actually know what it's like to have fever dreams.

24 Hours later I was back in the saddle (quite literally) with Bob and Chris, and we were off to the pyramids with another recruit, Greg, to take the camel-and-horseback tour, for 180LE apiece, which was a bit steep but worth it in the end.

I forget the names of our horses, but our camels were named Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown (the tour guides are incredibly adept at appealing to tourists with snippets of their home culture. Our guide kept saying "aloha!" when he took photos of us, and we met many random people on the street who spoke bits of Norwegian, Korean, and Japanese).
We let ourselves be led around the pyramid complex for awhile, before being led, finally, to a perfume shop ambiguously affiliated with our tour guide, which we admired uncomfortably before leaving without buying anything.

All in all, a good day, even if I didn't get to eat anything.L-->R Me, Chris, Greg, Bob.

Ahlan Wa-Sahlan

2006-01-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

Exit London and enter... well, not the most comfortable city in the world. Cairo. al-Qaahira fi MaSr. The Egyptian one.

My first impressions of the city are of an immense, dusty, noisy morass of incomprehensible motion. When our plane arrived in Cairo airport (there were probably 15 or so of us on the same flight in from Heathrow) we were met by a round, jolly man with only half his teeth. He gathered us up and herded us out the door to the most haphazard minibus I've ever seen.

We piled in and, with our police escort's sirens wailing (the fact that we had such an escort startling and worrying in of itself), we headed off into the darkened, congested highways of Cairo. Apparently nobody here believes in headlights.

Apparently nobody here believes in organizing anything ahead of time, or conveying any pertinent information when other cultures might consider it necessary to do so. As a result we tumbled out of our bus onto the doorstep of our marble-and-glass dorm, all ready to fall immediately into bed after our varied but lengthy travelling ordeals, only to be hurried into the lobby in preparation for... sitting. And more sitting. The reception and security crew piled up our suitcases carefully in one corner of the room, then shuffled the heavy bags to another end of the room and carefully resurrected the mass. Eventually they gave up and simply piled everything in mounds on the floor.

After much clambering, confused zippering and unzippering of bags to facilitate the security staff riffling through our belongings (for booze, apparently... two students found themselves already receiving warnings for possession), we were handed envelopes filled with papers and our room keys. One reception staff member led a group of us (girls) to the women's wing of the dorm, to show us where our rooms were. We lugged our massive suitcases (me being one of the most lightly laden, I can attest to the unpleasantness of this task) up two flights of stairs to the "first" floor, where the elevator banks were located. After 10 minutes of frustrated pushing of buttons, the staff member concluded that the elevators were broken (again), and led us back to the stairwell and pointed up in the direction of the various floors we lived on. My floor was the 6th.

Round about the 3rd floor a few other girls and I discovered that the elevators actually functioned from the third floor, and decided to risk taking one up to our respective floors. We made it alive, and stumbled out in relief. The keys here are different than I was used to back home, so upon finding my room (nobody here believes in putting room numbers in any sort of logical order) I fumbled around with the lock for a few minutes, then in frustration attempted to rattle the doorknob. To my surprise I discovered it had been open the whole time, and even more surprising, I discovered that I had a roommate, and that I had just woken her up.

I had requested a single, and the student services office had neglected to tell me my living circumstances would be other than what I had asked for. Clearly life in Cairo is going to require almost superhuman amounts of patience.

That's it for first impressions. Hopefully I will be able to begin including useful travel tips and pointers on local Arabic for those intrepid travellers who are not dissuaded by to so-called "Cairo Moments" I experience.

I will leave you with one tantalizing image, however:
The Nile, in all its Glory.

Mind the Gap!

2006-01-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone. Sorry for the delay, but so much has been happening so quickly that it's been a little intimidating to tackle it all in the few moments I have had open for such non-survival-related activities. So here we go--my (mis)adventures to date, the short version.

The first leg of my trip was a lengthy (about 10 days) layover in London con mi chica Alycia. As I've learned in this short amount of time, there are two Rules of London:

1. London is the most comfortable city in the world.
2. London is out to get me. Yep, the whole city.

I have come to believe these two rules to be completely and utterly true, in spite of their apparent contradiction. To elaborate, I was subject to a massive series of mishaps which included 1. the loss of Alycia's mobile number; 2. lack of prior knowledge about the tube worker's strike, resulting in an inability to plan around it, resulting in 3. being dumped off in a tube stop of unknown location somewhere in downtown London in the middle of the night with a good 50 kilos of luggage and 4. being unable to locate said tube station on my map due to there being three additional tube (bus, actually, but i had no idea at the time that bus stops also use the standard tube stop sign) stops of the same name within a few blocks as well as 5. most of the streets (appearing to be) unlabeled.

I did eventually manage to find Alycia, but within 24 hours followed mishap number 6. in which I was taken to a local dive (ahem, club) which promptly flooded and forced everyone to leave. The next night we decided to not push our luck and stay in for the evening, but then I somehow managed to 7. blow out the fuses in Alycia's room by trying to plug in my electric adapter. Apparently unable to find any safe means of entertainment, we attempted to soak up some culture by attending Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Royal Opera, but the tube being unreliable and us being typical college students (which is to say, running late), we had to try to run there in typical women's "nice" footwear, which, needless to say, is not designed even for everyday walking. This resulted in me 8. ending up with such terrible blisters that I had to spend the rest of the night wandering downtown London (in January!) barefoot, except for the last bit when the sidewalks got so cold that I had to borrow Alycia's socks (they were black, they never get dirty, the longer you wear them... oh, nevermind), and was 9. unable to wear shoes at all for a couple of days afterward. There were a few more mishaps in there someplace, but since they were relatively minor I'll leave them out.

Despite the potential horror of my experience in London, I spent the vast majority of the time wandering the streets grinning like an idiot. Yes, even when I was sure my toes were about to freeze and fall off.

My theory is that in London everything looks so small and dinky (ee! smartcars!!) that you can't help feeling a little bit like you're in Disneyland, which, as everyone knows, is The Happiest Place on Earth (tm). Everyone there is also amazingly friendly and helpful, so I only had to attempt to climb two flights of stairs in the entirety of the tube system without some random guy offering to carry my massive suitcase for me. Also, it wasn't nearly as cold as everyone led me to believe.

Alycia and I also had an interesting pub experience courtesy of Uncle Jack. We picked a random tavern (they're all decorated so nicely, it's hard to choose) called The Rising Sun, fought valiantly for a table (we won!), and per his instructions ordered some "real food" (Yay non-Tesco!) and a couple of pints. Alycia ordered a heart-attack-inducing meat pie and some kind of beer I don't recall the name of, and I got the famous fish and chips and a pint of Stella. The fish and chips was excellent, the Stella was foul. Actually, whatever Alycia was drinking was pretty foul too. Guess I'll just never be a beer drinker.

That was about it. Yay London.

Welcome to our wanderings! Feel special. We do.

2005-08-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

New Beginnings.

2005-08-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

Zombie Feet is the collaborative travel blog of Jess and Kat. Please excuse the craziness as many of our adventurings are undergoing reconstruction for posting in roughly chronological order. Letters, emails, journals and such are being reformatted and having photos added. Please check the archives frequently as changes will most frequently occur there. Once all is in order, cataloging of present and future adventures will commence. Stay tuned! :D

Long trails

2005-08-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Backpacking in Yosemite

Our last three days were greuling. I think the milage was 13, 14, and 17, but I don't remember now. It always feels like more, anyway. We headed south towards Isberg Pass, then looped north again and followed the bottom of the valley we had been hiking above. On the last day there was a tremendous rainstorm. The kind that lasts all day and soaks absolutely everything. We decided to hike all the way out into the Yosemite valley for the night, so we trudged soggily past the misty monoliths that make the valley so famous. The only reason this was a good idea was the veggieburger waiting for me in a cafeteria at the bottom.
This picture is from our camp the night after Bernice lake. The trail climbed haltingly for the first seven miles or so, then followed south along what was little more than a ledge. Thunderstorms rolled in and continued all afternoon, and we were exhausted, so we pitched camp at an incredible spot just next to the trail where the ledge widened out. The whole Clark Range was open to the west, and you could see the storms brewing over the peaks and the silver of rivers shooting thousands of feet straight down the carved granite to the valley below.

Day 7

2005-08-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

Dinner

At Tuolumne meadows we resupplied and met up with Laurel and Mary Wagstaff. Laurel, fresh from a trip to Japan, was full of stories and questions about Reed. We got along famously. Newly loaded, we had an easy late afternoon trek up Rafferty creek towards Vogelsang, and spent the night by the creek.
From there, we crossed over Vogelsang pass and descended into a steep granite-sided valley threaded with thin waterfalls, and climbed right back out of it to camp at Bernice Lake. I couldn't resist swimming in it, wide and blue and empty as it was. I shivvered all night in payment. It's always worth it.

Day 5

2005-08-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

At Glen Aulin

We cut cross country over Virginia pass into the spectacular Spiller creek basin. The whole valley was smooth and symmetrical with steep sides, the kind only very huge glaciers can make. It was open and swimming with wildflowers. We spent a lazy afternoon reading and sleeping in the meadow where we camped.
The next day we followed the creek south down its valley into the Yosemite highlands. McCabe lake, where we spent the night was just two miles off the PCT, but entirely deserted. Perhaps the hill up is too much. Dinner and sleep, hough not enough of either.
Day five. We had a long hike south to make it to Tuolumne Meadows the next morning for a resupply. The country was woody and gently rolling for most of the 13 miles. The huge granite domes of Yosemite valley rose above the trees in the distance. At Glen Aulin, we stopped for a swim before following along the tulmultuous Tuolumne river as it shot down towards Hetch Hetchy.

Eastern Sierras

2005-08-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

I drove out to Bishop and met up with Cooper and his dad to go backpacking in the Eastern Sierra highlands. They do long trips every year with their family friends the Wagstaffs. We started in the Hoover wilderness, to the north of Yosemite, and spent two days climbing into the highlands.

Head Over Heels

2005-07-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

I´m in love. Guatemala with its high cloudy mountains and corn fields and colorful indigena women carrying giant baskets on their heads and babies tied to their backs, its old schoolbusses packed with people like sardines, its glittering city centers and its mud brick huts, its ancient carvings and temples littered about, yet still living... It has absolutely captivated me. Today I am in Quetzaltenango. Everyone here calls it Xela (shey-lah). It is somewhere between the pervasive filth of Guatemala city and the touristed, decaying colonial splendor of Antigua. A working city. Cooper and I came in last night on the infamous chicken busses, which is what they call the 2nd class busses that everyone uses. They are old schoolbusses, painted in bright colors with luggage racks installed above the seats and on the roof. Two people should fit in a seat on each side of the aisle... they squeeze three to a seat, hunching shoulders, and fill the aisles with standing people. At one point yesterday, I ended up standing in the aisle with my back pressed against the emergency exit back door. There was literally no place to move. I have it better than Cooper, though. His legs are so long, he doesn't fit into the seats, even if there are any. We found a great hostel, a multi-leveled, whimsical collection of rooms and courtyards and patios patched together from several different buildings. We got a bed, use of a kitchen and even hot water showers (oh glory... up in the highlands the water is COLD!) for $4 a night. Life is good. And there´s a Reedie staying there! What are the odds?? I domiss Reed.We ended up staying our first four days in Antigua. After burning the Mayan city of Iximiche, originally allies, and having his second capital burried by a volcano within two years of founding, the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado founded Antigua as his capital, and it became the seat of colonial government until the mid 1700s or so when it was leveled by an earthquake. They moved the capital to Guatemala city, and spared Antigua the capital´s grit and glory. Guate, as they call the capital, is a striking city. We bussed through it... while descending into the wide valey we got sweeping views of glittering highrises.On the main roads, there were nice restraunts, chain stores, wedding gowns and furniture in windows. Lots of new cars. But as soon as the bus pulled away from city center towards the bus stop, the utter filth of the city engulfed us. The streets seemed to be swimming in a brown haze. There was mud and rotting vegetables and who knows what else mounded up against the walls of the buildings that lined the street. People everywhere, sitting in the muck withbaskets of vegetables or pirated cds spread on blankets. We had to switch busses, and the taxi drove us past miles of these decrepit buildings and decrepit people. As Cooper said, it could have come straight out of Orwell...white towers rising above the great miserable mass of humanity. Antigua is nothing like this. It is a clean, friendly, beautiful little town of 10,000, with all the old spanish style houses, high ceilinged, tiled roofs and tiled floors, and internal courtyards with gardens and fountains. Definitely highly touristed, but I quickly found that the kind of tourists who would mob Guatemala are different from the ones in Costa Rica. They all speak spanish, and are there to learn about the country... not just to have a nice vacation ona tropical beach somewhere. I think its the off-season for Antigua, despite how many people were there, because the innumerable cafes and handicraft shops all seemed strangely empty. We got to enjoy all kinds of wonderful food and company, a movie and some live music thanks to the tourist scene. Wasn´t¨the Real Guatemala¨ I guess, but it was a good place to be. From Antigua, we went to the lago de Atitlan. We had another long winding busride along the Panamericana, through high, misty mountains with stands of pine and a patchwork of corn fields and houses. Off the highway, we descended a crazy switchbacking road, several thousand feet to the edge of lake Atitlan. It´s a big lake... surrounded by cliffs and volcanoes, and just heartstoppingly beautiful. We stayed one night in the town of Panajachel, where all the tourists go... again strangely empty, then bargained for boat passage across the lake to San Pablo de la Laguna. This was a smallish town. Cobblestone streets go straight up the hillside from the dock to a church strung with pastel colored flagging. Houses and hotels and little groceries and restraunts are all perched along the narrow streets in the center, or fan out by dirt paths and blend into cornfields which ran down to the lake shore on the other side of the hill. I heard more Quiche(kee-chee, the most common highland maya people)spoken than spanish. Even the men here wore traditional dress. Many grunted their way up the steep streets carying huge tubs on their backs, hung from a strap of cloth across their foreheads. Women carry equally enormous bundles balanced on their heads. I cant imagine how strong you have to be for that. I really can´t imagine much about what life must be like for this people. Guatemala by the numbers has some of the worst poverty in the Americas, despite a relatively strong economy. The Maya have always been at the bottom of this. And then you add to this crushing oppression the kind of genocide that was conducted against them during the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted thirtysix years and left more than 200,000 dead or disappeared by right wing death squads. Like in El Salvador, all this was done with US military aid (against the ¨communists¨). The CIA ousted the only president who ever tried to do anything to help this people in 1954. Jacobo Arbenz, expropriated uncultivated lands for redistribution. Since most of the country was owned by united fruit company, and the compensation offered for the land was based on the values UFCo stated for tax purposes, the company was unappeasable. Arbenz was obviously a terrible threat to national security and capitalism everywhere. Leftist guerillas fought periodically against the string of US-supported generals that came after this coup. Death squads targeted the Maya wholesale in response. The civil war didn't end until 1996. I can´t immagine how much courage it takes to still wear those beautiful skirts and embroidered sashes, after all that. I'm on my second history book about this country. Sorry for the lecture. It is a terrible, bitter, and fascinating history. I cant really begin to tell you what I've read. But you can see it written in the architecture of the buildings and the faces of old people, if you look.

Northward Ramblings

2005-07-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Hi from Guatemala!
Sorry not to have written in so long. There are so many stories I hardly know where to start. I have been in four countries since my last confession.

I guess I should start from the beginning. I met up with Cooper in Nicaragua,a beach town called San Juan del Sur. There was a festival going on at the time, so our hotel room, between the sounds of fireworks, church bells which we calculated rang once every 47 minutes at random intervals all day, construction, and then the marching band, wasnt exactly quiet. Otherwise, it was a quiet town, though. In a big crecent shaped bay full of boats. We wandered around the beach and ate a lot of pizza, then spent another few days camping on the beach just north of there in a place called Playa Majagual. This was where the coast got truly spectacular. It was only acessible by forty five minutes in a taxi chugging down muddy, potholed dirt roads, and then hiking along the beach a ways, but the place that we found was well worth the trek. The whole coastline there is a string of crecent shaped coves, with flat empty beaches in the center, green water rolling in perfect tube-shaped waves into the sand, and crashing spectacularly over the rocks on the points. Two days there I did nothing but swim and read on the beach and climb around on the rocks.

From there, we bussed to Granada. The countryside gets a little healthier there. As in, there are some crops growing on the farms. Around Leon, the countryside was the saddest thing I had ever seen. This land, formerly tropical forest, formerly industrial cotton fields, had nothing but pastures for miles and miles along the flat plane all the way to the ocean. Pastures full of emaciated looking cattle and grass eaten to the root everywhere you looked. In the Spanish school they told me that the cotton farming had sterilized the soil, and it wouldnt be farmable again for another 30 years. 30 years! Peoples houses there often consisted of wood frames with plastic sheeting stapled to it. Forget plumbing. Forget electricity. You had a nice house if you had a floor. That's what it means when we talk about people living on less than $1 a day. Half the world lives like that. Around San Juan the countryside was a little healthier, in that the ubiquitious pastures had some grass in them, and north east of that, I was impressed to see some crops growing.

Granada is a beautiful city. It is clean, with the same colonial style houses and tiled sidewalks as Leon, but more freshly painted, with paved roads and nicer shops and fewer people wandering the streets selling lollipops and tortillas and pencils. We found a gloriously cheap hotel in an old mansion right next to the market, with a garden and a courtyard and a kitchen. We wandered around the square, which was pleasant... full of trees and benches and kids running around, down to the shore of the lake, through some old colonial churches, a fort, and the market, as gritty and bustling as ever. My favorite find of this visit was an art studio in a place called La Casa de Los Leones (the house of lions) where they had a kind of center of arts and culture. A bunch of artists lived in this old mansion and had their studios downstairs where you could come and look at their art and watch them work and talk to them about it. It was truly fabulous art. Modern, colorful. Each artist was different. I spent the whole afternoon there. The other great discovery of the trip was THE BEST drink EVER. Fresh lemons, honey, and aged Nicaraguan rum in equal proportions. Damn.

From there we went up to Esteli in the mountains. It was a rather graceless town. Wide streets and stout grey cement buildings. We had a terrible time finding a restraunt with halfway appealing food. Went to a movie for the night and then got out of there. The border crossing into Honduras was incredibly easy. So for that matter, was the one yesterday from El Salvador to Guatemala. Its just Costa Rica-Nicaragua and Honduras-El Salvador that's a bitch. Those are the countries with bad relations with eachother. Go figure. Well, we were just passing through Honduras on the way to El Salvador. People on the bus were friendly, and the country was beautiful. Coming down from steepsided mountains, it opened up into wide, fertile plains. The country houses we passed were cheerful looking, white with tile roofs, generally. And flowers in their yards.

El Salvador has the same mountains, but is almost completely deforested. Once across the border, after about six different busses, we headed east, up high into the mountains of the Morazan province to visit a town called Perquin. The town was tiny and charming. It was perched on a hillside and had cobblestone streets, just a few markets and houses, and basically nothing else. Surrounded, belive it or not, by pine forests. And there was the museum. The civil war was from 80 to 92 in El Salvador, and some of the most brutal fighting was in Morazan, the mountain territory perfect for a guerilla stronghold. Just uphill from the town was a war museum. It wasn't much, really, except for a collection of old photographs and some guns and such left over from the war, but its one of the most powerful things I've seen. They had pictures of war heroes. Not the Rambos I expected, but normal, honest looking people. A curly haired girl sitting at a desk. A young priest with a turtleneck and glasses. A fat housewife with an apron sitting at a typewriter. All killed. These were the movers and shakers of a revolution. They had pictures of soldiers too. Old men, young boys looking proud and holding rifles. There was one of two girls my age, crouched in some bushes with machine guns, smiling the most beautiful, joyful smiles. And there were printed testimonies from people whose towns were raided. Just gripping. Hiding in the hills for days and watching your town smoking and coming back and stepping over the corpses. Anti-guerilla tactics consisted in going into towns in rebel territory and killing everything. Babies. Old women. Livestock. Everything. And our government funded that. In a town just down the hill from Perquin, called El Mozote, they dug up more than 1000 skeletons from mass graves before excavations stopped. God. Outside of the museum, the twisted remains of a helecopter and an old plane. And there was this round depression, maybe
fifteen feet deep, thirty across, grown in with grass labeled humbly as a bomb crater. I realized the museum was surrounded with them. I don't really know how to describe the impact of that. The human face of it. The guns that had that greasy feel that metal aquires after long contact with the sweat of humanity. The utter infathomability that you could blow craters that big in a hillside, and that there were people where those craters were. The fact that this kind of brutality is going on in other places every day, and some of them are still our country's fault. I spent the whole afternoon shaken and a little teary.

Coming down from the mountains, we made our way to San Salvador, the capital. It is a sprawling, crowded, car-choked city. A lot like LA, actually. They had overpasses! And landscaping! I cant tell you how long its been since I've seen an overpass. But El Salvador has by far the best, most modern roads in Central America. The city was very modern, too. Shopping malls, movie theaters, six-lane roads, chain restraunts of all kinds. We found another very good art museum. I really like Latin American art. So, from there, we headed to Guatemala. Late last night, after nine hours on four different busses, I got to Antigua. I went into immediate Gringo shock. Haven't heard much english or seen more than maybe five other white people since leaving Granada. But it's a cute town. Lots of tasty looking restraunts (one with bagels! oh glory), and greater glory... last night the hostel had hot water!!! My first hot water shower in 5 weeks! I took two. Bask in luxury back home. You don't know what
you have.

Well, thats all so far!
Ciao

For the love of elbows

2005-06-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

The miracle of the body is one of those things you never appreciate until it stops working... and you find yourself on your knees begging forgiveness from your ACL or your kidneys... please darling, I know I've been unkind, only now do I understand how much I need you, come back to me.
Luckily my elbow and I have only had a little bit of a falling out. It will come around in a couple days,and I will be able to bend my arm and lean on it again. Today, though, it looks like a surgically implanted golf ball that was stitched up none-to-well. Wish I could call it a battle wound or something... well, maybe I can... you see, it was a dark and stormy morning, and the rain pounding down on the streets of Gotha--I mean--León was pooling on the smooth tiled sidewalks. Our heroine was walking unsuspecting to class and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she slipped on the sidewalk and fell on her ass! Luckily, her valiant elbow (ironically the only non-squishy bodypart she currently possesed) sacrificed itself in the continuing battle against the forces of gravity! Heheh. The rest of my combined body parts have been having a great time in Nicaragua.
I´m in Nicaragua. Guess I should get to that first. I came back to Costa Rica from Panama with my mom and dropped her off at the airport. It was great to have her down here. Spent a couple extra days in San Jose getting organized and seeing Cooper. Nothing particularly exciting, though the next time I go to a public clinic in a big city I will not bring a book about the public health disasters of infectious disease. After a couple hours of reading about smallpox in the waiting room trying to get a prescription for chloroquine, a woman next to me in a wheelchair started vomiting into a bag... I decided to take my chances with malaria. Sunday I headed up to Nicaragua. Cooper woke up at 4:30 to take me to the bus and sing me happy birthday (It was my birthaday). Damn I love that boy. I didn´t have much more about the school than the name and the city because they don´t have a telephone, but I got myself there alright. The old guy next to me on the bus from Managua, the capital, to León was telling me all about how god made women from the rib of adam and how adultry is always the woman´s fault. He was nice,though. So, León is a beautiful old colonial town. It looks a lot like Granada...High ceilinged houses with decomposing spanish tile roofs that make a continuous wall against the streets. The streets are pretty clean, generally narrow and strait, paved with cement bricks, with checkered-tile sidewalks raised on both sides. There are still cobblestones some places, and horsedrawn carriages to clatter over them. It is hot all the time, with the same intense white light we have in California. Churches everywhere. On sunday they shoot off rockets to announce mass. The family I am staying with is wonderful. It is basically two older sisters living alone, one with a twelve year old daughter who only talks in whispers. They don´t talk about husbands. It seems there are a lot of men just cut and run here. Same thing happened to my spanish teacher, six months pregnant. They have a big beautiful house all to themselves. A parlour with wicker chairs where they never go faces the street. Where they really live is in theback of the house. It is completely open to the big garden they have back there. Basically a big segmented patio. It is simply furnished but refreshing. Doña Socorro and Doña Marta seem happy to have me there. We have been teaching eachother how to cook things. A lot of terrible news on TV right now. There´s an economic crisis because gas prices rose. Unemployment, poverty, and political corruption everywhere. Another sister of theirs is about to leave for Costa Rica to find better work. She had been working 14 hours a day in a bar in Moyagalpa and making about a buck fifty a day. It wasn't enough to feed her daughter, so she's hoping for better in Costa Rica. The family talks about these things in a serious, matter-of-fact manner that at first I mistook for despair, but I think is actually a kind of guarded optimism. The spanish school is a great place too. Full of murals. I have a professor all to myself, which makes the grammar go quickly first thing in the morning...then we go out to markets or museums and stop class for lunch. They have activities in the afternoon, which so far have been dance class, a trip to the beach, and a war doccumentary. I am impressed with the students here too. Most are very educated, well traveled people here learning more spanish to help them work on various projects... an epidemic reporting system, a school, and some articles on fair trade coffee and people trafficing among them. Lots of amazing people doing amazing things. The epidemiologist guy took really good care of my elbow.

San Jose

2005-06-03T18:51:00.000-07:00

I stayed in the sketchiest hotel of my life last night. It cost four dollars, contained nothing but a bed, linoleum, no windows, and there were donald duck noises coming from across the hall all
night that Cooper said were people snorting coke. I wouldn't know. I got the hell out of there. Sunday Im heading up to Nicaragua, waving goodbye to gallo pinto, cheese that tastes like plastic, and crazy fucking taxis. I have trouble missing things when there is so much great stuff in front of me. Maybe when I'm home again I will start to process some more. I have been reading detective
novels and about small pox. I always thought small pox was relatively benign, you know. The plague sounds so much worse, but this book makes it sound absolutely gruesome. Im just starting the part about biological weaponry. Fucking scary. Here I thought global warming would kill us all first. Maybe astroids and zombies. Or the free masons. Theyre so cute and cult like. My
favorite conspiracy theory subjects after the Nazis. Heil pyramids!

More Hammers

2005-05-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

So, we got to Boquete yesterday evening, way later than planned because of a series of annoying little events like the girl at the checkout desk having run to the supermarket. Well, no big deal. Boquete is a really cute little mountain town in western Panama. Adorable. Little square, christmas lights, old trees. Big green mountains with clouds drifting around them. The hotel we are staying at is a little family owned place right next to the river, with two rooms and a little kitchen and livingroom, all painted with flowers and such. Like most houses in towns and cities, its outfitted with bars on the windows and a metal gate caging the patio and front door. Since we got there late, the family that runs it had already gone home, and left us a note and number to call for them to bring us the key. (We, at this point, was me, my mom who is down visiting, and Kelly and Melissa, two girls from the program. Kelly left this morning) So we got dinner... local panamanian food consists of rice and fried meat. Its pretty terrible. I have found both real cheese(not Costa Rican plastic) and crunchy apples in Panama, though. That almost makes up for it. Alexis, the owner, got there right as we finished, and took us over to let us into the room. He had three keyrings with maybe four keys each... and none of them opened the gate. Not one. Must have left the real keys at the house. What a pain. So he piles us all into the back of his truck, and we get a nighttime ride up the mountain to his house. Met the wife and kids, and even the dog. They were really funny, happy people, with a house that could have come right out of the suburbs, and a view of the entire valley. The wife sat us down to tea and cake, their little daughter came and gave us little candies and played with the dog and did her best to argue her way out of her homework, and it turned out Alexis knew lots of botany, so he ended up showing Kelly all over his garden telling her about plants, and bringing us out books from his biology library. It was really nice. Couldn´t find the key though. The wife came down the mountain with us too to see if she couldn´t work the keys any better. She couldn´t, of course, so they pull a hammer out of the truck, and are trying to break us in with the hammer by pounding the lock out of the gate. That wasn´t going so well either, so Alexis went around back while his wife kept trying, and we start hearing lots more banging and thunking... then eventually a giant crash, and a couple seconds later he walks out the front door and tells us now we can just come in through the back door!
Well, I think mom has been having a great time riding around in trucks and public busses and staying in hostels with me. She makes a really good travel buddy. It´s been fun to have her visit. So far, we´ve been doing a lot of hiking around Boquete. We climbed volcan Baru, found this beautiful rainforest trail called "Sendero los Quetzales" and visited a coffee farm. Before that we were in Panama city.

Panama City is as cool a city as ther ever was. It´s streched out along the coast, right next to the canal. We went to see the ruins of the original colonial city, first city founded by the spanish on the Pacific. Leveled by pirates in 1671. They had a great museum... way newer and more modern than anything in Costa Rica. Panama is a little better off in general, I think. Panama city is very modern. Skyscrapers and supermarkets and good roads. Anyway, apparently Sir Robert Morgan marched twelve hundred men across the isthsmus from the caribbean and took the city by land, loaded the entire stockpile of inka gold onto some mules, and made off with it. Crazy. Also went to see the canal. Panama has been operating the canal itself since '99, I think. They've done a good job of it, and seem really proud. There were all kinds of cargo ships heading through there. You could see them lining upout in the ocean... then they cross under the graceful Bridge of the Americas into the canal. Seeing the locks was pretty cool, though the Panamax ships that are the largest which fit through the canal were a lot smaller than I expected. I'm used to much bigger ones going in to LA or long beach harbors. The sheer volume of stuff is staggering, nonetheless. Did a little more exploring around the city, and ate at some fabulous restraunts, but Panama city was on strike while I was there. Apparently the government was trying to raise the retirement age for recieving social security payments, and raise taxes. It was an uproar... all over the radio and news. There were giant marches and rallies in the Cinco de Mayo square for three days, and most of the city went on strike. Lots of police with bullet proof vests and combat boots and semiautomatics. Our last night we tried to go out, but the play had gotten cancelled when we got to the theater... and on the way there the taxi drove through a cloud of tear gas and lots of running people. It came in all through the windows. Oh man. I never want to be tear gassed. I just got a whiff and it burns and chokes you like nothing. In general it seemed to be pretty peaceful. But big stuff is happening. I think lots of latin american governments are being pressured by the IMF to dismantle social welfare programs, so this might be from that. Corruption never helped anything either. On the bright side, they have the coolest paintings all over the public busses. Some have chrome and strobe lights, and they all play dance music. Party on the bus!!

La Cucaracha

2005-05-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

I had my first cucaracha at dinner with mom. You layer rum, kaluha and vodka in a shot glass, stick a straw in it, and set the vodka on fire. You have to drink it through the straw before it melts!

I got all set up at spanish school in León, something to do while I wait for Cooper to get out of school and come be my travel buddy. I need to be in Leon on the 5th,
so I will be on the road for my birthday. Nine hour bus ride. whoop-de-dee. Looks like the school is in one of their old colonial mansions with pretty personal teaching, so it should be good. Nice to have something scheduled to do. I've ended up being the leader on this little trip, since
I organized everything for me and mom and for Melissa and Kelly, and I speak the best spanish... so they keep wanting me to figure out what we´re doing today, or to say when we go eat or which trail to take and all that stuff. I don´t mind the organizing, I guess, it´s just wierd to feel like Ive been put "in command" Especially when it´s not like I know this place any better than they do.

Not that its been hard to find things to do. Boquete is awsome! It keeps reminding me of steamboat. All these pretty little houses. Sendero los Quetzales was beautiful. Thanks to Cooper for the reccomendation. If the taxi hadnt ripped us off and left us at the bottom of the hill on the road instead of the entrance to the trail, we would have just gotten lost there all day. But great as it was, wandering past farmhouses too. There is a good bakery in town, and they sell the most delicious sesame peanuts. Yum!

Today we were lazy. Mom and I did a coffee tour in the afternoon, of a mostly organic, shadegrown plantation and processing plants. I was really impressed. Its a very well designed, environmentally friendly way to do agriculture. And the coffee was really good. Otherwise, I finished a detective novel. Got the best strawbery batido in the history of civilization, did laundry, and went on a run. Its been a good day. Tomorrow, climbing volcan Barú. After that, a lot of busses.

One of those nights

2005-05-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Panama city is on strike. There have been protests since I got here, and most sectors have been striking for two days. Police in bulletproof vests with motorcycles and machine guns everywhere. We were going to go to the theater, but the production was suspended. On our way, the taxi drove us through a cloud of tear gas, past lots of running people. I decided to come back and watch the news. Drinking rum and trying to translate something meaningful from three channels, reporters all in spanish talking too fast and about nothing that wasnt obvious. Gave up. I find myself channel surfing alone.

Bus-O-Rama

2005-05-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

So, the semester officially ended yesterday. Finals were on friday, and then we hopped down to the Caribbean beach town of Puerto Viejo. It was my first time on the Caribbean... it was just beautiful, and I really liked the atmosphere... everyone completely relaxed. Lots of reggae music, rice and beans with coconut, and a whole lot of jewelry vendors and young bohemian-looking travelers, but not upscaled in the way gaudy way tourist towns can often be. I really liked it. We stayed in these condo style rooms south of town, where we had our own party on the second night instead of going out. So,after a last weekend on the beach, we hitched it back up to San Jose, where we stayed outside the city in the hotel next to the airport to avoid trouble with the transportation strike. A lot of taxi drivers and transportation workers are angry about gas prices and a company called Ritere that does annual vehicle checks... so they scheduled a strike for monday. Luckily, it turned out to bea march and some negotiating, and not road blocks around the entire capital. We had our goodbye dinner at the hotel by the airport and all stayed out by the pool together late for our last night together. It is sad to leave... I was really genuinely impressed with everyone on the program. It´s been a good time with them. We said our goodbyes yesterday morning as people left for their flights. Kelly, Melissa and I got a taxi down town for the morning. The two of them are also traveling for a little while after the program. They went to Corcovado yesterday, and we are planning on meeting back up in Panama City next week. San Jose seems different to me now. Still crowded, bustling, and noisy like any city. We were choking on exhaust the entire time. The driving doesn't terrify me as much as it used to, and having been in smaller towns I look at the same buildings in SJ that I thought were a little crooked or dingy and think that they are normal, and in general there are a lot of clean and upscale places there, at least by Costa Rican standards. We north-americans are pretty spoiled with our public spaces. Do you realize how rich you have to be to keep up all that landscaping? My plan for the day was to head down to the town of Golfito, where Cooper was staying at a station for the week, so I could see him before going to Panama. I got a bus with out too much trouble, and seven hours later, only interrupted by a lunch break in the mountains where they had hummingbird feeders outside the windows and surprised me with the best arroz con pollo Ive ever had, I stumbled blearily into the town next to Golfito. All I had was a phone number for the station, and no one picked up.. so I had a bit of a time actually finding where Cooper was. I payed my taxi driver double because he was so helpful. He gave me all kinds of suggestions and helped me ask people along the way if they knewwhere a group of gringo students was staying.. and eventually I found the U of Costa Rica building in town, and he was staying there. So here I am in Golfito. Its a pretty typical little town. Not so well touristed, With a collection of a few bars and sodas and supermarkets, a school, a couple hotels. It streches out along the east side of a big green bay... so it´s a port, though there´s only one dock as far as I can see. I met a guy from the US coast guard down here last night. Apparently the coastguard does anti-drug smuggling missions and picks up refugees along everyone´scoasts, not just ours. The guy told us a lot about debt slavery to coyotes and these ridicuous, overstuffed, breaking down boats that these people try to go to the states in. Pretty amazing and sad what people will do to get to our country. I have met a lot of people down here that want to go to the states. One of the janitors in Corcovado, taxi drivers, and some of our cooks...they make a decent living here, and they wouldn't have nearly as good a life if they moved, but they still want to come. I think it's because of the success stories. I met one guy on a bus who bragged to me about how he tricks immigration by saying he is buying cars and is just visiting, then he works as a gardener in New Jersey, makes a ton of money and brings it back here. Well, I should go pick up my laundry.

Rice and Bean Melt-down

2005-05-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

I have been eating rice and beans for just about every meal for four months now. They're not bad, but oh you wouldn't believe the things I would do for a bagel. It's finals week, so I'm studying and finishing up about three papers at the same time. Not too bad. We have had the most apocalyptic lectures this last week. The most terrible predictions from global warming I have ever heard, from a woman who discovered that higher temperatures decrease photosynthesis of all tropical plants, which means a positive feedback loop, which means droughts and floods and crazy weather like you've all already heard before. It also means the entire amazon basin forest, in her model, will rise in temperature 14C, photosynthesis in tropical forests globally will be pushed above its upper temperature limits, and the entire amazon basin, and the congo, and big partsof indonesia will die and turn to savannah. OK, the modeling is a little extreme, but the woman's work is rock solid, and that's the most terrifying thing I've heard in a long time.
Today I visited a banana plantation. It was run by a university that was studying sustainable alternatives for bananas. That was really interesting. It was like a theme park, with giant bunches of bananas cruising along on a disneyland rail system, hanging in green and blue plastic bags with colored tags. Bananas dont have seeds, so every plant in an entire field is a clone of the same plant, grown basically by sticking chunks of meristem tissue in the ground. They grow from those chunks to trees and produce one giant bunch of bananas every nine months. Then they cut the entire stalk off, and a new one grows and does it again. Since it's such a huge monoculture, all the bananas are incredibly susceptible to diseases and dependent on artificial fertilizers. The good plantations can last 40 years before they sterilize the soil. Where we visited, they were really proud of their semi-organic bananas, that they only sprayed with fungicides thirty times a year, vs the usual 50 (that's every week, folks!), and mixed plant matter with the soil to distract the pest nematodes, instead of using nematocides (there are a bunch of workers suing right now because they got sterilized by these in the 80s), and they use citrus extract to keep bananas green for shipping instead of some other fungicide. Sounded basically like this system was still swimming in creepy chemicals, but was a step in the right direction. If you do one thing for your environment, PLEASE pay the extra twenty cents for organic bananas! The people who process them were really interesting to watch. They have the assembly line down pat...just the fastest movements cutting, washing, sorting, trimming, and packing the bananas as they cruised in on their amusement-park rails. Looked like it would get boring fast, but they were good at it.
So seeing the plantation was good. The apocalyptic part was comparing this with our reading about the socio-economic causes of deforestation... a lot of which related to the instability created by export-agribusiness, which have boom and bust cycles, and deforest land and attract immigrants during the booms, which they leave jobless, with no option but to try and homestead in yet more forests during the busts. Costa Rica, for example, is 28% national parks... pretty damn well protected compared to us at less than 2%... and yet they had the highest deforestation rate in the world over the last couple decades outside these parks. Basically, the point is that you cannot have conservation that just builds a wall around a few chunks of land, and lets the rest go to hell. It doesn't work in biological or human terms. The alternatives? A lot of smaller scale, more diversified farms, agroforestry and such. Reduced poverty, population growth, and social instability. None of which seem likely to happen without some kind of social and economic justice. Then I had a lecture on population growth. I'm not too worried about population growth. Global warming will kill us first. So saving the world proves yet again to be harder than anticipated. The forests still surprise me with tiny beautiful things. I got to see Cooper for the first time in months, and find myself still in love. I feel humbled, a little sleep deprived, and greatful for my rice and beans.

Big Plans

2005-05-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

My semester ends next week(drowning in finals and projects and
such right now...ACK! But Im learning how to be a good scientist. Biology here is WAY different from Reed's program) After that I am traveling all summer!! I have a week to travel in Costa Rica, if I don't get blockaded into the capital because of a transportation strike, then my mom is
flying down for two weeks and we're going down to Panama. I'm really excited to see Panama city... the history starts out with the normal slaughter of the natives and founding by the conquistadores, then the city grew like crazy because it became an important gold-route; it started getting sacked by pirates and rogue Spanish commanders, and then there was the canal... totally fascinating place.

By the time Mom leaves it will be June, and Cooper will get out of classes with the U. of Costa Rica, and we'll start hitching busses back to California all through central america and Mexico. Planning to be back in August. I can't quite believe that such a huge adventure is so close to me right now, though. What Ive been doing recently is very absorbing. Just finished a research
project on geckoes.. they're super cute... but writing the paper has kept me mostly inside for the last couple days, punctuated by 5:00 soccer games (I'm a bad-ass, Ive been the only girl on the field playing with all the Costa Rican men. There's gravel in the bottom of the mud puddles, though, so I scraped myself up pretty badly a couple days ago), occasional drinking, guitar playing, or random conversations with the researchers here, and a few lectures.

I don't even know what to tell you about my life, really. These are all details... but I don't know that I even could tell you accurately yet how Im changing and what Im learning by traveling so much. I'm getting older, I guess. That means a lot of complicated things to everyone. I still have no idea what I want to do with my life... Im sticking with biology for now because I get to travel and be outdoors and I like it, though I'm frustrated sometimes that all the work of it seems useless. I mean, I just spent a whole week studying if geckoes compete with eachother over bugs. What the hell good does that do for anyone? But I'm comforted that I keep meeting
PhD students and middle aged travelers who don't know what they want to do with their lives either. Life is in the getting there, I guess.

2005-04-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Happy Renn Fayre! La Selva is treating me pretty well. I got up at 4:30 this morning to go get
rained on all morning doing a bird study. The rain made all the birds hide, so
we passed our sample times taking funny pictures. Saw a giant army ant bivuoac
on the hike back... procrastinating on a paper right now. We got to go into
town yesterday for the first time in three weeks, basically. Dos Pinos
icecream rocks my world. Holy crap is cookies and cream good. I ate two cones
and was considdering a third, but we ran the store out of change. Yum.

Soccer like its my job

2005-04-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

I'm at La Selva. First day. We have a plant tax test tomorrow, so everyone is studying. But not hard enough to skip 5 o'clock soccer. I've played three games so far... happily haven't forgotten everything since middle school.. though the Ticos are good, and some of my fellow gringas haven't gotten the idea through their heads that you don't run full speed into you for the ball... so I have a few bruises. The real soccer injury so far was when Jeremy landed with his chin on Nancy's forehead. He got stitches.. and she had this ridiculous bump on her head, and a black eye and a half from it. Mmm.. all part of the game. So, yeah.. your girl is safe and sound, and is gonna be hella buff if I keep this up for the next three weeks. Finals and papers and all are coming up, though. We'll see. ooohh.. other cool news... yesterday on the way here from Palo Verde, we visited the mangroves. Those trees are so amazing! Some can tolerate three times the salt concentration of seawater. They secrete it from these gland sand crystalize it in their old leaves. Crazy. And they have all these breathing roots for when they get flooded. We got to go hiking around in them, and we went out with this researcher to the center channel of the wetland, where the rhizobium mangroves grow... those are the kind with big arching support roots like 15 ft high. We climbed through all the roots playing lavamonster... best jungle gym ever! And just beautiful.

middle-aged men

2005-04-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

So, you know how I was sick last week.. guess what I got yesterday... my third throat infection! Woohoo! More antibiotics for me, so I can kill everything thats left in my system. This is an ok one though, because even though my tonsils are the size of golf balls, I dont feel sick and I can still eat. What the hell, though?
On the bright side, I got a kinda creepy offer from a sugar farmer who could have been my dad. We gave him and his sick mother a ride back to their farm from the clinic in the truck, and he was sitting next to me making polite conversation, We made some polite conversation that amounted to "You plant sugar? That's nice. Yes, I study biology" though he had a hick accent and talked fast so it was really hard to understand. And we drop him off maybe twenty minutes down the road, get back to the station, get out of the car and walk strait to dinner... and when I walk in, someone is holding the phone out to me saying its for me. The guy calculated how long it took to drive back... and he called trying to give me his phone number and invite me to go mango picking and horseback riding. Eeewww! Maybe I need a machete after all.

I think all this is rather funny, really. Im in a pretty good mood. The kids who got bitten by vampire bats are back from rabes shots in San Jose, my guitar is still around, and Ive almost finished rewriting my paper. They told me Im not supposed to get much sun while on antibiotics, so I borrowed a really doofy hat from vicky for doing field work in the sun all day today. There are also a million tinasaurs that like to run around on the roof. They just jump right off when they want to get down. Its really funny to see them fly by the
window.

Backpacking Barefoot and Other Stories

2005-04-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been bad about writing... lots of things are going on! There are three weeks left in the semester right now, so things are starting to get crazy. I just spent the last two days re-writing a paper... and from now on there are projects and papers and tests non-stop. Nothing like Reed, though. So.. I guess the last you heard from me was before spring break... The paper I just finished was from the experiment I did the week before break. We were at a station in the mountains near Panama, and everyone had a week to design and conduct an experiment of their own. So I did a project on mushrooms in these forest fragments above the station, which involved a lot of bushwacking around looking for fallen logs. I thought I had bushwhacked before with hiking and working trail crew and all... but walking 10 m through all them crazy twiny spiky vines and things is entirely different. And it involved a lot of late nights identifying, with me and a bunch of books wondering what the @#!$% that little brown thing is. Moral of the story - mushrooms are cool. And never conduct an experiment without a hypothesis again. You will be re-writing your paper for days... I know...

So, spring break we finally got to rest a little and go travel around in our own directions. I was going to go backpacking in Corcovado park on the Osa peninsula, in basically the most pristine forest in the country, with my friend Ingrid. This girl is amazing. She speaks four languages and works at an art museum, has traveled all over europe, started a local organic food program at Columbia basically single-handedly, and now is studying ethnobotany and sustainable forestry. She's spending the summer in a mayan-descended community in Mexico doing an inventory of native-used species. Basically, she's my hero. So one of the other student's dad was visiting, and we drove down to the peninsula with them on our first day. That was a Saturday and the banks were closed... and the only ATM on the peninsula didnt accept any of our debit cards... so we found ourselves a little short on cash for the week. Definitely not able to pay for meals at the ranger station we were going to stay at in the park. And then I find out that Ingrid had fallen head over heels for this grad student from Stanford who was doing research at the station, and about to leave for the States... and then Angola and Turkey and she was basically never going to see him again... and he had asked her to stay with him for the break! The thing was he had asked her at five that morning, and she didn't want to let me down, so she had left even though she wanted to stay... Well, I basically told her she was only going to live once, and after a lot of agonizing about it and a little bit of rum she decided to go back to spend a last weekend with him, and meet up with me later in the park.

So, I went into the park with Jake and his dad. Corcovado was amazing! The backpack in was along 15 km of absolutely perfect, absolutely deserted beaches. There were flocks of pelicans and scarlet macaws and parrots just everywhere. And hermit crabs. and Peccaries. and Jesus Christ lizards (they walk on water). I even saw a tapir! They're something like a cross between a deer and a hippopotomus... one was just sleeping under a tree in the river by the station. That river was a crazy river. On my first day I was going to cross it and check out things on the other side, but the tide was high so it was a little swollen at the crossing at the beach. I was thinking about just swimming it, and looking at the mouth of the river when I saw a big fat crocodile swimming maybe 10m farther up the mouth. So, I decided that was a bad idea and sat down to wait for the tide to go out... and as I'm watching the water I see a bunch of splashing where the waves came into the river... and there were three sharks swimming around in the mouth, just down from the crocodile. I stayed at the ranger station there a whole week, and never crossed that river. I actually had a great time being more or less on my own. I made friends with the threerangers and the cook. My spanish has gotten pretty good, I guess. And I met a lot of other travelers, and Bruno, the french wildlife photographer who was looking for jaguars. I heard some great stories - like about Mr. Jeevers the Taliban monkey from an ex commando who now tests outdoor gear for the army (monkeys with hand grenades are one more reason NOT to join the army) - or doing CPR on a heart-attacked tourist while scubadiving in Egypt from a pair of Aussie doctors who were traveling around the world. Never a dull moment.

After spring break, I met back up with the program in San Jose. I think Corcovado will keep a little chunk of my heart, but I was definitely glad to be eating something other than tortillas and peanutbutter again. (I don't think I will ever be sick of rice and beans) We went to a reserve called Cabo Blanco, which is on the tip of the Nicoya peninsula on the Pacific. Dry forest (they have dry forests! a rain shadow half the year...) and a marine reserve. The field station was right on the beach, and we were studying marine biology, mostly. What an ingenious excuse to go snorkeling in the name of education! They scheduled us snack time with cookies and juice, and I didn't miss a sunset all week. It was glorious!
The wierd thing that happened that week: three people got bitten by vampire bats! Vampire Bats! Crazy! They were sleeping outside and would wake up with open cuts. It took a while to figure out what it was... and then we were all impressed. They had to get rabies shots and all. It's almost worth it to have been bitten by a vampire bat though, eh?

Well, after Cabo Blanco, nothing could be as good. And it wasn't. We said goodbye to Cabo blanco with a bonfire and dancing on the beach, then went to a place called Palo Verde, which is dry forest, next to what becomes a wetland in the wet season. It was hot and dry enough that no one wanted to go outside. For a bunch of crazy bio nerds that's pretty ridiculous. Course we had papers and lots more reading to start doing, and I've been feeling kind of sick again. That's ridiculous! I've been sick way too much already.

a room with a view

2005-03-22T22:24:00.000-08:00

I climbed up a strangler fig this morning. These trees are amazing. They grow around other trees and form this lattice of fused vines all the way around. On the very oldest, the tree inside has died and rotted out, leaving nothing but the hollow fig. They're like something out of Fern Gully. There is something magical about them. I found this one about a quarter mile from the pasture restoration project we visited yesterday, and Vicki and I scrambled up the hollow middle. We got up maybe 60 feet, enough to sit in the canopy and marvel for a while. The light is different up there, and the birds come right up to you. Welcome to a remarkable universe.

Mmm... bug bites

2005-03-19T22:39:00.000-08:00

So much has happened to me in the last couple weeks. After my week in the station at Monteverde, we headed up to Nicaragua and stayed on Omotepe island - which is basically two volcanoes in the middle of lake Nicaragua. The lake is huge! We had a two hour boat ride from the near shore... you can't even see the farshore! and I was so surprised that the spray wasn't salty because I felt like I was on the ocean. (the states definitely got jipped building the canal in Panama - the lake Nicaragua route is WAY shorter) The station where we stayed was an estate owned by this elite family that came back and bought land after the sandinistas lost power. Half the family wanted to make a resort, and the other half a farm, and the one son, Alvaro, wanted it to be a field station, so it was more like a resort than anything else. Pretty, lots of hammocks, and no forest.

The rest of the island showed how very different Nicaragua is from Costa Rica, though. All these mud brick houses, with dirt yards, kids playing everywhere, and farm
animals running around. The road (dirt, more potholes than road) was frequently blocked by cows and horses (according to alvaro, horse meat is cheaper, so they raise lots of horses there and sell them to a fancy canned pet food factory to sell to the states. yummy) I managed to get a pretty mean case of strep throat while I was there, so I missed out on the hike up volcan maderas, but i did get to visit the government clinic on the other side of the island. I was pretty impressed, considdering. It was clean, with a big open courtyard with benches where you sat in line for the doctor, or the maternity clinic, or the emergency care room... no appointments needed, I only had to wait half an hour and they checked me out and sent me off with some antibiotics and tylenol... all completely free! They refused to let me pay for anything! So, yeah.. by the time I had recovered, we were leaving the island.

We stayed the night in Granada, which is this beautiful old colonial city. I absolutely fell in love with it! I was expecting dirty, poor, underdeveloped... this teeming impoverished city, but downtown was all elegant old houses with tile roofs and internal courtyards with vines and fountains. The streets were pretty open- not nearly so many cars as san jose.. there are still horse-drawn carriages around! and the busses are all painted with wild tropical colors, some as animals, some with palm trees and clouds and such, some playing salsa music out the windows and lighted inside with colored christmas lights. They have a really incredible collection of precolumbian statues in the museum. I had lunch in this woman's garrage and played with her cat... she had this little barbeque and beans and rice table out front of her house, all for less than a dollar. That afternoon I met a really interesting group of mexican jewlery vendors in the plaza, who were on their way to Peru, making jewlery and playing music and sleeping where they could. The guy I talked to most had this great philosophy on how travel is the best kind of preparation for life, and how life is just preparation for our next journey. They invited some of us to their hostel that night, where I was hoping I could pump them for travel stories... but when we got there, they were playing a drum concert(a lot like the Lions of Rumba) and the hostel owners were moving all the tables so people could dance! It was such a fun night!

Our next field station, 15 hours worth of bus ride away, was high up in the Talamanca mountains at a place called Cerro de la Muerte, or "hill of death" And seeing as how all things are better when they have "of death" in their name, the place was fantastic. The best part, I think, was Don Carlos, the guy who runs the station. He was just this really incredible person. He grew up in the mountains all his life, knows so much about medicinal and edible plants and such that he can go into the forest for a month with nothing but a knife and the clothes on his back. The station, which he pretty much built himself, is on his farm, where he started a trout hatchery and grows blackberries. He's done a lot of stuff to make it self-sufficient and sustainable. All the silt from the trout becomes fertilizer, and the water flows through his hydroelectric plant to power the station. Leftover food gets composted, and they feed the worms to the trout. He planted a lot of trees to protect from erosion and supply firewood. Working on having his own garden. I spent the whole week just trying to talk to him, and ended up having a lot of conversations about life in our countries, and just life in general. He's one of the most genuine people I've ever met. And he seemed to like me too, because by the end he was giving me hugs, and invited me back if i ever come to Costa Rica again. Hopefully I will.

Right now I'm at a station called Las Cruces, on the south pacific side of
costa rica. It's very built up, in the middle of this huge botanical garden. The food is excellent, and it has great facilities, and I'm really enjoying the hot water showers, but i do already miss the wood stove and the hot chocolate and the company back at the cabin on the cerro. Right now it's pouring rain, and I'm off to dinner. Sorry for the monster post... this is the first
computer i've seen in a while =)

The Tarzan Diaries

2005-03-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

I had a free day yesterday, so i decided to hike to this waterfall... and on the way there was a huuuge vine hanging in the middle of the trail just waiting to be swung from. It was on a slope, so you could grab on, get a running start and swing thirty feet up into the air, just missing the trees. That's right ladies and gentlemen, I got my tarzan on. Wheeeeeeee!!!

The field section of my course has started. From now on I´m living in various field stations and doing biology for the rest of the semester. Just got out of Monteverde. I was a little disappointed to find out that my field station wasn´t technically in the cloud forests or in Monteverde preserve itself, it was just connected. But it was beautiful nonetheless. We had really good weather, so every day from the deck at the field station we had a view of Arenal volcano and the lake below it. It was the back side of the volcano, unfortunately, so we didn´t get to see any lava, but it did smoke and rumble a little for us. The forest is amazing in these mountains. Intimidating and dense, draping itself over huge steep hills.

I have had a shitload of stuff crammed into my brain. Frogs are amazingly cool! Apparently the extinction of the golden toad from Monteverde in 87 was part of an amphibian crash world wide, for many many species. I was also happy to meet our frog expert. He never studied biology... came to CR with a degree in spanish and literature and has just done all kinds of research assistanceships and studied on his own.. he´s the one who wrote and illustrated a bunch of field guides. Mark Wainwright. He took us out on night hikes to catch frogs. We found these phosphorescent mushrooms that night. It was so amazing! If you turned off all the flashlights long enough, you would slowly notice hundreds of these tiny glowing blobs, everywhere! I´m learning how to identify plants to family. Lena taught me how to weave baskets from vines. She's into wilderness survival, after dinners we had little weaving circles and sat around talking.

So, here I am on my way to Nicaragua. We are staying the night in Liberia before crossing the border tomorrow. The boat ride should be long, but I´m excited about this island.

I wish Cooper was with me. I'm normally so engrossed in the moment that emotions like that don't even surface. But I love that boy so deeply. I miss him. Especially in the quiet times, when I should have my head on his shoulder. Like last night when the sun set and the generator broke down. Red and black clouds behind the distant volcano, and the fire flies came
out on the uphill slope. Hundreds of them just flickering in the trees. Kelly and I nearly missed dinner just watching them. For all the work, there is very little stress, and I find myself immersed in wonder sometimes. I have been happy here on a very basic kind of level. Like the bedrock shifting beneath my daily life.

J-Walking Like a Pro

2005-02-23T23:06:00.000-08:00

It's true! After a month of conditioning to the maniacal driving around here, I can frogger my way across freeways as well as any tico. Maybe it's a good thing they don't believe in traffic lights after all. I've died and gone to Costa Rica. The beach at Manuel Antonio wasn't really real... nothing that perfect could actually exist. White sands, warm aquamarine water, trees growing everywhere, with giant iguanas and sloths and agoutis and monkeys hanging out everywhere. Saturday morning we stumbled upon this beach-side fruit market in Quepos, so we got bread and cheese and fresh avocados, a ton of mangoes, and a pineaple and feasted all day on the beach. At Manuel Antonio we hiked to the farthest beach, where there weren't many people and a point curled around from the north to make a practically enclosed lagoon with warm, gentile water. There was this beach to the south that you could only get to by swimming. Spent the whole day lying there and swimming around the islands in the middle of the lagoon. They gave us free dinner at the hostel that night, and we spent most of the evening walking on the beach and back in the hostel. The next day hiking around the park. Vicki and Cooper both know a hell of a lot about lizards, and we managed to latch on to a lot of guided tours, so we could look at the sloths through their telescopes, and hear interesting things about the monkeys and koatamundis and such. So this weekend was incredible. I think I ended up having the best trip out of the group because the huge group that went surfing in Tamarindo came back exhausted from 7 hour bus rides and bad hotel rooms, and some of the girls had bad encounters with Tico guys in the bars and on the beach. Classes continueas usual. I'm actually procrastinating on my final essay right now... Next week off to the field in Monteverde.

I love this place!

2005-02-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

So, I'm about to run off to the beach for the weekend, but I figured I'd say hi. This week has been awesome. Beautiful weather. Beautiful places, and amazing people. I found out I could walk home along these abandoned train tracks, and it's a really pretty way to go... it winds right through the university row of shops and restaurants, then through this park and a residential neighborhood where the flowers overflow from people's back yards and you can hear them sweeping or playing soccer or listening to music. I went to the town of Cartago yesterday.. it's the oldest city in the country, once the capital... and we visited the church of la virgen de los angeles, which has been in the same place for four centuries, built over a river because they found an idol that kept magically reappearing on a rock on the bank. The river flows right under the church, and you can still go down underneath and see the rock. In august, there's a holiday where people walk to this church from all over the country to ask miracles, and under the church where the rock is they have hundreds of little silver offerings... shapes of legs and eyes and heads and things for healing miracles, little children, houses, boats, army badges, the occasional sports trophy to give thanks to the virgin. Makes me wonder a little if WE're not the blind ones, refusing to see miracles when they happen in small ways everywhere.

I've also been hanging out with the biology group that Cooper is with at the University of Costa Rica. It's a really cool, interesting group of people. Four girls from sweden rented their own apartment here, so we went there wednesday night to hang out. They had a second story, and from their place there was a walkway along the roof of the house below to a little open air alcove with candles and a view of the city. It was gorgeous. I stayed up until two in the morning, mostly talking politics with the swedes, a canadian girl, and these two very activist americans, one of whom went to the world development conference in Rio last year, and the other one who was grilling him on what he actually, tangibly did with that knowledge. Josh, the second one, had a fidel castro beard, and went on a lot about how important it is to take tangible action against things when they know they are wrong, and they know what they should do. How much atrocity is enough? One of the things he said...In all my organizing, I've never fought conservatives, I've just fought liberals to get off their asses. We are the reason we don't have any power.

2005-02-12T23:27:00.000-08:00

It's the bailadora from california checking in. I've been having fun. Spanish classes and a little biology to shake it up. I'm definitely still in summer camp mode but I'm starting to have lots of homework too. Alas. The weekend was awsome. I had a tour through the language school to the town of La Fortuna, at the base of Arenal volcano, which you can see spewing lava if it
isn't cloudy. But it was. The best part, however, was going to Tabacon hotsprings. They're the best hotsprings I've ever been to. Steaming pools and jungle plants and beautiful wooden bridges everywhere. After a long bus ride and a touch of a cold, it felt fantabulous. I spent all afternoon lounging around like a mermaid in pools or on rocks when it got too hot. Mmmm. That evening a bunch of us ditched the tour and stayed in hostels at La Fortuna for the night. The one I stayed in was really cool... "Gringo Pete's" run by this old salty texan. It's painted all kinds o colores and had a kitchen and bunkbeds and books lying around all over the place. A hammock in the yard and birds in the morning. I was feeling lazy so I just ran in the morning and then sat around the hostel meeting other travelers and reading, but some other people went hiking and horseback riding yesterday. Then we hitched the public bus back to San Jose. The busses are a trip... basically like old greyhounds, and they run pretty well... but everyone who's waiting for the bus gets on the bus, one way or another, so they jammed the aisles full of people and off we went suffocating for a couple hours untill we got up into the mountains a little more and some people got off the bus. Cooper just got to San Jose too, so I managed to see him last night, and hopefully we can be hanging out a lot for the next couple weeks. I'm starting to get tired of costa rican food. I miss hummus! Chocolate chip cookies! Soup. Bread!! They only eat stale french bread. But the pineaples are hella good. So, that's life.

Happy valentines day all you cute couples! You know who you are... don't do anything I wouldn't do!

And eat all the chocolate chip cookies you want for me.

Salsa like there's no tomorrow!

2005-02-08T23:03:00.000-08:00

I had quite a weekend! Our last day at La Selva we went out dancing at this bar in the little town. It was a little harrowing when we first got there... Karaoke night(shudder), but I asked them to play dance music, so eventually we got just about everyone in the bar out on the dance floor. We had just had a salsa lesson, so we managed to pull off all kinds of spins and things with a little style... and its a lot of fun!

After that we headed back to San Jose, got shown around the language school, and met our host families. I have a room in this colorful house with lots of skylights and only one bathroom. I still haven't figured out exactly who lives there because so many people are in and out all the time. It's very exciting. My host mother Ana Maria is the matriarch of it all... and there's her husband, two daughters that I know of and another couple of girls about my age who arrived last night and are related somehow, the boyfriends of the daughters, and two of their kids, the maid in the mornings, another spanish student from germany, and various friends and cousins and things all drift in and out of the house. Ricardo, the four-year old is the cutest thing ever. I read his little picture books with him, and he thinks I'm stupid because I'll be trying to learn the names of things while he's making up all kinds of stories about what the rollerskating dinosaurs are having for breakfast. It's fun. The family is very warm. They took me right in as soon as I arrived. To say hello and goodbye to friends here they put their cheeks together and make airkisses... it was a little startling to me at first, but I'm getting to like it. My first night my tica sister took me out with her and her boyfriend and another friend to the Jazz Cafe for a live concert. "Roc Classica" is popular here, so this Costa Rican band called the Tortugas was playing Floyd and the Beatles and singing in english. I spent a lot of the night explaining songs because they had no idea what they were about. I got to play trucks with Ricardo, explore around downtown SJ a little better and snagged myself a most delightful sunburn(should have known, Loren) with the rest of my weekend. Today is my second day of Spanish classes. The language school is pretty awesome. It's big and filled with people all the time. They have salsa and cooking classes on the side, and some organized activities. The other big event... the Costa Rica/Mexico soccer game, which is supposed to be jam-packed and crazy with a huge party after whether they win or not. I'm in a lit class with only three students in it.. we're reading a lot of magical realist short stories and getting an overview of literary history. I love it so far! So that's life so far. I'm making my family lasagna tonight for a much-needed reprieve from rice and beans. Ciao!

Hello From the Jungle!

2005-02-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

I'm in Costa Rica!!! I've been here since Monday and I'm already having adventures. Right now I'm at La Selva station, which is a preserve owned by OTS on the Caribbean side - lowland forests. There are all kinds of enormous trees dripping with vines and birds and snakes and THE COOLEST bugs EVER!!

It's incredibly dense and kinda intimidating but beautiful in minute ways. Hanging out with thirty other biologists is fantastic because it makes you notice everything. Everyone here is really enthusiastic, and it's infectious. We have four profs who travel around with us, eat with us, hike with us, and just teach as they go. It's like having friends who know EVERYTHING! The other students know a lot too, and they're all cool. I'm impressed.

So right now I'm hanging out and having a few classes at the field station. I actually just got back from a 6 hour hike... they took us halfway around the preserve in small groups pointing out trees and birds and frogs as we came across them. Then for the afternoon we have a class on geology, soccer for the brave, the willing and the muddy, dinner and another night hike. Tomorrow I think we go rafting... So it's been very active so far. I am hungry all the time because of that, but the food is pretty good. I have to learn to make rice and beans like this!
This weekend I go back to San Jose and meet my host family and start my spanish lit classes. San Jose is alright for a city. Very smoggy and the driving is crazy. On the way from the airport, people J-walked across the freeways, motorcycles zoomed around cars and into oncoming traffic. There are barely any signs, much less traffic lights, and if you survive something as harrowing as an intersection you might turn a corner and find a tree growing out of the middle of the street. Except for the cars, though, the city is pretty friendly. Lots of little parks and plazas and things. The day I arrived was national poetry day, so I stumbled upon a little festival with live music and tables selling Costa Rican poetry. I also walked through some kind of labor demonstration. There was a van with loudspeakers parked in the middle of the street outside some old castle-looking building, which might have been the parliament, and the street was filled with people carrying orange flags. A guy was giving a speech from the van about how the people would rise up, and would not tolerate this oppression, and would lift their voices and so on, but I couldn't figure out what it was about. Peaceful - though. Democracy on the move, I guess. The graffiti here is pretty interesting too. Except for the occasional "Mauricio te amo" it was all political. Stuff like "No TLC" (the US/Central America Free Trade agreement), "Bush is a murderer" "the word of government is the word of god" and all kinds of things like "so-and-so is a (pinche) neoliberal!" I think I have a lot to learn about it. I'll quiz my host family.

So.. what else? Salsa dancing is fun. The University of Costa Rica is right next to my language school. It's much bigger and much prettier than I expected... like a lot of the city, I guess. The nice neighborhoods have sleek modern buildings and very old beautiful houses, and the rest is a mix of the old majesty, trees, and corrugated metal shacks painted in bright colors. Not bad, in all. And they have the best pineapples ever!