Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year!!! Mutlu Yillar!! ευτυχισμένο το νέο έτος! سنة جديدة سعيدة! 


From my journal today-

It's New Year's Eve 2010.  December 31st, 2010.


I'm writing this on the Acropolis of Athens, watching the sun set over this ancient city.
Before me is a forest, a rocky hillside, a Byzantine church chiming the hour.
Beside me is the ancient agora of Athens.
Behind me, the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, everything.
And above me, but swiftly sinking, the sun.  Apollo takes his chariot into the sea for the last time this year.  When he surges out of the Mediterranean foam tomorrow, it will be a new year.


I am so happy to be here.  


A year ago, I was on a pier in Philadelphia with Liz + Ned and Annie, and my beloved Madli.  It was raining, but we still went out and watched the fireworks and had a lovely time.  Madli and I drank something she'd brought, and we stayed up late laughing and singing songs.


Tonight, I'm going to bed early.  I got quite sick in Cappadocia and haven't gotten over it yet, though I'm trying not to let it slow me down.  And I'm exhausted from my 2+ weeks of traveling.


I won't drink a lot or go dancing or stay up very late.


But I am on the Acropolis of Athens, watching the sun set for the last time in 2010.


I have done and seen some things this year - so many new challenges, new triumphs, some dreamed of, some impossible to anticipate, each sweet and memorable.


I've seen Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, Ain Sokhna, Luxor, Aswan, Edfu, the Western Desert, magnificent Rome, Venice, Beirut, Bcharre, Al-Arz, Wadi Qadisha, Istanbul, Ankara, Cappadocia, Goreme and Athens.


And it's certainly not just the places I've been on a map.  I've been all kinds of crazy new places this year, and you can't see most of them with your eyes. 


I dreamed up a huge world for myself last year, and this year - 2010 - I have met that huge world and made it a reality that I now seek to fill with myself.  


I expand.  I am my dream.


I'm tired of plans and wary of dreams, but I'm hungry for the world.  Hungry for the sea and the sky and the dirt under my feet.  


I want to fill myself with the world, until I fill it up in turn.


Happy New Year, 2011!!!

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Wise Words

"If I have learned anything from this trip, it's that no matter how great a civilization, how large and beautiful a building, how important a person's tomb, it will always eventually become just a place for birds."
                        - Marisa Kovacs

Cappadocia

Check it out:



My hotel is actually in a cave.  They have 12 cats.  About to hike up and watch the sunset over these amazing rock formations.  We're going hiking, horseback riding, or hot air ballooning tomorrow.

I'm living in a gnome metropolis.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Istanbul

Call it by whatever name you like - and it has had many - this city is a dream.  Beirut was perfect, Northern Lebanon was amazing, but Istanbul is a dream.  It's gloriously large, massive and glamourous on a scale befitting a city that bestrides two continents, but it's walkable and welcoming too.

And Merry Christmas to everyone!  I know, I didn't do a Hanukkah post, but I did have a proper Hanukkah celebration while I was Alex - made a menorah out of clay and everything!  In Northern Lebanon, where the majority are Maronite Christians, Christmas spirit was everywhere.  Here in Turkey, where the country is 97% Muslim, not so much with the Christmas fun times.  It's a little sad, and it feels strange to say that today is December 24th and I'm a million miles away from my family and friends and home.

But, let me not feel too sorry for myself.  Today, I saw the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Grand Bazaar, the Basilica Cistern, Taksim Square, the Galata Bridge, ate tons of delicious street food, had my first and certainly not last glass of raki (hint: it's not pronounced like it looks)....and best of all, I did it in the company of truly wonderful friends.  Generous, hilarious, joyful people who reminded what Christmas is really about for a pagan like me - taking time out of the routine of daily life to celebrate warmth, company, light, laughter, and to make a little extra happiness in the world.

Merry Christmas, Istanbul!

And of course, everyone I love in the U.S. and around the world, you know I miss you, especially now, and I wish you bliss and ease, comfort and adventure, and friends as uplifting as mine to make your holiday brilliant.

Love,
Helen

P.S.  I think this picture should give you a good idea of how I'm spending my Christmas:

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Beirut I Love You

Don't have much time to write now, Marisa and I are in Beirut, Lebanon and loving it.  We've been out and about, museuming and naturing and barhopping and finding random live rock concerts, and this afternoon we're off to the horse races.  Still frantically working out our next step, everything up in the air all the time, and the people at this internet cafe already greet us like friends.

We're both in love with Beirut.  It's so perfectly different from Egypt, which actually begins to look a little better with some distance and a positive outlook on life.

Loving it here, next stop Wadi Qadisha in the north, then Istanbul with more friends for Christmas!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

3 more nights in Alexandria

A little Mahmoud Darwish in honor of the occasion.  When I first read this poem, two years ago, I promised myself that one day I would read it again on Egyptian soil.  I can even read a little of it in Arabic.


In Egypt


In Egypt, one hour isn't like any other…
each moment is a memory renewed by a bird
of the Nile. I was there. The human creature
there invented the Sun-God. No one calls himself
by name: "I'm a son of the Nile, that's name enough
for me." From your first moment, you call yourself
"son of the Nile" to avoid the heaviness of the abyss.
There, the living and the dead pick clouds of cotton
from the land of Upper Egypt and plant wheat
in the Delta. Standing between the living
and the dead, two guards take turns watching over
the palms. Everything romantic is within you,
you walk on the edge of your soul in time's labyrinth,
as if before you were born Mother Egypt
had given birth to you first, as a lotus flower.
Do you know yourself now? Egypt sits with itself
in stealth: "Nothing is like me." And mends
the battered coat of eternity with a wind blowing
from any direction. I was there. The human creature
was writing the wisdom of Death-Life. Everything is
romantic, moonlit…except for the poem
as it turns around to look for tomorrow, thinking
of immortality but speaking only of its frailty
before of the Nile…



                                       - M. Darwish

Sunday, December 12, 2010

With a hey ho, the wind and the rain

Just got back from a five day idyllic Nile cruise that reminded me of all the reasons why I came here, of everything I hoped to find in Egypt, and dazzled my eyes with wonders.

In 6 days, I will be done with my first semester in Egypt, and I'll begin traveling on my own and with friends, hopefully through Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Palestine, and maybe England or France.  After that, it'll be Ireland to see my parents, where I hope to be cuddled and cared for until I explode.

But right now, winter has come to Alexandria.  It's raining, it's hailing, the sky is dark blue black grey, the wind is throwing the city into the sea as the sea rushes right into the city, and all the elements are screaming through the cracks in my windows, flooding my hardwood floors and cracking the paint on my walls.  The extremity, the might of the weather here is like nothing I have ever known.

Click here for a video a friend sent me of the Corniche of Alexandria overcome by the weather.

I will post about my cruise soon,  I promise - I have over 500 pictures to sort through, and five action packed days to summarize, and in the next 4 days I have a paper, a presentation and 4 exams to get through, so it may take a little bit.

But right now, I'm going to cuddle up with my roommates and watch some movies, order in some soup from our local cafe, read the storm scenes from King Lear, and as always, balance between the thrill and the terror that is life in Egypt.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Moon rise to sun rise

The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East...All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries.  It was a place of faith.  We disappeared into landscape.
                                                                 - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient               





Last weekend, I went with 8 of the other girls on my program on an overnight camping trip to the Western Desert, specifically the Black and the White Desert.  The White Desert, a well-kept secret for a long time, is swiftly becoming one of the most popular tourist destinations in Egypt.  But it's probably the only tourist place in Egypt where no will try to sell you anything.  They may instead cook amazing meals for you, stop every time you want to take in a view, or play drums for you as you look up at the endless Milky Way.  


This is the Black Desert.  The whole desert area used to be an ancient sea - really ancient - and this area had a lot of active underwater volcanoes.  So now that it's desert, everything here is covered in black volcanic basalt rock.  We renamed it Mordor, and picked out Lord of the Rings characters for each other.  I'm so glad to be here in Egypt with so many awesome nerds.  

Also, I'm Frodo apparently.


Driving along.  We drove four hours from Cairo to the Bahariya oasis in a bone-rattling van, and in Bahariya we transferred to the 4x4 which would take us out into the desert and onto the sands.  We stopped first at a 50 meter golden sand dune and climbed to the top, frolicking and shrieking and reveling in the sun and sand.  We were like children, like animals, looking and running and climbing and sinking into the sand, and taking pictures of each other, laughing constantly, stunned by what we were seeing.  

There is a feeling with beautiful and mighty things in Egypt that what you are seeing is not real, that you cannot actually be looking with your own eyes at what your are seeing.  With the Pyramids, it's hard to comprehend the reality of what you're seeing, because the image of the Pyramids is so familiar.  You've seen them a thousand times in pictures, how is this time any different?  What I have learned after all these months is to close my eyes and use my other senses.  What does the desert sound like, smell like, feel like?  You can even taste it sometimes, though I don't recommend doing that in downtown Cairo. 

On top of the dunes, you feel the sun on your face and neck and you register the implacable dry heat of it.  Mostly though you feel the wind - buffeting and whipping and making you grateful that you cut your hair so short in Italy, because now it doesn't tangle.  And then sometimes the wind is completely still, and then you hear the silence of the desert.  You're up so high, and you're so far away from anyone, that you can relish in silence, the most precious sound in Egypt.  Then your driver, behind you on the next dune, turns on the car radio because he's bored of waiting for you, and Elisa, the Lebanese singer who you're actually beginning to like, comes screeching scratchily across the space to you.  The feel of the desert is the best thing.  You've kicked off your shoes a long time ago, so you can feel the sand under your calloused feet, shifting so quickly from hard and packed to soft and sinking, from the surprising cool that makes you want to stand still for a while, to the heat that makes you jerk and tiptoe like a dance.  The taste of the desert is just dry, and then you can taste your hallucinations of water.  

This was Romario, our 4x4 driver, with me, Marisa, Lauren, Liana and Ger.  He named himself Romario as an homage to "Mario Kart" and a brag that he was a comparable driver.  He really was pretty awesome, but I would have liked him to do more wild off-roading stunts.  We were there for adventure, after all.  We all got new names in the desert too - mine's Aziza, if you're curious.  

And then there's the sun.  In the desert, I saw so many stars.  The whole Milky Way stretched out over my head, so that I had lie down on the ground and just look up with my whole body.  So many stars, and only a few familiar constellations.  I was not the only one that night who wished out loud that I had studied astronomy, that I knew something to say or think to make sense or style out of the vastness of the sky above me.  But the most important star was our own, of course.  Here at sunset, turning everything your usual purple and pink and gold and blue and black.  Shining behind the moon like the light in a shadow puppet theater, turning it's perfect half-circle from bright orange to gold to silver to the same bone-white as the desert, or lighting up the whole desert at sunrise.  

The 4x4s were draped with colorful blankets, delicious chicken was barbequed and served with rice and fresh vegetables, songs were sung, the stars were celebrated, we were all renamed, and myriad other wild things happened around our desert campfire.  

Our guides woke us a few minutes before the sun had begun to show on the horizon, and we climbed an ancient chalk rock, bundled in blankets and sleepy-eyed, to watch the whole thing.    

The White Desert, a few minutes after sunrise.  The white chalk sculptures that cover the entire desert are the remnants of an ancient coral reef.  We humans walked through a desert, and billions of years ago, fish swam through a sea.  We are probably descended from those fish.

I suppose every photograph of the desert makes it look the same, but the stunning reality of it is that when you're there, every single instant looks different, and it looks like nothing you've ever seen before. It seems impossible to find your way in the desert, but not because everything looks the same - rather because everything looks different, even if you look and then close your eyes and look right back.  It is a place - but the meaning of place implies a fixed nature, a location to be plotted and to orient by.  The desert, even the vast unyieldingness of the Sahara, is no such thing.  A place that transcends place, that cannot be held down with a pin and can be marked only by the passage of eons of time.  


I will come back to the desert.  It's a place to feel the urgency and the importance of your connection to other people, as you feel both your own smallness and the power of your togetherness, of how different you and your friends are from the rest of the desert.  But it's a place to feel entirely alone, to feel your own isolation from everything else.  And to feel how desperately you need sometimes to sit around a campfire and laugh wildly and sing and smile with others of your kind, and how sometimes you need to lie alone on the sand and stare back at the universe.