Somewhere around six months ago, I was sitting in my apartment talking on the phone with my mom. From just outside my window I could hear Buddhist monks chanting at Ninnaji, an enormous wooden temple […]
On December 20th of 2006, I received an e-mail from my dad. It contained this Powerpoint file. The forwarding messages all included such phrases as: “I CANT EVEN LOOK AT THE PICTURES WITHOUT GETTING DIZZY!!” […]
KaZantip 2011: Black Sea Paradise
Warning: This post contains a few NSFW photos. View only in good company 🙂 The Republic of KaZantip, the legendary Eastern European Shangri La of parties, lasts for just one month a year in a […]
The following is not actually a single narrative of one continuous evening, but a composite of many. It’s written as a representative summary of my average night out in Kyoto. Nothing is exaggerated. It’s Saturday […]
At long last, I made it to Petra. Petra is a place that’s intrigued me since before I even knew its name – since I first saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a […]
As my trip through the Middle East draws towards its end, Mike and I have ramped up our pace to fit in all the remaining must-see destinations. This, combined with the increasingly slow internet the further we travel down the Nile, are making it impossible to keep up with my posts. I’m taking tons of photos and keeping notes, and as always I’ll do my best to catch up in due time.
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My grandfather passed away this morning. He was 93 years old. Continue reading »
Our first day in Cairo Mike and I visited the Egyptian Museum, just a couple blocks away from where we’re staying. That place is so massive it’s overwhelming, with over 100,000 relics and antiques from all throughout ancient Egyptian history. Apparently there’s so much there that if you spent just one minute at each exhibit, it would take over nine months to see it all.
We did it in 3 hours.
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Driving in Cairo is absolutely INSANE.
I did read about this a bit in my Lonely Planet. A couple of excerpts:
• One of your enduring (and hopefully not too painful) memories of the Middle East will undoubtedly be the driving standards: the driving is appalling by Western norms. Fatalism and high speed rule supreme. Many regulations are, in practice, purely cautionary. Car horns, used at the slightest provocation, take the place of caution and courtesy.
• It may sound silly, but the greatest challenge most travelers face when traveling through Egypt is crossing the street in Cairo. Our advice is to position yourself so that one or more locals form a buffer between you and oncoming traffic, then cross when they cross – they usually don’t mind being used as human shields. Never, ever hesitate once you’ve stepped off the sidewalk; cross as if you own the road. And do it fast.”
Or my personal favorite,
• In Egypt road rules are something that the average Cairene has heard of, but only in jokes. Continue reading »
Hiking up Mt. Sinai was interesting. In order to witness sunrise from the summit, we began our climb at 2am and climbed throughout the night. No big deal. Except for a few things:
1) I got zero sleep before the hike on account of the damned mosquitoes. I don’t know what it is, but ever since I can remember I’ve had a problem of attracting a ludicrous number of these little nuisances: I’ll be camping with my family and no one will have a single bite but me, who’ll have hundreds. When I got out of bed at 1:30am for our hike, there were four of the little bastards sitting on the wall right next to my head. Squishing each yielded a one-inch diameter blood splotch on the wall. Nice.
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