So, I took my PDA along with me on my trip and made journal entries and these are spread over like two weeks and written in the present tense, and I will probably write something down if I remember it in the middle, so the tenses will be messed up. So just read away.

Mosques used to be the only places that smelled like feet, now airports do, which sucks, because even the best of people, after hours of stress waft a bit, and we are not dealing with the best of people.

So, at the start of the ten hour flight, this ass in front of me already has his seat back, before everybody sat down even. This is making me mad, which is a bad thing to do at the start of a ten hour flight. I hope, I get over it.

So, very pleased to be here, back in Abu Dhabi, very much indeed. Sucks about the jet lag though, I just went for a pre-dawn walk, and last night I couldn’t stay awake late enough to do anything. And I will be super pissed if I can’t enjoy myself tonight, New Years Eve. One neato thing is that my dad was able to hook us up with cell phones; the slightly more neato thing would be if I had someone to call.

Well, here I am, again, at the beach for free, which is cool, but I fell asleep under the sun, and I might get burnt, which would suck. But I don’t want to be white, like that, if you get me.

So New Years was pretty decent, we went to some bar/restaurant, where for about forty some dollars, you could eat and drink all you want, with exceptions. Which was a nice deal and we had some great times there before, but I just wasn’t feeling it last night. Which might have had something to do with the crushing eight hours worth of jet lag I was dealing with. Saw a few kids from my brother’s class, my brother actually came along as well, which was odd. And some of my good buds from my year as well, which was most of the reason I came here in the first place. But I was getting kind of bored, and my fatigue was sapping my drunk, and then people stared to kind of pair off, which is never the best thing to be apart of, especially if you are not a part of it. If you get me. Now, I didn’t want to be a part of it, but there was someone I did want to be with, and this midnight hooking up just threw that into sharp focus...

So the funnest night so far involved just the guys sitting around bullshitting till last call. After we went and saw the truly useless Haunted Mansion, we sat around and reminisced and talked about what was happening in school, and a lot of high school talk. We did the same thing the next night, but earlier and we whipped out some old newspapers and yearbooks. Then we went to an old high school hang out and oddly enough found it full of high schoolers, which was kind of off-putting. Today we fell asleep in the sun, in my relentless pursuit of sun cancer. Hopefully all of this red turns into bronze, and stays that way for the next ten days, which might possibly be a pipe dream, but what can I do, Egypt is too cold for tanning.

Back in Egypt, sitting on the roof of my under construction house. Kind of odd actually, I have never been around something like this, which was wholly owned by us before and while it was being built. Because, it is all under construction and shabby looking.  I do like the roof though. Downstairs we have some big piles of sand and these workers mix in water and gravel and stuff and make cement. I find this process oddly fascinating to watch, cause like, it so doesn’t look like the end result.  Nice hanging out with my sister again, we always fall back into comfortable ruts.

So, weirdly, one of my good buddies from high school was here in Cairo, visiting his family. So we asked him to tag along with me and a few of my cousins, and my brother and sister, his brother came too. We went to some boat on the Nile that has dinner and a show, as it tools along the Nile. The food was pretty good, and so was the company, but the show was something else all together. And by something else, I mean pretty bad. They started off with a band that was kind of weird sounding. They changed from kind of weird to super bad when I realized that they were singing in English. Then these two dudes that did some very short and not very impressive dance. Then came the belly dancer, which I thought would be fairly good. But the problem was, that there wasn’t much belly dancing going on. Belly dancing, because of the conservative culture it arises from, has to pack a huge amount of sensuality and enticement inside some very strict guidelines. This makes for some fascinating subtleties of form and figure. All of which was totally lacking. They did have a whirling dervish, which is always cool.

The next day we went shopping for some touristy goods for people back home, which we never used to do, because back home was the Middle East, so it would have seen super kitschy, everybody already had them anyway or were from the country that you had the souvenirs from. We brought along my dad to speak the native tongue so instead of tourist prices, we got tourist with native prices. Also, he is quite good at bargaining, something at which I am stinkypoo at.

Then I spent the night at the cool, younger uncle’s house, which was nice and new and clean. He has two cute, hugely hyperactive kids which were fun to play with in the morning. Then, we were late to rendezvous with the rest of the family for a trip to the red sea, where we were promised some fun in the sun. Unfortunately, our guides thought fun meant looking at hundreds of uncompleted villas and sitting on the cloudy beach in our jeans. It seems there was a considerable miscommunication, but what could you do. And I got to stick a finger in the Red Sea.

So we had one of those huge family gatherings that we have over here, stuff like the families of my dads cousins and whatnot. Decent fun, I found myself hanging out with my sister a lot, which might seem like some kind of English speaking snobbery, except for the fact she lives in Ireland and I will miss her more then some people I am barely related to and also, she speaks English. Then my used-to-be-Western Egyptian cousin, since become highly conservative Muslim, so much so that he is growing a beard a won't look at my sister, this cousin took me to meet some American and British converts for ice cream. And while I dislike generally talking about religion, it is at least better talking to intelligent, realistic, English speaking, young people. And good ice cream too. Also, this cousin gave us some of the biggest and ugliest presents I think I have ever gotten. For these reasons these very expensive gifts are staying here.

Then yesterday there was supposed to be this big barbeque at an uncle’s new house, we slaughtered a sheep to bless the new house and gave thirds to the neighbors. Not that I was there for that disgusting part, I was supposed to be in charge of cooking it, as per all of my bbqing experience. However, even though there were two grills and several kilos of different kinds of meat, there seemed to not be enough for one dude there. So, in the short time of like twenty minutes he managed to tell me what I was doing wrong approx. seven times. I was so happy to be told my wrongdoings in such a snide manner I decided to leave him to it. And it wasn’t like I was happy when the chicken meat next to the bone was underdone or some of the lamb was so raw I heard it bleating...not happy, just very smug and full of myself.

Arrrgh, my brain hurts; I just read 500 of the 600 pages in my new book. Straight through. And my brain, it hurts, as you can probably tell from my remarkably lucid entry. Oddly enough, the majority of the book takes place in about the same time it took me to read it, six hours or so.

Yay, and now I am home, my head still hurts though that might have to do with like 3 hours of sleep in two days, so yeah, I will go sleep. Soon...