Finally some sightseeing.

Yasser and I took 20 min out of our day to check out the view of Cairo from atop a mountain right on the outside of the city. I think this picture is actually Saladin's old fort though I could be wrong. Anyway it was pretty cool and the view from up there was spectacular. I have a whole panorama that I need to stitch together and upload that gives some idea. The main thing I took way from the view though was how huge Cairo is...I only saw one small part of it from atop this mountain and it was just mind boggling how many buildings and people live here.

Cairo Dodgeball

"If you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball."

Although I've been mostly working here, one of my first exposures to Cairo the city was the way to cross the street. If you've seen the movie Dodgeball than you have a pretty good idea. You essentially just walk out into the street and dodge the cars coming by. It's like a game of Frogger, except I'm fairly sure you only get one life.


It's not as hard as it sounds, though I've yet to venture it by myself. Since everyone does it, there is kind of an implicit system where the drivers don't fully try to hit you, and you try to identify which drivers you don't want to mess with. Supposedly foreigners and old people get a little bit more leeway from the drivers, which works in my favor. However I'm told that in no circumstance do you want to try to play chicken with a bus or taxi driver.

Happy Birthday to Me :-)

I'm 28 years old today...it's cool to find myself in Cairo. It makes me feel like I'm doing something interesting with my life...which of course I am :-). I'm still pretty tired. These past few days have been hectic with arranging the SilverKey workshop, arranging logistics, etc. I think I'm going to order up a cheeseburger from room service, pour myself a beer and watch some West Wing. Perhaps later I'll go down for some sheesha in the hotel cafe...people stay up pretty late here; I find myself up until 3am for no particularly good reason.

Tired but awake

My Blackberry says it's 2am here in Cairo and my laptop time says it is 6:00pm in Chicago. My body is flipping between the time zones I think. One minute super tired the next not tired at all. I know I need to go to sleep but somehow it's not fully happening. Any tips for dealing with jet lag?

What to do for seven hours?

I'm stuck in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on my way to Egypt. What should I do for seven hours? I don't think I want to exit the airport as then when I get to Egypt they'll definitely put me through a protracted bag search. Feeling a little bit jetlagged as you can tell from the photo. It's around 5am Chicago time now. I didn't get much sleep on the flight...watched some West Wing, chatted with the guy in the seat next to me. His name was Alex and he was a racecar driver from Romania who also owned a motel and gas station outside Transylvania.

The flight was relatively uneventful except when I lost the pen to my tablet PC and ended up periodically crawling around the aisle looking for it. I found it after the flight in the seat behind me :-).

Testing of First Post

Hopefully this will show up!