This post comes to you directly from Crankbait. A dear friend and recent UCF grad who betrayed the Sunshine State all because he wanted to experience "seasons". Anyway, I asked if he would share his experiences of living in Egypt and he happily agreed. So here you go!
Welcome
everyone, to another edition of the Florida Rider. I’ll be guest blogging on here from time to
time when Jimmy asks me to write for him.
So I’ll start by introducing myself.
I’m much like the lycan/vampire
hybrid you see in the “Underworld” series in that I was raised by a Southern
mother and a Northern father and have lived in both the South and North as well
as the barren wasteland that is the Midwest.
My Texas-born-and-raised grandfather living with me has only furthered
the cruel social experiment, and as a result I have this to show for it.
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| What the Hell, right? |
I
kid about the Midwest, but seriously my home state is a little lacking in major
cities, (we have 2, one of which half belongs to another state, so thanks for
nothing Kansas). As you can already tell,
I’m going to be a bit different than Jimmy when it comes to blogging. I may be a little abrasive, some might not
even find me funny. Too bad. Don’t worry,
I’ll save the really incendiary stuff for Xbox.
You won’t get anything intentionally offensive out of me, no sir. So lets get on with it, homies.
I’ll make the rest of my
bio short and sweet for everyone. I
graduated from UCF with a degree in Marketing (lol) and I love hockey. Specifically #USABestHockey (sorry Canada)
#worldjuniors2013. I don’t associate
with a political party because I think they are hot dumpster fires, I don’t
abide by any religion or credo other than “don’t be a terrible person”. I believe that, if there is a Jesus, he most
certainly COULD hit a curve ball, that batting average is
at the least the second worst way to judge a baseball player’s ability, and
that every child deserves the right to have only 151 Pokémon. And on a serious note parents, when your kid
is 18, stop doing everything for him; It’s time to let lil Johnny grow up. Speaking of your kids, I also believe that it
should be illegal to dress your child in Jorts and Crew socks
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| Andrei, C’mon man. End the madness, people.
I
have been blessed to travel all over the world and visit different countries
for extended periods of time. These
experiences have taught me a great deal of perspective on how the world works
and shown me the ludicrousness of racism and bigotry, which in my opinion
essentially boils down to unwillingness to understand and embrace a culture
different than your own. I will go into
what I learned from my specific travel in Egypt at the end of this post, but
first let us all step into my time machine and get this puppy rollin’ back to
1999.
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I
want all of you to think of Egypt, go ahead, close your eyes. If you think of flying carpets and lamps,
open your eyes and slap yourself, you racist.
This isn’t a 1995 Disney movie.
Egypt
was a beautiful place, and yes, blah blah blah, I know much of it is desert. I
get that. But the country was still
beautiful. The people there were just
wonderful. They loved tourists, and most
in fact went out of their way to help you.
One of the best things I remember was going to the Khal el Khalil; which
is the oldest market in Cairo, dating back to biblical times actually. The staircases, the pathways, all built by
hand. It captured an essential part of
Egyptian life…haggling. You could bargain
and haggle your way into any price, for ANY object. There was never a set price. In fact I remember my grandfather haggling
over a gallon of milk. MILK, people. It
was wild. Back to the market though. When
you enter the market they have some military there armed with AK-47’s. If that doesn’t tell you to keep in line, boy
howdy I don’t know what will. The was a
vast maze of stores that went on forever.
The walkways were cramped so you needed to be prepared to jostle with
people and keep a firm hold on your belongings.
The shop owners would sit or stand on the steps outside of the shop and
cry out what their shop had and in some cases would try to lure people into the
shop to bargain.
An
effective tactic that we found was to know roughly what you were looking for
beforehand. You could do that by going
one day and just looking around, not buying, in some shops. Many shops carried similar products so you
could get a good idea of what you liked.
Now this is not to say that all shops were the same, but just that
similar products were carried. But having an idea beforehand was essential to
getting a good price. You could simply
ask the shop owner how much a certain thing was and they’d give you a price. If you didn’t like it you just say “no thanks”
and walk off. Odds are that they will
come follow you and haggle with you over the price. They want a sale as badly as you want your
trinkets and such. No one goes around
the world to come back empty handed, c’mon people. I wish I had some pictures of the market to
show you, but I cannot find my album with those pictures. In other words, It is in storage in another
state.
Now,
I have no idea what the police force is like now with the current state of
affairs, but I do know that when I was there they were fun to watch. They didn’t have guns, just the billy clubs
and a whistle. They had to chase people down on foot if there was a
problem. I once watched in awe of a police
officer as he hauled ass through an intersection to chase down a bus and he
jumped on the bus through the door AS IT WAS MOVING. Egypt’s Finest, doin it big. Driving there was nothing short of a
terrifying and frightenly maddening experience.
Hey LA, think your traffic is bad? LOL.
Try driving in Cairo, ever. In LA
you nerds have to stay in your lanes and obey traffic laws, boo hoo. In Cairo, traffic laws and lanes don’t
account for jack. They turn a 4 lane
road into a 7 lane road just because they feel like it. No one obeys the traffic signals, they stop
and go as they please. Have you seen any
zombie movie were the zombies run together in a huge pack through a city street
and its like a swarm of ants? Now pretend those zombies are actually cars
driven by real people. That’s the best
way I can describe it. Pure madness.
Taxis were always an adventure. You could haggle on prices before you even
left and buddy make sure you got the price BEFORE you step in the car because
they can change the price on you like Kim Kardashian changes husbands. The interesting thing was that there were
legal and illegal taxis, but it wasn’t very heavily policed. Imagine walking down Broadway in New York and
some random dude pulls up next to you and asks you if you want a ride, but you
have to pay him. Same story, different
place. It was always a crap shoot doing
that, because the illegal taxi drivers didn’t have to adhere to the same
pricing strategies etc. Now when I say
“illegal” taxi drivers what I mean is that these guys made a living taxiing people
around, but they weren’t part of a licensed company. Sometimes the illegal drivers would try to
mess with people and I can’t tell you the number of times they tried to change
the price etc and people would say, “yes well the cops are over there so you’ll
take the price we agreed upon” and they would just drive off instead of
collecting a fare. Sad, but true.
The
only dark side I ever saw to Egypt was involving licensed Taxis
ironically. Once my mother and
grandmother were in a taxi and there was an accident involving the taxi they
rode in. Apparently in Egypt, even if
you are licensed, getting in an accident while driving tourists around is BIG
trouble. The police according to my
grandfather “will hold the foreigners partially responsible for the accident,
sometimes will haul you off to jail and with any interaction between police and
foreigners there will be very steep fines”.
Now my grandfather lived there for over a year so he is a qualified
source, so pipe down you liberal hippies who are probably wallowing in your
tears from the Nixon era, shouting “QUIT BEING RACIST”. But bottom line, involvement with authorities
comes at a big price to foreigners.
There are so many things I could
tell you about the culture. It was out
of respect that we stayed out of the streets when were heard the Prayers going
on. Many people would stop on the
sidewalks or the street medians to pray.
They showed respect to the Christians and to the foreigners, so why
should we not do the same no? They
appreciated the differences we all shared and in turn it taught me as
well. There was a strong sense of
community as well. Things that would
probably not happen in America because everyone is so lawsuit happy and this
country is so whiny and sensitive about every little thing, happen in
Egypt. There was a little girl who was
hit by a truck on the street below our flat, and the truck driver tried to
drive off. Guaranteed, in America people
would have let that jerk drive off and taken down his license plate. Yeah, well, in Egypt that crap don’t
fly. People IMMEDIATELY surrounded the
truck as another group tended to the girl.
The truck driver tried to drive through the crowd and someone dragged
his sorry behind out of the truck while another turned the car off. I watched a citizens arrest from the 7th
story. It was bittersweet, as what I
assume was the father of the girl had to pick the girl up in his arms and
started sprinting for the nearest hospital, through the streets. The nearest hospital was at least 5 miles I
knew. It was terrible. But the jagweed who hit the girl was
apprehended. Yeah, time to step up your
game America.(see: lawsuit because my feewings were huwt after I hit da girl).
There was so much more that I could
tell you about Egypt but I am at almost 2000 words now, so I’ll put it in
pictures from here on out with some blurbs about each picture if needed. Hope y’all enjoy, and Go USA.
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| Memphis, Egypt |
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Pyramids
of Giza. Khafre’s (front) and Menkaure’s
(back).
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Step
Pyramid of King Zoser. In 6th
grade we had to build Egyptian stuff for our projects, and I made an exact
replica of this. Best BELIEVE I got an A
on that section.
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Khufu's "Great Pyramid"
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