i put down the chopsticks, it all changed.

Bangkok International Airport, I was sitting back with my eyes shut, feeling happily bloated from the totally unnescessary 2nd dinner I had taken. I was just about to carefully let a giant, magnificant burp escape quietly after a huge bowl of Thai noodles - they were sen yai - the wide kind, the ones with the balls of congealed pork blood that i love so damn much and the pounded 'salted crab' on top and then -

and then:

"You are finish? 120 baht sir thankyou."

I looked up at the waitress. Unlike before, before when she had invited me me to sit down and after, when she had commented how happy I looked with my food with a sweet, shrill Thai "Arroy, nakha?" -

Unlike before, she was not smiling. She wanted me to pay and fucking Move. She looked pained, and urgent. This was very un-Thai. Something must be wrong? Something must be wrong. And then I heard it. Arabic.

"Fee lahim sandawitch?"(Do they have meat sandwiches?)
"La ya habibi, ma'feesh, yallah - al mata'aam mish qwais, w'al-bint 'aandah"(No my dear, they dont have them, c'mon lets go. The restuarant is no good and this girl is slow)

I looked behind the girl in front of me - she seemed paler than any Thai skin whitening cream could have gotten her.

All I could see was black.

I finally understood that I was leaving Asia.

The work was beginning.

--

Walking towards the gate, I looked back. The 4 women from Saudi Arabia or some other gulf country were swarming around the table I had been enjoying, it looked like a ninja party. They were fully covered - all black burkas revealing only their eyes, and shapely, bejeweled hands. I could sense that the poor Thai girl hadn't seen anything like it before. I heard their broken English and hilariously stupid questions to ask at a Thai restuarant, about whether they had bread or lamb noodles in broken English.
Fucking Saudis.
They need to be educated. And shaved.

--

Egypt Air, flight 804 nonstop to Cairo.
The service in the air - stunning.
The attendents? Surly.
The food? Scary, horrible mock western.
The passangers? Angry. It had been less than a month since Egypt Air changed their smoking policy on-board, and several people had to be asked to put away their lit cigarettes.

I recalled a paragraph in a Middle East affairs journal I had read some time ago, in which an Egypt Air flight had been hijacked. Egyptian "commandos" had boarded the plane on the runway in Cairo. The hijackers were killed by the crack team, along with 57 passengers who were caught in the crossfire. There were 92 passengers on board.

It is not terrorism I am worried about, it is just the Egyptians. Something in my gut is telling me ..

--

Cairo Egypt.

a better writer called this place the "great upturned ashtray". I have to agree with him. the fucker.

But I'm all for urban blight.

Cairo, where rabid seething Imams scream into microphones on Friday - gutteral, desperate, angry.
Was it I that said that Islam is not inherently violent?
This sounds violent. I've never heard a Christian or buddhist sound like this. This screaming can't be creating a sense of tranquility.

Cairo, where covered women move down the streets on platform open-toed shoes, their ill-bent and brightly colored toes a source of excitement for the ubiquitous nose-picking guards in white cheap uniforms crouched on every street.

Where believers who pray so much they have permanently bruised foreheads (like Wesely Willis, RIP) and confused looking eyes which scan you, relentlessly, unshyly, as you stand nearby.

Where the Muslim Brotherhood's samizdat tracts are passed out quickly on the French-built metro, and collected before the next stop.

Where lines don't exist - you simply crowd around the ticket booth/cashier and wave your money, stepping on anyone, stealing a ticket if the cashier looks away.

Cairo, home of the Felaheen.

Felaheen? The peasant class, the oafish subjects of the (great!) Ottoman empire and the Mamluks before them, and empires before that. The people who now occupy the land around the pyramids and whose descendant generations have lived here for thousands of years. Cairo started as a labor camp for building the pyramids.

Some of the poor are still known as the Felaheen, and you can see that they still retain many of the same worker-drone characteristics to this day. Big hands, stout, oddly shaped men, round women, quick and stupid tempers, guile and dishonesty - all a mix of Africa and the Middle East.

Arab, but Egyptian Arab. Not as clever as the Levantines, not as fervantly ignorant as the Gulf Arabs. Thick, expendable drones, in a hive of 17 million.

Most disappointingly, they lack their own cuisine, stealing from Turkish and Lebanese.. "They eat - but only to fight off death" said a good friend to me once. He's right. On the bright side, tea is everywhere, and costs 4 cents a glass, a falafel sandwich costs 8 cents. Yes, thank god for their plummeting economy, I can eat for cheap

These people tho. ..

--

Ahmed, our new friend, is under arrest. For walking with us without a permit. They put him in the back of a small van. I ask why they grabbed him

"He need Tourist-Leader permit for be with tourist" says the giant Felaheen asshole in horrible english. I reply in horrible Arabic.
"Huwa Sadiiki! Mish Tagen!"(he's my friend - not a businessman!" I say, desperately trying to remember any Arabic at all.

The other guards just look at us, stupid in their white uniforms, holding old Chinese AK-47s.
The 2 hilarious french guys with us just keep smoking.

The huge, pot bellied Felaheen captain pulls out his gun for us, and shows us the bullets are real. Why do most Egyptian men have those god-damned potbellies? For a starving country, everyone is so fucking fat.

He makes a popping noise witjh his mouth, as if to simulate the sound of gunfire. He then smiles through his ridiculous sunglasses. We stare at him, unimpressed.

They just wanted a bribe.

--

Yes, I've never met such a wildly dishonest people before in my life - these people have tried to take me for money or worse at least - I'm not exaggerating - 4/5 times in every interaction I have had with them. I pray it is just the tourist area that I
am temporarily in, and I miss the cool-hearted and sophisticated East Asians deeply.

Lord, these people - they make my Ottoman blood boil.
Insolence!
And my Southern USA blood is telling me to call in airstrikes.

Maybe I will get a ticket back to Thailand.

--

do i have the right to be so annoyed by
these people?

am I misinterpreting something?

is this culture shock?
if so, why didnt I feel it in Thailand, Myanmar, or Vietnam?
its 2003. culture shock isnt an excuse anymore.
or is it exactly what defines 2001-2003?
this is why im here right -
this is the work.
to understand these people.

but -
why am i asking you people?

--

Islamic Cairo - Old Cairo

Stray cats and winding, impossible streets. Slums built on buildings 800 years old. beautiful buildings. the entire area has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. UNESCO sites are supposed to be quiet, solemn, holy. This one is still alive. Pepsi cans are everywhere among the ruins. A little kids in a school uniform peed from the old fortress wall.

Donkey carts vie with vespas for the space around a truck from which a man is screaming at another man whose vegetable cart he bumped into. No damage, but It seems like they like the sport of it.

I'm learning. The sport of it - they are not angry - it is a ritual. They are saving face. I'm beginning to understand. In Thailand, you don't make a peep. When a white guy gets knocked into a truck on his motorbike, you pretend that it isn't happening. Here - here its the opposite - you Must make a peep about everything, or you lose face.

Children are saying hello to me everywhere. Unlike near the tourist attractions, they don't want money. I buy a kid some sugar cane juice for his outstanding farting noises. I buy some bread. Some young people practice their English on us. The roads, the buildings, the alleys, they are swollen with people, choked by exhaust. Flies whip through clouds of dust, a young girl sits among old tires and eats grapes, offering some to me as I walk by with her small hand.

Her hand is so clean.
Her uniform is so white.

Deisel smoke curls around us,

and I am somewhere else.

--