A Different Drummer

Bass.

Other people are writing enough about the worst thing in the world that has happened in South East Asia, so I don't really have anything new to say.

I've experienced the whole thing from my temporary, secret, location - Malta!

Coming here was a big surprise birthday present for Thea, who is home for Christmas and New Year - so I havent been blogging about it or telling anyone except my co-conspirators in Egypt and Malta. But now that the cat is out of the bag and I am here in Thea's house, I can show some photos and share my experiences here....

Malta is a really really unique place. Its kind of hard to describe in words - tiny and crowded but somehow still feeling like there is a lot of country to see. It has history in buckets, almost so much history that the really amazing parts are devalued by an oversupply. It has the strongest cuerrency I have ever used (1 maltese pound is 3.15 US Dollars) - changing my full months Egyptian salary (1000 Egyptian Pounds) and getting ONE NOTE in return was pretty soul crushing, especially given that it was only a fifty. I didnt even get the biggest note.

But things are also fairly cheap in places - especially the incredibly delicious street snack pastizzi - which cannot be described in objective terms - just imagine the thing that you want all other small snack things to be - hot and crispy and fresh and cheesy and TEN CENTS. Even a fairly decent meal in a restaurant will only cost you 3 pounds - which is still 60 Egyptian Pounds or almost 10 Euro, but it feels cheap dammit. Anything that costs 3 of any currency must be cheap, as any good economist would teach you in first year StupidNomics 101.

Enough talk, more photos.

Malta, where even the fishing boats are pretty and have nice eyes....


Thea's father and I doing our well practiced synchronised pointing routine.


You like little white buildings surrounding Mediterranean fishing vilages? You'll probably like Malta.


As you can see, Thea is pretty happy to have me here.

Since reading "The Wrong Way Home" by the Australian author Peter Moore, I've really set as a mid-term goal in my life to go back to Australia that way. In The Wrong Way Home, Moore travels home from London to Australia, over land, no flights allowed. Its a great book, detailing his journey throuh Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

So its been this thing in my life that at some point I will make this journey. My Hungarian homeboy Peter is down for this, and I'm sure there is a couple of others who would want to do it as well.

Why am I posting about this now? Look at my little GeoLoc widget on the right hand side. Look at the red dots showing where I have had visitors from. It beats an almost frighteningly perfect path from Europe, home to Australia. Now the people who read this blog are either people I have met around the world because of AIESEC, or people who I am connected with through the nomadlife blogosphere, who are all ex-AIESEC people, all cool, and all sympathetic to the life of the travelling nomad.

So my question is - if you are one of my readers based somewhere on the overland trail from Europe to South East Asia - do you mind if I crash at your house sometime next year?

So its Christmas time, and unexplainably, Egypt is really getting in on the act. Even though it is a predominantly Muslim country, whose 10 million Christians celebrate the Orthodox Christmas in early January, rather than the Western Chrismas on Dec 25, people are really putting in the effort.

There's people in the streets everywhere selling Santa hats and tinsel and tree decorations. Christmas trees are up all over the place, and theres some pretty impressive light displays going on in downtown Cairo. As a white western looking type people automatically give me a "merry christmas" as I walk past - today someone with less than perfect English told me to "have good Jesus day". His intentions were in the right place, bless him.

Theres plenty of funny little things to notice. Like the stores selling "Christmas Cake" - chocolate cake with cherries on top - and the Christmas tree on the corner of my street, which is decorated with the traditional Christmas items - potatoes, chilli peppers, barbie dolls and bananas. Salvador Dali would have a field day with that one. Its still pretty impressive though. I know if Aussies had a go at Ramadan we would screw it up royally.

I'm not certain of this, but I think a lot of the "western" Christmas celebration in Egypt comes from the western aspirations of the middle/upper classes. Its another way to live like the people in the movies or on the TV, which is something people here are really big on. I mean people celebrate Halloween in Australia and I'm pretty sure that comes 100% from watching American kids doing it on TV.

Following on from my last post, I have been playing around some more with the speech recognition software that is now a part of Windows XP. I had no idea speech recognition technology had come so far in the last few years. Just some background here, I am talking this entire entry using a microphone and I haven’t touched the keyboard except to put in the full stops and commas. I think the speech recognition software still doesn’t know when to insert full stops, commas and other punctuation.

But seriously look on the upside here I’m sitting on the chair speaking into the microphone and every single word that I say is coming up perfectly on the computer. Its making one or two mistakes every paragraph and most of these are ones that are not surprising - for example the difference between “commas” and “comments” but let’s remember that I am speaking in a terrible Australian accent. There's another one right nthere - it doesn’t really understand the way I pronounce “Australia” – but then again not many people understand how ‘strayans pronounce ‘straya

The best thing is its learning really fast. When I started using it about six hours ago it was making a mistake pretty much every sentence. After using it for a few hours it is working much better.

Man, If this speech recognition stuff gets really good it could really change the way we use computers. I'm going to go and buy myself a decent PC microphone tomorrow -the one I'm using right now is a cracked old piece of junk that I found at the bottom of a cabinet in the office. If the speech recognition system gets good enough that it can pick up my voice, talking at a normal pace in my normal accent and write it down pretty much accurately then I could seriously see a lot of potential for using this as an everyday application.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

So I have discovered the cheapness of using internet calling cards to call Australia from Egypt. For 15 Egyptian Pounds ($2.50) I get about 2 hours call time to Australia. Compare this to the normal price of a phone card in Egypt (20 pounds for about 2 minutes) and you can see its a significant saving. Especially when your salary is being paid in Egyptian money.

Anyhow, I have a headphone and microphone plugged into the computer. But when am not calling anyone, I unplug the headphone part so that I can plug in the speakers and listen to music. But the mike stays plugged in.

So today I am trping some stuff up, and I accidentally click on the "dictate" button without noticing. MS Word starts listening through the microphone and dictating what its hearing. I, praise to Jah, am bouncing to some Marley. "Iron, Lion, Zion" to be exact.

Anyhow, I stop typing for a second and am thinking of how to word my next sentence. But as I am looking at the screen, something weird happens....words keep on appearing, in a resonably legible sentence. First I think my computer is infected with some shitty virus or spyware, but then I look at the sentence this is being typed....

"A file on a one but I cant stop a mile down see hey we want be beaver star see the frightening down the lion at mount Zion lion Zion"

Microsoft Office was dicating Marley for me! I think what it meant to say was:

"I'm on the run but I aint got no gun
See they want to be the star
So they fighting tribal war
And they saying iron like a lion in zion"

I'm going to try it out with some hip-hop and see how it deals with it. Lets see what it makes of this, to begin with.

This car auction on Ebay Australia is like reading a 10 minute lesson on Australia and how much it rules. Go read.

As my Hungarian visitors discovered in their two weeks in Egypt, there is some awesome, awesome food to be eaten in Egypt. Egyptian food is cool because is can be so varied - from mashed bean sandwiches (fuul, tastes better than it sounds) and grilled livers and kidneys on the street, all costing less than half an American Peso, all the way through to the most delicious barbequed meat and chicken, awesome Lebanese and Syrian Shawerma and Arab desserts dripping with honey and chopped pistaccio nuts - there is some serious eating to be done in Egypt.

I'd love to give recipes and instructions for making some of this stuff at home, but mainly, its out of reach of the average western house cook. Most of the food requires weird ingredients, which even if I could disover their English names, would certainly not be the same anywhere else. And on top of that is the need for some serious cooking equipment - the coal grills and various pots and things which I have never seen outside of Egypt.

But I'm still going to try and give a few interesting ones where I can. A lot of Egyptian food is fairly achievable, and fairly familiar to anyone who knows Mediterranean style food. So, with no further introduction, here is "Tomatoey-Egg stuff that totally Frigging Rules", or Shakshouka, as these pesky Egyptians insist on calling it.

Shakshouka

6 tomatoes
A big red capsicum/red pepper (only Australians call this Capsicum I think....)
Garlic
A few red chillies (optional if you are a Great Big Pussy Who Doesnt Like Chilli)
A big onion
4 eggs
Spices of your choosing (i reccomend chilli powder, cumin, thyme, sea salt and black pepper)
Fresh basil leaves

Chop up the tomatoes, capsicum, chillies and onion in the way you would normally do if making pasta sauce, chilli con carne or similar. In Egypt they use a cheese grater to chop tomatoes, which is a cool idea that I have never seen before. Just grate the tomato through like any other gratable item, and you end up with tomatoes chopped substantially finer than you can do by hand. Try it out if you want some excitement in you sad little life.....

Fry the garlic until it smells great. Burning the garlic is the best way to complete fuck whatever dish you are cooking, so dont do it. Add the onions and fry until they are substantially more transpearant than the average Middle Eastern government. Add the tomatoes and capsicum, cook until it has simmered down to a thick sauce.

Throw in the chopped chillies and mix them around. Now heres the bit that's important to get right.

Crack the eggs and add them, whole, to the mixture, which should be bubbling gently. Now, you dont want to whip it all up into a custard, but you want to gently break up all the eggs, while still keeping them fairly autonomous from the sauce. You want to let the eggs set and cook within the sauce, without just becoming part of it. Think of the Kurds in northern Iraq, around that level of independance.

Once the eggs are cooked, spice it up to your heats desire. Last thing to do it tear up the basil leaves (do it with your hands, not a knife) and stir them through the whole thing.

Eat fresh and hot, with pita bread.

A new member to blogdom, Jaylan El Shazly, one of the coolest people I know here in Egypt. An Egyptian woman who is not to be fucked with, she is the kind of girl Egypt needs millions and millions more of.

Check out superluli, my pick for Egypt's first female president.

Oh man this looks frigging fantastic.....



The trailer for the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie is out, and it looks like Johnny Depp is having the time of his life playing Willy Wonka. I cant wait to see this when it comes out. 2005 looks like a good year for movies, with this coming out in July, and the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy movie coming out in "summer" time.

Oh, and Star Wars. Yeah, it will break out hearts, and suck terribly, but its like the woman who suffers from domestic violenece but still stays with her husband - he only hurts us because he loves us.

I ditched the tagboard thing on the right side of the blog, because I was bored with it and no-one was using it. In its place is something incredibly cool, but I'll probably get bored with the new thing eventually too.

Anyhow, the funky little "Geoloc" box tells you how many people are visiting the page at any one time, and even cooler, where these people are visiting from, pinpointed on a little map of the world. Super cool. It also leaves a red dot on all the countries where I have recieved a visitor from, so I hope to cover most of the world eventually (although my South American readership is non-exitstant, and those damn researchers in the Antarctiv territories don't do much blog reading).

Well I wont even try to describe it in words, too amazing. Everyone in the world needs to come to this place before they die, just to realise how perfect life on this Earth can be. My problem now is that every weekend I spend in Cairo will have a shadow looming over it....:"you could be in Basata in 6 hours if you leave right now"..........."just go...."

In pictures:

Perfect little bamboo huts on a white sand Red Sea beach, complete with coral reef and beautiful blue-green water:



Oh, and did I mention that it is totally surrounded by the Sinai mountains, which change through a rainbow of colours throughout the day as the sun hits them from different angles?



And when you chill out in the main hut, you're really not that far from the water. Really. Not. That. Far. :



Yeah, chilling in the main hut - its pretty easy to do. In fact, its impossible to do anything else....



There is serious work to do though, like watching unbelievable sunrises, and looking cool with your manual SLR film camera:



Oh, yeah, the sunrises. The sun rises over the mountains of Saudi Arabia, which really arent that far away at all. In the daytime that look like a realistic swim, and at night when the lights come on, it looks like another small town just down the road. Moses and his people really didnt have that far to go:



I'll put this simply. Come to Egypt. Go to Basata. I'll be happy to join anyone who can make it in the forseeable future. I plan on spending as much time here as possible while I am in Egypt, and for the rest of my life no trip anywhere will really feel like it is 100% awesome without involving this place in some way.

My camera isnt waterproof , but if it was, I could show you pictures of the snorkelling - the reefs were so amazing that they would sell you on this place on their own. You're lucky......

The upcoming elections in both Palestine and Iraq are causing some painful but obvious questions to be asked in the more leading Arab nations. MEMRI, one of the most useful online resources regarding the Middle East, has the goods, translating editorials and opinions from Arab newspapers and TV. This one is particularly to the point:
"It is sad and pathetic that the eyes of the entire world are upon the Palestinian and Iraqi elections that will be held under the lances of foreign occupation, while the peoples of the 'independent, free, and sovereign' Arab countries have no way of expressing their will. It is sad and pathetic that certain countries today are treating the Iraqis with the cheapest kind of political hypocrisy, even though no one heard any particular Arab protest during the time of the regime of the mass graves [i.e. during Saddam's rule].

Read the whole article, plenty of really interesting stuff. Egypt has elections coming up in October 2005, which will be something to keep your eyes on.

I'll be kicking it in Sinai this weekend. Cant wait. Sun, huts on the beach, coral reefs and