Cairo - Singapore - Adelaide: I'm coming home...
5 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Monday, October 22 at Monday, October 22, 2007.
For three sweet weeks in December, tickets confirmed and everything. It will take me 42 hours to get home, but a 24-hour stopover in Singapore isn't exactly the worst thing that can happen to a guy...
| Thursday - 20 December 2007 | | Flight | ||||
| Flight #: | SQ0493 | Airline: | Singapore Airlines | |||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Depart: | 12:30 AM | Airport: | Cairo Int'l Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Cairo | |||||
| Egypt | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Arrive: | 04:00 PM | Airport: | Singapore Changi Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Singapore | |||||
| Singapore | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Aircraft: | Boeing 777-200 | Confirmation: | XXXX | |||
| Seat: | Not Assigned | Mileage: | 5134 | |||
| Class: | COACH | Travel Time: | 9.30 | |||
| Meal: | Yes | Stopovers: | 0 | |||
| Thursday - 20 December 2007 | | Flight | ||||
| Flight #: | SQ0269 | Airline: | Singapore Airlines | |||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Depart: | 11:50 PM | Airport: | Singapore Changi Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Singapore | |||||
| Singapore | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Arrive: | 21 December 2007 | Airport: | Adelaide Arpt | |||
| 09:05 AM | Adelaide, SA | |||||
| Terminal 1 | Australia | |||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Aircraft: | Boeing 777-200 | Confirmation: | XXXX | |||
| Seat: | Not Assigned | Mileage: | 3359 | |||
| Class: | COACH | Travel Time: | 6.45 | |||
| Meal: | Yes | Stopovers: | 0 | |||
| |
| Friday - 11 January 2008 | | Flight | ||||
| Flight #: | SQ0268 | Airline: | Singapore Airlines | |||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Depart: | 01:05 PM | Airport: | Adelaide Arpt | |||
| Terminal 1 | Adelaide, SA | |||||
| Australia | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Arrive: | 05:40 PM | Airport: | Singapore Changi Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Singapore | |||||
| Singapore | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Aircraft: | Boeing 777-200 | Confirmation: | XXXX | |||
| Seat: | Not Assigned | Mileage: | 3359 | |||
| Class: | COACH | Travel Time: | 7.05 | |||
| Meal: | Yes | Stopovers: | 0 | |||
| Saturday - 12 January 2008 | | Flight | ||||
| Flight #: | SQ0492 | Airline: | Singapore Airlines | |||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Depart: | 06:30 PM | Airport: | Singapore Changi Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Singapore | |||||
| Singapore | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Arrive: | 11:15 PM | Airport: | Cairo Int'l Arpt | |||
| Terminal 2 | Cairo | |||||
| Egypt | ||||||
| ................................................................................................. | ||||||
| Aircraft: | Boeing 777-200 | Confirmation: | XXXX | |||
| Seat: | Not Assigned | Mileage: | 5134 | |||
| Class: | COACH | Travel Time: | 10.45 | |||
| Meal: | Yes | Stopovers: | 0 | |||
Beautiful beyond words
3 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Sunday, October 21 at Sunday, October 21, 2007.
Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place
Torin Boyd/Polaris, for The New York Times
"Though street crime is relatively low in Japan, quirky camouflage designs like this vending-machine dress are being offered to an increasingly anxious public to hide from would-be assailants." (New York Times)Thank you Japan, for making the world a more awesome place in which to be alive....
The First Rains of Cairo
1 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Thursday, October 18 at Thursday, October 18, 2007.
It started raining lightly on Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning it was pouring down, complete with thunder and lightning. Rain is one of those things, like public drunkenness or rolling around in lush green grass, that is appreciated on a completely different level when experienced through the lens of Cairo: fleeting and weird, totally out of place, and no-one is really prepared (or dressed) for it.
When it rains in Alexandria, it really comes down, reminiscent of a good old fashioned winter storm in Australia - springing out of nowhere, intense and loud and all-encompassing. It is a regular enough occurrence that you can tell the Alexandrians are kind of accustomed to it - windscreen wipers flip on, umbrellas pop up, people take shelter under balconies and awnings.
Nothing like this happens in Cairo, where the rainy season is as fleeting as the three-week period in August when the streets fill with piles of beautiful meshmesh (apricots), only to disappear again just as quickly. It rains maybe six times a year here (I might be horribly wrong on this, but it feels that way) and the reactions to it are priceless.
First up, whole intersections just flat-out flood, filled with water half-way up the side of the average car wheel. Instead of drains, out here in expat-friendly Maadi you see a guy with a truck, complete with huge cylindrical storage container and pump. He drives to the flooded intersection, puts a big tube into the giant puddle and just sucks the water up into the tank. It takes a while, but it works.
Drivers seem to use their windscreen wipers sparingly, much like the way they use their headlights at night, flashing them on and off for quick, almost completely inneffective five-second bursts. People walking around on the street shrug the rain off with indifference, although when it first comes, everybody looks to the sky at once, holding their gaze for a few seconds as if a shiny, never-before-seen kind of UFO is hovering above.
One of the cutest things I have ever seen and heard in my entire life happened right at the start of my first ever rain in Cairo, sometime around this time of year in 2004. A strange yellow-green, apocalyptic kind of light was suddenly everywhere, and you could almost feel the difference in the consistency of the air, even indoors. It felt like maybe the End Time was approaching, or at least a Great Flood or whatever.
All of a sudden I heard that pitter-patter noise that had hounded me constantly for the previous year in Ireland. I thought I never wanted to see rain ever again! But this time it was new, weird, special, out of place, and I ran outside to surround myself with it.
As I made it outside, I saw a gaggle of tiny little Egyptian girls, looking unbelievably cute in their puffy rain jackets and rubber boots. They were skipping round in circles together, singing a song in Arabic to the same tune as "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring". I still remember them whenever it rains here, which is rare enough that it puts a smile on my face every single time.
When it rains in Alexandria, it really comes down, reminiscent of a good old fashioned winter storm in Australia - springing out of nowhere, intense and loud and all-encompassing. It is a regular enough occurrence that you can tell the Alexandrians are kind of accustomed to it - windscreen wipers flip on, umbrellas pop up, people take shelter under balconies and awnings.
Nothing like this happens in Cairo, where the rainy season is as fleeting as the three-week period in August when the streets fill with piles of beautiful meshmesh (apricots), only to disappear again just as quickly. It rains maybe six times a year here (I might be horribly wrong on this, but it feels that way) and the reactions to it are priceless.
First up, whole intersections just flat-out flood, filled with water half-way up the side of the average car wheel. Instead of drains, out here in expat-friendly Maadi you see a guy with a truck, complete with huge cylindrical storage container and pump. He drives to the flooded intersection, puts a big tube into the giant puddle and just sucks the water up into the tank. It takes a while, but it works.
Drivers seem to use their windscreen wipers sparingly, much like the way they use their headlights at night, flashing them on and off for quick, almost completely inneffective five-second bursts. People walking around on the street shrug the rain off with indifference, although when it first comes, everybody looks to the sky at once, holding their gaze for a few seconds as if a shiny, never-before-seen kind of UFO is hovering above.
One of the cutest things I have ever seen and heard in my entire life happened right at the start of my first ever rain in Cairo, sometime around this time of year in 2004. A strange yellow-green, apocalyptic kind of light was suddenly everywhere, and you could almost feel the difference in the consistency of the air, even indoors. It felt like maybe the End Time was approaching, or at least a Great Flood or whatever.
All of a sudden I heard that pitter-patter noise that had hounded me constantly for the previous year in Ireland. I thought I never wanted to see rain ever again! But this time it was new, weird, special, out of place, and I ran outside to surround myself with it.
As I made it outside, I saw a gaggle of tiny little Egyptian girls, looking unbelievably cute in their puffy rain jackets and rubber boots. They were skipping round in circles together, singing a song in Arabic to the same tune as "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring". I still remember them whenever it rains here, which is rare enough that it puts a smile on my face every single time.
Monthly self-promotion hour
0 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Wednesday, October 17 at Wednesday, October 17, 2007.
Better late than never, here's a few of my articles from this month's Business Today Egypt:
The Great Egyptian Gold Rush - About the race to capitalize on Egypt's enormous untapped gold reserves
Searching for Success - The launch of Onkosh, a new Arabic search engine - the company behind the search engine, Orascom Telecom, also have some pretty big plans for their Arabic-language internet business.
Make Your Press Releases Work - A guide/plea to P.R hacks to write better press releases.
There was also some cool stuff in Egypt Today this month if you are interested in keeping up to date with the most important country in the Middle East. Voices of Islam is a great look at three of the most influential people in the Muslim world: Televangelist Amr Khaled, Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa and US-born convert Sheikh Hamza Yousef.
Given the Chance follows up on the plight of two "Islamists" (one was 14 when arrested in 1992) who have been jailed, tortured etc for the last 15+ years. They were recently released, and their story is one worth paying attention to - this type of painful reconciliation with the past is something we will be seeing a lot more of in this part of the world, for a long time to come.
Plus, who could look past the debut article of two great Divas of Cairo - Megan and Farzina. They worked together on Around the World in 30 Days, a look at the different ways that Ramadan is celebrated by Muslims across the world, from Illinois to Azerbaijan.
The Great Egyptian Gold Rush - About the race to capitalize on Egypt's enormous untapped gold reserves
Searching for Success - The launch of Onkosh, a new Arabic search engine - the company behind the search engine, Orascom Telecom, also have some pretty big plans for their Arabic-language internet business.
Make Your Press Releases Work - A guide/plea to P.R hacks to write better press releases.
There was also some cool stuff in Egypt Today this month if you are interested in keeping up to date with the most important country in the Middle East. Voices of Islam is a great look at three of the most influential people in the Muslim world: Televangelist Amr Khaled, Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa and US-born convert Sheikh Hamza Yousef.
Given the Chance follows up on the plight of two "Islamists" (one was 14 when arrested in 1992) who have been jailed, tortured etc for the last 15+ years. They were recently released, and their story is one worth paying attention to - this type of painful reconciliation with the past is something we will be seeing a lot more of in this part of the world, for a long time to come.
Plus, who could look past the debut article of two great Divas of Cairo - Megan and Farzina. They worked together on Around the World in 30 Days, a look at the different ways that Ramadan is celebrated by Muslims across the world, from Illinois to Azerbaijan.
Fifteen-minute Poems, Volume One
3 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Tuesday, October 16 at Tuesday, October 16, 2007.
Give Megan and I a fine Zamalek balcony, wireless internet pilfered from a nearby franchise coffee house and the inspiration that only the discovery of a new genius can provide (thank you, E.E Cummings) and the result is the fifteen-minute poetry challenge: Write something decent in a quarter-hour burst. Megan blew me out of the water in this challenge; her bittersweet, steamy little burst of disappointed nostalgia is frigging phenomenal - check it out here. My effort is below.
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Transition Complete
0 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Tuesday, October 9 at Tuesday, October 09, 2007.
Christopher Hitchens' long journey from radical socialist to lame propagator of nationalist myths seems complete - this Vanity Fair article about the death and funeral of an American soldier is as beautifully written as it is propagandistic. I doubt Goebbels was ever this fluent, but he was certainly as unashamedly supremacist:
The whole article is worth a read though, if for no other reason than to marvel at how swiftly Hitchens manages the navigate the tricky waters of being an unapologetic beater of the Iraq war drum whilst simultaneously trying to seem relevant and differentiated from the horde of morons that he is now an idealogical fellow-traveler of. He is getting worse and worse at it as time goes on.
"Everybody else also managed to speak, often reading poems of their own composition, and as the day ebbed in a blaze of glory over the ocean, I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best."Because we all know, there is nothing worse than the bogus hysterics and hysterical ululations of those awful Iraqis as they bury their relatives and neighbors and friends ten at a time, day on day, for four years straight. Such a shock to the sensibility and decency of an Oxford boy like Hitchens - it would be much better of them to do it in the style of the all-American funeral he witnessed: held in picturesque "dunes by an especially lovely and remote stretch of the Oregon coastline", devoting the day to "reminiscence and moderate drinking".
The whole article is worth a read though, if for no other reason than to marvel at how swiftly Hitchens manages the navigate the tricky waters of being an unapologetic beater of the Iraq war drum whilst simultaneously trying to seem relevant and differentiated from the horde of morons that he is now an idealogical fellow-traveler of. He is getting worse and worse at it as time goes on.
Ramadan from my window
4 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Friday, October 5 at Friday, October 05, 2007.
Waking up to the sound of this going on below you is one of the many, many only-in-Cairo stimuli that makes me so happy to be here. Just....wow...
Its true, its true....
0 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Wednesday, October 3 at Wednesday, October 03, 2007.
Click on the thumbnail to see my attempt at a Megan-style web cartoon. It's my first try, so be gentle with me....
We Hope Your Rules and Wisdom Choke You
0 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Tuesday, October 2 at Tuesday, October 02, 2007.
The best band in the world just happen to be one of the smartest as well:
The other side of the deal, discussed in minor detail later in the article, is that they are selling the physical album as a super-premium "discbox", including an audio CD, a media CD full of photos, video clips, extra songs and bonus stuff, and two 12-inch vinyl records of the album. It all comes packaged in a beautiful hardcover book and slipcase, and knowing previous album liners, that book will be full of weird and beautiful stuff. Price tag? £40 - the equivalent of four regular albums.
Pretty much every hardcore Radiohead fan with a credit card and a monthly income (and there is, scientifically speaking, shitloads of them) will buy that box, and at such a premium price, I can imagine it will massively cross subsidize all the $1 downloads. For me, this is the future for the music business - cheap downloads and premium-priced physical albums that come with tonnes of lovely real-world stuff.
CRITICALLY acclaimed and wildly successful British rock band Radiohead left news organisations and music industry types scratching their chins this week after announcing that it would essentially be giving its latest album away. Fans can currently pre-order the album at the band's website, but clicking through to the checkout page, a buyer finds himself confronted by blank boxes. The amount to be paid is, according to the site, "up to you." Presumably, that amount might well be zero dollars and cents, or pounds and pence, give or take the credit card processing fee. (The Economist)This may be the reason that I am not a management consultant or financial planner, but to me, this is a genius business model for the music industry. Digital music just isn't worth $10-15 per album to a lot of people - and for the majority of those people, they choose to pay zero instead, downloading a copy for free. Even if you only get $1 from each of these users, it is better than zero - and real fans, or people with money to spend, will probably price the album value much higher than that.
The other side of the deal, discussed in minor detail later in the article, is that they are selling the physical album as a super-premium "discbox", including an audio CD, a media CD full of photos, video clips, extra songs and bonus stuff, and two 12-inch vinyl records of the album. It all comes packaged in a beautiful hardcover book and slipcase, and knowing previous album liners, that book will be full of weird and beautiful stuff. Price tag? £40 - the equivalent of four regular albums.
Pretty much every hardcore Radiohead fan with a credit card and a monthly income (and there is, scientifically speaking, shitloads of them) will buy that box, and at such a premium price, I can imagine it will massively cross subsidize all the $1 downloads. For me, this is the future for the music business - cheap downloads and premium-priced physical albums that come with tonnes of lovely real-world stuff.
