The world, circa 1581. From the Library of Congress collection.

Okay. Hi.

The first ticket has been purchased, so it's for real... I'll be travelling around Europe and the Middle East through the summer. Here's the basic itinerary:

• May 9th: Leave Austin for New York
• May 16th: Leave Austin for Berlin
• Approx. June 6th: Leave Berlin for Cairo
• Approx. July 20th: Leave Cairo for Berlin
• August 8th: Leave Berlin for Austin

And soon thereafter I'll probably be back in New York to get ready for the big move at the end of August.

So I'm sort of "stacking" tickets, buying a round-trip to Berlin and then a round-trip from Berlin to Cairo. This seems to be the most cost-effective way to do this, though it does seem kind of odd at first. Also, I'm not going to stay in Berlin and Cairo the entire time (if you're wondering)... I'd like to take a few days in Poland and maybe Denmark and visit Haley in Italy while I'm stationed in Germany. And, well, I'm not really exactly sure what the plan out of Cairo will be. Certainly don't want to overplan...

Anyway, that's the framework. If you know me and think I'm forgetting about something, please let me know. I can still make modifications to the itinerary without too much extra cost.

Yip!

I saw a strange Einstürzende Neubauten show at the NBI club on Friday. They played their instruments (mostly laptops and other electronic cleverness) in silence upstairs near the bar. All of the speakers -- tons of speakers -- filled a small basement room with an absolutely deafening sound. They strongly recommended only going down with earplugs, sound-dampening headphones, or fingers-firmly-in-ears. So I stuck my fingers in my ears and got thoroughly vibrated by the dense, cacophany and rumbling noise clashes. Interesting, anyway.

Otherwise, I've been doing some of the usual sightseeing stuff -- Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Mauergedänksmuseum, Fernsehturm. And reading a pile of books, which is actually kind of nice... Just sitting at a café or restaurant for a while, reading. Some of the word collections I've had the most fun with have been the Penguin 70th Anniversary chapbooks. I've got about a dozen of them, so far, from Richard Dawkins to Robert Graves to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Melissa Banks to Will Self. They're great single-sitting reads and a good way to read some new authors, though I think they're only selling them in Europe right now (or, rather, only Britain, though Berlin stores get a few on import). Whatever happened to the chapbook? It seems like such a good marketing concept... Instead of paying $15, you pay $3 and get a good 60-page read.

Anyway. That's some of what's been going on. Nothing too dramatic, but it's nice to spend time over here (of course).

Oh, and in about a week I'm going back to Barcelona. Then I might join Haley in Warsaw for a few days. We'll see. All up in the air, still.

Josh... OUT.

The new hostel does, though, have a nice 24-hour bar with wireless internet access and everything right next door, so I'll probably be in here, getting my fix more often the next few days. I've only had internet access here-and-there. And no television for about four weeks, now (except for the TV at the hotel I stayed at the first few days in Berlin, and those channels were all auf Deutsch except CNN). Kind of nice. And kind of tweaking. I finally broke down and bought a copy of Der Herr der Ringe: Die Zwei Türme on DVD just to have something to look at. Not that I need television, but I need some English visual-verbal stimulation and I've been mostly on my own out here so far. I chose that DVD because it seemed like it would bear repeat viewings. And, anyway, now I've got one of the Lord of the Rings movies in German. In case that might come in handy.

Next week, Sonar in Barcelona. Then heading out to Poland with Haley. Warsaw for a few days. Krakow for a few days. Then back to Berlin. Fun fact about Poland: They have a horrible, horrible history. Reading through my Lonely Planet guide, I got a brain full of 500 years of asskickings at the hands of the Germans and Russians, destroyed cities (Hilter attempted to erase Warsaw after an uprising in 1944, I did not know before), displaced peoples, bad government, the Church, etc. Hopefully they'll remain stable for at least the next few weeks. I don't want Krakow partitioned out from under me...

Anyway. That's all for now. And remember: Don't invite a bunch of Teutonic knights to defend your home -- they'll just end up occupying your kitchen and stabbing your dog.

Geistreich

Let's start with something Haley swears some Germans once told her ex-boyfriend in Austin... Is it much less of a big deal for two guy friends to have sex with each other in Germany without being "gay" than it would be in our stuffy United States? Brenna and James heard nothing of the sort except that, according to James, German men are a bit effete (at least compared with the gorillas one might find in British pubs). (Bren's friend Ruth Elkins commiserates.) So who knows. It's probably a vicious urban legend, but let's spread it around a bit...

Anyway. We got back from eight days in Poland on Friday, arriving back in a cold, damp, miserable Germany. Yesterday, though, the weather was awesome and we accidentally stumbled upon this. I asked Haley if she wanted to go look at the sights around the Tiergarten -- Broken Tooth, Siegessaüle, Brandenburger Tor, &c -- and we stumbled upon what was reportedly about 250,000 Berliners packed onto Strasse des 17. Juni between the Siegessaüle and the Tor. Packed. Had we paid attention we might've caught Brian Wilson or Green Day (or, at least, A-Ha or Roxy Music), but... We didn't. So we caught the full Wir Sind Helden set and a couple terrible Irish pub songs songs by Chris de Burgh that made us decide to leave and go look at the Reichstag. I can pretty much extemporaneously compose moody Irish pub ballads. Watch: "Young Dermott was a fine boy, taken way too soon / but I hear his footsteps everyday, just at half past noon / [chorus] singing high-high-high-high! You can't buy a duck for two Pounds." Repeat.

We also caught the kind of cool intro to Live 8 done by Will Smith in Philadelphia. On the video screens they had the crowds in Philly shout out to those in Hyde Park, who then yelled to the Circus Maximus show, who yelled to us at the Brandenburg Gate, who yelled out to the Versailles show, who yelled up to Park Place, Ontario (Park Place, Ontario?) who then yelled back at Philly. A bit cornball, but fun at the time. Then he went into serious mode, explaining what this thing called "Africa" is and how they don't have enough food, and how by attending a free concert with bands like Audioslave and Die Toten Hosen, I, Josh Knowles, am personally MAKING A DIFFERENCE.

What else? Oh, I forgot Poland. Hm. How to summarize. Warsaw for a few days, then Krakow for five days. Krakow's lovely and quite lively, but most of the rest of the country seems to still suffer from the repeated beatings at the hands of the Germans and Russians over the years. Warsaw was completely demolished in 1944. They rebuilt the small old city as a very detailed replica of what was lost, but when you go inside palaces and museums everything feels very incomplete, with only bits and pieces of art that had been squirreled away by some forward-thinking Poles before all of the destruction. Krakow survived the war more-or-less unscathed and has a similar feel to Prague, with just a couple extra layers of grime on the buildings. Poland's apparently doing very well since the fall of the Communist regime, but they're still nowhere near on par with Germany or western Europe. Anyway, our experiences there were pretty pedestrian, I guess. Saw some sights. Ate dinners out on the town squares. Etc.

Oh. Krakow's full of really lame buskers, it turns out. It seems like every time we turned around some twelve-year-old kids would be out on the side of the road or in the square with a jambox making goofy attempts at brak-dancing by kind of jumping around and wigging out and doing handstands overandover. Hehe. I photographed a couple of these. They seemed to mostly play that god-awful Axel F / Crazy Frog ringtone single that's been such a horrible big deal over here.

Okay. Gotta get on with my day.

Seacrest OUT.

Okay. I'm on a crappy, cicra-2001 Windows box in a hotel, so I'm not logging into anything I don't have to -- include my blog-editor. So. Hopefully all interested parties will find this in the comments. When I get back to Berlin, I'll make them into regular posts.

So. I arrived late last night and someone had already pulled my bag off of the baggage carousel and stole my two near-empty bottles of cologne out of the exterior pocket. So: Might I suggest to my fellow travellers (Haley) that you keep any electronics (cameras, iPods) on your person during the flight into Cairo and stash anything else valuable deep enough inside your bag that someone can't get into it without totally dismantling your luggage. Also. Be aware that people at the airport offering you taxis and whatnot WILL try to scam you. So just mak sure you're aware of the exchange rate (about 6 Egyptian Pounds per US Dollar) and don't let them pull this bullshit:

"Taxi to hotel? $10."
"I only have Egyptian."
"Okay. Whatever you think is fair, EP200, EP300."
"How about EP70?"
"Whatever you think is fair."
Hand over a EP100 note.
"How much you want back?"
"EP20."
"EP10?"
"No. EP20."
"Okay."

This sort of nonsense also happened with the SECOND cabby after the first took me to the wrong place (a simple error, since there are more than one hotels with the name of mine). The wrong hotel arranged for a short ride for EP10. Fine. $1.50 or so. But. I only had EP100s. So.

"Here's EP100. I need EP80 back." Tip.

He hands back EP50, each note individually, with the western numbers facing away from me (they use actual current Arabic numerals, not numbers we're used to). So I have to sort out what I've been given ask ask several times for more.

Anyway. I'll turn off of this subject, except to note that (obviously) everything's up for bargaining at any time and the closer you get to the airport (or any tourist spot), the worse, I imagine, it gets. Just make sure you know our information, and it seems to be fine, since they're essentially preying on ignorance -- of exchange rates, modern Arabic numerals, etc.

Anyway. I spent today walking around the downtown isle in the Nile. I forget the area's name, but it's shoppy and full of embassies and schools, so it's well protected. The city's huge. Massive. And dense. And it smells like burning rubber and everything's got a fine layer of sand and grime on it, including me after a few hours. It's very hot and packed -- packed -- with people. Most seem perfectly fine, but there are pickpockets and gypsies sorts that linger about. Several times I observed a woman with a baby following behind me, waiting to make a move. Once kept asking for money and I kept ignoring her. She made a weak grab at my camera and walked off. They ALL keep their eyes on the pocket with the wallet. They jut stare. Forunately, the ne'er-do-wells are pretty obvious. Most Egyptians lingering about are just sitting, smoking, talking, and resting in the shade. They have little use for some white guy wandering around.

What else? Um. I bought a Cairo Lonely Planet on my walk and a map (yeah -- I set off only with the map in my mind I memorized off of the web in Milano -- heh). Oh. All hotels feature metal detectors at the front door (which I set off every time but no one seems to care). Also, I have yet to see a coin, though I've received bills as small as EP 0.25 (a quarter-pounder -- about 5 cents US).

Okay. ot sure if I have the balls yet to venture out at night, so I may just go hang out at the swimming pool onn the roof. It's got a great view of the seemingly endless sprawl of raggedy buildings.

More soon.

Anyway, Haley had a personal connection in Cairo, a jazz saxophonist named John Dikeman who lives in Zamalek in a huge apartment with his very international hotel-industry businesswoman girlfriend Cristina. They showed us around and let us both spend a couple of nights sleeping on their sofa. (Haley's still there, I believe.) Many thanks to both of them, of course!

Whew. So where to begin? Um...

Mohammad Mounir. So John had a gig playing back-up for Nubian pop sensation Mohammad Mounir on Firday night. Nubian pop? If the Mounir show was any good indicator, it's a kind of blend of jazz-funk fusion that most Americans are pretty comfortable listening to and the airier, more mystical dronings of traditional Nubian music (Nubia = Upper Egypt = southern Egypt). Mounir, a dark thin Arab gentleman, came off as a kind of Tom Jones figure -- an aging crooner who had seen his star rise in the 70s and who still knew how to stir up a bit of sex appeal and emotional response in his crowds. Except. This being the Middle East, the women tended to stay quiet and subdued while the boys got up on each others shoulders and ripped their shirts off and that kind of thing. Odd. But good. I enjoyed it.

The event took place in the parking lot outside of the Cairo Opera House and the staging was actually quite elaborate. Mounir had a live ten-piece (about) behind him featuring a couple horns, a drummer, guitars, a guy on keyboards, one on fife, etc. And they had extensive lighting and every other song featured some kind of firework: big exploders or colored smoke or spinning crazy fireworks hanging from the metal stage frame or flares shooting every which way or spark-flames shooting up form the front of the stage or something.

Oh, and Egyptian bureaucracy being what it is, we had to go through six (6) checkpoints after buying out ticket, each time showing the ticket once again and maybe every other time submitting to a search or metal detector. Rumor has it that the government keeps unemployment low by hiring ten people to do what one might be capable of. This seemed to make sense, given the number of security people lingering about the city doing nothing but bothering tourists to let them take photos of the tourists for baksheesh...

Next.

Saqqara. Well, I had given up on going out to Saqqara, but once Haley got into town we all decided to make the trip. (We = Haley and myself, John, Cristina, and Darren, a local keyboardist originally from New Zealand who sometimes plays in combos with John.) Darren lives in the south of Cairo in a nice, more residential neighborhood called Maadi. He has his own car, so he drove us down, out west through Giza and then south through the irrigated farmlands to Saqqara. What's interesting about the Egyptian greenbelt that runs along the Nile down to Lake Aswan in the south is that once you get south of Cairo it's only a few miles wide. So. We drive through tall palm tree groves and wet fields of whatever grains and vegetables with farmers and lazy, over-worked donkeys pulling carts this way and that -- but the horizon is sand-colored desert hills, completely devoid of life and liquid. The Sahara (on the west side of the Nile, at least). As soon as the irrigation ends, absolute desert begins. You could almost draw the line where it happens.

Saqqara is an outcropping of Pharaonic ruins about 20km south of Cairo. It seems to have more actual stuff to look at than Giza, but the pyramids are older and not quite as accomplished. Pharaoh Zoser's Step Pyramid is considered, though, the oldest surviving stone monument built by man. I'll put up photos as soon as possible, but it's essentially a pyramid prototype. But instead of having flat, angled sides it has big rock steps. It sits in the middle of an extensive complex of pillars and buildings and stone art that still remains on-site.

It also sits in the middle of an extensive complex of people trying to squeeze extra LEs out of the tourists, like the dipshit who just lingers at the entrance to one of the temples asking for baksheesh. Haley and I decided to find some toilets before our camel ride that afternoon and baksheeshed this dude to get the info -- but he wouldn't tell us. We didn't give him enough. So fuck it. We left him with the money and found it on our own. Like I've commented before, this whole culture of baksheesh at the tourist spots is rediculous. Especially when someone expects more than a couple of Egyptian Pounds to point to the toilet. If I'm being a culturally-insensitive American tightwad, please let me know in the comments. I hated it. And, I reiterate, I think it reallyreallyreally gets in the way of actual communication or helpfulness when after any little thing a tip is expected. If these guys were really providing a service at the monuments (and I've heard that they do help keep the places a bit clean and keep the tourists on the designate paths, which is great). That's great. But. I suspect more western tourists would happily pay two, three, or four times the cost to enter some of these places. Maybe that extra money could be spread around a bit and everyone would wind up with more...

Anyway. I can whine about that issue endlessly and the want me to leave, so I'll wrap up. More soon... Sorry to leave it hanging...

Saqqara, continued. We actually went to Saqqara earlier in the same day that we saw the Mohammad Mounir concert, so you can keep your chronology straight. On Friday.

So. We walked around the Step Pyramid and the surrounding funerary complex. Most, of course, had crumbled over time, but several stretches of wall still stood along with a grove of columns on one end and, of course, the big pyramid and a few smaller pyramids. The area around Saqqara is, by the way, much more like the western vision of Egypt than the Giza Plateau and the larger, more famous pyramids there. For one thing, from Saqqara you can see several other collections of pyramids off in the distance -- something especially cool from the back of a camel walking from the Step Pyramid complex out to another collection of artifacts as we did. South from Saqqara a few miles we could see the pyramids at Dashur -- the Bent Pyramid (a protopyramid that had to be modified halfway through the construction, giving it an odd bent look) and the Red Pyramid (the first actual pyramid built, once covered in red rock of some sort, I believe -- hence the name).

I'm all over the place in my description. Sorry.

So after walking around we decided to get some camels. It's a couple kilometers to some of the further afield sites over the open desert, so this is pretty much a must. So three of us got camels -- Haley, John, and myself. Darren, our Kiwi guide, got a horse. Cristina, allergic to animal spit, walked.

Sitting on a camel at first feels like sitting on a thick sofa cushion strapped vertically upon the back of a large, tall horse. Getting on the beast is quite simple: it kneels down on all fours and you throw a leg over. My camel, Ramses II, did a few rounds of phlegmy bleating at first but once I got myself settled, he shut up and took it like a king. The creatures stand back legs first, so I immediately felt like I was going to slide off the from of the saddle and wind up wound around Ramses's neck. The back legs go up and you hang at a 45 degree angle for a few seconds before the front legs boost and suddenly you're, like, sitting on something eight feet off the ground. Sitting on something that, like I said, kind of sways and doesn't feel at all firm. I mean, a camel's hump is more-or-less a water-boob, if I remember correctly. It's not bone like the back of a horse would be. And these are dromedary camels -- one-humpers. So one sits on a saddle that rests on a few layers of rug-ike fabric over the peak of the hump. So, anyway, we successfully got the camels up and moving and pretty soon my guide got tired of walking in front of Ramses II, pulling his reign, so the guide gave me the reign and some quick instructions and I took control. I could stop him by pulling the reign, start him or speed him up by heel-kicking him, and steer him by pulling side-to-side. Just like a horse, pretty much, except Ramses kind of lilted to the right when not explicitly controlled and had a weird habit of walking right up along side the other camels so close that my leg barely fit between them. Controlling a domesticated animal is always quite fascinating just because they really do respond just like a machine would. The communication is so pure and, for us city folk, at least, it's so rare to be at that level with an animal. I can't tell my cat to stop moving or walk over to the left and expect anything other than to be completely ignored.

John's camel was named Banana, by the way, and I forget the name of Haley's camel. John and I, though, got used to calling our camels 'Habibi' when we spoke to them. 'Habibi' is kind of Arabic for 'Baby' or 'Sweety.' Mohammad Mounir's songs were littered with the word, pretty much the only thing of his we could understand. Habibi.

Banana was extremely talkative and throughout the trip engaged in the sort of bleating which is rather difficult to describe except to say it sounded like someone playing a broken trombone filled with snot -- badly.

So we camelled out to another mosoleum and looked around and then camelled back to the Step Pyramid. It took maybe a half-hour each way and by the end I was really getting into it and wanted more. Darren told us that apparently you can pay to have the bedouins who own the camels to take you on a thre day trek out to one of the Saharan oases. If I get back to Cairo in an adventuresome mood (and maybe in the Spring instead of the dead of Summer), something like that actually sounds really cool. The Sahara desert fascinates me and being out in the desert makes one much more appreciate the pluck of the people who have been living in such places for the past several thousands of years. About 65% of Egypt is more-or-less uninhabitable Saharan desert. Another 30% or so is other various deserts. The remainder is the Nile Delta and the thin strip of fertile land that stretches into Nubia.

More soon.

Today's quite lovely, though. During the week it rained almost every night and then got sunny and hot (and humid) during the days. Last night seemed to break the trend and no today might offer the best weather I've seen thus far in Berlin.

So I'm spending my afternoon in a dim internet café. No, that's not true at all. I found a brunch buffet near the hotel in Savignyplatz and ate some pancakes, salmon, and fruit salad while reading the copy of Alain de Botton's The Art of Travelling that I picked up at Dussman's a few days ago. The book's a kind fo lit-crit approach to thinking about travelling. Or an exceptionally stuffy student of Milan Kundera's school of writing style, maybe, meaning he uses the same sorts of collisions between personal anecdote and references to the literary and artistic canon that Kundera uses, but with none of the sex or heated interpersonal interactions. Alain stares out of plane windows and chews on chocolate bars in bleak gas stations in rural Britain. (He's Swiss, by the way, and has an essay in another book of his I have that's a defence of boring places, so I guess it all fits together.) Anyway. I do, actually, enjoy the book. But I've become sidetracked.

I meant to write a few words about Alexandria, Egypt. Those few words might be: Alexandria came off as a slightly less congested Cairo. The Mediterranean Sea did a nice job of cooling the place down and blowing off some of the smoggy smells (though Haley didn't agree whenever I made that observation). It also kind of cut the intensity fo the city as we never really went far away from the Corniche (the boulevard that runs along the sea) so we always had a kind fo visual break from Egypt. John and Cristina recommended a hotel to us about a half-block off of the Corniche and our room had a narrow balcony from which we had a nice oblique view of the water and a direct view into the hotel rooms right across the narrow street. We had no air conditioning, so the night was extremely warm. We had to keep the balcony doors open while we slept to have any air circulation -- and by morning we were both flailing aruond trying to keep flies off of us while getting a few minutes of extra sleep.

After checkout we ran into the owner (I think) as we walked out with our bags onto the street. "Tell your friends it's a very clean hotel!" he called to us. So: The Union Hotel in Cairo. A very clean hotel. By Egyptian standards, at any rate. Your western impressions may vary.

So. We arrived that first night at about 8pm and, after dropping off our bags, decided to eat and walk around for a bit. So we did. We found a sidewalk cafe and got some food, fending off the unending stream of people -- adults and children -- selling everything from sunglasses to mangoes to Pokeman squeeze-toys to oriental rugs. "La." Firmly. "No." Over and over.

Walking in Alexandria's quite easy. The Corniche runs along the coastline and the coastline wraps in on itself, allowing you to see from any point on the Corniche almost all of the rest of the Corniche. Hard to get lost when you can see visually where you're going. At the far end, on the peninsula that juts out into the sea, stands the Citadel, which we walked out to that first night, past several large, beautifully intricate mosques and nighttime businesses of all sorts. This was actaully quite pleasant, except for the fact that:

As a very tall blondish white dude, I was a beacon for unwanted attention. At night the wall between the Corniche and the rocky beach was packed with people sitting and just hanging out: old, young, men, women, kids, everyone. And we just had to battle through people yelling at us, saying harmless things like "Welcome Egypt!" but we just couldn't stop and have a conversation with every group of obnoxious boys that decided to try to befriend us. Especially since, well, we had a hard time believing that these random displays of love were anything other than attempts to, after a bit of sweet-talking, get money out of us. Again, if I'm being a horribly western-centric or racist observer, here, Id like to know why and what I should've thought was going on. Maybe what I was really experiencing had less to do with money and more to do with a culture that's fascinated by foreigners (as many cultures are) and a culture that doesn't have the same sense of reserve that most westernizsed cultures have. Does someone look interesting? Shout out to them! Get their attention! Stare at them! That's more benign, but still very exhausting for the objects of the attention.

Okay. I've only got a couple minutes left, here, so I'll stop. More soon.

Yes, I think that's a meatball experiencing bloody, explosive diarrhea while a pile of mushrooms laugh at him.

Well, my web-stalkers at the Longbranch Inn have started posting lame little comments all over, again. These messages (calling me, for example, a "Nazi" or "dipshit" or, um, "Opie") are an answer to my bad experience with them waaaay back in December that I wrote about. Obviously I just delete them. Takes about fifteen seconds.

A couple days ago, though, one of the Longbranch Inn bar owners posted this comment to my site:

"I bet you think twice before slamming someones business again you little pussy. Now that you have learned your lesson we will all leave you alone."

Um. Hehe. Am I in junior high school, again? Did someone just think they taught me a lesson by calling me a faggot in a comment that I deleted? Surely I'm not dealing with adults, here...

Anyway, I hope my little ramblings aren't pissing anyone else off. I'd hate to have to learn any more lessons.

That said, I've uploaded the rest of my photos from Egypt and Germany, and they start right here. (Again, yeah -- my little photo gallery scripts have a couple of bugs right now, in case something unexpected happens.) Check 'em out. Included within are hot new shots of Coptic Cairo, Josh and Haley riding camels, Nubian-pop sensation Mohammad Mounir, and gangs of fighting sparrows.

Awesome.

In Warsaw.

In Warsaw.

In Krakow.

In Krakow.

In Berlin.

In Alexandria.

As suggested by Hilary Cardwell.

And make sure to check out her travelblog at Vino Viaggio. (If that's not working, try the temporary URL: by clicking here.)