Kολωνάκι Square
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Θωμ�ς - Squinting at Parnassus, Living the Pseudonymous Lifeen-us2005-01-04T10:58:47+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Seven: He Himself a Bloodless Sacrifice
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Read Part Six. In the monastery garden I worked alongside a twenty-one-year-old Bedu boy called Suleyman. We were assigned to gather olive branches for burning, and from the first day I could tell he was very special. He had worked with tourists as a camel guide for a few years and so could speak English well. I would come down to the garden each morning at nine o’clock, when we would first have tea together, which Suleyman or one of the Copts who also worked there would brew over a modest fire....djsmall2005-01-04T10:58:47+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Six: The Power of the Prophet's Word
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Read Part Five. The Bedu are much harder to crack. Their entire world has changed so completely over the past thirty years, and yet so much about it remains a mystery, cut off from the casual observer and inexplicable to Westerners. In only three decades they have gone from nomadic tent-dwellers and peasants to townsmen, from relying on trade in specialist goods to relying on income from tourism, from being cut off from the rest of the world almost totally to playing host to visitors from every corner of the globe. The disruption to their traditional way of life has...djsmall2004-12-29T19:13:58+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Five: A Question of Degree, not of Kind
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Read Part Four. If I thought that by going to St Catherine’s I’d be escaping the tension I felt in Cairo between tradition and the realities of modern life, then I was in for a surprise. Never was that tension more evident than on Sinai. When I emerged from church with the monks after three hours of matins each morning, many of us would mount the steps to the parapet overlooking the monastery gate. From there it is possible to look down the valley at the vast desert plain it opens on to – so barren, only an almond tree...djsmall2004-12-24T09:32:18+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Four: The Desert Stark and Virginal
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Read Part Three. As the bus jostled up the coast of the Gulf of Suez, I awoke now and then to see the high barren mountains of Sinai smouldering in the setting sun. The entire eastern horizon was one jagged summit cast in chiaroscuro as shadow poured down its deep, craggy gullies. They looked as though they had been carved, like giant bits of masonry. In fact, the intricate geometric patterns of those massive fissures reminded me of the stalactite moldings of Islamic architecture used to decorate squinches and pendentives underneath domes, as well as half-domed niches such as mihrabs...djsmall2004-12-21T10:13:39+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Three: Oriental Street Urchin and Gangsta Rapper in One
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Read Part Two. As I walked around the neighborhood near the Al-Azhar Mosque in the Old City one day, searching for a recently restored Ottoman mansion, I encountered a young man who looked about fifteen years old. He handed me a business card advertising his father’s carpet shop, and then offered to help me find my way. He talked and talked. His English and German were good enough to get by as a tourist tout, and he told me he was on break from university in Germany, adding with a smirk that his big blonde girlfriend was waiting for him...djsmall2004-12-18T21:44:36+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part Two: Are You a Muslim?
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Read Part One. The aspects of Cairo that most visitors find most offensive are the ones I found most charming. The medieval quarter, which apart from a jewelry or carpet shop is hardly visited at all by most tourists, provides hours of enchanted exploration to the traveler looking to be personally and culturally challenged. The dirt, the crowds, the squalor, and the livestock mingling amongst the vendor stalls, and even the incessant sales pitches from an endless stream of shady touts: all were part of its exotic charm and otherworldliness, together with the easy smiles of the Cairene children and...djsmall2004-12-16T21:35:24+02:00From Cairo to Mount Sinai, Part One: Lovely in a Malnourished Toothless Kind of Way
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After ten days in Cairo my bowels were acting up, so my memories of the bus journey to the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai are enveloped in a haze of achy drowsiness. My plan was to spend the whole of Lent at St Catherine's, the oldest continually inhabited Christian monastery in the world. I had been in and out of monasteries for years, but this would be my first experience of monasticism outside the West and my first time in an Arabic-speaking country. Though a Christian, I have always been fascinated by Islam, which for me has been...djsmall2004-12-15T15:01:56+02:00
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The United States is the only country which evolved from barbarity to decadence without ever attaining civilisation. -- Oscar Wilde...djsmall2004-11-04T12:28:40+02:00A Conversation with Japanese Tea, Part Four: Artful Yet Innocent in East Jerusalem
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Read Part One. Read Part Two. Read Part Three. 'It was very nice to meet you. If you were going to Suez, I could have given you a lift,' the Indian imam said warmly. My reverie was broken and I was back at the bus station in Taba at the Egyptian-Israeli border. Herlad and Chai were tucking into the standard Bedouin fare of rice and goatchop, and, I now noticed, so was I. Flies were buzzing mercilessly and an Arab man was peeing against a wall nearby, but it was still a relief to be out of Israel....djsmall2004-10-14T15:34:54+02:00A Conversation with Japanese Tea, Part Three: Containing an Interlude
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Read Part One. Read Part Two. Chai breezed into Jerusalem by bus, fresh from Turkey where he'd suffered even more bisexual assaults, and still reeling from Big Problem Baghdad. What a journey he'd been having! Imagine him, eighteen years old, tall and slight, impressionable and always quick to laugh; in possession of a straightforward comic delivery that caught us off guard in its (conscious?) exploitation of Japanese stereotypes, leaving us at each moment to wonder, 'Is this guy putting us on?'; and remarkably at ease in the company of strangers, eager to answer questions and forthcoming with the little naughty...djsmall2004-10-11T09:38:23+02:00Summer with its changes
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Summer has brought changes with it. At the end of the valley reclines a one-room stone cottage, and that is where I make my home now. A table, a desk, a typewriter; bed, toilet, marble sink and umpteen icons of Christ and the Virgin--that is practically all there is. My company: ants, midges, a tortoise in the bushes beneath the window. Silence but for the cicada songs, growing louder with each hotter day; and wind through the olive trees; and maybe the sea, but only just....djsmall2004-06-23T19:30:12+02:00Reading Friedman at the Ramses Hilton Centre
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The movie didn't start for another thirty minutes, so there was a lot of canned Egyptian techno-pop to look forward to. Instead of merely waiting for the lights to dim, I read from Thomas Friedman's book 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization'. It had not occupied first place on my list of things to read, but while I was in Tel Aviv I discovered that Israel is not the best place to find Noam Chomsky's book about the Israeli-Palestinian disaster. Reading the book has been an exercise in patience. Journalists like Friedman have not been trained to evaluate,...djsmall2004-04-29T00:36:33+02:00A Conversation with Japanese Tea, Part Two: No Problem Baghdad, Big Problem Baghdad
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'You were in Baghdad last month?' I asked, astonished. 'Yes, no problem!' Chai answered. 'I fly to Moscow and there I met an activist on way to Iraq, and so I thought: I go to Iraq too!' Chai recounted his exploits with a remarkable childlikeness and an incredible sense of humor, not to mention an outrageously appropriate Japanese accent. His English was not good, and it would take a Dickensian writer to reproduce its maximum comic effect. Very quickly, though, Her Lad and I realized we had stumbled across a completely unique and wonderful specimen of our silly species....djsmall2004-04-28T02:20:17+02:00Her Lad and the Muezzin's Orgasmic Cry
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The walk from Cairo's medieval quarter was back-lit by the setting sun, and for a moment the horrible air pollution here seemed almost worth it. The soft hues of a hundred colors framed the city's thousand minarets, their crescent-topped points raised proudly heavenward, as the muezzin's cry called the faithful to the sunset prayer. We were just stepping off the curb into a six-pronged intersection when the call to prayer rang out from a mosque only yards away, ripping through us like piss-shiver, an erotic puncturing of the heart. So it was for me, at any rate. Her Lad's eyes...djsmall2004-04-26T00:29:19+02:00A Conversation with Japanese Tea, Part One: Musings on an Opening Question
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Two French lovers had turned down our request that all four of us share a taxi to the Israeli-Egyptian border, when a young man from Japan approached and asked, 'Do you have a visa for Egypt?'...djsmall2004-04-24T15:52:41+02:00