A car lightly sideswiped Haitham as we were groggily crossing Talaat Harb street after grabbing our sandwiches this morning. It spun him around and he fell back onto the curb, panting slightly. I’ll give the driver credit; he stopped in his car, opened his window, and peered out at us silently. I should note that he was watching my reaction, not Haitham’s – he barely glanced at the man he’d hit. When I didn’t run at him clutching my passport and roaring “lawyer” he steadily accelerated away and vanished into the heavy traffic. We certainly weren’t in Jordan anymore. And I thought the traffic in Amman was bad!

So what should two foreigners do in Egypt first? The pyramids, of course. Haitham didn’t want to take a taxi, or the metro, or a combination of both, so we found the local’s bus system hidden under a highway overpass and waited about half an hour for it to slowly load up with people so that the bored-looking driver could stop chain-smoking and start driving.

What can you say about the pyramids that hasn’t already been said? It was exciting to see them slowly rise like mountains, shimmering in the Cairo haze, over the tops of the apartment buildings. Specials on TV never show them within the context of the ever-growing city around them, which made it all the more unreal. Then we got off the cramped microbus and came crashing back to the reality of the poor Giza district around us. Within minutes, three different men had tried to haggle with Haitham to have us rent horses to ride around the enclosed, fenced-off desert surrounding the pyramids. Haitham was all for it, but I took one look at the bony, sad-looking nags penned up in the shadow of the pyramids and tried to convince him otherwise.

About a hundred years ago, this would have looked intrepid. Now it's just 80 pounds + guide.

In the end, we ended up renting a couple horses for an hour, and unwillingly found ourselves renting a “guide” as well, who helpfully pointed to the large things dominating the skyline and said “These – pyramids.” Haitham’s horse seemed slightly healthier, but my horse kept tripping over things – rocks, sand, its own legs, air molecules – which I found somewhat alarming. We had to pay this guide’s admission fee into the pyramid site, and then it was time for my first fun experience with Egyptian pricing.

Egyptian historical sites love foreigners’ money. They really do. And good ol’ President Hosney Mubarak (yes, that’s the same root triconsonant as the American president, Barack means “bless” and Mubarak means “blessed”) really wants to help out his Egyptian countrymen (who all are united in hating his corrupt guts) so he makes sure that while the prices for historical sites are written out for foreigners in English, clearly stating that the pyramids are 60 pounds to enter, written next to it in Arabic is the 2 pound price for Egyptians and all other Arabs. I assume that the vast majority of foreigners who visit the pyramids don’t read Arabic, so they never know the price difference.

Haitham thought he could get me in for the price of an Egyptian; he explained that he had done the same for his friend James, who had lived in Jordan a few years ago and traveled to Egypt with Haitham. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so I hid quietly around a corner as Haitham went up to the counter to easily secure two 2-pound tickets, with الهرامات (al-Haramat, the pyramids) written on it. Meanwhile, my eyes meandered over the never-ending flow of tourists in, out, and around the security checkpoint-scanner gate. A couple of people whom I thought were Wisconsinites stopped nearby, and looked at the ticket prices on the wall. “Sheiza” one of them muttered disgustedly, proving that they were probably more likely to be original Germans than ancestral Germans like my countrymen.

The “I’m Arab” ticket didn’t work. Haitham passed through without difficulty, but then the burly officer/bouncer grabbed my ticket out of my hands and waved it at me, and then at Haitham when he tried to pull me through. “Does he look like one of us?” he grated to Haitham in Arabic. “Where is this foreigner from?” I answered him in Arabic, “I’m Jordanian, can’t you tell by my accent?” It was, after all, noticeably Jordanian. The man cursed under his breath, puffing up his medal and badge-covered chest. “I’m just a poor student traveler,” I told the man in Arabic, trying to calm him down, but the word I used for poor, “miskeen,” is more frequently used for downtrodden and people with bad luck, and Haitham told me later that he thought the man was going to punch me in the face in anger. As I went back to get my foreigner-priced ticket, Haitham told me that the bouncer kept cursing, told him that foreigners were never miskeen compared with Arabs, never deserve anything but foreigner pricing and that Haitham should be ashamed of himself for trying to “help” me around the 30x higher pricing. Well then!

He had a point, of course. If Haitham hadn’t suggested trying to get me in for cheap, I wouldn’t have bothered with the extra hassle of rule-breaking. Paying the equivalent of 11 USD to see the most famous ancient ruins in the world was not going to break my budget and I didn’t protest any further. It wouldn’t be the last time he’d try to “help” me, though.

Khafre's Pyramid and and the Unknowing Galloper

We rejoined our horses and Farghut, our knowledgeable guide. Haitham wanted to immediately burst into a gallop, but I was still feeling sick, since even before leaving, and I loudly protested the thought of forcing this poor, near-death animal and myself to suffer any further by heaving ourselves across the sand and probably crashing headlong into an ancient monument. It’s true; you practically trip over ancient monuments out here. Farghut appeared amused with this suggestion and suddenly slapped my horse on the rear, completely without my suggestion that perhaps we should wait on this idea. “No! No! NOOOOOOOOOOO” I screamed – in a very manly way, as my horse’s joints suddenly creaked into action and I was flung forward in the saddle. Egyptian saddles, I should note, are not like American “beginner” saddles and I would not consider myself anything but a beginner at horseback riding. I was in for the ride of my soon-to-be-ended life.

Continue reading this post…

Egypt, the crown of the Arab world. Cairo, the jewel of the crown. And the Egyptian Museum, the center of Cairo and the archive for most of the greatest works and achievements of the ancient world. And here we are, only a few blocks away from it in a small, cramped-but-clean room in the Australian Hostel.

Haitham and I left Amman at 3:30 promptly, thanks to the punctuality of the al-Moomayez taxi. Unfortunately that will be the last time I have anything good to say about this taxi service. I used them throughout 2009 to get me to the airport while praising them to friends and colleagues for their price and quality of service. The standard dingy yellow taxi wants JD25, but Moomayez only needs JD9 since they follow the meter! I would tell them. Today, however, the operator told me blandly that we would be required to use the Mercedes to get to the airport, instead of my usual Toyota, at twice the price per kilometer. I ranted at her for a few minutes, then hung up. Regardless of my rage, our JD20 chariot was waiting for us at exactly the time specified. Haitham was in shock that a transport service in Jordan would actually be on time. As for me, “being on time” for a taxi service shouldn’t be a charge that requires a double increase in fare prices all at once. Farewell, Taxi Moomayez.

Our driver was a huge hoout of a man who definitely had his seat pushed back all of the way. I made sure to offer him one of the brownies I’d made for Haitham and I, knowing that otherwise the delicious smell of chocolate might drive him insane and send us careening off the road. He and Haitham chatted amicably while I busied myself with taking the cornucopia of pills that Haitham had brought me, in the order he specified.

Like a kid in an amazing cancer-filled candy store...

This was Haitham’s first time in an airport, and he was curious to see the duty-free shop. However, he railed against the prices, noting as I already had that the prices here might be without tax, but because of the rip-off nature of airports the price was essentially the same as in Zarqa’, although better than Amman. We found our flight and boarded right away, seated in the back of the plane behind a group of Westernized Ammani high school students on their way to a conference. Their clothes and 100% American accent made them stand out in stark contrast to the rows of robed men and women who sat quietly throughout the rest of the aircraft.

As the plane roared and picked up speed on the runway, Haitham gazed out the window, muttering to himself rapidly in Arabic, words that I couldn’t quite make out. At the second the wheels left the runway and we became airborne, he moaned briefly in a single monosyllabic utterance and his hands twitched briefly on the armrests. Once we were safely aloft, he only briefly paid attention to the flight, only while going through some brief turbulence which caused him to look up sharply from his music player and question to me as to why we were shaking and vibrating. Personally, I was more interested in the complimentary sandwiches being served to us – for a short hour-long flight, I was pleased with the treatment.

You're not going to believe this but yes, we did have to take this ridiculous roundabout detour around Israel instead of just flying in a straight line to Cairo

We descended through the roiling black clouds above al-Musr to a twinkling carpet of gold and red sparks, the lights of the buildings and cars below. They stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Haitham definitely seemed to be discomforted by the landing, and when you think about it, it’s perfectly natural to be alarmed when you see the earth rushing up to you with uncontrollable and implacable speed. I told him, “There’s going to be a bump when we land.” He whirled in his seat to stare at me. “Will it hurt?” I paused, then nodded as the plane touched down. “You tell me.” Along with all the other Arabs on the plane, he burst into applause, a cultural trait that I’ve gotten used to.

After a short bus ride from plane on the tarmac back to Cairo’s airport, I paid my $15 for the Egyptian visa (Haitham did not require one; the first thing of many he would be receiving for nothing or almost nothing in our journey) and we strode purposefully with our luggage through the relatively quiet airport towards the door. The final customs check and declaration were interesting. A tall, elderly woman asked Haitham to open his bag to have it checked, and I naturally followed suit and opened my bag on the table next to his and waited for her to finish with him.

Once the customs woman finished making sure that Haitham wasn’t importing anything dangerous or illegal in his socks, I called to her that I was ready. She looked at me, uncomprehending, and a short man with gold piping on his sleeves rushed over to her and hissed, “Why did you stop that American!?!” She backed away from him, pleading that she hadn’t stopped me and that she didn’t know why I’d opened my bag. Haitham came forward and tried to explain that I had just been following his lead, but commented drolly that it was interesting that Americans didn’t get their luggage checked. The officer paled and his bushy mustache bristled under his bulbous nose. “That’s not true at all,” he insisted, glaring at my friend. Haitham merely shrugged and gestured for me to close my bag; we left the airport without further incident.

Now the question of the night still remained: how were we to find our way to the Australian Hostel? It seemed that we had several options in front of us. If we had booked for three nights online at the hostel, they would have found us and picked us up for free from the airport directly for 60 pounds, the equivalent of 8 JD. Now, of course, we were being swarmed by eager taxi drivers who I’m sure would have liked nothing more than to escort us to our location for twice that. Haitham wasn’t having any of that, of course. He quickly found us a bus to our destination on Tahrir Street that had a fare of 1 pound per person. We brought our luggage inside, and when the bus’s assistant protested, Haitham gave him another 2 pounds and bought a third ticket for our good friend Luggage. He quieted down at that, and joked with Haitham that for that, they’d alter the route and take us straight to Tahrir.

It was definitely a joke because it took an hour by bus, plus another hour of walking, just to find the hidden hostel. After disembarking near that famous Egyptian Museum previously mentioned, we wandered about blindly for a long time randomly asking strangers for directions until we found someone who let Haitham borrow his phone. Thankfully, that was all it took to direct Haitham up the (apparently) famous Talaat al-Harb street, past the KFC (of which there are apparently many!) and to the small alley with the Australian Hostel building.

I like this room they’ve put us in. Tall ceilings, a nice red silk curtain over the balcony, and obviously, free and serviceable wireless Internet. Haitham is in the middle of praying at this moment so I’m trying to type as quietly as possible so as to not disturb him. He found which direction Mecca is, which ironically happens to be about 2 degrees to my right so it almost looks like he’s prostrating himself at the foot of my bed, directly towards me. I won’t tell him that, of course, or at least not for another few minutes while he’s busy…

It’s been a year in the making, but Haitham and I are only a few hours from being airborne from Jordan to Egypt, or Musr as it’s called in Arabic. The two of us originally started planning this last year when our friend Silas was still in Jordan, but things never panned out and we had to put it on hold for quite awhile before we could try again this spring.

We’ve got a pretty good chunk of time allotted for the trip. Haitham was able to take off of work until the 2nd of April, and thanks to Whitman’s spring break, I’m going stay a few days beyond his departure and won’t get back to Jordan until the evening of the 5th. It’s the first time Haitham has ever been on an airplane, so I’m looking forward to seeing how my buddy handles his premiere flying experience.

I wish I could say that I’m as physically healthy as I am excited for the trip. I came down with some sort of mild cold/fever yesterday, the day before this trip, and my head feels like its stuffed with cotton balls. Haitham is currently napping somewhere else in the house; he came straight to my place from his 3rd shift job at Hikma, Jordan’s largest pharmaceutical company. He was able to bring me some powerful anti-fever medication and my head now pleasantly feels like it’s been stuffed with cavorting kittens, gently batting at my cerebrum with their fuzzy little paws.

We’ll be taking the Al-Moomayez taxi to the airport at 3:30, and our flight is scheduled for 5:40 – (insha’allah, as we must always say). The trip schedule has not yet been fully finalized but we’re definitely doing a few days in Cairo, a few days in Alexandria, then taking the train line along the Nile River to Upper Egypt to see the Valley of the Kings and the awe-inspiring Abu Simbel temples along the border of Sudan.

Here’s hoping for a gentle and turbulence-free journey…I’d like to keep my head kitten-free for as much of the trip as possible!

I almost had a heart attack today when I opened up my Thunderbird email client after setting up and removing some SMTP accounts. Of my three main email accounts, the primary account that I use here in Jordan had suddenly vanished, taking out about 6,000 emails from the past year. I had been using a plugin called SmtpSelect to help better catalog my numerous email aliases and sub-accounts, and when I disabled it, suddenly all of my Gmail was gone.

After I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that with almost 500MB of data in that IMAP folder, I would have had some serious hard drive action if it had actually deleted the messages. So I went to c:\users\zth\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles\account.default\ImapMail and sure enough, there was my Gmail folder, still there with no apparent damage done to it.

But I simply could not figure out how to get Thunderbird to realize that the folder was still there and parse the data out of it. There was no “import” button in the program and desperate Google searches were turning up nothing.

I sorted the account.default folder window by date modified so I could try to pinpoint what files might have been edited in the past 10 minutes. Cookies, plugins, the Thunderbird 3 index database (at a whopping 168MB), and something called “foldertree” which was a lot less helpful than I hoped it would be.

The key was in a small file called prefs.js. I had ignored it first, figuring it was a Javascript file but “preferences” was too intriguing to pass by twice. I opened it up in Notepad and examined it. Sure enough, it contained all of the different account records and folder links back out to Windows Explorer. Exactly what I was looking for. All of my other accounts were referenced in there in their specific ImapMail subfolders, but my main Gmail account was conspicuously absent.

It would have been difficult but not impossible for me to look at my secondary Gmail account and be able to piece things back together for how the account properties were coded into this prefs file. But backups came to the rescue! That and the automatic Windows Vista/Windows 7 ”previous version’ function, which completely saved me. I merely right clicked on the prefs.js file, selected the “Previous Versions” tab, and selected the most recent automatic backup of the file from last week. I clicked “Restore”, crossed my fingers, and opened up Thunderbird again.

Done. The prefs.js file had instantaneously restored all of my accounts back to their former selves and everything was being parsed properly. It was then that I realized I had been holding my breath for 20 minutes straight.

I was pretty proud of myself; it was one of the few times I’ve ever actually lived up to my so-called “technician” reputation and actually figured out something for myself as opposed to turning to the Internet for guidance. Of course, that’s exactly why I wrote this blog entry, in the hopes that perhaps it will help someone else out.

I recently had an eye-opening look at the differences between standard biology theory in the west versus the east. One of the teachers I know here recently had some inpatient surgery, and told all of us that she was going to “demand that the nurses don’t take my plants out of my hospital room at night!” Everyone who had lived in Jordan for awhile chuckled at this, but we new teachers were confused. Why would Jordanian nurses take plants out of the rooms of sick people?

Our elders explained that it was a common theory in the Arab world that at night, plants start taking in and using oxygen and compete with humans for it. Because of this theory, many people here make sure that they remove all the plants from their bedroom at night and put them outside in the hall. I confirmed this with a friend of mine here who has a bachelor’s degree in nursing. “Of course you put the plants outside of the room, especially in a hospital,” he said. “Otherwise, they might suck up all of the oxygen in the room.”

I was completely dumbfounded by this. Now, I can’t speak for all of the countries in the west, or other states besides Wisconsin, or even other school systems besides the ones I went to. However, I’m pretty sure that it’s a standard part of middle school biology classes that we learn that plants = good for oxygen, regardless of the time of day. On that same topic, I learned that there are old superstitions here that walking through a forest at night can be harmful to your health, for the same reasons.

I had to find out where this completely contradictory idea came from.

In my completely scientific research process of “searching The Google” I came across some pretty interesting articles, the most credible of these being from “Yahoo! Health Expert” Doctor Maoshing Ni. I checked his credentials – he’s a specialist in Chinese medicine and anti-aging research.

To get through the night, most plants reverse the process of photosynthesis and breathe, like you and I, by burning carbohydrates and oxygen while producing carbon dioxide and water. So surround yourself with plants during the day but remove them from your bedroom at night when you sleep.

On this Yahoo! Answers question thread, I found the back-and-forth between people to be particularly interesting. The reactions of most of the question answers that you can see if you scroll down the page (that the asker did not select to be “best answer”) were the same as mine – incredulous that someone would even ask the question (also note the citation on the “best answer” selection is Dr. Maoshing’s article).

Finally, the page that I found to be the most helpful was this one from the Aroid Forum. After establishing that yes, plants do shut down photosynthetic reactions at night, I learned that yes, that does mean that they need to carry out simple respiration at night, same as humans. Maybe it was just my school, but strike one against me: I was wrong. I don’t recall ever learning that plants carry out human-like respiration in the absence of light.

But is the Eastern World right? Let’s look at the math from Aroid Forum. (Bold emphasis added by me)

I asked a friend who did his doctoral work on plant respiration and got the approximation that the emission of CO2 in the dark is unlikely to exceed 4 micro moles per square meter of leaf surface per second. This is the same as the O2 taken up. Say our plants have a leaf area of one meter. Let’s say for the sake of argument that both upper and lower leaf surfaces emit at that rate, so our plants use up 8 micro moles PER SECOND (please excuse the upper case, but when we think of a whole night the seconds really add up).

In an 8-hour night, we have the 8 micro moles/s x 3600 s/h x 8 h = 230400 micro moles of oxygen the plants take up. That is only millionths of moles, so it amounts to 0.23 mole. That got the number back down in a hurry.

How much oxygen was in the room to start with?
A room 4 m x 4 m x 2.4 m has 38.4 cubic meters of air. That is 38400 liters.
At room temperature, a mole of gas is about 25 liters, so the room has 1536 moles of air.
If we say the air in the room is 20 % oxygen, we have 307 moles of oxygen to start with.

How much of the total oxygen in the room did the plant use? It is 0.23/307 = 0.075 %.

What about our oxygen-starved sleeper?
A person breathes out about 900 g CO2 per day or about 300 g in an 8-hour night.
CO2 has a mole weight of 44.
300/44 = 6.8 moles CO2 emitted = moles O2 taken up by a person in the night.

The 6.8 moles of oxygen used by the sleeping person amounts to only about 6.8/307 = 2.2 % of that available.

How do the plant and the sleeper compare? The plant uses 0.23/6.8 = 3.4 % as much.

With all the guessing (“approximation” in science-speak), none of the numbers has any meaning unless it’s rounded off to only one digit. You can insist that a sleeping person uses less oxygen than an active one, the room is smaller and the plant larger, but that doesn’t change anything. A good-sized plant surface won’t reduce the oxygen content of the room by much more than a tenth of a percent, and that is only about three percent of what the inhabitant uses up.

So, that takes care of that. To summarize, no one has been getting the complete picture so everyone’s a little bit wrong. My American school never taught me that plants consume any oxygen at all, and Eastern schools don’t mention exactly how ridiculously small the amount of consumed oxygen is.

And bottom line: how many of us sleep in completely air-tight sealed rooms, anyway? Eastern science really needs to take that into their considerations, otherwise they’re ignoring the question of how humans don’t just kill themselves off with the amount of CO2 we use up in one night. Or, for that matter, why a husband and wife who sleep in the same bed don’t suffer from oxygen deprivation. Unless you sleep with your head in a plastic bag (in which case you probably have bigger problems, my friend) that plant next to your bed, or even an entire roomful of them, isn’t going harm you a single bit.

Science!

Intracom provided my teammate Andrew with the company’s high-definition Panasonic HDC-HS9 camcorder during the race, in order to help record the memories of us being sweaty and exhausted. Now just imagine the wonders of being sweaty and exhausted, captured in high-definition! That’s right, 1440 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080 video clips were being taken of us the entire time.

We're holding onto his legs as he does this, I promise

Andrew and I shared one of the three hotel rooms that our team utilized, and after the awards ceremony I asked him if he would mind me taking copies of the video. He told me to go ahead, but warned me of the difficulty of doing so. He told me that I needed to have a special program to play the videos back, and that they took a long time to transfer off the camcorder.

I got out my Windows 7 laptop, took his USB cable, and had the files downloaded and playing on my computer in Windows Media Player 12 (WMP) in less than a minute. He stared at the laptop in amazement. “How did you do that?” I explained that Windows 7 really focused on interoperability and being able to work with as many devices as possible. They probably got tired of Apple people warbling about how it “just works” and devoted some of their billions into tangible R&D…these days, sure enough, everything “just works” with Windows 7, too. Score one for the Redmond team!

.MTS files are the default file format that most high-def camcorders use, and I don’t know how many other free programs can play them besides WMP. Of course, the king of Open Source Media Players, VLC, plays them without issue, although they need to be de-interlaced and the playback is slower on older computers.

I’ve put one of the MTS files up on HeiseHeise.com, and you can download it here to check it out. Keep in mind that it’s about 26 megabytes in size, and half a minute in length, at 1440 by 1080 pixels of resolution. Personally, I was quite impressed at the level of quality Panasonic was able to fit into such a comparably small size! Try playing it back with Windows Media Player, but if it gives you an error message, download and install VLC and you can be assured that this file, and anything else you throw at it, will work with it!

After I assisted Andrew with getting the .MTS files off his camcorder, he took them and made a nice little 4 minute video of highlights from the ride, set to music. Just imagine you’re out there with us on the highways!