Flight of Fancy

Kaleidoscope Eyes

Soon, I'll find I've disappeared completely, once more. Again and again, all over again. A blur in the headlights. A mirage in your eyes. A figment of your imagination.

The Persistence of Memory

Apologies, Dalí.

Minding gaps

(Quiet)

Sometimes, it pays to really, truly appreciate the lush, red carpets and amber lighting, the oaken furnishings, the clipped echoes of eager footsteps trotting along long, candle-lit corridors. It pays to let the strains of music flow over you like a park fountain in summer. It pays to quell the fury within.

Rivers of steam

Because everything has a shelf life.

In the peak of summer, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible crabbiness.

Symmetry

(It was with great astonishment that I realised this morning that I'd completely forgotten to throw in the handful of words and pictures I'd diligently stashed away in a Word document about Cairo here. Clearly, this oversight is earth-shattering.
*straightface*)

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Cairo suddenly feels a million miles ago…

Desert Daze

The Sinai from the sky.

In keeping with the intricate, convoluted unravelling of events over the past year, my trip to Cairo almost didn’t happen. In the midst of juggling a million potential travel plans, trying to anticipate all the visas I’d need, and in trying to apply for too many in too short a time frame, I somehow ended up passport-less until the morning before I was to leave for Egypt. Such inconveniences barely frazzle these days. Realistically, I can’t really allow them to, what with anxiety attacks and aneurysms being so annoyingly detrimental to long-distance locomotion…

In retrospect, however, I probably shouldn’t have stayed up the entire night before I left. Perhaps, then, the hapless guy at the window seat in my row on the first excruciating eleven-hour flight from Perth to Dubai wouldn’t have had to climb over my seat (yes, over. As in, one foot on my arm-rest, one leg over me, followed by a carefully placed foot on the aisle) a few thousand times to make his way to the toilet, as I collapsed into a veritable coma.

Oh, but the Sinai! Thankfully, much awake through the second four-hour leg from Dubai to Cairo, I shutterbugged manically at the wonderfully weird landscape below. Acres and acres of dry, sculpted desertscapes, housing powdery dunes sprinkled amongst unforgiving crags. Red, red earth, baked crisp. Abrasive tunnels of wind, blinding dust swirls, slowly yet resolutely eating away at their world. Arid, thirsty magic. A rumbling silence.

I’ve never been more acutely aware of how crippling it is to be utterly lost in translation. More accurately, lost without translation. In more ways than I can count, Egypt looks, smells, and feels like India. But something as simple as stepping into a cab and trying to get somewhere disintegrates into an exercise of hopeless futility. I seriously doubt I’ve ever mimed more in my life. Even writing doesn’t work as you’d hope, since all the numbers are read backwards. I spent a large part of a morning trying to explain to a cabbie that I wanted to go to No. 26 on a certain street, while he planted the cab stubbornly at No. 62, insisting that we’d arrived. It took a while until I saw the light.

Managing to wrangle a trip to Egypt at the company’s expense seemed like a very clever idea. In theory. The flipside of attending an intensive, unimaginably academic training course in an exotic country is that, while, for all practical purposes, you’ve hit a pot of gold, being where you are and everything, the struggle is in trying to see and do everything while watching, with cold horror, time slip through your fingers.

In a while, though, you get better at juggling everything, once again. Thanks to an extremely patient Egyptian girl, Azza, also attending the same course, the four mind-boggled non-Egyptians were taken to the very beautiful Azhar Park, set smack in the middle of Old Egypt. An elevated dusk, surrounded by minarets, graves, and the muzzein’s call. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the magic started to pour into my skin, like backlit, mellow honey.

At first glance, the office building in Cairo where the course was held, has the appearance of a quiet suburban residence, much like the upmarket homes in Connought Place or Gulmohar Park in Delhi. Leaning against the barricade on the balcony of the ninth floor while nibbling at a lunch of tomato, cheese and bread, each day I’d thaw in the blinding sunlight and soak in a bit more of the city. Among the myriad unusual sights that have come to epitomise Cairo for me was that of an Arab lying blissfully asleep in a patch of sunlight for a good part of the day, every day. It was Azza who explained that the reclining Egyptian was most likely the night-shift security guard of a nearby building, catching his forty winks after a long day of, most intriguingly, retail. Apparently, it’s a common thing for locals to set up temporary shop along street corners, selling odds and ends to supplement their income. As I was slowly discovering, in Cairo, the surprises never cease.

Hazy Chain

Scours. Scars. Cars.
Lees. Leas. Lease.
Seer. Sear.
Fear.
Here.

Momentary Lapses

Half Full

Round and round and round and round...

TrooBloo