Back in the US of A Don't Know How Lucky U R

I guess you can tell if you scan my recent posts that I am still thinking a lot about my experience in Egypt. It was my first time visiting any country south of the Mediterranean and my first time in a place where I didn't speak the language and my first experience in an Arab nation, so I guess it's understandable and perhaps even good that my two weeks rocked my world. I would not have it otherwise. I didn't even visit the pyramids, but I had such a great opportunity to spend time with everyday Egyptians that to spend time with tour guides just didn't hold appeal. Maybe I'll go back when I'm 80 and sign on to a tour bus group that will take me straight from the airport to the pyramids, maybe even let me pose on a camel's back. The only camels I saw were loose in the streets of Nuweiba, wandering freely, eating out of the town's open dumpsters before heading home to sleep.

I prepared for my visit by reading all the Egyptian novels I could cram in, almost all of Mahfouz and a major selection of Aswany. It turned out to be a really great preparation. Today, my hair stylist, working diligently to repair my travel's double devastation of the desert's sun and the sea's salt, asked me if I'd ever felt real culture shock. I thought about it, thought about the women in hijabs and birqas and the men in long, loose galabiyas, the bruises in the middle of the devout men's foreheads, the hookahs and the separation of the sexes, the crazy crazy traffic and the all-night bazaar life that substituted for nightclub life, and I had to answer, "No, not really." Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction can be more informative than truth.

Now that I'm back, I'm rereading a lot, mostly archives of the articles about the revolution that make more sense after having crossed Cairo's bridges and walked around Tahrir Square. I'm reading more non-fiction now: Aswany again, but his pre and post revolution collection of essays this time, "The State of Egypt." And a book I heard about right before I left and ordered right after my return was waiting in my mailbox today after work: "Cairo: The City Victorious."

Travel is not just tourist sites and postcards, not just collecting souvenirs. Travel is a quest for understanding another place, another people, another way of life. I am still on my quest, even though I'm back in Wisconsin, where democracy is just as precious and precarious as it is elsewhere, as our friends in Egypt are now experiencing. Here, democracy is just looking a little less inviting and exciting than it is in Cairo, with a careless Republican government fully installed and controlling the conditions of our daily lives with as little regard for diverse opinions as well, any deposed Egyptian tyrant. Thank goodness state's here don't control the military nor even most levels of law enforcement. That may prove the essential diffence.