Tales from the Quim

Yeh so I havent posted in a few months.. Went to Manila for a week back in March, didn’t get out much and stayed around Makati in a nice hotel. Everyone is so over nice there, it can be a bit much but they do suceed in making you smile in the end. Clothes are cheap there as a fair few big names are manufactured there, like polo and crap.

So yea the hotel was nice, and I picked up some rare breed on the way over.

So after that I drove from Sydney to Fraser Island and back, which is about 3000 k’s return. I got to see Guru and Nads before they fucked off to Mauritius.

Fraser was cained by big seas and we couldn’t get to the usual spot up the sandy cape, we did however get a lot of food and drink into us and had a good time…

Soooo.. I’m off to Toronto, Calgary, Hong Kong and Jakarta on Wednesday. If yer lucky and if anyone actually reads this, there might be a post after that. Pics will prolly hit facebook first as they have a nice upload applet.

So I went to Cairo for a couple of weeks. It was raining and 12 degrees when I arrived which was unusual, it doesn’t rain very often and you could tell as the drains don’t work very well there being clogged full of rubbish and dirt and there is large puddles of muddy water everywhere.

Travelled Emirates on the way there and they were ok, nice I guess, limousine pickup to the airport. The Sydney business lounge has really good food compared to others. I spent a couple of hours in Dubai airport business lounge which was very average, very crowded, I recommend hassling for a first class lounge pass at Sydney.

I arranged a pickup from the airport with the hotel which was a good idea, the system there is the guy will take your passport, get your visa, walk around the queue at immigration and get your passport stamped, come get you and take you to the car… queue jumping is the goods.

So the first thing you notice is the police, that look more like military, with guns standing around on intersections everywhere, you never know if their guns work, some have ak’s and some have semi automatic shotguns. As you get closer to garden city near where the embassies and hotels are there are a lot more armed police, some armoured vehicles, metal bomb proof screens they sit behind at checkpoints.

Getting to the hotel they take your bags and use a big industrial xray on them, you do the usual airport like metal detector stuff, this is common in most buildings. Although I eventually noticed that people beeped and no one cared, even at the airport on the way out, although you and your luggage get done at the front door as well by a serious looking guy so I guess after that it’s a formality.

The Grand Hyatt Cairo is on the Nile with views to the pyramids, quite nice.

The first day we went to the museum, I don’t think a cent has been spent on that place since the 60’s except for x-ray machines and metal detectors. The displays that do have descriptions have some faded 1960’s typewriting on yellow faded cards. There’s heaps of stuff to look at, you are not supposed to take photo’s but then I think I’d already seen everything in there in photos before anyway. They have a copy of the Rosetta stone that the British sent them in 2005 after the Egyptians demanded it was returned, muahah. It looked pretty much like the real one at the British Museum :) King Tuts treasure is here and it’s worth the visit to see.

The Khan El Khalili bazaar certainly is crowded. One end is more touristy and the other is your usual grotty north African city. Roasted sweet potatos are the local snack, I saw one guy’s cart set up roasting next to a fireworks stall, business as usual for Egyptian safety standards. It’s weird being squished up against the old women and old men, I mean really squashed up, it’s the way things work there, everyone just keeps pushing until it moves again or the stronger side dominates, the same way intersections and traffic direction work on the roads.

On my last day there a colleague drove us to Giza to get a close up of some pyramids. They are big… and old.. umm.. yea…

Next episode, Manila.

I stayed in Australia long enough to find somewhere to rent in Sydney, I took a week off to move what I could from Brisbane (still a few things left to move, guess I need to come and visit soon). After that I’d been there 6 days before flying out, but that’s another episode.

So I’ve rented a 2 bedroom house with off street parking at Newtown. Newtown is a lot like the Valley or West End, just 10 times larger than either. There was about 60 people at the inspection and I was luckily (well it wasn’t luck) fully prepared with a completed application with cover letter and written references.

A fellow from our office is packing up and moving back to England, so it was very convenient that he had most all the furniture and white goods I needed for sale.

I decided to drive down the pacific highway rather than the new england. I figured that now there is an hour taken off the leg to Byron it’s probably comparable. It is a more interesting drive, although the little towns that make you drop to 50k’s is a bit over the top, I know they are trying to get some money into their local economy, but screw them for making me slow down, I’ll spend my money somewhere that doesn’t selfishly slow down the the highway. I guess without stopping for a truck that caught fire, it would have been about 11 hours.

So the good news for everybody is I have a spare room and spare bed, a spare key. The house is 320m from Macdonaldtown train station which is 2 stops from central. The nearest pub (excluding the Newtown which closed its doors – and was gay anyway) is the Marlborough which is even closer than the train station at 195m walk.

So there’s no excuse to not visit.

Anyway, next episode is Cairo, I’m here now, more later.