Thank god for Nyquil. It put me right to sleep last night despite my headache, runny nose, sore throat, fever, and minor cough due to brachial inflamation... I should be getting paid endorsement for this. I woke up at like 8 after it wore off I guess and promptly took another dose. Right back out until noon. I've never been such a fan! Ugh, I do hate being sick though. Stupid college. I heard it's really spreading around now. Isn't that gross...

11 more hours and I'll be 19. My last teenage year... That's kind of crazy. If I ever want to become a teen idol or a teenage werewolf or a teenage mutant ninja turtle then I have 365.5 days to do it. Let's get crackin'...

Apparently my blog entries suck lately. Well I'm taking a dump while I write this one so hopefully it'll be way better!
College is fun. It's good to be back around SP and the old friends. It's bad to not be around some people though... So I am often aloof and crap like that. I want to figure out how to handle that...
I'm at home right now... My parents threw a 'half our lives in colorado' party last night, second billing being Caley and my birthdays. It was actually pretty fun!
Still no word about jobs yet... Catering orientation meeting is tuesday.
Maybe this entry still does suck. But at least I pooped. I honestly care more about that right now.

So its my first day of the new semester... Hooray!..? I'm sitting in my first class. Starts in 20 minutes. I'm actually kind of excited...
I went to the job fair early this morning and I acually feel kind of good about it. The library was all full for jobs but there are a few others... I'm sure I'll get SOMETHING. I hope. Maybe work study will be good...
Still miss you.

So... I'm back.  Europe was amazing.  I want to move to Amsterdam.  Holland is the land of the free.  And oh so beautiful.  Italy was also really nice and they of course had the best dang Italian food I've ever had in Tuscany.  Paris was ok for the what... 3 hours we had there.  Eiffel Tower was impressive and pretty.  Glad we made the effort!  And yadda yadda.

I miss Mikey so much.  How can you spend a month straight with someone like that and not get even a little tired of them?  ::sigh:: I'm so... melancholy right now.

What does it sound like when you try to clean underneath your keyboard because you opened a can of delicious Egyptian apple soda right next to it and then the h key was really sticky?  Something like nnnnnnmmnmnmmmjjmmjhhhhhjuuuuuuuyyyyyyuuuuuuuuuyggggggghghggtggyyjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjnbnhjkuuyyyygggghhghuuuu
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjnnbgghhhhhhhnnnnnmmmjijuyggnhhhhyuuuuuuuuuuuyy888yyyhhh
jjjjjiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii8jiiijijjjjjjjj,.kkkkkkioki7yyuuuy7yjuhuh

It's about time for another edition of Parker's Hotly Anticipated Movies:

• Aeon Flux
  
• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
  
• The Corpse Bride
  
• Chicken Little (Only just looking at the creative team...)
  
• Rent
  
• Brokeback Mountain
  
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (of course.)

I love the attention span of Xanga-ers.  Write a big, interesting post of a few paragraphs and nobody can be bothered to read it.  Write a few sentences about a movie and voila!  Haha, I'm sure the other ones get read SOMETIMES... it's just kinda funny.  <3heart.

Recently we have discovered the wonderful majick of the Shisha.  It's what you'd probably call a hookah... but I think Shisha sounds cooler and just more majickall.  Apple shisha is all the rage in Egypt, pretty much EVERYONE sits outside at cafés or along the Nile smoking it, so of course we had to try.  It's pretty great.  TOTALLY smooth.  Only seven Egyptian pounds, which works out to be like less than $1.25 so it's pretty great!

It's been a really nice couple of days.  Things with Mike just keep getting better and better, and we're having a great time here... I can't wait to go to Rome in two more days.

Fantastic Four was, in a word, lame.  In two words, really lame.  In three words, REALLY freaking lame.

It's been a pretty exciting last couple days.  I went to the Giza Zoo yesterday and that was fun/funny...  The park was WAY dirtier than the rest of Cairo, and that's saying something  My ankles above where my socks were were freaking BLACK with filth when I got home.  I saw a little girl pissing on the ground, just right there on the sidewalk, and her mom was just sitting there laughing, it was kind of weird but I know that it happens everywhere over here all the time.  The cages were all small, but at least they had some habitat stuff so you didn't feel SO bad for all these poor animals.  They had a bunch of monkeys, an elephant, a giraffe... Siamese cats?  Domesticated dogs?  Chickens?  Pigeons?  Some funny stuff.  OK, they were fancy pigeons but still.  I thought it was kind of funny they had Siamese cats in cages and then there were like 500 cats running around the park eating all kinds of garbage.  Had an interesting experience with two boys following me around the whole park and talking to me at random times and finally 'befriending me' and taking me into the reptile house, which cost extra.  Then we walked around, arm in arm, for like half an hour looking for the one kid's family, and he brought me up to them and they all just laaaaaaaaaaaughed and laughed.  At me, and that their kid just freaking befriended me at random... kind of funny.  I gave them money for being my tour guide... dispite the fact that I couldn't understand a quarter of what they were saying.

Last night we went with Mike's boss and co-worker to probably the nicest restaurant I've ever been to... awww.  It was a revolving restaurant, the highest restaurant in the middle east, which I thought was interesting because you'd probaby think there's something taller in Dubai.  Maybe not!  I had ostrich because I had been eyeing them hungrily at the zoo prior to dinner and I was kinda excited to see it on the menu.  Mmmmm was it ever delicious.  For desert had this trio of creme brulees which were reeeeally good.  And the view was spectacular even though it was a foggy/really bad pollution day.  The sunset was pretty interesting... I've never seen the sun set at a horizon that was ABOVE the Earth.  It was like 15 degrees ABOVE the earth, a horizon of pollution and fog in the sky.  Weird.

Today we went to the museum and hired a tour guide who totally scammed us.  He showed us around, a few important pieces in the museum, but I kind of got the feeling that he would have no idea if we asked him about something he just walked past.  We saw the treasures of Tutankhamun, which was pretty spectacular.  I thought they were all out on tour with him but I was pleased to find they moved nothing of importance.  It was all so  beautiful.  Saw the mummy room too which was really kind of creepy.  Saw Ramses II.  He's still lookin good after all these years.  After about an hour he asked if we could pay him and then said we'd go to "smell the essence of the lotus oil and see the papyrus factory."  He took us out across the road and into this little touristy shop... haha, it was such a scam.  He made us smell these fake perfumes... Mike actually bought some, haha.  Good times.  What a con.  There are SO many Egyptians just WAITING to do this to you.

Went to this little pub afterwards which was really cool... there was a party of Spaniards with an accordion player inside, they were all drunk and singing all sorts of songs nonstop and dancing and just having the best time ever.  It was fun to watch.

First of all, if you enjoy a good puzzle, play this game real quick, there's really nothing like it. 

Might go back to Alexandria this weekend.  That'd be cool.  I'm getting a wicked tan already.. RAWR!!  I'll be so hott in Europe.

I'm too lazy to update.  Here's an abridged email to my mom.  Haha.

I went to the pyramids a couple days ago... man it was cool!  I got to climb up on one of them (and find a piece for Nathan) and we got to go down into an underground tomb through this little 4ft high tunnel down into the earth.  Once we got down there it opened up into the chamber, and it smelled a little dank just like you always hear the tombs smell.  The giant sarcophagus was there sitting open.  We also saw a camel chase.  Cops chasing criminals... on camels.  In the desert.  It was amazing.  There are all these people with camels that come up to the pyramids and try to get white people on them.  They aren't allowed to do this so the cops chase them out... it doesn't work.  They tried to get me up on one of them but I pretended to be afraid and cry.  Hahaha.  He was all grabbing my arm and trying to pull me over to the camel for a picture.  Camels are kind of scary... they're REALLY big and one of the police camels growled at me and I was sure I was going to get spit on.  Ha.  Afterwards we went to this really nice restaurant with Mike's boss and work people who I have gotten to know kinda well... this restaurant was pretty cool, and Mike and I got lost in it looking for a bathroom and we wound up finding a room that said "Churchhill Suite" and the people that were cleaning it saw us and invited us in for a showing.  It was SO nice.  Turns out that the Big Three conference of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chang Kai-Chek was held in the hotel there.  Kinda neat...  It's pretty cool how hospitable the Egyptians are to tourists, too.  Like that, just inviting us in to the suite the moment they saw us peeking inside.  Pretty much EVERYONE you encounter here is like that, probably because they realize how very important the tourism industry is here, and tourists are PRETTY easy to identify.  We're the white ones.  Haha.  There are also a lot of Pakistanis that vacation here I guess, but you see tons of Europeans.  And all the Egyptians assume you're very rich and you get the star treatment wherever you go, maybe because you ARE very rich by their standards... it is VERY inexpensive to live over here.

So I'm not going to Luxor.  Mike's boss who's going down there has to stay in the hotel the whole time he's there because they don't want Whitey to get murdered and mess up their tourism industry even more.  He's pretty disappointed about that, I kinda feel sorry for him because his life is already kind of going bad... this would have been fun.  Oh and we won't get to see Il Palio either, since I was really stupid and didn't even think that the race might be in the EVENING so we booked our train then.  We'll be in Siena the morning of the race but we won't get to see it, pretty funny huh?  I thought so.  ::sigh:: oh well...  I'm still so excited to go, I'll just have to go see the race for real another time, actually go and get some of the hospitality that goes along with it, like eating dinner with the winning contada... that'd be so cool.  Stuff we don't have time for this time around.  I guess we'll see how much we like Tuscany and if it warrants a return trip.

Cairo continues to be awesome.  I see amazing stuff every day.  I really like it here.

Good things about Cairo:

• In spite of all the shit you hear I actually feel pretty safe


• It's WAY cheap to live here compared to at home


• Pace of life is enjoyable (to me)


• Over-the-counter Viagra!  Haahahaha.

Not so good things about Cairo:

• It's so dirty.  The air, the streets, the water, the... everything.  Everything is just so dirty.  It stinks and you get lots of headaches.  You can't have ice in your drinks.  You will be sorry if you eat the wrong foods.  Etc, etc, etc.


• WAY overcrowded


• I almost got hit by like 5 cars now... it's pretty insane


• People are always trying to rip the whities off

I wish I could think of more now.

Haha, juuust kidding.  I know you were all SO scared but yeah.  Time for today's geography lesson...

As you can see, Sharm El Sheikh is nowhere near Cairo.  We went up to Alexandria the day after it happened (that's up on the Mediterranean coast, that's that big ocean thing to the north... Alex is on the Western edge of the delta, that's where the river fans out and does that Y thing, see?) and it was SO nice up there.  Walked around a bit, toured the big new Library of Alexandria, and swam in the Mediterranean.  I might be a LITTLE more tan... hehe.  Tomorrow I might go down to Luxor, that's where the Valley of the Kings and all that kind of cool stuff is... however there's a travel advisory for Americans going down there.  I personally think that's just being a little over paranoid but I GUESS there's a lot of stuff that happens down there that you just don't want to be a part of... I guess we'll see.