Big Trip ‘09, Day Thirty: Istanbul

August 20, 2009

Having arrived after midnight, and not having procured a guidebook or map or anything in advance, Anna and I hadn’t really seen much of the city, and didn’t know much ll about its layout, where our hotel was, and all of that good stuff. Which is why, when I awoke around 8:30am and found [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Days Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine: Chefchaouen Walk, the Kasbah, & on to Istanbul

August 20, 2009

Day Twenty-Eight dawned bright and early, but even before any dawning was done, we woke around 4:30am to the now-familiar overlapping and competing Adhan performances from the three or four mosques within a half mile of our hotel.  To western ears, a single Adhan is kind of haunting and beautiful.  Several of them at [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty Seven: To Chefchaouen

August 18, 2009

Waking up in Tangier, Anna and I knew we had a bit of a morning ahead of us: we wanted to get to Chefchaouen; we had no idea how we were going to do so.  Anna expressed a preference for renting a car, but because there was no way she was going to drive [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty Six: Meandering around Tangier, & a Great Restaurant

August 17, 2009

Tangier is a very interesting city.  Pretty much all cities are interesting in their own way, but Tangier is interesting in an interesting way.  Especially having just come from Cairo, and Egypt in Jordan in general, it feels much less Arab and Moslem than we were expecting, even though there’s plenty of Arabic writing [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty Five, Part 2: Tangier and Le Croissant Rouge

August 17, 2009

So 1pm found us arriving in Tangier, after a brief layover in Madrid that featured a most excellent breakfast, some pretty good walking, and more GI pain for Anna.  That last bit, as I said before, was not good.   In any event, we arrived at the Tangier airport and took one of the ubiquitous [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty Five, Part 1: Breakfast in Madrid

August 13, 2009

So this was a pretty long day.  Anna and I left Cairo at 11:40pm on day twenty four, got maybe a couple of hours of sleep on Iberia’s putative business class seats (pretty much identical to normal Southwest Airlines seats: six across on an A319), and arrived in Madrid at 3:30am.  The airport was, [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Days Twenty Two – Twenty Four: Four Stars, a Pool, and Departing Egypt

August 13, 2009

As day twenty two dawned, we were getting ready to wrap up Egypt, and frankly, we were ready to move on.  Lars and Anna were both experiencing GI problems, and all of us were just tired of of the dichotomic choice between being ripped off or constant argument with everyone we met.   Our hotel in [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty One: Giza, Pyramids, Thieves & Liars

August 10, 2009

Day twenty one marked the halfway point in Anna’s and my trip, the conclusion of Luke’s trip, and the tail end of Lars’.  The day started with a 5:30am alarm so Luke could get going to the airport.   After two weeks of being together every waking moment, it felt weird to be saying goodbye.  [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Twenty: Hell. I mean, Cairo.

August 9, 2009

We had boarded our sleeper train from Luxor to Cairo around 8:30pm, with an expected arrival in Cairo at 5:45am.  I had taken Ambien in the hopes that it would allow me to sleep on the train, with mixed results that involved lots of tossing and turning and lurching around with the train.  The [...]

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Big Trip ‘09, Day Nineteen: Karnak, Valley of the Kings, & More Baksheesh

August 9, 2009

If you’ve been following our trip so far, you know that Anna, Luke, Lars, and I have all enjoyed stuff like hiking through the Sinai and sailing on a felucca a lot more than we’ve enjoyed the more postcard-friendly tourist destinations like temples and ruins.  But we were going to be in Luxor today, [...]

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