Vacationings

I was going to post more photos but now I'm about to go camping in the desest so you'll have to wait...again...

In Afghanistan, A Change in Mission

When a Marine battalion is sent to Afghanistan to train a town's police force, it meets a very different challenge -- deadly insurgents.

Lt. Arthur Karell and his Marine battalion were sent to Now Zad, Afghanistan, to train Afghan police. Instead, they had to fight the insurgents who had taken over the town.

"Fix bayonets."

Not long after giving that order, 1st Lt. Arthur Karell was hunched in a dirt trench crowded with Marines. The hushed darkness bristled with eight-inch blades fitted beneath the barrels of dozens of M-16 assault rifles.

You fix bayonets when you expect to need the aggressive combat mind-set that's produced by the primal sight of massed blades. You fix them when you expect to search hidden places. You fix them when you expect the fight could push you within arm's reach of your enemy -- gutting distance. In modern warfare, that's extraordinarily rare.

The problem was, Karell didn't know what to expect.


Photos from the article

Beetles!

Cairo - November 2008

A bunch of tiny scarab beetles for sale.

Up

Cairo - November 2008

"All Good Things Are In Heaven. We Are Upstairs".

Watermelon

Cairo, Khan el-Khalili - June 2009

Another picture from the Khan from when I went just a couple days ago. I don't know why they were throwing all the watermelon away, if that's in fact what they were doing.

Cairo Bridges

Penned-In Egyptians Find Peace in City’s Din

Cairo is a city with a lot of people, a lot of tightly packed houses and buildings, a lot of traffic — and very little open space. There are some parks, but they tend to be fenced off and charge admission. So Egyptians grab what public space there is and make it their own. Bridges are a favorite, but nearly any open space will do...

... “I feel suffocated, of course,” said Nourelhoda Mohammed, 18, as she described her life in Waraq, a poor, crowded neighborhood. She has graduated from high school but has no job and is hoping to marry. She passes the time on the Rhode al-Farag Bridge, an imposing span of concrete, traffic and picnickers on the northern end of the city. “This is a place where there are not a lot of people and you can breathe,” she said. Ms. Mohammed dressed up for the outing, wrapping her head in a gold and red head scarf and applying a flowery perfume. Her mother laid a sheet down over the sidewalk and gave breadsticks to her daughter and some friends.

“It’s calm, it’s not crowded, and there is clean air,” her mother said. Her younger brother, Muhammad, 11, said he liked it on the bridge “because this is where the car accidents happen.”


Gotta love little brothers!


These photos are mine, they are not from the article:


This is the entrance to one of the famous bridges mentioned in the article: the Kasr al-Nil bridge. Both sides of the bridge have two of these lions. At night crowds gather and people like to take photos of themselves crawling all over the statues. The story I heard about the lions was that the sculptor was apparently so sure his lion statues were perfect that when he finally realized he forgot to put whiskers, he killed himself.



Arabic grafitti on the bridge's rail.



Paint peeling off the rail.



The bridge on a quiet night: