(continued from ish 220, day nine, and at last no longer day nine, but instead a new day, a shiney day. Well, more dusty than shiney. There you go.)
Hey, and we were back in Luxor! On dry land! Very dry!
This was actually quite a bit more difficult than it might seem.
Now, you (and by you I mean the concrete you, not some abstract you you couldn't care less about and have no hope of identifying with) walk around most days, do things that you do, walking around, going to the shoppe, maybe getting in your car first, driving away, perhaps you're one of those environmentally conscious people and you walk or bike down to the shoppe, get your things, bike or walk them back home, arrange them in the cupboard, put them away in the fridge. You do this all quite happily, maybe even with vim and vigour (I realise this is getting further and further from the concrete you, especially if the concrete you is at all like me). Now consider the previous activities whilst trees and pavement and small children and horse dung are constantly leaping at you. The horse dung you might ignore, if you don't live in Egypt. Unless you happen to have a lot of that lying around on your city streets.
Now imagine, while all this is going on, your knees feeling like some sort of claymation version of your regular knees that's yet to have been put in the kiln for firing just yet and is still all quite soggy and prone to being poked by little kids, eager to see how wet clay feels.
This is remarkably what standing and walking about on dry land after three days on the water feels like. Sea legs, if this is indeed how quickly you might acquire them from a fresh water jaunt from Aswan north, are definitively incompatible with land.
We arrived quite early that morning and were greeted by a quick reality check as we disembarked what had been our home for the last few days and nights on to a shore littered with rubbish and more of the traditional Egyptian exercise gurus, the ones that chased you down the street offering to let you buy things and pay them for hanging on for dear life to your luggage as you dragged them through the street to the nearest bus to your hotel. In fact, had I not been experiencing the kind of incompatibilities you thought were only capable when you brought home a new digital camera and attempted to plug it into your computer (PC, obviously), I might have liked to take a ride on what was obviously a local sport.
The object was... well, I'm not entirely sure what the object was. The game was played as such: a youth (usually a youth... otherwise they were very short and young-looking old people) would wait by the shore for a boat to pull in, as the boat pulled in the player would run over to the boat to steady the plank for the people getting off. That this usually resulted in a plank that was less steady than it would have been normally as the wrestled with the boat's crew who had entirely different ideas of what 'steady plank' meant until finally all the people were off the boats one way or another. Once the people were off and were toddling up towards their bags, or perhaps, as the more adventurous did, catching them as the crew threw them off the boat, the players would wait until the person reached for a bag, at which point, like some rather impatient chess player who saw the move you were going to make was going to allow them to knock a few pieces off the board, they would grab for the same bag (this is where the chess analogy breaks down, I'm afraid) and latch on to some peripheral piece. Having latched on to the person's bag, they would usually whine at almost sub or super-human pitches. Being sub or super-human pitches, I'm not entirely sure what they were saying or whining, presumably something to do with the bag they'd just latched on to. Now, having acquired their 'ride,' as it were, the player would then find themselves clutching for dear life on the bag handle or strap or something suitable as their feet and body whipped about in the air as the owner of the bag and sometimes other players would shake the bag to and fro. Like a riverside, non-bull-involving rodeo. If rodeo's involve bulls. I have no idea, maybe I need to go to somewhere they have rodeos next to do a bit of research on that one. At any rate, it was rodeo-like in that someone who's never seen a rodeo would be inclined to compare this scene to a rodeo. And that would be it. The bag would get carried to a bus or calesh and thrown on top, at which point the player would usually let go and land on the ground. I don't know if that was the end goal, or whether or not it was just the amateurs that were out on our day, maybe the end goal was to land on top of the calesh or bus along with the luggage and none of the guys out that day were professional class players.
At any rate, after landing, they'd generally come over with their hand out and ask for baksheesh, which is probably why this isn't an Olympic-sanctioned event, seeing as how none of them seemed to be doing it for the sheer pleasure of the sport. But then it was only one day, and one short period of the day, as well.
The bus, eventually, made it to the hotel. The hotel with a pool with water the temperature of very very cold beer, only less sticky, and more clear. The hotel with the pool on the roof, some 12-14 storeys closer to the sun, just in case you'd forgotten it was there.
disclaimer:
At last! Dry land! Progress instead of the indeterminate shallows (and deeps) of the Nile! Now this is more like it, no more of that post-modern lack of a direction and theme stuff on the Nile!
For those of you (and we presume it's most of us) concerned with the general state of affairs of the world, never forget Emmanuel Goldstein... The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping wh ich occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.
Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about.
Double(time)think?
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.