My recent travel companions have all left for Dahab. I've been alone all day and I'm bored, homesick, and hating Luxor. All of the dregs of Egypt seem to congregate here. Every issue that I worried about running into in Egypt has come up: men trying to touch me, men being foul in the ways they speak to me, hustlers, mistreated animals, pathetic snot-nosed, filthy children begging and manipulating and already way too grown up for their years.

Ever watch a 5yo smoke a cigarette? I have. And the adults who were with him couldn't care less. :(

This city makes my soul feel dirty. The rest of Egypt seems so different than here. I don't feel that I'm in danger in Luxor, but I'm filled with loathing and disgust.

Since I'm homesick I thought I'd write more email. It's a cheaper way to spend time than scurrying around the souq and I'm about museumed and monumented out.

Egyptian security is interesting so I thought I'd write about it. I still don't understand the minutia of it but I've learned a few things that I thought I'd share.

In the US, we are taught to go to the police when we need help. Here, there are many different types of security: regular police, tourist police, soldiers in dress uniform, soldiers in fatigues, and the scary men in suits.

Every monument has some sort of police/soldier checkpoint. They do random bag checks but they don't check very carefully. The bigger monuments and museums have metal detectors, but they beep constantly and security never investigates...so why bother? I think if you look like a terrorist, they use the machine beeping as an excuse to go through your stuff. Hopefully they know what terrorists look like.

The most important places (translation: those with the most tourists) also have x-ray machines. The tourist police look official and at first I couldn't figure out if they were around to "police the tourists" or to "help the tourists." I attempted to assume the latter, so would turn to them for things like directions. I swear none of them speak English! Today, one of the tourist policemen told me that he is the toilet police (as he handed me my quota of toilet paper in exchange for some baksheesh.) I'm not sure that he knew why I was so amused and I'm not sure if he was making a joke or truly securing the toilets!

An Egyptian native tells me the tourist police are supposed to help tourists, but if you need their help they have to find someone who speaks english to investigate. ;->

The dress uniform soldiers are also supposed to keep tourists safe, but most of them come from poor farming backgrounds (fellahin) and are not educated and don't speak English. (The ones in Cairo seem to be especially obnoxious in making lewd remarks in Arabic to any single females they spot. You can't understand what they are saying, but the tone is unmistakable.)

The educated soldiers are not the ones you find in the cities. They are off doing more important and more secret things. I suspect they are the ones more often seen in fatigues.

The secret police dress in suits and carry machine guns and walky-talkies. They give me the creeps. For some reason, the soldiers and tourist police don't scare me in the same way as the guys in suits. I don't know if the suits speak English. I'm too scared to talk to them! One came up and sat next to me at the Ramses III temple today and he was sitting so close it completely freaked me out. But he didn't speak to me and didn't arrest me so I guess it was okay. :)

ma-salaam
Kayla (the disgusted donkey who is looking forward to going back to civilized Cairo)