Savvy Women

The American University in Cairo mid-year break is just around the corner. As a matter of fact, in a little more than a month from now, I’ll be on a five-week holiday. Most teachers use the time off to travel. Last year, I stayed in Cairo during the vacation. This year, though, I’m making travel plans. I want to blog this week about the trip I’m putting together.

One last thought before I let you enjoy this video: I find it amazingly interesting to see the beautiful country of Malta this way, through the eyes of complete strangers. Now, without further ado…

For those of you out there who do a lot of traveling, and I’m referring to transatlantic or transpacific sorts of trips, meaning those that take you far and wide, across multiple time zones in a single bound, you know that there’s nothing more frustrating (or debilitating) than having a bad case of jet lag.

That’s where I’m at right now.  I’m jet lagged to my very core, which explains why I’m up and writing this at 3:17 a. m. when everyone else is fast asleep and dreaming of whatever it is that everyone dreams about.

I definitely have good reason for being in this condition.  My whole trip, beginning in Midland, Texas, and then concluding in this dusty capital city of this dusty land of the pyramids, took about thirty-two hours to complete.  That means I started at ten o’clock Tuesday morning (Texas time) and arrived home at one o’clock on Thursday morning (Egypt time).

As everyone knows, Wednesday comes between Tuesday and Thursday.  My most recent Wednesday, though, was (and still is) mostly a blur to me.  The point of this blog is to discuss how I spent that blurry day and the very interesting travel experience I had during it.

I can say one thing about Wednesday with utmost certainty:  Most of it was spent as a thirteen-hour layover in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

As soon as I deplaned, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make such a long wait unless I could find a place to crash.  Going into the city, though I truly love Amsterdam with every fiber of my being, wasn’t an option because I was so utterly exhausted.

I knew Schiphol had hotels that could be rented by the hour.  I’d stayed in a place called the Mercure for several hours several years earlier.  When I asked the pleasant, Dutch person sitting at the information desk how to get to it, she advised me to stay at something called the “Yotel” instead.  Looking back now, I’m glad she gave me that advice.

After wandering for what seemed like forty days and forty nights, I finally was able to locate Yotel on the second floor of the airport in an area that was rich with eating and shopping opportunities.  I dragged myself up to the Yotel check-in desk, asked if they had a room, and was happy to hear, from the young man manning it, that they did.

From here on out, this becomes an advertisement for Yotel.  If you ever find yourself trapped in Gatwick, Heathrow, or Schiphol, with lots of time on your hands, head over to the Yotel and get yourself a funky room to spend some time in.

Yotel is hip, in the same way MTV is hip.  It is very clear to me that Simon Woodroffe, founder of Yotel, had two goals in mind when he came up with his creative vision:  to give the weary traveler a refuge and to provide her with a memorable travel experience.  In both of these, I would say that he succeeded.

I have to apologize at this point because the pictures I took of my Yotel room were really very weak.  (I blame this on the jet lag, but it’s probably more likely, if truth be told, that I’m just incompetent as a photographer.)   Luckily, the company website has some really nice pictures of the rooms.

An important fact:  I got my room, something called a “standard cabin,” for seventy-nine Euros (or approximately ninety-five U. S. dollars).  That price allowed me to keep the room for eleven full hours.  As it turns out, the longer you rent a room, the cheaper the per hour rate gets.  (Businessmen and women are clever, aren’t they?)

It’s a challenge to come up with terms to describe Yotel, its rooms, and the staff, but I’ll give it my best shot.  “Otherworldly,” “Star Trekish,” “high-tech,” “IKEA-like,” “minimalistic,” “super-duper efficient,” “fun,” “friendly,” and “youthful” capture it pretty well.  It appears that the rooms have been designed by the European version of a feng shui master, someone who profoundly understands how to get the most use out of the least space without that space feeling confining.  Oh, and one more thing, I really like the purple mood lighting as well.  It reminds me of when I was a child in the seventies and we had those “black light” light bulbs that were so popular.

It’s approaching five in the morning, and I’ve run out of steam.  Now to bed.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that these eyes will close and that I’ll fall into that deep sleep that’s a little bit like “passing away.”

Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com

I am an American teacher who lives far away from the place I was born and raised. Once a year, whenever the days grow long and hot, my nightly dreams change. I begin dreaming about airplanes. I often dream that I climb aboard one and then go up and up into the clouds. When that behemoth with wings lands and I’m back on terra firma, I’m in a place I recognize and surrounded by faces that belong to people I know and love.

But travel is not only about being reunited with friends and family. Often, while moving through space and time, I have the opportunity to meet new people. The purpose of this blog is to share two photos of a very interesting person I met not long ago on one of my journeys. The pictures were taken by Greg McElwain, a friend and fellow traveler. Even though I spoke nary a word with the woman shown in them (except through a translator) and spent a very short period of time in her presence, she left a lasting impression.

I met this woman while traveling, though not by plane. I met her during a brief stop on a bus trip I took a few weeks ago with a number of AUC colleagues. Our destination was a resort on the Red Sea in an Egyptian town called Ras Sidr (sometimes spelled “Ras Sudr”) on the Sinai Peninsula. To get there, we had to drive through a tunnel that passes under the Suez Canal. Once we’d popped up on the other side of that man-made waterway, we stopped at Oyoun Moussa, an apparently uninhabited and inhospitable site in the vast desert.

All of a sudden, while we were milling about outside the bus at Oyoun Moussa, this wonderful Bedouin woman appeared of out nowhere. She was selling handmade bracelets and wondered if we’d like to become buyers. She was standing right next to me, and I looked down into a face that was wizened but beautiful. I asked Sherine Zaki, an Egyptian friend standing nearby, to translate. She spoke to the woman whose answers to my questions came in a soft, susurrant Arabic.

A number of us bought her pretty jewelry, and then I asked if she’d mind posing for a photo or two. She seemed very pleased that I found her so interesting.

Several minutes later, while we were rolling down the highway again, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d just met a woman who was physically tiny but also larger than life, someone straight out of a fairytale, perhaps the Mother Goddess of the Sahara.

A number of questions came to mind as we made our way along. How had she survived all those years in the desert? What had her life been like?

I imagined that she must have had some incredible stories to tell! It’s unfortunate that I’ll never get a chance to hear them.