OK whose dumb idea was this...

Last Wednesday I was invited to a football match that will take place tomorrow between two of the biggest sides in Egypt.

The queues outside the ticket office in Zamalek in the centre of town were bedlam, people literally climbing over each other to get hold of tickets in third class.

Being a cocky little git, I strolled past all the supporters and the touts, swaggering like a real colonial and walked straight in and bought 3 tickets for me, Ben and Stew in what turned out to be the cheapest seats in the house, without much trouble. Having learnt my lesson from the train last week, I strolled right back up and changed them for seats in the second class seats, in the Ahly end of the stadium.

"This is too easy" I thought

...and today I open the Guardian website to read this

The world's most violent derby: Al Ahly v ZamalekA clash of nationalism, class and escapism going back 100 years means it's not just fists that fly in the Cairo derby

Maybe being a smug colonial in the Ahly end isn't going to be the best idea.

The article is terrifying.

The game happens tomorrow.

Bring it on!

I'm watching the Watchmen

I left the group entitled "Say no to the Watchmen movie" on facebook yesterday after seeing the trailer at http://www.empireonline.com/video/watchmen/. It looks amazing! Finally Hollywood may have learnt that making a comic for the big screen doesn't have to be crap! I can't wait, roll on 2009!

Splash

A while back I was walking around Madrid when I dropped into an Irish pub for a piss.



As urinals 2,4 and 6 were occupied I made my way into the cubicle where somebody had earlier finished a pint of beer and left the glass on the back of the cistern. Like any man, I couldn't resist it and was gobsmacked, not just by the fact that I managed to fill the entire pint, but that it actually looked identical to a pint of Fosters.

Hmmm I can see a business opportunity here.



For those of you who haven't seen one of these it's called a Urinal Fly. The urinal fly reduces the amount of piss spillage that occurs at urinals because men have an innate desire to aim for stuff when taking a piss, so by putting a fly in there, our pee just magnetically gravitates in that direction. It's all pretty scientific, working on very basic male psychology to reduce mess. Heck you even get a booklet with advice on the optimum place to stick the urinal fly in the urinal to reduce the amount of splashback on your punters shoes when you purchase a pack of 100. Why you'd need 100 urinal flies is still a mystery.

If there were 100 flies in my urinal I'd ask them to clean the damn place.

This is a typical Egyptian toilet. As you can see it comes with a copper loop in it



Working on the psychology above, the loop is like a piss magnet and even though logic tells us that pissing in the loop will get our shoes wet, we still can't really help ourselves. On top of this the loop is placed just about over the chocolate starfish position, so that some soiling of the loop is inevitable during your daily triple S (Sh*t/Shower/Shave) ritual.

So if this copper loop is just going to be covered in shit and piss and still gets your shoes wet, what is it doing there, you may ask. Well the loop is attached to a bit of plumbing, which strangely seems to be connected to the only hot water source in the house. Even though you can't get hot water from the shower head, you can be sure that if you flip the tap attached to the copper loop you will get a searing hot jet of water up your arse, which probably contains a lot of piss and shit at first until the pipes are cleaned out, conveniently discharging their filth up your butt in the process.



I suppose you could say that things get worse before they get better in these parts.

Now you may notice that the taps are located behind the s(h)itter and hence when you are seated you need to reach, yogalike behind your backside to turn on the waterworks.

Last weekend I went to Siwa and stayed in Youssef's hotel, the cheapest place in town, costing a mere 15 LE, which translates as £1.50 sterling, a bargain complete with two 2 inch cockroaches and my own en-suite bathroom.

I slept on the roof of Youssef's that night under the stars and the next morning I got up for my customary morning double S (I don't shave much as regular readers will know) in the standard order.

Realising that the room came with no bog roll, I flexed and turned the tap on getting a stream of lukewarm water up my crack and trying not to think too much about the communal nature of hotels or how many people had been in this room before me. As the water quickly heated up, I decided that a steady trickle over a long time would be preferable to a rapid upward cascade of scalding water up the rectum.

Satisfied that most the clingons were gone I got up and bent over to reach the tap to turn it off, leaning over the throne as I went.

If you've ever tried to switch a dial on behind your back with one hand then put it in front of you and tried to switch it off with the other hand as a result of changing your orientation you'll know what happened next.

Siwa is well known for it's proliferation of hot springs in the desert. I wasn't expecting to see one quite this close up.

I leaned over and with my left hand and twisted the tap really fast before quickly realising the errors of my ways as the jetstream smacked me right in the face.

Shit.

Probably.

Good thing that shower was the next one on the list and I was certainly not going to complain about not getting any hot water this time.


(Thank to MySpace Games for the urinal game)

The Bumpkin train to Cairo

The trip to Siwa from Cairo can be done in about 11 hours if you catch a bus to Marsa Matruh and get lucky and transit directly to Siwa.

A more common route is to get the train to Alexandria (just over 2 and a half hours) and a bus (via Marsah Matruh) to Siwa, which takes about 9 hours.



With a 4 day weekend to play with last week, me and Ben decided on the latter option and headed to Alexandria at noon on Friday from Cairo Rameses station. Getting to Cairo, we found there was only one seat left in first class on the train, so we took second class, which cost 40 Egyptian pounds (about £4 sterling) and turned out to be surprisingly pleasant.

There was no one in the carriage, huge amounts of legroom because the seats were rotatable to face the direction of travel, and it was 20 pounds cheaper than the apparently full first class. I decided that second class was definitely the way to travel Egypt.



As Alexandria to Cairo is such a well travelled route, I did think it was a little strange that we had a three hour wait for the train and, not being able to read Arabic, I was unaware that in the time that we waited for our train, another train had departed for Alexandria too, which I was soon to find out about.

On the way back, Ben and I decided to travel separately, as I had work to do the next morning so, after sleeping in the desert, I boarded the 7am bus from Siwa to Alexandria, a 9 hour trip made more grueling by the fact that I had not had a chance to wash and the air conditioning wasn't working. Not a good thing when you are driving through the desert I can assure you.

At Alexandria Misr station I walked up to the booth where I saw all the Egyptians fighting for tickets for a train to Cairo at 5pm.

When I asked for a ticket in second class for the 5pm the guy looked at me like I had grown two heads or was pulling his leg and told me to go and see the Station Master, who was based on platform 1.

This I duly did and the station master told me that the next train was at 7pm and I had to buy a first class ticket.

Eh?

Confused I insisted that I wanted to be on the 5pm and in second class, and again I got the look from the station master like he couldn't believe what he was hearing, but he walked me over to the ticket office, asked me if I was sure that I really wanted to travel second class and I was like, yeah of course second class was great.

When I handed over my 100 LE note, I had expected to get 60 LE change as before.

He gave me back 91 LE.

Oh shit.

As I went to platform 6 I realised that there are actually two tiers of train as well as two classes. On the way in I had travelled second class in the Espani train. On the way back I had booked the second class of the somewhat more dubious Faransawi train, which I was later reliably informed that no-one in their right mind gets on. Not English, not self-respecting Egyptian.

When I told the guys at the office their jaws dropped. Some have lived here for ages and told me that not a single tourist had ever had the (or been) nuts (enough) to travel on the Faransawi. Ever.

And I could see why.

As I boarded I couldn't help noticing that there were no lights and no glass in the windows. The whole carriage smelt like piss and BO. I tried to walk down to the next carriage but the situation was the same, humans piled on top of each other with vacant stares, human driftwood floating in a sea of luggage.

I found a seat and sat with my knees pretty much up my nose, while a bemused Egyptian bumpkin looked at me like I was made of yoghurt and tried to make conversation. Next to him sat a very pissed off middle class guy who buried himself in his paper, partly to deny to himself the reality of his situation and partly to try and hide the fact that he was there from the foreigner, who shouldn't have seen him in this light.

In the next bank of 4 seats there sat a guy with wild eyes. Every time anyone sat next to him he would punch them.

I think he was a bit 'special'.

In Egypt they don't really treat the special like we do in the UK and after punching all the people who tried to sit next to him, the train started to fill up. Finally 3 guys all sat down next him and after about 2 minutes of putting up with it, he got up and tried to punch all their lights out!

Not taking too kindly to this scrawny guy trying to attack them the three turned on him, and slapped his ass until he sat down and shut the hell up.

They then proceeded to rest their legs on him and sing loudly, clap and point, occasionally changing to one-handed clapping using his face for good measure.

That was the next four hours as, not only was this train dark, smelly and cramped it was also the slow train which stopped all over the fucking place. At one armpit of a stop in the middle of nowhere the train reached bursting point and people started climbing on the luggage rack so now I had my knees up my nose and someone else's feet in my head.

It couldn't get any worse could it?

Well of course it could, come on it's me!

I somehow managed, despite all this to activate my sleep-anywhere function, which allows me to fall asleep anywhere, (under a pool table, through a 6.5 earthquake the other day etc) no matter how absurd and found myself constantly getting woken up by the passing trains which would smack me in the face with a wall of air on entry and another one on exit.

About 3 and a half hours in, the crazy guy has had enough of getting slapped every 3 minutes and decides to try and make a dash for it. The big boys are having none of this and drag him back to sit down. He futilely tries to slap them back while everyone watches on helplessly. I figure that not being able to speak Arabic in a carriage of possible fundamentalists is not something I want to draw attention to.

Suddenly the mental dude gets up and makes a break for freedom, running across the carriage. Losing their slaptoy wasn't an option for these lads and like a couple of high-school jocks they got up and raced across the train to grab the guy around the waist and hauled him to the open door of the moving train where they threatened to throw him out.

They let him go but he was shitting himself and most the carriage seemed to be pretty indifferent to the whole thing. I had no idea what to do and a stinky foot in my ear and decided to just sit still and think about cheese. Probably not the most inspired thing to do but you'd be amazed at how many different types of cheese you can conjure up when the mentally afflicted are being assaulted nearby and you can't do shit all about it.

Stop the train!

Every few months or so I am harshly reminded by some silly action of mine that I am not Indiana Jones as I lead myself to believe.

On Friday, me and Ben set off from Cairo's Rameses train station for Alexandria. We got on the 3pm train at about 2:45 and Ben sat down and made himself comfortable, while I decided to go out and take some pictures around the platform.



Our carriage was right the way at the front of the train, so much so that to get on to the train, we actually had to lean out, off the edge of the platform and reach onto the door that was about a foot from the end of the platform, with a metre drop off the end.



So I went in search of some photos and, seeing that the locals were crossing the tracks and walking anywhere they liked, I had the idea that it would be quite cool to sit in front of the train and take a pic of the converging lines of the tracks towards the front of the train.

As I made my way to the front of the train, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that it had started to move. Not being very bright I continued for a bit, before realising that it was actually 3pm and the train had started to leave the station. SHIT!

I ran back to the main part of the platform, where I could actually reach the doors only to find that they had all been closed, thus leading me to consider the only option left available

...running off the end of the platform and trying to grab the handrail of the open door that was slowly but surely moving out of reach.



This was my moment to prove that I was indeed Indiana Jones, only mildly more entertaining and witty. All I had to do was run, jump off the edge of the platform, grab the handrail and swing into the open door of the moving train. I'd be an instant hit with the ladies.

I ran.

I jumped off the edge of the platform.

I missed.

I landed a metre below the platform.

And the train driver stopped and let me climb back on as bemused Egyptians looked on.

Harrison Ford would be cringing.

Air conditioning

I went to Siwa this weekend via Alexandria with Ben, a mate from work.

When we got to our hotel in Alexandria he cracked me up by pointing out the fan that we had.

"I think I'll like settings 1 to 3" he said, "but the grill setting scares me a bit"

Changing tyres in Cairo

Roaming the back streets of fuck-knows-where I bump into this guy changing the brake pads on his Cairo taxi cab. I took a few quick snaps and he invited me to come over and sit down. Not speaking any Arabic myself I tried to work out what he said next, and when I couldn't make head nor tail of it, I decided that what he was trying to say was

Why not have a crack at this monkey-wrench and add fixing up a Cairo cab to your collection of foreign adventures.

And so I did.



I wish I understood any Arabic at all,

I'm sure he must have been totally bewildered as to why a Chinesey guy in a shirt and shoes would want to be tightening the nuts on the wheels of a Cairo cab!

I tightened up the bolts holding the wheel on and when I was done, he asked me if I fancied letting the cab off the jack, which I did.

Once I was done he jumped in and drove off. Given that I've never fixed a car in my life and I am built like a stack of marshmallows, I worry about the wisdom of his hurry.

As the day wore on, I saw a bunch of guys loading up 20kg bags of sugar onto the back of a truck. The foreman said jokingly

You want to help us?

to which I obviously was not going to say no.



After loading up half the van, I took a few more pictures and went on my way.

Just before evening struck I was walking by a car repair yard and a guy was using a blowtorch to strip paint from a car frame.



And for some reason he didn't invite me to have a go.

Damn.

One for the ladies

I got out of work early today and decided to board a metro in Cairo for the first time and just go to a far off station and get a little lost.

This was to prove a little more difficult than I initially thought.

I've never really been the sharpest tool in the shed, and I boarded the metro at Sadat station with narry a clue of where I was going, daydreaming about girls.



Hearing a chatter of voices brought me back to the present just as the doors began to close, and I realised that I was surrounded by women.

"Strange," I thought, as I realised that the majority of the carriage were wearing hijabs "Maybe the women in Egypt travel mainly by metro"

at which point one women kindly pointed out

"Ladies only"

Oh shit! I dived off the train a split second before being sent to Hell/Jail and the doors slammed shut behind me with a noise that sounded strangely like the word "chump" and drove all the ladies away into the sunset leaving me alone on the platform.



Story of my life.

Mr. H. has left the building...

That was great! The kids were shouting out words and remembered absolutely everything! They love you!

That was the feedback from my observation today, teaching English in Cairo to 6 year olds. The observer was a young teacher trainee, who had qualified recently as a TEFL teacher.

The lesson was quite complex, involved a heap of group dynamics, an awesome memory and vocab game and a lot of running and shouting. In the process the pupils had memorised nearly 30 words, done some pretty complex sentence structures (for that age and in a second language), practised listening and reading and had spoken to each other. They didn't write much but then they didn't have to.

Rewind the clock 6 months. I'm in Spain, being observed by a "veteran" physics teacher. The kids hate her as they think that she's dull and too strict and they say she doesn't explain things very well.

That was awful! The kids were shouting out and wrote down absolutely nothing! They love you, that's clear to see, but your popularity won't get them the grades you know.

Hmmmmmmm.

Let's compare that with what the kids have to say...

It is also sad as an student to see how [other great teacher] and you leave, leaving us alone with Mrs.R (yup that's her). I enjoyed your classes, you made Physiscs fun. The thing is that they don't like your methods but your methods are effective: even those who didn't sympathise with you listened carefully in class.

I've always hated chemistry, in my oppinion it was the borest class of all, and at the beginning of the year I didn't thought I was going to have great results, but time changed my oppinion about chemistry. "it's as simply as that"- you always said... and indeed it was...you are a great teacher, I've learned a lot with all; your pictures of chairs being joined as atoms, all the moodle events, voting... IT HAS BEEN FUN...

You changed my oppinion of Chemistry...I enjoy it, it now looks easier, fun and enjoyable...thanks for all

I hope you have a great future in your next jobs, here they didn't appreciate all what you did for us, a new system of teaching, a great system!...so whats the point in staying? We will miss your experiments(the egg one was fantastic), little andy, and you!

So who's right?

This is my last contract as a teacher for the forseeable future, but it's only now I figured it out. I can leave safe in the knowledge that I'm the teacher that new teachers aspire to be, the one that makes their subject fun and challenges crap teaching across the school.

In the same breath, I'm also the teacher that those crap teachers wish they were, because they are too damn stubborn to change the way they do things, and they aren't intelligent enough to make the link between a pupil liking a teacher and liking the subject they teach.

Teaching is still full of crap teachers, but there are some heroes in there too. Just take William Atkinson as an example, the head who turned around the failing Phoenix High School. This guy is a true superhead and a true superhero, the cream of the crop.

Unfortunately, more often than not it's not the cream but the shit that floats to top and I've worked in so many schools with crap management and been frowned upon because my practises are group conversational, technological and discussive, more than reading, writing and arithmetic.

But when we teach, we teach not the people of the past but the bearers of our future. We need to equip pupils for a future that will include computing and the internet in many forms. Computers are machines that are designed to simplify arithmetical procedures and they remove the need for writing.

However they also present us with the issue of data overload, which we need to ensure our pupils are competent to discuss and filter with confidence.

By discouraging experimental methodology like mine (yes I've been told to read more passages from the books and make the pupils answer every question so that they know what's coming in the exam) in order to chase league table positions, schools have ultimately lost the interest of the pupils and sent themselves on a vicious cycle that ultimately may lead to their own obsolesence.

The children of today go home and use super-powered computers to play amazing games, then talk to their friends on social networks.

Then they go into school and are told to open books and shut the fuck up.

How long can we really go on with these outdated methods in school and continue to alienate our young? Why the hell do you think that there are packs of disinterested youth on our streets who have not a good thing to say about school?

The gulf between the school and the home widens every day and teachers, the guardians of our youth for a good proportion of their development are now part of an ever widening dichotomy between the home and the school and are being seen as part of an oppressive, no-fun system that all children have to grin and bear as a rite of passage. It's not about learning. You are someone who does something foreign with them. No wonder so many teachers have become disillusioned by an old guard of people who should have left the school system long ago.

And so it is that I leave the chalk face and head towards the office, to get amongst the electronic learning pastures. I've gone for a university where I hope that I can continue to make a difference, it's small, it's open minded.

Goodbye then teaching. It's been a bumpy ride...

My last day as a science teacher (for now)

As many of you know, I've given up science teaching, fired from the last joint in Spain for being too good. I couldn't help though, but go out on a high, so I worked in a Grammar school deep in Kent for a 2 week stint before coming out to Egypt.

It was great, and by the time I left, even though I'd only been there a couple of weeks, the pupils were all whining that I shouldn't leave and that they had learnt loads in the two weeks I was there.

I love teaching, I really do. On it's good days there is no better job in the world.

I finished up with a lesson in biology with the nicest year 7 class I've ever had, then in the afternoon it was sports day, and the kids painted my face in all the house colours.

Trystan said the day before

I remember my last day. I had 9Retard and they were fucking awful. Good riddance

I had the best class in the world. Angels all. I was only there for 2 weeks, but they made me feel like one man could really make a difference.

20th June 2008 was the day that Science teaching lost one of it's keenest teachers, due to perpetual mismanagement, and in August when I come back I'll be in a new job as an e-learning advisor.

See you all in the UK soon...