On Saturday night Samira and I boarded Train 38, an elderly Russian night train from Baku, Azerbaijan to Tbilisi, Georgia. The train rumbles slowly and casually for thirteen hours through mountains and countryside taking us away from the Caspian Sea heading west towards Georgia’s more European flavour.

The train loaded around 9pm, while boarding the train I made Samira pose for some “getting on the train” shots, the porter who had checked our passports and tickets got a kick out of this, she asked Samira where she was from and if she spoke Azeri Turkish, Samira climbed on board and I followed, the porter pointed to Samira’s back and pointed at my chest and gave me an approving thumbs up and a smile, I don’t know how to say “just friends” in Azeri.

We settled into our cabin and after a few minutes the same porter (Sakena, we later learned) came by and informed us we were in the wrong one, we moved the correct cabin and Sakena hung out a bit and talked with us, she had a very, very small bit of English plus what common Farsi/Azeri words her and Samira could figure out and we got by, she asked if I was Samira’s husband and if I thought Samira was beautiful and informed me that it was time to have babies and that I only have 9 good years left before I am old.
I’m pretty sure Sakena called me “weird” while teasing me but Samira thinks no.
Around 6am Sakena knocked on our door to inform us that it was time to “stand up” for Azerbaijan border control. So very tired but we got dressed and moving a bit, around 20 minutes later Azeri border guards and dogs came on board and started interviewing and checking visas and luggage. The border guards decided that two men from Pakistan did not have the correct visas and started telling them they would have to leave the train. I can’t imagine being left behind in the middle of nowhere on the Azeri/Georgian border at 6am.
Other passengers started jumping in to try and help, with translations between Russian and English and Azeri and Pakistani all flying back and forth, Samira used my internet connection and her phone to find information online showing that the Pakistani men were correct about their visas, I gave her phone to the men to show to the border guards and various phone and radio calls were made.
In the end it wasn’t enough, the men were removed from the train and the mood onboard with the border guards got decidedly more serious with them barking orders and seeming to have lost patience with us all. The guards asked for Samira and took her to one of the cabins for her interview, Sakena came and got me and said “Go, stay close to Samira now”, it was an amazingly sweet and caring gesture, I parked myself outside the interview cabin and listened to see that everything was going ok. Samira’s interview went fine other than some questions about why I had a Russian visa but Samira did not, and why she had come from Iran but I had no Iranian stamp.
Sakena came by again after to check on us and to let us know about the upcoming Georgian border crossing. I think I love Sakena, I doubt any other car in this train has someone as sweet as her working on it. We wanted a photo with her but when our train pulled into Tbilisi Sakena was gone or sleeping already.

One thing I’ve learned from Beirut this past week is that trying to summarize all a visitor’s feelings, reactions and thoughts in one post would be dumb, so here I go.

I have never been in a place that felt so foreign and so familiar at the same time. Middle Eastern but so European, Arab but strongly French, Christian and Muslim in equal parts. Everything confuses me but also seems explainable with a little digging.

The amazing things… the food (outstanding, not a bad meal anywhere), the coffee (amazing 3rd wave high end), the art, the softness of the people, the endless style, the nightlife (best ever anywhere)… the maintaining of eye contact (man or woman) and the desire to be playful with the result of that sustained eye contact.

Seeing the way men pay attention to a woman, to Samira, very hard to explain but so natural, easy, appreciative (there is a flip-side to this as well, an occasionally startling difference in how Samira is treated versus how I am treated, in a bar, restaurant, coffee shop…. if a male employee is talking to an attractive female customer there is no point in even waiting around if you are a male customer, you do not exist)

The frustrations… the traffic (because of corruption), the lack of pubic transit (because of corruption), the painfully slow and spotty internet (because of corruption), the rolling power blackouts (because of corruption)… in ALL of these cases there is the means and the money to easily fix the issues but keeping them mostly broken is more profitable for those in power and there seems to be almost no interest in the public good.

Of the frustrations that are easily experienced by a tourist the only one that really impacts a visit is the traffic, the rest is easy enough to ignore, deal with, or find charming, locals definately seem to find a certain charm in the city’s deficiencies, a power cut in a hoping bar at night will invariably be met with cheers and laughs or varying levels of silliness and cynicism.

I have been doing alright at posting everyday up until now, not as much as I had wanted but more than I expected. For the rest of the trip, however, things might be more spotty as I tend to be not great at posting once a buddy joins my travels.

I struggled to sleep again last night and had to force myself out of the suite around 10am, luckily I stumbled onto a great coffee shop and spent an hour there getting my head together.

I didn’t see a name on the coffee place but it’s really cool, tucked around a bend in an alley that looks like nothing from the street, I only noticed it because there was a small sign near the sidewalk showing a coffee bush.

Downtown is beautiful and completely deserted as it’s Sunday, it’s a national holiday and yesterday was election day.

I’ll probably write more about the Maronite’s at some point, a really interesting Christian sect, very old, they are not considered Catholic but they are led by the Pope.

Yup, more of the empty downtown, pretty though.

Beirut was a Roman city for around 700 years, some Roman ruins, like these baths are visible but most of the city has not been the subject of any large dig.

The city is quite hilly, stairs are there every time you turn around, my left knee is starting to ache a bit and stairs are bothering it so I tried to pace myself today, I walked for a few hours and covered a lot of ground but eventually called an Uber to go back home rather than walk more.

I need some clothes properly cleaned so I looked up laundries near my Airbnb, one was highly rated so I packed my stuff and called an Uber. The driver dropped me at a semi-hollowed out crumbling industrial building…. I wandered for a while until I saw men loading trucks with what looked like bags of clothes, I held up my bag and asked “Laundry?” one guy said “No English, come” and led me to a rusted out of freight elevator with no doors or walls, he motioned me to get inside, pressed a button and jumped out.

The lift slowly crawled up the shaft and eventually stopped where I could see men ironing clothes in a huge industrial area, I wandered amoung them a bit, one man approached me, said “No English…”, I made washing motions, he got another man with a little English who tried to explain to the idiot Canadian that this is an industrial laundry. I started to leave and he stopped me, shrugged, took my bag of clothes, said “Tomorrow morning” and walked away. No receipt, no number, no ticket…. tomorrow morning should be interesting.

The heat finally broke, it’s 28c today and I have walked and walked and walked, enjoying the manageable weather and exploring more of the city before I leave tonight.

Cairo has been so lovely, not what I expected, much crazier, much dirtier, much louder, but so lovely, everyone nice to me (except maybe the pickpocket). Today while walking 3 different people started chatting with me, the most common thing I heard is how badly tourism is doing, two different men said to me today “when you go home make the good propaganda about Egypt”.

Bananas seem to be a big deal in cairo…

 

While walking I stopped for one last bowl of koshari, I’ll be trying to recreate it when I get home.

 

 

 

 

Most surprising thing about Cairo: I have adjusted to the heat. It’s been around 40c most days and not even that “dry” of a heat, usually around 50-60% humidity. yet I can function for a few hours at a time in that heat and when it comes down to around 32c by 7pm I feel fine outside. This is surprising.

I had my first English speaking Uber driver (actually first English speaking person period, outside of guides) of my time in Cairo, we talked about a lot of different things (because Cairo traffic is insane and it took 40 minutes to go 4kms) and he was saying how the climate has changed in the past decade, how much hotter and dustier it is all the time, he said Cairo now has Gulf weather.

 

Cairo has the only major subway system in Africa, three lines, Mistubishi rolling stock, full sized trains and tons upon tons of people. Also it’s the most “locals only” subway I’ve ever seen, in a week I did not see a single other tourist on a train.

It was also the friendliest subway I’ve ridden anywhere, people saying hi, offering me their seat, their water, over and over.

The system is also, despite having only three lines, the most confusing I have ever ridden. The English signage is either totally nonexistent or completely inconsistent. For example signs that tell you this train is going “West” or to “Giza” or to “El-Mounib” or to “Al-Moniq” or to “Al-Mounib” are ALL the saying the same thing. None of the stations colour code the signage in any way nor are the lines named. Eventually I just had to start memorizing things and figuring out the Arabic signs.

Who could find this map confusing?

Yup….

 

Line One:

Line Two:

The only time I saw stations empty was late morning, the city steadily gathers steam all through the day, peaking around 10pm.