A Blog From Alex

I'm now back in Cairo. The trip to Alex was wonderful. It consisted mostly of sitting an watching tv, practicing guitar, walks on the beach and a little swimming. I wrote a few blogs while I was there, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to post them until I got back. So here is the first one.


I’m here in Alexandria. The weather here is beautiful. The summer sun is strong, but the sea breeze effectively counteracts the sun’s heat for the most part. We are staying in a spacious apartment which overlooks the Mediterranean. Everyday I ask myself how I got to be so damn lucky.
I wasn’t always so lucky. Growing up, my family always stayed in the cheapest possible option (as you do when you are a family of six). And, whether it was the beach, an amusement park, the mountains, or whatever, we always managed to be staying at least a half hour drive away from our daily activities. This meant that our family of six would spend a good chunk of the day squeezed into a vehicle that was only meant to seat five. Our hotel/motel was never big enough for our family, but cost efficiency was the concern, not comfort. Inevitably, Tommy (my younger brother) and I would always be the ones to take the floor for our bed. Julie was the oldest so she had bed priority, and Mary had back problems so it would just be cruel to make her sleep on the floor. My memories of childhood vacations rarely include being amazed by nature’s beauty or building an enormous sandcastle or having a particularly marvelous time anywhere. The memories are things like mom and dad fighting because dad forgot to bring the checkbook, feeling car sick, and being disappointed because we were staying at another hotel that didn’t have a swimming pool.
I try to think of happy vacation memories and I come up with two. The first is visiting my Granny (mom’s mom). She lived with one of my aunts first in Maryland and then in Pennsylvania. I did not particularly like this aunt and her husband was big and quiet and, as a child, he intimidated me. This aunt had two children who I never really connected with. But I didn’t really mind the rest of the family, as long as my Granny was around. Granny loved all of her grandchildren so much. She used to have us sit in her lap, even when we were way too big and too old to do so. She made the twelve hour trip in the car all worth it. The second is visiting my Grandma Lee (dad’s mom). We didn’t visit Grandma Lee every year. The drive to Wisconsin was longer than the drive to Maryland, plus (who are we kidding) my mom usually called the shots and she didn’t get along with Grandma Lee very well. But one Christmas, when I was about 12 I think, we visited Grandma Lee. That was my first white Christmas that I remember (I may have had one or two when I was too young to remember). I remember being incredibly happy to be there and have snow on Christmas day. Since that Christmas I have only had two other white Christmases when I have visited family in Pennsylvania. Christmas is my favorite holiday and it is even better when it snows. But anyhow, I find it sort of sad that in 18 years worth of family vacations I could only think of two happy memories. I feel like either my parents did a bad job of planning our trips or I was just an ungrateful child who refused to be optimistic about life. The truth is probably a little bit of both.
But since I have become an adult, slowly but surely, my luck has changed (that or I am just much more optimistic about life now). And so currently I find myself staying at no cost in an apartment I could never afford. And to add to the bliss of it all, I am staying with people I enjoy being with. How did I get so lucky?