Engrish

Okay, so now I'm an English teacher.

Not in the "dude, let's go to Thailand and teach English so we can get tons of chicks and do a bunch of yabba and party on the beach with trannies and for sure get a Red Bull shirt and it'll be crazy" kind of way.

Not even close.

In fact, I was sitting in the corner of a dusty church in downtown Cairo going through the alphabet with a guy from Darfur who has serious problems with the letters E and H. It's not paid, but I figure if I've got enough time on my hands to do a blog, then I've got enough time to help a brother out.

On Tuesday, I went out for a drive with these guys who try and transform Cairo's streets by planting trees and painting walls and picking up trash and stuff. On one street -- which was literally in the shadow of the pyramids -- the volunteers had really done a nice job of removing an impromptu garbage dump in the middle of the street and planting trees and fixing street lights. Nice work.



Long story short, we pulled back out onto the expressway in their little sedan and barreled through miles and miles of garbage-strewn slums and donkeys and stinking burning trash and dust and cats and filth and humanity before arriving at the next street, where a fresh row of trees had been planted.

Talk about banging your head against a wall.

Okay, here are my top three Israelite kings of all time:

1. David - Musician, adulterer, conqueror, legend.
2. Jehoash - A minimalist. Not only did give the temple a redesign by ridding it of all those gaudy, pagan symbols, but he also clamped down on Baal worship and fired the sacred whores.
3. Saul - Suffered from depression and liked David’s band. Nuff said.

And my top four buys of the last year:

1. My $250 laptop, which was purchased from a dude in a car with leather seats at a gas station in North York, Ontario. The keyboard doesn’t really work, but I don’t really like typing, anyways.
2. My $20 H&M polo shirt. Sure, it looks like a dead cat when you pull it out of the washer, but…
3. Kompakt Speicher CD ($22), mixed by Michael Mayer. Is it possible to wear out CDs? No, it’s not. But if it were, this CD would have the comfortably warn look of a sweater in a J. Crew catalog.
4. Iftar last night: half chicken, tabouli, stew, chips and bottled water: $4 CND. Take that, world bank!