Oh Canada

I want to say "thanks" to you too, Cecka - you're amazing at making us all feel loved! To the rest of you, I hope you know that even if I haven't posted/emailed/everything else very much, I'm still thinking about you - one of the first things I did when I got home today was make my mom sit down and look at our group picture so I could tell her about all of you:)

I'm finally back in Canada - it's been a long trip home! My adventures started at JFK, where some man kept persistently trying to make me take his taxi to La Guardia (oh memories of Egypt) - at first I was just being nice and politely telling him that I already had a bus ticket, but after he asked whether or not I was over 18 (because he said he "just had to make sure") I decided he was pretty much a loser. One of the airport guys who had told me where to catch the bus seemed on the verge of "rescuing" me from what he called a "hustler" - I should have told him that after being in Egypt I wasn't going to fall for sweet-talking men (yeah,yeah, Barret and Andrew K, I know you're probably thinking "whatever" after the incident with the freaky man on the bus in Jerusalem, but this was different!).

Anyways, after flying to Chicago and catching my connection to Omaha, Nebraska, I sat next to a man on the plane whose grandpa was from Lebanon - although the only Arabic he knew was "keyfak", it was still really, really great to sit next to someone who knew at least a little about the Middle East (he was even a member of what used to be called the Syrian Orthodox Church): one of God's little blessings when I was feeling really sad and tired about leaving Egypt (and about not really having slept for 2 nights straight). After dozing in and out for a little while, I was woken up by the Lebanese guy saying "look at the light show outside the window" - the lightning was crazy, probably the craziest I've ever seen it. From up in the air it looked like every streak was hitting the ground. After watching for awhile I fell asleep again and woke up to some intense turbulence (it felt like a roller coaster). The guy next to me looked like he was praying pretty seriously and although I tried to pray too, I was suffering from a lot of jet lag and yup, I fell asleep again (some of the people on the flight later said that they were afraid for their lives - maybe I should've been, but I'm not that dramatic). To make a long story short, we couldn't land in Omaha because of storms and tornado warnings and instead got rerouted to Cedar Rapids, Iowa (where the airport was already closed). After a big ordeal with people yelling and swearing about being "stranded", they put us in a hotel for free (although I only got about 3 hours of sleep because we weren't there long). I called my 3 roommates who had come to pick me up and they told me that they had decided to sleep in the airport to wait for me rather than drive the 2 1/2 hours back to Sioux Center - I have really amazing friends :)

After hanging out for a few days in Sioux Center (and getting to have wonderful sahlab with Margaret and Andrew K), I took a bus back to Edmonton - it was a long ride, but I figured that after all the time we've spent on buses in the last 4 months, a few more days wouldn't kill me. Once we got into Canada it was strange to be sitting with a bunch of people who were neither American or Egyptian - and after Egyptian and Israeli bus drivers, these drivers were pretty dang slow. I got to see a lot of prairie, and a lot of trees - just doesn't match the desert. However, I got a great "deja-vu" of the middle east this morning when I was sitting in a little middle-of-nowhere town in the middle of the Alberta prairie and watched as a tank rolled by through the streets. Who would've thought I'd see such a strangely familiar site (I'm thinking of border crossings in the ME) in a country that barely has a military . . .

I've been home now for about 5 hours and it's been great to see my family although I've got one sister in Greece, and I'm waiting for the other one to get back from work. I still haven't "settled" into life yet so I don't really know how it feels - it's strangely normal to be back home and "normal" is probably what I'm most afraid of. I still want to use our strange mixture of Arabic and English and it's weird to think that everyone around me doesn't know what a "higab" or "falafel" is. When my mom was driving me home from the bus station I saw a woman wearing a higab walk into a restaurant - I was excited to point it out to my mom.

Anyways, that's about enough for now - my life has been "in transit" for the past week or so and now I'll have to see where it goes from here . . .
As for Survivor: Agouza, I'm going to have to jump on the bandwagon and vote for Marcia - after all the debating she had to do with some Israelis/Palestinians to convince them that she was Egyptian and not Indian, I think she deserves it (that, and the fact that she survived getting hit in the face by a tomato) :) BUT, I am still waiting for Marcia (who was the first person to tell me what a blog actually was) to post something on here - I can't really vote for her if I don't even know if she's alive . . .

Hope that all's well wherever you are - Josiah, can you be a little more specific about the missile? I mean, the way you wrote that Hizbollah fired a missile at your kibbutz is the same way someone would write about the weather . . .

Cheers to you all . . .