Traveling is, in essence, the best thing for any adventurous young observer of people to do.  In a lifetime, I would say that one must travel at least 20,000 miles around and away from his relative home to really learn about what the world around them is like.  This is especially applicable now, in this day and age with the help of technology; discount airfare, discount hotel accommodations and much more reliable modes of transportation.  It still amazes me though that some people think that they can read a book or learn a language and really understand about the place they are studying.  Worse off, television makes you think that sitting at a dinner table with an American chef/author on the Discovery Channel will give you an understanding of the people he's eating with and their culture.  I don't believe in such things.  To understand the world, you have to go out into it; that's my motto.
    When I first graduated high school, it dawned on me that I knew nothing about my real culture; I didn't speak the language and I definitely didn't know any traditions.  I didn't know where I came from, and even though I had been born there and had made plenty of summer visits, it seemed like my cousins were learning more about American culture from their summer visits to me.  I was a displaced individual with a misplaced identity; I was too Egyptian to be American, but not Egyptian enough to be Egyptian.  That was when I decided I was going to attend college in Egypt and regain my lost identity.  It didn't really work out the way I had intended, and I found this out as soon as I landed there.  At the time, my long and uncouth hair did not match the long and devout name in my passport, and the customs official made sure of pointing that out to me.  My four bottles of liquor from the Duty Free didn't pass well either in my country with its strong religious morals and my grandmother waiting in the Arrivals area.  It didn't take me long to realize that this was going to be one of the harder adventures that I've tossed myself head first into.
    The culture shock was amazing and hard to get my head around.  The most homophobic men were holding hands while they walked the streets, hollering out to anyone with the remote shapeliness of a woman.  Cabs were driven by men with one eye; some cabs barely had a floorboard, others were either tastefully overdone or obviously the driver's actual home.  People were praying in the streets when all the room ran out in the mosques, the prayer call was everywhere and unavoidable.  Everyone stood close together and sweat on each other on the public transportation system, but it was o.k. because everyone was sweating anyways and had nowhere else to stand.  Traffic was a free-flowing parking lot and it seemed like the whole country had snuck into Ferrari Racing School even though none of them actually had a Ferrari.  I became aware of a new concept, something that was only applicable in Egypt; the Organized Chaos Theory is how I would describe my motherland.  Everything was so crazy and chaotic, at any given moment you could find yourself face to face with a story that you could tell your friends for a lifetime.  But even with all that insanity, everything flowed fluidly and perfectly.  At the end of the day, your car will be fixed, even though when you woke up the mechanic from his insect-infested bed to fix your flat tire he picked up the sledgehammer.  Enjoy cups of tea with  a dysfunctional police squad who drives their dark car on the wrong side of the highway at night with no lights on.  Actually, the one time I remember peace and normality the whole time I had spent in my country, was when I visited the American Embassy for 3-4 hours.
    I spent nearly two years of my life jumping into cabs and taking the long way around the city, running into grocery stores and pharmacies and cafes and just about everywhere to speak my broken arabic with the American accent.  It was my own take on guerrilla self-education.  I made field trips for myself to go all over the country and see all sorts of things that no tourist ever heard about and I made plenty of friends who taught me about quite a bit of everything that had to do with my country.  I took amazing pictures and consider this to be one of my most memorable periods in my life.  I will never forget living in the heart of a pumping, artery-clogged city that was never going to die.  I took my living there as a privilege and had the motivation to take advantage of everything.  I even used being on that side of the world as a much closer, and cheaper, launching point for me to get into other countries that also happened to be on that side of the world.  It was hugely beneficial experience to me in more way then one; socially, culturally, traditionally, philosophically, and spiritually.  After an experience like that, it's hard for me to even appreciate being a homebody, or a non-traveller.  At this point in my life, I'm happiest when I'm not "around."