Calendar watchers will know that I've been home for a few days. The last few posts have been me catching up because Dubai didn't offer the chance to blog regularly; a cramped schedule.
I have also managed to charge the battery for my phone and upload photos from one of my biggest days on the trip: Cairo - The Pharaonic Period. Here are direct links to the updated pages (photo additions, not text changes):
The only other thing to do is offer some reflections on my trip.- I'm glad to be home. A month away is exactly long enough. I was starting to miss all the conveniences of home rather than enjoying the different-ness of foreign places. Canberra is such an easy place to live too. That's a lesson I learn every time I go overseas.
- The trip was worth every penny and every moment. It provided me with all the wonders I could wish for on a 'trip of a lifetime' and really only trivial things might have been changed. My heartfelt thanks go out to Kim Glazer for organising it all, my various tour guides, especially Ray, and to the various other people who intersected my journey.
- Cultures in the Mediterranean are different to ours. (No, really!) The Arab people (and here I'm counting Egyptians, Turks and Emiratis, probably incorrectly) are very assertive and self-centred in their approach to life. In spite of there being huge numbers of them in various cities, there appears to be little civility or even fair-mindedness in their approach to interacting with the rest of their society. Pushy and rude, one might surmise, except that they are all like that and if you're not you get left behind. It's just different to what I'm used to.
- Yet, the Greeks felt much more "like me", although they too are pretty assertive and direct. I suspect that I'm more used to them because the Greeks have had a profound affect on Australian culture over time (as have a number of other southern European nations). Perhaps that makes them less distant to my culture?
- Road rules in the Mediterranean are clearly modelled on the Pirates Code: "more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules" (Pirates of the Caribbean). I certainly wouldn't want to drive there.
- We don't really look at the construction of our buildings with the same eye as the ancients did. I think we ought to make more effort to include cunning architectural tricks to make the buildings we construct more inherently interesting, particularly the ones that are constructed to be landmarks (various parliament buildings, monuments like the War Memorial, etc).
- I find myself not as attached to the pursuit of richness. Don't get me wrong, I still need to develop my income, but I find being surrounded by vulgar wealth quite less appealing than perhaps I once did, or at least thought that I did.
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