Going The Distance: An Internet Love Story...for Valentine's Day

We weren't really going to do a Valentine's Day post this year, except maybe some romantic dinner ideas, etc...which we'll probably post tomorrow...because romance can happen on any day.

Valentine's Day, like Christmas, doesn't really hold much appeal to us. The only real holiday we enjoy is Halloween, even then...*shrugs*. We believe that if you love someone you do little things for them everyday, and those are really the big things - not some gesture forced on a day that was originally created out of true love, now deemed a holiday by candy and card companies in the interest of profit.

However, we were asked by our friend, @singlemomdate (SMD) of Single Mom’s Dating Diary  (check out her blog, it comes recommended) to write about our romance with our boyfriend, James, the man she introduced us to on Twitter, back in May of 2011, for her blog, even though we are neither single, nor a mom.

The plan was to wait until we got to that point in the writings about our life, abuses, mis-diagnoses, experiences, things we remember, what we've done with our lives; which is currently at part 10 (It Spins Madly). We've gotten as far as about December 2010 and wanted to try to keep it in a natural progression, while other memories return to us (it's part of mapping therapy, part of wanting to have a solid way to chronicle our memories for each other). But like we said, SMD asked, and we obliged...we owe her so much really.

Most of us are not the mushy type, but in honour of Valentines we will do what we can to paint you an accurate and romantic picture of the progression of our relationship with James, the love of “our” life. <insert *gag*>

First of all, if you don’t know who the “we”, in we is, then you should probably read more of this blog. In short we struggle, live with, sometimes enjoy, a life with a mental condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as MultiplePersonality Disorder.

James, our boyfriend, met Single Mom when he started reading her blog the early months of 2011, he started to follow her on Twitter, we know very little on the specifics but she subsequently directed him to our blog, because we had been writing a lot about dating in the later months of 2010, where he read about our life and all the other strange and odd things we write about daily.

The story on his end goes like this: James read many entries in our blog, absorbed our writing, and then started following us on Twitter. One day he got up the nerve to leave us a comment on our blog, thereby drawing attention to himself. We started watching him on Twitter, with all the other followers we had, we only paid him minimal attention. At first we were only mildly curious about him, honestly we thought him odd. Turns out he’s just British. <insert laughter>

At the time we were going through a bought of un-medicated insomnia so our six hour time zone difference didn't seem so bad, he flirted with us occasionally, and we flirted back. He’d send us e-mails on occasion, commenting on things, asking questions, agreeing with us that Natural Born Killers was one of the better romance films he’d seen; continuing to read our blog daily. Eventually we began to talk about potentially meeting, and then decided we should have a date on Skype.

We had planned to not pursue relationships any longer after the last one we had, with Significant Other, ended, decided to come out publicly about our mental illness and work slowly toward helping raise mental health awareness, and writing about our life. We knew we would never be able to keep the Us, and our “illness” a secret from any man we ever dated again, realizing it wouldn’t be right to date a man, then after weeks, months, tell him we were ill. We resolved to a life of being single and only casually dating men, having “alternative” styles of relationships. We also didn’t want a relationship for reasons to do with privacy (we like being alone), and complications that might arise because of the way we decided to live, honestly, with no more hiding, so we could heal, come to terms with our history of abuse, and work towards a healthy life for us.

We agreed to a Skype date with James, deciding “why not”, he lives so far away after all, and if we were seriously going to have him visit in the future we should get to know him on Skype. On our first Skype date he drank red wine while we enjoyed a bottle of white, and ate our dinner of pork chops, 6 hours in a different time zone, thousands of miles apart. We had a good date, and he asked to see us again. We told him maybe in a couple of days; days later we had our second date. It quickly turned into seeing each other every day, on Skype; we would talk, getting to know each other, play on the computer together, he would stare at us all silly on the bad Skype connection.

For weeks it went on and we started discussing meeting in person and then we invited him to come visit us. He was excited and did what he could to fly to us as soon as he could. We were still not interested in a relationship; we couldn’t look past the distance, and the difficulty not only with our illness, but also immigration issues. Being the adventurous type, and willing to try anything we thought why not, he was nice enough, and willing to pay his way.

In July 2011 we met James at the local airport; we were excited, slightly nervous. He was better looking in person than on the computer. Our first kiss was seconds after see each other, in the international arrival room of the airport. Someone nearby made a snide comment about “kids”, we didn’t care. After weeks of dating online we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other.

We’ll spare you the sexy details that followed, but after weeks of online Skype dating; and no, there was no naked Skype escapades, in case you were assuming, only one of us is that kind of girl, and we kept he under control as best we could; and not being able to touch each other, connecting on a level uninterrupted by physical touch…need we say more?

He stayed with us for five weeks, ”fortunately” we had gotten fired from our job the week he was to arrive, and so the first couple of weeks until we found another job we go to spend a lot of time with him, and got to know him really well.

He told us he loved us one day shortly after he arrived, sitting on the sofa in our apartment, a day he’ll likely remember forever, because he professed his love to the “wrong” one of us (Cassandra) whose response was expressing her desire for a hotdog.  He laughs about it, but we are sure it wasn’t the way he’d seen that going.

A couple of days later he asked us to be his girlfriend, and we told him “no” at first. We are adventurous, but also logical on occasion. After some emotional conversation over it we decided to discuss it and talked out the semantics about how it might work, living in different countries, and neither of us being wealthy to afford several flights a year. In the end we decided it would be something we could try.

We spent the next few weeks as boyfriend and girlfriend(s), it was both amazing and difficult, difficult because it caused a lot of headaches, literally, for us, as is sometimes common in our particular disorder during high activity, stress and changes.

The day came when he had to get on a plane. Saying goodbye was hard. He promised to try to come back as soon as he could, ­he cried, we held tough, holding him at the international departures door, reassuring him he would be back soon, and it would be okay; waiting until he entered international departures, and we turned away, before we allowed the built up tears to stream down our cheeks.

It was only a month before he made it back, a long month for some, and he promised he never wanted to be away from us for that long again…and the rest…well, the rest is history, and the future. Seven long and event filled months after we made our relationship with him official we now find ourselves living temporarily in England with him. We’ll be going back to the states in the spring where he plans to immigrate, to live with us permanently.  He calls us his angels, and he is, for some of us, our knight in shining armour.

The most important thing we did, looking back over the months we were single, was finally dealing with a lifetime of baggage, condensing it, eliminating some of it; working on ourselves, and changing the way we approached dating and relationships. It’s important to be happy with you, accept whoever you are, to not go into every date thinking they “might be the one” because in doing that you are doing a disservice to the one who is truly “the one” …not to mention putting immense pressure on the situation.

We try to have a fairly open and transparent relationship with him. We value honesty, even if it’s hard, it beats the pain of the opposite, the pain of secrets. James knows a relationship with us isn’t going to be easy, but he loves us, he loves who we are, and is willing to work at it. He knows we don’t all love him, he knows when he feels the urge to tell us he loves us, he may not be getting an “I love you” in return. He knows that a good relationship required work, and communication, just like a friendship. No relationship is organic.

We are happy we took the time to start dealing with our issues, to be stronger together, to be who we are, to learn to love ourselves, because how can you expect someone to love you, if you don’t love yourself.

Love yourself.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

~Frank et al

We, most of us anyway, want to thank Single Mom  for introducing us to the love of our life. For her beautiful soul we can only wish the same.

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Some of the stuff we've written about James:

·      50,000 Tweets and All We Got Was...

·      A 'State of the Union' Re: The Visit of Our Twittercrush James

·      James and the Giant Peach Pit...Of Despair

·      A 'State of the Union' Re: The Boyfriend Moving In

·      Our British Invasion

Imported From Our Boyfriends Blog:

·      'I Meet Cassandra And It Doesn't Go Well' 

·      'A Rough Night, Not The Good Kind'

·      'Who's Here Today'

·      'I Talk to Cassandra'

·      'Nine of Nine'

·      'Meet Catherine, Not Bethany'

·      'Today Was A Good Day'

·      'They Are One'

·      'They Are Nine'

·      'An Emotional Night For Us All' 

·      'Brooke Gets The Better Of Me'

·      'Perfect Ten'

Culinary School - Part Two

Despite the fact that we graduated culinary school with honours, it didn’t come easy; as any honors student of any faculty/study will tell you...it takes hard work to be at the top of your class.

As we’ve mentioned in previous writing, after our car accident we had slight brain damage that had granted us, through a series of neurological testing, private test rooms and longer testing periods through disability services in the Second University we attended (where we started a Nutritional Science degree for a year and a half). It being University, you could be a disability student and still be somewhat anonymous and discrete about it, especially if you were us, a “mature” (26 years old) student, who had no desire to make friends on campus. (though we did have a study partner once, for accounting…a class which we failed miserably).

Once we got to Culinary School we felt we didn’t need to register with disability services and we were proud, so we tried to manage, knowing that if we got granted disability status for testing, and took tests in a separate room from our classmates, in a small class setting, they would all notice and ask questions. We were ashamed of our mental disability, prior to the accident we were able to manage distractions, work together fine, and organize thought structures much more effectively. We were a top student in First University, were we studied fine arts and communications, before the accident. Some classes we didn’t even have to attend, we scored higher marks than most of the people who went to class, and we didn’t study all that much, even though in those days we were living with The Mother and smoking pot every minute that we weren’t in classes, or working out to maintain our huge weight loss.

It turns out, in the end, we had to register. Instructors began to question our focus ability for tests, we knew we could do better than we were, we knew the information, we just couldn’t test in a room full of people. So we registered with disability services, and we took tests in a private room, in far less time we were allotted, and our text book grades improved.

Culinary school, and cooking in general, was always something that came natural to us, being from a food oriented family, we were engrained with the keen interest of at least eating food…which is only part of the reason we gained so much weight over the years, in addition to depression, various other mental health issues, and an unlimited food budget with time to experiment, was also to blame (the only good thing that came from our short lived relationship and marriage to The Ex Husband).

Slowly over the years we had gotten to 275 pounds, thankfully we lost it (100 pound in 9 months, back in the day) and gained an interest in food, from a nutritional standpoint, and then moved onto culinary arts when being in University got entirely too difficult for us to manage, and we began neglecting our studies to pour over cookbooks and internet sites; and create recipes and plan dinner parties trying to teach ourselves how to do it all better.

Man, one of the things we are confident in is that we can cook…can we cook…but we can hardly ever cook anything we are satisfied with – other people beg for our cooking, or have in the past; but because we live alone, and we are hyper sensitive to any weight gain, one of us fears food now, and a couple of us refuse to eat.

Culinary school, for us, was the most fun we can imagine having as an adult in school, and was as eye opening as the time we sold Kirby Vacuum cleaners door-to-door in one of the Mountain States. Being an older (“mature”) student, we got on well with the instructors, had a good report; and us being some of us, occasionally mouthy and opinionated, meant they all knew who we were – and the majourity of them enjoyed it.

It was in culinary school where we started smoking again, unfortunately. We’d been cigarette-free for at least four years, even as we had been in a relationship with Talented Boyfriend, a smoker; but as the last semester of classes loomed the stress, the physical pain, and influences from new friends in our social life began to take an effect, and by the time we graduated culinary school we were a smoker again, and it increased from there.

While in culinary school we ended the year long relationship with a man we were seeing and living with (Dreadfully Boring Boyfriend), because of several illicit affairs we had gotten tangled up in. We spent a couple of months sleeping on Standby’s living room floor, after we had broken off our love triangle with him and Firecracker, a girl who had been in love with us, and they began dating. To say we were hurt to have been second choice to our first choice would be putting it lightly, and sleeping in his apartment for those months, over the holiday season, eroded our friendship for awhile.

Those two years of culinary school also presented us with an opportunity to make friends all on our own, previously the only people we’d know in the city where we lived where fellow-musicians of Talented Boyfriend, so we were basically alone once we got the Culinary School. We made a lot of friends, like Partner In Crime; but we also made a friend in an ex-girlfriend of a musician who had been the first female we’d ever met in the City, we’ll call her Sexy Librarian. We became good friends with Sexy Librarian when we reunited she was super intelligent, and appealed to some of us very much. The friendship ended, as most of our female friendships do, when we met The Non-Bestie. Sexy Librarian commented on not being able to keep up with our party lifestyle, one facilitate by a new crowd of people we were merging with, and so, gradually she was gone, and was replaced by The Non-Bestie.

Culinary school was the first time we’d ever done hard drugs, having stuck with marijuana, and the accidental laced doobie when living with The Body Piercer.

As anybody who has read our first story of culinary school, you’ll know that we went through a “stage”, (you call it a stage, we call it letting Emmie run too much of the show). One of the last weeks of culinary school the class was at a local pub, there was a lot of drinking, and we were doing shots of tequila (we don’t even like tequila). Somehow we ended up in the washroom with a fellow female student, and as we stood there and talked to her, drunk, sharing boy talk we both came to the sudden realization that we were fucking the same guy from class (he was our bootie call, in those days, and nobody knew we were “seeing” him).

In a frantic state, she yanked us into a bathroom stall, locked the door, mumbling, and from her purse pulled a small white packet and her keys. That was the first day we ever tried cocaine; at about the age of (physically) 28, in the bathroom of a pub stall, with a hot younger woman from culinary school.

She took the first line off of the key, dipped the key in the baggie and instructed us what to do.

To this day we don’t remember feeling strange, or much different, just very...alert. We do, however, remember being dropped off at home, standing in the middle of the house we were renting in the hippie/yuppie part of the city, and exclaiming out loud while standing in the living room, to nobody but ourselves, “What.The.Fuck.Was.That”.

We were glad not to be around cocaine the next day, because even though we had a vague recollection of it, and the feeling we had, the post nasal drip down the back of our throat left us wanting more.

Around this time we also started dating Younger Man, our first younger man, 8 years our junior (we’d always been in to considerably older ones) and while it didn’t last more than a few months, it was an experience we should have learned from; however, it didn’t prevent us from moving on to the next younger man relationship, with one of a similar age difference; but apparently even the stalking, the leaving gifts on our doorstep and apologies accompanied by gifts when his jealousy would get out of hand when we refused to let him call us his girlfriend (he was also a culinary school student), didn’t sway us from moving on to the next relationship with Significant Other, a young man we terminated our relationship with last August (2011).

The friendship with Significant Other prior to dating didn’t seem to prevent us from pursuing a future, of sorts, with him. It was right before Christmas break our last semester of culinary school when we were pulling something from our locker, when we first met him and became friends. He stopped to talk to us and we thought him weird looking at that moment, he was probably high though. He was a massive pot head, and from a very young age, and could pass as a burn-out in almost any setting.

The worked in a restaurant that employed a server who also worked at the previous restaurant we had worked in. Long story short, he had told the waitress he liked us, and at the holiday party of the restaurant that Christmas she told us the things he had asked and said about us, so we knew he liked us and we teased and flirted with him in the halls at school while we dated Younger Man for a few months. Significant Other would call us up and ask us if we wanted to get high.

Our first memory of him was the night we didn’t have many people over (the goal of the evening was to smoke a bunch of pot we had in our freezer that was getting to dry to finish on our own) and he was slamming beers and smoking massive amounts of weed (that he had brought). He stepped out for a cigarette and came back into the house, went to the washroom and then informed us he had thrown up in the snow in front of the house and in the washroom on our second floor. We told him he really didn’t have to share that with us, and a little while later he was too inebriated to tolerate, so we requested Standby, still our friend in those days, drive him home. Obviously it was love right from the start. A fixer-upper!

That house we rented in the hippie/yuppie neighbourhood was the last place we held temporary residence, that last semester of culinary school we got a payment from the trucking company whose trucker had been responsible for our car accident. It wasn’t a lot, it was enough to buy a shitty house, in a tolerable shitty neighbourhood, buy a new bed, and some furnishing, things of which we’d owned none, being practically transient for years.

During one of the final parties we had in that house a guest of a guest rammed his head through the car window of a neighbour's vehicle, and with a house full of people that neighbour came barreling into the house, located us and told us what had happened, and that he had called the police. Some of the male guests located the young man, chased him down, and beat him up on the corner within view of our front steps.

Us being drunk, and high as a kite, we tried to maintain some calm, and as we sat on the steps of the house and awaited the police, crying, scared, because we were not a resident of the country we were living, and we’d never had the police called on any of our countless parties, people began fleeing. Word was that when the news traveled to the third story of the house there were drugs being stashed, and people trying to figure out how to escape out the third story windows. Fun times.

It wasn’t long, only a few months in that house, before we had to move out anyway, so it was a good thing we had the money to buy a house. The landlady, who didn’t live in the city, from that point on, had all the neighbours watching the place, and if more than two people entered the house she would call to “check up” on us. We were being watched, by neighbourhood watch.

When we bought the house in that sketchy neighbourhood, where we would live for just over two years, Significant Other moved in with us the very first day. He will be, for us, the last man/person we had a desire to “fix”, because as Frank re-emerged, finally, during the span of that relationship, due to a variety of reasons, we decided The Other Girl was going to stop trying to “fix” others and instead she would try to fix us. It didn’t work out exactly as planned, but the final year of the last two years of her life, The Other Girl began to write, even before we had her start a blog.

But that’s a story for the next entry of our history.

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Didn't click the links but want to read some more of our life story, specifically about how we came to be We?

• *We Are Just Call Me Frank | The Power Of We
• 1. Addressing The Issue of Frank: Part 1 (2011)
• 2. The Emergence of Frank: The Beginning (8 Yrs Old)
• 3. The Emergence of Frank: The Second Coming (13 Yrs Old)
• 4. The Emergence of Frank: Three Times A Rescuer (21 Yrs Old)
• 5. The Emergence of Frank: Frank's Failure (23 Yrs Old)
• 6. We Go To University & We Take A Lover
• 7. Life Without Frank - The First Two Years
• 7b. Collision: The Other Girls Accident/Franks Coma (2004)
• 8. Culinary School and Affairs
  
  (one day, one day all of this will be elaborated on even more...until then, these are the shells of our lives)

Stress And Food...And Weight Obsession

Just a quick post today, soon we're going to work on an entry about nutrition and weight loss. We studied it for about a year and a half at University before we headed to culinary school (only part of that we've written about so far), and after we'd lost 100 pounds on a diet and one of us became very interested in food, nutrition and balanced diet.

We've written in the past 9 months about issues we have with food, we got really thin for awhile, and it was a problem...but now we're getting back to a healthy weight...and it's a problem again.

Part of the stress of last night; which Cassandra wrote about on Tumblr...but only a bit, and not about all the issues she was having, more about the ones we were having; is that we're struggling over food with each other again. It's been going on since James was here visiting (we put a few pound onto our 6' stature), and now a lot since we have a new job where we work around massive, massive, amounts of food.

"I just want to eat" she whimpered and cried to James last night, who usually spends all of our home time with us logged into Gmail Video Chat. "I want a pizza. They won't let me." She put her hands over our face, sobbing.

While Cass and Catherine we're prominent last night, and Catherine's favorite food is pizza, she's a finicky eater, preferring not to eat when she is stressed out, which is the opposite of Cassandra, who is a little cow when it comes to food when she is sad/depressed/stressed...and even when she's not those things, she loves to eat. Catherine wouldn't let her eat...Sam wouldn't let her eat. There were many at work last night, as Catherine wrote, we were switching too much and our head was in agony. James saw us to bed via video chat and read us a story till we fell asleep. He really is the most wonderful boyfriend, no matter how much Brooke protests and hates him.

It's always more difficult when there are too many of us around. Back in the day (only a couple of months ago) when we would go to the grocery store, in between Tweeting and dancing, you would have see a tall young woman (looking much younger than her actual age) walking down aisles, staring wishfully, wide-eyed, at all the food. Sometimes in the grocery line she would want a candy bar, and Others wouldn't let her have it, and she would struggle with keeping her tears in until we left the store, begging to us silently, and sometimes she didn't make it out of the store before tears would stream down our face; and that's another reasons we wear sunglasses as much as we can.

Sounds childish, but she's only 14...and an emotional and sad one at times...

So, we're having struggles...we don't know what to do.

If you think seeking professional help is the answer then we won't agree unless you can tell us exactly how they might help; we're not giving each other us, we just want to learn to work together better. Like we told The Father last weekend on Skype, we need more than a year, preferable a year uninterrupted by stupid sexual affairs, getting fired and scrambling to find a new job, problems with the property we own, and all the other stuff that has been going on this past year with people in our past life, from The Others Girls life. It's only been a year since we had to deal with an ex, Significant Other...who we are still in need of writing about...who harassed us when we ended the relationship with him last September.

How far we've come, is far...how far we have to go is further...and with all the new stress, maybe having to move, but then, maybe not (still waiting to know), meaning selling the house and moving back in with the mother...we're just looking down the road, to some time to relax and not be looking for a job for awhile, and spending time with the man who is much too kind for us...we need a vacation...from our life...we need to get to our adventure.

~Frank et al (almost all of the et al these days, again...it so much easier with only 3 of 9)

The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part VIII: Alexandria, Egypt

This travel journal entry will conclude the series of The Other Girls writing from our travel experience with Significant Other in 2009, it was supposed to have been done weeks ago, but with all the upset we've had in our life we really haven't had the time focus on it, rather we needed to write about what was going on day to day so we could keep things on track...we've fallen so far behind in our completion of our stories of how we go to this last year all thanks to our tenant fucking us over and stealing stuff from us, and getting canned last Monday.

It's hard to believe it's been a week since we got fired, it feels like forever.
Thankfully this last entry hadn't made it here, because we have some job hunting to do and not a lot of time to write. 

Today James (@mr_jmm) and us went to the public library to check out some books on writing query letters to literary agents and publishers; so while we search for jobs, contemplate our options regarding staying here or moving to a new city...we will pour over these books and try to figure out how we can turn our writing into something more useful...to help us, and to help others.

So while we do that, why not read some of the travel journals written by some of the others and The Other Girl? (or our post from yesterday with a bunch of archives in it?)...we'll be back to writing about James' visit tomorrow, all the things that have happened...if he'll allow us to talk about the day we had yesterday anyway...

It would be a few months after this vacation that things would start to fall apart heavily for all the others, and before I became part of the picture again.
All the entries up to the last days in Cairo....

• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal: Canada to Berlin
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part II: Berlin, Germany
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part III: Munich, Germany
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part IV: Germany -The Final Days
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part V: Germany In Photography
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part VI: Amsterdam In Photography
• The Other Girl: A Travel Journal Part VII: Cairo, Egypt

Original blog post date: 11.09.09

October 24th - Saturday

Today we headed to Alexandria which is on the Mediterranean (keep your ooo's and ahhh's at bay...).

Our mode of transportation was the Egyptian Train, first class. First class here does NOT mean the same thing as it does in North America, or when you are flying. First class means you get a seat, people are not packed like cattle into your car, and you have toilet facilities. Toilet facilities...that are a straight drop to the railway, trickles water to remove any waste that didn't drop (i.e. tissue paper, etc.) and gave the impression that someone(s) decided that urinating on the floor was preferable to using the toilet. I was the first to use the train bathroom, trying the left bathroom first and realizing the smell was too pungent to tolerate, and then decided to check out the right one. A little better smelling.

The boys didn't take me seriously so when their turns came to use the toilet I waited to see their expression when they came out, and it was exactly as expected, a revolted grin that said "boy where you right!".

The train ride in first class was pleasant enough...we had air conditioning! The sights that I could see through the mud smeared windows were pretty amazing as we drove north along the Nile Delta. You were nearly transported into biblical times for most of the trip, seeing farmers with donkey and plow in the field, windrows of wheat felled from sickle in hand and woman transporting their produce, baskets on their heads, children in tow.

This country is not for animal lovers (or people with sensitivity to smell, sensitive or delicate stomachs, those nervous about being lost in a foreign country, those uncomfortable with not understanding a word of the language including 99% of what is written on the signs...i could go on...). The animals along the delta, like the stray cats that roam the city, are dirty, thin and dehydrated looking (think beef jerky stretched over bones). They drink from the Deta streams that are overrun by garbage, animal feces, other dead animals, and most likely human feces.

It is interesting to see along the way the little towns whose buildings, like so many in Cairo, have no roof on the top level. I had previously though this was because they don't need a roof, receiving only about 1 cm of rain a year, but have learned that until a building is complete the taxes don't have to be paid...so they just don't finish the building!

Alexandria was a 2 1/2 hour ride from Cairo and when we arrived I was relieved to see there was a little less garbage, although not by much. We wandered off to try to find the Mediterranean, and a restaurant near it that was recommended called the Sea Gull. We finally came upon the Mediterranean, dodged a freeway full of traffic to cross (there was no crosswalks...why would there be?) and got a whiff of lovely salty sea air. We watched some fisherman drag in their nets from the rocky shore and continued on to locate the restaurant. We walked a long time before we realized we would have to consult someone and possibly find a cab.

On our cab ride I had my first and only real fear on this entire trip. The cab driver seemed to be taking us in an odd direction, stopped at a gas station type place and signaled something to someone and then continued on until it seemed we were leaving the city. It was at this moment all the warnings and stories ran through my head, the ones where they take you in the middle of nowhere and demand money, or leave you in the dessert...and worse. I was not the only one who felt this way, as we exited the cab at the restaurant [Significant Others Dad] expressed that he was also concerned.

Lunch was pretty interesting, upon entering the gigantic restaurant, and passing, of all things, huge pelicans, monkeys, birds and rabbits, they take you to an area where fresh fish are displayed on loads of fresh ice, not a fishy smell to be found as far as I could tell. In this room you get to choose the fish you want, the EXACT fish you want! I ordered grouper to be grilled, [Significant Other] ordered red snapper and [Significant Others Dad] had big shrimps, also to be grilled. While we waited at our seaside-ish table we got to observe the offshore oil rigs, ships in the distance and ponies. I have a feeling this place doubled or tripled as other things, seeing as there were tons of antiques everywhere and animals all over and a play area and I think a pony ride area. It was actually such a gigantic place that these things were pretty spread out.

They served us some appetizers which was fresh baked pita, and about 9 different dips which included hummus dip, chickpeas that were very lovely flavored, cold cooked potatoes and cold beets. While we enjoyed the start of the meal a man walked by our window...he was walking a camel!! Although it was really stinky it was pretty cool....while we ate, ponies ran by our open air window. Overall the restaurant was pretty cool. On the way out they gave us peanuts to feed the monkeys...I actually got to feed moneys peanuts!!! One of them grabbed my hair when I didn't give him the next peanut but instead opted to give it to his cage mate. Sad as it was that they were caged I thought it pretty amazing that I got to feed real live monkeys...and now I want one as a pet! 

After lunch we headed to the catacombs which were recently uncovered in the late 1800's when a donkey and some horses fell through the roof. They have unearthed 300 mummies from the tombs which we will likely see tomorrow at the Cairo Museum. I actually got to touch the walls and feel what was left of hieroglyphic carvings and reliefs. It was simply amazing! We got a bit of an unauthorized tour from a guy who wasn't supposed to take us in a closed area still under excavation. He got yelled at. They took my camera as I entered but [Significant Others Dad] kept his and once we were in the catacombs we were encouraged to take pictures by the guide. Seems everything can be had at a price here and protocol, rules and regulations can be ignored most of the time. I can't explain fully the tombs, it was by far the best experience so far and made the day that much better. when will I ever get to touch ancient walls inhabited by mummies for centuries AND feed a monkey peanuts?

While the Mediterranean was pretty dirty and disappointing the rest of the day was exciting. It was another day of people staring and it seem amplified today, at one point [Significant Other] commented that I was "totally getting stared down" and it was by EVERYBODY. I think it was the combination of the three of us, a white women and two white men who were showing their legs! (Men here do not wear shorts) I felt like I was half naked standing in a mall the way people stared, I wanted to yell to them that they should just get a good long look and get it over with. [Significant Other] suggested I carry around picture of myself and just hand them out so they can look at a picture of me instead. LOL

I am now off to have my dinner and fall asleep to the sounds of honking car horns, the faint smell of burning tires (pollution) and a smokey mesquite bbq smell that lingers in the air. Hopefully after I am awoken at 6am by the chanting from a local mosque over a loudspeaker I will be able to get a little extra sleep!

NOTE: I do want to just mention that I am in no way trying to sound negative about Egypt, I am simply stating the facts and experiences. We picked up a Lonely Planet guidebook today and they also do not cast Egypt in the greatest of light and actually reiterated a lot of what I have said.

Also, in yesterdays note I mentioned that some still wear "traditional dress", and I should elaborate that it is traditional Muslim dress, not traditional Egyptian.


Gallery Selections from our day in Alexandria, Egypt.