Day 175

July 13^th

Today started off with getting Chris a taxi so he could go see the pyramids of dashour and Sakkara. These are places I really didn’t want to see and I wanted some time to work on my research. Chris ended up paying a bit more than I would have settled for, but got a taxi driver who could speak English and knew the way around. So I felt that he would be safe. After seeing Chris off, I headed back to the gym as it had been a few days since I had seen it. It was a happy reunion.

After the gym and as I was waiting for the bus, I realized that Chris didn’t have any keys so he couldn’t get back in the apartment. This means I had to wait around to make sure he got in. Unfortunately, the internet wasn’t working in the apartment. Go figure, it never does, so I tried to do some Arabic. I quickly grew tired of this and resorted to simply reading. This turned into a nap, and I awoke a few hours later wondering where Chris had been. It was about 6 hours after he took off, so I started to wonder what he was up too. I went to the door to look out, and right at that time Chris came out of the elevator. Good timing.

We hung around a bit and got Pizza as I waited for Obama’s interview on CNN and Chris waited for the appropriate time to leave. He had to meet the agency at 8:30 for a ride over to the train station.

It turns out Barack’s interview wasn’t until about 10. Don’t really know why they said it was at 8, but whatever. The interview was very good, as Fareed didn’t care about any of the nit-picking that normal interviews do and simply wanted to understand his world view. He asked good questions and cut him off when he started to go to stump answers that avoided the topic. Obama did explain his “undivided capital of Israel” line as it meant not that Palestine couldn’t be in Jerusalem, but that there shouldn’t be a wall. I don’t know if he was bullshiting or not, as why would he say this to the AIPAC, but if this was the case it was some pretty smart political wording as the way it was originally interpreted came off as extremely pro-Israel, but it gave him the ability to back-track if it didn’t get the right response, which it didn’t Very savy.