As promised in the post below: here is the photo that was most popular at the show. (Click on it for a larger view.) It is a pretty great shot I must admit. Betsy said lots of people asked if it was photoshopped. Nope. I just turned and clicked, what you see is what I saw through the lens. (Please give credit where credit is due if you copy this picture.)

We were at Giza on a school field trip. It must be once a year that the pyramids are opened up for free to Cairo's schools. The place was crawling with kids, literally tens of thousands of them. I think, as these kids have seen the 'rids dozens of times on field trips, that we were far more interesting to see. Most of the kids were from regular state run schools, so were very poor and they probably don't see a lot of white faces around. I swear both Betsy and I had our picture taken, posing with a group, at least a couple of dozen times.

It was cute and fun the first few times, then it just got old. By the end we were rudely saying "no!" to the photo requests. Actually the last straw was when a boy tried to cop a feel while putting his arm around Betsy's shoulders. We should have known better- an Egyptian female would never have allowed a boy/man to touch her in any way. But despite the fact that we were seasoned and culturally aware expats, we allowed what would be pretty innocent in the USA. The kid probably could not believe his luck. A white girl letting him touch her! Of course he's going to go for some boob action. Betsy pushed him away and said something rude to him in Arabic and that was that. No more pictures.

I seem to recall being sort of gropped as well at some point. As a male in that region it can at times be hard to tell the difference between the signs of same sex affection and covert/overt homosexual overtures. I know 99.9% of the time it was affection, but a few times it seemed to be a bit more. (I always got a kick out of watching my stud boys give each other kisses and hugs in the morning. I'd think, "you guys would so get your asses kicked if you tried that in a school in America." Those types of things were always fascinating to me. The kids had a different term for erasures in Egypt. You should have seen my face the first time a female student asked me if I had a rubber.)