Hiding Beauty?

Living in Vancouver, B.C., a major port city in Canada, it’s common to see all walks of life walking the streets. I have seen practicing Muslim women before, covered head to toe no matter what the weather is. Long pants or skirts, long sleeve top, and a head scarf which is called a hijab. Sometimes they even wear a veiled hijab that only shows the eyes. I’ve never really thought about WHY the women choose to dress this way. I’ve always just made assumptions to myself, thinking it’s because the men in their culture don’t respect them and they are forced to hide themselves in public.

So, I entered Cairo with a very non-educated mind about the Muslim religion and soon found out my assumptions were half correct. Instead, the truth of the hijab is women choose to wear them, and dress they way they do to be treated with respect from men and not only thought as of sex objects. They believe that from the way they dress the men actually meet who they truly are and get to know the person inside first. Doesn’t sound so bad now does it ladies? Almost sounds similar to problems in our western society. How men react to you is, as much as we hate to admit it, a direct result as to how our men treat us. Dress like trash and guess who is treated like trash? Dress sexy and guess what thoughts are going through their minds? Etc, etc.

Muslim girls showing a sense of style paired with their hijabs

All of a sudden, how Muslim women choose to dress makes much more sense and many of them still have their own sense of style by pairing their hijabs with their outfits and wearing unique fashion tops or printed tees over their long sleeve clothing. However I have no idea how they can survive wearing that much clothing! It’s bloody hot in Cairo! Do they ever have some sort of internal stamina! Myself, to respect their culture made sure to get myself a pair of pants and a loose long sleeve top to wear while walking around the streets of Cairo. I had to do this shopping in October in Germany, which resulted in not many options to choose from since all the clothes for sale were made out of thick wools! I ended up with a pair of black yoga pants, and a semi see-through long sleeve top with a black tank top underneath, paired with a scarf to cover my chest. This outfit was still almost unbearable at the most of times and I often found myself rolling my sleeves up and loosening the scarf while sweating buckets.

My daily outfit in Cairo, as you can see amongst a heavy tourist site filled with westerners I have resorted to taking off my scarf and rolling up my sleeves the best I can

However, even with this respectful outfit I still felt a huge disrespect from most men in Cairo. They would never talk to me, only Scott, and if I said something it fell on deaf ears. It was always up to Scott to get the touts to go away as my comments like “We need to get back to our hotel to catch our plane” never worked in Cairo. Also, the further from the main core we went, especially while walking through the back lanes of the bazaar, I felt very perverted stares in my direction to the point that Scott could feel them as-well and told me to wrap my head up in my scarf. The moment I did that I instantly felt less stares. I only felt respect from men that worked in the tourist industry; the guides, hotel staff, personal drivers, and security. They would talk to me, make sure I was comfortable, ask my opinions, and I never caught them looking at my chest.

After my experience in Cairo, I feel I have more in common with Muslim women. Men across the world are the same and thus women have to dress in result of that. If you want to be respected you need to dress respectfully, and even though they cover themselves head to toe they are still very conscious about their beauty and style.

It’s so surprising you even find Teddy bears hanging themselves there! Quite odd.

We had heard from friends that Utrecht was a cool place to check out. Lesser known than Amsterdam, Utrecht still has the same liberal attitudes but a less crazy vibe. And being home to a major university was a plus, as they should have some neat shops and some sort of scene. Plus I needed a new day bag, the small attach-on bags that we have for our backpacks have been considered useless. You can fit 1 thing in them, and then it’s full. It makes me look like I stole a kindergarten kids schoolbag when I wear it.

Looking online at hostels, I couldn’t really find anything in a hostel. Either poorly rated or super expensive, there were only 6 available on the hostel websites. Luckily we pulled up HRS.com and searched for any cheap hotels available. We had heard about HRS from Dee’s cousins Andy and Judith, and used it a couple times. It’s like expedia or hotels.com, but the local cheaper version.

Look how fluffy this bed is!!

We managed to find a special rate at a Carleton Hotel, and decided it was time to splurge a bit. We’ve been spending some time in a lot of mediocre beds, some crap beds and a very few good beds and pillows over the last couple months. Checking in I was sure we looked pretty travel weary and out of place as we made our way down the plush carpets and gold trim décor to our room. The sheets were soft, comforter and pillows extremely fluffy and instantly lured us in to flump down onto the bed for a quick nap.

We had to get up again later that night, and it took a while to get out of that bed. But we had a great reason to. Dee had found out about a monthly club night that DJ/Producers Black Sun Empire throw, and to our luck it was happening just as we were in town! It also had Goldie and Noisia on the bill, which helped with making it worth it to get out of bed. The night was great, though we only saw Nosia and Goldie play. Goldie was not playing anything that made our feet groove and then Noisia came on and played same set we heard a couple weeks ago, and a couple weeks before that! We were really only there to see Black Sun Empire who were on last but there was no where to sit and chill to let some time pass. Tired legs and boring music made us feel the need to leave back to our comfy bed. And once we felt the softness of our bed enveloped us again we knew that was the right decision. Guess we will have to see Black Sun Empire again some other day….

Looking like a princess

We knew that a day of travel and a night of partying would make it hard for us to get up on Sunday, and we may have missed the entire day sleeping in. So it was an easy decision to order room service and have it delivered at 10:00am the next morning. This would wake us up, put food in our stomach and caffeine into our system. And the Carleton didn’t disappoint with their spread! They even delivered the second pot of coffee we asked for! This picture may be the happiest I have seen Dee in a while, with her extra pillows and breakfast in bed!
Taking our time eating and waking up, we finally had to go into town on our mission. Being in a University town in Holland I felt we had a pretty good chance of finding myself a cool replacement day bag, especially since we had already seen a bunch of closed shops with bags in the window the night before.

Time for some shopping!

There was a ton of selection, and anyone looking for a bag should go to Utrecht. I finally found the perfect bag by Crumpler. It’s a messenger style bag, waterproof fabric with a lifetime warranty on it. It has great loud Velcro straps so anyone trying to get into my bag would get noticed, and buckles for extra security. I’m pretty happy finding it, as Dee’s Mangler (her small green purse made of hemp) has done too much damage to my precious personal items… I can’t even talk about it…. *hangs head in somberness*

Now that I had a victory bag, we needed to get some dinner and drinks in celebration. We walked around until finding an awesome Rock’n’Roll restaurant. Like a Planet Hollywood except not part of a big chain, cheaper, better value and better artwork on the walls with a good Dutch flair.

Bit blurry but you can see it’s a typical religious heaven scene with all the dead rock stars consider to be going straight to hell because of their life styles

It was a great but way too short couple of days in Utrecht, and a perfect way to start winding down our European vacation. We have some serious planning to do ahead of us on our way to Asia for the next half of a year.

Dear Steve Jobs,

I’ve been using computers since the early 90’s, and other than learning to type on a Mac II with B&W screen, I was always a Windows man. When my wife bought her first Apple computer while in school for Graphic Design 5 years ago, the seed was planted in our household. Upgrading from a desktop to a MacBook, she slowly started to convert me with the ease of use. After her second MacBook and showing family how easy it was to make photo albums, more of my family converted. And when I bought a MacBook Aluminum in January of 2009, I went all in. This MacBook is the single best computing machine I have ever used, and I am happy to be part of the Apple family. It’s so well designed, easy to use and just simply always works, much like all Apple products these days.

We love your Apple Store downtown Vancouver, and have been to the stylish store in New York. Conveniently located with the newest products, it’s such a great experience going into the stores to see what’s new. So when I lost my power adapter while traveling and found myself in Rome wanting to write on my blog, I didn’t hesitate to lookup the official Apple Store in the city.

Quickly going to Apple.com and doing a quick search, I was happy to see that there was an official store located in Rome. Called RomaEst, I didn’t recognize the address but luckily there was a Google map. Not knowing the location I plugged the information into Google and saw that I had to take a train and walk a short distance to the mall that it was at. I was so glad that you provided great directions that my wife Deidra and I went out right away to get the missing charger with our train stop in mind.

Taking the subway and then having to transfer to a train, we thought it was a bit odd but hopped on. As the train drove along through many stops, we anticipated the location shortly coming up and a little under an hour our location was called. Stepping off the train onto a platform, it almost felt like we were getting off a train in the old Wild West, with a road leading from the train station and a small store/bar at the station but nothing else around. I walked up to this store and asked them if they knew where the Apple Store was, sure that it must be close and conveniently located.

When the nice lady pointed at Apple Juice, I knew my little grasp of the Italian language wasn’t going to cut it. We’d have to figure it out ourselves, with nothing more than the memory of what the map looked like from your website. It didn’t look too far from what I remember, and we grabbed a couple quick espressos and a bottle of water. Walking out of the store past the five old Italians gambling on a game of poker, I felt confident we’d find the plug and be back downtown Rome in no time. Out on the road we came to a junction with a choice to go either left or right. Left led us into an area with signs of civilization and right led us to the entrance of a busy highway with no sidewalk. So, using our common sense we headed towards civilization with a spring in our step.

Unfortunately the spring in our step only lasted for half an hour due to the extreme heat, and finally came onto some streets with older looking homes and barking dogs. As we continued to walk through this area I couldn’t image an ultra-modern Apple store being located here. But on we went walking until it was obvious the store wouldn’t be this way – we were bound by the far curve of the highway and hills with forest and agriculture on them. We now had no other decision but to turn around and walk back the hour to the train station.

Oh Glorious Commercialized Civilization!

On our way back I decided to climb a hill that was adjacent to the road to get a better idea of where in Rome we even were. From the top of the hill I could see a giant glowing sign in the distance – down the hill I was on, across a farmers field, across what looked like a dirt-bike track, then the highway and finally, the largest building in the entire area, a supersized mall. With doubt in Deidra’s eyes I made the executive decision to cross this expanse so we could savor the sweet juicy power of Apple.

As we made our way across the fields, I wondered how much like the Wild West this area really was. We obviously weren’t anywhere near anything, and would a farmer shoot us out here for trespassing? Our questions were answered as we walked by a shantytown on the edge of the dirt-bike field, complete with burning garbage, stolen shopping carts and some scrap metal makeshift homes. Deciding to avoid this area we quickly made our way across the barbed wire covered ditch after being charged by a Ram protecting 8 other sheep. Never being so happy to set foot on the pavement of a highway before, we used our childhood Froger skills to cross the eight lanes to the urban miracle of a shopping mall. Looking back at our feat of an adventure through the Wild West we noticed the hill we climbed down was now filled with a giant herd of sheep. Wondering to ourselves while we entered the mall doors what would have happen if we were still on that hill as all those sheep arrived with the farmer and his dogs…

Getting our power adapter at your store was uneventful, and with our purchase we then ran into our next problem of this adventure. It seemed that this mall was so far out of town that to get a cab to the train station ended up costing us as much as the power adapter. Not that we were that far away from the train station – probably only 5km’s down the major highway with no sidewalk – but that they had to call the cab in from downtown Rome which took just under an hour. There were no other cabs around, and by this time we were just happy to be done with it all as it was now getting late. As the cab dropped us off at the train station, we were up for our next surprise.

Walking to the entrance there was a Police officer and four armed military personnel with him. It was around 9:00pm and there was a train going to Roma in half an hour. With an odd look and quick nod to the contingent of military at the entrance we sat down to wait for our train. Around us we were gated in with 10-foot high metal bars and the only entrance was where they stood. Looking over at the military and police sizing us up, we started to wonder what was going on. Luckily we didn’t have to wait long as the policeman walked over to us and struck up a conversation. We chatted about where we were from in Canada and he mentioned while he was in the army, positioned in the U.N., he had a commander from Ottawa and liked Canadians. A little bit more small talk and then the question came out;

“Just out of curiosity, what are you two doing here? You don’t look like you belong…”

I’m glad he asked because I was wondering why a platoon of soldiers was guarding a tiny train station, so telling him our story of the afternoons adventures gave me a perfect setting. While he was laughing at what happened, I asked him,

“Why are you and the army here?”

His face got serious and said, “For your protection. This is a very dangerous area.”

Just then a military van drove up and he excused himself, saying he’d be back in a few minutes and that he had to check in. Unfortunately a moment later our train came and I wasn’t able to continue the conversation and find out more about what was going on. Taking his words to heart we hopped on the train and were off back to Rome, feeling lucky and wondering to ourselves the many different ways our day could of ended up.

Steve, as I mentioned earlier, there are a of couple things that I’ve come to expect with Apple products and stores. These things are: Easy to use products, modern stylish stores and safety knowing that things just work. I don’t expect to need to pack for a field expedition to purchase a simple power adapter, or need an army platoon for personal security. To say that your Apple Store is in Rome is akin to saying Cupertino is in San Francisco. It may be in the bay area, but hardly in San Francisco city.

May I suggest you update your website with better directions and a warning of distance and danger? Or better yet use one of the thousands of buildings in the City of Rome and design something that better upholds the Apple style. I’m sure you can do a hell of a lot better than this.

Thank you for your time,

Scott