Spoofy Randomness

Character: Aml

  • Miss or Not, Part 2

    Miss or Not, Part 2

    Ref: Weather Underground

    And that, my friends, is a wrap on Not on a Camel! This is the last comic of the series. It’s been a good run, but my contract is up and I’m back in America now so it’s time to end it. Thank you to everyone who read my silly little comic.

    Josh gets a cameo here for the sole reason of I needed someone taller than me because of the panel design. And panel two is true in two senses: sometimes, especially with foreign languages, what is meant as a good-natured joke doesn’t always land and I was being cautious, and there was so much stuff at that school that was completely ridiculous/sometimes edging on the illegal side that it would not present well…

    I did get the worst food poisoning of the entire two years the weekend before I was due to come home, hence the lateness of this comic. Not fun when needing to pack.

    The final panel obviously does not include everyone I met, but I just didn’t have room/skill to draw everyone. I tried to stick to people who had appeared previously, but Rhonda did get to appear for the first time. She is a teacher at Schutz that I got to be good friends with and would have likely appeared in the comic had my update schedule been better this year.

    And yes, that is a picture of my visa with ‘WORK IS NOT PERMITTYED’ circled (I did not add the circling). That was a thing that caused much frustration, including (as I later discovered) some of the issues with getting into Turkey. One of the requirements for me to stay at this job was to go to the visa office every few months and lie to a government official, claiming I’m a tourist. That is an experience I will never do again and I absolutely hated it, to the point that I almost left multiple times and probably should have (note: this was not revealed to me until I was already in the country, one of many omissions I encountered). The only thing that kept me from doing so was my life outside of work; I didn’t want to jump ship without completing what I set out to do.

    That being said, overall the last two years was a very positive experience and I’m glad I did it. To my friends in Egypt, I miss you already! To everyone else, Egypt is a wonderful and safe place and I hope you get the chance to go sometime!

  • Eye Lasers

    Eye Lasers

    Okay, I know Egypt is not very advanced economically and there’s many factors in play, but COME ON AMERICA.  Figure out your health care costs! Preferably before I move back, please.

    Health care is really cheap here, but don’t take that as a drop in quality.  Alexandria has a great reputation for their medicine, and several European countries will send their doctors here to study.  Also, everything is specialized to the point where there aren’t really general practitioners (which is a right pain in the gluteals when trying to get a BSA health care form completed…).

    Aml has been very generous in helping me navigate Egyptian doctor offices, especially FINDING them (not being able to read Arabic makes this difficult for me) and getting appointments set up.  Most places do not book in advance, so that’s interesting.

    If you’re not familiar, the character at the end is Jason Fox from the comic FoxTrot by Bill Amend (who is an Eagle Scout!).  For some reason, every single time I go to the eye doctor, this FoxTrot comic pops into my head.  I don’t know why it’s etched itself so firmly in my brain, but now I get to make my inside joke public.

    I may be making a retraction on this comic at a later date; I’m having second thoughts about actually getting the ‘eye lasers’. I’m not entirely sure where the phrase ‘eye lasers’ originally came from, but my friend Steffan used it frequently and it stuck.

  • Fasting

    Fasting

    I have also learned that ordering food off of Otlob (a food delivery service that has around 100 restaurants on it) is pretty much a crap shoot during Ramadan. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes they accept the order and then the restaurant closes and who knows if you’ll get the food or not.

    I had realized the food and water fasting, but it hadn’t quite clicked for me that this would also include coffee.  Short of sleep + caffeine withdrawal = whee… Yet another reason I’m sort of thankful I was forced to give up caffeine.

    I think this is the first time I’ve actually shown a generic student…in a comic about teaching in Egypt…huh.  There are some reasons for this, which I will probably elaborate on in later comics.

    (Wanna buy some black market water…?)