I like this one with the several short stories all being tied together. I’ll try to do more like it.
Location: Egypt
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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!
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Miss or Not, Part 1
Ref: Ookla Speedtest
Winding down now, so I thought a reflection would be in order of the things I enjoyed and the things that I could have done a bit without.
I really miss Mexican. There’s dire few places here, and they just can’t get the right ingredients. I will miss shawarma, though! And as much as I miss driving, there is something mindlessly satisfying about public transit.
The Crack store amuses me. Obviously it’s a reference to cracking phones (more important in third-world countries), but that tends to not be people’s first thought.
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Accommodations
People really don’t like having shops photographed here. It’s a big no-no.
Really, that last panel applies to any place of living, not just abroad. Egyptians aren’t as precise with agreements as us overly-detailed Americans…
I tried to draw the view from my apartment in Panel 5. I have a pretty nice location!
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Looking for Schools
Ref: Teach Away | International Schools Review
Shortly after making this comic, Mina (in the first panel) contacted me about an Alexandrian Pokémon GO group just starting up. Been hanging around with this lot every week since; great group of blokes who put up with my American quirks (I’m the only foreigner) and translate for me. Monsef is the cameo in panel 2 is a doctor and one of our little merry band of trainers. GO is not always very considerate of the Middle East, what with events landing during iftar and some ‘weekend events’ being on Sundays.
AIA, like probably every other school, has had its high and low points. One of those involved the government shutting down all church-based villa schools. AIA was eventually able to get an exemption, but needless to say in the time where everything was in limbo, there was a lot of discontentment. Not gonna lie, if I had seen those reviews before arriving I probably wouldn’t have come, so take them with a grain of salt. That being said, not all reviews are negative and they can give a good view of the school.
Also, I have a rubber mallet. This makes me happy.
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Job Hunt
After almost five months of applications, I have a job at last! I was coming home regardless, but it is a huge weight off of my shoulders to be coming home to a job.
Lori gets a cameo here! She is my friend and mentor from Johnson-Brock and is the one who told me about the NC job.
I don’t know if I’ll do any more full strips of my family’s visit, but there may be some more throwaway panel gags. It was very windy and unusually cloudy in Aswan (they rarely get cloud cover).
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Looking at a River in Africa
This may be my favorite NoaC comic so far, partly because of all the self-indulgent references I included here. Then again, NoaC itself it pretty self-indulgent, so…
I’m not sure how exactly or when this family joke of ‘looking at a river in Africa’ started (although I suspect it’s been even longer than 15 years…yikes) but I definitely never expected to ACTUALLY look at the Nile River with my family. And then we took a Nile cruise aboard the Blue Shadow from Aswan to Luxor, and there you have it.
I was amused to draw my family younger. Some of the other small references in this comic include Jass (a Swiss card game we play, pronounced YAHSS), of which I bought a French Swiss deck last summer that doesn’t actually mark face cards but all jacks carry axes. You can also see the scorecards with the reverse S (not a Z) because the Swiss do things backwards (the order of turns is also reversed in Jass). I also have gotten very good at falling asleep on planes before takeoff. Linda is Mom’s sister, and another running joke in our family is how often Wendy gets called Linda.
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The Joys of Flying
My parents came to Egypt! That was quite an experience for them; my mom had never left the USA. But of course, things don’t always go quite according to plan…
They got delayed out of Omaha, which meant they barely made their flight to Toronto. If my sister hadn’t been meeting them there and had let the flight attendants know they were coming, they would have missed the flight. But their bags did not make it, and thus the whirlwind of fun for the next four days as first they lost them, then they found them but had to get them to us… We wound up getting them literally four hours before we went to the airport to head to Aswan. (And yes, as soon as they got the bags, Dad got rid of the skinny jeans.)
Bit of an in-joke with this comic is that my sister only appears in text. Leading up to their trip, I had a tendency to say my parents were coming, but accidentally leave her out. I was more focused on them coming, since they hadn’t been here before and my sister had.
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Forgot to Do Something
I have not figured out this one at all. If it’s the same time every year, why does it always take forever to call it off? It’s not just Revolution Day that this happens with, it’s most holidays.
Changed the format of the comic slightly, as you may have noticed. One of my favorite aspects of the Sunday funnies was the ‘throwaway panel’, where the cartoonist would put something that wasn’t necessary for the plot, as some newspapers would cut that line of panels. Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) in particular was quite skilled at using this space for quick jokes, so I decided to imitate it. Never mind the fact that the strip comes out on Wednesday and never in a newspaper.
And the other Cliff makes his first appearance! He is the principal of AIA starting this year. Unlike John who had a few years’ experience, Cliff is new to the Middle East, which is kind of fun as he is figuring out the local customs right alongside us. Also, what are the odds that we would have to people named Cliff working at the same small school?
Should have a couple comics from my parents’ visit in the coming weeks.
