November 22. The Egyptian museum.

Beans for breakfast, sugary tea, and bread. I enjoy being the only foreigner here and take my time before I say goodbye to the friendly staff and walk around in Cairo. At first I try to use the tourist map but its scale and German street names only complicate things. Just walk around, just breath the air the millions breath here. Randomly enter a teahouse and sit down for a moment, smiling at the men as they indulge in their narguilas or clamorously play their cards. Veiled women pass by on the street, merchants shout, cars claxon their way through traffic. What is the fingerprint of a city?

I get back on the tourist track and have my bag checked at the Egyptian museum. I am granted student discount and walk in happily. There are some 160,000 items in the museum according to a man that offers me his services as a guide. No thanks, I kind of just wanna feel the stones and vases and marbels and pottery and tombs without explanatory interference. And I see some amazing objects there that make me go wow. Tutanchamon's tomb and all the gold, beautiful figurines readily put in a vitrine with a sign "Gods" above it, chariots with fixed axes and golden embellishments, steles with mysterious texts on them, flint knives, sfinx models, jewellery with feldspar, sapphire, opal, jade, emerald, amethyst and what have you, royal scepters, flails, chunks of marble, statues of Ramses both ans human and as God standing 30 feet tall, mummies with and without golden masks, 4000 year old diapers, and on and on. I enjoy the museum a lot. Outside I see a very conservative woman, or rather I merely get a glimpse of her dark brown eyes as she is completely covered in a black burka. Then I am distracted by two Russian women, or admittedly, their almost uncovered behinds. They were just walking there, taking pictures of each other and attracting the attention of many men. Quite a contrast, I tell you, and it would have been nice to catch both of them in a photo but that doesn't work out.

After the museum I look for the bus station for an overnight ride to Gaza. There is no such thing and I have to come back tomorrow. I manage to call my friend Mohamed and we spend the evening together. Tomorrow I'll try to enter the Gaza strip, document what I see, and do something good.

March 4.

We walked around in Bariloche and found a place to stay in an hotel run by an old lady. She was the daughter of Germans who had moved to Argentina. This really doesn't sound interesting. I have to skip it. She was friendly, spoke German very well and had those white hairs on her
head giving me the impression that she had lived through a lot of things. Her husband was dead for fifty years, she told us. The hotel-room was comfortable enough. The leak didn't bother us; the beds were good and there was warm water. See, it gets boring again, I see and hear you yawn. It is of no use telling those kind of stories. Nobody cares. It's an unhealthy vanity the wish to record it.

At this point I want to remind you that it can be a serious difficulty for grown-up men when young girls show their legs, because their look like women's legs and the men get all confused and ashamed if they catch themselves getting horny because of those legs. It can be a real problem.

We went to the old lady's hotel with Eris and Naddy two students from California and at night I suggested to go to the beach to make a campfire and maybe fry some food and have wine together. We bought two bottles of Argentinian wine that we shared that night. We didn't
find any bigger branches so we ended up burning newspaper and cardboard thus producing a giant fume but it was a nice gathering we had avocado and chips and dried tomatoes and bread. I was satisfied, and I think they were too. I'm not an egoist, I'm not even a person. You can ask them if they liked it too. Please do. If they say they were satisfied too it won't prove a thing though it won't prove anybody is not an egoist. The I in the sentences I write is a sting that you can turn around to proof my egoism. Even the sentences without an I are drenched in the mud of my perspective: there is no escape, no matter how much we try. Within language we can never refrain from being self-centered and beyond language, drinking each other's spit, rubbing each other's skin, staring through the eyes at each other's retinas, killing each other, reproducing - beyond language there's no center hence no nearness. We are all caught up in this. Stressing the importance of other people's pleasure, that's my last reflex before dissolving the mind (a different story), the last thing I want to do consciously before retreating from speech and language and human utterances of any kind.