Eilat

Another bus. Egypt. I'm on my way to Dahab. There is something about buses that inspires me to write. Maybe they punctuate the bits of the trip into describable segments. I had a very weird experience today. I walked across a border. Not just a town or state or even country. In a sense I just crossed the border into Africa and to do it I got up early in the morning and just walked.

I've been trying recently to not forget to be amazed by things. I did a dive with an instructor who told me "You're good but you use your arms too much. They aren't helping you swim you know." When diving I don't use my arms to help with propulsion. I use them to help with memory. If I don't put them out to the sides and pretend like I'm flying or push the water in front of me to quickly move myself up then I sometimes forget. I forget how fucking amazing it is that I'm just hanging out in the water for an hour and breathing like a fish. I need to look like an idiot on occasion to remember that. What do you do?

"There's nothing to do in Eilat." Anna tells me when I arrive. I went diving and kite surfing on one day. Diving and hiking on the next. Walked to Egypt. Saying that Eilat is a place people go to vacation in Israel is misleading. Eilat is a place where people in Israel go to vacation. It becomes apparent quickly. English is almost non-existent. There is some Russian but almost everything is in Hebrew. You don't even hear anything else spoken in the streets. Russian being the exception. This makes nightlife a little difficult.... for me.

From the bus I'm surprised how rocky this place is. It's no like mountain rocks though. It's like someone ground up mountains into little rocks and then made piles of them all over the place.

"I've been to Dahab four times but I've never been to Egypt" says a Russian man on the bus with me. I'll see in a few hours.