Quote of the week
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you.
The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.
By the time we got to the Moustafa Mahmoud mosque around noon, it was packed. People were spilling into the streets, their prayer rugs rolled out on the pavement. In the women’s section, I spotted faces I had seen at the protests in the days before, many of them without prayer rugs, praying on the Egyptian flag instead. “Let us respect this sacred space,” the imam began his sermon through a loudspeaker, “and all turn off our phones.” The crowd—by then numbering in the thousands—erupted into laughter. – Yasmine El Rashidi in the New York Review of Books on the protest in Egypt on Friday. The regime had cut off all cell phone coverage that morning.
