whenever i travel alone, i get really paranoid about losing track of the days. i live in fear that i will show up at the airport only to find that i miscounted and missed my flight home.
the internet has actually made date counting a lot easier. any news site always has the current date at the top of the page. before i used that system, my primary method for keeping track of the date was my journal. each day i would write reflections on what i did that day and put a date at the beginning of the entry. but what if i miscounted the days? that thought always haunted me. so one of the things i always do near the end of my trip is flip through my journal making sure i didn't skip a day or count one twice. that's still the case even in this internet age.
anyway, at some point before i left for egypt i noticed that the friday before i left would be the full moon. it made sense, that friday is exactly 2 weeks after the 'eid that marks the end of ramadan, and ramadan always ends with the new moon. so in the back of my head i thought: when the moon is full, high-tail it back to cairo. for the last two weeks i've looked at the sky each night, watching the moon get bigger as my vacation time trickled away.
the moon is finally full tonight and i arrived in cairo this morning. i still have a couple of days here, but it's all gonna be here here, and not over there here.
