{"id":214,"date":"2008-05-22T13:19:20","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T11:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/?p=214"},"modified":"2008-05-22T13:19:20","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T11:19:20","slug":"i-have-a-bad-case-of-mono","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/2008\/05\/22\/i-have-a-bad-case-of-mono\/","title":{"rendered":"I have a bad case of Mono."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, not &#8220;the kissing disease&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I suffer from mono-culturalism. (is that a word?).<\/p>\n<p>i live in a mono-culture within a mono-culture.<\/p>\n<p>Egypt is the larger mono-culture.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Religion. The vast majority of residents are Muslim. I have nothing against Islam. I don&#8217;t find it any more or less &#8220;fanciful&#8221; than Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Lifestyles.&#8221; While having more than one wife (at a time) could be viewed as alternative to the western mainstream, the day-to-day <strong>SAME<\/strong>-ness of things is getting to me. Coming from a place with a certain level of diversity (Seattle) to here is a bit jarring.<\/li>\n<li>Homogeneous population. Hair color, eye color, skin color, hair texture, &#8220;porn star&#8221; mustaches. It all blends together.<\/li>\n<li>Cuisine. There isn&#8217;t a lot of variety in the cuisine. There is an appalling lack of &#8220;ethnic&#8221; food. Or rather an appalling lack of <em>appealing <\/em>ethnic food. There is plenty of bad &#8220;italian&#8221; and worse &#8220;chinese&#8221;. One can only eat so much schwerma and kofta.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And then my social life is a smaller mono-culture within the larger context.<\/p>\n<p>It is also rather homogeneous, though I suspect several people would object strenuously to that generalisation. (Too bad. Get your own blog!)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Professors. How many times can you discuss cheating, lazy students etc and still have it be interesting? I mean really. Branch out. Go out on a limb. Talk about something else. <em>ANYTHING <\/em>else.  Please.<\/li>\n<li>Politics. (Ok, so maybe <em>almost <\/em>anything else) Most people seem to be fairly liberal big &#8220;d&#8221; democrats. Like most people back home in Seattle. I have nothing against that. I think their earnestness is <em>so cute. <\/em>But, like most people in Seattle, living here gives them a distorted view of the political landscape. &#8220;<strong>EVERYBODY <\/strong>they know is voting for Obama. It is going to be a <strong>LANDSLIDE<\/strong>&#8220;. I am sorry to say that I think they are mistaken about the outcome in November. (Assuming, and I quote,  Obama manages to keep &#8220;that woman&#8221; from &#8220;stealing&#8221; the nomination.)<\/li>\n<li>Race. Most of the American faculty are Caucasian. Not a big surprise, as most Americans are Caucasian. And most American college faculty are Caucasian.  But it is still strange to me that there aren&#8217;t more minority faculty members.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The one place that the faculty has great diversity is in their travel. The people here have traveled quite a bit and have seen more of the world than most people. Talking to them about that is fascinating.<\/p>\n<p>So what is the cure for Mono? Rest. Drink lots of fluids.<\/p>\n<p>Well, 1 out of 2 ain&#8217;t bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, not &#8220;the kissing disease&#8221;. I suffer from mono-culturalism. (is that a word?). i live in a mono-culture within a mono-culture. Egypt is the larger mono-culture. Religion. The vast majority of residents are Muslim. I have nothing against Islam. I don&#8217;t find it any more or less &#8220;fanciful&#8221; than Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism. &#8220;Lifestyles.&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-differences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}