Welp I’m back from Egypt, meaning any posts you see from me for the next little while are actually written in realtime as opposed to the canned tripe I wrote in advance that Axl’s been posting over the past 8 days. Egypt was amazing and absolutely fucking fucknuts. I’ll do a full blog with photos about my trip in due time, but for now let’s just say I’m glad to be home where I can easily stroll to my own toilet to suffer the wrath of Ra, who has inflicted upon me a wicked case of the shits that forced this guy to run to the airplane bathroom no less than 5 times on the brutal (in a bad way) 12-hour flight home. Some kind of revenge for my people escaping the Pharaohs a few millenia ago? Who knows.

Two quick observations about Egypt (and I promise I’ll follow with more in due time):

1. I spent a night smoking “chocolate,” drinking beer and jamming the fuck out to all sorts of metal with MS Maniac Timur Redu of the Cairo-based metal band Brutus. Timur played me some of the new Brutus recordings (not yet posted on their MySpace) and they’re really fucking good. I can’t wait for you all to hear them. Big ups to Timur for being the man.
2. Easily the best / funniest moment on the entire trip: our first full day in Cairo we rented some camels and rode them to the pyramids. Juggalo Bob spent the entire ride jamming out to Nile on his headphones while looking at these amazing five thousand year-old structures… until his camel went out of control and flipped him over onto the ground like a fucking sack of potatoes. Considering the guy had spent the past 3 months talking about nothing but listening to Nile at the pyramids it was only too fitting. He lived to tell the tale and endless laughter ensued.

In honor of Juggalo Bob, who is still in Egypt, here’s some Nile. I think they wrote this song about my bowels.

-VN

A little birdy came and told me that Karl Sanders has never been to Egypt.

What what WHAT?!?!

This perplexing nugget of information came up in conversation because yours truly just booked a flight to Cairo in February. There will definitely be a serious Nile listening session in effect when I visit the pyramids, and, if Egypt’s mobile technology allows, blog and Twitter updates from The Middle East will be aplenty. Better yet, I’ll be traveling with someone who lived there for 2 years and speaks Arabic, and for at least part of the time I’ll be staying with a local metalhead. I’m really looking forward to exploring the underbelly of Egyptian metal culture, whatever that entails… I’ll probably get a lot of confused looks when I tell folks I run a website called “Metal Sucks.”

We’re trying mightily to get Mr. Sanders to accompany us on our journey. We’ll see how that pans out. In the meantime, Noisecreep is streaming Nile’s new track “Utterances of the Crawling Dead” which comes from Nile’s new album Those Whom the Gods Detest, out November 3rd. You should listen to it whilst imagining the hilarity of this Jewish metalhead traipsing around Egypt this coming Winter.

-VN