Will Work for Koshary

08:33 pm - Shuf Hadhihi

In Wadi Rum after the Emad episode, where the mesas and mountains reach up in all directions to give you the feeling of perpetual entrapment, we sat in a circle with our Bedouin hosts to take some tea for a few minutes before setting out in the jeeps for a day of sight seeing and off-roading. Small camps such as the one we occupied dotted the desert and generally found themselves at the base of tall cliffs—convenient for wind-breaking and convenient for the stadium lights that have been placed at the top of the cliffs to provide intense, sky-dimming after-hours light. Ours had a charming feature: a vertical chasm ran from the bottom of the cliff face all the way to the top, but filling as it rose so as to provide walls and a roof. Arranged in a circle in this niche, we sat and let the Emad-induced tremors subside over heavily-sugared, liberally-minted tea.

American students at AUC, it should be noted, are sticklers for guidebooks. I have not participated in a trip yet where the collective luggage did not offset the profits of three or four different companies, including Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, National Geographic, or the occasional Fyodor’s, likely repeating the useful information at the same time. I have not seen one student allow the books to end up as dead weight, however. Down time at every new location gives time for consultation, and this tea break was no exception. But we were surprised at a new reaction from the local population.

A tall, thin, traditionally-dressed but well-coifed Bedouin guide, whose name now escapes me, asked to see the Lonely Planet guide. We gave it to him and he flipped pertly to the picture pages. Was he going to show us what we were about to see in person, whetting the palette for our journey that day? Did he want to see how the travel writers had portrayed his country?
            “Shuf hadhihi,” he instructed. With a smile on his face, he turned the book so we could see it and held out the selected page to us. The plate wasn’t too interesting. A generic picture of Wadi Rum that wasn’t anything we couldn’t gather by looking behind us topped it, and splitting the bottom of the page was the compulsory picture of the covered, mysterious Bedouin woman that accompanies every hinterlands section of these books next to a picture of two Bedouin men. At first I thought the picture was a bad representation of the local guide population. The two men portrayed both wore galabiyyas and one had a head scarf. I’d found that half of the guides wore modern clothing. But my second interpretation of the picture turned the first on its head: the picture was all too accurate as I was sitting across from the very man pictured in that book, innocuously captioned “Bedouin men.”

Surely this merits some thought. My most basic reaction was, “Whoa, cool!” I pondered more and then got a little upset. How small and unadventurous has the world become that guidebooks no longer give you the tools necessary to rough it a across a foreign and unfamiliar place but, as Jon Krakauer suggests in his account of Mt. Everest in Into Thin Air, a Yellow Brick Road to the top has been built and purged of all surprise: you know exactly what you’re going to get. A common and I think misdirected criticism that AUC students level at the various Bedouin tours in the Middle East is that “the Bedouin aren’t real: they wear normal clothes and drive cars and have lights and live in towns and talk on cell phones.” They complain about this while ignoring a unique history and lifestyle and sometimes ethnicity. Yeah, they’ve modernized, but let’s not let that diminish their under-respected minority status in most countries and their obviously distinct lifestyle as compared to the folks that drive Mercedes around Cairo and eat at McDonalds. People associate them with the primal and seem to want illiterate, un-interfered with specimens that haven’t existed for at least 150 years. They want these guides to be insulated from the very people they support themselves by servicing. I don’t understand it.

My final reaction was that this coincidence was just that: a fluke that, while illustrative of the phenomenon I just described, shouldn’t detract from the overall experience. He’s still a Bedouin, he can still guide us around the desert, and, at the end of the day, he’ll still make us some pretty bitchin’ tea.

Unfortunately, we forgot to ask him for his autograph.

Later that night, after visiting sites of dubious authenticity (Is that pile of stones REALLY where T.E. Lawrence stayed one night? Is that spring REALLY where Lawrence refilled his caravan? Couldn’t you have picked a less obvious name than “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” for that rock formation?) but striking beauty, including a rock arch and a mountaintop spring, we were making our way towards the day’s last two sites: another rock arch and our sunset site, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom when one of the two jeeps, the one I happened to be riding in, took a larger than unusual dip towards its front right. Sa9oud the driver got out, diagnosed the flat, and stopped the other jeep to help with the fix. When I say flat, I undersell the problem by the difference between a slow leak caused by an errant tack and an inch-and-a-half-long gash. This was a dad-gum blowout. There was an inch on our tire where the rubber simply didn’t meet itself. Sa9oud set to work taking the spare tire off of the other car that was traveling with us. Never mind the spare in the back of ours: it didn’t fit. Nor, as we discovered, did the other car’s spare. We were driving a Toyota Land Cruiser and the other group was in whatever a Toyota pickup truck is. But the sun was going down and we had to keep moving. So we were told to get into the pickup truck and go to the next spot and Sa9oud would locate another tire and join us there. The cab had room for 4 passengers and there were 6 tourists. Anne (see above post) got in the front seat and we all piled our bags in the cab and jumped in the back of the pickup.

Bad. Ass.

Usually the guides drove at about 40 kph, or 24 mph. But things seem much faster when you’re sitting in the back of a pickup truck with no windshield and a suspension that can’t quite handle everything the soft, divot-pocked sand threw at it. Five or so minutes later we arrived at our next site where we waited for the other jeep. Then we moved along to the final site to watch the sun set. I mentioned earlier that the topography of the Wadi serves to keep you feeling trapped no matter where you are. We climbed a small rock formation, spread out several hundred yards apart, and watched the many layers of mountains catch the falling sun and recede into shadow in turn. Such an open space with such tired people does not carry sound very well. When I stopped talking, my breathing competed with the high-pitched ringing in my ears that filled the space that complete silence left as I watched the sun impale itself on the tops of those jagged mountain tops and spurt the resulting blood-red rays all over the landscape. It was one of the most dramatic natural scenes I’ve ever witnessed.

After a brazen damn cat that couldn’t even kindly be described as domesticated but nevertheless lived at the camp forced itself upon my fantastic dinner of goat (?), potatoes, vegetables and rice, we set about the task of amusing ourselves for the evening. One of the group was a fan of the cards, so we had already spent a considerable amount of time aggravating each other in unending rounds of Bullshit, Schmuck, and (appropriately) Egyptian Rat Screw. We decided it would be fun to play with some of the Bedouin. More had shown up from work at Aqaba, where I can only guess that what they meant by working in development was that they were construction workers at one of the resort’s many new developments. Two of the younger ones, maybe in their early to late twenties, sat down with us to play ERS. If you aren’t familiar with ERS, it’s a game whose object is to rid yourself of all of your cards by dropping them in rising numerical order with ace low. You must only drop the number that comes to you, but you drop the cards face down. If you play lots of cards, then at this point you know bluffing is an integral part of the game, and “Bullshit” is called when someone notices a bluff.

One fair generalization of the Bedouin, and part of that which, for the naysayers, makes them distinct, is their tendency to hold on to traditional social mores a little longer than most of those surrounding them. They tend to be more socially conservative, some aspects of which may be motviated by religion, and, because of this, some of them have trouble lying for lying’s sake. Needless to say, bluffing had its limitations. A bedouin will tell you exactly what they have in mind, while a Cairo shop owner will demonstrate no such scruples as he invites you into his shop "just to look" at his selection that is "90% off, just for you."

“One Ace, “I’d say.

“Two twos,” my friend to the left would follow.

“I have nothing,” the first Bedouin would offer. Stares were shared.

“Take the cards,” we’d say.

“One four,” Our next companion would pick up again.

“Two fives,” Another would add.

“Three sixes. Bullshit!” the next Bedouin would say at his turn.

“You don’t have to call yourself! You can put down anything!” we’d try to explain. But to no avail. These two very jovial card partners were the two worst bluffers in the history of Cards. But they were very handy for clearing away the marching scarabs that were improbably attracted to our game.
            The next morning, after waking one of our hungover hosts (a vacationing Iraqi family had brought along some booze upon their late entry the night before) it was off to Petra. Though the oversleeping 9ali did not have time to make us breakfast, the Iraqi family understood our plight and shared their tasty bread, yogurt and tea with us the next morning. I have to say, accepting gifts from Iraqis, out of whatever cause or harmless and well-intentioned grace it grows from, is just downright awkward as an American.

To my knowledge, the segue has not been invented that goes from, “Hey, sorry about the bombing and the power grid and the sectarian violence and the occupation and all,” to “Hey, are you gonna eat that?” Great group of people, though, and fortunately we did not have to come up with that segue, as they offered us the food first. They even dragged (literally) some of their sleeping kids out of the backs of the pickup trucks we needed so we could get to the bus to Petra on time. 

       Petra is a place that should be appreciated by viewing, not by reading. If I told you about the hundreds of yards of tombs carved into rock, if I wrote about the Crusader fortress high atop a nearby mountain that looks down upon the city center, or the High Place of Sacrifice where the Nabataeans took goats for the slaughter, from which you can see the modern city, the old city, and miles of mountains and temples all around, where the scale of the cliffs around you plays with your depth perception until someone is dwarfed standing only ten yards from you, if I explained the anticipation of the ten minute walk down the ceremonial siq, whose tectonically-formed path arches above you and presses in around you until it bursts wide upon the Treasury, made famous by Indiana Jones, an intricately carved, thirty-meter tall human stamp on a natural wonder- a brash attempt by people to put the point on a godly exclamation that explains the religious connotations of the place, I would fail. It just has to be seen. But Petra’s overwhelming thrust explains why after two days of it, the group lay low enough to avoid any stories that bear repeating here.

            The Jordanian Journey was a very exciting, horizon-broadening, and positive experience. It single-handedly ensure that I’ll never spend too much of my time sitting in one place, and if I do, that my knees will shake restlessly and dissatisfiedly.

04:02 pm - "I smoke lights."

“[o]nly those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat… If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.”

           In many ways Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad has informed and framed my trip as I have worked through the copy my parents gave me a few days before leaving in August. And it continues to do so. In a deferential nod to my readers, I’ve started the first entry in over a month with this bit of self-deprecation in hopes that it will soften them up enough to hear my excuses.

            There comes a time in every college student’s semester when he must finally do work. At Drew, that’s reliably the second week of September. At AUC, I was able to delay it to mid-October and it was disheartening when I acknowledged it. This time came right after I spent two weekends traveling (more on that later) and so I lost some momentum journaling when I had to transfer it to academics. Then the longest span of midterms I hope to ever encounter made its entrance on the scene. I’ve dealt with multiple and distinct bouts of illness of varying degree and nature, helped a friend through being, in our humble opinion, unjustly fired from her job, moving, and finding a new job. I’ve known the sorrows of the Blue Screen and learned the hardships of getting a computer fixed in Egypt. I’ve become an honorary member of the Ugandan expat community in Cairo. I hope to give you insight into most of these things over the next few days, as I enjoy my first relatively normal week in quite some time. 

            On some levels, distance can make an experience easier to recount. Time and distance can distill the moment-bound enthusiasm from the interesting and permanent observations and stories. The details may become fuzzy, but who really cares about them anyway? What you write later can more accurately reflect what should be remembered later. I’ll start approximately where I left off and where a lot of people would probably like me to begin: my trip to Jordan.

            The first important lesson from this trip is that there’s no shame in chemical dependent sleep now and then. I’ve talked about busses in Egypt before, and I won’t do it again. I will say that Tylenol should be congratulated on Simply Sleep, and it made the trip to Taba a fast and restful one. Taba might be ringing bells (“loud alarum bells” as Poe would say) for some. It’s the Egyptian side of the border crossing into Eilat, Israel. Treat yourself sometime to a good gander at a map, and you’ll see there’s no overland route from Egypt to Jordan that doesn’t go through Israel. Rather than fly in, we opted for the cheaper bus tickets and the woes of Israeli stamps in our passports. (I’ve slipped into the plural here not because of any delusions of grandeur, and I do have them, but because I was one of a five-person company.) Crossing wasn’t that bad. It took a little while, and they have scary guns in that part of the world, but once I had resigned myself to the reality of an Israeli stamp, the thrill of crossing a border on foot overcame me.

            The last time I had crossed a national boundary was when I flew into Egypt. Based on what I’ve read by Mark Twain, I think flying into a country diminishes the reality of traveling. Tourists fly. Travelers walk. Generally, the pattern goes, one wakes up from fatigue- (or chemical-) induced sleep, puts his tray table and seatback up, gets off the plane, and waits in lines to get processed or pick up bags or all kinds of mean nasty things they do to you at the plane station. If she’s lucky, there are people waiting for her. If not, he finds a taxi, gets overcharged, and descends either into unfamiliar city traffic or takes a long drive through boring and ugly highways. When crossing into Israel, lines are nearly unavoidable. But when I saw the gates in the distance and walked through the passport controls, and when I saw the Hebrew signs welcoming me to Israel, and when I got to the other side, I actually felt like I had gone somewhere. I spent time and energy moving towards the border and once I was there I had to figure it out (with four others, of course) all on my own— over-priced taxis don’t seem like such a bad thing now and then. I had time to get excited about it. There was an opportunity to feel more change around me than just the cabin pressure. Whereas airports afford quick access to faraway places, borders shade in the details of the map. They let you know exactly where you are. I discovered exactly where Hebrew begins. I saw how the sunrise looks different from Egypt than from Israel. I felt how the dirt crumbles a little different under your feet here from there. While flight pries you from space and time and asks days of recovery for the privilege, walking the border gives generously of itself, wrenching a sense of place to your soul and situating you immediately in another place, so close to whence you’ve come, but so far from it, too.

            Israel lasted half a morning. My impressions of it are only my impressions of Eilat, a small resort town whose main sources of income appear to be taxis and bottled water. The taxis are something, though. In what kind of uncivilized, provincial quarter would the law demand 4 people to a taxi? And that the front-seat passenger buckle up! And Mercedes? Clearly, sir, I can see you’re nuts. I really didn’t get a good feel for the place, but I came away thinking two things. The first is the most straightforward: the money is gorgeous. All money is prettier than US currency. Somehow we decided that grass-stain green best expressed the spirit of Americans and, when we decided to liven it up a little, we threw some Disney-princess pink right behind Jefferson. Most countries do a good job of devoting a nice, light color or two to a white bill, and tastefully at that. But Israel’s money looks like they let Andy Warhol have his way with the 8 box of Crayolas. The currency is bold, varied and beautiful without being over the top. A liberal smattering of portraits and holographic strips, and it really lights up your wallet. Israel also left me with a desire to go back. Israel is, in many ways, forbidden fruit. Its tourism industry and historical sites have a lot to compete with—terrorism, State Department warnings, paranoid parents, and a dense aura of inaccessibility. But all that came crashing down for me. I literally just walked through it all. And though I don’t like resorts or resort towns, I know there’s some good stuff to be seen in Israel, and so while Eilat itself did little to fan the flame, the mere act of being in Israel made Israel seem like a good place to go. And since I’ve already soiled the passport, why not?

***

            If crossing one border on foot is a blessing then I was having a great day. A bus and taxi ride later I wound up at the border control for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. I paid exorbitant fifteen-dollar exit fee from Israel and changed a bunch of money into Jordanian Dinars. Dinars aren’t quite as distinctive as Shekels, but they’re nice nonetheless. This was a very exciting part of my day because I had four currencies in my wallet: US Dollars, Egyptian Pounds, Jordanian Dinars, and Israeli Shekels. I crossed the border and so accrued my fourth passport stamp of the day: a one-month residential (I don’t understand either) visa for Jordan. We stayed in Aqaba that night which isn’t terribly exciting once you get past what it is. The real fun started the next day and night. We took a van out to Wadi Rum, a national park where the local Bedouin population offers camping and desert tours. At this point I should mention that this was the Eid el-Fitr weekend, the feast that ends Ramadan. Whether it’s the festive spirit or the full bellies,  people become very animated for it. And no one proved this more than our driver, Emad. Emad took us from Aqaba to Wadi Rum in one of the safest vans I’ve seen in the Middle East. It was a Dodge minivan. It was new. It was unscratched. Emad wore a pressed suit. I thought for a moment I would have an atypically comfortable, quiet ride in the Middle East.  He disabused me of any such notion right away. He asked us all our names. When he got to the member of our company called Dot, he paused, looked in the rear view mirror at her, and repeated,
“Dot. Dot? Dot Net!” Never let yourself believe the Middle East is technologically backward.

            Our discursive driver, several minutes into the ride, did what every good Arab does when he’s bored. He took out his cell phone to call his friends. I don’t recall if I’ve explained the Ramadan greeting “Kul sana wa enta bikheir,” but if not, it is a Ramadan specific greeting that boils down to wishing someone perennially good health. It has several variations, like “Kul a9am wa enta tayyib,” or “Kul sana wa enta salaam.” Feel free to mix and match any of those. Emad seemed to have left it on his Eid to-do list to wish all his friends well. So he began calling them and, rather than convey his well-wishes cordially, he held the phone inches from his face and screamed them into it. Then he’d quickly pull the phone back to his ear to hear their response, as if anyone would be level-headed enough to have anything to say at that point. Laughing, he’d hang up and repeat the process. While dialing he’d say “I have many friends.” And again, “Many friends!” And later, “I have so many friends I can’t count them! I have so many friends I don’t know all their names!” This concept really does work in the Arab world. Perpetual readers of this blog will remember Ahmed. Ahmed would be considered my friend, though it would hit him something like a bucket of cold water in the morning to have me scream the Arabic equivalent of “Merry Christmas you ole Building and Loan!” into his phone. Emad didn’t restrict himself to his electronic friends, either. As we passed by gas stations, he rolled down the windows and surprised the attendants with his yells. A poor, unsuspecting group of Asian backpackers suffered the brunt of his greetings as well as we passed them by. Then Emad asked anyone if we smoked. We said no, which he said was well because it meant more cigarettes for him. As we found out later, this still wasn’t enough.

            Traveling on one of the small access roads towards Wadi Rum, Emad looked into his pack and realized that, in a fit of “Kul Sana”-ing glory, he’d worked through his last one. So he asked if any of us had any. Our incidental Irish traveling companion, Anne, came through. But when she pulled out a full-fledged Marlboro, Emad was not impressed, but in the strangest of ways.

“You don’t have lights?!” He screamed. He diverted his attention from the road a few more seconds than most of us were comfortable with. It was one of those moments when you could feel the blood being forced from your tightening knuckles.

“No, and I can’t stand those Middle Eastern brands,” Anne defended. “They taste horrible.”

“Well, I need lights. Who has a pen?”

Emad was many things, but MacGuiver wasn’t one of them. Having no idea where he was going with this, no one answered. But no matter, he had one up front. Attention diverted from the road, Emad made the steering wheel into a work bench and while maintaining 40 k/h on one of those narrow, 1.5 lane un-shouldered desert roads, began to write something on the cigarette. He chuckled to himself all the while and my knuckles were all the whiter for it. He dropped the pen and held the cigarette up so we could see it in a triumphant gesture.

“L!” he yelled! “L for Light! It’s a light cigarette!” But just like my brother’s rock that an alchemist turned to gold at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire so many years ago, the situation quickly lost its luster. A pickup truck going at a considerably faster speed went by us at the last possible moment, and Emad’s transfiguration had led him over the center line. It must have only been centimeters that the car missed us by, and the van shook quite a bit.

Emad was furious.

Wrist forcing the horn down, he mixed several epithets with “I’m going to get him! I’m going to give him back what he gave me!”

We’re not thrilled, but Anne came through again (as only a woman could for an Arab man, perhaps) and convinced him he was wrong and to let it pass. This was morning 1 of 4 in Jordan. We were off to an excellent start.

***

            I’m going to make an effort to update every night until I catch up. Now that I’ve got a computer, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Thanks for having faith and looking again. More about Bedouins, France vs. England, and an Argentinean named Guillermo tomorrow.

Current Mood: but sick isn't a mood!

03:47 am - Bi-kam?

Let’s talk about the cost of travel in Egypt, baby.

Last Friday, before I left, I drew 400 pounds for my weekly food budget and my 560 pound (I drew 600 too make it even) allowance for traveling for the weekend. Divide everything by 5.6 to get a conservative estimate of costs. I drew 1000 pounds total for the weekend. I took 500 in travel money and 150 for my food budget. 650 pounds. About 130 dollars.

Thus spake the liberal arts student: “Let's do some math.”

I only ate three meals over two days (other food too, but not meals).

I paid 33 for a breakfast, 38 for a lunch, and 23 for dinner. There was also a 4 pound incursion for a plate of fries and 42 pounds for what we'll call extra-curricular beverages. Some of the meals were pretty good, too. I ate Egyptian for the breakfast, but went for the more touristy stuff the rest of the time. They’re big on their shakes in Dahab. I ordered a chocolate one, and there was no milk to be found (it was literally a chocolate shake, sans “milk”). It was simply a glass heaped full of melting chocolate ice cream. When a friend ordered a banana shake and dropped a bit of the ice cream on the ground, he looked just as he described himself: “the closest I’ve been to crying since I was nine.” Other than that, there was lots of bread and tahina and baba ganoush, French fries, and the like. Food for hiking was part of the travel budget. Food cost for the weekend:

140 pounds. Not once did I feel hungry.

We took the "East Delta Bus Company" out to Dahab and back. Imagine Greyhound with bad Arab movies (think Baliwood) playing at a high volume. For those who can get the reference, it was no different from Superjet. I’ve given that fantasy up. Eighty pounds out, seventy pounds back. It was cheaper back because I had my passport when I bought the ticket and I got the resident price. This price is cheaper than the tourist price and is always listed only in Arabic. It's underhanded. But I'm a resident and I have a visa and can read Arabic. So I got it, and it was challenged (excitedly, sometimes) every step of the way, but always held up when I flashed my visa. The bus ride back damn-well should have been discounted, too. We stopped, after an hour of traveling, at a rest stop just east and a few kilometers north of a suburb of the middle of nowhere. We stopped for an hour. Near as I can tell, it was so the bus driver could have a cup of tea with his friends. I was not pleased, and that ten pounds savings made all the difference then.

150 pounds.

Three other guys and I traveled to Mt. Sinai (or Gebel Mousaa, "Mountain of Moses") together, a 2 hour drive both ways. We hired a private (and very spacious) minibus, and because we got on it late, paid a bit too much. There are four or five checkpoints between Dahab and Mt. Sinai. This is typical of any travel in Egypt. I don’t really know what they’re looking for, but a lot of it is to make sure Egyptians are traveling legitimately. Remember Ahmed (the one with the downtown boys? No? Read my earlier posts, dammit!)? One of his comments to me was that Egypt was not for the Egyptians. Tourism is to Egypt as oil is to Saudia Arabia. There’s a lot of frustration among many locals I’ve talked to that it’s easier for foreigners to travel than it is for Egyptians. I’ve seen a lot of evidence for this, but the behavior at the checkpoints was particularly telling.

Once or twice we slowed down, the guard glanced in the back, and waved us on. Other times we got stopped. But a couple times we’d get stopped, the guard insistent on this while the driver aggravatedly barked “Amrikan, Amrikan.” Of four or five checkpoints in two directions, I took my passport out twice. 600 pounds, divided by 4.

150 pounds.

You're required to take a guide up Mt. Sinai. I can't imagine why. When in doubt, go up. But that's how the Bedouin make their money (and tourism and all that), and if you try to challenge it, there's a security guard there to enforce it. Not the guys in white in Cairo nonchalantly carting around empty AKs, but suit-wearing government officials packing H and Ks. Family: imagine Uncle Carl as an Arab. So between 8 of us, we hired what must have been a 14 year old kid, Akhmed, for 50 pounds. A couple people neglected to pay, so I covered. Akhmed was okay I guess. Mostly what he did was point up the lonely trail or tell me to stop and wait for everyone else. I got nicknamed Secratariat on this trip. Thank you Philmont and Blue Rocks, thank you 17-Mile Drive and Schuylkill River trail.

10 pounds.

On the top of the mountain, where we slept, they rent mattresses and blankets. We won't go into the discussion of what's probably living in these things. Anyway, we each got one. 30 for the package. On the top of the mountain, with the temperature dropping rapidly, it's a seller's market. We agreed that what happens in Sinai stays in Sinai, but I’ll give you this much. Room on top of a mountain is tight, especially when there are kumbaya-ing Christians taking all the good spots because the Spirit moved them up the mountain sooner than we left. Anyway, five guys, five paper-thin mattresses, and thirty square feet.

30 pounds.

I did the tourist thing there, because, after all, I was a tourist there. In any case, in keeping with my fascination with the headgear in this country, I noticed the men were all wearing purple kufias (scarves) that I'd never seen before. The more traditional (stereotypical?) red and white checked ones were there, but the purple ones were very prevalent. I don't know why. Could be that's a local trend. Could be that's what they last made. Could be that's what they last bought from the factory. Could be that's what they had in overstock and needed to sell them, so why not make it look authentic for the tourists? Whatever the reason, they were new to me and had seemed different, so I grabbed one. Again, seller's market. 15 minutes, two walkouts, all the Arabic I could muster, and Souleiman, my vendor, knew there were 400 or so less savvy people coming off the mountain behind me. He didn't need to drop my price.

60 pounds.

But it’s one bad-ass, if metro-as-hell, scarf.

Back in Dahab, my friends and I finished lunch at 11:30. We had ten and a half hours to kill before we had to catch our bus. None of us is a fan of open water, nor of the cost of snorkeling or scuba tours. Plus, we’re exhausted. So we troll the strip for a while, getting accosted all the while by restaurant vendors. A word of advice: never go by a restaurant more than once in an hour in the Sinai. They remember you. The hassling just gets worse. Though, and this continues to prove to me that a lack of local innovation is not an impediment to Egyptian development, I have to give props to one of the guys there. The first time we went by, he said, very dramatically and with feeling, “I struggle daily to get people into my restaurant! Will you end my struggle?”
He ended up on his knees, supplicating. On our way back, he says, “You’re back! Will you come in?”
“We just ate, maybe tomorrow.” Never mind we were leaving that night. The third (and final) time, he says, “When will my train come in? Will it be tomorrow? Please, just tell me it will be tomorrow!” Way to be creative and make an effort.

Anyway, we finally decide that, barring a good beach (it’s very rocky and better for diving) we’d buy an all day pass at one of the hotel pools. The Nessima had a very nice figure-eight-shaped pool that sloped from a ten-foot-deep section to a four-foot-deep section where it butted up against the pool-side bar, hence the extracurricular beverages. Egypt being what it is, the pool water was decidedly salty, and judging by its proximity to the gulf, I’m sure they pumped in perhaps slightly treated water from just offshore. So we spent 6 hours there. Sixty pounds between three people.

20 pounds.

Remember the math? Add that all up. I paid 560 pounds. That is “right on the money” 100 dollars at the current exchange rate. One hundred forty of those pounds were part of regular food expenditures. So all tolled, I spent 420 pounds traveling, or under 100 dollars for two days and three nights traveling, to climb one of the most storied mountains in the world, to watch the sun rise and set over the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever seen, to experience the trials and tribulations of hiring transport in Egypt, to flash my visa and claim residency, to see more stars in the sky than there are people in Cairo, to get three new friends out of a weekend, and to have enough memories to last a lifetime. And so much else. And I’ll do it again next weekend. Look for posts next week about Jordan.

04:53 pm - What They Don't Tell You

            It’s time to reiterate a point. My various adventurous posts notwithstanding, there is quite a bit of downtime and frustratingly slow time passage associated with my trip. I usually spend forty-five minutes to an hour on two shuttle rides to and from campus at least a couple times a week. I spend hours on my bed trying to decide if Opinio Juris has been met in an international law case involving Cuban fishing vessels. Once you’ve walked Dokki street for a month, the sights wear thin on your eyeballs, and you just look forward to getting to bed at the end of a class-filled day, whether you’re the student or the teacher.

            Some days it dawns on you that you are where you are. You plot maps in your head and realize that “holy shit, I’m in Africa.” You notice the mosques surrounding you and the sheer drops of the desert’s cliff walls and you can’t believe how exciting your circumstances are. But you do homework. You read emails. You get ripped off. You break a shoelace. Your favorite pair of jeans starts ripping. The inconvenience of getting a 75 P ta’amiya sandwhich at 2:30 pm during Ramdan goes on one day too long. Or significant shifts happen in your personal life.

Maybe you got to bed 45 minutes later than you wanted. Or you just couldn’t sleep. Maybe some friend didn’t email you, or you read a particularly bleak news item on the BBC. Whatever it is, you realize, once you’ve gotten the “resident” stamp in your passport, that you’re not on a vacation anymore. It’s at that point that the bad days take their place alongside the good, when you ignore your alarm clock and get a late start and consider skipping class because, just like at Drew, excitement doesn’t outweigh monotony on the balance of life. A friend asked me if I felt detached from my experiences. That’s about as close as I can come to describing some days. Even when good things happen, you can’t always get past the stunning reality of where you are. The only reasonable explanation is that it’s not real. Did that just happen to me, or someone I’m watching? It’s when you lose the urge to freeze-frame every moment on a camera. It’s when you stop trying to read every Arabic sign you see. It’s when you just say “screw it” and you go and buy a Big Tasty with Macfries combo, or a Kwaarter-bounder big-gibna (gibna=cheese). The normalization of a place can be rapid. And it takes more and more effort to get something out of it. It’s very frustrating. A few weeks ago I was wondering how I could possibly describe the whirlwind emotions and activities I’d experience to my friends. Now I’ve gotten to the point where saying “pretty good” or “alright” makes just as much sense as it does when talking about the last week at Drew.

In less than two weeks I’ll be exploring Jordan, and hopefully some of that spirit will return. In 3.5 weeks I’ll either be in the Sinai or in the Western Desert. But for the times in between, I might have to work that bit harder to find something to write home about. Not only are the surface issues dealt with and the real gems working to hide themselves away, but I have to navigate my shifting conception of the word. This is the part they don’t tell you about in the brochures.

06:19 pm - Damn Kids with their Music...

One of the universals I’ve noticed being in Cairo is children’s behavior. Children are rambunctious, shameless, conniving, and cruel no matter where they live. This is true despite the different child-rearing techniques used in Egypt. Children are typically given until a certain age to be children, and then they are forced to grow up very quickly. (This is not true, however, of the toddlers on the street trying to sell you tissues; they have no childhood to speak of.) But for now, my thoughts settle on those five to six year old devils who have plagued my life for the last month and change.

On the most benign level, they stare. Egyptians have an easy relationship with eye contact. Sometimes people of all ages on the metro or on the sidewalks will lock you in a stare whose only key is walking faster. I’ve tried staring back. Once in a blue moon it works, but a vast majority of the time it doesn’t. The children, however, are champions. Shamelessly, they will stand right below you, head lolling back on their necks as their outstretched arms barely reach the oh-my-God rings hanging from the subway’s ceiling, their eyes glazed over but keenly searching yours. Now and then they might look at a friend and say something. This is how I learned to recognize the word “khawaaga,” or “foreigner.” But these are the well-behaved.

Sometimes it is most difficult to deal with those children who explore completely the bounds of good behavior. They know exactly where the line is and they never cross it. They simply press their mischievous little faces up against the glass windows of tolerability, leaving smudges, and squeeze everything they can out of it like so many citrus fruits. Case in point: This weekend I took my first field trip for my Art and Architecture class. (To meet your curiosity halfway, we visited the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and its shrines. It’s the first mosque in Cairo’s second iteration c. 960 and it was very old and big and had lots of arches and a minaret. You can find more out on Wikipedia, I’m sure.) Mosques are usually a calm tour. The only people in your way are praying, and arguably that inconvenience falls in your favor. A historically important mosque, it’s guarded and renovated. But its shrines are less important, and tourists doing the one-week whirlwind will only stop to see it and not its shrines. This is just as well, because they are nestled in a truly bleak crumbling tenement of a housing project. But there is a rippled dome there that we needed to see. In any case, our class (there were about 25 of us) stopped to take in this architectural feature that is truly insignificant when put in its modern social context right in the middle of some kids’ playground. They weren’t playing when we got there, but as soon as a score and a bit of white college folk arrived, their carefully-orchestrated dance began.

Our professor, a plump, aged Egyptian woman, stood with her bullhorn, spouting minutia about this architect on that date and this destroyer of architecture on that date while the students shuffled uncomfortably and disinterestedly around her, trying to stand in the shadows so they could look at the shrine and at least make a pass at seeming focused. Meanwhile, these little kids, whose turf we so rudely turned into a classroom, started charging. At first, their efforts were coordinated. In their handfuls they ran in a line around (and when possible through) us, their shrilly pre-pubescent vocals driving straight through our professor’s drone. But when youthful enthusiasm truly got the better of them they split up and like water on pavement found every crack and crevice available to them in our group and made their ways through. It didn’t help when cameras, dutifully brought along to catalog the day’s various arches, grilled-windows, rounded pillars, minarets, minbars, miHrabs, crestings, friezes, and transepts, turned towards the much more appealing children. Like high-energy electrons around a packed nucleus, these children zoomed around us. Then phase two began.

The professor spewed some diminutives in Arabic and a middle-aged man, perhaps a father or uncle, came out and yelled at them. So like the French Knight (No? “You silly English “kaaaaanigits!” That one.) in Monty Python’s “The Search for the Holy Grail,” these incorrigible little shits retreated and began yelling at us from the shrine, which we stood back from to be able to see it better as a whole. They began to mimic the time-honored Egyptian baksheeshing tradition of offering unsolicited advice, information, or service and then asking for money. While they didn’t have the second part down, they were more than willing to foist their tidbits on us, still obscuring our professor’s lecture, all the while pointing at the shrine and jumping up and down on their pile of rubble. They had a routine. One stood on the pile for a few seconds, then ran down the side and through the shrine while the next ran up. The man came back out again and physically excised some of the offenders, and things quieted down. I couldn’t help but feel bad. We were in their play space and they just wanted attention. They also weren’t being that much of a problem. You could strain to hear, and that’s what we get for trying to have an on-site lecture. But the ones that I take significant issue with are the children who are just plain mean.

A kindergarten appears to have started a couple blocks away from me. Like most schools for young children, it has a shift that lets out around noon. So if on one of my lighter days I happen to be making for the metro at the last possible moment, there will be several dozen little kids in blue pants and mustard shirts (the boys in ties, the girls in the same thing with a skirt) fully embracing their newfound freedom from the classroom. The first was on the first day of this school. I was heading to the metro when I noticed this gaggle of little kids. I approached, and saw two surly older boys, maybe 15 or so who were probably picking up their younger siblings taking quite the knee- and crotch- level beating from their excited peewee counterparts. I don’t recall, but maybe what happened next was some sort of cosmic “watch yourself” in response to an inadvertently cracked smile at this amusing scene. I have it in slow motion in my head. The little ones wailed away, and when one of the older boys looked up and saw me, an arm pivoted up in a direction that was unmistakably mine. Here we go, I thought. They disengaged from their primary target and all of a sudden two six-year-olds made their attack. They were separated by about ten feet, so I only had to deal with the first one. He ran by and smacked at my side. For a six-year-old, he packed quite a punch. I whirled around (and I really think it was my atypically-styled sunglasses and my use of Arabic that did the trick) and yelled at him. He stumbled a little bit, searching unsuccessfully for my eyes. I kept on walking. The second one didn’t make it to me. I expressed my displeasure to the older boys (“umak,” or “your mother,” carries some weight around here) and had an otherwise pleasant walk to the metro. Who knew that several years dealing with the Hontz children would prepare for a near-ball-tapped experience in Dokki? (If anyone needs help with this last sentence, leave a comment about the first part or check urbandictionary.com for the second.)

The point of all this is not that I can harass little kids. The point is that, with the exception of the late intervention of the father figure at the Shrines, I simply don’t see parents checking their kids. I’d buy the community raising argument if I saw someone dealing with them. But I don’t. Now it’s a strong possibility that these kids will be very independent when they’re older, but it’s moments like these that make me question the Egyptian family values I hear about so much or that I see when a father zooms up the stairs carrying a giggling daughter over his head or a young couple coos over their warmly-wrapped baby in the metro. It’s hard to figure out if the lines are based on socio-economics, ages, geography, or the situation. But one thing’s for sure. These Egyptian kids could give even the worst-run Cub Scout pack a run for its money.

11:02 am - Wednesdays and Saturdays

Speeding north on the longer of Cairo’s two subway lines towards the suburb of New El-Marg, I fought hard to keep my seat. I was lucky to have gotten it in the first place. Especially in the downtown (or “waSt el-balad”, lit. “middle of the country) stops, scores of would-be pedestrians charge the opening train doors while a dozen or so sweaty, smelly passengers, grateful to be getting off the tightly-packed car, haplessly scramble for a way out. Even the smallest gap in the advancing wall of riders vying for a good spot on the train can provide the opportunity necessary to squeeze one’s way out of the train. This struggle constitutes a daily phenomenon that, to the untrained eye, might resemble something more like a rugby scrum than public transportation. And if that untrained eye happens to be in the middle of this battle, it might, to its chagrin, turn into the ball. In the tense half minute before the train throws its doors open, people begin positioning themselves and when the coiled-up groups are released, hands surge forward against the bodies in front of them in a gesture that merits a “women only” designation for the first two  cars of each train, and annoyed yells of “push!” or “go!” fill the air. Suffice it to say, if getting on the train is this much of a chore, getting a seat is even harder.

            Typically, by the time the train gets three or four stops out of the asthmatic downtown area, things begin to thin out, and I can secure a seat. The driving force behind my strong desire for a chair on this trip is that when I get to my destination in el-Matariya, I’ll be standing up for two long hours, desperately peeling back the calloused third-grade layers of my brain in search for simple ways to explain English grammar rules to my class of predominantly Sudanese refugees. I need the rest beforehand.

            El-Matariya is right below Ain-Shams, a large residential district home to one of Cairo’s many universities. Downtown it is not. When I get off the train in Sadat, I step onto a clean, tiled platform and ride an escalator up to the ground level. When I get off in Matariya, I wade right into a full-scale market on the dusty street, full of yelling and screaming and pushing and shoving. Shopping in Egypt bears little resemblance to shopping in the States. Prices aren’t set, hard deals are driven, and in some cases more time and energy is invested in the product than money is. And why not? Commerce is the most basic form of social interaction, especially between cultures. Maybe that’s why tourists find the souq so enthralling. But for right now, I just need to find a way through it so I can get to class on time.

I make it past the old men in dirty, scraggly galabiyas whose only evidence that they were once flowing is their severed threads flapping with the men’s strides. I try to sneak past the old fruit-selling women sitting on flattened cardboard boxes, appearing as heaps of fabric on the ground in their fully-covered faces and gloves of black cotton. I am always struck by the cultural shift that took place during my 30 minute ride. To the extent that such a thing can exist, this is “real” Cairo and these are “real” people. These are the 44% of the population living on less than two dollars a day. I think I can so easily walk past them and not contribute to their daily income because of the people I’m about to work with. Not that I consider one good deed each day enough, but that I feel more for the Sudanese who ran from war who also live on very little a day, but also struggle constantly with the overt racism of a stressed society.

Once I get through this gaggle of locals, I have a fairly unimpeded trip over the old but solid concrete pedestrian bridge that crosses the metro tracks. A couple blocks later, I arrive at the school. It’s actually a decent building. It has several rooms, though they are small, a kitchen and plumbing. Graffiti is scrawled on all the doors from generations of bored school children. In the time before class starts, I usually get to spend a few minutes talking with the other Americans there, where I generally slip into unabashed, rapid-paced slang and get it all out of my system before I settle into a slow, articulate formal dirge of English for my students. A group of Ugandans who also teach here typically join the conversation as well. They are all young college students on government-sponsored scholarships to study in Cairo. Colonialism being what it was, their first language is heavily-accented English. As class approaches, the students file into the building from the courtyard in a calm, characteristically exuberant Sudanese fashion.

The classroom experience is an interesting one. Generally the students make up for their relaxed entrance with a stoic focus in class, a focus that I’ve only ever seen broken by the incessant ringing of cell phones. Everyone here has a cell phone. Egyptians, expats, and refugees alike share this one facet of the modern world. I’ve been to several concerts and events and straining to understand the Arabic speakers introducing them I can hear the call to turn off or silence your mobiles. At the beginning of my class I always try to stress this same plea. But discussions in class rarely finish without that damn Japanese cat cackling “hello moto” or Shaggy telling me it wasn’t him. AUC has this policy more locked down, and you may be dismissed from class for the semester (the likelihood of this is usually a function of the age of the professor) but at the very least for the day if your mobile goes off. But my students just go to the nearest window and talk, and I’m not sure if it’s to get out of my way or to get better reception.

***

The program roughly follows a textbook of origins dubious to me. It has plenty of cultural bias and makes you realize how different teaching English to well-to-do French écoliers must be from teaching it to refugees. Not that I’ve ever done the former, but I have a hunch that the lesson with vocab including “cash machine” and “can you recommend any good restaurants” is a lot less awkward with a class of wallet-toting westerners.

“Cash is fuloos,” I explain.

“Okay.”

“Machine is makiina,” I go on.

“Okay.”

“So a cash machine is one of those boxes on the wall where you can go to take out money. Like an ATM.”

I think the point got across. But don’t let the luxurious cell phones fool you. I doubt if any of the people in my class have ever had a bank account.

            Other less touchy lessons have included the difference between “I ran” and “I used to run” and tongue training for the English “P”. For the first, I made charts on the whiteboard outlining habitual vs. once and long time ago vs. short time ago.

            “Teacher, can you explain ‘habitual’?”

            “Do you know ‘habit’?”

            I love my students’ individuality, but it can be a burden at times like this. John Kennedy, the reticent young twenty-something in the front row, uses this time to stare at the board to appear as if in thought and avoid my call while Mark, the teenager who sits next to him gives a very competent explanation. Toong, the 45-year old behind Mark, makes an explanatory windmill motion with his hands while his pudgy face scrunches in concentration, explaining that “it es like something mebee you do it many a time-es” which typically throws off Peter, to his right, who only says “yes, we know.” Consensus? Not really. I’ll have Toong explain it to Peter in Arabic because his issue is only comprehending the idea, not the language, and I’ll work with John on the board for a few minutes, trying hard to bolster is English ear.

            “So   ‘used to”   is   something   that   puts   the   word   in   the   past   by    a    longer   time   and    it   means   it   kept   happening.”

            “Teacher I have many questions,” Mark has often said at times like this. Sometimes they are astute observations taking me to task for contradicting something I said last time or for making a less full explanation this time around. Sometimes they are unrelated issues from lessons we did the week before.

***

            The historical baggage that comes with being a white teacher in front of a room of black Africans in Egypt is sometimes hard to for me to deal with. They only call me “teacher” (even the 45 year old) and there is a strong sense of discipline in the room that I did nothing to instill. I repeat to myself that I’m there to help, that I’m a volunteer, that the skills I’m imparting might help them go to school or get jobs (especially if they return to Sudan), and that three of the teachers downstairs are Ugandan. I try hard to mix with them during breaks, speaking Arabic with them and trying to ask about their commutes to school, their jobs, their families, or, as my available vocab often dictates, what they think about the weather. I try hard to laugh in class and encourage them to as well.

            But after class, I notice the gap between me and my students close even more. Legs start shaking as I move onto just one last point. Hands sneak under notebook covers, poising to strike at the words “see you next time.” And when I finally do release class, everyone stands in unison and rushes towards the door. Like a contestant on “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” I fall right into the nearest chair to pack my bags as the students rise from theirs. The mental and psychological effort involved in the class is matched by the physical: I have to bend down and hold the badly-attached board to the wall. I have to snake through the packed chairs in the cramped room to point to something in a book. I have to act out words. Then I walk to the subway, standing at the backs of lines, yawning a white flag of surrender on my long ride back to the dorm.

07:55 pm - Subhan Allah

I walked into Al-Azhar Park not expecting much. I had walked a ways down Saleh-Selim road, a major highway that skirts the eastern edge of the city proper. I could see the cliffs that demarcate the desert floor’s edge. I could see miles of tenements in either direction. Sweat poured chilly down my back, because I had walked for 35 minutes at a brisk pace during the time of night and year when the summer heat still draws moisture out of your body any way it can find, letting you know in its last days that it will be back with a vengeance months later, but also when the cold desert air rushes around you, cooling you down with an unanticipated vigor. So when I got to the park entrance, I was overcome by a perfectly neutral state of mind. The moments of excitement that follow a successful jaunt through Cairo can be dimmed by the reality of a place when you get there. The zoo is dilapidated, and even the most beautiful mosques have turned- up edges of carpet. It was from this brutally honest detachment that my night’s phoenix rose swiftly and majestically from its own ashes.

The moment I walked into Al-Azhar park, a smile leapt energetically to my dry-sweat-caked face. The floors were polished stone and marble, with a depression in the middle of the main courtyard that houses the only functional water fountain I’ve seen in this city. I could move so freely here. The in-ground lights play with the globlets of water that jerk into the air and simultaneously catch the glint of the city’s lights and of my eyes, leaving a small pool in the depression that sometimes sent streams down the softly-declined pathways. I looked to my right, and the stone and marble floor extended fifty palm-lined yards to a beautifully lit stucco restaurant. But my gait was drawn as if involuntarily to the left when I turned towards it. It mirrored the first but for a larger-than-life view of the Mohammed Ali Mosque situated squarely between the trees. I moved towards it instantly, the gentle curve of its dome and the sleekness and profound height of its minarets overcoming my eyes’ Cairo-bred reflex to check the ground below me for uneven surfaces. Thank God they were smooth here.

I stripped my eyes from their seducer just long enough to check a park map and find the way to the observation deck. The Mosque had me under its spell, and I wanted nothing to come between me and a more beautiful view. Route in mind and destination assured, I quickened my pace and walked as fast as I could between the chutes of palms, breathing heavily the polluted air of a city even if in its purest spot. I powered by the man-made lake and the buffet and charged up the stairs to the observation deck, my camera slipping from my sweaty hands but for its strap, taking the steps two at a time when I finally conquered the hill.

I arrived at the top of the steps, heart pounding, and caught my breath for a moment before turning around. And, still trying to fill my lungs with the air my rush demanded, just when I needed it most, I learned what they meant when they say something took your breath away. I had to sit down to take it all in.

Before me lay a panorama in excess of 180 degrees, a Cairo night scene whose lights and sounds set off the desert floor and broad night sky. The Mohammed Ali Mosque, the highest point in the city, still commanded my attention for minutes after it initially filled my gaze. But when I was able to overcome my paralysis and I regained some of my equilibrium, I let my eyes slip around the skyline and steal glances at its other marvels. To the right were a dozen or so other mosques of various periods, with tall and squat domes, smooth and textured. Minarets grasped towards nothing in the heavens, reaching up as if siphoning the fresh air down to their devotees, the buildings bastions of peace in a city of tumult. And as I fixed my focus in different directions, the mosques blended together, their features meshing in a vast array of the world’s most distinct architectural elements. And they stood in stark contrast with the features that haphazardly filled the space around them. They wrestled out of their plain desert backdrop and accented the boxy, brown, harshly-finished apartment buildings around them. I wondered how people could live in such unflattering homes when the mosques around them are so beautiful. I think it’s a strong commentary on the value of community in the Arab world and extended family in the Egyptian tradition. Why does it matter what your house looks like? You shouldn't be there anyway. But these shapes all worked so well together! How does such an unplanned, cobbled-together city exude such improbable beauty? How could a place defined by the exquisitely simple squares, circles, and triangles of a child’s stencil ostensibly be the source of some of the world’s most painfully complex challenges? No, I think the questions asked need to be different. I think everyone needs to feel fully this Middle Eastern gift to the world fill their senses, invade their mind and body completely, before going any further so that it becomes a gift to them, too. Everyone needs to see this city stripped naked of its detail and spread out, with the few imperfections of its dynamic identity that draws from tens of millions of unique faces and almost as many unique buildings giving away to a gorgeous and perfect whole. With some time and devotion, this city opened itself up to me. When I began to love its faults as part of its charm and began to appreciate its real character, it flung wide its doors. In this moment, I saw the most beautiful sight of my life. Neither the backwoods of New Mexico, the pine-stubbled hills of Steinbeck’s Monterey, the lakes of Oregon, the skyscrapers of New York, the Falls at Niagara, the beaches of Cape Cod, or even the neighboring pyramids themselves could match Cairo’s magnificence tonight. A decidedly atheist person of Catholic background, a cynical student of politics, even I was moved to declare, even if under my breath, “Subhan Allah.”

09:12 pm - Vignettes Part One

Bridges

            Cairo is built along, because of, and in many cases in spite of, the Nile. The island district of Zamalek alone has six bridges, three on each side. There are a few more farther south. And though Cairo is a polluted city, there is a natural beauty to its waterfronts, and the bridges are a great way to glimpse them. But Cairo is many other things, too. And one of them is sexually repressed. Sometimes dates are supervised. But dates rarely happen anywhere but outside the home. Landlords may not rent even to a Western mixed couple if they aren’t married, no matter how platonic. Relationships tend not to go anywhere without the expectation of at least a several carat ring at the end. This is a large factor in the closeness within the genders in Egypt. Men walk arm in arm, even hold hands sometimes. Women recline on each other on benches.

            There was an Italian novel a few years ago (now a movie) whose author and title escape me. Point is, the two lovebirds sealed their romance by placing a lock on a bridge in Italy. Subsequently, there have been thousands of locks placed on this same bridge in real life to the consternation of the police and those very people when the police tried to remove them. But the setting was perfect. Cars fly by on the 4-6 lane bridges at astonishing speeds. The sidewalks tend to be too packed to stand still on unless you belly up to fences at the sides. And this makes them a perfect place to push the social envelope. Young couples (some old ones, too, it must be added) wrap themselves up in each other, backs to the road, leaning up against the walls peering over the water, several couples at any given time. More contact happens there than is appropriate anywhere else in the city. Asking the question of just how “in the city” bridges are. They aren’t real; they have no Islamic soil or dirt under them and so they rest, suspended in the air as unsettled in-between places, and the questionable acts they are witness to are able to float down, uncaught by any disapproving, tongue-clicking Egyptian matron and pass by as and with the water under the bridge.

The Metro

            There are FILO systems (first in last out) and LIFO systems (last in first out) but the Metro in Cairo is not so neat. It’s everyone in everyone out at the same time in both directions. The car slows and hands go to the ready either on the small of the back of the person in front of you or on his shoulder. The car stops, and everyone pushes. It’s like childbirth without the midwife. But once you’re in the car, especially on longer trips when the downtown crowds are subsided, the metro can be an interesting place that constantly creates new dynamics proving the human social nature.

_____________

As far as elementary school kids are concerned, a lanky white dude in the middle of learning the language is only slightly higher on the pecking order than the kid with the speech impediment on the playground. And if they knew that I won’t hit them to make them shut the hell up I’d probably be lower. They stare ‘cause little kids ain’t got no couth. And they don’t mask that they’re talking about me: “khawaga” (foreigner) “abyad” (white) “Sharhu mudhhik” (funny hair). There is no defense against these shameless pests, though the well-timed “andak kam sana?” (how old are you?” can throw them for a loop now and then. But usually it only ends when the lanky white dude gets off the train.

______________       

Subways are also very noisy places, so they turn any Arabic practice into the painful (sometimes embarrassing), ritualistic right of passage integral to anything worthwhile in life. I found myself standing next to two middle-school boys in the metro who couldn’t stop staring at me. They weren’t deterred by oft-successful stare back. So I turned off the iPod and shot a “Ramadan Kareem” their way. Their face-saving stoicism covered the fleeting look of surprise and embarrassment on their faces. And this is where the battle permanently turned in their favor. See, I’m used to language tapes. Language tapes are riddled with dramatic over-enunciation that can never prepare you for the real world. I got past restaurant white noise rather quickly, but the rattles and clangs of a metro cover the low-talking, uber-cool utterings of a 12 year-old to such an extent that I couldn’t even make out the basic “nazil fayn?” (where are you getting off?) unless the car was stopped. And I said, “eh?” (what?) and the kids looked at me funny. And they repeat with no discernible change in clarity and I just scrunched my face up and said “eh?” again. Then the laughing began.

            An old man behind me butted in:

“He wants to know why you’d leave America for here!”

“Shukran ya sheikh.” I looked  back at the kids.

“Badrus hina” (I’m studying). They shared a quick look. Somehow, kids always seem in league with each other.

“Btadrus eh?” (studying what?)

“Arabiya.” And of course they laughed at the ridiculous end to that conversation.

After another similar exchange, one of the kids, exasperated, imposed his culture’s value on personal space on me and walked up to me, guided my head down to his level with his hand and repeated again in my ear. I still didn’t get what he wanted, but I made a satisfactory sound to avoid other such awkwardness. Then my station mercifully appeared and I walked to my English class, where I taught the difference between “used to run” and “ran” and did the dance again, only this time having switched partners.

Nadi Wadi En-Niil (see previous post)

            At this club, which is becoming a regular haunt of mine, I can get a fine cup of tea second only to what I remember having at my grandmother’s house in Oneonta, NY. Loose-leaf, not bagged, with leaves of fresh mint bobbing up and down, it is served in a glass (no ceramic here!) with a heat-sinking spoon. Which I need, because the standard Egyptian cup of tea comes with sugar enough to send a sweet-and-low crying to its momma. Even hot, this tea is sometimes the only comfort I can find on Cairo’s hot, late-summer nights. It hits the tongue right on the sweet buds and then diffuses so that the mint is left as the after taste. Generally three of these get you through one water pipe, but for a quick sit down, two is plenty. Each sip you take heightens your awareness that, no, there just isn’t anything like this back in the States. It melts away your work, your stress, and you’re homesickness, because as each sip rolls warmly down your throat, you fuse with the social fabric around you: as you look out the front of the coffeehouse into the inconsistently lit night of Tahrir square, with its black and white taxis weaving recklessly between pedestrians, traffic furniture, buses, and more taxis, these same pedestrians unperturbedly dodging these same taxis, consumed by their excited chitchat (Arabic’s version of “blahblahblah is “looqlooqlooq”) that speeds them through the armies of little kids and old women selling packets of tissues, the younger ones chasing you once you pass by the elderly woman hocking her ware from her cardboard throne, and the dual sound of car horns and screeching brakes spills in, I’m never more aware that I’m in Cairo. And once I deftly draw the last leaf-free liquid from the bottom of the glass with a loud slurp, I raise a hand, catch the waiter’s eye, and ask my most controlled three words of Arabic: “mumkin shai tani?”

“Another tea?”

Ramadan

            Everyone goes to Church on Christmas and Easter, everyone goes to Synagogue on the High Holy Days, and everyone goes to the Mosque on the first day of Ramadan.

If you’ve ever drive home during the halftime of the Super Bowl, you know a bit about Cairo at evening prayer on Ramadan day one. The streets are so eerily empty that you feel like the cockroach that survived the nuke. You’re comfort is restored when the one or two cars left go zooming by you, tires at the edge of adhesion on the turns because they’re late for prayer. And they’re hungry. But this city, so full of vibrant life and crowds, rests for this one hour. If you need to get anywhere in the city, do it then, because you’ll never have another street-crossing opportunity like this, and you’ll never be guaranteed a seat on the Metro again. But the city is truly beautiful for this time of the year. Ramadan lights come out, blue red and yellow light bulbs hanging from wires intermix with the colorful fabrics hung around the bare wood and cement of storefronts where deep orange amr ed-deen (candied apricot, often mixed into a drink) accents the normally bread-white tables.

__________

            Walking through any part of the city, one sees tables set up for dozens in alleys and under raised highways. In one of the more beautiful gestures of the holiday, store owners and rich families set out an iftar for the poor. Men in street cleaning reflector suits lean brooms up against the backs of chairs and enjoy a meal. Mothers with three children quit their street corners and enjoy the first good meal in God knows how long. It’s one of the most concentrated displays of human kindness I can recall seeing, if not spontaneous.

__________   

Again, this is the time to travel. Leaving from Downtown’s main Metro hub, Sadat, I bought a ticket today (17 cents to go anywhere in the city) and had one of my most drawn out conversations in Arabic with a stranger (save for Ahmed’s downtown boys). I only had a fiver for a one pound ticket. The man behind the window held a bag of bread, clearly preparing for his iftar. I wanted to be quick.

            “wahid” (one).

            “mafiish fakka, da’ii’a” (there’s no change, one minute)

            “mumkin itnayn” (two is fine) I said, striving to alleviate the stress on his dwindling stock of small bills. A man walked up behind me, bought his ticket, and provided the rest of my change.

            “itfadl. Enta minayn?” (here you go, where are you from?)

            “Amriika. Badrus fii gama’ amrikiya” (America, I’m studying at AUC).

            The man behind the ticket window asked if I was Muslim or Coptic, an unusually narrow choice. I replied “Christian.” A couple more questions about where I was going, and some pleasantries, and I ran to catch my train, realizing a moment too late that he was alone behind that ticket window and in that station, and the curiosity about my religious affiliation was a veiled invitation to join him in his fast breaking. But I had English to teach anyway. Nevertheless, the day’s second act of hunger-induced kindness kept my mood light through the increasing hustle and bustle of the rest of my train ride.

Current Mood: tired

07:47 pm - How Ben saved his weekend, and how Ahmed met the downtown boys.

The title of this post is a la John Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat. I chose it because this book is about several close friends whose only aim in life is to combine getting drunk off of wine and helping each other. It works on so many levels.
I was feeling down a few days ago. I was in a funk, nearing the end of the 2 weeks of orientation and pre-class sitting around, I had entered a liminal state, completely, it felt, without identity or place. I wasn't a Drew student because I was watching my friends' away messages on AIM pop up saying, "I'm here!", "At Drew," "Back!" But I was in Cairo. I wasn't an AUC student because I hadn't been issued my ID yet and didn't even know what the textbooks for some of my classes were yet. I was just a guy in a city with no friends. But a dear friend from Drew threw me a line. This friend, who was in Egypt with me last January, asked me rhetorically (but with a clear purpose) how it was that I managed so well on my last trip. Who was the guy that lead trips to the market? Who was the one that always wanted to do something? I realized my problem wasn't with things I didn't have that I couldn't control, but with things I didn't have that I could. I felt empowered then, and it got me through a tough couple days after, but not completely better.
For instance, when classes started Wednesday I was thrilled. Sitting in the shuttle in the slow, organic, bottlenecked Cairo traffic after my first day of classes, meeting  the gazes of young Cairo children and old Cairo men alike on the bus sitting next to me, I felt for the first time unintimidated. Because finally, last Wednesday, I was studying abroad. I had, from that moment forward, a purpose in this city. I occupied a real, productive, and important space in this city with so little room for people with nothing to offer. It was a watershed moment for me. But still, three days later, sitting in my room on a Friday night, alone, I was unsatisfied. I was studying abroad, but I wasn't living abroad.
Sure, I was occupying space with a purpose, but I wasn't maximizing its value. I reread the lines from my friend. She made me realize that it was the things I initiated that made me most happy. I need more than to fulfill a role; I need to expound upon it and create for myself a character. In these lines I realized that not only was I capable of making the most of a place, but it was a necessary part of my well-being. Sitting in my room on a Friday night, alone, I decided to create for myself my first real adventure as Ben, the Student from AUC, not just to sit in my and read as student 900032632.
I paged through my guidebook, looking for something that could be fun to do at night by myself. Being by myself now, by the way, was a good thing. No one to tie me down. No stopping after street crossings to make sure that my friends were behind me, or at the very least not dragged behind an over-zealous taxi. No complaints about my route or my destination. Just me doing my thing. Second star to the left, straight on til morning. I settled on the cafe where Naguib Mahfouz used to drink his morningly coffee. That is, before he was knifed there. So I grabbed my notebook, my National Geographic Egypt travel guide, my wallet, my phone, and I headed off, into the smog-refracted neon glow of the giant Coca-Cola sign downtown.
Thirty minutes later, I had identified the place where Mahfouz's haunt should be, but couldn't get there because I couldn't find a path that didn't go through the Nile Hilton. So in the manner of someone completely given over to the idea of adventure, I quickly changed plans and headed to Tahrir square, the center of the city (AUC, Arab League HQ, Tahrir Koshary, etc.) and plopped myself down in an ahwa (or cafe) called "Nadi Wadi en-niil", or the Nile Wadi Club. (A wadi is a dry riverbed or valley, essentially a floodplain in the dry season), peeled my bag off of my 85 degree sweaty shoulder, and ordered a mint tea and an apple Shisha. 'Cause that's what you do at 11 pm on Friday in Cairo.
Remember in the first post when I warned about my target audience? This kicks in here. I offer no apologies for the following content though you're free to read it. And of course, this is where it gets  good.
I Order a second tea. The waiter gave me a hearty thumbs up. I finished this tea, which raised my core temperature another few degrees, and moved to pay the bill and leave for the relative cool of the outdoors. A mild success. But at this moment, Ben, the student from AUC, truly filled the form of 900032632.
"Hey, Could I ask you a question?"
A young Egyptian man in his late 20s hailed me from the next table over.
"Sure," I said. This is the social format of the country. If you're in an ahwa, anyone, especially someone sitting alone, is fair game for conversation. But it's also a very safe environment.
"What do you call this?" the man said, tugging at his collar.
"A collar..." I tentatively offered.
"A color?"
"No, a Co-ll-ar. C-O-L-L-A-R" I stretched out each syllable in a painful enunciation of one of English's most mundane words, and but for the zoot suit and poppin', one of the world's most mundane concepts.
"And this?" He reached his hand into his "Pah-kit." We repeated the dance.
"Are you in a hurry?" he asked. I looked at my watch, looked at the beads of sweat fighting to make their way out of their overheated dungeon, and then at the fan above their heads.
"No," I said. "I've got nowhere to be tonight."
So I sat with the man, Ahmed Zidane (an Arab name, apparently; Zinedine is Algerian) and his companion, Magdy. Magdy was the one asking about the clothing. Apparently he has a job interview tomorrow with a tailor and wanted to make sure his English was top-notch. Ahmed made me order another tea and smoke one of his cigarettes. Cause that's what happens when Arabs catch you in their net of hospitality, not unlike a fly in a spider's web. You accept what they offer and lest you insult them and end the meeting on a sour note (I realize that in my metaphor, the bug gets eaten anyway. So sue me), you consume it.
Then I spent the next 2 hours embroiled in the most lively conversation of the trip. Ahmed wanted to know what I was doing here, and how I liked it. Magdy, a happily married man with three kids, wanted to know why I was still single. Ahmed ribbed him, asserting that to marry is to give up your freedom. But he's just bitter because his fiance left him. And took the 7000 pound ring. Are all Americans rich? Are all Egyptians? Egyptians are not welcome in their own country, only Americans with money. And Jews, they have lots of money too and that's how they control the resorts in Dahab, Sharm esh-Sheik, Hurghada.
The conversation flowed through a mix of Arabic and English, me forcing my practice on them, them forcing their questions on me. The whole thing was very interesting, but sometimes it was downright fascinating or hilarious or both.
If you haven't read "Everything is Illuminated" By Jonathan Safran Foer, do it. If you have, Ahmed = Alex, guileless and all. As I said, he doesn't like marriage. Tomorrow, he has rendezvous with three separate "bitches" on his day off. On that note, he says you should always avoid Pyramid Street (I belive he meant the long, wide pyramid road that goes from giza to the pyramids) along which there are lots of casinos and brothels. There, you might be accosted by bitches or downtown boys. "Aywa," I replied. He laughed a laugh that I'd attribute normally to someone trying to hard to please. I think he just likes the idea of available bitches. Speaking of which, Ahmed asked, it is apparent to me, and correct me if my friends have told me wrong, that Minnesota is the only state in the USA where you won't get harrassed by the downtown boys. I swear to God, he pulled a dance move from West Side Story, the one where the gang crouches in a triangle, walks forward, and snaps. He did it in his chair. And on the subject of bitches, it is hard to do sex in Egypt, because you must be married. In the USA, people don't get married as much. Is it because it is easier to do sex in America?

These are the exact perceptions that a fictional character from Ukraine had. These are the very perceptions that I'm always told foreigners have of America.

We had a conversation about Sadat and Nasser that boiled down to a complex political version of who-would-win-in-a-fight. The conclusion was "not Mubarak". Whereas Magdy liked Nasser for freeing his country, Ahmed liked Sadat because he allowed everyone to have something while opening up opportunities for advancement through hard work. Then we talked about the different ways to say okay in different parts of the city. Then about how long we've each spoken each other's language. Then I learned the word for colonialism (iHtilaal) and the word for french colonialism (franaasa) coined because of the very tight-knit community among France and its former colonies, says Ahmed. this started because of his name. And because Zidane is Algerian, Ahmed says. Do you get many bitches in America? In Egypt, a woman can in fact walk naked down the street without harrasment if she has a man with her. The principle, Ahmed says, is "don't respect the woman, but respect the man she is with." That's bullshit, ask any woman on this study abroad program.

For two hours, I was engaged in all manner of conversation with two Egyptian men who only wanted to share experiences and pay my cafe bills. Some of these topics are funny. Some are sober. Some were sad. But the feeling of getting up to leave, only to be drawn into the most fascinating night of your stay so far is nearly indescribable. The Egyptian power current (which Ahmed is upset about because in the last year its price has doubled but the social services to him have stayed the same) is very unstable. It fluctuates several volts up, several down, within minutes. It destroys appliances, so you have to get special equipment to stabilize the current. Tonight, the current of my stay spiked dramatically. I was lit up by apple shisha, mint tea that just doesn't taste the same in the US, and incredible conversation, fascinating insights into another and my world. All because I explained how to say collar in English, and because for once in my life I wasn't in a hurry.

11:28 am - Ain Sukhna, Cairo, Sunday

I went to a resort on the Red Sea, Ain Sukhna, as part of my orientation the other day. I hated it.

Our story picks up at 8 am when we were supposed to show up for the buses Friday morning. We had 10 tour buses blocking up Falaki street where AUC’s main entrance is located. It’s a regular Cairo street full of tangled traffic, crazy drivers, and is just off of the main square in downtown. Imagine how the locals loved us. Anyway, most of us did arrive on time. It was the one jackass who didn't heed the "the buses will leave without you" warning who held us up until just before ten. Guess what? The buses didn't leave without him.

Fast forward an hour and a half.

So now we're rolling.,Red Sea ho! Southwest Cairo's flying by out the windows of the bus and we're out of downtown, we're out of Old Cairo on the double carriageway, we're.... stopping for gas. All ten buses lined up and spent the next 30 minutes taking turns navigating the tight driveway up to the two gas pumps where they took forever to load their ginormous tanks (PS, Webster has include ginormous in its newest edition, so I don’t want any scrabble playing aunts telling me otherwise). Then we started rolling again. I have to say, the roads weren't as bad as the road to Sharm El-Sheik. For those who don’t know, that was a six hour nighttime trip on a cramped and cold bus. The highway was two lanes (one in each direction) with no barrier. I know what 75 mph feels like. I know we weren’t doing 75 as we weaved in and out of traffic whose lights may or may not have been on. This time there was no two-lane-only madness. There were 3 luxurious lanes in each direction and since it was daytime, we didn't have to worry about people not using headlights.

We arrived around 11:50. Our meetings (this is, after all, orientation) were supposed to start at 11:30 after check in and after we'd all gone to our rooms, dropped our stuff, and returned. Not so much. We went straight to the meetings, now late, and were informed that we'd be pushing lunch from 1:30 to 2:30. Well you can imagine the productivity level of the meeting after that. Worse, it was the worries and concerns section. We'd been asked to turn these sheets, with out most deep-seated fears about life in Cairo, in on the third day of orientation. That was over a week ago. Thus, all of these concerns were addressed in the following days. So not only was it Orientation: Part Deux Redux (Or gzaa' itnayn here, i suppose) but the concerns were mundane shit about food, water, medicine, etc. One person, having learned about the toxic nature of local hard liquor, asked how long it can take blindess to set in after you drink a bad bottle. Someone asked about crocodiles in the Nile. Maybe now that I’m out of the situation I can see the humor. But my stomach found very little of this amusing.

On the whole, this was nothing anyone wanted to sit through on an empty stomach, one that is empty because the buses left late because we showed up on time. As an interesting aside, any one who has been to Cairo before will remember the mosque across from Al-Azhar (the seat of modern Islamic Sunni law where the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, an imam with the diplomatic standing of prime minister works) that's a lot newer and less interesting. Well, it's important nonetheless given its location and size, and our orientation director's great grandfather founded it. She's also, she claims, and can apparently prove by certificate, a direct descendant of the Prophet (salaat wa salaam). So she's the bee's knees around here. This put here alarmist, "don't eat cheap, don't go into this part of the town, don't drink, don't smoke, don't party" rantings in yet another context. I'm pretty sure she's classist and I'm having a lot of trouble taking seriously a lot of advice she gives us anymore. She revealed this fact partway through this session, making it even less tolerable.

Back at the meeting, everyone miraculously learned the concept that if you don't ask questions, things get shorter. We ate by 2, and then hit the beach. I sat and read and wrote some. But it was pretty much like Sharm el-Sheik minus my friends from last time L plus a bunch of annoying people in their stead. There was no place to buy food until dinner, and I was very hungry. Then there was no place to buy food after dinner, and I was still hungry. I managed to track down a bottle of water for 8 pounds ($1.50, a rip off). I bought it at a bar where I managed to get in some Arabic practice with the bar tender, who was enamored with the American women by whom he was now surrounded and with whom he was, being the drinks man, very popular. Certain parts of my vocabulary didn’t increase, but there are some insinuations that transcend language and culture. (Hal tafhamuun ma aqsaad?)

The next day was more of the same, but they scheduled it so that as we would be getting dinner, we were leaving. Just long enough to be there and get hungry but not long enough to pay for our food. We checked out 5 hours before leaving, so I couldn’t get a towel at the pool. I read a lot instead.

Sunday: Back in Cairo (hamdullilah)

This weekend I met three interesting people, sort of. The first is someone I just got to know better, a girl who was at the Monterey program with me even though I didn't talk to her until now. The second was a girl (less interesting, only pertinent by coincidence) whose older sister was at Smolny at the same time as Jordan (my brother). We're investigating the connection. But how weird is that? The third was a grad student who will be starting her master's in forced migration and refugee studies at AUC this fall. It's a cool program that harnesses the several refugee groups and programs in the City and also utilizes its close proximity to Europe, a rich source for this field. If I were to continue in my current direction academically and career-wise, any grad program I’d do will have a similar name if it’s not this very one.  

I also ran into an Italian guy wearing a Drew T-shirt at Ain Sukhna. Messed up, yeah? He has no affiliation with the University and simply bought it once while he was in the area. He doesn't know anything about Drew, only that it exists, he was there, and bought a T-shirt. There was something very comforting about that to me. I guess I’ve made the right decisions coming here if the ghost of school’s past has taken it upon herself to follow me halfway around the world and keep an eye out.

_________________________

Last night, as we drove back into Cairo, I watched the skyline, I saw the various quality buildings, luxury condos to row homes to dives to tenements to condemned, come into view, and I really never thought Cairo could feel so nice. But no, it was better than Sharm, too. Today I gave the AUC pyramid trip a miss (been there, done that) and I got some business taken care of. I bought a voltage converter, because I'd forgotten one and absentmindedly decided it didn't matter. Good bye, ten dollar Compaq speakers from Drew. So I've got one now. I've also got an electricity stabilizer now! So in the even that I get internet in my dorm, I can leave my computer on for days on end in my room and not be worried about it getting totally fried by volt fluctuations. Or however you measure that stuff. Cairo, if you haven’t guessed, has a very unstable power supply. A kid from Drew had his computer ruined last year by it. Fifty bucks between the two of those. I also went back to the Refuge. But they're closed on Sundays, and so I ended up just talking to a guy named Steven who was working at the Tukul Crafts (income generation program) store. They're selling a lot more stuff now, things from different parts of Cairo that Egyptians with various handicaps made. I also just looked around at the refugees and couldn't help but feel back in the right place once more on this trip. I'll head back tomorrow to sign up to teach English. Theoretically I start Tuesday. Classes begin Wednesday.

I’ll try to make these more regular soon, but I still don’t have internet in my room.

Current Mood: anxious

05:57 am - The Whirlwind of Entry

I'm in Cairo. I'm sitting in the campus courtyard right now. Long story short: an 18 hour trip became a 27 hour trip when Alitalia got involved. This should be read as a warning against using them. I wasn't the only person here who had trouble with them, too.

In any case!

I’m only in my third full day here (really my fourth, but I slept away the first one) and already I’m noticing all those little things that make Egypt Egypt. And out of the protective cocoon of the group from Drew that accompanied me last time, I’m finding myself in certain authentic situations that were only hypothetical before. Before I get to those, a couple quick updates to put some people at ease and get others off my back.

I had my first (I assume I’ll be there again and often) trip to Tahrir Koshary on Friday. Walked in, got a table downstairs by the mirror, and ate a gigantic bowl, complete with tomato sauce, garlic sauce, and whatever that really spicy stuff was. The only problem is that I can never quite get it distributed properly so that I alternate between disappointingly bland spoonfuls and aggravatingly sinus-busting ones. The name of the livejournal is now well-earned. Though I haven’t done that much work yet.

The goal is that there will be internet in our dorm by Sunday. It’s possible that I’ll already have it by the time you read this (I’ll post this at campus later). We have a signal and I’m picking it up on a limited basis, but some number is wrong and the signal’s not getting through. I’m sure it’ll resolve itself quickly. I hope for the university’s sake it does, or they’ll have a full scale riot on their hands. Speaking of which, yesterday was the general academic advising session. Between poorly organized and disseminated information from the University (typical Egypt: they’ll have to get used to it) and jetlag-inflamed tension among a room full of 300 students (never open a general question session to that many people!) it would have been, were it not for the fact that I don’t really care as much about my classes as some people here do, the most aggravating two hours of my time here so far. In any case, I should have a class schedule on Tuesday after I take the placement test for Arabic and after I decide what it is exactly I want to take.

On to the vignettes.

Fii Khariita?

Not knowing exactly where I am is the most frustrating state that I can be in. I got taxied to my dorm at 5:30 am when I got here, and suffice it to say I wasn’t paying attention to where I was being driven. So when I woke up the next afternoon, the order of priorities was shower, food, map. That night, walking around downtown with several of my roommates, I kept popping my head unannouncedly into book shops along our way (a la CT) and asking “fii khariita?” (do you have a map?) This worked titillatingly well at the first shop in Talaat Harb, though the successfully navigated question and answer led me to maps that don’t include my out of the way, residential district. This was to be variable theme all night. The frustrating part came when I walked across Talat Harb to the sketchier bookstore there and asked again, “fii khariita?” This time it disturbed the settled dust of bustling Egyptian commerce just enough to provoke bits of laughter from the salesmen around me. “Ayiz map” one of them said. Apparently, at this store, saying “I want a map” would have been correct. So I repeated after him, and was directed to the same selection of maps whose degree of helpfulness to me was equivalent to looking for something you lost under a lamp simply because it’s bright there. Third store of the night. “Ayiz map” I started. A confused stare. “Map?” I repeated. Nothing. “Fii khariita?” I asked. “Aaaahh! Map!” Yes, map. Go figure. MiSr! Same selection. The next morning at orientation, in what I’d like to think of as a cosmic encouraging pat on the back, there was a “detailed map of greater Cairo” in our packets. And it had everything I needed on it.

Ethiopia.

In an episode of the West Wing, President Bartlett complains to octogenarian Secretary of State Albee Duncan that none of the original Cold War allies were still supporting the US in Korea. “Where did they go!” Bartlett asks. As part of the answer, Duncan responded, “Ethiopia’s trying to feed itself.” Apparently their obligations in quite a few parts of the world have gone that way, as well. Walking down 26^th of July Street on Zamalek, just outside of my old neighborhood but on the western side of the island Thursday, I went past a run-down lot that caught my eye. I looked in and there were overgrown weeds and trees, cracked pavement if not all-out dirt, cars, car parts, and parts, scrap metal, and a shell of a shack. On the door read, “property of Ethiopia.” This part of the city houses a plurality of Cairo’s embassies, so I wonder if this isn’t a disused Ethiopian Embassy. I’m not sure if there’s another embassy. But it was a really sad microcosm of Africa’s Horn, but at the same time a stark and potent reminder of why it is I’m doing what it is I’m doing.

Dangerous Places.

While I’m on the subject of Zamalek, I have to share a story that even in a quick telling runs the gamut from absurdly off-color to comically off-base to just sad. During orientation a few days ago, some representatives from the US embassy came to explain procedures and safety and other such boredom-inducing pertinents. One of the students asked, “are there any places in Cairo that are particularly dangerous or that we should stay away from?” I kind of laughed to myself. Maybe I’m being somewhat haughty about my even limited but valuable experience with the city, but I thought how simultaneously dangerous and safe the city is: a veritable vacuum of even minor criminal activity, you nevertheless take your life into your hands each time you step off the sidewalk. As such, I wasn’t expecting the answer I heard. The representative, an Egyptian, said to stay away from the places at the outskirts of the city: some of the suburbs can be a little unpredictable. Okay, they’re far from help and unfamiliar. But then he said that you should be wary when around the southern part of Zamalek. It has a tendency to be poorer and you have a better chance of being pick-pocketed. He then made reference to the non-Egyptian population there. For those who aren’t aware, this is where I spent my last trip. Nothing could be further from the truth. I actually felt safer there than in any other part of the city, and the ethnic implications of the comment struck me a little hard, but nevertheless were only a confirmation of a state of affairs I’ve observed to be true before.

A light and refreshing note on which to end.

As I said, I’ve taken my maiden trip to Tahrir Koshary. There’s a very out-of-character “no smoking” sign above the counter that I’d never noticed before. So sitting in my chair at the side of the store behind the stairs, I laughed to myself as I saw two employees stand, in the fashion of an ostrich, just out of sight of the counter and its sign and light up. As if the smoke wouldn’t make it over there. And of course no one cared. During this episode, I realized that I’d only eaten downstairs there once before, and then with other people. I didn’t look around that much. So I was a little surprised but not really when I looked at the feet of the smokers and noticed the square of missing tiles under the stairs that exposed the dirt below, sprouting weeds that grew on overturned shelves and shopping carts like lattice. Okay as long as it stays in the confines of the stairs, I suppose.

These are the experiences of my first few days here. Nothing out of the ordinary, but everything unexpected and exciting. Keep reading and keep in touch.

Ma salaama byebye.

04:13 am - Pictures come second, emotions come first.

Before I quit this continent and join the Cairenes in their hustle and bustle through their busy streets, I think it's important to give some emotional and psychological context to what it is I'm doing in addition to the academic background. Shouts out to the couple people whose open ears, intent to listen, and bits of wisdom in the last few days have helped me identify, understand, and come to grips with these issues. Thanks!

Study abroad is a brilliant opportunity. I can't complain too much about what I'm doing, but whereas many of my friends from Drew have taken the three-week International Seminar route, I've taken a different approach that takes me away from campus during the semester. It comes at a cost, and I think that's a side of Study Abroad a lot of people don't appreciate. So before I give you the impression that everything is hunky-dory, I decided to indulge myself in one last round of perhaps too-generalized and over-simplified though still real thoughts about a second-guessing mind.

The return: I’m now well into the time of year when I’m looking forward to coming back, looking forward to that first night back at school when the rooms are pristine, the paths are uncluttered, the freshman are deer in the headlights. To that first night when meaningful hugs are shared, gifts from travels are exchanged, no homework awaits you at your room. Of course, by about 2 am the campus loses some of its luster. Happy drunks stagger their way from the suites to their rooms, and the manicured lawns get walked on. Rooms begin to accumulate clutter in the form of friends’ shoes and half-crushed beer cans. Sounds great, doesn’t it? It is. It’s magical. And I’m going to miss it. Coming in part way through the year right now feels a bit like getting out onto a fresh snow after everyone’s already despoiled it with their wanton footprints. And that’s the reception I have to look forward to.

Friends and friendships: I’m leaving behind a lot of friends. I’m leaving behind relationships at different levels of intensity that mean different things. Usually I’m looking forward to a return to normalcy for the first time since May at about this time. Now I’m looking at an extended tour of loneliness, set to terminate in early February. I know there are people at school who I need. I know there are people at school who might sometimes need me. Sometimes it’s okay, and I know we’ll all find a way to deal, especially my friends, since at school they have so many people to enjoy. Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying them because I’m having an adventure and they’re not. Sometimes I just feel lonely.

Inside jokes and those moments that are never repeated but always remembered: These are the two experiences that bind friends together. Sometimes one word uttered with no context but just the right inflection and timing can send an entire rectangular table by the window at the Commons into uproarious bouts of laughter. Sometimes an awkward silence can culminate in nervous, stolen glances around a round table or the violent racking of a body by suppressed laughter. No words spoken, but memories shared. These two experiences make up the identity and bond of any group of friends. Each one of these that a group accumulates adds one more dynamic. And for four months, I’ll be out of the loop. I’ll have to explain my jokes to my friends and be clued in on theirs.

Spring!

08:59 pm - Introductions

This post is just a placeholder-- the first glimpse of my environs made visible by the dim crown of the semester's eastering sun . As such, I don't have anything terribly illuminating to say yet because I'm still in the US. But I figured some background on the journal, what I'm doing, and what any hapless readers of this journal can expect would be in order.
What I'll be doing:
The journal is designed to give anyone who cares a window into my activities over the next few months, over which I'm spending the fall semester of my junior year living and studying in Cairo. I'll be taking classes at the American University in Cairo (henceforth AUC) and volunteering at the non-profit, non-governmental organization Refuge Egypt (henceforth RE). For those who remember, this is the same organization that I worked with last winter with 9 other students from Drew. They provide financial, material, nutrititional, legal, and psychological support to refugees from the Horn of Africa. The opportunity to work at RE again played a significant role in my decision to study in Cairo as opposed to any other middle eastern city.
Where I'll Be:
I'll be living in Dokki (pronounced Do'ee in Egyptian, where the apostrophe represents a glottal stop), located on the West side of the city as delineated by the Nile. I didn't get one of the AUC dorms because of crowding issues, so I'm living in a hotel that AUC rented called Marwa Palace. All the same amenities and then some: I get a laundry stipend, wireless, and cleaning. Not too shabby. The disadvantage is the distance. Though they'll be running a shuttle between the dorm (I'm just gonna call it that because it sounds less seedy than hotel and it makes me feel less like a tourist) and campus, it's still a 25 minute drive. That said, walking is often faster than motor traffic in Cairo. The campus itself is located more or less across the river from Dokki. It's a few minutes' walk south of downtown. There's a fairly direct route from Dokki across a bridge to the island district of Zamalek and across a second one to the general campus area.
The Title of this Journal:
As I explained in my journal last winter, Koshary is a very tasty dish made with macaroni, lentils, rice, and tomato sauce. It's not a very complicated dish or a delicacy. It's a little like chicken soup: very simple, cheap, and accessible. Of course it doesn't have chicken or broth in it. But that's a minor difference. In any case, it's delicious and represents good people and good times for me.
General Tone, Content, and Audience:
This is the internet. Anything can happen. The tone will be whatever I'm feeling on any given sitting. If I'm happy, so will the entry be. If I'm not, then chances are if you empathize strongly with people you won't be either when you finish reading. My bad. I can't really speak to content. It will probably closely mirror my experiences but I'll probably focus mostly on people and travels within and around the city. Since my studies are just that, I don't expect anyone would find them more interesting than I do, so I won't pretend. But I enjoy people and what they do and how they act, so that will probably fill the greatest part of my pages alongside my observation and insight into the things around me. I'll try to keep it balanced. A note on the audience: the people who initially encouraged me to write my experiences like this are my friends from school and so my strongest impulse is to write for them. That's not to say others won't enjoy or find interesting (I hope beyond hope) what I have to say, but I'll be using a voice befitting a college student. Consider that fair warning.
I'm going to wrap this up now, having gone on far longer than an entry with no  real  purpose should.  But please keep reading for the good stuff later.
My flight lands in Cairo at 1:30 pm local time  on Tuesday the 21st. I'll be back then.