Cowboys and Arabs...?

I get satellite TV In my new apartment, which, besides being a distraction most of the time, is occasionally quite cool because I get to watch American movies with Arabic subtitles, Arabic news media, and maybe best of all, hilarious Egyptian commercials. The latter of these run the gamut from almost American-seeming commercials like a shampoo commercial with an Arabic version of "My Favorite Things" to low-budg montages set to bumping Euro-trash dance music of gawdy Egyptian female singers performing for frumpy Egyptian men whose dramatic gesticulations would seem to indicate their only purpose is a comedic one. Some of these commercials especially draw my attention though, in large part because they seem at first glance so normal to my American eyes, but which have weird Middle Eastern twists to them that catch me off guard.

I just caught one such strange commercial for yogurt that featured an Arab man in a full white galabaya and gulrah (the white head scarf thing with the black circular thing securing it that you see a lot of Saudi Arabs wearing) returning home from work to his wife and two kids, a la 1950's American family stereotype--except in traditional Arab garb. He and his very western-looking wife find their two Egyptian kids scampering around wearing outfits like--get this--Native Americans. The mom gives them the last yogurts in the fridge, but now Dad wants some too. Conundrum! What a zaney family, right?! Then suddenly, inspiration strikes the dad. He dons--wait for it--a cowboy outfit, complete with a handkerchief, cowboy hat, and lasso, the last of which he uses to round up one of the conveniently individual-sized yogurts that come in a variety of exciting and interesting flavors. The dad knows what Europeans and Americans have known for centuries: how do you take something from the Indians? As a cowboy.

There's a anthropological point about cultural translation of racism and historical rewriting, but I as I am happily divorced from that world of academia, I don't have to actually explore it. It is strange to think of how cowboys and indians are a trope (and an advertising gimmick at that) that have somehow made it over into Egyptian popular culture. I mean I suppose we've done that with all kinds of other cultures, be it Shao Lin Monks or Saharan Desert Bedouin, but it was still weird to see an Egyptian man wearing a cowboy hat and chaps.

Speaking of culture, here are some cool pictures from some of my recent wanderings around one of Cairo's more famous sites, the site on top of a hill that was the seat of royal power for many centuries called the Citadel:

Mohammad Ali Mosque which pretty much dominates the whole compound

Inside the courtyard area of the mosque. The fancy looking gazebo-type thing is where you would go to wash your hands and feet before praying if you were Muslim.

The Mosque's ceiling

The beautiful, polluted view of the city

A Spontaneous Trip to Aswan

Finally, finals are over and I have finished moving into Nora's apartment, so I have time to write a real post despite the incessant meowing/screeching (think of a noise that is a mix between Gollum's coughing and a baby being strangled) of the resident cat in heat that I am sharing the apartment with. As I was finishing up my finals last week, one of my classmates mentioned that she and two of our mutual friends were going South to explore some of Egypt's most famous ruins, Abu Simbel, outside the multi-millenia old city of Aswan. Despite not being much of a ruin-y kind of guy, I have been meaning to go there for a while now as they are supposed to be pretty mind-blowingly cool, so I decided sort of last minute to go with them. Aswan is almost 900km south of Cairo, so my friends were flying, while I, wanting to go the cheap route, decided to take a train, which ended up being about 1/4 as expensive, so I felt justified.

Getting my ticket turned out to be quite the adventure in and of itself as the train station is still under heavy construction on the inside. I can't quite explain the turmoil that is the inside of Ramses train station, but it's not even really an exaggeration to say it looks like a recent warzone. Copious dust and the sounds of heavy machinery inundate the air completely, all of which made it hard to ask where the ticket offices had been relocated to. After asking two Egyptians, I was having no luck, so when a random Egyptian man came and asked where I was trying to go, I told him even though in Egypt this is usually a recipe for being taken to the wrong place and asked for money. In what ought to be a lesson to me, this man and his friend ended up being some of the nicest two Egyptians I have ever met.

Ramses Station, with the outside newly refinished, but with an inside still under heavy--and confusing--construction.

Despite numerous obstacles and annoyances, they eventually took me to the right office. This involved going underground into tunnels, asking more Egyptians for directions, and talking to a total of 4 different counters. Throughout it all he and his friend cheerfully accompanied me through each setback and then talked to the ticket sellers.* At first my pride was getting a little pouty as I am now capable of talking to ticket sellers very much on my own, but as complications inevitably arose, it was nice to have an Egyptian there. Complications like the sleeper car tickets were unavailable, first class was sold out, and--oh--the Egyptian government unofficially doesn't allow foreigners to buy second class tickets for the Cairo-Aswan train route. They just...don't. Luckily, my Egyptian friends were kind enough to buy the ticket on my behalf, so I was not only able to leave at the time I wanted, but I only had to pay LE55 ($10). To top it off, my new friends wouldn't even ask for money, and then insisted, and I mean insisted, that they buy me a soda. "Are you thirsty? You must be thirsty! Do you want a bebsee? You must want a bebsee!" (bebsee=Egyptian pronunciation of Pepsi). All in all, it was a very positive experience, especially as I was able to have a decent Arabic conversation with him the whole time.

*You may be asking yourself why there are 4 different counters in different locations which are all so separated from the counters I had first found that I couldn't find them. You might be further confused in the light of the fact that all of these trains mentioned are run by a single organization: the Egyptian Government. Why not have all the ticket counters selling tickets for any state-run train, you ask? There is only one answer that my friends and I come back to time and time again: this is Egypt.

A few days later I got on my train at 10 pm settled in for a 13 hour ride. Riding in second class, as I'd found on the train to Alexandria, is more than comfortable enough. The seats lean way back and there is plenty of legroom. The only real drawbacks were in trying to sleep. It is loud, for one thing. So many ring tones--and all through the night. I remember deciding rather irritably at one point in the night around 5am, that selling Egyptians phones with the ability to play music out loud on their tinny, fuzzy speakers ought to be banned, because they did that.all.night.long. And if they weren't listening to their music without headphones, they were taking phone calls at 3, 4, 5 am. Two girls with shimmery, sequined black hijabs sitting a few rows ahead of me, in fact, played their phones the entire night. Some shabab (arabic word that literally means young men or young people, but is most often used to convey something like ruffians) in the seats behind me alternately joked, clapped, sang, and whistled all through the night as well. The seat next to me rotated between a few men, but all of them snored at various degrees of loudness. I'm a pretty adept sleeper, as most of you know, so it was far from unbearable; I just remember waking up a few times and really wanting to break some Egyptians' phones.

The ride was further ameliorated by one of the coolest sunrises I have ever seen. The Cairo-Aswan line sticks to the Nile valley so I woke to the sun's first light silhouetting countless palm trees against the foggy river-fed plantations. The mist sat low to the ground, sometimes obscuring the trunks of the trees so that the palm leaves looked like shadowy explosions penciled onto the bright colors of the sunrise.



As I tried to take pictures through the horribly dirty windows, the guy in the chair next to me stirred and awoke. One of the countless food salesmen walking up and down the aisles of the second class cars had apparently caught his attention. Among the sellers, there were tea/nescafe sellers carrying their glasses on metal trays, cold drink salesmen selling from carts, as well as one selling "hommos," which here in the Middle East means any number of variations on some ingestible thing made with chickpeas. I had a bought a particularly delicious cheese and bread sandwich from one of the tea/nescafe guys and I had just finished it when my neighbor flagged down one of the food guys carrying a big wicker basket on his shoulder with pieces of paper sticking up and hiding what was inside. Like all the salesmen, he was yelling out something about what he had, but the only word I could understand was the word for "sweet."
I watched as my neighbor purchased one of the strange snacks inside which got wrapped in one of the papers that had been sticking up in the basket. I thought at first they were very strange sweet potatoes as they were the same light brown color, but they were all identically shaped cones, like the ends of those Vuvuzela horns from the world cup. After a second, my neighbor broke the thing in half and offered a half to me to reveal it to be a tightly packed, powdery, crumbly...thing. It had the consistency of bread crumbs and brown sugar, but it was much sweeter. Tasty, with a familiar taste that I couldn't quite place, but very sweet.

As I thanked the man, a little girl in a pink jumpsuit tapped my shoulder to get by me to my neighbor in the window seat. Her bright pink jumpsuit stood out against the man's dark green galabaya as she sat on his lap, but his tinted glasses and fancy watch hinted at some slightly less traditional Egyptian tastes to the man. He was pretty adorable with the girl, who I assumed was his granddaughter, as she pointed and marvelled at all the things she saw through the window. We talked a little in Arabic, but he had an accent--whether from his age or from being a southern Egyptian, I couldn't tell--that I couldn't totally understand. I stern looking man in a leather jacket sitting in the front of us turned around and first asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Egypt. Then he asked me in English "What are your qualifications?" and acted both confused and annoyed when I wasn't sure what that even meant. That was the end of my conversation with him, but my grandfatherly neighbor had left me in a pleasant mood. He got off at the next stop and I dozed pleasantly for the remaining three hours of the train ride.


After getting off the train, I had a couple of hours to kill before the friends I was meeting there in Aswan would be in the city, so I headed to the nearest koshary place--what else? The place had come recommended in the copy of Lonely Planet I stole from Nora, and while it wasn't the best koshary I've ever had, I apparently managed to speak enough Arabic with them that after I finished eating it, they informed me that the meal was on them! Boo ya free koshary! After that I headed over to the Market Street which is literally a big long street that runs parallel to the Nile and through most of the city. Lining the cobble-stone walkway on either side was shop after shop selling, for the most part, the standard Egyptian kitsch (scarves, things shaped like pyramids or camels, spices), but there were plenty of Egyptians walking along the path buying various other day-to-day goods as well.


The shopkeeps heckled and hassled every foreigner walking by in much the same aggressive style as the ones in Khan do, yet despite knowing better I ended up stopping at one such shop, compelled by the same inexplicable feeling that this guy would maybe be interesting to talk to as had once stopped me in the Cairo clothing market. The shopkeep, named Gameel, offered me tea, which I accepted, and then after deciding to buy a t-shirt with some hieroglyphics on them for my dad, we sat and talked for a good hour or so about his thoughts about Egypt and such. He spoke mostly in Arabic, and I spoke exclusively in Arabic, which alone would have made me really happy with the conversation, but it was even cooler because of the interesting things he had to say. The highlight was that he actually liked Mubarak, the thirty-something-year President of Egypt who looks likely to arrange for his son to be the next President. I've literally not met a single other Egyptian who likes Mubarak, but he seemed to think Mubarak was widely liked there in Aswan, so it made me wonder how skewed an image of Egyptian politics I'm getting living in Cairo.

After my little discussion with Gameel, we parted ways, and I met up with my AUC friends, Sanya (from my Fusha classes) and Rhianna. We had lunch at a Nile-side restaurant with mediocre Tagin (kind of like a stew) and then decided to try and figure out a way to visit some of the famous islands just across from Aswan.
It was about 5pm when we started out, and we decided to take a felucca ride with a nice-seeming man named Nasser. Like the Koshary guys, he seemed particularly impressed with my Arabic* and we were having a nice conversation which at first served to console me for a while until I realized his sail boat was going very very slowly. Our promised one-hour felucca ride turned into a three-hour ride, and involved me and Sanya both (Rhianna slept through all of this) steering at various points in our ill-fated voyage as well as me having to row for a stretch because our captain wasn't able to generate enough power by himself on both oars. This was a frustrating boat ride, to say the least, especially because I had suggested that we would probably prefer no to go the way he wanted as we were in a hurry. On top of it all, our driver insisted on giving me his phone number and address for the purpose of referring anyone else I knew coming to Aswan. He lived on one of the islands we were ever-so-slowly sailing by and I had to laugh at his simple address:

Nasser Ahmad
Elaphantine Island
Aswan, Egypt

No street and no street number, he's just the only one on the island with that name. Needless to say, I do not recommend him. It was mostly too dark to see anything on the islands anyway!

*Let me say for the record, I am really not that good at Arabic yet, though I'm getting there. When I get these kinds of compliments on my Arabic, it is more a reflection of the dearth of Arabic-speakers from America and Europe. Many Egyptians really just don't expect Westerners to speak anything more than the absolute most basic Arabic, and often times they don't even expect us to know that much. I do perhaps do a slightly better job using Ammeya instead of Fusha which maybe gets me some extra points with them as they know we're all mostly just learning Fusha.

After our boat ride we grabbed some fiteer for dinner and then headed to a cafe to have some tea and smoke some sheesha just like your everyday Egyptian. We just picked one of the closest cafes to our dinner restaurant on the Market Street and sat back and relaxed for a good two hours. It would have been a great end to our night, if not for the cafe's proprietor wanting to charge us for LE60 for two sheeshas and three cups of tea. That is only $11 dollars, but that is about five times as expensive as it should be at most cafes. He was definitely giving us the tourist price--I know because a regular Egyptian sitting at the cafe also asked the proprietor how much he was asking for--and after our irritating boat ride, I was not having it. I unleashed as much indignation as I could in Arabic and ultimately got the price cut in half, though that was still really twice as expensive as it should be.

After the cafe I said goodbye to Sanya and Rhianna as they had to catch their plane back to Cairo that night, and I set off to find myself a hotel. I picked the cheapest one recommended in Lonely Planet and was in my room by about midnight. As I checked in, I also arranged to go on one of the hotel-organized trips to see Abu Simbel the next day. I knew that would entail having to take a bus at 3:00am, but as these are some of the most famous ruins in all of Egypt, I knew I had to go and see them myself. To my annoyance, the hotel assistant woke me up at 2:30, apparently not trusting me to wake up to my own alarm, which was set for 15 minutes later. I managed to get one of the only seats in our mini bus with leg room and so I slept through most of the four-hour trip down south to the sites of the ruins, despite our driver periodically carrying on a shouted conversation with the other Egyptian man on our bus who turned out to be our "guide." This guy continued to be annoying as he actually shared little more information about the site than I had learned in the guidebook and then demanded that we "tip" him at the end. The rest of the group I had come with were all tourists just travelling through Egypt for a week or so, but even they sensed this was a little weird, and so began what would be kind of an uncomfortable relationship with our guide which led us all to literally avoid him at the second site.

Squinting into the Sun in front of Ramses' Temple

Nonetheless, the ruins at Abu Simbel, two giant temples in honor of semi-divine Pharaoh Rameses II and his famous, also pseudo-god-like wife Neferari, were indeed pretty magnificent. This even with literally hundreds of other tourists all there at the same time and prohibition on taking pictures inside the temples. I ignored both (see picture to the right). I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but one other interesting piece of information is that these temples were actually not originally located in this spot. They, along with many other spectacular Ancient Egyptian sites, were painstakingly relocated at the expense of both the Egyptian government as well as many other countries' to avoid being submerged by Lake Nasser--a humongous reservoir (one of the world's biggest) created as a result of Egypt's massive Aswan High Dam.

Nefertari's Temple with her husbands' in the background.

After Abu Simbel we headed almost all the way back to Aswan to go to the island ruins of Phillae. Phillae is actually a collection of various temples to various Egyptian and Greek gods alike, and all of these were moved from a different island now under the waters of Lake Nasser. My capacity for ruins-appreciation may have run out or Phillae just only had so much to offer, but either way, I was ready to go after about thirty minutes. The one thing I found most interesting was how many of the hieroglyphic pictures of humans had been defaced by various Christians and Muslims who had appropriated the temples centuries after their creation.

I keep bringing up how I'm not one who can really appreciate ancient monuments as much as many other people, but I did find myself thinking as I was bored and waiting for our boat to leave Phillae, that perhaps I am so nonplussed because in a lot of ways these ancient sites don't actually look very different from the recreations our technology has allowed us to produce in theme parks and restaurants and such.

After heading back into town, I grabbed some lunch with some of the other tourists and then bought my train ticket for that night. This time I wasn't able to get a super-cheap second-class ticket again, so I bought the first class one for three times as much, feeling like this trip had turned into quite the money pit.

With three hours to kill, I went and stocked up on train snacks. Then, with nothing else to do in Aswan, I resorted to the same thing Egyptians do all the time: I decided to go and sit at a cafe and do nothing, making sure this time that I picked one far from the touristy areas. I had brought a collection of Dostoevsky short stories I've been meaning to read for about a year now and read that for a bit, but I mostly just sat and enjoyed a sheesha and some tea just like the vast majority of Egyptian men do every day. I began to think to myself about just how much speaking Arabic is a commodity over here while I watched two other tourists get almost no service as they struggled to communicate with the servers. Knowing a little Arabic is worth less hassle here, a free koshary there, and lower prices when you bargain. Now someday it is hopefully worth some kind of real understanding of this place. Or at least a job...

On the train, I met a fascinating Sri Lankan family of five who lived in Oman just finishing up their second Egyptian vacation. Don't entirely know what the father in the family does in Oman (something with computers, I think?), but he seemed to be providing for his family quite well as two of his children went to college in Australia. I ended up talking with the middle child, the son who was about to enter his first semester of school in Aussie-land, and he started talking to me about a lot of his worries about college, girls, his professional future, etc. and I tried to provide the best reassurance and advice that I could. He in turn taught me a good amount of things about Sri Lanka and Oman, both of which I am fairly ignorant about, and I shared with him a Galab (the cone thing from the train ride into Aswan) I had bought in the market just before my train. Maybe I just figured out someone I can stay with if I ever visit Oman! They got off after only about three hours and then I pretty much slept the rest of the trip back to Cairo, waking only to speak briefly with the Egyptian businessmen that took the Sri Lankan family's seats. I returned to Cairo feeling pretty tired and like Aswan had been kind of a continuous rip-off only made up for by the good amount of Arabic conversation I had gotten to have. Either way, I was ready to get back to some more normal exploits with my friends while they were still in Cairo. I don't know if I'll get to the other major site of ancient Egyptian wonders to the South, Luxor, but I am glad I brought myself to see Abu Simbel at least. Maybe someday I'll really come to appreciate these things, but in the mean time I still have lots of exploring of the sites in Cairo to do still...

...Which is what this next week will be for (and writing lots of blog posts). Here's a pic from al-Azhar Mosque (one of the most important Sunni schools in the world) during the Friday prayer last week. Pretty cool.

After the noon prayer in the courtyard:

And then finally, a mosque in Cairo with what appear to be Christmas lights on Christmas eve...Oh Cairo:

Happy Holidays everyone!

Harry Potter in Egypt

I saw Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows in a Cairo movie theater the other week, and let me start right now by saying, I loved every minute of that movie. It may be cover for another way to stretch out the cash cow that is the Harry Potter franchise, but it also allowed them to actually do justice to what I have always thought was a really perfect end to my generation's defining book series.* [At this point in my first writing of this this post it turned into me waxing adoring about the movie and the series, which I moved to the bottom of the post in favor of getting to the point of the post: the weirdness of Egyptian movie theaters.] That being said, seeing HP7.1 in a Cairo movie theater full of irreverent Egyptians was much less than ideal.

Perhaps the Egyptians in the audience didn't feel the need to stay quiet because there were Arabic subtitles. Maybe they all really needed to have their phones on because they were waiting for important calls from their mothers/bosses/Ahmad who they are going out with later. And they definitely needed to answer in the middle of the movie. Sure those Egyptian 6-year olds probably had no idea what was going on, so they needed to shriek and talk to each other to occupy themselves. Fine. I'm just saying, when I went to see a stupid slapstick Egyptian comedy about an old guy with Alzheimer's (pronounced "al-Zuhaymer") whose kids try to take his money, the audience was a lot quieter.

One thing both movie experiences had in common though, was the 5-minute intermission. The theater with the Egyptian movie had a quaint little slide with that western-style, old-timey lettering declaring it was Intermission, and it lasted about 15 minutes. As soon as the lights came up for the intermission, some of the Egyptians in the audience bolted for a smoking break. Harry Potter's intermission started abruptly and ended without warning after only about 3 minutes--so fast that I hadn't gotten back from the bathroom before it started back up again. I'm not even sure what the point of it was. The real point is...um...Egyptians do not quite appreciate Harry Potter like us Americans do.

* * * * * * *

Ok now Harry Potter rant:
Basically, I thought it was pretty much a perfect rendering of the book--quite a relief after the disappointingly truncated 6th one. So much less was cut or changed from the books than in the other movies, plus somewhere along the way Daniel Radcliffe finally learned to be quite a good actor. The same holds true for Rupert Grint and Emma Watson (yes, I do think she is a good actress, and no, not just because she is also very pretty), and the supporting cast has always been quite well cast from the beginning (re: Alan Rickman as Snape). The one really noticeable change, having Harry and Hermione specifically not use pollyjuice potion when they visit Harry's parents' house, made sense in order to actually have the faces of Harry and Hermione, rather than of some random old people they impersonate in the book, on screen for two such pivotal scenes. On that note, so many of the scenes were absolutely pitch-perfect, how I had imagined them in my head. Perhaps the descriptions of Nagini's house in Godrick's Hollow and Bill and Fleur's Shell Cottage on the cliffs of the English seaside (to name just a few of the really fitting scenes) were so detailed in the books that they left little room for variation in both my imagination and the movie's execution, but either way the end result was that this movie reinforced my mind's depictions of the story I love so much.

Finally, the movie did a really perfect job handling the section when Harry, Ron and Hermione are left only wander about day by day without a clue what to do. When reading this part in the book, I vividly remember feeling--really feeling--their despair and their restlessness, and the movie captured that aptly. All in all, I had a great time with this movie, and can't wait for the next one to come out. Even with the less-than-perfect viewing setting, I loved it.

School's Almost Out...

I just had the strange realization that I am nearly done with my time in Cairo, and as such, that I will be finishing up at AUC soon. I have really loved my classes in the Arabic Language Institute and, as evidenced by my exultant tweet-story about successfully being able to BS an Arabic presentation on the spot, I really do feel like I have learned a lot. Suffice to say, I was feeling like kind of a big deal when I realized that I was able to read a newspaper article to the class and then summarize, explain, and even add to its content all in Arabic. It wasn't pretty necessarily, and I obviously didn't convey more than a few sentences, but I was moderately fluid and miraculously was able to pull vocabulary words out of thin air to make some points about whatever incidents of violence in Pakistan I had just read about. That and feeling fairly confident about how I did on the deceptively important-sounding ALI Grand Unified Exam reminded me that I should maybe tell you all a little bit about what I have been spending most of my time in Egypt here doing, that is, my school work.

In the beginning, I was assigned 5 classes, 3 in the intermediate level of fusha (pronounced "fus-ha," that's the Modern Standard Arabic used in the News and in official verbal and written communications of the Arab World), and 2 in beginning Egyptian ammeya (i.e. the Colloquial, or spoken dialect of Arabic). In addition to those, I signed up for an elective course on Quranic or Classical Arabic. All have been helpful and interesting in their own ways.

Eating couscousi in Khan al-Khalili with part of my Ammeya class

Two of my fusha classes, one writing and one grammar, are taught by the same teacher, Azza. Azza is a big, dour-seeming woman who wears an assiduously-pinned head scarf every day and black rimmed glasses perched forever on the tip of her nose except when she is walking. At first, she seems forever like she is barely tolerating your presence, and has a propensity for long disappointed sighs. If all my teachers weren't so great, she would definitely be my favorite. Her intensity and high expectations really kept us on our game most of the semester, pushing us to always be ready for class, always fearing one of her pained sighs followed by a slightly defeated sounding "bous ya shabab..." (sort of equivalent to "ok now look here, kids...").

But her terse manner was only the tip of the iceburg with Azza. We got the first hints of her really quite warm and expansive sense of humor in our writing classes when, upon coming to one of our mistakes, she would sing/say that stereotypical American "you messed up" motif from TV that goes "bumbumbum baaaaaa." (You'll figure it out.) This would happen every Tuesday as she had advised us at the beginning of the year that her preferred method of teaching in the writing class, which only meets twice a week, was to have us turn in a one-page writing assignment every week the day before our first class. She then marks up without correcting the mistakes on each paper, and then in class the next day, she puts them under a camera that connects to a projector screen on the wall. We then have to correct the mistakes together as a class. Though some might think this would be sort of mortifying to have all your errors dragged out and flayed in front of the class, I honestly was never bothered by this setup, and when everyone is making so many mistakes, it really doesn't matter. Azza, like a stern grandmother, is sparse and deliberate with her praise while generous with her constructive criticism, and because no one is spared, no one takes anything but the lesson to heart. Everyone learns from everyone else's mistakes, plus it forces us to actually go through and think about each mark on our paper, something most arabic students will tell you they would usually just ignore. What's more, Azza is really a loving wordsmith and grammarian--of French and English as well as Arabic--so she is great at explaining even the most nuanced, untranslatable aspects of Arabic. Perhaps that more than anything has been what I appreciated most, as I find more and more that a lot of Arabic is really not directly translatable.

My third fusha class is a 4-times weekly Arabic Media class. This class has been where I get most of my practice reading and listening to fusha while also learning lots of neat politically-charged vocabulary words like "sectarian conflict," "bilateral negotiations," and two different ways to say "car bomb." The class is a lot of repetition and memorization, but I enjoy--as much as one can--a lot of my homework from that class. Every news clip I listen to and every article I read is like a very satisfying puzzle to decode.

The teacher for the class, Leila (which, if you didn't already know, is the arabic word for "night"), is a chic, smartly-dressed woman in her late middle-age with a sort of impish sense of humor that peeks out every once in a while when we are not displaying over much incompetence. I remember once when she made fun of our apparent procrastination when she informed us that she would now be sending us our listening clips by email so we could download them and "enjoy the homeworks on the bus." It doesn't sound all that funny now that I'm writing it out, but at the time I thought it was pretty hilarious. I heared another story about Leila having a funny conversation about hash with one of her students in an ammeya class (Leila, as a good muslim woman, neither smokes nor drinks alcohol), but I don't really know the details. Everyday she walks in wearing a pastel-colored pants suit and speaks quietly with what I think could be a very loud voice when she wants it to be. Of all my teachers, it seems like she has perhaps the most boring job, as Media classes mostly consist of repeating vocab over and over, with us working on reading and listening assignments on our own, or her babying us (some of us more than others, and altogether less now than at the beginning of the semester) through news articles. Luckily, I know all the teachers rotate between the classes they teach, so one semester they might be teaching media, and one semester they might be teaching Quran. This also works out that all of them are roughly equally able to answer questions about really an0ything we ares studying, and they are more or less aware of what we are doing in all our other classes.

Discussing an Arabic movie my Ammeya class had just gone to see in the theaters

Besides having really good connections between the teachers, since it is the same group of students in all of my fusha classes, the six other students and I have developed that closeness that comes with spending 2-5 hours a day with each other 5 days a week. Including me, there are 3 girls and 4 guys. All the girls are Junior or Senior undergraduates studying abroad, while all of us guys happen to be graduates studying Arabic for our various personal or professional reasons. Although, I have found myself to be kind of impatient with the other students' pace of learning (I often find myself saying things to myself, quite ungenerously, like "God why don't you know that "ightiyal" means assassination yet??"), I like everyone in the class very much, and am happy that for the most part we are equally serious about trying learn this language. Regrettably I haven't spent that much time with them outside of class, but when I have I've always had fun as they are all really interesting and come from very different backgrounds from a Muslim lesbian to a former platoon leader in Iraq. If I get frustrated with some of them in class for picking up things slower than me, I really only have myself to blame. With the exception of one other person, I've taken at least a full year or more of Arabic than everyone else, and I know if I had spent even 1/10 of the time I spent on my thesis on Arabic in college, I probably would have been prepared to place into higher intermediate fusha. So while I flatter myself to say that I may naturally have better pronunciation than most of the people in class, whatever other superiority I may have probably comes from my being exposed to more Arabic for longer.

[Side rant:] On the other hand, one of my classmates keeps mispronouncing the damn Arabic word for Egypt, and every time he does I want to punch him in the face. Not only is this ridiculous based on the soul fact that we live in the country and every single person says the name of it every single day, but the absurdity is compounded by the fact that there are actually TWO acceptable pronunciations of the word, "Masr" (like the "a" in "about") or "Misr" (like the "i" in "dim"), one that the rest of the Arab world and one that Egyptians use (don't ask me why). So why in god's name does he choose to pronounce it like "Moosr"??! This wouldn't be such a pet peeve of mine, except this particular student, while being a really nice guy and an enthusiastic Arabic learner, does this with all kinds of Arabic words, and it drives me a little nuts. (Tbis is an understatement; it turns out that I am incredibly impatient sometimes. This will not surprise many of you.)

Out to dinner with most of my fusha classmates. Azza didn't make it out to join us...

As for my ammeya classes, one is technically strictly just a conversation class while the other I guess is just supposed to be for teaching us the vocab and different grammar constructions of the Egyptian dialect, but in practice both classes are pretty much just conversation classes. The only difference is that the latter class meets more often and has us work on conversations as well as grammar and vocab. Now when I say Egyptian grammar, I'm sort of talking about a nonexistent thing. Or something that has so many variations and exceptions, that it may as well not have many rules. It happens that Egyptian ammeya is one of the most different dialects from the fusha all my studies had been in before this. I've often likened the difference--with only a bit of exaggeration--to the difference between Spanish and Italian or Portuguese, it seems so distinct at times. The most annoying way that this manifests is in that even the words that are almost spelled the same in both fusha and Egyptian are pronounced in rather drastically different ways. It kind of feels like your entire vocabulary is useless as so many Egyptians just stare confusedly at you. There are lots of other differences (including pronouncing about 7 of the letters totally differently (though not in consistent ways) from how they're pronounced in fusha), that I will restrain myself from boring you all with, but the other big challenge is the fluidity of their word order that is really different from fusha. The existence of all these possible variations in word order means I could say the exact same sentence that I hear an Egyptian say, and some other Egyptian very well may not understand as he assumes that, as a foreigner, I don't know what I'm saying and mean something else. Lose-lose.

All the difficulties of the Egyptian dialect notwithstanding, the teacher of my non-conversation class, a young grad student from Alexandria named Mariam, has somehow managed to get me fairly comfortable with some basic Egyptian ammeya. She doesn't look like she is a teacher as she is probably only about 5 years older than me, and because she everyday looks like a Banana Republic model, wearing high-heels that can be heard before they are seen to counteract her roughly 5-foot stature. She dresses more stylishly than most American girls I know (sorry Vassar girls), which, as we found out on a class field trip of sorts to the outdoor market of Khan el-Khalili, leads some Egyptians to mistake her for a foreigner. As we were walking down a street listening to her describe something we had just seen in Arabic, a shopkeep, in that characteristically forward and aggressive manner of Egyptian shopkeeps in Khan, butts in (in English) and shouts "Ah you speak Arabic!" at her in that voice that Egyptians use when they are surprised to meet a foreigner speaking Arabic. We all laughed at the annoyingness of the shopkeep and walked on to get some couscousi (sic) and tea at a cafe in the middle of the market, where she, ever patient, conversed with us for another two hours. She may look like she could be a foreigner who is still in college, but she is the picture of a modern Egyptian woman, and an astoundingly good teacher.

Ammeya classmates drinking some Tea and practicing Arabic

with our teacher

at the most famous Cafe in Khan el-Khalili

Ammeya is the only class I've had off campus, but that is not what also makes Mariam standout from my other teachers. Like all the rest of my teachers, Mariam puts up with lots of halting sentences and horrific mispronunciations, but more than any other teacher I've had in my life, Mariam relentlessly and patiently has us repeat words over and over until she is satisfied with our pronunciation. It seems a little infantilizing, but it is, in fact, incredibly helpful. If she were a literary character, the author might comment that the diligence with which she dresses causes her to make us repeat words endlessly until we meet those same demanding, nitpicky standards. She uses her unmistakable smoky, loud voice to guide our class through the subtleties of the Egyptian dialect with her perfectly enunciated pronunciation. There's no getting around the fact that learning a language is a lot of rote memorization, and our teacher recognizes that we need to force difficult words into our pronunciation comfort zone by repetition if we are ever to speak fluidly, never shirking from forcing us to stay on the conjugation of a difficult word until it is perfect. Because all the people in my class are students of Arabic with fusha but no ammeya background, words from our fusha inevitably creep their way into our ammeya speaking which our teacher always swiftly corrects in her loud, authoritative voice. At one point, after a student had used one too many improper fusha words in a sentence, she exclaimed half-jokingly "No! No fusha! Speak ammeya! I will RUIN your fusha!" I laughed, because everyone starting ammeya feels like the two versions of Arabic are just one big inseparable jumble in our heads. With the help of the conversation class, the teacher of which is my only unimpressive instructor, my ammeya has come along all right, and this is most definitely thanks to Mariam's teaching.

With another semester here, I think I actually would have made some really considerable progress with my Egyptian ammeya, but instead I'll be going back to step one with Syrian ammeya. Luckily, it's supposedly easier and closer to fusha. While fusha is understood and read, if not spoken, Quranic Arabic is probably even better understood throughout the Middle East, which is in part why I chose to take an elective on the Quran.

The Quran is in fact the original compendium of Arabic grammar and pronunciation, so the class has served to teach and/or reinforce all kinds of crazy Arabic nuances while also giving me all kinds of antiquated meanings for fusha words I thought I knew. The rarefied complexities of Islamic scripture aside, the class has been great as an avenue for practicing my fusha conversation skills. Our teacher is a tall, lanky guy with endearingly large ears who is super enthusiastic about pushing his students to push themselves, and is clearly teaching the class for educational reasons only. (I just said that in case some of you might wonder if he might have some evangelical ulterior motives in teaching a Quran class.) He insists on speaking only in fusha Arabic for the entire class period and demands we do the same, and it's awesome. In terms of the class work, basically all we do is work on a part of a Sura (i.e. Chapter) that our teacher picks for us to do for a week or two, trying to reason through every other word until we understand it all and then move on to the next one. It's not sexy, but it's useful and interesting. Our teacher doesn't have the whole Quran memorized, but he has whole swathes of it commited to memory, something he does not call attention to, but which I like to watch while everyone is reading from the printouts he gives us. I heard a rumor that he once was sent to jail by the Egyptian government, but I have no idea why. I keep hoping for an appropriate time to ask him about it, but it turns out, there is pretty much no such thing.

Nonetheless, this class has been the ideal addition to the rest of my classes as it gives me a chance to practice my spoken fusha. This is not actually an important skill per se for getting to know most any Arabs on any meaningful level (unless you consider getting laughed at meaningful), except fusha is what I'll be using whenever I interact with an Arabic speaker of a different dialect...until I start to learn that dialect. In other words this is what I'll be using over the next two months as I travel, and when I first get to Syria. Have I mentioned here that I'm going to Syria yet? Oh, well, I am. I'll write out my plans more once I actually know them.

While I set out to write mostly just about my classes in this post, I realize that this actually turned into a portrait of some of the Egyptians I will most remember when I leave here--that is, my teachers. This stands to reason obviously, because I have spent the most time with them of any Egyptians. More than that though, when I think about the generosity, warmth and patience of Egyptians, I think of my teachers first. Sure,they sort of have an unfair advantage in monopolizing all those good traits I associate with Egyptians given their job descriptions basically entail being generous, warm and patient, but it doesn't matter in my mind. They were all undeniably great teachers, and really couldn't have asked for much more from an intensive Arabic program, but on top of that, they showed the best of what Egypt has to offer. The appropriate Egyptian phrase here would be alhamduley, thank god

Sinai, pt.1-[OMG MULTIMEDIA POST]-Sharm el-Sheikh

First off, my apologies for such a long break since my last post. I got sick last weekend and spent most of last weekend sleeping off a fever or on a toilet. I then came back to school only to find that I had a presentation and a comprehensive Arabic exam that week. I'm back now and I've tried to make this one an especially good post to make up for the interlude. In honor of said commitment, here is You're here too's first ever multimedia post (ok don't get too excited):

The beach in Sharm el-Sheikh at Sunset

The week of November 16 was the Islamic holiday "Eid al-Adha," which lasts for 4 days, so we had the whole week off to spend in our chosen vacation destination, the Sinai peninsula, or the ubiquitous beach and partying haven of Egypt and much of the Mediterranean. This trip was to be just me and the three girls, a plan we were excited about for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that we could all fit in one cab easily. After two weeks of midterms, we were all ready for a break, and I can say I now fully appreciate the appeal of lazing about on a beach for hours on end, though I used to scoff at such things.

[MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE: Now would be a good time to open this video, pause it and let it load while you continue reading so that it's all the way loaded for when it needs to come in. I'll tell you when to go back and start playing it in the post.]

We began our trip Thursday night after some furious last-minute packing on everyone's part. Said frenetic packing was mostly done by the girls who had had some adventures (involving details which are almost too hilarious not to write here, but also might be kind of embarrassing so I'll refrain) prior to packing and who all brought twice as much stuff as me. I, on the other hand, as a veteran last-minute packer [I know no other way], allowed myself exactly the right amount of time and didn't forget anything I had meant to pack, so I contend that my packing was not furious, but appropriately hurried, as planned. Before the packing, I had semi-spontaneously decided to go to a real Egyptian barber for a haircut and my first real straight-edge razor shave. That was kind of a cool experience which I'll save for another short blog post another time. Anyway, newly beardless I and my cohort met up only a little bit later than planned and headed on over to the bus station. The not entirely miserable overnight bus ride took us east and then south down to the tip of the Sinai peninsula to Sharm el-Sheikh, the city inaccurately dubbed by one travel book the Middle East's answer to Las Vegas.

Sharm is, in fact, really just a glorified a beach town at its heart, and its resemblance to Las Vegas lies only in its active nightlife and tendency towards
ostentation in the buildings and beaches. During the day, like in Vegas where the only thing to do besides look at the crazy casinos is to gamble in them, in Sharm, the only thing to do besides look at all the pretty beaches is to make use of them. Nonetheless, from the breathless descriptions of the town in guidebooks and online, (Sharm's lights at night: not quite like Vegas's) we were expecting a sort of miniaturized combination of Miami and Vegas with a healthy infusion of European dance culture from the supposed swarms of gaudy Russian tourists. In fact, it was barely a little bit of any of the three. Indeed there was a high number of Russians in shocking (by Middle Eastern standards) outfits, though they may have been outnumbered by the equally outrageous Italians who, as my crew's Italian speakers, Shayna and Julia, could tell us, were also pretty consistently saying as many outrageous things as they were wearing. I think more Russians have been coming for longer though because many signs were printed in Arabic and Russian rather than Arabic and English if they weren't printed in all three. Nonetheless, by far the most ridiculous people we witnessed in Sharm were not in fact foreigners, but the Egyptians on vacation there. These are almost exclusively rich Cairenes on vacation, and as such these are some of the most ostentatious Egyptians anywhere. Case in point:

Yes, those are whitey tighties. Yes, that was his bathing suit. And yes, that girl is, in fact, Egyptian. This is the henna tattoo that inspired first Nora and then eventually the rest of us to get ones too, though Nora originally planned to get the exact same one on her back so we could recreate this gem of a photo. (Photo courtesy of Julia.)

We spent our two days in Sharm basically doing one thing: being beach bums. As previously mentioned, this has never been my M.O. for a vacation before, but I was all about it this time around (see not particularly flattering picture of me, pina colada and non-Arabic-language book in hand). The first day, after unloading our stuff in our apartment (lucky #13), we took the advice of our super-friendly Australian-Egyptian landlord (or whatever he's called in our situation) and bought discount beach tickets from him and headed to Vida beach.

Though the promenade with basically all the beaches was just a 15 minute walk from our apartment, by incorrectly taking a left instead of a right at the promenade, we ended up taking a self-made tour of the promenade almost all the way to its end. This allowed us to see that every beach section basically looked exactly the same. Just as we would find Vida, they mostly all had some kind of open-air restaurant of some size that you had to walk through to get to that particular piece of ocean front. They all had towels that they gave you with your entry fee and they all had
music of some kind playing at varying volume levels. Vida was great in every way (once we eventually got some vacated chairs together), except for the blaring techno music (a recurrant problem in Sharm), and made for a perfect introduction to the true difficulties of beach life.

After napping and snacking on food that was technically not allowed into the beach, I took my goggles and set out to swim some laps in the Red Sea which turned out to be a fantastic idea, though not for lap-swimming purposes. The Red Sea is the second saltiest body of water in the world (second only to the Dead Sea), and so it was actually too easy to float to get as good a workout as I wanted. Nonetheless, thanks to my goggles I was able to see what the various Scuba Divers I had seen trekking out into the water were looking at: reefs! Nothing too spectacular although I did take to holding my breath and diving down to have the fish swim around me and did have a school of pretty stunning rainbow-sherbert-colored fish swarm past me at one point.

After our beach day, we headed to Sharm's Old Town. The Old Town is about a 10-minute ride in the awesome public mini bus from our apartment. LE1 per ride per person and you just pile in and out wherever you can pick up the bus and wherever you can get it to stop. The buses were all clean and ran with surprising efficiency. Old Town was basically just your run-of-the-mill kitschy open-air market in an Arab country. As such, we were greeted near the entrance, of course, by a dude with a camel, and he, of course, insisted on wrapping a scarf around anybody's head who came remotely near the camel, so as to invite photography, and therefore, of course, some baksheesh--i.e. money. Preferably in dollars or Euros, of course. There was also a large man-made waterfall thing arranged in a gigantic fake rock facade. It was all rather nice, but I was mostly biding my time until we got to go get dinner at the seafood restaurant recommended by our landlord. The fish, was both cheap and delicious, as promised, and I left Old Town feeling happy and full.

For Day Two of beach glory we decided to seek out a more calm beach where we might have a little more room, so after a comical failed attempt to sneak into a beach (sort of)
we decided to pay the Marriot for the use of its beach and pool. This was just $8 more expensive than using a regular beach, so we felt it was worth it. Not much to say except that it was great, and Nora decided it would be fun to go dance in the painfully awkward hotel-sponsored belly-dancing circle put on for Marriott guests. Good for them for being unabashed enough to look silly in front of everyone, but you'll all be disappointed to find out that I didn't join in. Anyway, after a full day of soaking in the sun, sipping cocktails, and searching for sea creatures, we picked up some groceries from the nearby Pyramid-shaped (of course) grocery store and then went out for some fantastic Chinese food (they have that in Sharm, unlike Cairo). We were pleasantly surprised when the manager came out to tell us he was happy to have Arabic students and would be taking 20% off our entire meal just to be nice. This put us in a good mood for the rest of our night and foreshadowed other Arabic student related perks we were led to believe we were getting throughout the trip.

On both of our nights in Sharm we tried our best within our limited financial means to experience the supposedly legendarily crazy nightlife of Sharm, though we were not overly impressed. The first night we went to Sharm's supposedly premiere dance club called "Pacha." Though Pacha is chain of clubs around the world that started in Spain, there is a distinct Middle Eastern influence apparent in the name. The word Pasha is one you might (or might not) recognize as one inserted in many Turkish names, which is actually a title. Interestingly, the honorific has been appropriated by Egyptian Colloquial (pronounced more like "basha," since there is technically no letter "p" in arabic except in transliterations) as something like a more respectful version of "dude." Anyway, the club is supposedly ranked #25 in the world on some list of what I assume are all trashy Euro-dance-techno clubs, so we wanted to check it out. After some minorly successful negotiating by me with the contemptuous doormen about the exorbitant minimum charge, we got into the club.

Dancing in our apartment is obviously the best kind of clubbing

Inside the gargantuan club, a blonde female DJ was up on a stage in front of a gigantic projection screen periodically rotating images of scantily clad cartoon women in front of colorful backdrops. She was intermittently flanked by two Russian-looking girls who looked like twins and who danced in various outfits that might best be described as the superficial amount of clothing that strippers wear at the beginning of their dances in movies. The club had many levels with a whole other wing closed off by some tastefully hung white sheets that looked like boat sails. I took that to mean that this club is often times a lot more full and probably a lot more fun. And that was the first time I realized what a strange juxtaposition it is to have a beach vacation in the middle of November and how what I was doing was in fact pretty strange.


Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera out that night and none of the pictures I took with anyone else's cameras turned out very well in the dark club lighting, so all I have is this unindicative picture taken from the outside during the day. What's more, I don't have any pictures of the all the shiny ceiling hangings, the fake stone cliff overlooking the dance floor, or the hilarious, sleezy European dudes dancing from pretty girl to pretty girl until they found one who would dance with them. Pacha also had a weird system for getting drinks involving buying chips at one place to be brought to the bar in a completely different place which seemed like it should be far too complicated for drunk people. Unimpressed, we left vowing to do better, unwilling to give up on the much ballyhooed nightlife of Sharm.

The next night, we tried the only other big dance club that that looked like it was getting any traffic, the Hard Rock Cafe. [Get your volume set and start the youtube video playing now!] Generally, I had planned specifically not to go to places like the Hard Rock while in Egypt (because I'm in EGYPT), but almost immediately, our choice was vindicated when talking with the doorman (a burly guy wearing stupid lens-less black plastic glasses and sporting a shaved mohawk a la the character Puck from "Glee") got the girls in for free because he recognized them from the beach we had gone to on our first day (creepy, yes, but it brought their cover charges from LE120 each to 0, so no one complained). Then after I spoke approximately 5 words of Arabic to him he decided I would get in for free too. Apparently, not a lot of foreigners bother with any Arabic in Sharm, so saying "Yeah, we live in Cairo" correctly won me some serious points. Sweet. Inside the club was really just a medium-sized restaurant decorated mostly with polished dark wood and the requisite pictures of American rock n roll idols around a bar and moderate-sized dance floor/pit. We decided to reward Hard Rock for its generosity by buying some of what turned out to be their relatively cheap drinks, and then we moved onto the dance floor.

The Hard Rock further cemented its Sharm el-Sheikh-club-supremacy by sliding into a rendition of "Empire State of Mind," which, if you have been abroad for even just 3 months, is no longer the overplayed new anthem for America's beating metropolitan heart.
Suddenly, the song was the invocation of everything awesome about America, and believe me, there are still even awesome things despite recent disappointing elections. Something about everyone, Americans and foreigners alike, bouncing to the music put me in a great mood. On some level, it seems like everyone loves this song, because Jay-Z rapping about selling rocks on the streets of Brooklyn as a teenager reminds of that tired yet true American conceit that in our country, more so and for longer than in most anywhere else, it has been possible for people to rise above a life like that.* (As evidenced by this recent NYT piece about Jay's biography.) The mood in the Hard Rock soared as Alicia Keyes' classic R&B voice swooped in and all at once it seemed like every person in the club was belting out "Newww Yoooooork, concrete jungle where dreams are maddde offf..." like the whole club had joined in one of those obnoxious "U.S.A. U.S.A.!" chants that now plague international sporting events...except it wasn't obnoxious and arrogant. It felt good to be the member of the world's cultural superpower. This was not the first time I'd felt this or had these thoughts, but it has surely never felt so poignant. Thanks for that, Jay (how has thanking Jay-Z never come up before??).

*This is obviously not the time or place (or blog really) for a real discussion about all the issues I know I'm glossing over here. My point was, being away from America makes you realize how there are truths, however diminished, behind America's self-aggrandizing ways.

The rest of the night we danced happily to a mix of American, Egyptian and European hits which felt like a very fair compromise between the various musical tastes of the nationalities present on the dance floor. On our 15-min walk back home, our conversation consisted of basically taking turns exulting our appreciation for the Hard Rock and laughing about the various guys who had taken particular interest in the girls.


The next morning, I woke up excited for what had become my morning routine in our Sharm apartment (pictured is our apartment's little neighborhood). During breakfast, which consisted of plain yoghurt mixed with frosted flakes and potato chips, I would sit down in front of the TV and watch whatever shitty movie was on the Fox Movies channel and assiduously try and read all the Arabic subtitles as they sprinted by. I saw the better parts of the 13th Warrior, Terminator 3, and some other forgettable movie like this, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it as I got to learn all kinds of useful words like "robot," "ass," and "bear-demon," while also learning that they usually translate swear words uttered by themselves as the Arabic word that translates to "Of course!" I recently had a conversation with an affluent Egyptian who was telling me how he had noticed with interest how Egyptians often tend to view lewd behavior and language as more acceptable as long as it presented in another language even though everyone knows what it means. Obviously American media doesn't censor German swear words that we all know the meaning of like "Shietze," but I had always thought that was more because our society increasingly doesn't actually view swearing as a bad thing. I'm sure there's a great Anthro paper (my roommate here would say that is an oxymoron) to be written about how Egyptians compartmentalize their culture with foreign influences, but I'll just leave it for now.

On our last day in Sharm we headed to Dahab thinking we would be climbing Mt. Sinai that night for the sunrise, but the plans didn't quite work out as we had hoped so we had to improvise. That story in the next post, and in the mean time here's a preview for that next post, taken on my way down Mount Sinai:

Roots

On my last day in Dahab I got a sweet tattoo. Now I generally view henna tattoos as unacceptably tourist-y things to have, and getting an Arabic one in an Arabic-speaking country is no less so, but after watching all three of the girls get cool ones from our personable jokester of a henna artist, I let them convince me to get one too. The girls got these:


I think it's fair to say that for the $2-6 those each cost, those are pretty cool. Thus, in a move that reflects either my excited dedication to this blog, or a lack of creativity on my part, I got a henna translation of this blog's title on my arm:

The transliterated Arabic reads something like "Inta huna aydan, ya nakhla, fee hathihee al-ard al-ignabiy..."

Besides getting a pretty badass (in my own opinion) tattoo, I learned something interesting about Arabic when the Egyptian henna artist was drawing my tattoo. To explain, I have to get into a little bit of the nuances of written Classical Arabic, so bear with me.

When Arabic is written, the letters all look different depending on if they are in the beginning, the middle, or the end of the word. Furthermore, as in aydan the third word of my tat, the first letter is an "Alif" which can also change depending on the complex Arabic rules of voweling. When this letter isn't doing crazy stuff like turning into an entirely different letter (Arabic is confusing), it sometimes gets a squiqqly thing, called a "hamza," written above it, below it, or not at all. Now in the word aydan, which means "also," I had only ever seen it written with the hamza on top of the Alif, and so I accordingly had written it thusly when telling the artist what I wanted. As a result, I was confused when he wrote it with the hamza below for no reason apparent to me. Besides changing the pronunciation from what wikipedia tells me is a "near-open front unrounded vowel" A (as in "apple") to a short "close front unrounded vowel" I (as in "little"), this could also change the meaning potentially as in this case it did, though not in a way our non-grammarian henna artist could explain very well.

Basically, according to the artist, Aydan is written with the hamza below when it is meant to connote a fundamental addition of sorts. It's sort of like italicizing the word "too." All he could really say is the hamza had to be the roots of the alif here, because we were talking about really being something too. I just liked that they had a way of conveying the sense of "rootedness" with a slight change in the writing of the word. This is the kind of stuff that gets you excited when all you do is sit around trying to learn a language.

Either way, I found it fitting that the I should learn something about the roots of Arabic writing, in the process of getting the words at the root of my trip engraved on my body. More about the rest of my trip coming soon!

(Edit: I asked my Arabic teacher about the whole hamza above-versus-below thing for emphasis, and she summarily dismissed the whole notion. When I explained that the guy had done it deliberately, she brushed it off and declared "he does not know Arabic." So that more or less negates this whole post...except for the pictures of our cool henna tattoos...!)