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...!)

Off to Sinai...

Fully planned on putting up a new post today before I left, but my plan was foiled by my impulsive decision to go to a barber--a real barber--and get a shave my haircut. That was quite an experience so I'll try and borrow one of my friend's computers some time next week and write it down if I can. I don't know if I'm going to have internet though...in the mean time, you can look at the full album of pictures I (finally) put up from Alexandria on my facebook.

Anyway, now I'm heading out the door to go to the Sinai Peninsula to hit the beaches, climb the mountain Moses received the 10 commandments on, and then hit the beaches some more.

You're here too, oh fresh air...

Walking in Cairo's picturesque Al-Azhar Park last friday night, I had was struck by the uncanny feeling that I was breathing Colorado air. The park's air was crisp and dry and unencumbered by the usually inescapable weight of Cairo's pollution, so much so that my brain hyperlinked to memories of strolling Pearl Street on summer nights back in the Mile-High. Perhaps it helped to be walking on a clean stone path with trees lining my way, but either way, I had a distinct "You're here too..." moment in that instant. Like Borges's King who found a comforting sense of home in his epiphanic "discovery" of the Middle East's most ubiquitous plant in the soil not of his home, I found the feeling of Colorado's summer nights here in the sweet air of Al-Azhar's gardens.

Sitting above the pollution of Cairo, the view from our picnic spot just after sunset of just one part of Al-Azhar's gardens with some of Cairo's landmarks in the background.

I'll write more and post more pictures of the Park after I go back next time to take more pictures while the sun is still out! For now here's another picture from the night in the park. As we were finishing up dinner, Hemeida, our friend from Siwa, remarked that the music we had been hearing in the distance sounded like "Upper Egypt music," meaning more traditional sounding music. Well after we finished eating we strolled on over to where the music was coming from to find these:


"Whirling"* Dervishes!

*I'll explain my snooty academic reasons for putting the quotation marks and a little more of what I know about Sufi Dervishes later.

...who can even go double decker:

And then during their finale, they decided to bring the show right up (and above) to the audience:

We'll see if I ever have a "You're here too, oh whirling dervishes..." moment back in the states.

I hope so.

Wikalat al-Balah

(Note: I wrote this last Tuesday night, but saved it to edit) So this is definitely a time that I should not be writing extra blog posts, as I have midterms this week and next week, but I've resolved to write more punctually about some of the more exciting spontaneous adventures I have. Tonight, in the hopes of finding some potential materials for a Viking costume for Halloween, I decided to try going to a market I'd never been to. I've been a little frustrated recently with not having the time to wander Cairo, and so when I read that Wikalat al-Balah was a good market for second hand clothing, it sounded ideal for both some cheap halloween suppliesand some exploring.

Long story short, I got distracted from my original goal and ended up sitting and chatting--all in Arabic (!!!)--with some dudes I met there. Here's how it happened. Though it's in an area just over the river from Zamalek, the area is a much less gentrified part of Cairo, and I was the only foreigner in the whole area as far as I could tell, yet, surprisingly these Cairenes didn't seem to notice. After walking around trying to get a feel for the prices and the options available there, I was on my second lap ready to buy some things when some Egyptian men sitting in front of a shop to my right said something to me while I passed which surprised me, because they seemed to be the first ones to treat me any differently from regular Egyptians in the market that night. I was pretty sure they had just yelled "welcome to Egypt" (in Arabic), which is a common thing for Egyptians to say to you when you are obviously a foreigner. Sometimes it is genuinely just them being hospitable, and other times it's them trying to lure you in to buy something. Assuming the latter, I was about to ignore them when, for no conscious reason I can remember now, I happened to look back at them. There were three of them, one middle-aged, one who looked to be around my age, and one who looked like he was about 13. The oldest man had been the one to welcome me, but after I gave the proper response (I don't really know the exact translation, it's just what you say in response to the Arabic phrase for welcome) the one my age asked me something in Arabic that I couldn't understand. In the millisecond I spent deciding whether to respond or not, I looked at their faces and judged, based on instinct alone, that they were being sincere and were worth talking to further.

I walked over and had the younger guy repeat his question, which turned out to just be a variation on the standard second question when having conversations with Egyptians. Most times Egyptians will ask foreigners in Arabic, "inta min ayn?"--"where are you from?"--running the three words together into one, as is their way, but in this other variation, they just list off countries until they get the right one, debating eachother all along. Russia was their first guess (I think because of my beard) and then America ("Amreeka"). I told them I was studying Arabic which prompted them to ask how I liked it to which I responded that I really liked the language and from their on out they kindly spoke nothing but Arabic with me.

The older man's name was Aydil, who looked to be about 40, the one close to my age was named Yasser, and the boy was named Mash-hoor (which means "famous"). Yasser's brother, Ahmed, came over after a bit and talked with me for a while too. Our conversation ranged from politics to geography (my limited vocabulary, especially in colloquial, only allows so many topics really). They were pretty pleased when I agreed with their distaste for the feckless Egyptian President Mubarak and his sham of a democracy (albeit a largely benign one), and I also managed to make some jokes that made them laugh, which I felt pretty good about.

Egyptian dialogue, I've noticed, is peppered with jokes and exuberant approval of said jokes, more so than in America, so I've been trying to get a feel for Egyptians' sense of humor. It's tricky and sarcastic in a way, and it comes out in the conversations making Egyptians seem jovial, animated, and irrepressible all time. This also makes Egyptian conversations seem intimate in ways that American conversations are not, making it seem like Egyptians are more comfortable around each other--though when I said something to this extent to Hemeida, my Egyptian friend from Siwa, he vehemently denied it. Nonetheless, relationships here do not seem plagued by the same kind mutual self-consciousness that ones in America sometimes have. It's hard to explain, but it's something to do with the ease with which Egyptian strangers will interact with each other that I think Americans tend to eschew.

Another way this comes out is in the amount that Egyptians touch each other during conversation. Men, just like women, kiss each their friends on the cheek (2 times here, 3 in Saudi Arabis, I'm told) when they meet, and no joke goes without that weird, traditional Egyptian high-five/weak handshake hybrid of approval. Occasionally you see friends just holding hands, not in the ironic way that American friends sometimes do, but in a genuine way. Maybe I wouldn't notice it if it were just girls, but in Egypt you notice that men do not mind touching each other (and it is such an American thing that that sentence should even sound perverted), because when you're friends, it's more like you're brothers here. On the other hand, there are obviously a lot of different restrictions about how men and women can be intimate, and homophobia is definitely still the norm, but these restrictions manifest in different ways so that Egyptians can still be very affectionate and warm with each other without some artificial taboo being violated.

Anyway, besides making jokes and high-fiving, in my conversation with my new friends after we finished talking about Egypt's government and the places I have and have not been in Egypt, we got to the other frequent topic of discussion that regularly comes up with Egyptians: what don't I like about Egypt. Every single Egyptian I have talked to at length (outside of school) has asked me the same question more or less, a phenomenon I find fascinating. Many of them are convinced that Americans have quite bad opinions of both Egypt and its people and they all want to know what things I haven't liked since I got here and what bad things I heard about before coming. I usually say nothing at first and then if they pressure me more I tell them I wish Cairo wasn't so dirty or that the salesmen around Tahrir (a main part of downtown) are pushy and dishonest. I say these things because they are largely inoffensive, undeniably true and also because I wouldn't really know how to say much else. Regardless, I'm not really keeping all that much from them since I really don't have that many other complaints. But why does this keep coming up? Even my language exchange partner at AUC, a highly-educated, very sweet girl from Upper Egypt (which confusingly means southern Egypt) told me flat out that she doesn't believe me when I say not all Americans believe Arabs are all terrorists. Egyptians just seem to be self-conscious about their being a third world country that is decidedly awash in both strong "Western" and "Eastern" cultural aspirations. I didn't ask my friends why they asked, but they seemed to like my answers. I'll have more to say about my bigger Egyptian cultural observations, but I'll leave this for now at this: that was a really fun conversation for me, and not only do I think I made some genuine friends out there I felt like it really helped my Arabic.

Their willingness to speak Arabic with me, more than anything, was what made the conversation so productive for me. I know I was mispronouncing all kinds of words (I don't completely suck at Arabic, this just has to do with both the different vocabulary and the maddening way vowels change in Egyptian colloquial from the Modern Standard Arabic I studied before coming here), but my new friends diligently made the effort to understand the words I was saying. What's more they rarely resorted to speaking English. This was in large part because only the younger guy knew any, but whatever the reason, we spoke Arabic basically the whole time, which was GREAT. When a few other Egyptians approached to talk to us during our conversation and tried to speak English, my new friend chided them, saying "he loves Arabic and wants to speak more." Awesome.

This is the sort of thing that has not happened in my entire time in Egypt (outside of my classes, of course). No Egyptian has ever displayed almost any amount of patience for us foreigners limping through their language, and so I cannot properly communicate how exciting it was to make some Egyptian friends who did. In just that one hour, I could feel my colloquial Arabic getting better. My confidence and fluidity with the pronunciation of the Modern Standard Arabic words morphed into Egyptian definitely got noticeably firmer. This is what I came here to do, and I'm thrilled I finally got to do it.

* * * * *

P.S. I went back to Wikalat al-Balah again the next night and couldn't find my new friends :( I also had some really strange street food that looked like sausage but was stuffed with spiced rice instead of meat. Kind of good, but a little weird. When I need to buy some more clothes I'll be going back there and so hopefully I'll see my friends again then!

P.P.S. Here's a picture of me and some of my friends on Halloween with the Viking costume I crafted. I found the fur vest and the long white t-shirt/tunic in the market, while I made the sword and helmet from scratch out of duct tape, juice boxes, cardboard and paper. Not the best picture, but the best one of my in my costume.

Kind of a modern adaptation of a Viking, yes, but I was pretty pleased with it all the same, given the limitations of being in a country which mostly doesn't care about this made-up American holiday.