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:
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