I met J in a bar on my second night in Damascus. This bar, like basically all the other bars in Damascus, is in the Christian Quarter of the “Old City.” The Old City is a sort-of oval shaped section walled in and packed full with shops and old houses navigated between primarily by ancient stone alley ways that look like they have really not changed since the 13th century or so. I fell in love with the alleys the first time I was in Damascus with Dylan, and it was also during this first time in Damascus that Dylan and I discovered the bar that I would find J in upon my return to Damascus.
J is a character. He is Syrian, but he is also American thanks to studying and working in the U.S. for around ten years. Furthermore, he is rich. He is this big gregarious man who loves to drink and smoke sheesha (which they call Nargile here) and has called me on a few occasions to “go party” or "come to Beirut for the weekend." This is pretty much what he does.
One of the first such nights that he invited me out happened the day after I met him. Me and my first American friend in Damascus, Sarah, and a Dutch girl I met in my hotel had gone to dinner with him at his favorite restaurant only to have the whole affair build into an all-night affair. After dinner, J had declared that we were going to a bar where foreigners are supposedly only allowed in with the company of Syrians. The reason for this supposed exclusivity (since proven false) was that the children of rather high-level Syrian government officials apparently go to that particular often bar and they don't want foreigners going off and talking about it. This night involved champagne bottles with sparklers attached to them sent to our table, literal fires on the dance floor, and seeing Syrians grinding like I had only ever seen Arabs dance in Beirut do. I have a few great pictures of the night, but this lovely country partially blocks Blogger, so I can neither look at my blog or post pictures.
J also likes to go to the same small hole-in-the-wall restaurant many times a week at which I have had some of the best food in my life. He goes so often that the owner and chefs will actually lend J cash when he forgets it, because they know he will be back tomorrow or the day after that. What's more they will literally make him whatever he wants, even if it means going to the restaurant next door, walking down to a juice shop for a jug of his favorite concoction, or picking up a bottle of his favorite liquor from the liquor store around the corner.
Frankly, I don't know how I feel about the guy. He tells me stories about partying in Mexico, Qatar, Beirut, and then he goes home to his decidedly conservative Muslim wife and two daughters who he is only allowed to see on weekdays during a 2-hour window between homework and bedtime allowed them by their mother. If you ask J abou this religion, he will tell you he is "lost." His daughter are being raised to be able to choose their religion on their own. And these are just a few of the rather interesting facts about J. There's more I could write, but I've mostly written all that in order to give context for his younger brother's wedding which I got to go to a few weeks ago with Sarah.
The night started out with J's friend Bashar picking up me up near my house. Why was Bashar, a 50-something year-old owner of fruit shops who speaks literally not a word of English, in charge of picking me up, you ask? I don't really know. Maybe simply because he knew where I lived, having dropped me off there the night before from the pseduo-bachelor party/private hammam party. Maybe because he didn't seem to know that many other people at the wedding. I don't really know. But we did have a nice, if tortured, Arabic conversation in the car.
(I know I just left that Arabic term unclarified, but I'll explain what hammams are in another post)
Upon arriving at J's house, I walked in to find the groom, J's brother, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I had met J's brother a few times before, and I just thought to myself, "Haha, oh J's brother, you crazy guy, still wearing your regular clothes at your own pre-wedding celebration...." Then a troop of dudes wearing full-blown kitschy Middle Eastern outfits with scarves around their waists and red fezes atop their heads paraded in sing-chanting and playing instruments, including a trumpet, drums, and a bagpipe (According to the Oxford History of Music, apparently the first mention of a bagpipe in history was in some place called Eyuk near Turkey.) As they started singing, all the men in the room (there were no women) began clapping and singing along--that is all the ones who weren't recording it all on their phones. Seconds later, the groom was standing not two feet away from me on a chair taking off his clothes to much cheering and hollering. It was only then that I remembered vaguely hearing about something to do with some dressing-of-the-groom ceremony involved with Middle Eastern weddings.
Basically, the ceremony consisted of watching the groom strip down to his underwear and then put on his tux with a little help from some of his friends. I feel like this ceremony probably involved more bathing and cleaning and stuff originally, but it has now probably been adapted for more modern weddings. There was sort of a funny moment when it turned out he was wearing like 6 layers of pants/underwear, each of which he pretended to take off as if it were the last ones. Then some of the dudes carried him around while he stood on the chair--but not too high, since his head was basically at the ceiling already--and some of the others did the default Arab dancing in a circle while putting eachother's arms on eachother's shoulders.
We then filed out of the apartment and outside for the first of many opportunities for photographing of the groom doing stuff while the band executed various actions with other stuff (fire and swords and aerosol cans, to name a few), as we watched on. The energy was already sort of waning as we filed out of the apartment, but I tried to stay engaged even though no one seemed particularly interested in talking with me (which is fair, because this was a group of friends who hadn't seen eachother in a very long time). We then all hopped in various cars and drove, caravan-style behind the flower-adorned, white BMW carrying the groom to some distant, random suburb of Damascus in order to wait around for an hour and a half for the bride to arrive for...more picture-taking with swords and fire. It was during this time, and the half an hour stuck in traffic that I discovered the appeal of the one game on my crappy Syrian phone involving some as-yet-not-totally-understood system of moving little jewel things around. By this point my energy was seriously lagging, and Sarah. who had not yet joined the girls' party had received a number of bored text messages from me.
Finally, after the two hours of waiting for about fifteen minutes of photo-taking, we hopped back in cars to head to the hotel whose conference room was being used for the reception. This hotel is a 5-star establishment: shiny, polished gold and marble everywhere and definitely made for the rich and fancy, but the real class had clearly been supplied by the groom's family as far as I could tell. After processing slowly inside the hotel and down a spiral staircase--all along as the band continued executing their various fiery-swordy activities--everyone but the bride and groom entered the ball room to have a seat and watch the couple's grand entrance.
As I walked into the room I saw about 300 Arabs of almost every style of dress seated around 50 or so tables. Actually, I should say, I saw 150 or so Arab men all wearing suits, and about 150 Arab women wearing all manner of clothing. There were rail thin twenty and thirty-somethings wearing tight strapless dresses that stopped 6-inches above their knees, and then their were some nigh-full blown muhajibat, though none had their whole faces covered. Interestingly, no one seemed to care what anyone else was wearing--or at least not visibly so.
I also noticed their were two big screens on each wall with footage of what I realized was live footage of the bride and groom. It turned out that the camera that had been assiduously recording everything while walking backwards in front of the couple of honor everywhere we went had been broadcasting everything to the conference room! Now of course, the shots were alternating between that camera and one on a crane doing aerial shots of the dance floor in the middle of the room.
As I sat down at my table with Bashar and his wife, dramatic music sounding like something from the climax of Ben Hur erupted suddenly over the speaker system and smoke filled the dance floor. It was time for the couple to make their entrance. They entered and walked slowly, ever so slowly, across the floor, letting the cameras take it all in as they waved and smiled at their guests like a Presidential candidate and his wife at a fundraiser. They then took a seat on a raised white couch framed by vines and flowers wrapped around a trellis (is that the word I want? like a fence thing?). Finally, they sat down and the music's volume decreased, signifying it was time for us to sit down.
What followed was a more elaborate sword-dance involving shields and choreographed hits by the band and then a buffet-style meal with a lot of delicious-looking traditional Syrian dishes that tasted sort of bland. All throughout the meal, black vest-wearing waiters prowled about getting drink orders from the many guests. Surprisingly, coke, 7up, coffee, tea, and an undefined juice were the only options. The bride and groom then took one of the swords from the band and cut every level of their 10-level cake together. This was succeeded by perhaps that most stereotypical of Middle Eastern dances, the one where the guests hold the celebrees up on chairs and dance around with them to the delight of the crowd, and then a full on dance party mostly to Arab pop music, but also to a few western hits, like Pitbull's “I know you want me.” Sarah and I danced for a bit with the rest of the younger guests (as well a few of the skeezier-seeming uncles it would seem) and then decided to head out when the music started to turn to much older-style Arab songs that required some actual knowledge of Arab dance styles.
All in all it was certainly a remarkable and extravagant wedding by any standards, but given J's shenanigans in the past, I think I had set some impossibly high expectations for the level of opulence I would see at this affair. I realized also, this is actually the first wedding I had ever gone to as a guest.
Since the wedding, J has unfortunately taken to calling me quite a bit more frequently than I would like, every time asking me if I want to "go party." I like going and drinking at bars just fine, but I just do not have the urge to go out as much as this guy who is over twice my age. He has invited me to go partying in Beirut, in fact, something I neither have the time, nor the money to indulge in. So, although I really do like him, as so often happens with foreigners and their Arab friends, I am getting sick of his invasive calling that can get a little claustrophobic. Still, I don't want him to think I just wanted to go to his wedding, so perhaps next time I'll let him talk me into going out. Maybe.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
The Everyday in the Revolution
A poster seen in Midan Tahrir yesterday. The red Arabic script on the upper right says "The most expensive newspaper in Egypt. The Price: Freedom." The red script below that atop the fake newspaper says, "Egypt, where are you going?"
Every day, I become more and more intent on finding some way to stay in the region longer--probably in Cairo. I'm visiting there now, but I find myself wondering what I'm supposed to post here these days, as this journey ceases to be something fantastic and strange and instead becomes everyday.
I came back to Cairo and felt instantly energized. Something about the size and the frantic electricity of the city, amplified post-revolution immediately found its way into my blood. Yesterday, Friday, we walked to Tahrir through a few mini protests, past the barbed wire remnants around the Media Ministry, and past the inevitable opportunistic Egyptian salesmen with 25th of January and I-heart-egypt paraphernilia everywhere we looked. Flags billowed everywhere we looked as Egyptians red, white, and black face paint sung and danced in the streets to Egyptian music blaring from a battery of loudspeakers. There obviously weren't anywhere close to as many Egyptians there as during the revolution's hey day, but there were probably at around a thousand or so there spread out in the circle still. One shy looking Egyptian man carrying an "oud," a traditional Middle Eastern musical instrument, saw me carrying me my camera and asked me to record this video and post it on the internet. I think the song is their National Anthem.
So in short, the spirit of the revolution is alive and well (though the implications of the recent referendum may not bode well) here in Egypt, and judging from the continuing cross-cultural, cross-sectarian solidarity rallies going on as well, it is certainly still something that many different Egyptians are paying attention to.
Indeed, when I stopped by AUC's campus to see my old fusha teacher (and take advantage of their awesome gym and outdoor track), she told me how seemingly every Egyptian has become addicted to politics, following the news obsessively and discussing it all constantly. About the extremely high participation in the recent constitutional referendum--36 million compared to the 6 million election turn out of the elections just last November--she simply said in Arabic incredulously "What's that? What IS that?"
And so, I've all but concluded that I have to find a way to stay here. Leaving this all for America feels like it would mean I'm sort of giving up on ever actually learning Arabic, a fate I'm not yet ready to accept. This means I've got to a find a job out here is all. I'll be accepting suggestions or job offer any time.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Stop Gap Picture Plug
I've been seriously slacking with Oh palm of late, but I did finally get around to putting my pictures up of my travels with Dylan through the UAE, Damascus, and Lebanon, here and here.
I'm almost done with a post about my Syrian friend, J, and his brother's wedding, and Also, I'm hoping I'm going to figure out how to put pictures up on my blog here in Syria and update my twitter soon.
I'm almost done with a post about my Syrian friend, J, and his brother's wedding, and Also, I'm hoping I'm going to figure out how to put pictures up on my blog here in Syria and update my twitter soon.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Qaddafi "A whole new level..."
**I had to edit a lot of swear words out of this one. I'll let you imagine where they were. It can be like a game!
A few days ago, when I was talking with Hana, the Egyptian girl who was staying in our house last week, about the events in Libya she said to me, "In Egypt we were saying that the only way Mubarak would leave the country was after he burned it down...but Qaddafi is taking it to a whole new level...." That pretty much sums it all up.
If a leader starts indiscriminately gunning down his own people in front of the world's eyes, the international community really should be feeling some moral imperative to do something. I don't mean we have to send in the troops Iraq-style, but instituting a no-fly zone really does seem like a no-brainer. Stopping Qaddafi from bombing his people should be the least we can do.
On top of that, Europe needs to stop buying Libyan oil, um, like...twenty years ago. And they need to cease their feckless diplomatic hand-wringing. The political calculus behind coming out and supporting the Egyptian people was at least marginally complicated in that Mubarak was (maybe) less obviously a ruthless dictator to most people, but this unabashed massacring of peaceful protesters supposedly excused by the pre-recorded rants of a drug-addled dictator should pose no challenge to the political mathematicians of America (and Europe, but they're not my government).
In all this, I can't help but think back to the book written by my old Thesis adviser at Vassar that examined the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam and concluded that the most important similarity of all was that both war's legacies had sapped America's willingness to intervene in cases of actual moral necessity. He wrote the book in 2006, and though this argument may not be new, I had never heard it before, and his conclusion seems remarkably prescient and relative to today's events.
Is Obama's reaction to the Middle East a kind of reincarnation of some old school George Washington-style protective non-involvement doctrine? Is this the natural reaction to the over-active interventionism of George Bush's neoconservative era (something I attempted to write much of my thesis about)? Is this plain and simple uncertainty? Or is this just a purely-political bet that the public will be happier in the long run if we stay out of it and keep our hands clean? The history major-nerd in me cares about that stuff a lot, but more than anything, the human being in me only cares about putting an end to the insanity that is Libya.
I'm not one to herald the decline of America blah blah blah, but I am one, deep down, to worry about America ending up on the wrong side of history. American interventionism is a topic that comes up quite a lot in basically every political conversation I've ever had here in the Middle East, so this post does not do justice to everything I think about it, but suffice to say, I think America needs to do something more than use stern language and renew sanctions not only for political but also moral reasons.
A few days ago, when I was talking with Hana, the Egyptian girl who was staying in our house last week, about the events in Libya she said to me, "In Egypt we were saying that the only way Mubarak would leave the country was after he burned it down...but Qaddafi is taking it to a whole new level...." That pretty much sums it all up.
If a leader starts indiscriminately gunning down his own people in front of the world's eyes, the international community really should be feeling some moral imperative to do something. I don't mean we have to send in the troops Iraq-style, but instituting a no-fly zone really does seem like a no-brainer. Stopping Qaddafi from bombing his people should be the least we can do.
On top of that, Europe needs to stop buying Libyan oil, um, like...twenty years ago. And they need to cease their feckless diplomatic hand-wringing. The political calculus behind coming out and supporting the Egyptian people was at least marginally complicated in that Mubarak was (maybe) less obviously a ruthless dictator to most people, but this unabashed massacring of peaceful protesters supposedly excused by the pre-recorded rants of a drug-addled dictator should pose no challenge to the political mathematicians of America (and Europe, but they're not my government).
In all this, I can't help but think back to the book written by my old Thesis adviser at Vassar that examined the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam and concluded that the most important similarity of all was that both war's legacies had sapped America's willingness to intervene in cases of actual moral necessity. He wrote the book in 2006, and though this argument may not be new, I had never heard it before, and his conclusion seems remarkably prescient and relative to today's events.
Is Obama's reaction to the Middle East a kind of reincarnation of some old school George Washington-style protective non-involvement doctrine? Is this the natural reaction to the over-active interventionism of George Bush's neoconservative era (something I attempted to write much of my thesis about)? Is this plain and simple uncertainty? Or is this just a purely-political bet that the public will be happier in the long run if we stay out of it and keep our hands clean? The history major-nerd in me cares about that stuff a lot, but more than anything, the human being in me only cares about putting an end to the insanity that is Libya.
I'm not one to herald the decline of America blah blah blah, but I am one, deep down, to worry about America ending up on the wrong side of history. American interventionism is a topic that comes up quite a lot in basically every political conversation I've ever had here in the Middle East, so this post does not do justice to everything I think about it, but suffice to say, I think America needs to do something more than use stern language and renew sanctions not only for political but also moral reasons.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Cairo into Damascus
(Beginning note: I've been trying for weeks now to put pictures up on the blog, but for some reason they never show up. Also, Twitter can't seem to figure out how to connect with my phone...Hopefully these get worked out soon?)
Ok wrote this one in a rush; too much stuff to fit into grammatically appropriate sentences. I’m here in Damascus now, sitting in my room in my classic Damascene style house on the ground floor hearing the sounds of one of my Syrian neighbors dance around puddles in my alley left over from what seems like the thousandth rain storm since I got here. The walls are very thin so I can hear pretty much everything going on outside, including the (5-times daily) call to prayer from the loud speaker phones of the Shi'a mosque just 40 feet down the alley. The 5am call to prayer wakes me up maybe one-day a week, but my prodigious sleeping abilities keep me under most of the time.
Thin walls notwithstanding, my house is pretty neat. Architecturally its got two floors with rooms and bathrooms and then a small rooftop landing arranged around a courtyard that doubles as our living room under a leaky removable roof that we'll take off in April or so when the weather gets nice. I live with two Germans, one Swiss, one Dutch, one Syrian, and soon to be one Swede and maybe one other American. They are all at least as good, or much better than me at Arabic, and living with them has already been impossibly interesting. They're all very culturally interested, and like going to Damascus' many art showings and concerts (a field in which Damascus has definitely got Cai-town beat). Swiss Philip (as opposed to the other, German Philip in our house) teaches Kapawerra (sp?). German Philip is taking drum (I am too ignorant to know what it is actually called, but it's basically like the Middle Eastern equivalent of the bongo or jembe). We all pitch an equal amount of money for certain shared foods, like the bread, hummos, mutabl, and baba ganoush we eat most mornings for breakfast, and we have really enjoyably intellectual conversations. Wednesdays are house nights where we try and do something together. Basically, I really really like my house. Even the fact that we don't have internet is kind of nice (except for blogging purposes), because it gives me more time to just focus on Arabic. This is really my first extended interaction with Europeans where I am in the minority as the only American, and I really quite like it actually, although I find I my tolerance for “America-controls-the-world jokes” which I already got quite a lot from Arabs. It has also been really fascinating getting to know my housemates' other European friends even though they all speak one or two other languages besides English and Arabic.
Speaking of me not understanding languages, Farhan, our Syrian housemate has some hilarious language quirks. He speaks rather good English, but he is largely self-taught, so he is consistently comical when he speaks English. To this day there is still an unexplained interaction that he had with me in my first week here where he kept on insistently telling me about “throwing the sandwich.” Also, because the other house owned by my landlord/tutor that Farhan gets paid to clean (Farhan has about four different jobs it seems [which is not to say he is poor by any definition of the word, in fact it is quite the contrary I think) is populated by mostly Brits, Farhan also humorously declared upon my first meeting him “oh my god I just got used to the British accent, but I cannot understand American now.”
Coincidentally, I suffered from the reverse problem with Arabic accents. I had just gotten used to—even a little confident in my—Egyptian Arabic, and now I was plopped in the middle of the Levant only to find I could not understand a thing. So began what has been sort of a depressing month in terms of my Arabic. The setbacks mostly involved tests in Fusha not going as well as I feel they should have while at the same time I was finding that all the skill I had acquired in speaking Egyptian ammeyya was now apparently only useful for getting myself laughed at—even more so than speaking fusha in fact. (For those of you, like my parents, who can't remember, fusha is Modern Standard Arabic that is in school, media, and government, while ammeya is the term for the various spoken dialects.)
And so as I have suddenly found my Egyptian ammeya useless it seemed to be an existentially important parallel the helplessness and regret I was feeling as I watched the history-making events—and we all know how I feel about history-making events—happening in Egypt.
As I described in the last post, there are quite a lot of things and people that I miss from Egypt, not the least of which are Koshary and my best friends. I even miss the as yet unmatched craziness of the streets and markets in Cairo. I missed the underlying method to the madness, and what it was like being a part of that order rising from the anarchy of every second. And of course, I think it was the same energy and fire and spirit in the streets and markets that animated Egyptians to rise up so phenomenally. I frequently found myself asking why I had left. If I hadn't bombed the placement test for the University of Maryland Graduate Masters Program just earlier in the week, I was strongly considering going back to Egypt to celebrate and see what it was like after Mubarak stepped down. The more I think of it, the more I regret not going back. And Syria, frankly, will not be going down the same path as Egypt anytime soon, because, well, Cairo and Damascus are just different.
For one thing, besides the MUCH higher number of non-American foreigners here, there is just a different feel to the interactions here. Syrians are not as open and forward as Egyptians are, and even though that means going to buy things is hugely less of a hassle, I think I don't like it. I’m going to wait to reserve judgment though, because I have three more months to really get a feel for this country. As I looked back on that last post I wrote, I feel quite confident in my observations about Egypt, so I am going to give myself time to develop a fuller opinion o f Syria. Especially because I have also met some really wonderful Syrians so far, including perhaps my most peculiar friend, who, for reasons I won't mention now, I will just call J. I'll save my stories (so far) about J for the next post, because, well, I’m going to his brother's likely-to-be lavish wedding...tonight.
And so the reason for sitting down and finally getting around to writing for the blog is because I finally understood a fair amount of Syrian Arabic. German Philip, one of the best non-Arab Arabic speakers I have ever met, has a girl, Hana, visiting him from Egypt who cooked a dinner for Philip, me, some of their other mutual friends from Egypt who happen to be here, and a Syrian poet. The pasta Hana made was good, but what was so great was the truly fascinating conversation ranging from various poems to the similarities and differences between the Syrian and Egyptian political systems she and the Poet had. Not only were the topics interesting, I was pleasantly (to say the least) surprised to find myself understanding probably 80% of their conversation. It helped that she was speaking Egyptian ammeya (it was almost a relief to hear all that vocabulary my brain had gotten used to using on a regular basis), and that he was definitely making an effort to elucidate the normally kind of slurred, almost lazy-sounding Syrian dialect that I am still having a hard time parsing through, but still, it was one of those moments that teachers and experienced Arabic students often talk about when you find yourself listening to a language being spoken and somehow find yourself understanding nearly all of it.
And so I am taking this all as a good omen that things will keep on getting better. As this post (and the long empty silence before it) probably indicates, it's been kind of a rough transition to Damascus at times for me. It's been a little lonely at times—even as I get to have all these intriguing cultural experiences with not only Syrians but also a plethora of Europeans, it's been hard not to dwell on what I left behind in Egypt, among other things.
Sarah, my American friend who coincidentally had also studied at AUC (two years before I did), and I had just talked about how we felt like the only ones who hadn't fallen madly in love with Damascus. It seems no coincidence that most every other one of the foreigners we've met here who is really enamored with Damascus had come here first before going anywhere else in the Middle East. Many of the ones who haven't, interestingly, had all gone to Cairo first. Perhaps the real change-inducing factor is that we all fall in love with the first place we go in the Middle East. I’m sure a lot of the appeal Cairo held for me had to do with how I've attached the experience the nuances of Middle Eastern life to that city, so Damascus didn't really have that much that shocked or wowed me, besides its quite wonderful Old City. But more than that, Damascus feels....quaint. And small. Indeed, the charm of the Old City, while enchanting at first, is sort of easily tired-of as it is not actually all that big.
The challenge then, should be for me to find new ways to enjoy myself while appreciating the good things that I may be overlooking here. It also means I have all the more reason to take advantage of all the amazing places in close proximity to Damascus. That should mean some blog posts about travels around Syria and/or Jordan and Turkey. I'll try to keep you all posted, of course.
Thin walls notwithstanding, my house is pretty neat. Architecturally its got two floors with rooms and bathrooms and then a small rooftop landing arranged around a courtyard that doubles as our living room under a leaky removable roof that we'll take off in April or so when the weather gets nice. I live with two Germans, one Swiss, one Dutch, one Syrian, and soon to be one Swede and maybe one other American. They are all at least as good, or much better than me at Arabic, and living with them has already been impossibly interesting. They're all very culturally interested, and like going to Damascus' many art showings and concerts (a field in which Damascus has definitely got Cai-town beat). Swiss Philip (as opposed to the other, German Philip in our house) teaches Kapawerra (sp?). German Philip is taking drum (I am too ignorant to know what it is actually called, but it's basically like the Middle Eastern equivalent of the bongo or jembe). We all pitch an equal amount of money for certain shared foods, like the bread, hummos, mutabl, and baba ganoush we eat most mornings for breakfast, and we have really enjoyably intellectual conversations. Wednesdays are house nights where we try and do something together. Basically, I really really like my house. Even the fact that we don't have internet is kind of nice (except for blogging purposes), because it gives me more time to just focus on Arabic. This is really my first extended interaction with Europeans where I am in the minority as the only American, and I really quite like it actually, although I find I my tolerance for “America-controls-the-world jokes” which I already got quite a lot from Arabs. It has also been really fascinating getting to know my housemates' other European friends even though they all speak one or two other languages besides English and Arabic.
Speaking of me not understanding languages, Farhan, our Syrian housemate has some hilarious language quirks. He speaks rather good English, but he is largely self-taught, so he is consistently comical when he speaks English. To this day there is still an unexplained interaction that he had with me in my first week here where he kept on insistently telling me about “throwing the sandwich.” Also, because the other house owned by my landlord/tutor that Farhan gets paid to clean (Farhan has about four different jobs it seems [which is not to say he is poor by any definition of the word, in fact it is quite the contrary I think) is populated by mostly Brits, Farhan also humorously declared upon my first meeting him “oh my god I just got used to the British accent, but I cannot understand American now.”
Coincidentally, I suffered from the reverse problem with Arabic accents. I had just gotten used to—even a little confident in my—Egyptian Arabic, and now I was plopped in the middle of the Levant only to find I could not understand a thing. So began what has been sort of a depressing month in terms of my Arabic. The setbacks mostly involved tests in Fusha not going as well as I feel they should have while at the same time I was finding that all the skill I had acquired in speaking Egyptian ammeyya was now apparently only useful for getting myself laughed at—even more so than speaking fusha in fact. (For those of you, like my parents, who can't remember, fusha is Modern Standard Arabic that is in school, media, and government, while ammeya is the term for the various spoken dialects.)
And so as I have suddenly found my Egyptian ammeya useless it seemed to be an existentially important parallel the helplessness and regret I was feeling as I watched the history-making events—and we all know how I feel about history-making events—happening in Egypt.
As I described in the last post, there are quite a lot of things and people that I miss from Egypt, not the least of which are Koshary and my best friends. I even miss the as yet unmatched craziness of the streets and markets in Cairo. I missed the underlying method to the madness, and what it was like being a part of that order rising from the anarchy of every second. And of course, I think it was the same energy and fire and spirit in the streets and markets that animated Egyptians to rise up so phenomenally. I frequently found myself asking why I had left. If I hadn't bombed the placement test for the University of Maryland Graduate Masters Program just earlier in the week, I was strongly considering going back to Egypt to celebrate and see what it was like after Mubarak stepped down. The more I think of it, the more I regret not going back. And Syria, frankly, will not be going down the same path as Egypt anytime soon, because, well, Cairo and Damascus are just different.
For one thing, besides the MUCH higher number of non-American foreigners here, there is just a different feel to the interactions here. Syrians are not as open and forward as Egyptians are, and even though that means going to buy things is hugely less of a hassle, I think I don't like it. I’m going to wait to reserve judgment though, because I have three more months to really get a feel for this country. As I looked back on that last post I wrote, I feel quite confident in my observations about Egypt, so I am going to give myself time to develop a fuller opinion o f Syria. Especially because I have also met some really wonderful Syrians so far, including perhaps my most peculiar friend, who, for reasons I won't mention now, I will just call J. I'll save my stories (so far) about J for the next post, because, well, I’m going to his brother's likely-to-be lavish wedding...tonight.
And so the reason for sitting down and finally getting around to writing for the blog is because I finally understood a fair amount of Syrian Arabic. German Philip, one of the best non-Arab Arabic speakers I have ever met, has a girl, Hana, visiting him from Egypt who cooked a dinner for Philip, me, some of their other mutual friends from Egypt who happen to be here, and a Syrian poet. The pasta Hana made was good, but what was so great was the truly fascinating conversation ranging from various poems to the similarities and differences between the Syrian and Egyptian political systems she and the Poet had. Not only were the topics interesting, I was pleasantly (to say the least) surprised to find myself understanding probably 80% of their conversation. It helped that she was speaking Egyptian ammeya (it was almost a relief to hear all that vocabulary my brain had gotten used to using on a regular basis), and that he was definitely making an effort to elucidate the normally kind of slurred, almost lazy-sounding Syrian dialect that I am still having a hard time parsing through, but still, it was one of those moments that teachers and experienced Arabic students often talk about when you find yourself listening to a language being spoken and somehow find yourself understanding nearly all of it.
And so I am taking this all as a good omen that things will keep on getting better. As this post (and the long empty silence before it) probably indicates, it's been kind of a rough transition to Damascus at times for me. It's been a little lonely at times—even as I get to have all these intriguing cultural experiences with not only Syrians but also a plethora of Europeans, it's been hard not to dwell on what I left behind in Egypt, among other things.
Sarah, my American friend who coincidentally had also studied at AUC (two years before I did), and I had just talked about how we felt like the only ones who hadn't fallen madly in love with Damascus. It seems no coincidence that most every other one of the foreigners we've met here who is really enamored with Damascus had come here first before going anywhere else in the Middle East. Many of the ones who haven't, interestingly, had all gone to Cairo first. Perhaps the real change-inducing factor is that we all fall in love with the first place we go in the Middle East. I’m sure a lot of the appeal Cairo held for me had to do with how I've attached the experience the nuances of Middle Eastern life to that city, so Damascus didn't really have that much that shocked or wowed me, besides its quite wonderful Old City. But more than that, Damascus feels....quaint. And small. Indeed, the charm of the Old City, while enchanting at first, is sort of easily tired-of as it is not actually all that big.
The challenge then, should be for me to find new ways to enjoy myself while appreciating the good things that I may be overlooking here. It also means I have all the more reason to take advantage of all the amazing places in close proximity to Damascus. That should mean some blog posts about travels around Syria and/or Jordan and Turkey. I'll try to keep you all posted, of course.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The Egyptian Revolution: My Article for the Vassar Chronicle
The following is the *mostly* final draft (Edit: this is now the exact copy that I sent, so it is indeed the Final draft now) of a piece I was kindly (or foolishly) invited to write for Vassar's political journal, The Vassar Chronicle. I had already been writing something for you guys, but as things kept changing from day to day, the versions of this changed considerably from when I had started writing. In my next post I'll try to put up some of the pictures I got from the day of protests in Egypt I was there for. Anyway, here's my article. I don't know if I like the title, but it's the best of the four I've come up with so far...
On January 26th, after five months living and studying in Egypt, I left for Damascus, the next destination in my studies, as planned, but the Egypt I left was not the same one in which I arrived.As you all know by now, on January 25th, thousands of Egyptians gathered for the first day of protests that would soon engulf the whole country. After that first day, I’ll admit I was not ready to believe that this really could be as pivotal as the protests in Tunisia had been. Stuck in an old way of thinking, bedeviled by the same complacency and lack of foresight that has frozen so many expectations about Egypt’s future for so long, I had no idea even as I stood among the protesters that millions would come forth just days later.
Another occasional misconception held that the recent deaths by shark-attack near one of Egypt's famous Red Sea beach destinations had been trained and planted by Israel's Mossad in order to damage Egyptian tourism. This somehow-not-entirely-discredited theory was not believed by the majority of Egyptians, but that it managed to persist at all is less a reflection of Egyptians' backwardness so much as it again, shows how stacked they seem to feel the odds are against them.
* * * * *
On January 26th, after five months living and studying in Egypt, I left for Damascus, the next destination in my studies, as planned, but the Egypt I left was not the same one in which I arrived.As you all know by now, on January 25th, thousands of Egyptians gathered for the first day of protests that would soon engulf the whole country. After that first day, I’ll admit I was not ready to believe that this really could be as pivotal as the protests in Tunisia had been. Stuck in an old way of thinking, bedeviled by the same complacency and lack of foresight that has frozen so many expectations about Egypt’s future for so long, I had no idea even as I stood among the protesters that millions would come forth just days later.
Jasmine on the Nile
Despite the fact that news sources--including even Al Jazeera--were remarkably silent about Egypt's protests on their first day, the details and causes of Egypt's turbulence are fairly well known to anyone with a pulse by now it seems like. Just two months after blatantly rigged parliamentary elections turned out huge results for Mubarak's party, Egyptians felt the reverberations of Tunisia's “Jasmine Revolution,” and as if woken by a splash of cold water, a group of young Egyptians sprung into action online to bring about the same kind of protests that could lead to the ousting of their own multi-decade presidential dictator. Indeed one of the signs I saw most often on that first day of protests read "In the beginning, Tunisia. Now, Egypt." Undoubtedly, that's the order it will be remembered in, but with a population almost eight-times the size of Tunisia's, Egypt will be the one that changed everything, a fact surely not lost on Egyptians.
Egyptians chose January 25th, because it was the Egyptian national holiday of "Police Day," coming forth specifically to defy that ever-present symbol of the Egyptian government's control that the day was intended to celebrate. Some news outlets reported for a while that they were protesting corruption, unemployment, bureaucratic incompetence, and the thirty-year-old emergency law allowing charge-less arrests, but really the Egyptians that came out were protesting one thing and one thing only: Hosni Mubarak.
The 82 year-old President has been serving since the Carter administration in no small part because his political party has stamped out all viable opposition and rigged the political mechanics of the country to keep it that way. Furthermore, he has systematically injected his family and himself into most of the country's major industries, enriching his family with tens of billions. And so, on January 25th, Cairenes assembled in various spots around the city and marched to the major square in downtown, Midan Tahrir ("Liberation Square"), to face water cannons, tear gas, batons, rocks, rubber bullets and the threat of arrest--a fate much worse in Egypt than in the U.S. Indeed, for political dissidents in Mubarak's Egypt, arrest can mean being driven out into the desert to be marooned, it can mean sodomy by a broomstick, or it can mean good old-fashioned torture in a solitary cell. Thanks to this merciless security apparatus, Mubarak has held onto power through a mixture of fear and complacency, and so on that first day of protests, I was still pessimistic about the protester's chances. My pessimism stemmed from seeing the resignation that fear caused on a daily basis.
The way it was…
There is an Arabic verb (and a noun in this case), istisalam, related to both the word salaam ("Peace") and islam (literally, "submission"), that would often pop into my head when pondering the state of Egyptian politics. When verbs in Arabic start with "ista-" it can imply both emphasis and a sort of personal involvement with the action, and so this word is used to signify total surrender or capitulation.
I often think of this word because, before the protests, every Egyptian you talked to could (and probably would) swiftly tally up the long list of ills afflicting their country, yet they did so largely without anger or passion. Instead, there was only depressed resignation, like it was all too far gone to even warrant their energy.
Even the smallest aspects of their lives seemed touched by this submission to their country’s problems. During one of my first full conversations in (broken) Arabic I watched as an Egyptian carelessly threw the paper that covered his sandwich onto the street just minutes after he had complained that the appalling number of trash-piles around Cairo never seem to go away. I asked him about it, and he just shrugged.
From my conversations with Egyptians, they seemed similarly resigned to their country's undemocratic government.When pressed about whether they thought Mubarak's son, Gamal, would be the next President (most believed he was being groomed for higher offices), the only answer I ever got went something like what my good Egyptian friend once said to me, "Who else would Mubarak allow?" Similarly, a cab driver once said to me when I asked him if it was ok that Gamal might effectively inherit the executive office, "[o]f course this is not Democracy, but it is just what we have in Egypt...." as if the two could not coexist in the same country.
More troubling perhaps was how this sense of surrender seemed to penetrate some Egyptians so deeply that they felt there was actually no solution. The (very) few Egyptians I ever met that actually claimed to like Mubarak exonerated him based on their belief that he could not be blamed for Egypt's problems because they are too big for anyone to handle. In conversations about their country's ills, they would often cite the statistic that Egypt has a burgeoning population of over 80 million by itself as if it alone represented too high a number to ever be dealt with. Sometimes they would say 100 million, and one even tried to convince me that this was bigger than the United States, mistakes which are not only comical but which only further seem to reflect how unmanageable they perceived this problem to be.
Another occasional misconception held that the recent deaths by shark-attack near one of Egypt's famous Red Sea beach destinations had been trained and planted by Israel's Mossad in order to damage Egyptian tourism. This somehow-not-entirely-discredited theory was not believed by the majority of Egyptians, but that it managed to persist at all is less a reflection of Egyptians' backwardness so much as it again, shows how stacked they seem to feel the odds are against them.
I even began to perceive a connection between this surrender and cynicism in the way that Egyptians think about their old-age. On a few occasions when talking with middle-aged Egyptian professionals who are nearing what we Americans would consider retirement age, they would tell me--proudly almost--of how they never bothered to save their money. As they put it, they would rather just enjoy their lives. Of course, there are many other cultural factors that play into this--not the least of which are the stronger family support systems in Egyptian culture as well as the appallingly low average daily wages for most Egyptians (about $2 a day according to the New York Times)--but I can't help but feel there is at least the shade of a connection between the pessimism engendered in politically repressive systems like Egypt and the feeling that your life is better worth enjoying in the here and now than hoping to do so in the uncertain future.
Who shall lead…
So where does that leave things in Egypt today (February 4th at the time of this writing)? I have obsessively followed Twitter (finally it seems useful to me!) and any of the major news sources writing new information about the events there, so I am just as excited and awed as anybody at how decisively Egyptians have risen up, swelling from thousands to millions in just a week. But what I fear most of all is that this movement will remain leader-less and without a unified idea for the Egypt they want post-Mubarak. Mohammad el-Baradei, though respected by many Egyptians for leading a mostly uncorrupted life and for amassing power and influence independent of Mubarak--no small feat--nonetheless elicits lukewarm support at best. One chant heard often in the streets of Egypt this week has been "Not Mubarak, Not El Baradei, Not [Muslim] Brotherhood; We want no leaders! We just want democracy." It is undoubtedly a good thing that the protesters want Democracy and furthermore that they resist the potentially extremist religious leadership (or the perception of one) associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they also don't want Baradei, or any leaders whatsoever. Leaders have proven corruptible, so Egyptians are understandably cynical and suspicious of outside interference. But is this nihilism? What do they believe in, besides the need for Mubarak to go? Who is crafting the plan for what happens after, and why will Egyptians be any more inclined to follow them?
From what my friends in Egypt said, Baradei did gain some credibility and praise for coming out to the front lines on Friday, and even though his confinement under house arrest may have left Egyptians feeling again he was just playing it safe, he came back to the protests a few days later with little love lost. At this point he is quite well positioned to act as a representative, especially in light of his apparent ability to draw allegiance from many of the different opposition groups, including the most organized of the groups, the Muslim Brotherhood.* But then again, unless Baradei accrues much more respect from the people very quickly—which I’m not ruling out given his positioning as the chief representative for most of the organized opposition groups—the level of popularity he has right now is hardly enough to make him a shoe-in to succeed Mubarak.
*(On a side note: despite what Glenn Beck said this week, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, probably one of the most moderate “Islamist” groups in the Middle East, are not going to be the ones who take over Egypt when this is all through. See this excellent article in the NYT pretty much explaining why the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't matter and is not a threat.)
Recently an American university professor suggested in an Al-Jazeera op-ed that today’s Egypt may be like 1989 Czechoslovakia and Poland with their hugely popular first post-soviet presidents, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. The truth is that Baradei is not yet their equal in stature or popular respect. I think many Americans would like it if Baradei succeeded to the leadership of Egypt, because he is a known quantity of sorts, but that’s not how he’ll get the job. This all could change, but it is not guaranteed, no matter how much I think Americans would like it to be so.
Burning history
Today though, February 2, was the consecration of Egypt’s pro-democracy protests by fire. Watching masses of Egyptians literally burning and breaking up their capital city was actually heartwrenching for me in a way that I would never have predicted.
Dirty, crowded, confused, and often a little offensive, Cairo is beset by a whole host of problems to be sure, and if you had asked me even just two months ago, I would have told you I would be happy to leave it. But somewhere, sometime, my mind changed. Amidst Cairo’s craziness, there is a rhythm to the madness that you can find yourself falling into like you fall into stride with the people walking next to you. Cairo is one of the world’s truly organic metropolises. Made up of 18 million people, they accumulated there over the centuries to be a part of its history and its energy. When you exit the city’s famous hilltop Mohammad Ali mosque and see the Great Pyramids through the haze your gaze is still drawn down past the city’s infamous “thousand” minarets to the remarkable city of colorful Egyptian lives. There is something special about Cairo—and it’s saying something that I feel this way still as I sit in the heart of Damascus, probably the world’s oldest inhabited city.
So as a result, just as I became aware of this strange love I for a city I lived in for only five months, I had to watch as it tore itself apart thanks to the paid thugs of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. What had been perhaps most amazing about the protests up to that point had been their distinctly, purposefully non-violent tactics—and then came Mubarak’s mercenaries, armed with machetes and malotovs that they would aim indiscriminately at the unarmed pro-democracy protesters camped out in Tahrir Square as well as at the famous Egyptian Museum whose priceless antiquities the “pro-government” forces had most likely helped loot just a few nights prior.
It may be impossible to prove Mubarak’s party was behind the sudden emergence of so-called pro-government supporters, but the discovery of numerous police and security force IDs on them, coupled with the ways they targeted foreign reporters, and the similarities to intimidation tactics implemented by the NDP around elections seems about as convincing as anything else. Mubarak has knowingly and willingly committed violence against his countrymen behind closed doors for years, but now he has perpetrated it for all the world to see.
For whatever stability and continuity Mubarak previously lent to American affairs in the region, it should now be completely clear that he has forfeited whatever moral right to lead Egypt he ever had, and the U.S. should completely recant any support for his regime, regardless of the political consequences we may fear from our various other allies in the region.
Consequences confused
Some have probably argued that severing ties with Mubarak might make our other Arab allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan (and arguably Lebanon and Syria), uneasy with the apparent fickleness of our allegiance. I am not so morally-high-minded as to argue that we should avoid associating with such governments all together—for the sake of ending this piece, I’ll just say that foreign affairs are too complicated for such a blunt tact and leave it at that. But Mubarak’s actions, this open violence against his own people as they attempt to protest peacefully, has crossed a line, and we must react with more than vague statements about the need for “transition.”
Moreover, the argument that a repudiation of Mubarak’s regime might threaten our relations with the other benign-ish dictatorships at best misses the point, and at worst blatantly misleads. Frankly, I think such allies should be a little spooked that we will renege on our support for them should literally millions, representing members from every cross-section of their population, stand up in protest of their autocratic, oppressive policies.
I am totally comfortable with that being the line we draw in the sand. If that means slightly higher oil prices, so be it. Already, we have seen how Yemen, Libya, and Jordan, all suddenly feeling more accountable to their people, have promised to implement measures to help their populations (the actual merits of those measures themselves is another story, but I stand by my point). We have long claimed that this was essentially what we demand of our allies, accountability to their people, and I think abandoning Mubarak can only reinforce such a righteous message. I know the people of Egypt would have appreciated such a message long ago.
Pessimism justified?
I don’t know what’s next for Egypt and my thoughts about whether the revolutions taking place in Tunisia and Egypt will spread to other countries in the Middle East are less thought out. The events in Iran just two years ago may beg the question of whether Mubarak will even step down, though I think Egypt’s security apparatus is not so pervasive as Iran’s. If it were, I think Mubarak would have used it already to squelch this movement. Furthermore, the demographics of Egypt’s pro-democracy protesters seem far more varied than those that participated in Iran. Protests have sprung up with gusto in nearly every major city in Egypt—not just its capital. Egypt is bigger than Iran’s protests. So, in a word, I am hopeful.
Yet, the pessimism displayed by the thousands that accepted the bribes—both ideological and monetary—from Mubarak’s ringleaders to come out and attack the protesters yesterday, reminded me of how istisalam seemed to define the mindset of the Egypt I lived in, even as I fell in love with its people and its capital. I don’t think Mubarak will succeed or be able to remain in power until the Fall elections, but I do worry that the next government will become co-opted by men possessed of the same cynicism that made megalomaniacs out of NDP’s leaders who felt no accountability to any but themselves. I fear they will throw the trash out onto the streets instead of where it belongs, shrugging it off because deep down they still believe that their country is doomed anyway.
On the other hand, there is another word that is even harder to avoid when walking around Egypt, and that is the Arabic name for Cairo, al-qahira, which means “victor.” I think the Egyptian people’s dedication and devotion over the past week carries within the recipe for an Egyptian future that will hold onto that optimistic idealism that induced them to keep their protests peaceful right up until the point they were attacked. Perhaps the cynicism of life under Mubarak need not persist. Perhaps the people will emerge the uncompromised victors of this revolution.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Backup life plan: Egypt tour guide
From the Old Wonders of the World in Egypt to the new Wonders of Dubai and from there to the wonderful and surprising interactions I got to have in Syria and Lebanon, the past four weeks were just about everything I could have asked for, and there is really more to tell then I will ever be able to realistically write down (especially given my penchant for long-windedness...). That being said, I'll try and hit some of the highlights in the next couple of posts.
Starting the moment I picked up Eleanor and Dylan from the airport I had a great time leading them around Egypt. I'd been looking forward to sharing all the things I've learned and picked up on here for a long time, so I was pretty excited to play the tour guide. Plus, during our time in Egypt for the most part I had a number of pretty gratifying Arabic experiences as the translator for Ellie and Dylan. I found on more than one occasion that I was able to converse (as in an actual conversations(!)) in Arabic at least in some very basic ways and fairly regularly even with enough skill to crack a few good Egyptian jokes which had me feeling pretty good. What's more I even managed to hold my own well enough in a few good arguments (usually having to do with bargaining for some prices, of course). At the same time, Dylan and Eleanor had no idea how much I didn't understand of what Egyptians would say to me, but as I'm sure most language learners know, you kind of learn to fake it well enough to believably limp through most conversations that you don't feel like working all the way through.
So anyway, on our first day of the Egypt tour we went to Giza--the place I had been avoiding going to specifically because I knew I would be going with Eleanor and Dylan for sure anyway. I kind of suck at touring ruins, as I've mentioned, but the size of the Pyramids is pretty hard to argue with:
And of course, the Sphinx:
In Arabic, the Sphinx is called "Abu Hol," or Father of Terror
After Giza, I took them downtown to get some juice and other classic Egyptian foods. We also went to Khan el-Khalili around midnight which to my shock and disturbance was actually completely barren--something I thought never actually happened.
The next day I took Eleanor and Dylan to the Citadel to see the fantastic Mohammad Ali mosque and the stunning view of Cairo from the fortress' elevated location. I then also convinced them to walk with me somewhere I had not yet been in Cairo, but had been meaning to go to for a long time: the Garbage City. I knew from the maps in our trusty Lonely Planet guide book that the city and the famous church of St. Simon the Tanner tucked away in the cliffs surrounding the city were fairly close to the Citadel and so I convinced them that it would be a cool idea to walk there. This involved asking multiple Egyptians for directions (you can't just ask one as we know) and then walking first along a highway and then through the, um, not clean streets of the garbage city. In between the highway and the garbage city though we had the good fortune to walk past some pre-teen Egyptian boys playing soccer on a park/patch of grass between some streets. Eleanor patiently let Dylan and I indulge in some pick up soccer with the boys--possibly one of my favorite memories of being in Egypt of all time, I think.
After our impromptu game (during which Dylan, as usual, played better than me) we made our way into the garbage city which was also a very cool experience. Now the area, a portion of Cairo that is partially tucked away into a cliff, is officially part of an area called Manshiyet Nasr, but the garbage city is really its own distinct area. For centuries, this region of the city has been home to the "Zabaleen," or "Garbage People," who have taken care of the city's garbage, and who have also historically almost always Coptic Christians for reasons I don't fully know. Even to this day, you will see them late at night picking up the bags of garbage distributed on certain street corners around Cairo and loading them up into trucks. Despite having seen that countless times, I had not realized that they indeed literally just took it back to their area of Cairo, but judging from the number of trucks loaded to the brim with garbage bags driving past Dylan, Eleanor and I, it seems that is exactly what they do. I think they burn quite a lot of the garbage, but nowhere near all of it, as piles of garbage were everywhere to be found in the city, though not just piled up any old place as you might expect. Instead, they had either piled it all in certain locations, or had actually taken it into what seemed like their own houses. After walking past what seemed like more or less a giant pile of trash near the entrance to the city's main road, we passed what appeared to be abandoned store fronts filled with trash. At one point we passed one that was particularly full that actually had an Egyptian man sitting in a little dug-out amidst the trash in his store/home(?). I didn't get too many pictures here, because I felt a little intrusive doing so, but I did like the way the clothes were all hanging from everyone's windows:
The state of the city sounds sort of shocking, and while thinking about it afterwards it made me sort of sad, but at the time I was mostly taking cues from the residents I walked past, none of whom seemed particularly bothered by the state of their city. Also remarkable was that we were basically not harassed at all, even with blonde, blue-eyed Eleanor. This sort of made sense given that there is a direct relationship between how used Egyptians are to seeing tourists and how much they will harass said tourists (sort of contradictory-seeming when you think about it at first, I know). After asking a few of the nice residents we took a right turn and a slight hike up a curvy road to find the rather impressive Church of St. Simon carved into the white stone cliffs.
St. Simon was canonized as a Saint for successfully praying to God to move the mountain (as some part of the gospel of Matthew says: If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to the mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move, nothing will be impossible for you) and in the process saving all the Copts. For some reason though, he didn't get himself a fancy church until the 1990's despite being an important saint for Coptic Christians in Egypt for almost a millennium. Anyway, his church had lots of cool reliefs chiseled into the walls and though we couldn't see it, also had a multi-thousand person outdoor auditorium for big services that we were not allowed to see unfortunately. It was clean and quiet and really rather beautiful, but it also felt a little like an abandoned Christian amusement park as there were very few people there.
The next day we got up at around three in the morning to take the short flight down to Luxor (the train ride which I had recently done to Aswan could have been cool for Eleanor and Dylan, but we didn't have the time). We landed in Luxor around 6:30 in the morning to see this dream-like sight (or was it just dream-like because I was half asleep?):
And then this cheerful sign:
More on Luxor soon. Lots of crazy temples and stuff. And someone called Mr. Dude.
Starting the moment I picked up Eleanor and Dylan from the airport I had a great time leading them around Egypt. I'd been looking forward to sharing all the things I've learned and picked up on here for a long time, so I was pretty excited to play the tour guide. Plus, during our time in Egypt for the most part I had a number of pretty gratifying Arabic experiences as the translator for Ellie and Dylan. I found on more than one occasion that I was able to converse (as in an actual conversations(!)) in Arabic at least in some very basic ways and fairly regularly even with enough skill to crack a few good Egyptian jokes which had me feeling pretty good. What's more I even managed to hold my own well enough in a few good arguments (usually having to do with bargaining for some prices, of course). At the same time, Dylan and Eleanor had no idea how much I didn't understand of what Egyptians would say to me, but as I'm sure most language learners know, you kind of learn to fake it well enough to believably limp through most conversations that you don't feel like working all the way through.So anyway, on our first day of the Egypt tour we went to Giza--the place I had been avoiding going to specifically because I knew I would be going with Eleanor and Dylan for sure anyway. I kind of suck at touring ruins, as I've mentioned, but the size of the Pyramids is pretty hard to argue with:
Dylan and Ellie in front of the second biggest pyramid, but the only one that managed to keep some of its limestone siding from thrifty Egyptian rulers who used the limestone on the monuments for other building projects.
In Arabic, the Sphinx is called "Abu Hol," or Father of Terror
After Giza, I took them downtown to get some juice and other classic Egyptian foods. We also went to Khan el-Khalili around midnight which to my shock and disturbance was actually completely barren--something I thought never actually happened.
The next day I took Eleanor and Dylan to the Citadel to see the fantastic Mohammad Ali mosque and the stunning view of Cairo from the fortress' elevated location. I then also convinced them to walk with me somewhere I had not yet been in Cairo, but had been meaning to go to for a long time: the Garbage City. I knew from the maps in our trusty Lonely Planet guide book that the city and the famous church of St. Simon the Tanner tucked away in the cliffs surrounding the city were fairly close to the Citadel and so I convinced them that it would be a cool idea to walk there. This involved asking multiple Egyptians for directions (you can't just ask one as we know) and then walking first along a highway and then through the, um, not clean streets of the garbage city. In between the highway and the garbage city though we had the good fortune to walk past some pre-teen Egyptian boys playing soccer on a park/patch of grass between some streets. Eleanor patiently let Dylan and I indulge in some pick up soccer with the boys--possibly one of my favorite memories of being in Egypt of all time, I think.
After our impromptu game (during which Dylan, as usual, played better than me) we made our way into the garbage city which was also a very cool experience. Now the area, a portion of Cairo that is partially tucked away into a cliff, is officially part of an area called Manshiyet Nasr, but the garbage city is really its own distinct area. For centuries, this region of the city has been home to the "Zabaleen," or "Garbage People," who have taken care of the city's garbage, and who have also historically almost always Coptic Christians for reasons I don't fully know. Even to this day, you will see them late at night picking up the bags of garbage distributed on certain street corners around Cairo and loading them up into trucks. Despite having seen that countless times, I had not realized that they indeed literally just took it back to their area of Cairo, but judging from the number of trucks loaded to the brim with garbage bags driving past Dylan, Eleanor and I, it seems that is exactly what they do. I think they burn quite a lot of the garbage, but nowhere near all of it, as piles of garbage were everywhere to be found in the city, though not just piled up any old place as you might expect. Instead, they had either piled it all in certain locations, or had actually taken it into what seemed like their own houses. After walking past what seemed like more or less a giant pile of trash near the entrance to the city's main road, we passed what appeared to be abandoned store fronts filled with trash. At one point we passed one that was particularly full that actually had an Egyptian man sitting in a little dug-out amidst the trash in his store/home(?). I didn't get too many pictures here, because I felt a little intrusive doing so, but I did like the way the clothes were all hanging from everyone's windows:
The state of the city sounds sort of shocking, and while thinking about it afterwards it made me sort of sad, but at the time I was mostly taking cues from the residents I walked past, none of whom seemed particularly bothered by the state of their city. Also remarkable was that we were basically not harassed at all, even with blonde, blue-eyed Eleanor. This sort of made sense given that there is a direct relationship between how used Egyptians are to seeing tourists and how much they will harass said tourists (sort of contradictory-seeming when you think about it at first, I know). After asking a few of the nice residents we took a right turn and a slight hike up a curvy road to find the rather impressive Church of St. Simon carved into the white stone cliffs.
St. Simon was canonized as a Saint for successfully praying to God to move the mountain (as some part of the gospel of Matthew says: If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to the mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move, nothing will be impossible for you) and in the process saving all the Copts. For some reason though, he didn't get himself a fancy church until the 1990's despite being an important saint for Coptic Christians in Egypt for almost a millennium. Anyway, his church had lots of cool reliefs chiseled into the walls and though we couldn't see it, also had a multi-thousand person outdoor auditorium for big services that we were not allowed to see unfortunately. It was clean and quiet and really rather beautiful, but it also felt a little like an abandoned Christian amusement park as there were very few people there.
The next day we got up at around three in the morning to take the short flight down to Luxor (the train ride which I had recently done to Aswan could have been cool for Eleanor and Dylan, but we didn't have the time). We landed in Luxor around 6:30 in the morning to see this dream-like sight (or was it just dream-like because I was half asleep?):
And then this cheerful sign:
More on Luxor soon. Lots of crazy temples and stuff. And someone called Mr. Dude.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
I'm currently obsessed with this
Things I'm also marginally obsessed by:
Dubai water parks, the amazingly cheap and delicious food in Damascus, trying to figure out whether Dylan and I should still go to Lebanon as planned in light of the recent "collapse" of the government there. My answer, still yes probably. More on my shenanigans in Dubai soon.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Alex pt. 3 - The long awaited anti-climax
I'm currently publishing this from a pay-by-the-hour internet computer in mine and Dylan's awesome hotel in Dubai. It is currently 3:28am here. Why am I up so late? Because I was doing some awesome clubbing in Dubai? Because I was base-jumping off the Burj Khalifa? Yes? No. Because I'm working on a Grad School application for a two-year Masters Arabic program that comes with a fellowship to cover the tuition and the living costs for the second year of the program when you are in Damascus. And because I decided to do this at 5 in the morning before Dylan and Eleanor came. Turns out this is maybe the worst timing ever. Alas.
Anyway, here's a little somethin somethin about my long passed trip to Alexandria.
I don't know what took me so long to put up this post as it wasn't even that long of a day thanks to the, shall we say, unhelpfulness of a particular ticket seller in the Alexandria train station. Generally I found most Alexandrians to be like those two young guys in the streets whom I initially tried to blow off by speaking Spanish: helpful, friendly, occasionally wanting a picture with me, and much more patient with silly foreigners than Cairenes. Unfortunately, the ticket seller in Alex was not like these other more pleasant Alexandrians. We got up early-ish thanks in part due to the insistence of our unwanted travelling companion, Rachel (actually we were planning on doing this anyway, but she made a big passive-aggressive fuss about it...) and headed over to the train station to get our tickets back to Cairo. The plan was to take a late train back and get to some of the last tourist sites done while spending a good part of the day at a beach. Now, in case you've forgotten thanks to this blogger's non-chronological blog posting, we had not yet been to the glorious beaches of Sinai, so we'd all been savoring the thought of a relaxing beach day as a change from our city lives in Cairo. Thus, you can imagine our shock and disappointment when the first ticket seller we talked to informed us that every train, except for one at 2pm, was sold out. It would seem that Rachel, to my chagrin, had been right to have been complaining that we hadn't gotten our tickets yet. Curses!
With seemingly no other options available our group started buying our tickets for the 2 o'clock train while sullenly working out a new plan for our day. Luckily, Nav and I seemed to have the same thought something along the lines of: "wait a second, this is Egypt..." We exchanged suspicious glances, started to say "Maybe we should..." at the same time, stopped, and then ducked the queue separating ticket booths to talk to the other ticket seller who had no customers (which maybe also should have been a clue). I asked him if there were any trains with free seats later than 2pm, and he gave a sort of pitying look like, "Yeah dude, why wouldn't there be?" and said yes, at 7:30pm. We got our tickets changed to 7:30 after little righteous indignation on our part and a short conversation between the two ticket guys which I couldn't hear but which I imagined was something like this:
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "Dude, wtf? Why'd you tell these kids there were only seats on the 2 o'clock train?"
-Dickhead first ticket seller: "I dunno man, they were buggin me with their horrible pronunciation and convoluted grammar constructions...and...stuff..."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "...You just had the 2 o'clock train page open on your computer and didn't want to change it, didn't you?"
-Dickhead ticket seller: "Well yeah! And I was really busy moving these papers in this stack over into this other stack! Didn't they see that??"
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "I don't even know why you have stacks of paper, man. All we do is sell tickets for the Alexandria-Cairo train route. All we do."
-First ticket seller: "Me neither, man. Me neither...But didn't they see that I had them?! And why'd you have to go and tell them about the other train? Now I have to change their tickets! GOD."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "You're an idiot."
And so it was, relieved to have only about 2 hours less than originally planned, we decided to skip our planned visit to some ex-royal gardens somewhere and go straight to the beach. Because all the beaches are not actually on the part of the coast in the center of Alex, you have to go East or West. We chose East on the recommendation of our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook as there was supposed to be a particularly good (yet cheap!) private beach that way. The free public beaches were out of the question, as those are for the more conservative, anti-bikini Muslims, but the beach we chose only ended up costing something like LE10 each, and the long cab ride east along the Corniche afforded not only some beautiful views of the ocean and beaches, but also some really interesting snapshots of the city. Driving along I got to see some of Alex's bigger buildings and interesting restaurant areas, but I was most pleased to see how many random public aesthetic additions there were along the road. With fountains and murals and sculptures and a number of other art installations, Alex really seemed to show that it was a serious city trying to not only take care of itself, but also to nurture and encourage some culture...unlike Cairo. The capstone of this cultural self-improvement we would be visiting later that day, but first...
the beach!
Our cab entered what clearly seemed to be a new, upscale exurb of pricey condos and apartments. The streets were unusually clean by the standards of most Egyptian cities I've been to, and nicely manicured and arranged palm trees gave the feel of a Miami neighborhood. We found the boardwalk entrance and walked past a number of beachy snack shops to our beach's entrance. After getting our tickets one of the attendants brought our chairs and umbrella to the only spot left still on the water at the very end of the beach, and we set up.
The girls, minus Rachel who, it turned out, couldn't swim, all quickly got in the water and i soon joined them. I'd been hoping to spend the morning doing lots of walking around and exploring before I became a beach bum, so as soon as I got into the cool water, I decided to swim down farther east to get some exercise and see what was going on down the coast on the other beaches.
My little swim turned into about two and a half hour affair as I got distracted first by an international kayaking race that was being held, and then by what I realized were some prime body surfing waves. As I sort of childishly bodysurfed over and over, I couldn't help but be reminded of my best friend who taught me how to body surf in Hawaii in 9th grade. On my swim back up the shore to where I'd left the girls, I ran into an Egyptian boy--the only other person as far out from the shore as me--with whom a conversation quickly led to more childish fun for me. Afte exchanging the usual "Oh you speak Arabic?" frivolities, we were soon swimming back toward the land to gather his group of friends and a soccer ball to play keep away with. They were all apparently entry-level employees at a law firm in Cairo on vacation for the day, and I ended up goofing around and playing for probably another 45 minutes.
Now not to brag or anything, but just like in the cold spring of Abu Shrouf (outside Siwa) when our driver (foolishly!) challenged me to a race, I seemed to have a pretty solid advantage in my swimming abilities. Is it fair to say that Egyptians, handicapped by their desert upbringing, are not especially good swimmers? Maybe I'm inclined to say yes. But they sure are fun sometimes anyway. After a nice long swim back to my friends, I was good and ready for beach bumdom. The girls were slightly worried at best, even though I had been gone for almost a good 3 hours. They were "JUST starting" to get concerned. I chose to believe it was out of faith in my swimming abilities. Ha.
After a nap and some snacks, we rinsed off and headed to the library of Alexandria about half of the way back to our hotel from the beach. Outside the library were sculptures and sort of decorative pool of water between the library and the corniche, and there were plenty of tourists and Egyptians alike going in and out. Many of them were quite friendly and it was as I was trying to squeeze by a group of girls excitedly asking Julia questions that I accidentally bumped into a little boy. I said something innocuous like "excuse me" in Arabic as he looked at me, and attempted to keep walking only to find myself suddenly surrounded by a whole crew of boys. One boy saw I was holding a camera and gestured for us to take a picture (why are Egyptians so fond of having their pictures taken with foreigners on the the foreigners' cameras? I don't know...), which immediately turned into...well...this:
Anyway, here's a little somethin somethin about my long passed trip to Alexandria.
Sculptures outside the new Library of Alexandria
I don't know what took me so long to put up this post as it wasn't even that long of a day thanks to the, shall we say, unhelpfulness of a particular ticket seller in the Alexandria train station. Generally I found most Alexandrians to be like those two young guys in the streets whom I initially tried to blow off by speaking Spanish: helpful, friendly, occasionally wanting a picture with me, and much more patient with silly foreigners than Cairenes. Unfortunately, the ticket seller in Alex was not like these other more pleasant Alexandrians. We got up early-ish thanks in part due to the insistence of our unwanted travelling companion, Rachel (actually we were planning on doing this anyway, but she made a big passive-aggressive fuss about it...) and headed over to the train station to get our tickets back to Cairo. The plan was to take a late train back and get to some of the last tourist sites done while spending a good part of the day at a beach. Now, in case you've forgotten thanks to this blogger's non-chronological blog posting, we had not yet been to the glorious beaches of Sinai, so we'd all been savoring the thought of a relaxing beach day as a change from our city lives in Cairo. Thus, you can imagine our shock and disappointment when the first ticket seller we talked to informed us that every train, except for one at 2pm, was sold out. It would seem that Rachel, to my chagrin, had been right to have been complaining that we hadn't gotten our tickets yet. Curses!
With seemingly no other options available our group started buying our tickets for the 2 o'clock train while sullenly working out a new plan for our day. Luckily, Nav and I seemed to have the same thought something along the lines of: "wait a second, this is Egypt..." We exchanged suspicious glances, started to say "Maybe we should..." at the same time, stopped, and then ducked the queue separating ticket booths to talk to the other ticket seller who had no customers (which maybe also should have been a clue). I asked him if there were any trains with free seats later than 2pm, and he gave a sort of pitying look like, "Yeah dude, why wouldn't there be?" and said yes, at 7:30pm. We got our tickets changed to 7:30 after little righteous indignation on our part and a short conversation between the two ticket guys which I couldn't hear but which I imagined was something like this:
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "Dude, wtf? Why'd you tell these kids there were only seats on the 2 o'clock train?"
-Dickhead first ticket seller: "I dunno man, they were buggin me with their horrible pronunciation and convoluted grammar constructions...and...stuff..."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "...You just had the 2 o'clock train page open on your computer and didn't want to change it, didn't you?"
-Dickhead ticket seller: "Well yeah! And I was really busy moving these papers in this stack over into this other stack! Didn't they see that??"
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "I don't even know why you have stacks of paper, man. All we do is sell tickets for the Alexandria-Cairo train route. All we do."
-First ticket seller: "Me neither, man. Me neither...But didn't they see that I had them?! And why'd you have to go and tell them about the other train? Now I have to change their tickets! GOD."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "You're an idiot."
And so it was, relieved to have only about 2 hours less than originally planned, we decided to skip our planned visit to some ex-royal gardens somewhere and go straight to the beach. Because all the beaches are not actually on the part of the coast in the center of Alex, you have to go East or West. We chose East on the recommendation of our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook as there was supposed to be a particularly good (yet cheap!) private beach that way. The free public beaches were out of the question, as those are for the more conservative, anti-bikini Muslims, but the beach we chose only ended up costing something like LE10 each, and the long cab ride east along the Corniche afforded not only some beautiful views of the ocean and beaches, but also some really interesting snapshots of the city. Driving along I got to see some of Alex's bigger buildings and interesting restaurant areas, but I was most pleased to see how many random public aesthetic additions there were along the road. With fountains and murals and sculptures and a number of other art installations, Alex really seemed to show that it was a serious city trying to not only take care of itself, but also to nurture and encourage some culture...unlike Cairo. The capstone of this cultural self-improvement we would be visiting later that day, but first...
the beach!
Our cab entered what clearly seemed to be a new, upscale exurb of pricey condos and apartments. The streets were unusually clean by the standards of most Egyptian cities I've been to, and nicely manicured and arranged palm trees gave the feel of a Miami neighborhood. We found the boardwalk entrance and walked past a number of beachy snack shops to our beach's entrance. After getting our tickets one of the attendants brought our chairs and umbrella to the only spot left still on the water at the very end of the beach, and we set up.
The girls, minus Rachel who, it turned out, couldn't swim, all quickly got in the water and i soon joined them. I'd been hoping to spend the morning doing lots of walking around and exploring before I became a beach bum, so as soon as I got into the cool water, I decided to swim down farther east to get some exercise and see what was going on down the coast on the other beaches.My little swim turned into about two and a half hour affair as I got distracted first by an international kayaking race that was being held, and then by what I realized were some prime body surfing waves. As I sort of childishly bodysurfed over and over, I couldn't help but be reminded of my best friend who taught me how to body surf in Hawaii in 9th grade. On my swim back up the shore to where I'd left the girls, I ran into an Egyptian boy--the only other person as far out from the shore as me--with whom a conversation quickly led to more childish fun for me. Afte exchanging the usual "Oh you speak Arabic?" frivolities, we were soon swimming back toward the land to gather his group of friends and a soccer ball to play keep away with. They were all apparently entry-level employees at a law firm in Cairo on vacation for the day, and I ended up goofing around and playing for probably another 45 minutes.
Now not to brag or anything, but just like in the cold spring of Abu Shrouf (outside Siwa) when our driver (foolishly!) challenged me to a race, I seemed to have a pretty solid advantage in my swimming abilities. Is it fair to say that Egyptians, handicapped by their desert upbringing, are not especially good swimmers? Maybe I'm inclined to say yes. But they sure are fun sometimes anyway. After a nice long swim back to my friends, I was good and ready for beach bumdom. The girls were slightly worried at best, even though I had been gone for almost a good 3 hours. They were "JUST starting" to get concerned. I chose to believe it was out of faith in my swimming abilities. Ha.After a nap and some snacks, we rinsed off and headed to the library of Alexandria about half of the way back to our hotel from the beach. Outside the library were sculptures and sort of decorative pool of water between the library and the corniche, and there were plenty of tourists and Egyptians alike going in and out. Many of them were quite friendly and it was as I was trying to squeeze by a group of girls excitedly asking Julia questions that I accidentally bumped into a little boy. I said something innocuous like "excuse me" in Arabic as he looked at me, and attempted to keep walking only to find myself suddenly surrounded by a whole crew of boys. One boy saw I was holding a camera and gestured for us to take a picture (why are Egyptians so fond of having their pictures taken with foreigners on the the foreigners' cameras? I don't know...), which immediately turned into...well...this:
Thanks to Nav for taking such a cool picture with such awesome lighting.
After extracting myself from the raucous boys we made our way over to the ticket office. As luck would have it, we were given the Egyptian price for our tickets, I think because we were speaking Arabic and some of the girls look passably Egyptian, but we were dismayed to find out that you are not allowed to bring outside books into the library, ruining some of our group's plans to do homework. I think we all enjoyed walking around the gigantic bestepped library anyway. I don't think I can really properly describe it adequately, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
One of the coolest things about the library, far beyond its stunning interior and its obvious dedication to improving the city, was its partnership with this project called the Internet Archivethat I found totally awesome. The Internet Archive has archived and kept copies of every public webpage since 1996, and the Library of Alexandria has a mirror of the whole archive on its website--the only one of its kind. In other words, the Library of Alexandria is again one of the biggest repositories of information in the whole world. Thousands of years ago, the Library of Alexandria was probably the first library that purposefully attempted to amass a collection of books from around the world and its scholarly atmosphere gave birth to the scientific method. I think the new Library of Alexandria is worthy of its predecessor's esteemed title and place in history, and what's more I think it will do good things for Alexandria and Egypt.
After an hour of contentedly wandering the peaceful library (listening to the Arcade Fire on my ipod the whole time), we met back up and went to grab a quick dinner before our train back to Cairo. Sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station, I was all ready to study some Arabic notecards until I fell asleep when an Egyptian man sat down in the empty seat next to me. I could feel him watching me with my note cards, but it wasn't until I got to the flashcard for the word that meant "means" (as in a means of communication) that he started to talk to me by asking what the English word meant. Our conversation quickly turned to other things, and we ended up talking the entire train ride back in a mix of Arabic and English. Unfortunately I can't remember many of the particulars of this conversation, but he did express to me, as many other Egyptians have, his disgust and annoyance with the Egyptian government under Mubarak. He also shared his view (and what he portrayed as most Egyptians' view) on retirement, as well as why it is American youth always are portrayed working in restaurants in movies and television shows. "What is it? Is there a lot of money to be made in American restaurants or something?" he asked. Struck with a little bit of confusion over why it actually was that I and so many of my friends had worked in restaurants, I responded with a half-explanation about how American servers get tipped more because they are actually expected to do stuff. Rather than offending him, to my surprise, he agreed and complained about how the often apathetic and unhelpful waitstaffs in Egyptian restaurants annoyed him too. We touched on some bigger issues about the different ways that Americans and Egyptians approach their life and their work, but I'll save some of these more academic thoughts for another day perhaps.
Looking back, this was a rather pivotal conversation for me during my stay in Egypt as it was really the first great conversation I had with an Egyptian using my Arabic, and it set me up for the really great conversation I would have a few weeks later in the clothing market of Wikalat al-Balah. It was a perfect capstone to what had been a really nice trip to Alex, and it left us all wishing--in vain as it would turn out--that we could come back again soon. Hopefully I get to see this kind of sunset again soon:
After extracting myself from the raucous boys we made our way over to the ticket office. As luck would have it, we were given the Egyptian price for our tickets, I think because we were speaking Arabic and some of the girls look passably Egyptian, but we were dismayed to find out that you are not allowed to bring outside books into the library, ruining some of our group's plans to do homework. I think we all enjoyed walking around the gigantic bestepped library anyway. I don't think I can really properly describe it adequately, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
After an hour of contentedly wandering the peaceful library (listening to the Arcade Fire on my ipod the whole time), we met back up and went to grab a quick dinner before our train back to Cairo. Sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station, I was all ready to study some Arabic notecards until I fell asleep when an Egyptian man sat down in the empty seat next to me. I could feel him watching me with my note cards, but it wasn't until I got to the flashcard for the word that meant "means" (as in a means of communication) that he started to talk to me by asking what the English word meant. Our conversation quickly turned to other things, and we ended up talking the entire train ride back in a mix of Arabic and English. Unfortunately I can't remember many of the particulars of this conversation, but he did express to me, as many other Egyptians have, his disgust and annoyance with the Egyptian government under Mubarak. He also shared his view (and what he portrayed as most Egyptians' view) on retirement, as well as why it is American youth always are portrayed working in restaurants in movies and television shows. "What is it? Is there a lot of money to be made in American restaurants or something?" he asked. Struck with a little bit of confusion over why it actually was that I and so many of my friends had worked in restaurants, I responded with a half-explanation about how American servers get tipped more because they are actually expected to do stuff. Rather than offending him, to my surprise, he agreed and complained about how the often apathetic and unhelpful waitstaffs in Egyptian restaurants annoyed him too. We touched on some bigger issues about the different ways that Americans and Egyptians approach their life and their work, but I'll save some of these more academic thoughts for another day perhaps.
Looking back, this was a rather pivotal conversation for me during my stay in Egypt as it was really the first great conversation I had with an Egyptian using my Arabic, and it set me up for the really great conversation I would have a few weeks later in the clothing market of Wikalat al-Balah. It was a perfect capstone to what had been a really nice trip to Alex, and it left us all wishing--in vain as it would turn out--that we could come back again soon. Hopefully I get to see this kind of sunset again soon:
Yes, I know I have a habit of ending my posts with pictures of sunsets...I realize it's cheesy, yes.
On future plans defined and undefined
Though I have over a month left till I start school again, today is my last "boring" day of break. I'm picking up Dylan and Eleanor from the Airport (who conveniently land only 20 minutes apart from each other) beginning what surely will be a rollercoaster ride of adventures. It starts with a whirlwind tour of Egypt with the both of them that should go something like this:
T-4
Night: get back to apartment around 10-ish and then maybe go smoke some sheesha and drink some tea like real Egyptians do all the time (if you guys are feeling up for it after your travels)
W-5
Morning: Giza Pyramids/Sphinx
Afternoon: Get lunch Downtown and then wander (take the metro back to Zamalek for the experience)
Dinner:Slow Kofta
Night: Check out Khan el-Khalily at night before chilling at Fishawi's, the oldest and probably most famous cafe in Cairo
R-6
Morning-Afternoon: Start out with the Citadel and/or the Garbage City then make the journey by foot through the backstreets of Islamic Cairo up through the back entrance of Khan in time to catch the afternoon prayer at Al-Azhar Mosque or the Mosque of al-Hakim
Dinner: Fiteer downtown
Night: hang out at Hurreya Bar or Odeon Palace and then get some street snacks on the Nile before heading back to Zamalek to get a little sleep
F-7
Morning: leave Cairo at a brutal 5:30am to get into Luxor at 6:30 by plane
Rest of the day: Marathon tour of ruin-y things
S-8
More Ruin-y things
Leave to go back for Cairo that night at 11:35 pm to get in to Cai-town an hour later
Sn-9
Morning: Probably sleep in
Afternoon: get some supplies and then go to al-Azhar Park for a picnic of Alex Top koshary
Dinner: maybe go out to dinner with my friends and one of their families to an awesome Lebanese restaurant
Night: dinner will probably go late, but if not too late then maybe take a short Felucca ride on the Nile and then go back and get ready for White Desert
M-10
Leave Early to go to the White Desert with Hemeida
Do Desert-y things
T-11
Morning: More desert-y things
Evening: head back to Cairo
W-12
Leave Cairo, Eleanor going back to the States, and Dylan and I to Dubai
If you can't tell, I'm pretty thrilled to be getting to show off some of my Egypt know-how. After Cairo, Dylan and I have less concrete plans, though we know we'll be in Dubai for two days then Abu Dhabi for two days before we fly to Damascus to explore Syria for three and a half days until we find a private cab to take us to Beirut for another two and half days in Lebanon. We haven't figured out all our accommodations yet, though we have two (or three?) nights in Beirut booked at what is supposed to be a really cool cross between a Bed & Breakfast and a home-stay, plus we have all our flights.
Luckily for my teeming throngs of loyal blog-followers (hi mom!), I've stocked up some posts in my free time over the past couple of days that are ready and waiting to be posted, so I won't be totally AWOL. It's been nice having the past week or so to myself to just be free to be totally lazy sometimes while also getting to take my time exploring the parts of Cairo I felt like I'd missed. Nonetheless, as ridiculously, overpoweringly excited as I am to start in on my adventures, a part of me does wish I had another week like this last one. I realized this is officially my first time with my "own" apartment, so I felt like I wasted a little too much time just revelling in that fact instead of figuring out some better plans for my life. This feeling probably stems from my 4am decision last night to apply to a Grad School Arabic program--though I'd all but vowed never to do any such thing. The deadline is also in just a few weeks, so it means I'm going to have to sneak in time on most of my application stuff in between showing my friends around Egypt. This is, of course, no one's fault but my own, but it's still stressing. I've also started looking at Foreign Service Exam test booklets for the State Dept. (which actually looks like it will be kind of fun to study for) and into other Arabic-specializing programs around the Middle East. So I have some plans, or at least some ideas for plans, but they're all sort of vague and open-ended. I just know, I really don't want to have had this amazing experience with my Arabic only to go back to the States and never be able to use it again.
Anyway, here's a nice picture of the sun setting from my apartment taken a few days ago:
And here's satan-cat, my only housemate for the past week, looking deceptively cute right before doing what she does best: attacking my feet.
T-4
Night: get back to apartment around 10-ish and then maybe go smoke some sheesha and drink some tea like real Egyptians do all the time (if you guys are feeling up for it after your travels)
W-5
Morning: Giza Pyramids/Sphinx
Afternoon: Get lunch Downtown and then wander (take the metro back to Zamalek for the experience)
Dinner:Slow Kofta
Night: Check out Khan el-Khalily at night before chilling at Fishawi's, the oldest and probably most famous cafe in Cairo
R-6
Morning-Afternoon: Start out with the Citadel and/or the Garbage City then make the journey by foot through the backstreets of Islamic Cairo up through the back entrance of Khan in time to catch the afternoon prayer at Al-Azhar Mosque or the Mosque of al-Hakim
Dinner: Fiteer downtown
Night: hang out at Hurreya Bar or Odeon Palace and then get some street snacks on the Nile before heading back to Zamalek to get a little sleep
F-7
Morning: leave Cairo at a brutal 5:30am to get into Luxor at 6:30 by plane
Rest of the day: Marathon tour of ruin-y things
S-8
More Ruin-y things
Leave to go back for Cairo that night at 11:35 pm to get in to Cai-town an hour later
Sn-9
Morning: Probably sleep in
Afternoon: get some supplies and then go to al-Azhar Park for a picnic of Alex Top koshary
Dinner: maybe go out to dinner with my friends and one of their families to an awesome Lebanese restaurant
Night: dinner will probably go late, but if not too late then maybe take a short Felucca ride on the Nile and then go back and get ready for White Desert
M-10
Leave Early to go to the White Desert with Hemeida
Do Desert-y things
T-11
Morning: More desert-y things
Evening: head back to Cairo
W-12
Leave Cairo, Eleanor going back to the States, and Dylan and I to Dubai
If you can't tell, I'm pretty thrilled to be getting to show off some of my Egypt know-how. After Cairo, Dylan and I have less concrete plans, though we know we'll be in Dubai for two days then Abu Dhabi for two days before we fly to Damascus to explore Syria for three and a half days until we find a private cab to take us to Beirut for another two and half days in Lebanon. We haven't figured out all our accommodations yet, though we have two (or three?) nights in Beirut booked at what is supposed to be a really cool cross between a Bed & Breakfast and a home-stay, plus we have all our flights.
Luckily for my teeming throngs of loyal blog-followers (hi mom!), I've stocked up some posts in my free time over the past couple of days that are ready and waiting to be posted, so I won't be totally AWOL. It's been nice having the past week or so to myself to just be free to be totally lazy sometimes while also getting to take my time exploring the parts of Cairo I felt like I'd missed. Nonetheless, as ridiculously, overpoweringly excited as I am to start in on my adventures, a part of me does wish I had another week like this last one. I realized this is officially my first time with my "own" apartment, so I felt like I wasted a little too much time just revelling in that fact instead of figuring out some better plans for my life. This feeling probably stems from my 4am decision last night to apply to a Grad School Arabic program--though I'd all but vowed never to do any such thing. The deadline is also in just a few weeks, so it means I'm going to have to sneak in time on most of my application stuff in between showing my friends around Egypt. This is, of course, no one's fault but my own, but it's still stressing. I've also started looking at Foreign Service Exam test booklets for the State Dept. (which actually looks like it will be kind of fun to study for) and into other Arabic-specializing programs around the Middle East. So I have some plans, or at least some ideas for plans, but they're all sort of vague and open-ended. I just know, I really don't want to have had this amazing experience with my Arabic only to go back to the States and never be able to use it again.
Anyway, here's a nice picture of the sun setting from my apartment taken a few days ago:
And here's satan-cat, my only housemate for the past week, looking deceptively cute right before doing what she does best: attacking my feet.
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