Field Trip

Jessica took her students on a field trip around Cairo looking for evidence 0of pollution. Needless to say, it wasn't hard to find:

This is a photo of the Pyramids. They're across the valley, about 8 miles away. On a clear day, they're closs enough to see the outlines of the slabs of rock. That happens about ten times a year, at best. They're visible from across the valley (meaning you can at least see their outline through the smog) about 10% of the time.

Horse in the road; bitch in the car.

I ride a bus to and from work every day. In retrospect, I’m surprised that tales from the back of the bus haven’t made their way to my blog sooner. Its my university’s version of the water cooler, shade tree mechanic, happy hour pub all rolled into one (minus any possible form of refreshment; no food or drinks allowed). On the bus, I rub elbows with folks from all over the Uni, all three schools, multiple departments and some of the senior administrators. I learn things on the bus, both about life in Cairo (best restaurants, shops, social events), AUC news (new campus building stage, controversies, firings and hirings, the dirt on everyone). Its our institutional memory, social networking, oral tradition and urban legend reservoir all wrapped into one.

In short, for a mere three Egyptian pounds($.50) per trip, its cheap, as they say, at half the price.

Last Wednesday, may go down in the record book as my most memorable bus ride ever. Not only was it great for mere entertainment value, but it crystallized in my mind all of the things about Egypt, both rotten and remarkable. And to think, it only cost me fifty cents.

Ola, who works in some weird bureaucratic office called iPART (I think they’re the long term planners of the university), lives on a narrow street near the corniche in Maadi. Sometimes, she’s feeling rugged and the bus drops her off on the corner. Other days, she insists on being taken to her doorstep. She’s the first person dropped off in the afternoon, and those of us in the back of the bus are usually way too preoccupied with our own cleverness to notice what’s going on outside the bus.

Well, last Thursday, what was going on was that a cart, loaded with gravel and pulled by a handsome horse (chestnut brown, extremely healthy), was coming down this narrow, one-lane street towards us. We were too far down the block to back up so, as is quite typical in Cairo, our driver blazed on ahead, signaling to the cart that he had to pull off to the side. The cart obliged, he found an empty parking space on our right and pulled into it, the blinkered horse casually munching on a bucket of grass while our bus pulled past him. Or at least attempted to pull past him. As we had been patiently waiting for the horse to maneuver into its spot, a woman in a beat up, but relatively late model Peugeot 407 zoomed up and tried to sneak into the same spot as the horse. Apparently, she had been talking on her mobile, and hadn’t noticed the impasse looming. Unfortunately, the cart took up most of the space. Her car could only get about halfway in. Our bus was therefore unable to move forward, and the cart was effectively blocked in.

Now, up till this point, nothing that out of the ordinary had occurred. This was typical Cairo driving behavior and certainly hadn’t garnered much attention from our contingent in the back of the bus. We had dimly been aware of the horse, had heard our driver shouting a little at the car in front, but what got our attention was when our driver shut his engine off completely.

Apparently, after the lady refused to back up, even after he told her that she was the one responsible, his inestimable opinion was that making a defiant gesture of absolute firmness would best resolve the situation.

The lady, herself a deft practitioner in the dark art of back alley driver negotiations, and at an apparent tactical advantage over the bus driver as being the only one really capable of resolving the situation, instead chose to engage the emergency brake, exit the car through passenger side (the bus was blocking the driver’s door), set the car alarm, and calmly, ignoring the speechless but hostile stares of our now thoroughly engage bus denizens, picked her way through the debris on the side of the street and disappeared into a building. The horse, meanwhile, continued to enjoy his snack and break, but was the only creature on the street not entirely aghast at this situation.

Fifteen minutes later, let me repeat myself, fifteen minutes later, during which time we all sat silently, trying to figure out what to do, the neighborhood roused a shopkeeper from his stalled and persuaded him to moved his 1979 orange Mercedes 200E from the right hand side of the street, thus allowing our bus to restart its engine, swerve to the right of the Peugeot (where the bus driver found the restraint not to side swipe it as we passed remains a mystery to me) and we continued home. I didn’t get to see what happened to the horse, but I presume he, too, continued his appointed rounds.

As I mentioned before, this story contains so many elements of my life in Cairo that it practically beggars my ability to expound upon them all. And, since, I’ve almost used up my self-imposed 1000 word post limit, I’ll leave that up to my faithful readership to fill in. Look forward to more episodes from the back of the bus…

Manifest Destiny

Saturday night I had a very vivid dream:

I was on a trip to the desert as a teacher on a bus. The students were a mix of AUCians and BSCers and we had faculty from both. We stopped in a village in the middle of nowhere and all the people on the bus went off to do their thing.

I found myself on the doorstep of what looked like an antique shop, cluttered with bric-a-brac. I really wanted to go in, but was afraid; it was clearly not open for business, and entering would have been trespassing. Two professors joined me on the doorstep, one, named Nate, was equally hesitant and interested. The other, Steve*, said he knew his way around in there. He said he could show us around.

We went in, but the room was too cluttered to walk freely. We had to belly crawl. Although Steve led us in, once inside, I was in the lead; I’m not sure why. The stuff in this room was amazing, I especially noticed the rugs, Dragon style Persian carpets of astounding beauty. Pieces from the Caucasian mountains, Persian pieces and also Bedouin pieces. The other furniture seemed mostly of the typical middle class Egyptian style, heavy gilt and crystal, not really my taste. I also remember some alabaster pieces and some beautiful classical portraits.

After we had all gotten our fill of looking, I led us back to the front door. Although we had left it open, it was shut and barred! I had to stand up to lift the bar, and as I stepped out of the room, there was an Arab sheik, clearly the owner of this building standing on the front porch, casually drinking his tea and holding court with the locals.

I had never felt like more of a trespasser in my life. I felt utter shame, that I would have breached what, in retrospect, was clearly a private space, not meant to share with the likes of us.

The owner, turned toward us as we exited. He was a tall thin man, with bright sharp eyes, leathery, mahogany colored skin and a huge mustache. He was wearing a brown galabeya and a blood red turban. As we shuffled out into the light, covered in dust and cobwebs, he beamed a huge smile and welcomed us with a twinkle in his eye.

He never looked at Steve, but he took Nate by the shoulders and said that his people needed Nate to stay and help them. Nate, shrinking at the prospect, stepped back and refused to help. At which point Sheriff (I knew his name without an introduction) turned to me and asked me if I would help.

As I said that I would stay (I decided to build a school in his village), Sheriff reached out to shake my hand. He hand a huge hand, but the handshake was still strange somehow, it didn’t feel right. When I looked down to see why, I realized that his hand was missing the index finger and pinkie. Each finger was twisted and charred at the second knuckle. But he shook my hand with no self consciousness at all. And as he continued, I realized that it was a warm, welcome handshake, and I felt relief.


All this is introduction to the news that, on Sunday morning, I was invited by Steve to give a teacher training workshop in Baghdad and Irkuk this Spring. Given my name, and the proximity to Mosul, it may come as no surprise that I’ve felt as though my destiny somehow lay in (or at least beyond) the Tigris. The dream had no small part in my feeling that this was a trip that I absolutely had to do. Of course, the fact that I’ll be traveling through a war zone, about five weeks before my second daughter is expected to enter the world, certainly gives me pause.

But I simply can’t escape the feeling that destiny is calling me. Its time to step onto the shore.

Wish me luck.

Unspoiled

I just got back from the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since last summer. I’m not much for movie reviews, but I’d definitely recommend this one. The English movie selection here in Cairo is, not surprisingly, fairly thin, and I chose to see The Prestige (registration required) basically as the least of the bad ones. It’s been advertised here quite a bit, and I’m a big Christian Bale fan (more from the Empire of the Sun days than American Psycho, although I thought Batman was pretty decent as far as superhero movies go). When I learned that it was written and directed by the brothers who did Memento, it was a lock. I don’t want to write too much for fear of revealing the conciet(yes its one of those). I’m the type of movie goer who loves trying to figure out the trick, but I’m usually disappointed if I succeed. Luckily, my track record is not so good. Dead Again, The Usual Suspects, The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, Memento, and The Sixth Sense, all caught me by surprise. Even the Sting surpised me (granted, I was about ten the first time I saw it). The only twist movie I distinctly remember figuring out was The Others, and that was because someone told me beforehand that it was like the Sixth Sense, I was really irritated that the movie had been ruined for me and now I try not to listen to anyone discuss the movie in advance. I saw The Crying Game in the theater, but had to go to the bathroom. The sex scene happened while I was out, and, when I came back in, I asked Scott what I had missed. He just looked at me blankly. I still regret having missed that moment, one which could never be replicated.

Anyway, in this movie (didn’t I say that I sucked at reviews?), I found the twist to be pretty easy to predict, but my enjoyment only increased at watching it unfold. For me, the enjoyment was in seeing the replicated patterns (almost Shakespearean in its duplication of archetypes). The movie also succeeds by asking some very difficult questions and not trying to answer them.

When it comes down to it, though, I have only one empirical measure for a good movie; it is both absolute and impossible to define. When I leave the theater having just seen something wonderful, I feel larger than life, even than the planet. I feel as though I am walking on a very small globe (like the Little Prince), or I’m several miles tall. This happens whether it is a happy or tragic ending. I first noticed this when I left the Hunt for Red October (I know, not a great movie, but I was 16). I was standing outside Kipling Theaters, waiting for my dad to pick me up, and the lamp poles seemed like match sticks. The sky seemed like the top of a pup tent.

Tonight, I walked out of the Galaxy Theater, in Manial, and wanted to walk forever. Nightlife here in Cairo is just starting to pick up around midnight, so I put in my earbuds, played a Norah Jones album and started walking. There were a bunch of cafes along the Nile and small groups of guys were walking down the street, laughing and joking. On the main thoroughfare, the bright lights and fast moving traffic energized me. There were little sheesha joints, and kushri shops with a scattering of customers*. Once I got to Maadi, the wide, leafy streets, the occasional security guards and the pollution haze all combined to enhance my mood. I started taking long measured steps to stretch out my legs, put my hands in my pockets and walked home. Occasionally I would get into my grandfather's bulldog style of walking, head down and working more on speed than style, but when ever I noticed this, I slowed myself down, enjoyed some detail of the walk and tried to regulate my breathing.
There were so many beautiful details. It started with my new shoes, which, after ten days of walking in the dust of the Pharoahs and the Imams, look ten years old but still feel brand new. The night noises, filtered through my own music also got my attention. Then, of course, the Maadi trees captured me and my heart. The last bit, down road Fifteen was the best. I stood at midan moustafa kamal (known by some as the gay garden) and looked down the street. The Sycamore Figs form a canopy, actually a long tunnel all the way down the street. I was leaving the confines of the great wide world and gradually entering the narrow freedom of my personal cave. I was exchanging the refreshing brisk miasma of Cairo for the filtered warm cleanliness of the hearth. Hera, that peacock, would be proud. As I turned into my building, I said goodnight to the guard, and promised to write Athena a letter.

Well, this is what comes of seeing The Prestige, do so at your own peril.

*In the interest of accuracy, I need to mention that a taxi ride and a decaf mocha cappuccino (flavored with cinnamon) broke up the narrative here. I omitted them for purely poetical reasons.

Some photos taken in Egypt

This picture demonstrates what I was talking about. "Bartys"


These were e-mailed to me by a former classmate. I don't know who took them, but, together, they say a lot about living here.

Cultural Disconnect

So my class has a number of really interesting, opinionated, and type A personalities this semester, which I absolutely love. It makes for lively discussions. Usually I'll have one or maybe two big talkers and the others just kind of coast by. But this class is much more fun. Its also nice that there's no gender gap here. There are big personalities on both sides of the class (yes, much like grade school, they all segregate themselves by gender).

So I thought we would have a great discussion today about gender rights. I had given them an article about perceptions of women in the office, and after doing some reading comprehension questions, I opened up the discussion.

Stone cold silence.

Usually, all I have to say are the magic words, "what do you all think?" and the next two hours are sucked into a time vacuum. This time, though, I asked question after question about women in the work place, perceptions of roles for men and women all the usual stuff.

I got one word answers, people sort of mumbling under their breath, and nothing really direct. After a few minutes, one of the guys, Islam is his name, expostualtes in Arabic. I didn't cathc it all, but he basically said, "this is a bunch of horse shit" (I got this more from context than actual vocab, btw).

I asked him what he thought and he replied that this whole conversation was a joke, that women already hve all the rights they need. I looked to some of the girls in the class, especially the ones who seem to have anb opinion for everything, and tried to get them to respond. Nothing.

So I responded myself, a little bit, hoping I might give some of the others some ideas that they could then develop on their own. I talked about women not getting many managerial jobs, about how certain fields were pretty much closed off to them. Islam (and others) responded that this was because they had to stay at home and be moms. I did get a rise out of a few of the girls when I mentioned how women get harassed on the street, then I really got them excited when i asked why women aren't allowed to go to cafes to smoke shisha (hookahs).

But then I lost them completely. I talked about how no women were allowed to be Judges in Egypt. At this they all (girls and boys) started arguing with me. They said that women can't be judges, that they are too emotional and aren't qualified to be a judge. I told them how we have had several judges on the supreme court who do quite well, and they didn't really beleive me, or they said "well, that's just one example".

I asked Farah, the best student in the class, most organized, opinionated and reasonable person there, if she thought that SHE shouldn't be allowed to be a judge. Her responce?

"No, I shouldn't. I get too emotional."

Stunned, I ended the discussion.

beanut putter and jelly

So I believe that Egypt is a ripe proving ground for my latest audio-linguistic theory:

As some of you may know, Egyptians, especially of a lower socio-economic status, have dificulty distinguishing between the voiced and unvoiced bilabial plosive (/p/ & /b/) usually this results in many English /p/ words sounding like /kombooter/ (for computer) or /bleez/ for please.

Well, here's the interesting part (to me, at least): Since I've gotten to Egypt, I've noticed that, when I type, I occassionally transpose these two letters! They are no where near each other on the keyboard, and, although they do mildly resemble each other, it is not like the f and p, or the i and l. So where does this mistake come from?

Some proffessional linguists assure me that there is no known linguistic theory to account for this. They were perfectly willing to offer up some non-linguistic explanations (i.e. that I'm bonkers, or just plain wrong).

So here is my challenge: somebody come up with a cogent theory to explain this phenomenon, and I'll test it here in Egypt.

Any takers?

Ramadan: Kareem or Bidan*?

So, I'm into day four of my fifth Ramadan. I've discovered that my dislike of the month is in inverse proportion to the ammount of guilt I feel for not fasting. As a non-muslim, I know this is preposterous, but never-the-less, when your surrounded by 50 million fasting people, you tend to wonder if maybe you should avoid the luncheon meat, ya know?

The last five years, (with one ramadan off in DC) my ramadans have been super stressfull. The first three I actually tried to fast. The second year (my first here in Egypt) I actually made it until the third week before giving up. Last year, I just resolved not to eat in public, hiding behind closed doors or furtively gobbling a small sandwich in my cubbyhole when no one was around. Anytime I was invited to an Iftar (Arabic for breakfast, served at sunset during Ramadan), I did fast for that day.

This year, I am flaunting my food. I eat when I want, what I want. I order sandwiches and lemonade delivered to my desk (by fasting Muslims), and, when I do go to an Iftar, it'll be my third meal of the day.

Guess which year I've been least stressed out about Ramadan?

Now, in the interest of fairness, I've decided to make a list of plusses and minuses for the non-muslim living through Ramadan. Let's start with the plusses:

Ramadan Kareem
No smoking during the day
Shorter lines in the faculty lunch room
no traffic between 4 and 6 pm (everyone is already home)
greater generosity and less hunger (everyone eats well in Ramadan, regardless of income)
Workday ends an hour earlier

OK, now the minuses:

Ramadan Bidan
Classes are only 40 minutes long (how can I do anything in 40 minutes? Attendance takes 40 minutes)
Two days a week, classes start 40 minutes earlier (because we want to make sure they have enough time for lunch break, fer pete's sake!)
L'Aroma, the nearest Cafe is closed for the Month
Tahrir Kushri, my comfort food, is also closed for the month
The sandwhiches I get delivered, come without any extras (tomatoes, condiments etc.)
My students are exausted during the day (they've been out celebrating all night)
They don't have time for any homework (their social obligations really are extreme)
They have a major test the week after Ramadan ends.


So, in this analysis, I'd have to say, in total, Ramadan Bidan!


*kareem translates as "sweet" or "nice" bidan roughly means "sucks balls"