Saturday, November 22, 2008

Coptic Cairo and al-Azhar Park

Yesterday I went on a day trip to Coptic Cairo and al-Azhar Park. Those two places, more than any other two that I've visited in Egypt, gave me a real sense of being "somewhere else."

I think I may have mentioned before that people are people no matter where you go (even if I didn't mention it before, there you have it now). There's a certain consistency in human nature that makes me feel less confused about my being transplanted into a different culture from my own. ANYHOW, for a while I thought that, considering how people are remarkably similar even given vast distances between them, there was nowhere in Cairo where I would feel really, really far from the US. All it took was one day trip to Coptic Cairo and al-Azhar Park for the very real sense of being in an ancient and foreign land to settle over me.



There are a number of sites in Coptic Cairo that are thought to be places where the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) visited so long ago. At one such site is a well that is said to have been blessed by the Holy Family when they stopped there. When my friends and I entered, there were some Greek pilgrims there, gathering water in bottles and reverently crossing themselves with it.

In another area of Coptic Cairo is another peaceful and strangely beautiful place: a cemetery. There are mausoleums that look like small churches, tombs with the occupants' pictures carved into them, graves with flowers and other plants that seem to be flowing from the graves themselves. There are pools of cooled wax from candles that seem to have been burning for years. And over it all is that fine, democratizing Cairo dust that mutes some of the differences from grave to grave. It's like a small, silent village. I almost expected to be greeted by shopkeepers, or to see children running around, or hear music winding between the statues and various architectural tributes to loved ones.



Most obvious was the silence.

Most other place in Cairo, one is bound to hear the honking of taxis and minibuses. The cemetery in Coptic Cairo is restful. I suppose the people there tend to get along. One image that impressed itself on me was where two mausoleums stood as neighbors with wildly different themes. One was obviously Greek with its Parthenon-like pillars and white marble, while the other was clearly more at home in the Middle East.



And then there's al-Azhar Park. It is a beautifully landscaped park on what used to be a landfill. We visited in the evening and, like many other Cairenes that night, got to enjoy Cairo's unbelievably crowded silhouette.



This was one of those places where it was abundantly clear that Toto and I were not in Kansas anymore. Minarets burst up over thousands of brick apartment buildings. Modestly-dressed women walk leisurely with their husbands and children, a hijaab covering many a head. And I had forgotten how it felt to be in open spaces until we got to look down over the city; in my mind's eye I imagined civil engineers staring drop-jawed at the insanity below.



Are you staring drop-jawed? Go ahead and click on the photo for a larger version. Stare. I did. The view caught me off-guard as I hadn't been out of that maze of buildings for quite some time. And then there I was, above it all. There is modernity built up right next to historic architecture. This is a land where some people can look out from their balcony and see pyramids in the distance and taxi cabs racing along downstairs.

How different this is from "historical sites" in the United States. In my own home town we make a big to-do about maintaining Victorian homes built in the 19th Century. Go to Egypt and you can do handstands on a structure built before 2000 BC. If that doesn't serve to make you feel the weight of history, I don't quite know what will.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Just Getting Settled

You know, for all the "inconveniences" that Cairene life presents, I've grown to like it here.

When I first wandered the streets here in Maadi, I looked around in disbelief at the trash piles on the side of the road in in the streets. I tripped over random pipes that jut out of sidewalks. I nearly rolled my ankle in potholes on a daily basis. I was nervous about haggling over fruit prices at the fruit stand across the street. I noticed with worry how I woke in the mornings and coughed up some grey pollution bits before breathing normally. Those are all things from which the 'disbelief' has faded. The deeper I looked, the more I saw that those initially vexsome traits have become a part of what has endeared Cairo to me. Not only that, but they've been countered five times again by some really spectacular features of this place. ...Though I could do without the morning coughing routine...

There are such generous people here. One of my bus FRENDs (refer to a few posts back) recently relayed an invitation from her mother to me, to visit their home for lunch. I don't really know this young woman all that well, but here her mother is inviting me over. And our Coptic friend, Peter, has been an exemplar of hospitality for my roommates and I. He's proven an eager guide around the city, and insists on treating us to fresh juice every once in a while (fresh squeezed juice is a staple here, as water isn't so good for you). The American/French/New Zealander/Gulf country expatriots here have also been indispensable in making me feel truly at home here in Egypt.

I was also pleasantly surprised and extremely blessed to find a strong church community here. I've been the recipient of a lot of wise words and free meals from my fellow church-goers, and that's been an incredible boon to me during my stay. I've found family away from family, and home away from home.

In short, I guess that although I have a few more weeks in Cairo, I'm really going to miss it here. I know that already. I've made so many good friends as I've been here. I also see so much potential for Egypt to grow stronger economically, politically, even socially that I want to get to see the changes happen. I know that if I return in a few years I won't be returning to the same Cairo or the same Egypt. I love this country for what it is now as much as for what I can see it becoming in the next few decades.

I was just getting settled in, and now it's nearly time to go!
Dear friends and family, I will most certainly have to return to this country. I don't think I could stay away!

Monday, November 10, 2008

Voting from Cairo

Just in case anyone was wondering, yes, it is possible to vote from Cairo, albeit more of a hassle. But how exciting-- several people were dragged into this process just so I could vote.

I was already registered to vote, but needed to fill out the form to vote absentee from abroad. After an international call to the San Bernardino Registrar of Voters Office, I was emailed the correct form, and told that I could fax it in. A fax machine. The list of things that I took for granted in the US grows each day. I knew there must be fax machines SOMEWHERE in Cairo, but how could I find one? One of my Cairene friends, Peter, came to the rescue. Peter got one of his friends (thanks, Muhammad) to drive us around Maadi in search of a fax machine.

In the end, I faxed my absentee registration from a tiny, semi-jumbled stationary store in some far corner of Maadi. It felt adventurous.

Then I waited for my ballot to come. And I waited. And I waited. When the darn thing still hadn't come with 2 weeks until the election, I shot off an email to the Registrar's Office asking whether it had already been sent, or if there was another way for me to cast my vote. Bless our county, a week later I was EMAILED a ballot and told that I could fill that out and FAX it in. Ah, technology. So, this year, my first elligible year to vote in a Presidential election, I faxed my vote to the Registrar. And again, Peter and Co. drove me to that little stationary store to get the job done.


"Tell Mr. (candidate's name here) that he can thank us later," said Peter.

I was so glad to be able to be involved with my country's oh-so-important democratic process from all the way around the world!

As a side note, I was really pleased to see that almost ALL of the United States study abroad students there in Cairo were eager to vote.

Side note #2: The Foreign Student Association put on a mock election at AUC, where anyone could cast a mock vote for either John McCain or Barack Obama. At the end of the day Obama won with about 88% of the vote. And watching the news here in the Middle East, that wasn't entirely surprising; various international polls reflected the same affinity for Sen. Obama.

Just the same, on November 5th almost all of the American students and faculty showed up to school looking like the walking dead: everyone stayed up all night watching the election results. So whether people were elated, depressed, or didn't care all that much it all looked relatively similar. Bloodshot eyes, heads nodding off in class, and people cursing the time difference.

Looks like I'll be coming home in December just in time to see the Executive Branch transition. A much anticipated event for everyone, I'm sure--my arrival, that is :)

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Sky is Falling!!!

This past Friday, Lindsey and I were over at the Knapps' house for a post-church lunch when suddenly Eric Knapp says, "Quick, if you look out the window you'll see something that only happens once per year." So I looked out the window and at first I thought that the sky was falling. The brown color that I usually associate with the sky and that normally hovers over all the buildings and hills was suddenly descending on the streets of Maadi. I thought, "Maybe a sandstorm?"

"It's raining," said Eric.

Rain! I jumped up from my place at the table and ran out to the balcony to see what rain was like in Cairo. Big surprise: it's dirty. When it rains, it makes all of the pollution fall out of the sky. It was like a fine, fine dust that swirled around, and it whipped into my eyes and mouth. Not to be outdone, the dust from the streets and building tops were also disturbed by the fallen droplets, and swirled upward to meet the falling smog. There was something playful yet foul about it.

I held my hands over the balcony to feel some of the drops and got pelted by the random pattern of rain then dirt, rain then dirt.

Like other experiences here, this whole rain thing left me saying, "Only in Egypt."


Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Pretty in Pink

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
-Maya Angelou

I put a lot of stock in Maya Angelou's criteria for testing one's character. Finding the humor or absurdity in a given situation can make the difference between living a life where all things living and otherwise are 'out to get us,' and a life where it's funny that little things like Christmas lights and luggage can get the better of us. I'd like to think that I try to live my life with the latter attitude.

I recently came to one of those crossroads--a moment where I saw two distinct options for how I would react. While I initially thought about getting horrified, I couldn't help but see the hopeless humor in it. I hadn't done my laundry in a few weeks (I know, I know) and I was running out of clean clothes to wear. My quick-fix for this was to throw 2/3 of all the clothing that I brought with me to Cairo into our little washing machine that really wasn't meant to hold more than 1/2 a normal load of laundry.

In following what I thought would be a time-efficient way of washing my clothes, I had neglected to set the water temperature to 'cold.' I had also forgotten to separate darks from whites. I had also forgotten that I had not yet put a certain maroon skirt through the laundry yet. Result? When I went to move my laundry from the washer to the drying rack, I pulled one shirt out and held it up thinking, "Whose shirt is this?" My eyes narrowed and I pulled another shirt out of the wet pile of clothes.
"Oh. Oh, no," I said to myself, my eyes widening.
2/3 of my clothing that I brought with me to Cairo is now some shade of pink, purple, or puce. In fact, my clothing now comes in so many unusual shades that I had to learn new color-names: I have a mauve taupe undertone to my blue jeans, a few carnation pink shirts, a thermal shirt that is now light thulian pink, and various other articles of clothing that are, as I have been informed, cherry blossom pink.

I had to laugh for a while. I think I might have only owned a single pink shirt before this. On the bright (pink) side, almost all of my clothes now match. And luckily, most of the shirts were dyed evenly. And those that weren't, look sort of retro-tie-dyed-ish.

Don't forget to have fun with life, folks! In one textile mishap you can either count most of your clothing for lost or inherit a whole "new" wardrobe. It's all how you frame it.


Best to you all,
Caitlin, pretty in pink




Saturday, October 25, 2008

Egypt: Where "Upper" = South

EID BREAK
At the conclusion of Ramadan is a holiday break called Eid al-Fitr. Most AUC students use this week long break for travel around the region. My roommates, for example, went to Greece for a few days. I decided that I wanted to see more of Egypt and joined a group of 6 other students headed to Upper Egypt. Be not deceived, though. Upper Egypt is actually due south of Cairo, but since the Nile flows northward, Egyptians refer to "Southern Egypt" as "Upper Egypt." Now you know.

Anyhow, I was initially a little nervous about going on this trip, since I didn't actually know the other students very well, or at all (I know, Mom, I know: what was I thinking...). But that turned out not to be an issue at all. By the end of the trip we were all quite good friends.

Here is the entry in my travel journal from the first night of our trip:

"9/30/08
So yesterday might have been the last night of Ramadan. I think it was, but someone has to officially decide based on the moon phase, I think. And yesterday night I also set out on an adventure myself. I am currently on a train on my way to Aswan. We boarded a train at about 10 o'clock last night in downtown Cairo at the Ramses train station. Now it's about 9:09 am and we're still some 4 hours from Aswan. I'm sort of just glad to have made it through last night.

So the break down is this:
  • I am now on a 6 day trip with a group of AUC students who I don't really know.
  • I payed 1,100LE (Egyptian pounds) for said adventure, which may make it worth it if only so I can say that I paid only 1,100LE for a week-long vacation.
  • BUT I will admit that this trip makes me a bit nervous. There. I said it. But knowing me, I'm usually nervous before I get to do something awesome. Please, please let this trip be awesome."
The next entry: WARNING, This contains some insight as to the propensity for college students to revert to 7-year-old potty humor. If words like "poo" offend your sensibilities, then you should read a different posting. As a disclaimer, this was written when we all had cabin fever and were beginning to get loopy for lack of food and water. There. You've been warned.


"Oct 1, 2008


"...On our way (Nisreen and I) to the train's restroom facility, Nisreen looked down and there was a sizable hunk of human feces on her shoe. Her cute ballet flat with a silver buckle.

"Firstly, we were all generally curious as to how that was even possible -- had there been a hunk of poo on the wall that happened to flick to the floor just as Nisreen's foot passed below it? There were no further signs of poo anywhere on the floors, walls, or ceilings, so we were all sort of amused at how this particular bit of poo ended up on top of and not under her shoe. Plus, we'd been on the train for about 15 hours at that point and we were bored of every other topic and activity. We had a drum circle, briefly, before it failed for shyness and the realization that some of our car-mates were asleep. By this point I had moved into the other car with the other 6 of our group--the two students from Duke got off at Luxor [I had spent the first 12 hours of the trip sitting in a compartment with Britney and Tosen until they got off the train, and I didn't want to be by myself for the rest of the trip].

"Our trip ended up taking over 19 hours. Nine. Teen. Evidently the train ahead of us kept having troubles, and at around 4pm these "troubles" stopped our train dead on the tracks. We couldn't go anywhere with that stupid other train in the way. And then the A/C and lights went out. It was one of those 'Noooooo!!!' moments. Stuck out in the desert without any food and only 1/2 a bottle of water, images of death by dehydration or train robbery flashed through my head. So I decided to calm my nerves by moving into the hallway and looking out the window. Not long after, a man with a chainsaw slung over his shoulder walked by. No joking. I called the others out to look but he was already making his way around the corner of a wall. But they saw him.

"When we finally reached Aswan we were all ravenous. We took our luggage to the hotel and then we went to the most quaint little restaurant by the Nile. And by "quaint" I mean that there were fingernails in my lentil soup. I shall include now the observations/new names that we gave to our orders: fingernail soup - ash hummus (tasted like ash paste)- pretzel babaganough (tasted surprisingly though not necessarily disappointingly like a twisty pretzel). And a quote from Yousef: 'When chicken looks like steak, that's not a good sign...'"

So that was the first day of our trip, and seemingly one of the longest days of my life.

American University in Cairo: In Progress

THE GENERAL GRIEVANCES
With any trip there are bound to be unmet expectations. Maybe the continental breakfast that a hotel boasted about in brochures consists of nothing but bagels and bananas. Or perhaps the whale watching trip you were so excited to go on in Mexico only yields one unexciting photo of a tail splash some 200 yards away. Yes, there are minor disappointments in every trip. I coming to Egypt I expected a slower lifestyle. I expected it to be smoggy and hot. I expected to face a certain amount of sexual harassment. What I did not expect was for the new AUC campus to be left unfinished.

The Fall 2008 semester is AUC's first semester on its new campus. Aside from the fact that this new campus lies 20 minutes from the nearest--anything, it was heralded as an amazing feat of modern architecture, technologies, and amenities. When we went to the International Student Orientation on the new campus, we spent our time at the campus' Greek theater, where we enjoyed live music, dancing, and some pretty good Egyptian food. We hadn't set foot on the main campus. On the first day of classes, it became clear that there was something amiss; namely, the campus wasn't finished. The buildings themselves looked impressive, but for the first week of school I had 3 out of 5 professors not show up for class, there were piles of rubble lying around, a lot of fenced off areas, no cafeteria/food commons, no air conditioning in most classrooms (more than a small problem in 110F degree weather), no offices set up yet, uninhabitable dorms, and desks that randomly (and I'll admit: sometimes comically) collapse in the middle of class.


WHERE'S THE FOOD?
I think everyone was shocked. There are scores of students who were supposed to live in university housing, but since the dormitories were not and still are not completed the university sent them to live in military hotels around Cairo. That was one disaster that I was able to avoid. But the food issue made things more tricky. For the first month of school, it wasn't as big of a deal since it was Ramadan and many students were fasting every day. But once Ramadan was over it quickly became evident that the student body needed food on campus. The only food choices on campus for a while were 1) a bagel shop, 2) Cinnabon, 3) a coffee shop. And with the new location of the university, the nearest food source off campus is at least a 15 minute drive away. Since facing mobs of angry letters and phone calls, the university has now added an impromptu food stand that sells pizza and sandwiches, and a little snack bar that sells hamburgers and chips and cookies, etc. These places are run by an AUC contracted company called Delicious, Inc. I think people would have been more excited about these places if the prices weren't outlandishly high (a hamburger from a fast food joint would cost 4 EGP while these stands are charging 14 EGP).

Interestingly, the Student Union (student government) recently set up a competing food stand to meet the demand of hungry students. And the Foreign Student Assembly set up a food stand, too. Capitalism went to work, and as Delicious, Inc. faced competition from student groups selling products at far better prices they freaked out. They went to the administration and demanded that the student stands be shut down. Admin said that they would not. The next day, the pizza stand was giving out free pizza slices in an attempt to lure people over. It was funny.

DO YOU HAVE YOUR BUS PASS?
There is an Egyptian learning curve. In the first week of class my roommates and I got to the bus stop 5 minutes before our bus was supposed to arrive. Evidently, however, the bus had already come and gone 10 minutes before. Usually everything is late in Egypt, but as our host mom Dorothy continues to remind us, "Don't ever think." We thought the bus would be late, we thought we'd be safe getting there a few minutes early, and thinking got us nowhere. We had to sit on the curb for a hour waiting for the next bus.

A secondary issue arose when the university informed us at the last minute that we would have to pay $300 for a semester bus pass. I went online by the payment deadline and purchased my bus pass, thinking that certainly I would need it. Don't ever think. Three hundred dollars later, no one has ever been asked to show a bus pass. They only issued the physical passes to us two weeks ago. The angel on my right shoulder has informed me that it is good that I was honest and bought the pass, per the instruction of the university. The more convincing little devil on the left shoulder keeps making fun of me for buying a buss pass.


A COMEDY OF ERRORS
Going to AUC is like living in a comedy of errors. For the last weeks of summer in the scorching heat we had no air conditioning. Now that it is cooling down in Cairo, someone somewhere somehow figured out how to make the air conditioning function, but managed to configure a system in which the on/off switch in the corner of the room does nothing. We sit shivering in some classes or open the windows and waste mass amounts of energy while the A/C blasts like it's run by a converted jet engine.

Someone else decided to have a laugh and order a couple thousand of the most ill-thought-out desks you'd ever be likely to see. They are trapezoidal. They are on wheels. They are easily collapsible. On the one hand, it's highly amusing to watch people try to decide how to set up the room, as the desks are a nightmare of a shape to fit next to one another. Also it can be a good wake up call during class when you lean on your desk only to have the whole thing flip over, sending your books, pens, and whatever else sliding across the room. On the other hand it has proved less funny when some people's laptops have crashed to the tile floor.

Then there's the fact that for the first few weeks of school there was no A/C, lots of classrooms with no glass in the windows, no food, many times no electricity, and the consistent occurrence of the fire alarm going off a couple of times each day, BUT God bless them, there were guys all around campus polishing the floors.

And the campus was constructed such that the main source of shade on campus is in this one relatively narrow corridor. This attracted the attention of a group that AUCians sarcastically refer to as "Gucci Corner," since they used to all hang out together in a certain corner of the old campus. Well the Gucci Corner kids choose to pull the large wicker chairs that dot the campus into this walkway where they sit and smoke and talk while hundreds of other students and faculty are forced to move in cattle-like formation through a now even smaller gap between the buildings. Despite the constant back up of traffic in this walkway, the Gucci Corner kids will NOT move. I can't imagine that they don't see how insanely crowed it gets as a result of their settlement in this bottleneck. One student suggested to me that those kids want to escape the heat, but more importantly to be seen by everyone else.

And lastly, a phenomenon I was not expecting: many Egyptian students bring nothing with them to school. No backpack, no notebook, no pen, no anything. In my political science courses there are students who literally just sit there and listen to the professor, send the occasional text message under the desk, and then leave once class is over. So either they have minds like steel traps, or their approach to learning is far different from anything that I understand.

I am gaining most of my education here outside of the classroom. At this point I've sort of shrugged my shoulders in resignation at the complete lack of infrastructure at AUC and have most of my fun outside of class.

Again, feel free to drop me a line any time: mduncan@usc.edu

Monday, September 22, 2008

You've Got a FREND in Me...

Yay! My devious plan to make Egyptians be friends with me is working... I hope.

First, let me explain something. Among many of the international students there's already "common knowledge" about how things work here. You see, on first glance it seems like the Egyptian students don't want anything to do with the international students--maybe some of them don't. And I will admit, the obvious tight-knit groups that pretty much ALL the Egyptians are in seem impenetrable. BUT, I have observed that Egyptians are not unfriendly like some of the mythology (circulated among American study-abroad kids) would suggest.

I admit it. I was almost sucked into that unfortunate mindset (that the Egyptian students just won't be friends with foreigners). But I also thought it seemed really ridiculous to go all the way to Egypt and then only come home with stories of all the American friends I had made in el-Misr (Egypt).

So-- I came up with Operation FREND (Force the Reserved Egyptians to kNow the Duncan).

I decided that it was, in fact, pretty intimidating just walking up to one of the closed-off circles of Egyptian students that form along the corridors on campus. And most of the Egyptian students come to class, immediately sit with friends, and then quickly leave together once class is over. How, then, was I to woo these people and make them talk to me?

Then my evil plan came to me, and Operation FREND was a go.

The bus. It's perfect! Every single morning I ride the bus 40 minutes to campus, and every afternoon I look forward to another hour-or-so trip back to my stop in Maadi. I decided that whenever possible I would try to sit next to an Egyptian girl. No escaping me.

Thus far my shameless bid for new friends has been a success. One-on-one interactions are far less intimidating, AND I've found that Egyptians are really willing to build new friendships. By the second time you see a new friend, it seems expected that two girls will kiss one another, once on each cheek. You have no idea how excited I was when one of my Bus Friends got on the bus the day after I'd met her and greeted me with an excited "Caitlin!" and the cheek kisses. I felt like I was "in." Or on the fringes of "in." Plus, this whole greeting thing happened in front of another girl I was talking to in a bid for FRENDship. The kiss-kiss thing probably gave me more Egyptian street cred :)

This coming weekend, I'm going shopping with a girl I met last week. And another new friend and I have met up between classes just to hang out.

Wish me luck in making new friends!

I think I threatened our Bowab...

I don't know if we could have DIED from the heat and mugginess, but I bet we could've, I don't know, passed out or something. That definitely could have happened last night. Oh yeah, by the way: ALL FOUR of our A/C units broke. Or we thought they did. Then we went to a BBQ at the CSA (Community Service Association) with some people from church, and Eric told us that it was probably the fuses that blew. There are lots of power surges here.

Eric offered to come fix the fuses later, but then it got to be pretty late and we decided it'd be better to do it "bukra" (tomorrow). Then someone suggested we ask our bowab (doorman) to have a look. She told us the Arabic word for "air conditioning" and the word for "fuse." Somewhere on the 10 minute walk back to our apartment, though, Lindsey and I forgot both. We decided that if we could just get Moussa (the bowab) up to our apartment, pointing to stuff might work.

We found Moussa in the elevator and I tried to tell him that something was broken in our apartment and that it was really hot in there. I didn't realize it right away, but I had used the wrong word for "broken." There's one word to indicate "not functioning," while the other "broken" means that something has been physically crushed or smashed or something. That got his attention, though.

Moussa took a look at the fuse box and didn't seem to know what to do, but he took a screw driver to it anyhow. Lindsey had wrassled up an Arabic-English dictionary by this point, and I quickly flipped through so I could tell Moussa to be careful with the electricity. I ended up spouting out something like "elec-- elec-tro...cute?" in Arabic. Moussa shook his head and laughed. Then I laughed, realizing what I'd said and how it must have sounded.

Long story shorter, Moussa took a really long time fixing the one fuse, but I'd been watching and fixed the other 3 myself with Lindsey being my Scalpel Girl-- you know, like in every hospital scene in Hollywood: I'd say, "Scalpel," and she'd hand me a Phillips-head :)

THE END?

Not quite. As I transferred this story from my journal to the computer, Lindsey thought it would be a nice touch to include the actual Arabic script for "electrocute." She looked it up in the dictionary and I looked it up online. Result? We found that the phrase that I had used to warn Moussa means "execution by electricity." He is SO never coming to help us again.

Making Bus Drivers Giggle: A How-to Guide

9-18-08

Much earlier I had said that my mother suffered from EPS. True. BUT she had been outdone, quite unexpectedly, by my cab driver this morning. Do I need to work on my Arabic more now? Yes, yes, yes.

I was a little behind this morning, so I took a taxi to the bus stop. But I shared a fare with another woman (she was let off a few blocks away) before the driver took me to the bus stop.

Yikes. A few seconds here and there made the difference.

We pulled up to the stop just as my bus was pulling away, so I ask in broken Arabic for the cab driver to follow the bus. Boy, did he follow that bus.

I didn't know how to say "bus stop," so all I could manage was, "It's not a problem. There's another BLANK." The cab driver ignored me or didn't understand me because he kept right on the bus' bumper--honking, waving his arms, yelling out the window. We followed that stupid bus for a good two minutes straight of my taxi driver honking and hollering out the window. Persistent man he turned out to be, he even tried to force the bus to the side of the road with his taxi.

I. wanted. to. melt.

Finally, the bus came to the next stop. I got out of the cab, gave the driver an extra 1.50L.E. for a 2L.E. fare , and scuttled onto the bus to face a giggling bus driver. Only in Egypt.

And Mom, don't get any ideas.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

I Spy With My Little Eye, Some Uniquely Egyptian Lessons

And here are a few random things that I have noticed/thought were amusing so far in Cairo:

- There is something ridiculous about the pyramids and I'm not sure what exactly it is. All you can really think to do is take a picture of them. And then you stare for a while. And then whirlwinds of trash swirl around them.

- The mystique of the Sphinx was somewhat hampered by the fact that there are pigeons ALL over its face. Hehehe. I mean, it's shaded so I understand why they were there, but the idea of a majestic icon was diminished by the birds living in its nose hole.

- Everyone wants to sell you something. People try to open the doors to your car when you park so that you have to give them baksheesh (a tip). In tourist traps kids try to sell you tissues and book marks at outrageous prices.

- The money here is fun. The larger the value of the money, the bigger the actual bill is. So a 100 pound note is slightly longer than a 50 pound note, which is longer than a 20 pound note, etc.

- We exchanged money at the bank today, and I felt rich. Really, really rich. I gave them $73 and they gave me about 380 Egyptian pounds. Call me little miss money bags.

- The money here SMELLS and FEELS like Cairo. That one is hard to explain unless you come to Cairo, wander the streets, and then smell the money.

- Egyptians are afraid of dogs. They do not like them. They think every dog is just waiting to attack or something. It doesn't matter whether it's a Rottweiler (some guy had one on a leash across the street and our real estate broker turned pale) or a Schnauser (the ancient white dog the Knapps babysat while we stayed with them), people will give you a wide berth on the street if you're walking one.

- There are tons of feral cats.

- Sidewalks are not for walking on. In fact, I don't know what the sidewalks are for. Sidewalks stay empty and people just walk in the street. Cars whiz by and leave no more than a foot-and-a-half of space, but people just don't use the sidewalks. I sort of found out why, when I tripped over a jutting, broken pipe and almost tumbled bum-over-tea-kettle into the street. Also, there are often trees and guard huts (I'll explain that later) plopped right in the middle of the sidewalk. In other words, you'd have to step down the super tall curb into the street anyhow, so you might as well stay there.

- We took our first metro trip on our third day in Egypt. We rode in the women's car and we were fine. We got stared at though, for sure. More than 95% of the women wear a hijaab or veil (head/neck covering).

- Women don't really walk around outside / in the street. It's odd. We were like, "Where do they GO?" And then when we were on the metro, there were a LOT of women in the women's cars with us; that was the most females we had seen all in one place in our first week in Egypt. But we still don't know where they all disappear to once the get off the trains... weird. Someone should have CNN investigate.

- Everywhere delivers food. MacDonalds delivers 24hrs a day and they have a sandwich called the MacArabia. Really.

- During the current holy month of Ramadan, grocery stores have ready-made bags of groceries for people to buy, which get donated to the poor.

- We got cell phones REALLY easily from the big mobile company here called Mobinil (MOH-bih-neel). Our phones were 149 Egyptian pounds (EGP) and then you buy what are called "scratch cards" that have a certain amount of money on them to pay-as-you-go. We each got 50EGP scratch cards. And they gave us bright orange hats for signing up. Yeah. Someone is getting that from me at Christmas. It's awful.

- Eric spoils us. Badly. He treated us to the Giza trip and then he took us out for dinner at an American-style place called Lucille's. And the night before that he took us to the market and let us pick out 3 ice creams. And he went on a business trip to Geneva and brought each of us fancy shampoos and conditioners from the Swiss hotel he stayed in. He and his wife treated us to dinner buffet at the Marriot hotel the other night, and then a BBQ at the Community Service Association last night. We don't mind too much--being spoiled like this. And we certainly weren't complaining about the steady flow of ice cream for the 1 1/2 weeks that we stayed with the Knapps (We love mango ice cream, we've decided. It's mango season here, and Eric showed us how you eat this one smaller variety of mango. There are about 10 different kinds of mangos here. I'm in mango HEAVEN!!!). We owe them lots of baked goods now that we have our own apartment and oven.

- OK, that was more than just a few things... But I've been so behind in this blog that I feel like it's warranted.

Raise Your Hand if You've Seen the Pyramids!

Our second day in Egypt, Eric treated us to a trip to the pyramids at Giza and it was HOTTT!!! The thermometer said 110F and I believe it. We were drenched in sweat. I could see how someone could possibly DIE out there if left long enough.

Lindsey is from Michigan, where it's still 60 some-odd degrees, and Daphne is from the Bay Area-- they were both struggling in the heat. We had seen two pyramids and the Sphinx when we sat in the shade to rest. Eric asks "So do you want to see the other pyramid?" And Lindsey and Daphne, faces flushed, hair stuck to their foreheads with sweat, say wearily, "How far is it?"

I almost let out a burst of laughter. The tone of their voices made it sound like "Do we have to see another pyramid?" I was hot, too, but still highly amused that there was that kind of cost-benefit analysis going on. Like, "We flew across the world and we only want to see another pyramid if it's really easy to get there." :D I just thought it was perfect.

Oh yes, and Eric kept telling people we're Russian so that they'd leave us alone. For the first few days I got away with telling guys that I was German so they would leave me alone. Recently, though, I've been telling people that I'm Spanish (so that just in case someone starts to speak to me I'll be able to respond). As a female, if you respond when men call out to you or harrass you in English, they'll just keep it up. In my limited experiences, as soon as they think I speak some other language they stop trying. The whole blonde thing gives me some nationality wriggle room, so "Catalina the Spaniard" isn't a complete stretch.

Any-how, I was shocked at the way that some tourists dress here. Shocked. Here they are in a Muslim country wearing hot shorts and a spaghetti strap shirt. Initially I thought that they were Americans until Eric informed me that it's mostly Italian tourists that dress that way. Then we heard them speaking Italian. So, my apologies for being so quick to assume the worst of my fellow countrymen and women. So they were Italian; nonetheless, I was shocked.

First Day in el-Misr (Egypt)

Where did I leave off? Ah, yes: Eric Knapp sent drivers to pick us up from the airport and to take our baggage up to his house/apartment. He then gave us an impromptu driving tour of the City of the Dead, where people live in grave yards among the mosoleums, etc. Evidently, as a foreigner you have to have special permission from the government to go there.

We finally came "home" and Dorothy Knapp took us with her on a walk to the corner bakery (yesm they're here, too), and when we got back to the apartment we ordered out-- Italian food! :) We ate our Egyptian vesion of Italian food on the balcony of their 10th floor apartment and watched the sun set over the Nile (which we couldn't actually see because of the huge apartment buildings built right along side it). The experience was topped off when we got to hear the evening call to prayer from the mosque behind the apartment...and the mosque down the street, and the mosque across the street, and...I'm sure you all get the point. It was so awesome. Each Imam (he leads the prayers in the mosque) has his own particular way of doing the call to prayer, and because they all go out at relatively the same time, there's this intermingling of voices and tones all over the place via loudspeakers.

After dinner, Eric walked us to the neighborhood market (Sa'udi) for ice cream. He spoiled us to the tune of mango, pistachio, and chocolate. *Side note: Ice cream, I will have you all know, is different here. Just the cream-based varieties are kind of crunchy? Maybe not crunchy, exactly, but its texture is different. Chewy-ish? Not sure why this is, but as hot as it gets here I don't ask too many questions about what's in the ice cream.* On the way home from Sa'udi Market Eric pulled a fast one and made us try to find our way back to the apartment. A valuable lesson. Now we pay better attention to where we're going.

So, Lindsey Daphne, and I made it through our first day in Egypt and didn't crash into the Atlantic, although that little Egyptian woman sitting next to me on the plane ("Octopus!") suggested to me that we might do just that. She had made a nose-dive gesture with her hand and made the crash noises and everything.

Day One was mostly a success. Whattya think?

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Ancient Egyptian Bruins, not a typo

To those of you who feared I mighyt have dropped off the face of the Earth, fear no longer; I am here and ready to update the lot of you as to what I've been doing these last two weeks.

Note / apology for laziness: Some of the following may be pulled from emails that I sent home. So I'm sorry if some of you have already read some of this.



GERMANY TO CAIRO
Not much of interest happened in the Frankfurt airport while waiting for my flight to Cairo. Although, I did sit in the wrong terminal for almost an hour before I realized that wherever I was, my fellow travellers were probably not going to Egypt (as I waited, the terminal slowly filled with men and young boys donning the yarmulke and wearing tzitzit, or "fringes"). I left as discreetly as possible, and looked around the corner to find Egyptians in designer jeans and some women wearing the hijaab. Found it.

As luck would have it, I was able to sit next to a fellow USC Trojan, and my roommate here, Daphne on the flight from Germany to Cairo. We marveled at how few passengers there were on our plane and at how delicious the on-board meal was (photo forthcoming... yes, I took a picture).

We landed and followed the directions given us by our host family, the Knapps (an expat couple from Manhattan Beach, CA). We headed straight to customs in the surprising airport heat. No one checked anything. We simply slid our passports through a window, walked through a turnstyle, and had our passports handed to us through a little slot. Home free.

We walked through the cigarette haze in the airport to the outside, finding a MESS of people waiting for passengers. I thought it was hopeless looking for our driver until I saw distinct a sign that read:
Welcome to Bruin Country! Go UCLA!
Beat USC!

With our names below a grinning bear. And lo, thus was our welcome to Cairo.

We were led outside into the hundred-and-something heat, and the frist thing we see in Egypt is a mobile billboard drive by with a huge image of America's finest representative: Britney Spears. Daphne and I exchanged looks and then chuckled at the irony.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Somewhere over the Atlantic

8/20/08

I was in flight and already had new material for writing:


Already two new friends. Boy, did I get lucky in seatmates!

Flying Los Angeles to Chicago I was sitting between two gentlemen, one of whom is a German named Marc. Marc works for an non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered in Bogota, Colombia. It has been forming new curricula for the various regions of Colombia. He used to be a consultant until he said that he couldn't stand the requirements of the job anymore. We talked about the merits of non-profit work and he told me about a certain prize given / offered to African leaders who leave their country in better shape than it was in when they came to power. Apparently the President of Mozambique received such an award.

I ramble.

Marc and I were both connecting to a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, so we got to grab lunch together from some mediocre Chinese food place in O'Hare. I volunteered him to help me find my way through the airport in Frankfurt, since he speaks German and all.


My seatmate on the Chicag0-->Germany flight was really fun to sit next to. It turned out that she was from Alexandria, Egypt. At that point I could hardly wait to speak more Arabic. There were lots of misunderstandings and some laughing. She kept trying to use sign language to explain abstract concepts.

Example:
I think she's asking me how long I'm going to be in Egypt so I say, "August through December."
She raises her eyebrows and says something exclamatory. Then she thinks harder and says, "birthday" and pointed at me.
"Oh!" I say, "October."
"Octopus," she says.
"October," I say in Arabic.
"Octopus," she says again, nodding.

Now she starts saying something about fish.
I must've looked confused because she draws a fish on the sticky note pad that I had pulled out for our translation game.

"Okay, fish..." I say
She nods, "Fish: March."
"Fish in March?" I ask.
She nods vigorously, apparently thinking that I must be putting two and two together by now. She must think I'm so slow on the uptake.

Now she says, "Kharoof: April."
She points to an Arabic-English phrasebook I'd been consulting. I look up "kharoof" and it's "sheep."
"Sheep in April?" I offer. Again the vigorous head nodding.
Then she says "fish" again, makes a face and chomping / gnashing teeth noises.
"Biting?" I guess, which gets nothing.
"Octopus," she says.
"Octopus in October?" I venture.
"YES!!! Yes!"
She's so proud of me even though I'm not sure what I just learned.

"Fish in March, sheep in April, and octopus in October," I conclude.
She approves and I come to terms with the fact that I've won at the game, but I have no idea what we were playing.

Most of the plane ride was that way.

And bless her, she kept talking to me, each time as patient as ever. And she kept offering me food.

I had fallen asleep and missed the all-holy pretzel packet and drink. So when I woke, Hannah (as her name turned out to be), directly handed her bag of pretzels over to me. There was no arguing-- she was insistent that I take it. Then she patted my hand (She did a lot of that type of thing, actually: maternal reassurances. She had no reservations about touching my hair or face either).

Again, when we got our drinks, I ordered tomato juice and she, Coke. I had just finished my tomato juice when she pours me an extra cup of her Coke.
I tried to say "No, it's okay," but there didn't seem adequate sign language for me to communicate "I feel badly taking all your food, especially since I don't know you."

So she kept sharing. I tried to share my bag of sweets with her and she smiled and shook her head. I was trying to remember how she had gotten me to take food even after I said "no," but I didn't want to force her to take some crummy candy that she didn't want.

She was very convincing. She even got me sharing her tiny, 1/2 teaspoon packet of butter spread.

When all was said and done, she gave me her telephone number, invited me to visit her in Alexandria, and at some point had managed to communicate that I look exactly like her son's first wife.

Or something.

When my Egyptian Arabic gets better I'll have to call and find out.

LAX: Pre-departure Exploits

8/20/08

My first entry in this travel log came unexpectedly quickly -- I was still in LAX.

The night before I left was a disorderly flurry of laundry, books, documents, and snacks. My good friend Elisa came to my rescue and promptly remedied my time-consuming practice of ordering my clothing into sections (pants section, shirt section, sweater section, etc.) by grabbing something from my mess of a bed, asking, "Do you want to take this?" and, if I answered in the affirmative, stuffing whatever-it-was into the nearest gap in the previously segregated architecture of my suitcase. Her way was faster even if it made me cringe a little.

Thanks, Elisa.

Packing the odds and ends of my life into 2 up to 50lb suitcases went deep into the night. At some point, Elisa crawled over the migrating mess on my bed and nested there until she fell asleep around 1:30am. What a sight. And what a friend :)

But what prompted me to chronicle this morning was not the frenzied packing/suitcase cramming routine. The fun really began once my mom and I got to LAX. As if it weren't bad enough having to drive to LA at 3am, we get to the security screening point and she gets a remarkable case of Embarrassing Parent Syndrome (EPS). The hug and big kiss were were not a big deal.

Not embarrassing.


What is a little awkward is standing there juggling my shoes, laptop, passport, purse, backpack, and boarding pass and having her holler for me to turn around for a cell phone picture. The line behind me is HUGE. Well, sizable, at least... Anyhow, I smile for the picture and make my barefooted way over to the x-ray machine while she stands on the other side of the plexiglass and keeps waving and waving. Her EPS is beginning to present itself.

I make it through the x-ray machine and metal detector without cause for excitement until the metal detector...technician? --until the metal detector guy says, "Hey, you! Ma'am!"
I look around for some rule-breaker; some disobedient traveler.

My glasses had to go through the x-ray machine, so I barely put those on and dip my toes into my right shoe when I realize that metal detector guy is looking right at ME!

"Ma'am, you need to come back out here. They need you to come back out."

I was terrified that I had accidentally put a hunting knife in my purse or that a razor blade had found its way into the sole of my shoe. I thought I was in trouble for sure. But no. I lop-sidedly over to the TSA inspector, and she walks up to me with a cell phone camera.

"No," I say preemptively, "You must be joking."
"No, ma'am, I'm not joking. She wants a picture of you. And this time I'm going to save it."

I look past the security personnel and see my smiling little mother standing there expectantly. Her EPS is of the more persistent variety.

"Oh, no," I sigh and smile for the photo. The TSA agent makes me stand there until she's sure that the picture is saved. I wave goodbye to my mother again and hobble back to where my laptop, passport, and backpack lie ready for pick up at the end of the x-ray conveyor.

"Your shoe," the metal detector guy stops me. "You need to put that shoe back through x-ray."

I do, and finally wave goodbye (yet again) to the little soccer mom on the other side of the plexiglass. You better believe I packed up my shoes, computer, and backpack lickety-split and hurried off to my terminal where I could sit and write about how much my mommy loves me! :)

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Hello Cairo

Finally, a moment to set up a blog! Thus far, I have been in Egypt for five days-- the longest five days that I can recall.

I have been writing some of my experiences in both a journal that I carry with me and in a few emails that I was able to write home. I plan to copy those entries into this blog for all those who wish to vicariously live in Cairo.

For those of you who know me well, I love to retell stories from my life. If you were hoping for succinct lists of things that I do in Egypt, I'm sorry, but this is going to be more colorful than that. I hope to share with you most of those things which strike me as pleasant, odd, surprising, amusing, or just good material for a story.

Anyone who wishes to do so may post comments here or email me at mduncan@usc.edu (I love getting emails!).

On that note, I'll now begin the process of copying entries to this blog and I'm sure that I'll soon have new experiences to share with you all!

مع السلام,
Caitlin