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! :)