Taking a Brief Hiatus...

I'm taking off at last tomorrow for my travels in bilad al-sham (the Levant). I've decided to go minimal on the technology, so I won't be blogging while I'm gone. But don't worry, I'll be back in action on August 17 with a full report on my travels. If anyone has recommendations for any of the following places, I will be checking my e-mail occasionally:

-Lebanon (Jul. 31-Aug. 5)

-Jordan (Aug. 5-Aug. 9)

-West Bank (Aug. 9-Aug. 12)

-Jerusalem & Tel Aviv (Aug. 12-Aug. 16)

مع السلامة!

The Last Week Before Horreyya

Horreyya means "freedom", and by that I really just mean the end of summer classes and the beginning of my six-week break that will bring my trip to Lebanon & co. and more opportunities to discover Cairo itself. Backing up a bit, last Thursday (the night before Ramadan started), Sarah and I went to yet another concert, this time at Sakiat al-Sawy, a popular concert venue in Zamalek. This was a concert of the Egyptian folk-rock band Maghna Khan, whose catchy songs you can experience in part here. (The link is for my favorite of the songs they performed at the concert, "Eskenderia".)

The next day was the iftar I hosted at my place followed by our late-night felucca and sohour adventure. Since I slept through most all of the following day, I roused myself just in time to meet one of our CASA cultural advisers (and former student) Andrew, for a walk to the little-known Sidi Zein el Abdin mosque in Sayyida Zeinab. Sayyida Zeinab is what is known as a shaaby neighborhood, which technically means "popular" but actually means poor. The mosque, which we approached just before sunset, was raised above a picturesque but aging cemetery, and was surrounded by stone walkways for strolling about and either thinking about God or marveling at the simple beauty of the mosque/tomb. The downside to this visit was that four of us girls attempted to enter the mosque. At first, the man at the door greeted us in English and was quite friendly. Then he asked us where we were from. "Amirika," we responded brightly. His smile turned into a snarl. "Amirika?! AMIRIKA?! No. No. No. Get out. This is Islam. Amirika No. Go away, get out." He waved at the exit. It took us a moment to realize that he was utterly serious, partly because this has never happened to me before in Egypt. And every Egyptian we told was shocked that we'd had such an experience, although Andrew says it happens to him not infrequently in shaaby areas. Although I'm used to hearing angry attitudes about America expressed, people often go to great pains to explain that despite all that they really like Americans as people. Not this one. I found myself wanting to engage the hater in conversation, explain to him that the four innocent-looking girls (looking a little silly in hijab) were there to respect Islam, etc. etc., but thought better. Nevertheless, it left me slightly shaken up as I contemplated it on the way to a nearby restaurant for iftar. We feasted at the simple plastic tables thrown up in the street -- on chicken, kofta, rice, and mahshy.

After a walk through Sayyida Zeinab's packed and colorful streets, past the best selection of fawanees (plural of fanous) I've yet seen in Cairo and a camel butcher with his live wares tethered to posts in the street, we stopped in the courtyard of Sayyida Zeinab mosque itself. It was the hour of 'asha, the last of the day's five prayers. People were milling around the courtyard when the call to prayer sounded and men began rolling out mats to catch the overflow from the mosque itself, whose minaret, entrances, and "Allah" on the facade were illuminated with green neon light. We migrated across the street then to a hole-in-the-wall called Rahmany's, which sells exclusively a special kind of dessert called miziz. I can't exactly tell you what that is, except that it includes milk, rice, sugar, and a "secret ingredient", comes in either sour or sweet (I had sour, good choice), and is topped with cinnamon. The ingredients make it sound like every other Egyptian dessert, so it must be the secret ingredient that gives it an odd kind of glow and that sour tang.

The next day, Sunday, I ventured for the first time to the neighborhood of Shubra, on the east bank of the Nile, north of Downtown. I spent a quiet afternoon at my friend Nada's apartment with her and another Egyptian friend, Evline. Since they are Protestant and therefore not fasting, we had a nice lunch. We also discussed Hillary's recent meetings here with President Morsi and the SCAF. Based on information gathered from this conversation and other conversations with Christians, the widespread belief is that the U.S. is throwing support behind the Ikhwan and therefore has no moral compass whatsoever. And they are clearly outraged about this. (One friend posted a photoshopped picture on Facebook of Hillary sitting in Morsi's lap.) Conspiracy theories abound. My friend explained that her father, for instance, thinks the US is hoping for Islamist takeovers throughout the Middle East so that it will then have reason to invade said countries. Most takes on the issue are less spectacular, but I haven't met a single person (even those who describe themselves as pro-American) who thinks the US has anything but nefarious intentions regarding Egypt. Shubra was unusually quiet (given that it is one of the overcrowded areas of Cairo -- someone once told me, hyperbolically or not, that 75% of the city's population lives there) because there is a large Christian population, so the Christian shops close on Sundays, while many Muslim shops close in the afternoon during Ramadan. So when Nada offered me the chance to ride to the metro on the back of her brother's motorcycle, how could I refuse? No one get nervous here -- I was a pro! We sailed through the sleepy streets without a hitch, past the lovely but aging buildings perhaps dating from the period when Mohammed Ali built a palace in the area. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't a thrill!

From Shubra I met up with Kevin and we taxied out to one of the lovely gated compounds in the suburbs, called Arabella. We had been invited to an iftar at the villa of our college friend Alya's aunt. When we arrived at the gates, we realized we didn't know the aunt's name and so were stuck for about half an hour with the gatekeepers, most of whom were from upper Egypt and a lot of fun. They brought us stools and sweet juice, even though they hadn't broken their fast yet, and we made smalltalk. Finally we made it to the sprawling villa we intended, and took a brief stroll around the pool and gardens before the azan sounded and it was time to eat. Several large tables were set out on the back balcony, overlooking the infinity pool, and we broke our "fast" with qamr al-din (a special Ramadan apricot drink) as the sun slipped behind the palm trees. Like our friend, who is half British and half Egyptian but grew up in the U.S., pretty much everyone in the family lived part-time or had lived at some point in the U.S. or Canada. The dinner was a mix of Egyptian staples like lisan aasfour noodle soup, ful and (what I think was) lamb, served by a pair of men in crisp black tuxedos -- and familiar staples like ravioli and a real, leafy green salad... something I have not yet seen with anything but shreds of iceberg lettuce since I arrived. When the Ahly vs. Zamalek soccer game started, everyone gathered around. I haven't chosen sides yet, but this is becoming a problem here as people take team allegiance very seriously. We ended the evening back on the deck sipping tea and nibbling dried fruit.

My other family iftar of the week came on Tuesday, when I returned to the house of Ali, the friend of my professor Tarek from Princeton. We sailed out to Shorouk in Ali's car just before sunset along with Kevin and Hannah, another Princetonian currently in Cairo. Ali's wife, Taghrid, had again prepared us an eyepopping feast. The centerpiece this time was an entire sheep, curled up on a large platter. Although the meat was succulent, there was no way seven people could finish, especially given the ten or more other dishes alongside the sheep. Personally, I'm always a fan of the sambousek, fried pastry shells stuffed with beef or cheese. After the meal, we headed off for a postprandial walk at the family's social club, the Shorouk branch of the Heliopolis Club. Memberships in these clubs are hereditary, so upper middle class and wealthy families have belonged to their chosen club for generations -- and they are the main place many such families socialize, since they are oases of green space, swimming pools, gyms, sitting areas, and sports fields in the middle of the cacophonous city or barren desert. (Of course, if your money is new, it costs about $50,000 as a down payment, plus yearly fees, to join any of the clubs.) Taghrid, who worked as a lawyer before she married and now has two young sons, showed us around the soccer fields, track, croquet lawn, tennis courts, and pools (with olympic diving boards) before we went inside and sunk into deep leather sofas in the club's pristine interior.

On Wednesday, the night before the last day of classes, Miriam, Robin, Scott, and I ventured out to a screening of a new (English-language) film called The Noise of Cairo. It was held in a room of someone's apartment (whose? I'm not sure) downtown, which was outfitted with a projector and about 30 chairs. The crowd was about half foreign and half Egyptian, but 100% hip (except maybe us). Word on the street is that if I go to enough of these events, I will see the same 20 ultra-hip people in skinny jeans and plastic frames every time. The movie was about the art scene in Cairo in the aftermath of the revolution, and profiled people like a dance choreographer who hadn't performed anything in Egypt in 10 years, a couple high-end artists working out of galleries in Zamalek, the popular singer Ramy Essam, the graffiti artist Keizer, and a few others. We thought it was a bit limited by being a foreign production and in English, as the vast majority of the content was focused on a small, elite sliver of society (whereas there have been quite a few public art projects as well), but nevertheless quite interesting because it was apparent that many high-end artists were really carefully censored under the Mubarak regime.

Then, on Thursday, to celebrate the end of our first CASA semester, the program splurged on an iftar for all of us, and our professors and language partners. They held it at the Hussein Hotel, right in the heart of Islamic Cairo, at the entrance to Khan el Khalili. When we arrived just before sundown, we passed by swarms of hungry people seated at long tables outside the restaurants next to El Hussein mosque, poised to gobble down the salads tantalizingly distributed in advance of the azan. We ourselves sat on the rooftop of the hotel. After a lovely traditional (but thankfully not stressfully excessive) chicken dinner, we migrated to ElMalki, a branch of the dessert chain, for roz bi-laban. Thus began my second Ramadan all-nighter. The next stop on this adventure was a hole-in-the-wall arts center downtown called Mastaba, which had advertised Egyptian folk music. It exceeded our wildest expectations: the folk music, as a smiley old man with an impeccable mustache announced to the fifteen of us or so gathered around on stools, was that imported north into Egypt from present-day Sudan in the time of Mohammed Ali. This meant that the instruments were things like a xylophone with a bunch of gourds dangling from it, a noisemaking skirt made of sheep's teeth, and something Robin called "the one with lots of necklaces" -- a triangular harp of sorts with a lot of -- yes -- beaded necklaces attached to it. Although some of the tunes were familiar to me from contemporary Egyptian music, and the words in Arabic, the rousing rhythms were undeniably African, punctuated with bongo drums. It turned out to be an interactive concert, and so basically the entire audience (including us) was invited up to dance with the members of the band. My favorite band member was either the one woman, a friendly older matron in a sparkly black robe and black hairnet who sometimes sang with a white sheet over her face (not sure of the symbolism of that). After the concert, we saw her sitting by herself at a dingy coffeeshop across the street puffing away at her shisha. Or maybe my favorite was this guy, who appeared in the finale in THIS unexpected costume:

After the concert, we drifted through downtown, which was teeming by 11pm, drank hibiscus juice at a shaaby cafe, and then migrated to our final destination, Korba. Korba is the historic zone at the heart of Heliopolis, the suburb founded in 1905 by Belgian entrepreneur Baron Empain. Baghdad St. is lined with fantasy oriental buildings with lovely arcaded sidewalks. The white stone facades shone in the darkness, and the streets were packed with mostly young men enjoying a coffee and shisha in the wee hours of the morning. Around 2, we got a table outside a place called Arabiata and feasted on ful, omelets, baba ghanoush, warm pitas, and fried cheese. We were lingering outside a juice place when the azan sounded fagr and the crowds evaporated from the streets in the blink of an eye.  

P.S. Ramadan TV series mean Ramadan commercials - check out this new ad for the cell provider Mobinil. You can spot Adam in the movie theater scene near the end!

Tales of my First Ramadan Kareem

First and foremost, I have to say that I think I've started my first Ramadan off on the right foot. I say this because it's 2:30pm and I woke up half an hour ago. This means that I can fast today (minus the water part, which scares me) and I only have 4.5 hours to go until iftar, the fast-breaking meal. Second, it means that I stayed out all last night exploring the city in true Ramadan style. I did not fast yesterday, but rather ate two eggs and peanut butter around 11 and then held out until iftar so that I could enjoy a massive meal. I decided to host an iftar at my own apartment for all the CASAwiyyin who were not invited to break their "fast" at an Egyptian home. Ultimately, more than fifteen people showed up to this potluck affair, bearing bowls of potatoes, green beans, beef, brownies, banana whips, and some traditional chicken and bulgur concoction. Personally, I cooked rice with dried apricots (mishmisheyya, one of my favorite words), prunes, almonds, raisins, onions, and cardamom. Surprisingly, it came out well. I did, however, have to drop 90 LE ($15) on my dried fruits at the special Ramadan dried fruit stand set up outside my supermarket, Seoudi. Dried fruits are sort of special to Ramadan, and come at a dear price.

My little trip to the grocery store was my only time venturing outside during the daylight hours, when the streets are virtually empty. In the blink of an eye, everyone has switched to a Ramadan schedule which means as little activity as possible while fasting. The grocery store is packed during the day, but closes about two hours before maghrib, the dusk prayer, when people are allowed to break their fast. I set up my fanous in my living room, and it projected crescent shadows all over the ceiling. We were quickly getting into the holiday spirit. Through the wall of sliding glass windows in the living room, we observed the Seoudi employees sitting in a circle in the grass of the Medan and eagerly breaking their fast. We couldn't really tell if the sun had set, so we made this our cue to dig in to our own feast. We gorged ourselves on good food and good conversation for a few hours before deciding we would try to stay out the whole night until sohour, the last meal eaten before sunrise. In fact, it is eaten at fajr, the prayer time that means dawn but actually occurs about an hour and a half before sunrise. We're still looking for someone to explain that to us.

Good friends and good food: awaiting iftar in my living room

I headed out from Medan Mesaha with about eight friends, first by metro to the Borsa around 10pm. The whole neighborhood was teeming with people, and the cafes glittered with what we would call Christmas lights. In some places, restaurants or rich individuals set up tents, also lined with neon lights, to welcome people for iftar or sohour. We wedged ourselves in at an outdoor table belonging to a cafe called either "Revolution of Jan 25" or "Friends", or both. Behind us was a big mural of martyrs of the revolution with the English caption "The People Demand the Removal of the Regime." We passed several hours there with a cherry shisha and a game of backgammon (which, no, I still don't know how to play), listening to the occasional bursts of firecrackers and the delighted shouts of crowds of young men to their buddies. We then decided, sometime around midnight, to walk from Borsa, near Talaat Harb, to the Corniche. The Nile was bathed in a neon glow reflected from the restaurant and nightclub boats anchored along its banks. Men, women, children, juice sellers, horse-drawn carriages, and felucca fixers filled the downtown streets usually reserved for cars and young guys by this hour of the night. We strolled along the Corniche, negotiating for a felucca of our own. Some are enormous and can fit groups of fifty or so, while others are designed for private hiring by couples or families. We wanted one of our own -- a boat with Allahu Akbar written in green neon lights above its bow, which was graced by a campy pair of blue neon dolphins. For an hour, we motored slowly between the 6th of October Bridge and the southern tip of Zamalek, hosting our own wild dance party to a mix of Egyptian shaaby tunes, Bollywood hits, and "Call Me Maybe" -- much to the amusement of our captain, a 20-something guy in a hot pink t-shirt, and the passengers of every other boat cruising the Nile.

Aboard our Ramadan felucca

By the time we returned to port around 2am, we figured it was time to scope out a place to have our sohour. But every taxi was full. When none would take us to El Hussein, the area near Khan el Khalili said to be the best (and most crowded place) to do Ramadan, we headed back to Dokki to sohour at a little place famous for its ful. It was 3am by the time we feasted at a plastic table outside this buzzing place on the otherwise nearly deserted Mossadek St. We ordered bowls of ful shakshouka (beans mixed with eggs), ful iskandrani (beans with tomatoes and onions), baba ghanoush, fried cheese (the best), and falafel. Suddenly, around 3:15, the waiters scampered to clear the tables and stack the chairs. The other customers evaporated into thin air as we paid our bill. At 3:27, the call to prayer sounded from the mosque around the corner. One of the waiters tried frantically to down a Fanta, but his colleague grabbed it playfully from his hand -- "Matishrabsh!" he told him, "Don't drink!" It was too late. We began the walk home through the quiet streets, now that people had gone to pray or sleep. Nearing Medan Mesaha, we passed a small, open mosque with bright lights packed with older men prostrated in prayer, some spilling out onto the sidewalk. At five, I finally crept into bed.

Bagels and Internships

My uncreative titling continues. But so does my recent blogging binge! Today I was yearning for a little soul food so I trekked the three blocks from the AUC building where my classes are held to Munch & Bagel, Zamalek's very own bagel shop. Yes, I discovered, they do have bagels with lox and cream cheese at this hole-in-the-wall stuck between the doner kebab stand and the Salafi koshary joint that makes the best roz bi-laban (like rice pudding). Instead of splurging, though, I got egg, cheese, tomato, and cream cheese on a sesame bagel and it was really delicious. Now I know what my go-to place will be whenever I miss home.

My second piece of news is that I went today to Manial to a women's NGO that I will be working part-time in the fall. Sarah and I got connected with ADEW through an Egyptian girl we met at the American diplomat's 4th of July party, and she arranged for us to meet today with a more senior person in the fundraising department. What they need our help with is planning and raising money for a medical center in Qalyubiyya, the governate just north of Cairo. Of course I know nothing about medicine, but I will work on brainstorming ideas for attracting donors, potentially making contact with American partners, translation, and potentially helping with plans for a civic education program connected with the center. It will give me experience with the daily work of an NGO and also allow me to get to know other members of the 95-person staff, who work on issues ranging from legal rights to youth to literacy to political education. Meanwhile, it looks like I might also be tutoring technicians at Darb 1718, the alternative art space, in English, once I return from my Ramadan vacation.

Arts of Cairo

This has been a week of sampling Cairo's art scene, in various senses of the word. Last Friday, first of all, I ventured out on a solo expedition to the Islamic Art Museum in the atmospheric neighborhood of Bab al-Khalq. Recently reopened after years of restoration, the neo-Mamluk building (or neo-something, maybe neo-Fatimid... even after my extensive visit to the museum I can't keep all the dynasties' architectural features straight) hosts a formidable (yet, I might point out, un-air-conditioned) collection of woodwork, stonework, ceramics, mosque accoutrements, etc. from the Arab Conquest in the 7th century through the Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. My favorite items were a pair of Mamluk lunchboxes (yes, they were so labeled) dating from the early 16th century -- mostly just because I liked the image of fierce Mamluk warriors sitting down and pulling out ful and tameyya sandwiches from their ornately decorated lunchboxes. From the same period, the museum had on display a set of exquisitely inlaid wooden side tables and suitcase-like boxes for storing Qur'ans. Not surprisingly, the best and largest part of the museum was the Egyptian section, although there were some nice Iranian tiles. My only disappointment was the dearth of manuscripts, which are usually my favorite part of Islamic art collections, but were here limited to a few Ottoman Qur'ans and medical texts. I also learned a legend about the founding of Cairo, however, during the Fatimid period. Supposedly, astrologers had marked off the outlines of the new city's future walls with ropes, to which they attached bells that would ring to start the construction at an auspicious time. But... a gaggle of crows sat on the ropes, causing the bells to ring prematurely during a time at which Mars (i.e. "al-Qahir") was dominant. Thus the name al-Qahira, or Cairo, came to be. No suckling at a mama wolf's teat or anything like that, but not a bad tale all the same. As the museum panel pointed out as a side note, these were astrologers running the show in those days and not sheikhs.

My second foray into the art scene was Saturday night, when I hit up Cairo Jazz Club for the second time this summer. The star was a guy named Basheer -- Mohammed Basheer -- whose genre is what someone or other calls "Nubian Fusion". In other words, Arabic rock with Nubian influence. I can't tell you what this means other than being really catchy, except that some other person said that Nubian beats are appealing to our Western ears because the scale is closer to the Western 12-step scale than to the Oriental 32-step one. I don't actually know if this is correct, but you can scope out one of Basheer's songs here, the one he opened with at the Jazz Club concert. The venue is, after 2 concerts, becoming a favorite -- it has a hip crowd of various ages, but no cover charge, tasty mezze alongside its drinks, and always the opportunity to dance. Anyway, I didn't know any of this guy's songs before, but I am quickly becoming a major fan... what's not to love about a band that has a violin, saxophone, and a lead singer who seems like a real ibn el balad? 

Tonight, Tuesday, was my third attempt at art appreciation this week. After a long day of class that culminated in an end-of-semester writing exam about Copts and hijabs, we waited for the 100+-degree heat to abate a little. (It has been hovering around 100 for the bulk of most days, with tomorrow promising 103, but we're all pretty excited that the high over the weekend will be back down to 95! Nighttime doesn't really equate with coolness -- the coolest it ever gets at night is about 88 or 90.) Anyway, I went with my roommate Andrea and friend Robin back to Darb 1718, the artists' enclave and exhibition space abutting the old church quarter in Masr Qadima. The current exhibition is called "Taharrush" - aka Harassment. Sexual harassment is, unfortunately, something that every woman deals with here, and so while the quality of the artwork was varied, the firsthand encounters from which it was derived made the pieces very raw and direct. A short documentary, for instance, consisted of an interview with a frustrated and unmarried young man from Alexandria in an attempt to get inside the minds of men who engage in this kind of behavior; another video nearby simply played the text of women's descriptions of being victims of sexual harassment, in many cases even from children. (One Egyptianwoman described her doorman's 3-year-old son as greeting her with the equivalent of "hey, hottie" every time she came home.) Sometimes, as foreigners, we feel that we're targeted because we stick out, but it's clear from exhibits like this, as well as talking with women here, that not even being a local or even being dressed extremely modestly and with hijab protects you from harassment. An American male friend of mine recently saw from a taxi window a man on a motorbike fly past a pedestrian and grope her, causing her to fall down in the dust. This is not something you witness every day on the street, and I've never seen it happen myself, but verbal harassment is pretty ubiquitous. Usually it's just irritating ("hey, honey" accompanied by a whistle or a hiss). But on Friday, on my way to the art museum, I told the 50+ cab driver, with rotted teeth and a gray beard, that it was hot outside, and he responded: "No, you're hot." Despite my expression of discontent, he proceeded to proposition me for sex, multiple times, on the way to my destination. Neither silence nor a harsh and disgusted rebuttal silenced him. Egyptian women are protesting increasingly vocally and in larger and larger numbers. Some of you may have heard about the anti-harassment protests in Tahrir a few weeks ago, for example -- which were joined by many men but sadly physically attacked by others. So, there's a push for change and a growing awareness of the severity of the problem, but still a ways to go in fixing it.

I didn't mean to write so much about this subject, but it is something that many friends have asked me about, and that is a part of daily life here. But on the upside, this is really the only seriously negative thing I can think of when people ask me what I dislike about Cairo, so from now on my posts will only get more positive. (Of course there's the pollution, too, which is probably blackening my lungs by the day, but as I said earlier, it makes for an unusual and unearthly sunset!)

In other news, I finally acquired my long-awaited Ramadan fanous. I trekked a few blocks down Dokki St. in my neighborhood and found a toy store with a large selection. What these lamps share are seriously neon colors -- mine is hot pink and lime green, which look pretty sweet when I have it plugged into the wall. Here's a photo:

Also in the positive column for this week, I reconnected with an old friend from my high school program after at least five years. We caught up over a great dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with a giant tree inside. While we both recognized each other right away (I know, I still look 16!), our discussion of politics and religion showed me how much has changed. Although her father is a Protestant pastor here (Protestants being a minority of a minority), she left the church a few years ago and considers herself an agnostic. Almost no one will ever admit that in Egypt, at least not unless you know him or her very intimately. But my friend told me that in fact people who share her beliefs have connected extensively on Twitter, which she uses mostly as a platform for broadcasting her admittedly controversial stances on social (e.g. gay rights or sexual freedom), political (e.g. relations with Israel), and religious issues. This was an eye-opening conversation for me because I learned about communities about which little is said publicly here, and whose connections are largely virtual. At the same time, my friend's predicament mirrors that of many young, well-educated Egyptians: underemployment. Just out of college with a degree in television production and broadcasting, she works hours twice as long as my daily class time, makes less than 2/3 CASA's monthly stipend, and hates her work as a community service representative at a call center handling complaints for Expedia Canada. Also like many young liberals, she invalidated her ballots in both rounds of the presidential elections, disappointed with all the choices and the way the process was carried out. "Everyone our age is depressed, seriously," she told me, not just about politics, but deeply exacerbated by it.

As I build new friendships and rekindle old ones, I am also looking for part-time internships and volunteering so that I can speak more Arabic and become more a part of the community. Tomorrow I'm going to meet with program directors from a women's advocacy and economic development NGO in my first effort to this end.

Residency Permit Acquired

I received my Egyptian residency today, valid through next June. Looks like I'm no longer just a tourist here! This also means that I now have my passport back from the abyss of the Mogamma so I will, thankfully, be able to carry on as planned with my Ramadan vacation plans. More details to follow, but this is the rough outline of my trip... On July 31, I will depart Cairo for Beirut with fellow CASAwiyya Miriam, and we'll spend about five days in Lebanon enjoying the Paris of the East and venturing out to places like Baalbek and Byblos. Then, on August 5, I will leave Beirut for Amman, where I'll meet up with my Sheeba from Princeton who is studying Arabic there. I'll do a couple days of visits to Petra, Wadi Rum, and the like before crossing the border into the West Bank. In Ramallah I'll meet up with my friends Clare and Ada, both living in Palestine for the year. After a few days sightseeing there, I'll continue into Israel and visit friends in Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as do as much sightseeing as possible in Jerusalem. Finally, I will fly out of Amman on August 17 and back to Cairo, just in time for Eid el-Fitr, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan. 

News of the weekend coming soon.

Catching Up, Part II: Cultural Excursions and Kitchen Struggles

Realizing that I need to stop devoting my afternoons to catnaps and verb conjugations, I arranged for Tharwat to take me and Sarah one day to El Moezz St., where we had visited a beautiful and newly restored mosque one evening in January. Whereas going in seemed to be an informal arrangement then, someone decided two weeks ago to charge 100 LE for foreigners to do the historical sites on the street. Anyway, the street, behind Khan el Khalili, is lined with medieval mosques, madrasas, and palaces, most of which date from the medieval period. We got our tickets in a giant cistern that at one time provided the neighborhood with water through a series of public fountains (sabil) decorated in Ottoman style. We then went back to the Qalawun mosque, madrasa, and mausoleum that we had visited previously, although it was a little less magical during the day. Still, the blue and gold ceiling and intricate woodwork are exquisite, and as we were the only visitors, it was a welcome respite from the chaos of the outer world. We also visited the palace of Prince Bishtak, which has been turned into a concert space so there's not too much to see inside (aside from the screens of the haremlik overlooking what is now the auditorium...). The caretaker told us that the said prince only lived in his palace a short time before being overcome with guilt that he had razed the houses of many neighborhood residents. In any case, the guy led us on a climb up to the roof of the palace, which provided a breathtaking view of Islamic Cairo. This really warrants a photo more than a description:

Anyway, we continued from there on to the very large Mosque of Hakim bi-Amr Allah, built in the 10th century but refurbished quite recently with a massive expanse of white marble by Ismaili leaders (making it a site of Ismaili pilgrimage these days). While my friends prayed, I padded around in my bare feet on the cool marble of the inner courtyard, enjoying the near silence punctuated only by a sheikh leading some women in Qur'anic recitation.

The next day, expanding my cultural horizons once again, I rounded up some friends to go to an event at Gallery Misr in Zamalek, a hip art exhibition space. That night, it was sponsoring a tribute to Sheikh Imam, an immensely popular Egyptian folk singer and composer who died in the 1990s and spent much of his life before that in and out of jail as a result of his protest music. As I wrote a little about in my thesis, many of his songs (whose lyrics were written by a range of popular poets, most famously Ahmed Fouad Negm, who is still alive) were sung in the January 25 revolution here last year as well. In contrast to what you might see at a Bob Dylan concert in the US (the closest parallel I can think of), the vast majority of the audience was young people, all of whom knew the words to the songs. Anyway, the event began with a documentary on Sheikh Imam's life and music and a short talk by the director while the organizers passed around beers to the audience. This was followed by a rousing (singalong) performance by a young band called Baheyya. At one point, an old man named Zein Abdin Fouad stood up and explained that he had composed many of Sheikh Imam's songs, and then recited some of his own poetry. Even though we foreigners were probably the only ones who couldn't sing along in the whole room, it was a lot of fun to be part of the energy and at least clap along.

That night, after the concert, I went also for the first time to Borsa, the alleys around the stock exchange that have been closed off for pedestrians and are filled with little cafes with names like "Facebook" open all night. Downtown is filled with aging colonial apartment buildings, which are both beautiful and a little sad as they have almost all seen much finer days. A Eurocup match was just finishing up, so Borsa was packed -- I'm pretty sure the audiences for soccer matches are much larger than for the announcement of the election results or Morsi's swearing-in. Soccer is serious business. We finished up the night at Horeyya, the paradigmatic downtown baladi bar that is bathed in fluorescent light, covered in mirrors, and where the gruff waiters miraculously carry 20+ beers in two hands, aggressively dangling them in front of the patrons' faces until they give in and drink them. But it's famous for having the cheapest Stellas in town at 9.75 LE.

A couple days later, June 30, was Morsi's inauguration. There wasn't too much buzz about all of that beforehand, and when the moment came for the swearing in, in the early afternoon, I was sitting with Adam in the delicious Lebanese restaurant Zaytuna in the swanky mall at Nile City Towers digesting a tasty feta cheese concoction. Most people in the mall continued shopping, although the waiters turned on a TV and gathered around to see his official speech at Cairo University. He didn't overemphasize religion in his speech, which was interesting, but generally there was nothing terribly surprising in it. It was a little anticlimactic compared to the announcement of the election results (I didn't see any firecrackers), and up to this point (now two weeks later, as I write this), I guess people are sort of in a holding pattern to see what Morsi actually does. Of course, his decision just a few days ago to order Parliament back into session despite the dissolution of the body the weekend of the second round of elections caused a bit of a stir. On July 10, the day the high court ruled Morsi's order void, I happened to be passing the Maglis al-Dawla in a taxi in the early afternoon as it's on my way home. There were about 10 police trucks parked around, as well as a substantial but quite docile crowd of demonstrators. Despite this episode, I would not say the air is at all tense in the way it was leading up to the announcement of the election results. While we wait to see what a Morsi presidency really entails, we are also waiting to see what kind of celebration, if any, will take place on July 23. That has always been the public holiday celebrating the 1952 revolution, and more specifically the armed forces. Given the unusual and strained relationship between the president/parliament and the military council, it remains to be seen how this holiday will materialize. If only I were still writing my thesis! 

Another current events item I wanted to mention -- hopefully I haven't already -- is the ad the military aired warning Egyptians against foreigners. As a foreigner living here, this is of course worrisome  -- and mind that it came from the SCAF, not from the Muslim Brotherhood. Here's the ad from last month, with English subtitles. Anyway, it was definitely controversial but we have been warned by our program and others that being present at demonstrations in Tahrir, for example, is risky in part because it's not rare for foreigners to be accused of being spies. That was one impetus for the widely discussed assault on a female British journalism student who was taking photos in Tahrir one night a few weeks ago (part of it was that she was female, part that she was foreign). I mention these things not because they are the norm at all -- they definitely aren't -- but simply to show the contradictions in attitudes toward foreigners here. No one really believes that the US government has anything but sinister intentions, but obviously the troubling trend, if it ultimately turns out to be one, would be a shift in attitudes toward individuals. I want to stress that I don't see this happening at all on a large scale, but simply worry that if the kind of conspiracy theories promulgated by ads like the one above become more widespread, foreigners will be really deterred from visiting Egypt... and God knows, that's really the last thing Egypt's economy needs.

But back now to all the positive things about this place, and some of my special outings. We were assigned a few weeks ago for my Egyptian dialect class to go to a special market in the Ataba neighborhood that sells only materials for "soboua" (not sure how to transliterate this!) This is something like a baby shower, but takes place exactly 7 days after a baby is born. The shops sell primarily baby-themed knicknacks (small statues, mostly) that are distributed to the guests, as well as baby rockers or decorative cradles (I know this is hard to imagine... basically a bassinet in which you shake the baby back and forth in front of your guests) decked out to the extreme in pink or blue froufrous. There is also a special metal pot, also with froufrous -- the more the better -- hit with a metal beater to create a din. We had a really comical time with this homework, since I went with a male classmate and the shopkeeper of course assumed that we were having a souboua when we asked how much we would need of every item if there were to be 30 guests at our party... not many tourists come asking after baby shower paraphernalia. 

A second assignment, carried out last weekend, was for each of us to cook Egyptian food. I was assigned mahshy, which is anything stuffed -- i.e. grape leaves, cabbage leaves, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, etc. Although grape leaves are apparently the most beloved here, I felt that would be too challenging a task for my first foray so I chose peppers (filfil), eggplant (batingan) and zucchini (koosa) instead. I went in the morning to Soliman Gohar, the vegetable souk in my neighborhood and bought those three veggies already hollowed out for mahshy, as well as tomatoes and onions for the stuffing. A kilo of tomatoes, for instance, only costs about 40 cents. I then picked up the rice, fresh mint, fresh parsley, etc. from the grocery store and went home to begin. The problem was, the Egyptian cooking show my teacher had told me to use for the recipe didn't give any quantities, since every woman here already knows how to cook this. I also couldn't really understand the chef... except that he kept saying "hasb 'a-raghba" -- equivalent here to "depends on your taste." So I winged a lot of it, just throwing spices into the mixture in random quantities and hoping something edible would emerge. I want to point out that this is not a recipe for a busy woman - I cooked from 12pm-4pm and from 7pm-9:30pm, stuffing my vegetables with the rice/tomato/onion/spice combo, laying them in a pot on a bed of tomato and onion slices, and finally boiling them for an hour or so on the stove. Again, most of this was guesswork. In the end, we all met for a potluck at a classmate's place and feasted on koshary, lisan asfour, hawawshy, masaqa'a, and other classics. I also made about 8 times more than was necessary, so clearly my estimates were off. Although every Egyptian I told about my mahshy struggles, looking for validation, told me that his or her mom's was definitely better than mine, overall the meal turned out to be delicious and our toil worth the while. 

As all of you are well aware, the 4th of July recently happened as well. Here in Egypt, we would naturally not let this pass us by without some truly American partying. One of the other CASA fellows, Michelle, hosted a potluck barbecue in her apartment after class that day, set to the truly American soundtrack of songs like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Friends brought or made mac 'n cheese, key lime pie (don't worry grandma, this was good but yours is still the best!), corndogs, hamburgers, lemonade, pasta salad, and other down-home classics. This was my second 4th abroad in the last few years (the other being 2009, when I celebrated at the US Embassy in Rabat). (And then of course there was the famous July 4, 1996, when we went to the embassy party in London and I met Ben & Jerry. A day that will never be forgotten.)  Being away from America for this kind of holiday (maybe Thanksgiving will be the same?) makes celebrating them even more imperative, and there is a lot of bonding that goes on on such occasions among American expats. On July 5, I went to a second party, this one at a diplomat's apartment in Mohandessin, where I began to see familiar faces and realize that the American expat community here is really smaller than I imagined... and then on the 6th I went to... get ready for this... an American Idol world tour concert at the Cairo Opera House! I know this is weird, especially since I've never seen the show, but why not, right? The audience was split between American embassy families and hangers on, and Egyptian teenagers who actually knew the words to the Justin Bieber songs the performers sang. 

Earlier that afternoon, I had gone to Al Azhar Park with an Egyptian friend, Ali, and an American, Dexter. Dexter and I made the mistake of taking the metro to Ataba (the market district), which is one of the most crowded places I have ever seen in the entire world, and then walking almost an hour to the park. But it was worth the struggle, because Azhar park at sunset has to be in the running for most beautiful views in Cairo. It is on a hill overlooking a panorama of minarets, palm trees, desert, and, on one side, the famous Citadel. The Cairo sunset is a special beast because of the obscene amount of pollution here: the sun looms enormous on the horizon for a few moments and then slips into a constant grayish haze that is oddly beautiful. Here are a couple photos. In the first you see the Citadel behind us (the mosque of Mohammed Ali, which also happens to be the name of the friend pictured here), and in the second you see the view from another side of the park just before sunset.

Azhar Park is a great feat because it is a lush oasis that was built on top of a massive landfill in 2005 with a grant from the Aga Khan Foundation. It is filled with flowers, fountains, and neo-Mamluk style gazebos. I remember coming here in 2006 when I was in Cairo with LINC and dining in one of the restaurants, but hadn't realized then that it was brand new. Ali took us to a quiet area of the park and we sat for a bit on the grass before being approached by a guard who told us that particular patch was off-limits. All Ali had to do, however, was tell them he was Dr. Mohammed Ali (he is trained as a veterinarian and works for a medical company) for the guard to offer his deferential apologies and walk away. Another family then tried to sit down near us, and the guard again asked them to leave -- as no one was a doctor, however, their pleas were in vain. We were explained to Ali that this was a strange encounter for us, as no guard could care less if you were a doctor or a Congressman or anything else in the U.S. if you were sitting on some patch of protected grass. But here, being a doctor or an engineer earns you a wide range of extra privileges: in that respect, there is a much keener sense of class consciousness, and uneducated people are usually very deferential to those who seem highly educated in a way that one does not really see in the U.S.

My last story for now is about food and hospitality. An Arabic professor I had at Princeton, Tarek, is currently in Egypt visiting his family and agreed to meet up with me and Kevin, the other Princeton student in CASA. He took us to the villa of his friend Ali, who used to live in New Jersey but now owns a popular restaurant downtown. The villa was way out in a desert development called Shorouk, past miles of barren sands and Burger Kings and next to the British University of Egypt, an odd complex of brand new British colonial-style architecture in the middle of nowhere. The place reminded me a lot of the development where I lived with my host family back in 2006 -- a bit soulless on the one hand, but green, pleasant, and windy on the other. Ali's family put out an eye-popping spread for us. I am struggling with how to describe the quantity of food present: lentil soup, eight or ten salads, pasta with bechamel sauce, gigantic lamb shanks on the bone, a platter of whole pigeons, a tomato stew of some sort, mahshy, two rice dishes, kofta, kobeiba, and at least five or six other dishes I've forgotten, all cooked by Ali's wife. We didn't even touch at least half the dishes and from this meal alone I have developed a kersh (belly). The pigeon was the most original experience.... as it peered up at me from its little black eye, Ali showed me how to crack its back so that the rice stuffed inside would pour out. As they say here, it was a khibra! So after we gorged ourselves and I apologized profusely for being physically unable to put anything further in my mouth, we moved out onto the back porch and watched Tarek, who many, many years ago used to play for the Ahly club in Cairo, take on Ali's two young sons. Then it was time for the first of four rounds of dessert, Umm Ali. This is a delicious concoction of milk, sugar, and maybe some other things, but mostly milk and sugar. This was followed by a steady procession of tea, lemonade with milk, chocolates, cakes, and fresh fruits while I nursed my kersh in a corner. Hospitality in Egypt truly goes to extremes, and visits stretch on late into the night, much longer than they would at home, where I suppose guests tend to assume the host has other things to do and vice versa. In this case, we arrived around 5pm and stayed talking until midnight. What was perhaps best about this evening spent with a real family was the opportunity to speak only Arabic for an extended period and experiment with all the colloquialisms we've learned in class but are sometimes afraid to use on the street in case we mess them up. I felt for the first time yesterday that I have made major progress in speaking since I arrived a month ago.

Now I'm off to buy myself a fanous, the special Ramadan lantern, since the holidays begin in a week!

Catching Up, Part I: Election Results and a New Apartment

I know, I know. It has been 2 weeks since I posted. So this is going to be a grab bag of stories -- which is why I don't have a catchy title. First, I should mention that as of last weekend, I have relocated to a new apartment. It is, however, in the same building as the old one -- the building we have come to know and love on Midan El Mesaha. I'm finally starting to get chummy with the security guys downstairs, especially Ibrahim with the fine mustache, who works mornings and has offered to be our surrogate baba (father). One of the many things that is splendid about this apartment (as well as the last one) is that it looks out on... green space! This is something that is not always easy to find, at least not available  for public sitting, in Cairo, and probably (along with rain), what I miss most about home. Of course, we can't actually sit in the grass of the Medan because it is overgrown and there are no benches, but it's nice to fantasize about at least. The new apartment is spotless, though we now know the reason for that is that a cockroach and ant population of unreal proportions has long reigned in this "shaqqa" of ours. But we have more grownup furniture here (no more gold lamé pillows here, for better or for worse), and a pretty large living and dining room. We're on the 8th floor now but still overlooking the square. My bedroom has a great gold queen-sized bed and an entire wall of closet space -- something Egyptians appear to know how to do extremely well.


I've been working a little more on my knowledge of the neighborhood and have identified a few more key anchors. First, the pious bakery next to the liquor store on Tahrir St. Second, City Drinks, the tried and true juice joint. Third, Tawhid wa Nour, the apparently Salafi-owned homewares department store to which I made an inaugural visit earlier this week. Next-door, there was a full cow being skinned on the sidewalk. Hello, there! Anyway, Tawhid wa Nour has a really complicated system by which you order what you want in a given department, whether that is the plastic tree department or, as in my case, the sheets department. Then you are given a receipt and go downstairs to pay at a different counter. But the key is: don't try to take your purchases with you from the place you found them! Because finally you are sent to a third counter, where a salesman picks up a microphone and calls out your purchase number and a messenger comes trotting down the stairs with your (in my case) one sheet, delivered to your hands. You've now been given fair warning: things are more complicated than they appear.


Moving now from skinned cows and bedsheets to politics, the two weeks from the elections to the announcement of the results to the swearing in of Mohamed Morsi were pretty exciting. It's important to emphasize again that I have no experience whatsoever with most of what you read about in the newspapers happening in Tahrir. Just before the results were announced two weeks ago, things were indeed starting to get rather tense, largely because the parliament had obviously been dissolved and it seemed quite possible that Shafik would be announced as the winner despite appearances that Morsi had won democratically. Many people here worried that given the masses of Muslim Brotherhood supporters organizing in Tahrir, a decision in Shafik's favor could ignite a wave of serious violence. I read in the New York Times: A few blocks from the swelling crowds in Tahrir, a contingent of soldiers and riot police continued to guard the Parliament building Friday to prevent any attempt by lawmakers or others to enter. Tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military forces have resumed positions a on the road into the city from Alexandria that they had occupied during the uprising against Mr. Mubarak. Over here in Dokki, however, I would never have known any of these specifics had I not read the Times, and in fact it would have been pretty easy to be totally ignorant of rising tensions as people continued to go about their daily lives.


On Sunday, June 24, the day the presidential election results were set to be announced, Sarah and I spent the morning working in Cilantro a few doors down from our building. As the prescribed hour of 3pm neared, we relocated to Pizza Hut to watch the announcement on a big screen. The employees were all gathered around waiting, but none of the patrons was even looking. We waited and waited, awkwardly long, and then realized that we should just go home and watch on our laptops. Farouk Sultan, the head of the Egyptian Presidential Election Commission, then made an hour-long speech listing every single election complaint in every Egyptian governorate. Twitter was buzzing with people moaning things like: "al-shaab yurid inha' al-khitab", which means "the people want an end to the speech" -- a pun on the famous revolutionary slogan "al-shaab yurid isqat al-nidham" (the people want the fall of the regime). I zoned out for a moment, and then suddenly saw on the ticker of Jazeera Mubasher: "Mohamed Morsi Ra'isan li-Misr". Simultaneously, we heard from the square below an ecstatic voice bellowing Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. He continued for maybe five minutes, by which point the streets, which had up to that point been empty while people watched the speech, filled with cars pounding their horns in delight. Firecrackers went off in the distance. After a few moments, I had to catch a taxi to meet my language partner in Zamalek, so I walked up to Tahrir St., which was filled with boys on motorbikes screaming and waving Egyptian flags, and a general sentiment of unadulterated joy. Of course, not everyone in Egypt felt this way by any means, but those people were not out in the streets that day. I met that week's language partner, Evline, at Sufi bookstore cafe in Zamalek. As we sipped our mango juices, Evline (who is an AUC student in economics) told us that she was happy that day that the people were happy (mabsota 3alshan il-sha3b mabsot) but hadn't even been enthusiastic about a candidate in the first round... like virtually every other liberal young person I know, she had supported Hamdeen Sabahy, although she called him the lesser of two evils (a7san il-wi7isheen). (This was similar to what another friend said -- that he was happy Shafiq lost and sad Morsi won.) Our chat was interrupted briefly by earsplitting firecrackers in the street below. But that was it for the election drama.


In the same bookstore after our dardasha (chat), Adam held the launch party for his new (first) book, Plateau. Lots of friends came and all of us got a few unique lines on the title page. A bit of shameless promotion: http://www.facebook.com/Plateauadam. For all you English speakers out there, you can at least take a peek at the cover and look at some photos from the book signing.


The following day, we had a little CASA outing to the Umm Kolsoum Museum and Nilometer (Nile-measuring apparatus) at the southern tip of Rhoda Island. On the way there, a confused taxi driver took us through Tahrir for the first time on this trip to Egypt -- but things were pretty quiet because it was early in the afternoon. There were still lots of tents set up, but mostly people were just milling around, eating snacks, etc. A critical mass or organized group of any kind was definitely absent. The driver, who was maybe in his 60s and had a great fro-like halo of Einsteinesque gray hair, asked us our feelings toward ElBaradei, the first time he's come up in conversation. Like all good foreigners, we said he was smart impressive, blah blah blah. This guy, who had voted for Morsi, then rambled on quite a bit about how ElBaradei had lived abroad and become so Westernized that essentially he was Egyptian in name only. When we finally reached our destination, we found Umm Kolsoum mathaf just to have a bunch of dresses, but the Abbasid-era Nilometer, which measured the level of the Nile in style beginning in the Abbasid Period, was a sight to behold. (Pictures to come soon, which will explain better.) But perhaps the highlight of the trip was our stroll along the Nile on the island. The riverfront is covered with little garden shops where you can buy any plant you might desire.