My Afternoon with the Cairo Police

In my last English class, I was reviewing with my students the difference between the terms to steal, to be robbed, and to be ripped off. Little did I know that this lesson would hit so close to home. I descended into the metro at Opera, unthinkingly putting my wallet in a rather accessible pocket of my backpack after I bought my ticket. I held my backpack on my side with my hand over the zippers, as usual. When I changed trains at Sadat (Tahrir), however, I was caught as usual in a giant commotion while boarding the women's car. Shoved this way and that, I couldn't have my hands everywhere at once. A few stops later, I went to get off. Your pocket is open, a schoolgirl said innocently. Oh, no, I thought. I knew exactly what had happened, and I was furious. Instead of getting off at my stop, I shouted loudly, Had sara'ny! -- Somebody robbed me. The ladies in the car looked at me skeptically, whispering amongst themselves. Mostly I think they were surprised that this white girl was yelling in Arabic, since no one made any gesture to help. I went back to where I was standing, angrily demanding that the women seated nearby tell me what they'd seen. It was open the whole time, they said, shrugging. This happens all the time here, to both men and women, by men and women, to Egyptians as well as to foreigners. And of course it has also happened to me in the United States. But I felt at that moment, with everybody staring at me and no one caring, extremely aware of my foreignness. 'Alshan ana khawaga, sahh?! I sputtered -- It's because I'm a khawaga, right?! I pushed through the crowd and got off at the next stop. I bounded down the platform, visibly upset. A creepy man approached me and tried to hit on me. Ohhh you need money, do you? he asked, coming too close. I heard myself shout, I hate this place! to my roommate on the phone. I was doing a great job as an ambassador between cultures.

But then I made my way to ADEW, the NGO where I'm working. My coworkers there were incredibly sweet, asking one of the assistants to bring me some juice and helping me contact the bank. CASA sent over Moheb, a quiet young man who works in the office, to accompany me to the police. At Tahrir, the site of the crime, the police station was in a small, unmarked room. Perhaps it's not surprising that they don't want to draw attention to themselves these days. The door opened onto a burly man with a hefty mustache and a jolly grin. The room itself was painted a dull cream, with a few posters of Qur'anic verses hung on the walls, a couple file cabinets, and not much else. Unlike my first Middle Eastern theft experience, in Morocco, these policemen did not write out reports on colonial-era typewriters but rather scrawled mountains of testimony out by hand. They were gleeful to discover I spoke Arabic. In addition to the plainclothes officers, there was a girl my own age, her eyes ringed with dark kohl, who had also been pickpocketed, her little brother, and a pair of child thieves. They were less than 10 years old, probably, scraped and dirty and crouched on the floor in the corner of the room. Hey, was it these guys who robbed you? one of the officers laughed, trying to tease the kids as well as me. They weren't amused. I wondered what the older girl in the cheap red hijab was thinking; it was probably not her first time there and no one was paying her much attention, but she considered me with carefully narrowed eyes. I was marched to two other offices within the Sadat metro station for no apparent reason, and then brought back to page through the photo albums of known metro thieves. There was a book of women's photos and a book of men's. I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the thief and anyway, all the women standing around me were munaqabat (wearing the niqab) or nearly so. Meaning I couldn't distinguish one from the other as hard as I might try. The officer laughed. It's ok, we have photos of munaqabat, too! he said. The women's album was a hefty volume of rather similar photos, with captions indicating where they had been caught and brief physical descriptions. Many held signs in the photos that read "Sar'a" - theft. After this obviously unsuccessful effort, we waited while the officer in charge made a variety of calls and wrote pages and pages of reports on something (not my own matter). An Egyptian woman came in and announced that 1500 LE ($250) had been stolen out of her purse. They told her they were backed up and she should come back in three or four hours. A few minutes later, two husky middle-aged men burst into the office, shouting and gesticulating. One, I learned, was a plainclothes cop, the other a pickpocket he'd caught and dragged in. Still, it was not immediately easy to tell who was who - everyone seemed to be rather good-natured about the whole thing once the initial drama cooled down. Then the officers announced it was time for tea. The cabinet was opened and glass cups and Lipton's tea bags were produced for all. Somehow that seemed to be the way to conclude the visit: when the tea was done, we were sent merrily on our way with the promise that we'd be called if any of my cards were found. 

My ReachOut Class

Here I am with some of my English students after the final exam review:

A New Semester, A Visit to the Delta, and the End of the Cairo Honeymoon

The summer has ended, and with it the feeling that I am on an extended vacation. Now I feel simply that I live here, and many days are unremarkable. In one sense I suppose I have adapted to life here, although I'm not so sure of that. As I've written before, I don't know that I could ever feel like anything but a foreigner in Cairo: I will always stick out on the street, will always be greeted with 'Welcome in Egypt!' by tight-shirted teenagers, and (I think) my Egyptian friends will always insist on paying for coffee. This transition out of the honeymoon phase and into the humdrum-routine-but-I'm-still-an-'other' phase has not been particularly easy. Of course, there is not only the natural flow of time that is taking its toll, causing the newness of living in this place to fade away, but also the end of a relationship, the beginning of yet another year of classes, and the fact that my younger friends have returned to Princeton without me as I navigate real life. I follow their posts about Outdoor Action trips and Lawnparties and I can't help but feel a little wistful. I try to imagine myself downing one of Jameel's famous omelets at Tower breakfast before heading to class each morning before the illusion disappears and my Temmy's imitation cornflakes are staring up at me. And yet I wonder how long I can keep trying to trick myself into ignoring the passage of time, since in some ways it is harder to mark here without the changing of the seasons. I say this as if it's a good thing, although in fact I am currently undergoing a small personal crisis over experiencing my first autumn without changing leaves. It's important, I think, to express the bad as well as the good, since these rough spots are as much a part of living in Cairo as the adventures. Am I happy here? Right now, I'm not so sure. My mood changes with the temperature and degree of harassment I endure on any given day.

Last week I began my internship in earnest at the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW, see earlier post). I'm working with the fundraising division on identifying grants and eventually preparing the grant applications for an initiative seeking to open a primary care medical center and women's shelter in poor Qalioubiyah north of Cairo. The other young women I'm working with are lovely -- a mix of veiled and non-veiled, all speak in the "Arabeezy" of the educated upper-middle class. NGO-speak is largely in English, all those long academic-sounding words that are too much of a hassle to produce in Arabic (like presentation or monitoring and evaluation), and so conversations are a jumble of the two languages, often within a single sentence.

My first day at the office was fine in itself, but I felt myself falling into my Cairo September blues as soon as I was out in the streets. When I left the office, on the island of Manial, a bird defecated on my hand. Then, two perhaps 8-year-olds whizzed by on a motorcycle. Suddenly I felt myself already getting into a foul mood, as often happens here for no obvious reason. What kind of parents let their 8-year-olds drive motorcycles around Cairo?! I thought angrily, knowing this was silly. When I eventually boarded the metro to ride home, I found it so tightly packed that it seemed women should be hanging out the windows -- except all the windows were shut tight and the fans not working. At times like this, the stench, heat, and claustrophobia make me want to bang on the walls and scream. When I  arrived in Dokki at last, I passed by my favorite bakery for a hot dog croissant. A little boy who was working there pointed me toward the cheese croissants instead, telling me they were just out of the oven. Yet when I eagerly opened the bag having trotted happily down the street a ways, I found that he had lied -- it was completely stale. Of course, the vendors want to get rid of the stale items; who better to target than the unsuspecting khawaga? (A derogatory term for foreigner.) I recovered, though, and a couple hours later I was back on the street with Sarah headed to meet up with our Egyptian buddies. Two young men came up beside us, leering and holding their crotches: "You are beauuuteeful!" one said, in a grating accent common only to harassers. Somehow, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. My anger at the harassment had been, as you all know, boiling inside me for some time. "F*** you!" I yelled back at the man, shocked and scared that I had suddenly snapped. They followed us some ways down the street, snarling at me: "You are rubbish! You are rubbish!" I whirled around and shouted, "Enta mohtarem wla ey?!" -- something like, "Are you a respectable person or not?" I marched off before receiving a response. It was cathartic, in some way, to uncork my frustration, but I and many of my friends are increasingly concerned with the people we've become as a result of the constant and generally fulfilled fear of harassment. I often feel anxious walking in the street, concerned that someone will grope me from behind. I wear sunglasses and a grimace as much as possible. Yesterday, leaving the metro to head to my internship, a young man walked toward me, forcing me to press against the wall. He quickly made a gesture as though he were groping my whole body, then laughed and walked away with his friends.

 Last weekend, Dr. Iman, the director of our program, held a brunch for the ladies of CASA in her garden. We were sheltered from the abuse of the street, but went around in a circle describing our personal experiences with harassment. Many had spent longer living in the city than I, and had been groped many times and had men expose themselves to them on the street. Several described having violent fantasies about beating up the harassers, throwing rocks, and the like, and struggling with the fact that we are even having these thoughts about other humans in the first place. The psychologist from the university, also a middle-aged woman who had been brought in to give us advice about how to deal with harassment, came woefully unprepared with pamphlets describing how we should dress modestly and tie up our hair. (By the way, statistics show that 70% of women harassed on the street are veiled, if it's possible to really measure such things.) She was shocked that it had affected us so deeply. 

I like to pair the bad with the good, as that is usually how things happen in Cairo. On a more hopeful note, then, we went one night last week (after I had cursed at the man in the street) to visit my friend's mother in the hospital. It was a fairly simple operation, yet the room was filled with perhaps 15 different guests, mountains of flowers, and plates of chocolates. The guests with whom we came were, of course, just friends of the patient's son, and did not know her especially well. It struck me that such visits are not common in the U.S.: we would tell the friend to wish his mother well and ask if there was anything we could do to help him out, but I can't imagine visiting friends' parents in the hospital. This is something nice, I think, about Egypt, which also comes perhaps from having less of a sense of personal privacy and a greater desire in general to be with as large a crowd of family and friends as possible in a time of need.

A brief, unrelated note on food. Cooking healthy food for one person at a reasonable price here is not easy. To get decent fresh vegetables, one needs to go to the souk. Here, the good, the bad, and the seriously rotten are all mixed together and an eagle eye is essential to make sure you get the good ones. They're cheap, but vendors will never sell you lest than half a kilo of any one vegetable (which makes sense from their perspective, granted), but that is often more than one lone person can eat before they go bad. Even if I eat only tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fruit (other than berries) is widely available, but imported ones, i.e. most of them, are very costly relative to my CASA stipend. Egyptian fruits are limited to very defined seasons, and sadly mishmish (apricot) is long over. I still haven't figured out how to enjoy the smell or process of eating a guava. Salad is pretty tough: iceberg is the norm in the lettuce department, so be ready to pay a pretty penny if you desire more roughage. Of course, if beans (ful) and falafel (ta3meyya) are your thing, you are in luck here because those are incredibly cheap and on every corner. Our oven still leaks gas, so I'm exploring my stovetop cooking options at the moment and relishing my $8 bag of muesli. Hopefully, by the end of my stay here I'll be able to proudly report that I have mastered the art of eating and cooking healthily in Cairo -- stay tuned.

* * *

In an effort to clear my head at the beginning of semester, I took a trip last weekend to the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, to the northeast of Cairo. I was invited by my friend Ryme, who now lives in Cairo, to spend two days with her family while she was in between jobs. Strangely, I hadn't yet made any visits outside Cairo on this trip to Egypt (aside from my vacation abroad in August), and I seized upon the chance to see a place that is the capital of the second-largest governate in Egypt and yet is not even mentioned in Lonely Planet. I felt ambivalent about visiting the city where the boyfriend with whom I had broken up just three days earlier was from, and yet we had never visited together. But, nevertheless, I took the train from Cairo early Friday morning, and found myself in the first-class cabin which, I was told later by appalled Egyptian friends, is still the stomping ground of many a rat. First class is still cheap, about $4 each way for this 2.5-hour journey. I began to nap, then cracked an eye to find bread crumbs trickling into my lap from the baguette of a wide-eyed 10-year-old girl dangling over the seat in front of me. She stared at me with fascination. "Eat!" she commanded, thrusting her bread at my mouth. Now that she had my attention, she proceeded to barrage me with a number of other questions: "Why won't you eat?!" "Are you sleeping?" "Why are you sleeping?" "Why didn't you sleep during the night?" Given that I was no longer asleep, the girl's mother, seated beside me, insisted on pouring me a cup of Coke and ordering another member of her gaggle to figure out when my stop was. People seemed perplexed and charmed to see a foreign girl alone on this train to a place that was not even listed in the guidebook. Sure enough, I did not encounter any other foreigners in Mansoura.

As it was Friday morning, the streets were empty when I arrived and Ryme's father took me for a drive around the city. The corniche was much calmer than the circus one finds along the Nile in Cairo, and I immediately noticed the abundance of trees. At first glance, the city's serious overcrowding problem was not visible: it is in fact forced to build up, since it is surrounded on all sides by Egypt's most fertile farmland. It was the city where Louis IX was captured during the Seventh Crusade and thus began its tradition of French influence. (Many Egyptians say that the prettiest ladies in Egypt come from Mansoura because of this.) On Friday afternoon, Ryme and I attended a ceremony at her father's Protestant church celebrating the arrival of a new pastor. It was a modern service, without any smells and bells -- just a large wooden cross on the back wall and a worship choir with drums and guitar. It was a strange juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar, since of course the rock hymns they sang were in Arabic. That evening, we went with the whole family to the sporting club (see my earlier posts for more on these). Inside, there are all kinds of restaurants, hangout spaces, and sports facilities teeming with members. We ate Egyptian food in one of the nice restaurants overlooking the Nile before meeting up with some of Ryme's old friends to shoot the breeze. Before bed, her friend Waleed took us on a late-night cruise around the city, passing over the Nile to view the lights of the shoreline.

The next day, I slept in and chatted a little with Ryme's Armenian grandma, who brought me tea. Then Ryme and I embarked on a girls' afternoon at Angel Spa -- my first Egyptian spa experience. First a dip in the Jacuzzi, then threading. Thinking I was just signed up for eyebrows, I suddenly found several skeptical women around me investigating my claim that I did not need my lip hairs removed. Hair removal, as I quickly learned, is something women in Egypt take extremely seriously. I sometimes feel our lesser inclination toward complete bareness may be perceived as an apelike curiosity. In any event, saving my face from further construction, I was shuttled to the facial room. The attendant put a giant magnifying lamp over my face (the dentist's office kind) and called my friends over to investigate my facial imperfections. How long has she been here? the woman asked, noting that I didn't yet have whatever different kind of blemishes result from living in Cairo-quality pollution. Your pimples are not a private matter here. For fifteen minutes or so, she sweated my face, then popped everything there was to pop, and more, by hand. No pain no gain. She applied a series of goopy masks while interrogating me about my life and politics. Mostly she wanted to know why I was studying Arabic. To convert to Islam? she wondered hopefully, seeing no other rationale. But, when the rigorous process was over, I was thankfully in one piece and felt great -- refreshed and ready to start Week Two back in Cairo. There were no seats on the train, though, and no buses running. So I took a microbus back with one of Ryme's friends. Don't speak a word of Arabic or engage in conversation with anyone, he told me, as he regaled me with stories of raising a baby lion in his apartment. Actually, the microbus was pretty comfortable and I didn't feel like my life was on the line. In the seat in front of us, a trim young Ikhwani man in a plaid button-down and formidable beard quickly produced a miniature Qur'an and a reading light. He chanted verses aloud as we made our way through the darkness. Later, on the outskirts of Cairo, he got into a shouting match with the middle-aged woman next to him. She was dressed very conservatively, but clearly detested the Muslim Brotherhood. We used to have security! We need security! she yelled at her seatmate as he tried to drum up support from the other passengers. 

* *

Back in Cairo, I began my second week not only of classes but of teaching English. I mentioned some of my students in my previous post. I'm too busy to continue after the end of this three-week term, but I've enjoyed the chance to dabble in ESL and meet a different set of young Egyptians. The NGO where I'm working, ReachOut, offers very cheap, quick courses in a number of Western languages, mostly to Egyptian college students and recent grads trying to get a step ahead in the job market. They're motivated but not elite, so they're not the same demographic as my AUC friends. The level I've been teaching is intermediate, which means we're still doing a lot of pretty basic grammar (conditionals, comparatives, the dreaded phrasal verbs...) and my students still think I talk too fast. Nevertheless, we have a good relationship, perhaps because we're nearly the same age and can relate as peers. I ran into one girl, Iman, on the metro on the way to class and she told me about her studies in international trade and dream of becoming an ambassador in the Egyptian foreign ministry. I've had a few proud moments in class -- first when I gave my students the "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" tongue twister to practice the "p" sound (which gets terribly confused with "b" by Arabic speakers) and several immediately announced that they wanted to perform it for the class. Everyone thought it was hysterical. And yesterday, I had students come in with a comic strip they'd drawn and then tell the story they imagined aloud to the class. One girl, a mural arts student, had gone to the trouble to paint her work -- a story about two friendly skunks who learn to appreciate nature -- in color on a large piece of cardboard. At the end of the class, she gave it to me as a gift to bring home, and it now stands in my living room. After the last class before the final exam, one of the girls requested that we all take a photo together. I miss you, she said, as we packed up and headed outside.

* *

And then, of course, there are my own classes. I've saved the most important for last. On the whole, however, there is nothing serious to report on the academic front. Two weeks in and I'm still afloat, sleep-deprived though I may be. I actually feel great about my teachers this time around -- Nermine in Egyptian dialect, Nadia in my standard Arabic reading course, and Azza for media Arabic. We're assigned one full novel per weekend, which is a big challenge. For the first week, we read one called Maqam Ateyya by Salwa Bakr, published in the 1980s, and then a play by Tawfik El Hakim entitled El Sultan El Ha'ir (The Sultan's Dilemma) (1960) about a Mamluk sultan forced to choose between rule by law and rule by the sword. Inshallah all this will get easier as the semester marches on. We're still in class about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, which leaves afternoons wide open for internships, cultural events, or -- as the case usually is -- homework. More updates on this part of my life as the semester progresses.

**

To come back, then, to the sentiments with which I started this tale, I expect myself to settle before too long into a more comfortable pattern of life here. For now, I am still figuring out what to make of this year and wondering what I will do afterward. That the next step is so unsure is perhaps in part what makes me wonder at certain moments whether I made the right choice to do this. I find myself sometimes making unfair comparisons to my carefree semester spent studying abroad in Paris, when my only concern was the mice under my bed. This is a very different place and a different time in my life. At the same time, I cannot deny that I am going through a certain disillusionment from the Cairo I remembered from my first trip here and even my second. Thinking back to the month I spent living in a villa past the Giza Pyramids when I was 16, it occurs to me how random it was, in a sense, that the impressions I gathered during that time led me to spend now five years scrambling to learn the language, culture, and history of this place. What seemed charming and exciting then seems often riddled with flaws now -- markers of poverty rather than exoticism. From that first experience on, I often raved about how much I loved Egypt. And indeed, when I returned in January of this to research my senior thesis, I rediscovered much of the same magic -- albeit in light of more experience traveling in developing countries and more knowledge of the place itself. The second time, I was perhaps a little less naive, but the flavor of the revolution still hung in the air, and I reveled in the opportunity to meet with protest organizers in a shaaby back-alley cafe, to experience a surprise romance, to rediscover the friends I'd seen only on Facebook for six years. My old self, who thought it loved everything about the Middle East, is annoyed at my real self for craving the comfort, not infrequently, of bagels or peanut butter. I look at expats who've lived here for years, some days, and wonder how they can do it with such apparent ease. Things will change, I am sure, over the course of the year. For the moment, eight more months seems incredibly long.

Safety Announcement

I'm about to release a new blog post that has been gestating for a while about the struggles of adapting to life here. But, I know that what everyone really wants to know is whether we are all safe given the escalating anti-American protests sparked in large part by a nefarious yet marginal U.S. film insulting Muhammad. First things first, I am safe. Despite the deeply concerning nature of the situation, life marches on as usual in nearly every corner of the city. The exception, of course, is Tahrir and the environs of the American Embassy not far away. Naturally avoiding the area myself, I only came close enough to see columns of gray smoke rising into the smog yesterday afternoon.

I haven't written much since the elections about news events. There was Morsi's attempt to strike out and make for Egypt a new foreign policy more independent from the United States, for example, demonstrated by his early visits to Tehran and Beijing. The US found this unsettling, to be sure, and we read academic articles on it in class, but this did not attract the same kind of widespread public discussion here as the film. Then there was the appearance of the first hijabi woman as a newsreader on state television. Even though the vast majority of women here wear the hijab, it has long been unofficially (and in some cases, officially) banned from those working as flight attendants, newscasters (excluding religious channels), 5-star hotel employees, and the like. This does indeed seem like a puzzling double standard that Morsi seems to be suggesting may no longer represent a tone he wants to set.

Returning to the matter at hand. I first got word about the film and the protests here in Egypt from my roommate, whose Egyptian boyfriend had called her to express his feelings of disgust toward the movie. That was on September 11, and early the next morning we heard that Ambassador Stevens had been killed in Libya. Since then, I have been following events mostly on the New York Times, although we are also receiving security updates regularly from AUC. We discussed the early protests in my Egyptian dialect class on the morning of the 12th. My teacher is Protestant, I think, and mentioned by way of analogy, and condemnation of the protests, that demonstrators had also burned Bibles in Tahrir but that destroying the paper doesn't mean that her religion is any less. That night, I went to hang out with a bunch of my Egyptian friends, all well-educated and engaged in world affairs, and they also expressed disgust with what was going on -- one group of ignorant people stirring up violence over a marginal film produced by another group of ignorant people.

 But the next morning on the way to class, we rode with a taxi driver whose take was quite different. He had just come himself from protesting in Tahrir Square, he offered, suggesting that there were 10,000 people outside the embassy when I asked or an estimate. "There will be a millioniyya tomorrow!" he added, meaning a large-scale march that became the norm for Fridays during the revolution. Would he be going? Of course! The prophet Muhammad had been deeply insulted, and this was the natural reaction, just as we would do if Mary or Jesus were insulted in such a way, he said. "You are American?" he asked us somewhere in the middle of this conversation. "Canadian," I said quickly, for the first time since I've been here. Apparently this has not yet been recognized as a euphemism. The man was chatty, agreeing with my friend Sophia that it was good to talk about these things. (Of course, that does not include suggesting that producing the film, however awful and offensive, was within the producer's right to freedom of expression. That is not an opinion that you should voice here at the moment under any circumstances.) The taxi driver expressed the commonly held view here that respect for religion supersedes freedom of expression, condemning the U.S. for promoting freedom but not respecting Muslims' freedom of religion.

We will see today what happens after Friday prayers, when people migrate from their mosques to Tahrir. The past few days, most people protesting have been either soccer Ultras (crazed soccer fans who also played a role in the revolution) or conservative Islamists. You've probably read about the Morsi administration's tepid response to the attacks on the embassy. Paralyzed between calls from within his own Muslim Brotherhood and others within Egypt to defend Islam against American abuse on the one hand and the strained U.S. alliance on the other, Morsi did not reprimand the attackers until last night. This Twitter exchange between MB spokesman Khairat el Shater and the U.S. Embassy has been circulating online:

Khairat el Shater (in English): "We r relieved none of the @USEmbassyCairo staff were harmed & hope US-Eg relations will sustain turbulence of Tuesday's events."

USEmbassyCairo: "Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those, too."


I also had the chance to discuss the unfolding events with some of the students yesterday in the conversational English class at ReachOut. The day's theme was music, so I had asked each student to bring in the lyrics of a song he or she liked and discuss it with the class. Following a presentation on Celine Dion, my student Mohammed introduced "Worry Ends", a song by British Muslim rocker Sami Yusuf about the importance of faith. I asked why he had chosen it, and he said it was because an American Christian had made a film insulting the Prophet Muhammad. It had made him feel even more strongly the need to defend his own faith, though some, he added, such as those throwing Molotov cocktails at the embassy or who killed Amb. Stevens in Libya, chose the wrong ways to do so. This was the most engaged in class this student had ever been, and the other two young men in the class immediately jumped into the discussion in vigorous agreement. The girls did not want to talk about politics. "Please, tell your people we're not terrorists," Mohammed pleaded with me. The three guys stayed with me for forty minutes after class to talk about the protests. They were angry that the U.S. government would do nothing to prosecute those who had produced the film if it was really true that the perspective of the filmmaker did not represent that of the US government or the majority of the American people. Mohammed 2, the best student in my class, expressed extreme dismay at the American media for a promoting opinions deeply skewed against the Muslim world. At first he just mentioned FOX and I had a heart attack. But then he began reeling off New York Times columnists that he liked and those he didn't, mentioning that he thought the only fair news came from marginal leftist sources like Noam Chomsky and Alternet. He's a thoughtful young man, and admitted when I asked about the Egyptian media that Egyptians also needed to be less easily swayed by domestic propaganda. Still, he said, American media reach a global audience, and so the repercussions of its bias are far deeper. The third guy, who had been silent much of the time, is a Copt, so I asked him whether he thought there would be any backlash against Copts in Egypt because of the apparent revelation that at least one of the filmmakers was an Egyptian-American Copt. He emphatically said no. "We're all like brothers here; we live in peace," he said, with the two Mohammeds agreeing. "I will always come to help my brother." This is the most widely held opinion on interfaith relations in Egypt in my own experience, which may seem puzzling given events like the church bombings in Alexandria just before the revolution or the not infrequent hateful Facebook posts on both sides. I mentioned also that, well, it doesn't feel so great to be an American in Cairo at the moment with people ripping apart American flags and throwing rocks at our embassy. "Please don't be angry that they burned the American flag," Beshoy told me as we all rode the elevator down together. "It's something people do here a lot when they're upset." We stood outside and the conversation changed. "What do you miss most about your home?" Mohammed asked. "The rain," I said. Lately I've been having rain fantasies. He pointed up to the line of air conditioners dripping their contents onto passersby. "Just stand under it, it will feel like home."

As the Summer Wanes...

You might ask: what have I been doing for the last two weeks, since I returned to Cairo? The answer is... not much. I have adapted at last to what I resisted for so long -- the Cairo sleep schedule. By that I mean going to sleep around 4am or later and waking up at 1pm in the afternoon. Today, for example, it's 3pm and I've barely showered and eaten breakfast. Of course, to make the day worthwhile one must then stay up all night and explore, which means that the vicious cycle continues. Tomorrow, though, we have our fall orientation meeting and classes start Monday, so this pattern will have to come to an abrupt halt. In addition to my classes, internship, and St. Andrew's Refugee Services teaching gig, I'll also be teaching an English class three times a week at a professional development center and perhaps tutoring a private student in English as well. It's going to be a wild semester, so I don't feel all that bad about taking these two weeks very, very, very easy.

I have done a few things, however. For example, I went to the Giza Zoo. We approached this place with trepidation, having heard that while it was once one of the finest zoos in the world, standards of animal care have changed along with its reputation. Nevertheless, we found it packed with families, their picnic blankets spread out along the sides of the animal pens: unlike the nearby Botanical Garden, it was not a sad and forgotten place by any means. A few parts, like the new giraffe area, were clean and nice, while in some corners ponds were filled with trash and detritus. I fell in love with the albino wallaby population (the word in Arabic for wallaby is ولابي... wa-LAA-by, sure to come in handy), but we were crushed to find the lions still living in individual, pint-sized cages that surely dated from the construction of the Lion House in 1901. And thus we left with mixed feelings about this former jewel of Cairo...

I've also been trying to continue my "Cultural Cairo" streak. I went for the second time to Sakiat al-Sawy, the popular concert venue under the May 15th Bridge, to hear the funky rock band Ashara Gharby a couple weeks ago. Check out one of their songs here! Another day (and they're all running together, so I couldn't really tell you when it was), a group of us headed back to the Mastaba Center downtown for a night of Sufi music and dancing. We're 2 for 2 at this venue after our previous experience with the Sudanese-inspired folk tunes and sheep's tooth skirts. This time around, we were once again invited up to the stage to dance with the old Sufi men in their white robes. One of them handed me his finger cymbals to play as we undulated in a circle. It was so much fun that I could easily imagine entering an ecstatic trance were I to repeat the experience. When it seemed things just could not get any better, an androgynous teenage dervish emerged from the back room to twirl for us. While it was not the first time I'd seen whirling dervishes, this one was a crowd pleaser: he pulled his brightly colored apron above his head, while whirling, as dervishes are wont to do, then made his way into the audience. He rested his elbow on my friend's shoulder as he whirled the apron again and again and again over our heads. 

Just this Wednesday, we continued our culture binge by paying a visiting to the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art. The spacious ground floor was fitted with lounge benches, a grand piano, and a disco ball-like ceiling that suggested it might well have played host to a few swanky cocktail parties some decades ago. There were not many other visitors the afternoon we went, however. Above the grand piano hung the best known work of modern Egyptian art, a piece I suddenly remembered from Prof. Leisten's course last fall - Mahmoud Said's colorful tableau of Egyptian village life, El Medina (1937). The walls were chock full of paintings in every medium and of every kind of subject organized not by genre but by artist's birthday, so it was a bit hard to keep everything straight. To be honest, I found a lot of the works sort of conventional or institutional and rather muddy. Nothing noticeably dealt with controversial issues. But with a bit of digging, one could find some gems. That same night, I took a trip with the girls out to the Citadel for a little night music. It was the opening night of the annual music festival, and the Cairo Celebration Orchestra was at the ready with Phantom of the Opera and The Sound of Music for the occasion. Apparently orchestral music doesn't have much of a fan base here, because the audience was largely empty. That was okay, because it meant we could stroll around and enjoy the spectacular view while the music played. The Citadel itself was illuminated, the air was almost cool, and the lights of the city twinkle below -- far enough away to look pretty without betraying the chaos. Classic music etiquette, we learned, is not the same: it reminded me more of the time we went to a Chinese opera in New York and people were ordering noodles during the performance than of your typical orchestra concert back home. "YA HABEEEEBY!" shouted a man next to us at his friend on the other side of the audience, whistling with his fingers as the musicians plucked away at "The Hills Are Alive." "Want espresso?! Where are you from?!" a man, perhaps from the food stand, asked us loudly during La Boheme. Before the last piece was over, a well-dressed woman from Channel 1 state-run TV had approached us to secure an interview. Miriam, Robin, and I answered a number of questions on the state of tourism in Egypt. "How did you find out about this?" she asked, "Do you think lots of people back home would come to Egypt for events like this and at other touristic sites?""Is there enough touristic advertising?" For all of you who will never see this interview, know that you received a shout-out on Egyptian state TV. 

My summer antics did not stop there. A couple days earlier, I went with several friends to a small, trendy performance space called Makan ("Place" - the kind of name one expects from such venues) for a women's empowerment open mic night. And guess who sponsored it? Yup, the U.S. Embassy. We love this kind of thing. Knowing this, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. There were lots and lots of Egyptian men there, all speaking out against harassment. Most were young and dressed in polos or plaid shirts and jeans, many were students, but there were a few guys with Salafi-style beards as well, and some middle-aged dad types. In fact, there were more men than women in the house, which I certainly was not expecting. Most speakers just reiterated the problem and many related personal experiences as observers or victims of harassment, but some read poems or sang songs. No one seems confident in a solution to the problem, and of course the perpetrators themselves are unlikely to come to such an event. But after the open mic, I felt more upbeat than I had in awhile. As a follow-up, Robin invited me to an organizational meeting of one of the groups that had spoken at the Makan event, Haraket Basma (Imprint Movement). Basma was started by two young men and one tough woman just this July, so the meeting we attended was intended to recruit the executive board and establish a volunteer base. Focused on combatting harassment for now, the group organized anti-harassment patrols during the Eid holiday, when women are sadly counseled to stay indoors because harassment reaches an annual high. The men and women who volunteered wore yellow vests and either interceded nonviolently or called the attention of police, who normally stand idly by while harassment occurs. While the scale is not yet very large, it was inspiring to see the beginnings of this movement and especially meet the young men who have decided to go out of the way to volunteer on women's behalf instead of engaging in harassment like their peers. 

I'm not sure if I've already written an ode to the Cairo microbus. To recap, microbuses are ramshackle minibuses driven by preteens (I do not exaggerate) with tight purple t-shirts and lots of hair gel. They get you lots of places for very little money if you're willing to more or less put your life on the line. Anyway, we decided to take a microbus back home from faraway Nasr City after the Basma event, but as we were boarding, a second preteen driver who had been waiting longer to fill his bus jumped out and began a fistfight over us with driver #1. First fistfight I have personally started in Cairo. Never a dull moment. As if this were not enough, later in the trip (or should I say "joyride"), we passed a terrible car accident. These are not unusual in Cairo, given the systemless nature of the roads, but in this case at least thirty deeply anguished men were gathered around the car, shattered glass everywhere -- and a motionless man, partly covered in blood, laid out on the hood of the car. Of course we passed quickly and couldn't know for sure if he was alive or dead, but the shocking image has kept returning to me. Ambulances here can take an hour to reach the scene of an accident: it is often faster to drive an injured person to the hospital yourself than wait for one to arrive.

Not all news is so grim. The same week, I was invited to my second Egyptian wedding, this one a Coptic one. Again I knew neither the bride nor the groom: the bride was the sister-in-law of a CASA employee. Because we CASAwiyyin were thus removed, we were only invited to the church service and not the reception, a common division here. (Of course, we didn't know this ahead of time, so we dressed for a party rather than a religious ceremony. Oops.) The couple stood at the front of the church, as marrying couples usually do, but with priest-like robes covering their wedding attire. Naturally we did not understand a single thing the bearded priest said, but we observed that things came to a close once the priest had placed golden crowns atop the heads of both the bride and groom. Unlike an American wedding, the focus was not on any vows pronounced by the couple, and there was certainly no public kiss. I would say the focus was actually on the videography. There were about 15 people up at the altar with the bride and groom, and they were not bridesmaids: they were assorted cousins with cell phone cameras and the like, dressed in everything from suits to tracksuits, capturing every single moment of the occasion on tape. In fact, the priest made a point of posing the bride and groom at various intervals. When the guests were not up in the couple's grill, they were ululating, and this was definitely enjoyable. When the ceremony was over, the bride and groom posed for more photos with every guest, including us, which was pretty awkward given that we did not know them and they did not know us. But apparently this is totally normal at Egyptian weddings. Then we were all packed onto a micro(party)bus and sent to the metro while everybody else went to eat and dance. 

Of course, much of my time has been occupied with more mundane things -- although nothing is ever entirely mundane when it happens in Cairo. I went to see the new Batman movie a few nights ago (The Dark Knight Rises), but naturally we went to see the 3-hr show at 1am. As one does. We CASAwiyyin have also been bonding through dinner parties at each other's apartments and by sampling Cairo's ethnic restaurants. In the past couple of weeks, I have been to Sudanese, Yemeni, Indian, Italian, and Uyghur meals. Nawab, the Indian restaurant in Zamalek, won my unofficial competition. Then of course there was the balady bar crawl with a few fellow CASAwiyyin. Balady bars are the cheap holes-in-the-wall that mainly serve up round after round of Stella to working class old men. Women generally do not go to them, but if you are a foreigner coming with male friends, there is not a problem. Instead of pretzels or chips with your Stella, you are served wet beans. Often there are mirrors on the walls, broken chairs, and cloudy fluorescent lights. At the red brick Murias near Ataba, I attempted to use the upstairs restroom only to encounter a hysterical woman caked with makeup counting a giant wad of large bills. I chose not to think the worst of the situation. As foreign ladies, though, in no place did we encounter harassment, just amusement on the part of the patrons. The older gentlemen tend to try very hard to be chivalrous in such places, apparently, eager to offer us napkins and the like. 

Robin and I also went to explore Wekalat el Balah, the so-called Date Market in the neighborhood of Boulaq. It has nothing to do with dates, only used clothes. But there are a lot of them to choose from, and they're not all bad. The people working there seemed unused to seeing foreigners pawing through their wares, and middle-class Egyptians tend to scorn shopping at this place... but it is a picturesque walk at the very least. We walked back from Balah along the Corniche (a good idea if harassers doing acrobatics to get your attention is your jam) to the storied Cafe Riche near Medan Talaat Harb. I had written about it in my thesis because it established itself as a revolutionary and leftist stomping ground early in the century and continued to be the favorite of aging intellectuals through the 1970s. Having closed for awhile and reopened not so many years ago, the place has tried to evoke its history. A very round man sat at a desk near the doorway watching a small TV, surrounded by stacks of old books and miscellaneous papers. When we told the costumed waiter we were there for tea, he said it was required that we order food -- then went over to the old man at the door and whispered in his ear. The man judged us acceptable: we could stay, but just this once. 

Jerusalem/Al Quds

The last five days of my trip were reserved for Jerusalem. At first I thought I'd have enough time to venture to Haifa or Tel Aviv, but that was not to be. On Sunday, Aug. 12, I got a bus from Ramallah to   the Qalandiya checkpoint, but was not even asked to get off the bus (which is apparently rare). I arrived soon after at the Arab bus station in East Jerusalem, just a five-minute walk north of Damascus Gate. Suitcase in tow, my first vision of Jerusalem was a walk below the ramparts of the old city. But rather than entering the gate, I continued west along Jaffa Street and up to HaDavidka Square, where Abraham Hostel is located. It was a hip place, complete with rooftop beanbags, bar, and Greek yogurt for breakfast. But after my majestic arrival in the city, a sad sort of culture shock sank in. I was so close to Ramallah and yet a world apart, and felt in some way more foreign in Israel than I had in the West Bank despite the fact that my looks blended in much better. This alienation I felt was no doubt due in part to the language, but I felt a bit at sea wandering through the clean and European-feeling streets of West Jerusalem that first day. I spent the afternoon at the state-of-the-art Israel Museum near the Knesset, working my way through the archaeology wing and trying to create a mental timeline of all the civilizations that had dwelt in this city over the millennia. I pored over tablets with the earliest references to the House of David and over proto-Canaanite texts, jewelry from magnificent desert hoards, board games, sacrificial altars, ancient pull toys, pre-Canaanite polytheist figures of the sacred prostitute goddess, and even bits of cloth worn by Biblical peoples. When I had finished, I hurried across the verdant museum grounds to the Shrine of the Book, an odd, funnel-shaped building/fountain that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to inspect them really closely and was of course unable to read any of the originals. I also took a look, though, at the Aleppo Codex exhibit -- a 10th-century copy of the Torah stored in the Aleppo synagogue for centuries that is considered to be the most accurate version of the text.

After the museum, I returned to my neighborhood and took an evening stroll through the Mahane Yehuda market. It was packed with street performers of every ilk: puppeteers, dancers, magicians, and even women engaged in some kind of gag with clotheslines strung across the street. There were the usual vegetable, fruit, and pastry stands (none cheap, more like an American farmers' market) as well as kippah salesmen and "I <3 the IDF" souvenir t-shirt shops.

The next morning, my brooding mood had faded a bit and I determined to enjoy the Old City. I entered through Jaffa Gate near the Tower of David and took a morning stroll through the clean and tranquil cobblestone streets of the Jewish Quarter, arriving finally near the Temple Mount. I could not see the golden cap of the Dome of the Rock until I reached the back of the Jewish Quarter and it emerged suddenly from behind a building. I descended to a security checkpoint and then moved toward the Western Wall. The Wall is divided into men's and women's sections: most of the women, rather than praying at the wall, were perched on their tiptoes atop chairs so as to peer into the men's section. There, mostly Orthodox men with their black suits and curls came bearing velvet pillows and Torah scrolls to pray at this holiest of sites. After taking my turn watching, I made my way to the line to ascend the Temple Mount itself. Jews are not supposed to enter the Mount itself (but rather stop at the Wall), since the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque were built over the remains of the Temple and one might accidentally step on or otherwise trespass against the Holy of Holies. The Temple Mount (or, al-Haram al-Sharif) is controlled by the Muslim authorities in Jerusalem and the city's Muslims regularly go to pray inside. People of other religions (i.e. tourists) are allowed in during limited hours on certain days through a tunnel that attempts to conceals visitors from those who might find it sacrilegious. Unfortunately, I tried three times to go up to the Temple Mount during my time in Jerusalem and each time it was entirely closed to tourists. What I did get to see, though, were a whole lot of 13-year-old boys marching awkwardly to their bar mitzvah surrounding by fascinated tourists and shofar-blowers.

My first view of the Dome of the Rock from the Old City 

After my first attempt, I decided to turn my attention to the Christian sites of Jerusalem and walk the Via Dolorosa. This is the route that Christ is believed to have followed on his way to the Crucifixion, and starts in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. I started a bit out of order, with the Chapel of the Flagellation (whose importance you can probably deduce), then made my way to St. Anne's, which is not an official station on the route but hosts what is purported to be the cave where Mary was born. In addition, an archaeological site on the premises reveals the remains of the Bethesda pools where Jesus healed a paralytic, according to John. At the same spot is the ruin of an Aesculapian Temple, demonstrating that the pools were associated with healing even before the time of Jesus. Station 1, nearby, has no church these days but is rather an Islamic school, Al-Omariyya. I was the only visitor on the deserted grounds and so had a lovely view of the Dome of Rock all to myself. The later stations are all marked by plaques and special doors: while this is still technically the Muslim Quarter, you can find anyone passing through these streets. At the intersection of El Wad St., for instance, which is packed with Arab vendors selling prayer beads and belly dance costumes, a crowd of Chinese Christians was gathered around one of the stations of the cross reciting Bible verses in Chinese.

At the end of the Via Dolorosa, I made perhaps a slightly wrong turn and wound up in the deserted courtyard of a Coptic monastery seemingly inhabited only by a single long-bearded priest rocking back and forth, back and forth. Asking for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a man pointed me to the Ethiopian Monastery jammed vertically into a tiny slice of the church grounds. As I descended, I passed through a couple dark chapels with peeling walls and flickering candles inhabited by ancient Ethiopian priests. Then, suddenly, I emerged onto the bright, crowded plaza before the main entrance to the Holy Sepulchre just as the bells were striking noon. Inside, on the upper floor, are found the final stations of the Via Dolorosa, marking the supposed site of the Crucifixion: there are two chapels, a rather simple Franciscan one and an elaborate Orthodox one, where visitors (mostly from Eastern Europe) prostrated themselves and lit candles. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is an enormous place decorated in many different styles, since every inch is owned by a different faction. I spent a couple of hours exploring -- the large mosaic in the Chapel of St. Helena, Constantine's mother and the one responsible for building the church, the cool grotto known as the Chapel of the Discovery of the Cross, and of course the sepulchre itself. The tiny chamber fit just three of us, myself and an Eastern European couple who prostrated themselves on the tomb and murmured their prayers before moving with the crowd to light candles alongside the tomb.

Ladies praying at the last Station of the Cross in the Church of the Holy Selpulchre

While Jesus's final days were on my mind, I decided to walk the short distance to Mt. Zion, just outside the gates of the Old City. Here is found the room where the Last Supper is thought to have been held, which was later turned into a mosque during a different phase in the city's history. It was an odd sight to see a flock of Zimbabwean Christian bent in prayer before the mihrab. Nearby, I visited the modern Church of the Dormition, said to be the site of Mary's death.

I then walked around the southwest walls to an Israeli archaeological park wedged in alongside the Temple Mount. As it turns out, this is a controversial place because it is built on Arab land. It focuses on remains of the 1st and 2nd Temple complexes, with a bit of Umayyad palace thrown in for good measure. One of the highlights, IMHO, was the set of latrines dating from a Second Temple-era palace. There were also bits and pieces of the First Temple street that led up to the Temple itself and an excellent video that helps one imagine what the Temple looked like and the experience of pilgrims who came to it.

By the time I had finished, it was already nearly dinner time, and Clare had come in from Ramallah to meet me. We met up with Robin and her boyfriend (who were also visiting Jerusalem) at a sushi restaurant near Ben Yehuda St. in West Jerusalem, reveling in the wide variety and accessibility of ethnic food in the city. After dinner, we went for a nighttime walk around the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in search of the best Ramadan lights and garlands. Other than the civilian who ran by with a large gun, the Muslim Quarter was in many ways much friendlier than any other part of the city: children came to chat with us, vendors offered us discounts, and there were few foreign tourists there beyond the main thoroughfares. At 'asha time, people burst forth from their houses into the empty streets, moving as one toward Al Aqsa to pray.


The next morning I spent at the City of David, to the south of the Old City walls. It was a bit difficult to navigate on my own, but was valuable at least for establishing in my mind the geography of Jerusalem's origins, from the Valley of Kidron to the Mt. of Olives and the Temple Mount. The bits that remain of the original Biblical settlement include parts of David's palace, the city walls, tombs of the Davidic dynasty, and the Pool of Siloam. The complex is most known for its 45-minute walk through the waist-high water of the Canaanite aqueduct known as Hezekiah's Tunnel, but after a few minutes bent over in the dark wetness by myself I got claustrophobic and took the dry route.

I had a hummus and falafel lunch with Robin at the Old City staple Abu Shukri before making my way to the Museum on the Seam -- the Seam meaning the pre-1967 Israel/Jordan border, now the rough border between East and West Jerusalem. I was expecting a history museum but got an avant-garde gallery exhibiting art that deals with conflict and memory broadly speaking. While I found some of the work just too abstract and deconstructed for my taste, my favorite piece was a poignant video of Afghan children stuffing a rusted warplane with cotton in the hope that plugging the holes will allow them to fly it like a kite. Across the street in East Jerusalem, I visited the Garden Tomb, a quaint English-run garden that Anglicans believe is actually the site of Golgotha because of the quarry that directly abuts it. Whether or not it is the site of the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, it is a lovely spot for contemplation.

That evening, I signed up for a tour to the Dead Sea with a group from my hostel. Our leader was a hip, ex-Orthodox Jewish South African, and my fellow travelers included a black American woman who had lived in an American settlement near Eilat for 40 years, a heavily tattooed 30-something Mexican guy who regaled us with stories of Tel Aviv's nude beaches, a pair of middle-aged Turkish ladies, and a friendly German medical student. We drove, of course, through the West Bank, but arrived at an Israeli beach. We floated, as one inevitably does in the Dead Sea, hoping that we had followed the essential pieces of advice: don't shave, don't wear a tampon, don't swallow, don't open your nose, don't get cut, and don't pass gas. The salt will hurt you. I covered myself in the goopy mud we dredged up from the seabed and stretched out to dry. The feeling one has after a Dead Sea bath rivals the post-hammam sense of clean. Despite the mud. Our driver had brought dates, nuts, and tea for us to down before heading back to the city.

Dead Sea monster

Back in Jerusalem, I decided to experiment with hostel socializing. My German friend and I hung out in the lounge, where we encountered a Texan apparently researching British Mandate Palestine. Although it all began in a friendly vein, things started to devolve when our new buddy announced: "Settlements in the West Bank? Yeah they're a great idea! I'm real down with Zionism 'n all that, and Palestine doesn't exist anyway." They took a sharp turn for the worse when the German asked the Texan about American politics: she couldn't believe she'd met someone who seemed to fulfill all the stereotypes and, besides that, had at age 27 just ridden his first form of public transport ever there in Jerusalem (the bus). By the time I called, quite literally, for a truce, the Texan was shouting at her: "Oh, okay, so you won't come to Texas because you don't agree with our conservative politics? Ok, ok, see if I care. I don't care. You're so shallow!" As we made our way upstairs, we were rehashing the night's debate when a middle-aged man in a kippah approached us to express his own solidarity with GW Bush. "Jerusalem is better than rehab," he told us before fumbling into his room. "It's a great place to heal."

It was a strange night, and reminded me how you can find just about anyone in Jerusalem without looking too hard. I had hoped to visit a college friend in Haifa or spend a day at the beach in Tel Aviv, but I still didn't feel like I'd done everything I wanted in Jerusalem, so I stayed. August 15 was my last full day in the city, and I spent that morning at The Book Gallery off King George St. sorting through old postcards and newspapers. I came across a special edition of the Jerusalem Times published to commemorate Sadat's historic visit in 1977. The tone was extremely optimistic. One Egyptian reporter covering the event was quoted as saying: "Sadat has said a major aim of his visit is to break the psychological barrier between Arabs and Israelis, which, in the president's opinion, accounts for 70% of the Middle East conflict. If the experience I went through can be considered a yardstick, then Sadat may well be on the way to realizing his aim." Well, perhaps things have not gone quite so well as hoped.

A walk through the swanky Mamilla development brought me back to the Old City, this time to the outskirts of the Christian Quarter (Latin Patriarchate St.). It was silent in the early afternoon but for the occasional bearded priest or brown-robed monk padding past. I wandered but didn't linger, aiming rather for the Mt. of Olives to the east of the Old City. Much of the slope facing the Temple Mount is covered with the white tombs of the Jewish Cemetery, perhaps the most desirable place in the world to be buried. The views of the eastern side of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa were spectacular -- the closest I came to going inside the grounds myself. Panting my way up what turned out to be really quite a steep slope, I visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs, an ancient cave manned by burly Russian priests. Even higher, I came to the rather disappointing Mosque of the Ascension, and the Church of the Pater Noster. This is a French-run fief where Jesus may have taught his disciples in the final days (there's a cave). The best part is really the 100+ renditions of the Lord's Prayer in nearly every language of the world, tiled throughout the garden. From the top of the mountain down the eastern side of the mountain is Palestinian territory, if one doesn't count the fortress-like homes flying enormous Israeli flags. But I went west anyway, back down the mountain to the Garden of Gethsemane. If indeed this was the location of Jesus's arrest, several of the gnarly olive trees in the garden personally witnessed the event. They have been scientifically dated to be more than 2000 years old. These days one can't sit beneath the trees. The interior of the site's modern yet beautiful basilica, the Church of All Nations, has a blue and gold mosaicked dome, a starry night, under which I sat instead and reflected on my days in Jerusalem.

Later on, I met Clare for a sharp jab of modernity. We went for a walk through Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in Arab East Jerusalem that has been a lightning rod for conflict in recent months and years. Settlers have evicted Palestinians from their homes in the middle of the night based on Ottoman-era deeds and in some cases houses are split between Israelis in certain rooms and Palestinians in others. There are almost weekly protests in the neighborhood and the walls are covered with political graffiti. We watched as a large Orthodox family emerged from a house topped with a huge menorah  and something like "We Will Return" in Hebrew. A Palestinian woman emerged from the house next door, waited until the family was in their car, and then crossed the street to one of the split houses, watching us with caution.

Just 15 minutes later, we were back in the other world, West Jerusalem, at a vegetarian restaurant called Village Green. We were downing plates of tofu and exotic vegetables next to Israeli hippie families (not something you get at all in the Arab countries really). But stress and conflict are never far away in Jerusalem, and for that reason I would find it strangling to live there very long. Our last sight of the night, as I walked Clare back toward the bus station, was of an anguished middle-aged man, apparently Arab, lumbering down Jaffa Street cursing and beating walls, lampposts, signs, whatever he could find. "Mosh el awwal hayk!!!" he moaned -- something like "You weren't the first ones here." "Crazy," murmured the Jewish families who passed, giving him a wide berth.


The next morning I awoke at 6:50am for a last-ditch effort at seeing the Temple Mount. Little did I know, just two nights before (while I was at the Dead Sea), the Israeli authorities had decided, in an unprecedented move, to allow in almost any Palestinian who wanted to come pray at Al Aqsa for Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Destiny. This is the night during Ramadan when Muslims believe the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad. With all this extra traffic, tourists had no hope of getting in.  Meanwhile, while approaching Jaffa Gate, a Palestinian teenager climbed the stairs in the same direction as I was descending, intentionally running his clammy hand down my arm as he passed. I had been rehearsing appropriately insulting responses to harassment, but they rarely come out when and how you imagine. When you're actually touched, as happens not infrequently in this part of the world as I have noted, it's hard to respond in Arabic and with something that elicits embarrassment rather than high-fiving on the part of the males. "You're disgusting!" I yelled at the boy, clicking my tongue. Even though this was not particularly extreme harassment, I felt so angry that this teenager had stolen the feeling of serenity I had finally achieved on my last morning in Jerusalem. As I stormed off, I was particularly upset that not one of the three or four other women on the steps had said or done anything. That is not uncommon in Egypt, either - people always look the other way, and you are lucky if you can find another person to berate the harasser. Overall I felt that harassment throughout my trip had been so much less bad than in Cairo, particularly in Lebanon and to a large extent in Jordan.

I checked out of Abraham Hostel and made my way to the servees depot in East Jerusalem in order to catch a ride back to the Allenby crossing. It was tediously long, though in this direction the cause was Jordanian chaos rather than Israeli meticulousness. When I arrived several hours later in Amman, I joined Sheeba, her visiting father, and some friends on a visit to the possible site of the Cave of the Seven Sleepers (mentioned in the Qur'an in the context of something like a Rip Van Winkle story). It is a Byzantine tomb, still with bones inside, that has become a Muslim shrine in the midst of Amman's bleak industrial suburbs. Although I had grand designs for my last night of vacation, my energy had run out and I passed out early. By 1pm the next day, I was back in Cairo, with the odd feeling for the first time ever that being in Egypt was both a homecoming and, in some unimaginable way, relaxing.