3o2bal el Fara7

Egyptians love weddings -- a lot. Indeed, the word farah means both "joy" and "wedding" in the Egyptian dialect. Given my age, I am constantly overhearing engagement plans, engagement aspirations, wedding arrangements, and wedding gossip. During one recent metro trip, I was packed in next to four girls a little younger than myself poring over a lingerie catalog. This one... no this one! They pointed and giggled to almost every single negligee. (None of which, I will point out, were modeled by live humans -- don't be imagining Victoria's Secret here.) So, one of the girls leaned in when there was a pause, when's the wedding? 

Not long ago, I passed through the lobby of my apartment building and offered some cookies from the box I was carrying to the guards. Are you going to a wedding?! They asked eagerly. No, I said apologetically, Just celebrating a friend's new job. I received what would have been an improbable response back home: Well, I hope to God you are able to get married soon. I smiled and told them I was really in no rush. How old are you? one of the guards asked, scrutinizing me for hints of wrinkles. 23. Hmm, you really should hurry! You look much nicer now than you will when you get older. He said it with a wink and a smile, but it's true that 23 is considered primetime: it's all downhill from here. This brings me to the title of this post: It literally means - May the wedding be soon. You say this to congratulate someone on his or her engagement. (What are those numbers, you ask? That's Arabic chat alphabet, in which numbers are used to represent sounds the Latin alphabet doesn't accommodate.)

But the guards aren't the only ones who are praying for my speedy marriage. Facebook has also taken up the cause. I have been receiving a constant stream of Egyptian wedding advertisements, which concerns me primarily because those ads are supposed to be tailored to your interests and search history. A delicious sampling:

Starting off with an easy one. Pretty self-explanatory. Inshallah is the Arabic catch-all word that means "God willing." In addition to cases when one might reasonably say this in any language, it is used, for example, when someone asks you if you are getting off at the next metro stop. Proper response: "Inshallah." (Long did I wonder what could possibly come between me and my getting off the metro 30 seconds later. Until January 25, when, thanks to Ultras wreaking underground havoc, I was trapped in metro tunnel hell.)

"The way to marriage." This is great because it offers me free registration. Once I've registered, I am well on my way to finding my life partner. 

Now here's a winner. This is specifically advertising temporary marriages. Those are for couples that can't afford or don't want a real, long-term marriage, but don't want to do anything haram. You don't get the big party, but you do get some paperwork saying its okay for you to rent an apartment together. 

While Facebook was busy trying to help me plan my own future, I was busy getting ready for my friends Kareem and Rama's actual wedding. I've been excited about this for a while -- or at least since January, when they decided to hold the wedding in March. (I've observed that while engagements might last a couple years, as in their case, Egyptian weddings can be planned in record-breaking time.) The week before the wedding, Sarah and I went shoe shopping downtown. At one shop, I took my dress out from its plastic bag to match with the hot pink velvet shoes I was considering (and later bought). The salesman, a smiley guy about our age, looked on with astonishment. So where's the rest? he asked, pointing to the dress. Keda bas, I told him -- That's it. But that doesn't fly here, he told me, never losing his grin. Is this a foreign wedding or something? Nope, I told him, it was most definitely an Egyptian wedding and many girls would be wearing similarly scandalous dresses. He threw up his hands. El balad bazet!! he said (still grinning) -- which I liberally translate as: We're going to hell in a handbasket. Outside I had an altercation with a street vendor who told me he wanted to touch my ass. All in a day's work.

Downtown had returned to normal by March 12, just three days after the Day of Retribution that many had feared would go terribly awry. I had spent that Saturday morning not attending my Zamalek Zumba class after a friend on an early morning run reported that thousands of Ultras Ahlawy had gathered outside their club on the southern half of the island. Instead, a fellow CASAwy hosted a pancake breakfast at his Dokki apartment and we followed the Port Saeed verdicts on Twitter. In the end, there were no surprises. This very fact, however, seems to have surprised the Ultras and they waited around for a while, not sure what to do. The verdict, which confirmed death sentences for a number of Port Saeedis, was what they had wanted. However, they ultimately decided it wasn't satisfactory. Sometime late morning, we started to see police helicopters circling around the Zamalek area. And then we saw large clouds of gray smoke billow up from the island. What was burning? We checked Twitter. It was the Police Club, a fancy private club for officers and their families. Miraculously, this seemed to be the most dramatic casualty of the day.  I read that afternoon that two fast-food restaurants downtown had also been set afire by masked vandals claiming to be punishing Ikhwanis -- but one of them was the restaurant owned by Ali, the friend of my Princeton professor who served me a whole sheep at his house last summer. (Definitely not Ikhwani.) Fortunately, almost no damage was done and he quickly reopened. And so for now things are calm: I can sit on the AUC terrace off Mohamed Mahmoud St., a stone's throw from Tahrir, and listen to the peaceful sounds of garden shears and bird chirps rather than the explosions of Molotov cocktails or tear gas canisters.

It was in this happily peaceful context that Kareem and Rama's wedding took place last Friday. The day of the wedding, Sarah, Robin, and I went to Versailles Salon for some new 'dos. My hairdresser, Yassine, greeted me with an unexpected: Parlo italiano? I learned that he used to work in Italy, and so despite apologizing for not speaking Italian, I was treated to grazies and signioras that added greatly to the overall experience. A few hours later, we were in the car with the groom's father and his driver. (Only in Egypt would it seem perfectly natural for the father of the groom to agree to take a couple of his son's random foreign friends along!) It's common knowledge that 7pm means 9pm, so no one, including the wedding party, arrived in the hall before then. As we stood in the empty hall, the groom's father, who works in the oil business, explained to us that lack of precision when it comes to being on time was something that was making Egypt fall behind in the world market. (To be noted: he and his son are both always on time.)

It was an extremely classy wedding - and a fun one. There were no overeager dance troupes in matching sparkly costumes. The groom's two best friends brought him to the crowd waiting on the steps outside the hall, and he waited there for his bride as the zeffa band blasted its horns and friends blew bubbles or tossed flower petals. Rama arrived with her dad, passing through the crowd to meet Kareem. Then we and the band followed them inside together. The tables were decorated with bouquets of beautiful tall, white lilies. But except for the slideshow and delectable buffet dinner (at midnight, like clockwork), we were barely at the table. This wedding was a dance party that lasted from 9pm to 3am: Egyptian sha3by line dances (including my favorite, "Haty Bosa ya Bet" - check it out), party standards like 'Twist and Shout', and the bride's father weaving through the dancers with a fat cigar in his mouth. Sometime around 2:30am I found myself lined up and performing the Macarena with about 12 other hardcore partiers. Soon after, we gathered to symbolically usher the bride and groom off the dance floor and out of the hall. (Until they came back to say goodbye, of course.)

Walking the bride and groom into the hall - the Zeffa.

Cutting the cake (Shh, it's never real... That waiter is serving the bites of real food.)

 Awaiting the midnight buffet with friends

2am, when I'm told that Haty Bosy ya Bet is on next

Until the next wedding, I am trying to stay busy by reviving my reputation as CASA cultural attache. Tonight was Opera night, dress code: formal. You may know The Merry Widow as a turn-of-the-century German operetta about the romantic escapades of a bunch of dukes and diplomats in Paris. ("You'll Find Me at Maxim's" is one of the signature songs.) All of these things were true of the Cairo version, except the German. The operetta was performed in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, which was amazingly well suited to it. The light-hearted romantic plot closely resembles that of popular Egyptian movies. Although the audience was disappointingly small, the show was a big success. After it was over, a violinist friend of Sarah's, who had come to watch the opera with us, took us backstage. The prima donna was posing for photos, her face plastered in silver sparkles and mile-long fake eyelashes. We tiptoed past and walked out with the violinist's teacher, a graying Hungarian who was playing in the opera's pit orchestra. He introduced himself to us and immediately invited us to his birthday party this weekend. My wife is away, I can have many parties at my house, he promised. And, I have lots of beers!

Awaiting Retribution

The whole city of Cairo, and perhaps the whole country, is on edge as it awaits March 9. That's tomorrow, the day when the verdict will be issued for the remaining 54 defendants in the Port Saeed soccer match stampede that left 74 people dead and 1,000 injured in February 2012. "3/9" is tagged on buildings, police vans, and the walls of the metro. Often, the tag is paired with the word qesas, retribution. This forces one into an ominous internal countdown to game time.

And so tensions have been rising. Yesterday, 30 police stations closed, striking against the Ministry of the Interior and refusing to be deployed to quell the unrest in Port Saeed. Yet on other days, the police presence in Cairo has seemed to be surging. On Tuesday evening, I was eating dinner at a friend's apartment in my neighborhood when we heard several fire trucks pass quite close. I read a few hours later that Ultras had tried to burn down the apartment building of the former Interior Minister, who had presided over the Port Saeed incident. He happens to live in Dokki as well, at the end of the street and across a square from my friend's apartment. And so this morning I awoke to a message from an Egyptian friend, urging us to stay in tomorrow in anticipation of more clashes around the minister's house. We should treat it like a snowstorm, he said.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday, I go to the translation lab at AUC’s downtown campus off Mohamed Mahmoud St. for class. Underground, I pass through a long, inexplicably lightless tunnel that leads from the metro out to the corner of Tahrir Square. The tunnel reeks of urine, but it is always pulsing with subterranean life: the guy with fake robotic birds, the guy with the red satchels, the layer upon layer of “qesas” tagged on the beige tiles. Every so often, the authorities wipe off the graffiti, and it begins again. Like the murals that begin just above the tunnel, it has not yet become an artifact. When I emerge from the underworld, I see the familiar flag salesman who plays Qur’an at earsplitting volume, and a wooden stage from which people are occasionally giving speeches when I leave class. There hasn’t been normal traffic flow around Tahrir for a while, so people stroll around among the tents and the vendors at will.   

Meanwhile, President Morsi announced a few weeks ago that parliamentary elections would be held in four rounds beginning at the end of April. (This is because the previous People’s Assembly was invalidated, and currently there is none.) But this week, the Administrative Court struck down the upcoming elections and Morsi says he will not appeal the decision, so no one really knows when they will take place. The liberal opposition (the National Salvation Front of ElBaradei and Moussa) had said in any case that it would boycott those elections, even more emboldened in their (in my opinion, highly unwise and shortsighted) decision by what they felt was American pressure to participate. Earlier this week, a prescient Egyptian friend who had just returned from a high-powered executive training program abroad told me that boycotting or not boycotting the elections would be irrelevant anyway: much more important things would happen before the end of April. In any case, she added, It will be ten years before we can begin to be hopeful about the economy. It will probably be the Muslim Brotherhood’s downfall, because they don’t have the solutions, she said, but neither does anyone else. Anyone in power now would fail.

As Egypt gears up for tomorrow’s verdict, and whatever chaos that incites, I want to mention a rousing concert that I attended several weeks ago. It was Valentine’s Day (or, as we like to call it, Galentine’s Day) and we ladies teamed for a crazy night out at the fast food chain Gad. Afterward, we went to my favorite performance space in Cairo, El Mastaba Center. This is the unassuming hole-in-the-wall filled with 30 or so stools where we previously danced with Sufi dervishes and Sudanese folk singers wearing skirts made from sheep’s teeth. That night, however, El Tanbura band was performing: a group of middle-aged and older men from Port Saeed who perform protest songs in the husky, working class folk style of the canal cities. The restiveness of Port Saeed did not begin with the Ultras in February 2012. It has always been a bastion of antiestablishment leftists and labor organizers. For the people of Port Saeed, this is just the latest episode in a long history of civil disobedience (and, at times, armed revolt).

Unlike some of the other concerts we’ve been to at Mastaba, this one was packed – and not just with hip expats. In the row in front of us sat several aging Egyptian ladies. The one directly in front of me, in an elegant red blazer and a neat bun, was wiping away tears as she watched the oldest musician – who at perhaps 75 or 80 sat ramrod straight and wore a red fez unselfconsciously on his head. A long past romance! whispered Robin in my ear. True or not, the band’s words were filled with venom, humor, and emotion. Many in the audience knew the words to the old songs: they recalled resistance to foreign occupation during the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 or the leftist movement of the 1970s. Much of the music was sung to the tune of the semsemeyya, a lap harp especially popular along the canal. Despite the Eastern instruments, I was reminded by the heartiness of the songs and the roughness of the singers’ voices of Irish folk music.

The littlest semsemeyya player, Abdallah

At the end of the concert, the band performed the newest song in its canon, following in the tradition of Port Said’s historical protest songs. This one was about January 26, 2013, the day when fighting broke out after the first part of the soccer riot verdict was released. This was our January 25, said one of the musicians. O our free youth, our righteous martyrs, the song mourns. A cutthroat regime is killing peaceful protesters… and does business in the name of religion. At this last punchy line, a direct hit at the piety of the Muslim Brotherhood, a cheer rose up from the audience.

Video of Tanbura's rousing performance of "26 January"

Al Haraka Baraka

Al haraka baraka is one of my favorite Arabic sayings. I think I learned it sometime back at Princeton, when Ustaz Hisham would have us recite a dozen proverbs from memory before each class, but it has come in handy countless times since I moved to the Middle East. "Movement is a blessing" goes the literal translation, but its meaning stretches to suit any instance in which I want to fend off taxi drivers, people pressuring me to ride elevators, camel drivers, and donkey owners.

Last week I swore to live up to my credo, pledging myself to a week of exercise classes. It all began with a day at El Fit Fitness Festival, an exercise-a-thon that an Egyptian friend of mine organized at the high-tech industry oasis known as Smart Village. In Smart Village, some distance outside Cairo on the Desert Road, all the buildings are miraculously still white and all the windows are filled with blue reflective glass. There is also, notably, grass. Now, despite the gym ads plastered in various locations (including my neighborhood) featuring WWF-worthy bodybuilders with bulging veins, Cairo is not known for its exercise potential -- perhaps because of the hazards of inhaling air while outdoors, or the risk to joggers of being picked off by a swerving microbus pumping its beats. So El Fit sponsored a competition for the buffest guys and girls in Egypt to come prove their mettle. And then there were the hangers-on, like me and Sarah, who came for the Zumba tent and the free yogurt cart.

On our way to El Fit, we stopped for breakfast at Dandy Mall near Smart Village. As soon as we pulled in, I remembered my first day in Egypt in 2006 and my new host family's tour of this very mall. Mostly, I remember my humiliation when we made a beeline for the paper products section of Carrefour. My quiet host mom pointed proudly to the toilet paper aisle: "We were told in orientation that Americans use lots and lots of toilet paper. Here, you can pick whichever brand you like best!"

There was no toilet paper for us this time. Once at Smart Village, I immediately felt inspired by the clean (?) air, the greenery, and the 80-degree sunshine to get fit. The Zumba tent was going strong by 10am, and after an hour or so switched over to ladies only so that the hijab-wearing among the dancers could let their hair hang out. Still not fit enough, I joined a very aerobic outdoor BodyAttack class and found myself airplaning around in a circle at top speed with a bunch of strangers and a barrel-chested Romanian instructor in short-shorts.

Before leaving, Sarah and I were offered free, one-week trial passes to a bougie gym in Mohandiseen. Thus, the next day began our week-long, self-inflicted Cairo fitness challenge.

Day 1 - Body Jam. This is a kind of aerobic dance, gangsta moves included. We arrive to find a room full of ladies and one middle-aged man who leaves after two songs. I guess it wasn't his scene. Our instructor is Amr. He is wearing a red wifebeater, silver chains, and a flat-brimmed hat, and his athletic pants are stuffed into his sneakers. The class is conducted entirely in English. I find myself karate-chopping at the air and enjoying it immensely. (Spoiler alert: This turned out to be the highlight of my week.)

Day 2 - Pilates. This class is ladies only. I find my mind wandering and I want to sleep. Not really for me.

Day 3 - Zumba. This class takes place in the ladies only gym, which is across the street from the main gym and has most of the same facilities. Mostly I enjoy the smoothie bar. The instructor informs us at the beginning of class that we will actually be doing bellydancing. Unfortunately, my hips don't do that, so I spend much of the time jiggling. I sneak some peeks at the middle-aged Egyptian ladies around me, and am relieved to note that many of them cannot bellydance either.  I feel the eyes of four black-clothed munaqabat chilling at the back of the studio, watching (and judging?) us.

Day  4 - Fit Hop. Actually, we arrive to discover that Fit Hop has been cancelled. We work out instead in the ladies' gym.

Day 5 - BodyAttack. Arriving late, I get the distinct impression that this is actually BodyCombat, a very different class. The instructor is wearing black superhero gloves. Ten minutes in, Sarah is fed up and leaves me to high-kick and punch on my own. At first I'm intimidated by the tight, furious jabs of the women in the front. Eventually, though, I hit some kind of endorphin nirvana. I wonder if this was the answer all along to relieving stress and anger over street harassment (and if I missed my calling when I quit after-school karate after the infamous trampling incident of 1998).

Day 6 - Today we fail to live up to our challenge. Instead, I invite friends over for dinner and we cook pumpkin ravioli from scratch.

Day 7 - Zumba. This is the first day of an eight-week class subsidized by AUC. We're on the top floor of a fancy gym in Zamalek now, and our instructor, Reham, is no-nonsense. Her neck is tattooed with Chinese-esque characters. She has us wagging to Beyonce's "Single Ladies" in no time.

Getting fit at El Fit. Warming up for BodyAttack.