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.
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.
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.
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.
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