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.