Escapes

What have I been doing for the last 10 days? Well, as it turns out, I've been unknowingly battling an acute case of follicular tonsillitis. I won't go into the gory details for fear that you might just stop reading altogether, but the bottom line is that I am now more or less sticking to my bed for a couple of days while round 2 of my antibiotics begins (inshallah) to work its magic. What better way to pass the hours than a little blogging.

One of the things I pledged as I moved out of the September blues was that I would find more ways to make myself feel balanced and happy, rather than moping around and inventing hallucinations of changing autumn leaves. (Down with all those people who've been posting beautiful autumn photos on Facebook!) One such escape, a much needed one, was my weekend jaunt to Alexandria. Last weekend, several friends and I took the train up on Thursday night, and I went to stay with my old friend Mai -- one of my other LINC buddies I hadn't seen in six years. Alexandria may have a lot less action than Cairo, but it has a number of big things going for it: green spaces, fresh, crisp air, and the sea. It was also nice again to stay in the comfort of a family home, and to reconnect with a friend I hadn't seen in so long yet find that we had so much to talk about. Since I've done most of the tourist sites on my previous visits to Alex, I spent the first lazy day sitting on the Starbucks patio outside the Four Seasons overlooking the Mediterranean, chatting with Mai and her friend Laila. We talked a lot about politics: like most of my friends here, they really do not like the Muslim Brotherhood and are hoping that Morsi doesn't do anything too awful. At the same time, most such people I've talked to seem to feel that he hasn't done much of anything yet. Incidentally, after my return from Alex, the public prosecutor, who is a holdover from the Mubarak era and recently refused Morsi's offer of reassignment to the Embassy to the Vatican, pardoned all 24 old regime stalwarts accused of orchestrating horseback and camelback assaults on protesters in last year's revolution. Then, this Friday, the Muslim Brotherhood organized demonstrations in Tahrir protesting the verdict while, simultaneously, liberal, anti-MB groups led demonstrations in the same place protesting Morsi's first 100 days and demanding a more representative Constituent Assembly. Some people began throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the other side (accounts differ) and more than 100 people ended up in the hospital by the end of the afternoon with head injuries.

Back in Alex...For dinner, we relocated to a restaurant nestled in the Montaza, or palace, which is surrounded by acres of lush gardens. People were picnicking in the grass (not a common site anywhere in Cairo except perhaps Azhar Park), playing ball games, and strolling through the green landscape. I was entranced. The spell was broken only for a brief moment when the waitress came over to ask me to please pull my shirt down -- a bit of skin was showing above my pants. (How embarrassing! On the other hand, many of my friends have said that strangers often come over and tug their shirts down or up for modesty's sake on the street. Interesting to meditate a little on boundaries of personal space and whose responsibility it is to maintain women's modesty, which is obviously an important value here.) When I parted way with my friends after dark, I made for the Qaitbey Citadel, one of Alex's main landmarks alongside the famed library. Jutting out into the sea, the fort was entirely illuminated for the occasion of the Farah El Bahr Arts Festival. Sponsored by the Anna Lindh Foundation and emphasizing cross-Mediterranean cooperation, both communists and anti-Zionists had protested the really very innocuous-seeming event during the week prior. As a result, the main draw, that is the revolutionary Egyptian rock band Cairokee, had withdrawn its participation. Still, a big crowd came to see a number of lesser-known Egyptian and European groups, which presented everything from traditional folk music to, in the case of some Austrian ladies in glitter tights, an angsty rendition of something called "Satan is our friend." (Was this really the audience for that? Well, fortunately people didn't seem to really be listening to the lyrics.) We nestled ourselves in a sparsely populated corner of the old fort and reveled in what was unmistakably a cool sea breeze.

Inside Qaitbey Citadel, Farah El Bahr Festival 

The streets of Alexandria have not lost their colonial charm. There are the tall, scrubbed townhouses with wooden shutters and quite a few airy seaside cafes. There are places in downtown Cairo where you can catch a whiff of this grand architecture -- but the last century, and many layers of dirt, have taken a much harsher toll on the capital. However problematic the European presence here, they (along with the Mamluks, bless their souls) erected many of the most beautiful buildings. At the same time, Alexandria is considered much more conservative than Cairo these days: it is no longer the stomping ground of a global cast of recluse poets, artists, and seamen, but the city where Egypt's salafi movement is rooted and a stronghold for Islamist political parties like the FJP. On my second day in the city, after breakfast with Mai, I spent some time meandering through the stacks of the reborn Biblioteca Alexandrina. Worthy of its place on lists of the greatest libraries in the world, it is remarkable as much for the sense of history it evokes and as a symbol for a recommitment to book learning as for its particular collections. The main reading room, which is filled with open stacks, tilts down toward the sea and beams of light float in through chinks in the library's silvery shell. This monument to Alexandria's long-ago reputation as a repository for all the knowledge of the world opened in 2002, 2,050 years after the Ancient Library of Alexandria was apparently burned by Julius Caesar as he fought his way through Egypt. In Egypt today, as many of my young friends have explained, readings books is not much of a popular pastime -- in their view because the deeply troubled educational system turns students off them from a very young age. The library, though, is always quite crowded (perhaps more with tourists than locals, I'm not sure), and hosts all kinds of art exhibitions, poetry readings, and multimedia services.

Soaking up knowledge in the main reading room of the Biblioteca Alexandrina

We ended our visit to Alexandria at Teatro, a trendy new cafe in a back alley lit with colored lights that has what one might call an "oriental hip" vibe. (Oriental is the term in English that Egyptians use to talk about Middle Eastern food or decor.) No fish for us this time - we ran out of time. But I will be back - particularly because word has it that it rains in Alexandria! I will be checking the weather regularly.

When I returned that night, I decided to stop by my local pharmacy to see what the bespectacled 24-year-old man in the tight purple t-shirt could do for my problems. He took me into the back storage closet of the pint-sized pharmacy, where half-drunk cups of tea and packs of cigarettes were lodged into stacks of various drugs. I was instructed to sit in a desk chair stationed in the closet during the investigation. Sure enough, my tonsils were swollen and I needed antibiotics. I will get the injections, the man told me. My pleas for oral antibiotics were refused -- impossible. He began filling the plastic needles with some liquid I'd never heard of before. Ok, ready, pull down your pants, he told me. Hold up! Reality check: I was in the back closet of an Egyptian pharmacy alone with this needle-wielding man of my own age who was about to jab a giant needle into my backside. Nope, not happening. He said there were no women working that shift, which was obvious, so I called a friend to come. The pharmacist seemed to think this was very strange. I apparently survived, though when I left after the second and final dose the next day, he told me I should come by again. If I'm sick, I told him. No, no -- please come by just to talk, tell me about yourself, said my pharmacist. I think I may be switching pharmacies.

Nevertheless, feeling newly empowered by my antibiotics, I set out the day after my Alex trip for a long-planned day of field research in the governorate of Qalioubiyah. ADEW, the NGO I'm working for, was bringing along some prospective donors to check out the building they had used until recently as a shelter for victims of domestic violence. When the funding ran out, the facility became purely administrative, but the dozen or so apartments, outfitted with bunkbeds and shared bathrooms, are still there waiting for the center to reopen. Now it looks like the money is there and women will, indeed, be able to move back. Those who had lived in the shelter before it closed have by now all returned to their abusive husbands: One of the key problems in this community and many others is, of course, that there is really nowhere for women to go after they have spent time in the shelter (the only one of its kind). Their families mostly will not take them back and they don't want to return to abuse, but there is extreme stigma faced by women who choose to leave such marriages and little possibility for them to move out on their own. The village we were in, Masaken Shala'an, is only about 1.5 hours north of Cairo by car, but is largely agricultural. Unfortunately, as in many poor areas, there is no mechanism for sanitation, so the fields full of crops alternate with fields full of garbage. One of my coworkers from ADEW and I strolled up and down the main street seeking interviews with locals about the status of medical care. ADEW hopes to also open a medical center to supplement the badly underskilled and understaffed clinics in the surrounding area. Medical services?! most of our subjects scoffed, There's nothing like that here! People die before the ambulance comes. Some, perhaps to save face as my colleague suggested, said at first that they had everything they needed, but revealed the depth of the problem when asked more specific questions. The biggest problems are hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease -- all of which people were extremely open about discussing. I was struck, in fact, by how friendly and unsuspicious our interviewees were toward two obvious outsiders approaching them on the side of the street and probing into their medical histories. The last woman begged us to come in for tea. What's more, we were not harassed a single time during the course of the day -- even though we both stuck out like sore thumbs. (Maybe village life is for me?!) While I learned a lot, I felt somewhat discouraged at the end of the day about what a basic medical center such as non-experts like us could really provide these people. Where will the doctors come from and how will the center sustain itself over the years? We still have to work out these big questions.

The local staff took us in the afternoon for a felucca ride on the calm Nile waters in nearby Kanatir. It's known for a big dam built by Mohammed Ali and the banks surrounding it are lined with what are apparently neat little resort cottages for army generals. Back at the Center, a farm fresh lunch had been prepared, including fat rounds of white cheese and something that was promisingly similar to arugula. As we left to board our van, gaggles of cute children appeared at the windows of the surrounding apartment buildings to wave goodbye.


Finally - or, actually, before either of these trips -- I went to see my first real Egyptian play. This was CASA attending en masse as a listening exercise, which I essentially failed because I didn't understand a solid portion of the dialogue. From the outside, the theater looked very institutional, and had the ministry of culture or some such official body slapped on. Inside, though, the theater held only about sixty audience members, which was strangely more evocative of some hip off-off-Broadway New York theater. I discovered, however, when the director came to meet with our class, that in fact this is because the theater is not very popular these days. Born as a genre in Egypt around the turn of the 20th century, it witnessed a rapid revival during the Nasser era and then promptly faded from public interest. The play, called Hanzala, was originally a Palestinian piece about a man who gets out of jail to find that his wife and job have moved on without him, but he's too kind to do anything about it at first. However, this was a new take on the old play (unbeknownst to all of us), and so we were all thrown for a loop when it began with a pair of cross-dressing clowns, a large woman in a neon muumuu and feather boa, a guy in a pharaoh costume, and an Italian tenor belting songs about macaroni. The director had transformed the play into an over-the-top comedy that further involved a prison guard with rubber duckies attached to his epaulets and a fly swatter for a sword, as well as frequent musical interludes and a sufi mystic with giant red horns. The new scripted mocked everybody, from the deposed Egyptian government to Asians to the Muslim Brotherhood to women to men, and was filled with Egyptian political and cultural references that I mostly didn't know. All these additions, the director Islam Imam told us, made the play interesting to an Egyptian audience that really does not enjoy works in formal Arabic, from other Arab countries, or with too much seriousness. When anything sells in the local theater world, it's rollicking comedy.

On the subject of entertainment, I also had my first Egyptian clubbing experience this month, when I got my boogie on at Cairo White Club to celebrate my friend Ryme's birthday. (Unless we're counting that 16-year-old venture into the TGI Friday's Nile boat 'nightclub' -- when we excited LINC ladies showed up on the dance floor of the famed chain restaurant in our baggy linen pants and dowdy t-shirts.) Like weddings, the few clubs that exist here outside 5-star hotels (and yes, it's really a few) are just about the only places beyond your own home where it's cool to show your shoulders and knees. It's both a self-selecting and a selected set: the minimum charge, which racks up pretty quickly, is 150 LE ($25). A small fortune. The bartenders whip up cocktails like it's Beirut and the DJ pumps out songs like "Gangnam Style" and "I'm Sexy and I Know It" that give me a pang of nostalgia for carefree college weekends on the Tower dance floor. But at the end of the day, the set that frequents these places is small -- and even on a Friday night, there were only a couple of other parties going on in the club. But, when you go and make your own fun, it's liberating to wear a short dress and do a little dance every now and again.