One Wedding Shobrawy-Style

Egyptian friends have often told me: "Our Friday morning is your Sunday morning." Indeed there is a quiet laziness to Friday mornings here that is more like the idea of Sundays in America than the real thing. The streets are empty, the people are asleep, the shops are closed, and at least in my mind it is possible to hear birds chirping. The Friday prayer, which breaks the silence at noon via speakers positioned to reach every corner of the neighborhood, nevertheless has an oddly lulling quality. The voice of the imam, though loud and rhythmically aggressive, is muffled so that it is hard to make out anything more than a phrase here or there.

This Friday, as I lay in bed half-listening to the sermon, I thought back to the night before. Certainly it had been one of the most memorable experiences of my time in Cairo. I had spent quite some time that evening trying to figure out just what to wear: a tunic with loose pants? a long-sleeved shirt under a dress over pants with a scarf? The latter won out, but in truth we had no idea what to expect. I've written about weddings before, but this one was different. For one, it was the wedding of one of our own: a CASAwiyya. Second, it was to be held in Shobra El-Kheima, the very last stop on the Cairo metro line. In truth, Shobra El Kheima is in a different governorate to the north, and is considered by most in Cairo or Giza proper (many of whom, I found, had never even been there) to be the end of the earth. What will you wear? people asked us anxiously, worried we would scandalize the locals with short sleeves or skin. Just mentioning that I would attend the wedding had a huge shock factor. 

In any case, Sofia, the bride, sent out an e-mail a few days beforehand warning us that her fiance's brothers had printed off hundreds of flyers stamped with the Ultras Ahlawy and Ultras White Knight logos. But thankfully: Molotovs are not allowed, wrote her fiance, Mohamed, on the Facebook event.

We arrived as a conspicuous group of over a dozen, made more so by one guy narrating our journey in a Godfather voice. In order to reach the street where the wedding was to be held, we passed for quite some time through a labyrinthine souk -- not the Khan El Khalili kind, but the practical sort that sells kitchen implements and Mickey Mouse nightgowns and whirring children's toys. If we stopped to ask directions, we didn't need to say anything. The foreign bride? Straight ahead!

Because transportation beyond the end of the metro is exclusively by tuk-tuk, we passed a number of those parked alongside the dirt streets. It was around 10pm when we finally reached glowing lights and the entrance to a a tent, all strung up between a few apartment buildings of 3 stories or so. Most appeared to be single (extended) family homes: Sofia and her husband, fiance, will now live in one such house in an apartment about his parents'. In Egypt, the bride moves to her husband's apartment, which he must ready before the wedding -- usually having bought it quite a while before, as owning an apartment is usually a prerequisite to a girl agreeing to an engagement. "The apartment" thus takes on all kinds of broader meaning, most importantly the husband's ability to provide for his wife.

The two perpendicular alleys in which the wedding took place were covered over in old Oriental carpets. Bright red and yellow fabric was draped from the apartments to create a tent feeling inside, criss-crossed by strings of lights, and round tables were set up -- primarily, it seemed, to facilitate the passing out of copious amounts of green apple Fanta. The bride and the groom hadn't arrived yet, and in fact friends of the groom were still at work constructing the platform where the couple would sit on a white couch to greet guests. We watched as they hammered and erected a beach scene backdrop, subsequently covered in white gauze.

At last the bride and groom appeared on the TV screen rigged up in front of us, and everyone rushed toward the entrance of the tent to welcome the couple. Cheb Khaled's blockbuster hit C'est La Vie was blasting as they made their way up our makeshift aisle, the bride's father (the only one in a suit - weddings are casual in these parts) danced behind them. Sofia, my friend, was wearing a white lace dress with long sleeves and a turtleneck, as well as a sort of cap that Muslim women wear under their veil -- a kind of wedding hijab. She recently converted to Islam and her new husband is a political activist who trained at Al Azhar and hopes to be a reformist preacher. Look at her makeup! said an Egyptian woman to me, She is masreya masreya now! (100% Egyptian).



For a short time, we heard the sound of fake guns going off, and worried in passing if our other friends' ominous warnings about security had been warranted. But it was just to add to the festive mood, like the fireworks. As for the rampant hashish we'd been cautioned about, I saw only a few young guys smoking outside the tent when I slipped out to find a bathroom. A middle-aged lady standing on her stoop nearby invited me in to use hers. It was a hole in the ground with a spigot and wooden box. I couldn't have cared less given the circumstances, but she seated me down in a white plastic deck chair in the linoleum-tiled hall and apologized: Sorry it's not like your nice bathrooms downtown!! she told me, in the same breath asking me to stay for tea. Manawwareen, manawwareen! she kept saying, a gracious way of saying "welcome" that literally means - You are lighting up the place.

Back in the street, the dancing was picking up, with a mob of mostly teenage girls in one circle and a mob of young guys in another. Once I was in, there was no going back. The girls grabbed my hands and gestured to copy their moves. Seeing a foreigner enthusiastically engaged in "shaaby" dancing, as it's called (see previous: "Haty Bosa ya Bet" video) was hilarious to the girls, and one of them even asked me to dance with her husband. Another woman foisted her baby off to me (see below). Another was waving something in the air as she danced, then handed it to me. I followed suit, only to realize that it was a knife. We looked behind us to see the boys, some shirtless and drenched in sweat, crowdsurfing across a sea of strangers.






When I tried reluctantly to leave for the metro, the girls kept grabbing me and pulling me back in to dance. At last we all blew kisses goodbye and I started to make my way toward the exit. Partway there, I encountered a little boy, maybe 7 years old, who challenged me wordlessly to a dance-off. Drugged into shaaby wedding nirvana by the loud music and a couple hours of spinning, I accepted. To this day, I am not sure who won, but the photographic evidence is here:

What remained between me and the door was a sea of rowdy youth. Asking to get through would be fruitless, so I just began to dance my way through the crowd. The seas parted and the youth clapped as I threw my hands up and made a dramatic exit.

Two Taxis, April 13

11:50AM. 26 July St. En route with Robin from Dokki to Zamalek.
-Germany? From where?
-La, Amreeka.
-Obama!
-Aywa, Obama kwayyes. (Yes, Obama is good.)
-La, mosh kwayyes! (No! Not good!)
-Ah, okay. 

Surely he doesn't like US foreign policy...

-'Alshan aswad. Black. (Because he's black.)
-Naam? (Uhh, yes?)
-Black mosh helw. (Black is not pretty.)

Well, this just got awkward. More importantly, is this a joke? Our driver is definitely black by all reasonable measures. However, we got the feeling he would be pretty offended by that. He kept going...

-Wa Clinton, Clinton kan kwayyes. (But Clinton was good!)
-Mhmm.
-Wa Bush!! (And Bush!)
-La, Bush msh kwayyes. (No, not Bush.) 
-AYWA, KWAYYES! Kwayyes awy. (Yesss, good! Very good!)

What?! Not a single human I've ever met in the Middle East has praised George Bush, not one. Puzzling over what to make of this odd interaction, we arrive at our destination and never find out.


* * *

11:50PM. En route from Zamalek to Dokki.
I stand waiting for a cab at the corner of 26 July and Shagaret El Dor in Zamalek, outside a glowing benzina (gas station). As I start to walk, a groaning white jalopy pulls up beside me. I peer inside to get a good look at the driver. If he's over 45, I'll take it. He's at least ten years over my minimum, so I get in. He has a heavy aquiline nose and a rugged but sagging face topped by a close-cropped tuft of gray.

-Dokki?

He nods.

-Medan El Mesaha, inshallah.
-Inshallah ya madame.

We ride without speaking across the 15 May Bridge. The windows are down and a cool breeze laps at my face.  Umm Kolsoum is on. Her crooning fills the silence. The driver lights a cigarette and holds it against the steering wheel between his thumb and pointer. The tip of that cigarette is the only light inside the car. Outside, the neon signs marking the Nile dinner boats light the dark Corniche. Anyone here will tell you that Cairo is best seen at night, but I'm almost never alone enough to feel it. Umm Kolsoum crescendos. This is the Cairo I don't want to leave. We reach Maglis El Dawla and the driver turns toward the Medan. I see the white Cilantro sign glowing a few blocks ahead.

When we reach the square, I address the driver for the first time since I got in.

-Momken taleff keda? I gesture to turn toward my building.
-Araby is very good, madame. 
-Allah yekhaleek. Alshan 'aisha hena. Thank you -- it's because I live here.

We arrive at my door.

-Ma' el salama ya madame. It means goodnight. Ma el salama, ma el salama. 

I get out and the car putters off into the dark.

Am I Staying or Going?

Summer comes early in Egypt, and sometimes I have trouble remembering whether spring ever happened at all. As temperatures climb toward the 90s, I am reminded more frequently that CASA is actually winding to a close. A few more weeks of classes, a spring break, final exams, and then a brutal thrust into the real world of unemployment. For the time being, I feel in some sense that I am treading water, unsure whether I should be laying down deeper roots here or picking up the loose ends and getting ready to move on. I've never had this degree of uncertainty in my life before -- that is, not knowing what I will be doing 8 weeks from now, much less in a year. As I work on figuring out what comes next, I alternate between two sentiments. Sometimes, I think of the long, long summer ahead, a thirsty Ramadan under the July sun, an indefinite period of traffic jams on the Corniche and feral dogs and shouting matches with taxi drivers and sandwiching myself onto the metro as the sweat drips down my pant legs and the matrons ogle my arm hair. At those times, I am not ashamed to say I miss America and am maybe ready to go home. Yet I think just as often with fondness of the relationships I've formed here and the communities I have become a part of. At those times, I don't feel ready to leave.

One such time was the recent end-of-year awards ceremony for my social studies students at St. Andrew's. All grades gathered together with their parents to recognize the top students in each subject area, watch a slideshow of the year's highlights, and feast on cookies and soda. I was afraid before I went that I would feel out of place: I was only a part-time teacher and felt I didn't know many people around the school. I also felt like a failure because not a single one of my students had passed the final exam -- a real GED test intended to simulate the one we had hoped they would take in June. The highest grade was a 42. I worried that my students would feel incredibly discouraged. In fact, the same results were seen across the board, and the high school students who did come to the ceremony didn't seem fazed in the slightest. Grades in hand, they came up to shake my hand and pose for photos. They seemed pleased that I had come. The mood was jubilant as the student DJs blasted Jai Ho and, peculiarly, Barbie Girl, giving the elementary kids a chance to break it down.

I thought back then to the impending doom I had felt as we approached the final exam. I knew that only four or five students would be selected to take the actual GED, but they didn't. A few questions in particular stuck out. My lesson on supply and demand, involving an extended comparison of Chloe's Car Company and Velia's Car Company, had gone surprisingly well. A day or so later, a sample test I gave them asked an easy question about the effect of price increases on the demand for toasters. I felt good: I knew they had supply and demand down pat. But one hand went up, then another and another. What's a toaster? each student asked. Therein lay the crux of (one of) the big problems we were up against. State lottery revenues, teen driving laws, toasters. These were the questions that were supposed to be easy for any half-grown American with his eyes open, but they were the hardest for my students. So there I found myself, drawing pictures of toaster ovens on the whiteboard. Teaching American history made me feel alternately patriotic and foolish -- the former when my students oohed and aahed over Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the American West or when a few produced moving commentaries on the iconic photos of the Civil Rights Movement. The latter came about when I had to apologize for awkwardly propagandistic instances of cultural bias. One sample question featured a photo with soldier returning from battle and the stars and stripes waving behind her. What American value does this photo represent? it asked. A teaching moment for all of us occurred when I assigned a few sample questions related to an excerpt on Manifest Destiny. One question asked:
Which of the following beliefs from the 1840s has been discredited?
a. Democracy is a form of government that appeals to many people.
b. Native Americans are incapable of self-government.
c. The United States should promote freedom throughout the world.
d. Individuals should have the opportunity to improve their lives. 
e. Economic development helps the United States prosper.

Obviously, the correct answer as per the test is (b). Almost every one of my students chose (c). I tried to use this to segue into a discussion about the world balance of power after World War II, but in the end I found myself just telling my students that they should try to pretend they are the US government when they take the test. Standing in front of 27 16-year-old refugees from Sudan, that sounded pretty ridiculous.

A few days later, though, I had planned a lesson on analyzing political cartoons. The GED loves them, but I was panicked because cartoons are incredibly culturally specific. All but 7 students skipped class that day, yet those who attended came alive. They were very well versed in current events, and laughed raucously as I passed a few images around. As we discussed a cartoon of an ostrich with its head in the sand roasting in the sun like a chicken (global warming), I joked that I'd never eaten ostrich. But one of my students had. Yeah, it's easy, just grill it, he said, making a matter-of-fact grilling motion. Another cartoon showed Ahmadinejad as Pinocchio, lying about nuclear weapons. That same student launched into a discussion of Iran's right to nuclear weapons if everyone else was going to have them. Except, he explained, it's very bad with Sudan. Ahmadinejad was selling nuclear technology to Bashir [President of Sudan, not so popular among these kids for obvious reasons]. Yes, this was very bad. 

When the semester ended, we agreed that in May I would start bootcamp for the 4 students selected to take the real GED. The rest will do another year of high school and hopefully pass the Sudanese national diploma next year. Getting them from 40 to passing - not just in social studies but in every subject area - will not be easy. But for a lucky one or two, the GED offers a way out -- hope for a scholarship to study abroad. Of course, many other hurdles also stand in the way: the TOEFL, the SAT, the admissions process. But there are a few precedents, and my students hold on to this possibility.

The day after I celebrated the end of the school year with my St. Andrew's students, I left Cairo for a CASA-sponsored weekend on the Red Sea. We arrived in El Gouna via a red-eye to the nearby Hurghada airport. When I stepped out onto the balcony of our adobe villa at dawn, I discovered that I was on a manmade island paradise. Around me were canals with little footbridges and all sorts of desert flora.

The view from my balcony in El Gouna: an island playground

As I quickly learned while walking outside the resort down to the Abu Tig marina, El Gouna is a kind of elite desert Disneyland. It was developed only in the 1990s by a family of telecom magnates as an alternative to its somewhat tackier neighbor, Hurghada. The spotless streets are lined with tasteful villas evocative of Hassan Fathy's New Gourna, with SUVs and fluffy puppies parked in the front yard. We walked through the streets in short skirts without a single whiff of harassment. Of course, it is a completely artificial place, the kind I might have pooh-poohed back home. But as a brief refuge from Cairo's din and chaos, this artificiality was a welcome relief.

Our first night in town, a group of us wandered around the marina (very quiet, perhaps the season or perhaps the tourism crisis, hard to say), where a number of shiny yachts were moored. We wound up at the same place as, it seemed, everyone else: Mood's, an outdoor dance club with tiki huts and a DJ spinning house beats. Most of the others there were Europeans dressed lavishly for the occasion. It was a toned-down version of the kind of evening I expect people have in Ibiza and places like that: music pulsing across the coast, colored strobe lights searching the horizon. In Egypt, I didn't expect it.

 

The thrill of showing some leg - much taken for granted 

The CASA contingent after a few days in the sun

The next day was water aerobics class, with a very muscly Egyptian instructor and a pair of fleshy middle-aged Brits. From there we moved on to snorkeling, though this time the water was really rough (there had been a sandstorm the previous night). Later that night, after squirreling plate after plate of smoked salmon appetizers from the open buffet, we gathered on a moored pirate ship that serves as a beach bar by day. We clung to our last moments of peacefulness by spending our last day sprawled on the "Relaxation Beach". That night, dining at an Indian restaurant, the contestants in the Top Model of the World competition walked in. These were ten or so girls, all over 6 feet tall, wearing evening gowns and sashes bearing the names of their countries. The champion was to be decided right there in Gouna later in the week. Then arrived the men with whom they were to be taking photos in the restaurant (where they did not, apparently, actually consume any food) while making scintillating conversation. Within 20 minutes, they had all left.

Back in Cairo, I answered a call online to translate a screenplay for an up-and-coming local actor/director/screenwriter. I had never done any formal translation, but the simultaneous interpretation class I'm in has shown me that I really enjoy the creative puzzle of recreating a speech or story in another language. Most of what we translate in the soundproof booths in class is in the category of official political discourse (UN, Arab League, Mubarak's surrender, etc.). But even in the most basic ways - capturing a turn of phrase in Arabic in an equally elegant English expressing, for example - there is room for creative imagination. There's also the cultural interpretation element. A formal speech in Arabic typically begins and ends with "As-salaamu aleikum w rahmat allahi w barakatu" - Peace be upon you with God's mercy and blessings. Saying this in English would be absurd, so we were instructed to ad lib something like "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us." When it came to the screenplay I was translating, there was even more space for me to interpret: it needed to sound natural in English more than it needed to be perfectly accurate. Much of the dialogue was youth slang that demanded a careful repertoire of expressions like "hey, dude!", "you'd be nothing without me, man", and "can you chill out, please?".  The hope is that the screenwriter/director will win a grant to produce the film, which portrays issues like an at-home abortion that are pretty wildly taboo here. One of the things that is great about the independent arts scene here is that it's kind of a small and tight-knit community. It is easy to come in and meet pretty important up-and-comers.

Meanwhile, in political news, warrants were issued for the arrest of wildly popular TV satirist Bassem Youssef (often called the "Jon Stewart of Egypt", since he modeled his post-revolution political satire show El Barnameg on The Daily Show). Accusations were brought to the general prosecutor by independent lawyers that Youssef had insulted Islam and and the Presidency. Youssef posted bail a couple of weeks ago, and as of today, Morsi has asked the claims to be dropped. But even the threat of such action against a comedian is an ominous sign. The best English-language summary of what happened can be found, as it happens, on The Daily Show.

Not knowing how much longer I'll be here, I'm also trying to make an effort to get to corners of the city I still haven't seen. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lindsey organized a hiking expedition to Wadi Degla, on the eastern outskirts of the city. Who knew there was hiking to be done in Cairo? Unfortunately, the ticket gave us false hope that there would be flora and fauna. Instead we found ourselves trekking across scorched canyons, feeling something like post-apocalyptic Indiana Joneses. We offered a collective prize to the first person to spot a non-human living creature. Nobody claimed the prize. (Not that it wasn't cool: desert scenery is awesome until you run out of water.)

Hiking in Wadi Degla 

Not long afterward, my good friend Caroline from Princeton arrived to spend a week taking in the sights. This gave me the chance to flex my tour guide muscles again. Among the highlights for me were returning for the first time to two places I visited on my first trip to Egypt so long ago. One of these was Al Azhar mosque, the global power center of Sunni Islam. The seminary-university attached to Al Azhar attracts students from all over the world, and this internationalism can be felt inside the mosque as well. Not only were the visitors very diverse, but we dropped in on lessons (Islamic finance for instance) in a few of the side rooms and found Africans, Asians, and Arabs listening intently.

Al Azhar, then and now:

Here I am in 2006, Crocs in hand and my infamous fuchsia & lime green headscarf (with LINC friends Mary and Ashley)

And now in 2013 with Caroline

After winding through the khayameyya (tentmakers' market), one of my favorite somewhat lesser visited parts of historic Islamic Cairo, we suddenly found ourselves at the back side of Azhar Park.

Picnic games against the Cairo skyline, Al Azhar Park 

The second place I revisited with Caroline in tow was the Garbage City (Medinat El Zabaleen). It is the place that made, I think, the greatest impression on me in high school, and when I think about how my relationship with Cairo has been tempered by realism I often reflect back on my first experience of Garbage City. Then, in 2006, we drove in on a coach bus... Some years ago, I wrote in an internship application:

"There was a lurch, then a wave of gasps, and I suddenly found myself sitting peculiarly sideways. Outside our ill-fated bus, which had tried to navigate the narrow, unpaved alleys of Cairo's Garbage City, a mob of curious children had already gathered. Five minutes later, my friends and I were on foot, jostling with donkey carts piled high with teetering stacks of watermelons..."

Indeed, the experience of walking through a neighborhood centered around garbage -- its collection, sorting, and recycling - symbolized to me at the time my coming out of my comfort zone and exploring the unknown. The neighborhood is an amazing example of human resilience and ingenuity, of people filling the gaps left by nonexistent municipal services. That is more what struck me this time around, though: the first time, I was more drawn to the cacophony -- the teetering watermelons, the near collision with a donkey cart, the colorful political slogans scrawled on the walls, the skinned and headless cows hung by their tails from the butcher shops. Then, I found the neighborhood's colorful poverty both fascinating and shocking. I had never seen anything like it up close. These days, I'm sometimes troubled by the knowledge that a key element of Cairo's original allure was the exoticism of its poverty. Looking now at the Garbage City, it struck me that it might be the most organized place in the entire city. Without any idea how the residents actual organize themselves, it is a marvel that they are able to get the plastic bottles or the cardboard boxes of 17 million people into a single place.

Buried inside Garbage City, an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, is the Church of St. Simon the Tanner. Garbage City is built onto a plateau called Mokattam, and St. Simon is a Coptic Orthodox saint said to have moved the mountain in the 10th century. Although there has been a holy site associated with this incident for hundreds of years, about 25 years ago the Coptic Church decided to chisel a giant open-air church into the mountainside. These days, it seats 5,000 people. When we arrived, there were a lot of Christian school groups visiting and even a stand where you can get your cross tattoo (which all Copts here have on the inside of the wrist).

Inside St. Simon the Tanner's cave megachurch 

With Caroline at St. Simon's 

The final stop on this week's spiritual journey through Cairo was a viewing of the new documentary Jews of Egypt. For some months, authorities were censoring the film, but finally the ban was lifted and it is now in the ritzy Nile City Renaissance cinema. The audience was of mixed ages, but was overwhelmingly chic, with a heavy percentage of foreigners. I had heard that there weren't more than a couple dozen Jews left in Cairo, and knew that there had once been quite a sizable population. (Indeed, maps we looked at in my Ottoman Egypt course showed entire Jewish quarters in Cairo, just as they exist in most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East.) But I didn't know how it had happened. Of the people interviewed in the film, only one was both still living in Egypt and still Jewish, and he only nominally. He was a radical communist organizer who happened to be in jail for his political activities at the time Jews were stripped of their Egyptian citizenship and expelled from the country in 1956. He had actually converted to Islam as a formality in order to marry his Muslim wife, but a law put in place in the Nasser Era legally negated the conversions of any Jews that occurred after a certain year. The poignant stories of most of the other interviewees were told in French, from France: they had been teenagers at the time of the expulsion and their mostly fond childhood memories of being Egyptian had blurred with time. Even in the 1940s, few recalled much animosity. The film took pains to demonstrate that Egyptian Jews felt, for the most part, far more Egyptian than Jewish, and did not sympathize with Zionism at all. (Anecdotal evidence suggested that most went to Europe in 1956 rather than Israel, but the question was not addressed head-on.) Still, as historians noted, in the 1910s the Zionist movement had an office downtown that was open to the public, and in fact some of its members were aligned quite amicably with the Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul. After 1948, and especially in the 1950s, however, relations deteriorated rapidly. It was the Suez Crisis that gave Nasser the pretext to expel Egypt's Jews once and for all. You can still visit a few of Egypt's historic synagogues today, in Cairo and in Alexandria, but they are empty.

Spring flowers in Masr El Qadima

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.

How a Coptic Monk Got My Number and Other Tales

Hey guys, I'm back at last. The last few weeks have been busy for me personally but calm politically -- contrary to what one might have expected on January 25. But that seems to be how things work here: unrest waxes and wanes. One moment it seems that the country is truly in crisis and stability nowhere in sight, and then one morning after a series of demonstrations, I wake up to find the newscasters reporting on something else, something unrelated. It has become a habit to double check on Tuesday and Friday afternoons (the main days for protests) if anything is "going on" downtown or in Heliopolis, if I plan to go to either of those places. But by the start of the week, little memory of that specific demonstration lingers. However, a new player has emerged since January 25 -- the Black Bloc. No one seems quite sure of who they are, or whether they really exist in any organized way. We first heard of them on the anniversary: young guys in black ski masks calling to avenge the martyrs of the revolution. Each of two Facebook pages has 50,000 likes, but not much articulation of what the group stands for. The downfall of the Ikhwan, certainly. Anarchy, apparently. But are they a force for justice, a useful but potentially dangerous faction, or a destabilizing para-militia? "If I step forward, follow me. If I stop, push me. If I delay, then I am a traitor and so kill me." And then in English: "Get ready for Hell. Chaos against injustice." And another slogan: "When injustice because law, rebellion becomes duty." When I initially started reading articles about the Black Bloc, it was said that they did not prefer armed resistance, but rather disruptive acts (like blocking the metro tunnels), throwing rocks, and tossing the police's tear gas canisters back at them. Other times I've heard that they were, in fact, carrying weapons during the most recent metro blockage last week or so. Meanwhile, in Tahrir Square itself, the tents have returned for an ongoing sit-in. The colorful banners, speakers' platforms, political litter, and some barbed wire remain, but I've had no problem passing through. The most notable new mural I pass these days on my way to class at AUC's translation lab on Mohamed Mahmoud St. is one that pictures two policemen kissing. Originally, it read: All cops are gay. Soon afterward, however, another anonymous artist painted over the text and rewrote a new slogan: Homophobia is not revolutionary.

This was the backdrop against which my dad's recent trip to visit me took place. He didn't want to redo the Pyramids (phew!) and was more interested in getting a taste of my daily life (with a side of heavy smog). I had a lot of fun introducing him to my neighborhood buddies like Noss the Juice Man, who introduced him to the other employees as "Abu Chloe" and "'Am (Uncle) Fergus". We embarked on a number of adventures, including a fruitless search for Cairo's last stamp collecters' shop and a nostalgically rousing concert of golden age Egyptian music once sung by the likes of Umm Kolthoum. This latter was held at the Arab Music Institute, a hidden nugget of Cairo's past tucked in among the grayed-out facades of Downtown. Inside, everything is impeccably painted -- in golds, greens, reds -- and ushers in sharp burgundy suits are on duty to guide you to your plush wooden seats. It was originally founded, already in 1921, as a monument, a memorial dedicated to the preservation of "Oriental" music. It reopened under the Cairo Opera in 2001, evidently extremely well funded, after some period of disrepair. As the soloist crooned Umm Kolthoum's classic ballad "Enta 'Omry" (perhaps the most famous song ever written in Arabic), I thought of the crackly videos we'd watched in college Arabic classes. I hadn't imagined there was anywhere you could still get this kind of performance live. There is no doubt that everybody in Egypt still loves Umm Kolsoum and the composer Mohamed Abdel Wahhab, and sometimes one hears them in a taxi or a shop, but the days when the entire country would stop its work once a month to hear the diva's new hour-long masterpiece are long past. Yet in the time warp that is the Institute, a blind Azhari sheikh and a smattering of other rapt but aging fans still listen.

Another highlight of my dad's trip was our trip out to the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrun. We followed the Alexandria desert highway, which has sprouted villa compounds at a rapid pace, luring Cairenes away from the urban bustle. We were able to visit three of the four monasteries, all within a few kilometers of each other: Deir el Anba Beshoy, Deir el Souriany, and Deir el Baramouse. St. Beshoy, the local hero, apparently lived as a hermit in the 4th century in underground cells now under two of the churches. At Deir el Souriany, one can visit this cell and see the place where he tied his hair to a rope hanging from the ceiling so as to prevent himself from sleeping during prayer time. Most of the current structure is from the 11th century, and due to Berber attacks at regular intervals much was rebuilt. Today there are over 150 monks at each of the monasteries. At Anba Beshoy we joined a tour of Coptic pilgrims led by an enthusiastic Father Joachim, who treated us to Bible trivia as we walked. Others constantly stopped to ask him (and any of the other bushy-bearded brothers in black robes and embroidered skullcaps they could find) for a blessing. In one of the ancient monk's cells, we stopped and Joachim led the rest of the group in chanting - for me and my dad - a Biblical passage in the extinct Coptic language. I learned that it actually uses the Greek alphabet, with a handful of whimsically shaped additions to account for sounds only found in Coptic. While some of the other visitors went to visit the late Pope Shenouda III's tomb, we climbed to the roof for a panorama of the valley, an enclave of earthen domes topped with crosses.

 Roof of Deir El Anba Beshoy

Nearly next door was Souriany monastery, so named because Syrian monks inhabited the monastery for some stretch of the Middle Ages. As a memento of their stay, they left Syriac graffiti on the walls of the main church, as well as a number of frescoes in a completely different style from those done by the Egyptian Copts. Aside from the exquisite painting, Souriany was memorable for its many monk dummies set up across the grounds to demonstrate various monk activities: eating together, doing fieldwork, etc. While we were examining the frescoes, a live monk came up to us and offered to answer any questions. We sat down with Father Serapion in a corner of the chapel and he proceeded to detail his worries for us about the discrimination against Christians for government jobs and the number of Coptic girls being coopted into converting to Islam in the name of love. (It's possible to convert to Islam in Egypt but not to Christianity.) He was less terrified by the current regime than some other Christians I've spoken to, however: they all seemed to be bad for Christians, in his opinion, but they would hold firm in their beliefs. Fortunately, Father Serapion explained, the monasteries are thriving these days -- not as they once were, but they are recruiting enough youth to fill their ranks. I commented that that is certainly not the case in American monasteries and convents. Yes, he said kindly, because we are much more spiritual than you Americans. You have lost your religion; we have not. He noted sadly how many Coptic immigrants to America and Europe stopped practicing their religion. He turned to my dad, though, clearly thrilled by someone who had so many questions to be answered. But I can tell you are a very good Christian! he told him. We all just smiled and the Father asked for my phone number. One day I hope my English will be as good as your Arabic! he said.

One of the Syrian frescoes in Deir El Souriany

When we returned to the city, we balanced out our monastery visits with a day at some of the best mosques in Islamic Cairo -- Sultan Hassan, El Refa'i, and Ibn Tulun. I brought my dad next door to the Gayer-Anderson House, the English doctor's orientalist paradise I've surely written about before. As we moved through the museum, we encountered a pair of highly distressed Turks. One of them exploded in the face of our guide. I have been in your country for ten days (ten days!!), and I have traveled everywhere from Aswan to Alexandria... And you know what?! I have seen NOTHING about Cleopatra!!! NOTHING! Pure disgust. This was evidently the only reason Turkish Tourist came to Egypt, and he wanted his money back. Why he thought he would find the answer in the Gayer-Anderson house is anyone's guess. The National Museum? offered our guide, shrugging, but Turkish Tourist's fury would not be quelled. This man sought what many come to Egypt to find, his discouragement the realization of the absurdity of that quest once they're here. It's not, of course, that Ancient Egypt has disappeared (scroll down in this post), or that you won't be inundated with pharaonic knickknacks as soon as you step foot in the country. But there is what at times feels like a vast chasm between history - in all its ages - and the present here, and it can be disconcerting or disappointing for visitors.

A few days later we were off ourselves, though, to Luxor, an hour to the south by plane but a world away from Cairo's chaos and gray sprawl. The intentionally roundabout route we took to the airport brought us through the faceless, half-built megalopolis that Cairo becomes once one ventures beyond the inner neighborhoods and a few known outposts like Heliopolis and Maadi. Flying overpasses take you through eerily unlit seas of identical brick apartment buildings, most with rods jutting out from the roofs so that the buildings are never "finished" enough to incur taxes. These swaths of the city are entirely anonymous to me.

Luxor, on the other hand, is nothing if not manageable in size. Its problem is the dire state of the tourism economy. Empty horse-drawn carriages called caleches line the streets of the city, their drivers squatted nearby. Only once did I see anyone riding in one. Felucca boatmen stride beside you, promising: No hassle, no hassle. I'm just trying to make a living, you know? Many have certainly learned what appeals to tourists' sympathies. There is an undeniable awkwardness, and more foreigner's guilt, that comes about as a result of being among the few tourists (and only Americans) in a city whose entire livelihood has always been tourism. The Corniche is spotless, the sails of the feluccas flutter against the river, and the skies are fresh and bright, but the cruise boats are all tied up and the people's desperation is palpable.

How many camels for your daughter? might be an appropriate subtitle for this part of the post, as it was the most common refrain (aside, perhaps, from baksheesh?) we heard while in Luxor. This joke has, apparently, not gotten old yet. Our first pharaonic destination in the city was the Karnak Temple. It was close enough for us to walk from the center of Luxor. We spent the afternoon wandering through the site, playing Indiana Jones among rows of ram-headed sphinxes and pretending to translate hieroglyphics. Although I find it nearly impossible to identify with the Ancient Egyptians, walking through Karnak is pretty impressive. It was built over the course of approximately a thousand years, and while artistic taste doesn't seem to have changed much over that millennium, every pharaoh added his (or her! whoo Hatshepsut!) mark on some corner or other.

With Dad at Karnak 

The other important site on the East Bank of the Nile is the Luxor Temple itself, smaller than Karnak but especially spectacular by night. Part was turned into a church by early Christians and a mosque was built into another side once the Arab conquerors arrived a few centuries later. But the heart of the original temple still stands, many chambers replete with unreadable hieroglyphic inscriptions and monumental statues. Here we discovered more ram-headed sphinxes, which, it turns out, actually line a ceremonial route all the way to Karnak! Do the math and figure out how many sphinxes that is. We had tea in the nearby Winter Palace, the grandest of Luxor hotels, which played host to movie stars and vacationing princesses in a different era. Classical music wafted through the halls and a sign warned us to remember our formal wear if we wanted to dine as I sipped the thickest and richest karkadeh (hibiscus tea) I've ever tasted.

Luxor Temple by night 

We decided to devote our second day in Luxor to the West Bank, which is less developed than the East but home to every famous Egyptian tomb you've ever heard of and many you haven't. We decided to take the public ferry, and on the other side managed to shake off the hustlers to secure a couple of bikes for the day. We began riding out to the Valley of the Kings, inhaling deeply and basking in the warm sun. The first to greet us were the Colossi of Memnon, two gigantic statues that welcomed visitors to the land of the dead. The rocky hills ahead are thick with tombs, but took the long way around to reach the kings by bike. It is clear from the geography that the ancients hoped to outwit tomb robbers by cutting the most important tombs into a fairly narrow pass in the rock. (Still, the tomb robbers were smarter.) We chose to visit Ramses IV, VI, another Ramses, and Merenptah. The miraculously intact painting in some of the tombs - especially that of Ramses VI - was the most astonishing thing about them: parts look as if the paint went on last week, and yet the imagery is so distantly exotic. The golden sky goddess Nut stretches out, improbably, across the ceiling of much of the tomb shaft, encompassing the heavens beneath her limbs. In a couple of the tombs, ancient Coptic graffiti also suggests that visitors have been coming for quite some time.

(Sorry, photos were not permitted in the Valley of the Kings!)

Al haraka baraka, as we like to say -- "Movement is a blessing"

Skipping Tut because everything of his is in the Egyptian Museum these days, we made instead for some of the lords' tombs, tucked into the hills nearby. These are a bit more humanistic than the kings', a bit less shackled to artistic convention. Roy, for example, was a royal scribe rewarded for his labors with a rather unevenly cut but charming resting place. The ceilings are painted not with Nut but rather floral patterns that might possibly evoke Theban nobles' real home decor. Personalization is also more evident here than in the kings' tombs: special attention is paid to the tools of the trade, like the scribe's papyrus plants and pen holder. We spent that sunset, and the next, on the terrace of Marsam Hotel near the Colossi, overlooking green fields of wheat and skipping more cups of karkadeh.

 A fishing mural adorns one noble's tomb

On our final day, we at last made it to the Luxor Museum. It is actually much better organized than the Egyptian Museum here in Cairo, mostly because the artifacts are labeled. In addition to an excellent collection of Amenhotep busts and the like, the museum had on display a number of everyday objects (like cabinets, a bed, baskets) extracted from tombs looking like new, a scribe's writing materials, and an architect's scribbled plan sketched on the back of a piece of papyrus. These objects offer at least a glimpse of the humanity of that civilization, which can be so elusive in the temples and tombs themselves. From the Luxor Museum we went to the Mummification Museum, a room near the ferry dock that has laid out for your viewing pleasure specimens such as a mummified crocodile and a cat.

Off we were again to the West to reclaim our bikes and return to the funerary complexes. But first, I had caught wind (and seen a sign) that a village named New El Gourna was right around us. I had studied Gourna in my Art in the Modern Islamic World class back at Princeton because it was the chief project of architect Hassan Fathy and the practical application of his book Architecture for the Poor. Wikipedia says Fathy was "Egypt's best-known architect since Imhotep." That reeks of hyperbole, but may in fact be true. Fathy (1900-1989) wanted to reinvent Egyptian architecture, or rather create a modern Egyptian style that had a distinctly historical identity but was meant to be lived in and used by regular folks -- something that was not just mimicry of Mamluk mosques or Ottoman palaces. On the road from the ferry to the Colossi, we came across the first mudbrick house Fathy ever built in Gourna, which the son and granddaughter of the original owner have made into a small museum. The son has updated the house with basic modern amenities (electricity came to Gourna in the 1970s) and repaired the damage to the foundation and walls that comes from salt that has seeped up from the ground since the Aswan High Dam was built. Most of the village, though, fell into disrepair in the years after Fathy left it.  The owner of the museum house took us over to a couple of the handful of original Fathy houses that still remain. Wealthy Egyptians living abroad have hired this entrepreneurial guy to oversee the renovation of the historic homes. As we toured them, our guide pointed out the earthen domes used to create a feeling of natural air-conditioning. He sighed and explained that while Fathy intended his project for the poor, the poor had no interest in this "authentic" ambience: they dreamed of balconies and Corinthian frills. When wear and tear set in on their Hassan Fathy houses, they let them disintegrate and then built new, modern ones in their place. Now, he said, it was the rich who were charmed by the simplicity and historicity of Gourna.

The original Hassan Fathy house in New El Gourna

Despite the relative failure of Gourna itself, Fathy had a huge influence on Egyptian architecture (and even more broadly) in defining a style that was authentic but more or less suitable for modern life. Here's a mosaic mural of Gourna on the wall of the Fine Arts Faculty in Zamalek, done by students:



Before we left, we visited Fathy's village mosque, which is also crumbling at the base. The muezzin, Ahmed, explained that it is awaiting UNESCO funding. They hope it comes before the columns collapse.

Back on the trail we rode past alabaster workshops lying in wait for tour buses. Our favorite was the Opera Aida Company for Alabaster. I shuddered to remember the infamous jade factory affair of 2005, an unannounced detour from a group excursion to the Great Wall of China. But this time we were free to pass the factories by, and parked ourselves at Deir El Bahry, the Temple of Hatshepsut. Perched majestically against a craggy backdrop, the woman pharaoh's monument is approached by way of flights of sloping stairs. Throughout the temple, her face has been scratched out by her sourpuss stepson, the next pharaoh. But what remains is a pictorial representation of Hatshepsut's journey along the Red Sea coast to Somalia, known as the Land of Punt -- an evidently enchanting land of incense, ebony, and strange animal life.

Approaching Hatshepsut's Deir El Bahry

After dark that evening, we flew back to Cairo. We struck up a conversation with our taxi driver, Mansour, on the way to the Luxor airport. What do you think of the revolution? he asked bluntly. I told him I thought things had started well but were increasingly disappointing as time went on. Mansour agreed. He had voted for Abo El Fotoh in the first round, but had grown completely disgusted with the system. Luxor was in dire straits without tourism. It badly needed factories or some new way for people to work. Meanwhile, the police were imported from elsewhere -- mostly the same thugs as before the revolution. In Mansour's view, they had no respect for local ways of resolving conflict or for the dignity of the people themselves. Most importantly, he told us, A second revolution is coming. The first revolution was for the rich and the middle class. The second will be a revolution of the poor. They last two years had brought them only greater hopelessness. This time it will be violent. My dad asked: And where will you be when this happens? Mansour responded: I will stay home. I can't fix all the problems! He would continue studying tourism, graduate, and hope to find a job in a field whose value has disintegrated in the last two years. Meanwhile, he was proud to be middle class himself -- to share a taxi with his father and make enough that he didn't need to hustle or wheedle anyone for money. Mansour shook our hands grinning and sent us on our way.