My celebrity status in Egypt

Yep that's right, I'm famous. Well, sort of.

Obviously, in a country that is pretty homogeneous in terms of ethnicity (Wikipedia says: 99.6% Egyptian) as well as religion (about 90% Muslim), my sadly not-tan skin, light eyes, and rapidly blonding hair stick out in a crowd like a snowball stand in the desert. This has caused me a lot of grief in terms of trying to inconspicuously walk down the street without every bored guy pulling over and following me in his car, but it has had some not-so-annoying consequences as well.

For example, the time we drove to Cairo after class to catch Egypt's World Cup qualifying football (soccer) match against Rwanda. It was a pretty crazy experience; as soon as we finally pushed our way through the crowds to start climbing up to our section, our Agnabiyya اجنبية (Foreigner) presence raised a huge cheer from the entire stadium! The Egyptian fans are insaaaaane! They love their football. Everyone was jumping up and down dancing, yelling, playing drums and tambourine, waving huge flags, and doing the wave. We learned a few Masree cheers while we were there, my favorite one was: Opah eh! (clap clap) Opah ah! (clap clap) In-sha-allah-ha-naksab, Opah eh! And repeat. Which means something along the lines of, God willing, we're gonna win, hey!

People in the streets also love us. Egyptians are some of the most friendly and curious people that I've ever met, and although they often express their curiosity by staring openly at us, they're always willing to stand up for you if you're having trouble on the street, give you confident directions (even if they have no clue where you're trying to go) or invite you to sit down and have a cup of shay (tea). After visiting some cool ancient catacombs and Ptolemy's Pillar one day, Laura, Jake, Monica, and I decided to wander for a while through a colorful market down some narrow and clearly less-foreigner-traveled side streets. After a few blocks, I felt like the Pied Piper, wandering along with a train of little kids following behind us, and every fruit seller and fishmonger calling out "Welcome!" or in the case of one grandfatherly onion-merchant, asking us to rate his dance moves.

Another day, I was walking on the beach with Hannah to watch the sunset, and a guy came up to show us his baby, Meryam, and handed her to me after talking to us for a few minutes. Cute! Or there are the countless cases of friends of friends who I've never even met inviting me to be a guest at their engagement parties or weddings, which are some of the most gorgeous and elaborate events in Egyptian culture. I went with my friend Haidy to the engagement party of one of her best friends, Youmna, and it was amazing! It was almost like an American wedding ceremony, complete with the exchange of rings and a jewelery set to the bride, the bride and groom's first dance, cutting cake together (the cake had roman candles on it!), fancy dresses, of course lots of dancing, and even that crisscrossy-hands-feeding-each-other-cake thing. Needless to say, getting married is pretty expensive here, and definitely no expense is spared. From the perspective of the Egyptian girls that I'm friends with, getting married and starting their own family is the biggest moment of their lives, that they prepare for from birth, pretty much. Boys too, save up money before they even meet their future wife.

ANYWAY, back to the subject of my Egyptian stardom! A few weeks ago we went to see the concert of Egyptian pop star Tamer Hosni, kind of like the Justin Timberlake of this part of the world. It was pretty sweet! And a few weeks later, who shows up on the pages of women's magazine Nusf al-Balad (Center of the City) in the who's who guestlist Tamer Hosni concert section? Uh-huh, I think you can probably guess. Check out that bottom left hand corner, BAM! ;-)

Weekend in...ASIA?!

So, this weekend we set off on the long and winding road to Sharm El Sheikh. Sharm is at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, which is part of Egypt, but not part of Africa, since it is on the other side of the Suez Canal. SOOOO. What this means for my life is: Currently I have traveled to five continents, but only four countries! I am cool.

The drive over to Sinai took about 10 hours by a big tour bus they rented just for our program. When Flagship plans these incredibly awesome little excursions for us, they hire a travel group to do a lot of the planning and working out of details of the trip. This means, of course, that we're back in the big group bureacratic mentality, that sometimes can cause unpleasant situations. Such as stopping at an unnecessary rest stop on the way to Cairo that included a small zoo, and approximately 324029384701234 flies, which all promptly jumped on board our bus. Awesome. Literally the next 5 hours or so were spent swatting. At least it gave us something to do. Many were racking up epic kills in the double digits. After all the flies were gone we stopped to watch the sunset in the desert, which was really gorgeous.

We finally arrived in St. Catherine (a little north of Sharm, in the mountains) at around 12:30 am, and were sent off to our cool little cabin rooms to rest up for a little while. At 2 am, we got back on the bus (AHGHHH), and drove to the base of Mt. Sinai; yes, the biblical site of the burning bush and Moses' trek to receive the 10 Commandments from God. Then we began our climb. The monks that have lived at the base of the mountain since the 6th century built 3,750 stone stairs all the way up the mountain so that they could to the chapel at the top to ring the bell every single day. Our Bedouin guide led us up the "easy" (er) way, winding up rocky mountain trails, dodging camels and camel poop...and ascending the final 750 Steps of Repentence. We hiked for several hours up mountain, under the most beautiful sky of stars that I've ever seen. There was so little light pollution that we walked just using the light of the moon and stars, and we could even see our shadows in the brightness of the moonlight.

In the last hours of the trek, a few other guys and I ended up ahead of the larger group because of its frequent stops. The path was easy to find, so we just kept climbing. Walking up the huge stone stairs to the summit in silence was so peaceful...the only thing that reminded me that civilization still existed was the occasional plane that we could see moving aross the dark sky. When we reached the top at around 5am, we pulled out blankets and jackets and cuddled up on the summit to watch the sky slowly lighten, as the sun rose over the mountains. Graaaand.

After another couple hours of climbing back down the mountain, I had some tasty breakfast and a shower, then visited St. Catherine's Monastery, which dates back to the 6th century. The monastery was built on the site where Moses spoke to God in the burning bush, so we got to see the bush that supposedly is still growing from the original roots. It was really neat to see this still-operating monastery in the mountains, with its food-producing gardens, and a mosque and Greek Orthodox church just a few yards apart. Good evidence of the possibility of cooperation and peaceful cohabitation between religions: these guys have been living together within the same walls for almost 1500 years.

Another few-hour bus ride later, we reached Sharm el-Sheikh, which is a schmancy resort town at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula. We checked into our gorgeous hotel and bounced on our wonderfully soft fluffy beds, looking longingly at our pillows, but sleep was not yet on the agenda. We arrived with just enough time to change into our bathing suits and hop on a glass boat ride, which was very cool! We caught a glimpse of the Saudi Arabian coastline, and were considering jumping overboard to swim over and back, just to say we had, but decided that being thrown in Saudi prison was pretty low on our priority list. On the boat ride we got to look down through the bottom of the boat, and then jump off and swim for a while with the fishes! Seeing the multi-colored fish and awesome underwater coral cities was less foreign to us, however, than walking around in Sharm and seeing LEGS again. Not only legs, but bikinis, high heels, short skirts, and ponytails not hidden by hijabs. It was culture shock all over again. I'm still doubtful that we were actually in Egypt.

Later, the most incredible night of sleep, after hanging out and watching the colorful nightlife from our balconies. The next morning we were up again, and after some confusion and little to no explanation, we realized we were going snorkeling! We set off on a sweet little double decker boat called the Wassila (we had to know the name in case we got lost in the water, since there are about a hundred other boats that look exactly like it). The weather was perfect (as usual), and it was amaaaazing to just hang out on the boat in the sun and breeze. We made three stops to snorkel throughout the day, each one more incredible than the one before it. The Red Sea is home some of the best coral reefs in the world, and mannnnnn was it cool!!!!!! I got to swim with lion fish, baracuda, and we even saw a speedy blue spotted stingray. The coral and the fish were so much fun to watch, they're all like a whole little colorful city. Monica and I were swimming along at one point, and were watching a huge technicolored parrot fish swimming in and out of some coral caves, when it took a chomp out of a piece of coral. Apparently this coral was pretty crunchy, because we definitely heard it take the bite!

After an entire day out on and in the water, we were all exhausted and sunburned (despite reapplying every half hour, mom), so after a touristy and kind of disappointing evening with the "Bedouins" we took another night to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep before our long ride back to Alexandria the next morning.

PHEW, amaaaazing weekend. Some of the most incredible experiences and sights of my life. It just makes me think: all those hours of struggling through the craziness of Arabic grammar? Totally worth it. Thanks US government!!

For the record:

I crossed the Corniche.

;-D

Calligraphy class

Apart from our four hours of class each day, Flagship keeps us busy with lots of other little programs and events. Every Wednesday afternoon from 5-7 is Calligraphy club. Wednesday is getting close to the weekend here, and by 5 pm, I am wiped outttt, after class from 9-1, lunch, and adventuring around the city with my Language Partner Hiba for a few hours after that. But, I've forced myself to forgo a nap to attend the calligraphy club every week so far, and I'm always glad that I do. It's a really nice couple of hours, just sitting in the quiet room, everyone concentrating on holding our pens right, and forming the perfect letter alif (a straight vertical line), and receiving praise or criticism from the funny little calligraphy teacher who awes us with his never-failing ability to make normal words into works of art. It's a great time to decompress after a long hot day in Alex, and feel like a kindergartener again, practicing my letters. Now that a few weeks have passed, the class size has diminished down to 4 or 5 of us, so we get a pretty much personal lesson with the master calligrapher, and some pretty funny comments on our writing, like, "no no, this is VERY VERY tall!" or, "verry big verry big," but it's definitely worth it to hear the occasional, "GOOD, very verry good."

Corniche Scenes

The Corniche is a 10 or 12 lane divided highway that runs along the Mediterranean coast of Alexandria. It's very fast moving traffic, about the same type of road as the Washington beltway, except that all of the city streets turn directly onto it rather than having exits and ramps. It's also open to any pedestrians brave enough to try to make it across. Or to people who want to stroll across 6 lanes of traffic carrying babies and groceries, which I've also seen. Us flagship kids have been warned many times never NEVER NEVER ever to ever cross the Corniche.

I was sitting on the wall last night, on the ocean-side of the Corniche with some friends, when a car slowed down next to the curb, and backed up to right in front of where we were sitting. Oh great, we thought, here come some losers to tell us "welcome to egypt" and ask "boyfriend? boyfriend?" But we were surprised when they didn't bother us at all! We were also surprised when they popped the trunk of their car open, whipped out the biggest prawns I've ever seen, and started merchanting to the passersby. A crowd started gathering over at their trunk, so we went to go check it out. They had huuuuge baskets of freshly caught fish, shrimp, and those giant prawns. Selling seafood out of the trunk of your car...sketchy? Nahhhhh.

Tonight I also saw a guy, balancing (no hands!) a HUGGGE square basket on his head, which was seriously about the size of a refrigerator box. He was doing this while simultaneously riding a bicycle on the Corniche highway. I really wish I had a picture of that one.

Why you should never talk to strangers

This story must be prefaced with a disclaimer: I'm not the type of person to go around getting in real trouble. I'm willing to do pretty dumb things, but only if I'm good and sure it won't end up causing myself or others serious harm. I have been and will be very cautious about the people here, and I use common sense. I can take care of myself, and I know how to surround myself with people who can help.

Well! That said, I had a pretty odd evening last night.

Hira, Hannah, Zenit, and I went out after dinner for a walk and a snack, as dinner here is about the same quantity of food as breakfast in the states. We got some falafel, and met the rest of our group at a big movie theater, to see our first Egyptian film! Unfortunately, they had miscounted when getting the tickets and only had two left for the sold-out movie. So, the 4 of us all went to a next-door movie theater and saw another movie together, call Al-Farah, the Wedding, which was very good, (but confusing, of course!). After the movie we hung out in a coffee house for a while drinking tea, and then began to walk back down the street to the tram, window-shopping along the way.

A cute kid about our age or a little younger was selling balloons, and handed each one of us one, which we refused, of course. People will plunk their merchandise in your lap all the time and walk away, then come back and expect you to pay up. But this guy seemed legit. We got balloons, matching the colors that we were wearing. Sweet!

We kept walking along the street, and balloon guy walked with us, asking us about how we like Egypt, etc etc. All of a sudden, this old, homeless-looking guy with no more than 3 teeth total comes up and starts arguing with the balloon dude, thinking that he was bothering us. We decide to take this opportune moment to escape from both of them, and run down the street, balloons in hand, toward the tram. On the way, Hira trips! Slides! On the sidewalk! But we pick her up and leap onto the tram, into the women-only car, phew! Safe. ...Or so we thought.

Then our buddy the balloon seller gets on the tram. All of the other women are glaring at him, and us, as if we somehow let him into their domain. So we tell him to go, but he stays to pay for our tickets. All of a sudden we see a toothless grin pop up in the open window beside us, the homeless old man is back to join the fun. The tram is starting to move now and the old man has disappeared, so we yell at balloon man until he leaves. He does this by climbing, through the window of the women's section to the men's section of the tram. We decide to get off on the stop before our dorms, to ditch the balloon kid before we head back.

So, we disembark from the tram, and Hira's toe is bleeding so we visit a little shop to get some water and disinfectant, and the nice man at the store helps us out, so we give him our balloons for his three young kids. In the meantime, the balloon guy has spotted us again, and comes to save us from the guy working at the store. We finally make him understand that the man is just helping us. Just then, who shows up but the crazy, grinning, toothless old man, who we originally thought was good-intentioned, but now just keeps standing closer and closer. Ew. We all are walking back and forth, trying to get the old guy to leave, so the men who are sitting outside the cafe on the street stand up and help us chase him away, nearly breaking out into a fight for us. They tell us to sit for a while so they can make sure he doesn't come back, and pull up some chairs, and hand us cups of tea. Okay. Cool. We make plans to meet up with the rest of the group, since their movie is over now too, and we call our friend Scott to come sit with us, because balloon guy is starting to get creepier.

Anyway, Scott arrived, and we all walked together to meet the group, and we ran into these two really big protective Egyptian guys, Nadir and Ahmed, who work with our program, and they caused a scene in the street that drew a pretty big crowd and almost broke out into the second fight of the evening! We had to shove 7 girls and one guy into a car and escape to the Corniche because of innocent little Sabir the balloon boy.

As usual, the night ended happily with our habitual drinking tea by the sea, but man. Who would have thought we'd get involved with such a mushkila just by accepting a free balloon!

Highlights of the past few days

Monday, June 8: Orientation... We had a really cool tour of the Library of Alexandria, which has been rebuilt to pay homage to the original library which was destroyed. The new design is very cool, with a lot of symbolism in the architecture, to mimic elements in Egyptian history. The library looks from the outside like a rising moon or sun facing the Mediterranean, with eye-shaped windows, and pyramid-like shapes along the front of a connected building. On the back of the building there are a bunch of cool scripts from ancient languages...I don't know what they say. Inside it has eleven floors, and space for 8 million books!

I got to talk to Bridey to say happy birthday! Yay :)

June 9: We had to do a craaaazy scavenger hunt all around the city to take pictures of different significant monuments. My group was only girls, and we got a lot of psssssssttts and invitations from guys on the way, which was lame. We talked to a LOT of people and learned that anyone in Alex is willing to give you directions, even if they have no clue what you are looking for, haha. So we trekked across the city, and finally gave up without quite finishing. Ohhhh welllllllll.....

At night we found a sweeet cafe on the water, which we've been back to a few times. It's kind of tiki themed, with palm trees, and it's called the silsilla, which means necklace, I guess because it wraps around a little cove and sits looking right out over the water. We're pretty much VIP there now, and the owner always makes sure we get the best spot in the house. They play Celine Dion, whose music is taken seriously over here and beloved by all Egyptians. Even the 20-something-year-old guys. Hm.

June 10th, Wednesday: First day of class! I'm only studying Arabic for the summer, but I have three separate classes. The schedule is realllyyyyy confusing, because there are five classes, based loosely on the levels of the students, and each has a different schedule. But! I'm in the highest level Fusha class (Modern Standard Arabic), which has what I though was going to be a really intimidating teacher, but who is turning out to be tough but really really good. He has a really deep voice, and sounds very cool when he speaks the very formal Fusha Arabic. My second class is Aaamiyya Masriyya, or Egyptian Dialect. When I got the syllabus for this class it said it was for "near-fluent speakers"...woahhhhh! The lady we have for Aamia is pretty cool, we've mostly learned about the vocabulary you need to do some good shopping, yay! The third class is Media, which I haven't had yet.

Thursday my group is finished class at 11am, so I had most of the day free, and used it to just chilllll out! It was great, I finally unpacked. Hehe...

Today is the beginning of our Friday-Saturday weekend, which will take some getting used to. The program reserved part of the pool at the University club for us to use this morning, so Monica and I took advantage of thatttt, which was AMAZINGGGGG! My shoulders are finally starting to tan, since I never wear sleeveless shirts here.

After the pool, I went SHOPPING! And used some of that vocab, yeaah! Got some delish baklava (for free!), and a pretty scarf.

Peace out homes, sorry for the lengthy day-by-day summaries. If I don't write this stuff down I'm definitely going to forget it all!

I saw my first accident today! Or, rather, I heard it. I just ignored the loud smashing sound at first and continued walking, because that's a pretty normal thing to hear in the city. When every single person on the street around us started running simultaneously in one direction though, I realized what must have happened. It turned out a minibus had been hit by one of the bigger buses in an intersection. How exciting! No one was hurt, luckily.

I'm really surprised that I haven't seen more accidents though. The people here drive the way they live, really really close together. Cars somehow manage to fit into tiny gaps in traffic, and a taxi ride is...quite the experience. Parking is also pretty insane. Seeing cars double parked on the street is very normal, and I've seen some pretty crazy triple parking, cars parking sideways in the spaces between other parallel parked cars, or driving up on the sidewalk to triple park.

After we walked by the big accident, we crossed a small one-way side street and saw a backup of about 4 or 5 cars that had turned onto the street, but couldn't move because of the car that was driving up the street the wrong direction. I'm not sure how they resolved that...

First looks

اهلا و ساهلا!

I've been in Alexandria, Egypt for...2 days now, and I think I'm already starting to think in Egyptian. Right now it's 1 am and I am exhausted from the sun (shems) and the day's adventures, but here are some quick highlights of my first couple days:

Alexandria....it's about 25 miles long and maybe 5 wide, stretching along the Mediterranean Sea. We live in the dorms of "Kulliat San Markos" (Saint Mark's College) about 3 blocks from the water. Tonight and yesterday at sunset we walked through the tunnel under the Corniche, the large road that runs along the sea, and went out onto the beach to put our feet in the water. SOOOO amazing to be able to stand in the waves and watch the sun go down with the lights of the city surrounding us. Ahhhhhh!

It's been pretty hot, but not uncomfortable. It's not yet as hot as the summer in Maryland, and not nearly as humid. I hear it'll definitely get a lot hotter though....hehe. But, I'm ready!

TRAFFIC is craaaaaaazyyyyyy! You WILL get run over if you step into the street without paying attention. People here use the horn pretty much constantly. And they only use headlights to flash at pedestrians when they get in the way!

Everyone is soooo friendly. The dorms we live in are very conservative, and tonight all of the girls threw us a party and cooked us tons of felafel and fool and other egyptian foods and we all danced and sang egyptian songs :)

Guys in the streets are pretty annoying, it's kind of funny the number of times we'll hear "Waalcoome to Egeept" as we walk by in the street though. The boys hiss at us to get our attention, so we call them snakes.

Mostly so I can remember, the basic details:

Friday June 5:
leave airport in Dulles, fly through the night. Watched He's not that into you, or somehting like that.

Saturday June 6: Arrived Frankfurt, wandered confused around the airport for a while, found a place to leave our bags, got a really bad rate exchanging dollars for euros, then took the train straight from the airport into the city!!! We saw some awesome old churches, from as early as 1300s, and walked around old town Frankfurt. We tried some Fleischschnitzel, german beers, and apfel streudel! Yummmm. We ran into a group of british guys, who tried to get us to come get "leathered" with them. Haha! We declined, though we did learn a new way to high five.

Flew through the night again on Lufthansa, soooo much nicer airline. Real silverware!! Sat next to an Egyptian guy, and talked to him in Arabic a lot. He wants us to visit his stainless steel shop in Alexandria.

Sunday June 7: Arrived in Alex 2 am! Got through the customs and swine flu checks, and headed for the dorms by bus. Got to the dorms and were greeted by lots of lovely Egyptian ladies and girls from the dorm who helped us get settled. I live with Rachel, my same roomie from college park. Slept a few hours. (literally a few)

Woke up, lunch at noon, (yum!) met Mama Hoda, hilarious lady in charge of food, and Iman, in charge of the housing, learned the rules of the house etc. Walked from the dorms to the University of Alexandria, where the Flagship program has its own floor at the language center, and we have our own "dar" with a kitchen, a/c, comfy couches, and computers etc. Met all the professors, and then we had our placement testsssss ahhhhh in both aamia (egyptian dialect), and fusha (more formal ...and more difficult...Modern Standard Arabic.)

After orientation stuff was over Ahmed and Iman (the two students who are our contact people in the respective girls and boys dorms, and very very fun and nice) took us around the downtown part of the city by tram (women and men ride in separate cars, it costs a quarter ginea, which is less than 5 cents in US dollars) to Radio Shack and atms to get chargers and converters etc.

Dinner lezeez! Afterwards I went around with Hira and Hannah to downtown area and went to watch the big futbol game between egypt and Algeria in a cafe.

Sleep

Monday June 8:

Woke up, breakfast! Left with the whole group to do some touring of learning about Alex. Went to see a huge old fort at the entrance to the bay, amaaazing! Visited an old mosque and I didnt have a headscarf with me, but I borrowed one and went inside, I'm so glad I did. It was beautiful and grand.

Had some more orientation stuff at the dar, then Muatez (another one of the young people) took us to the market, or supposedly. Really he took us on a whirlwind tour around the city, downtown, saw some catacombs, ate the best falafel in the city, and learned a very important secret lesson. 3 hours later we were back in the dorms in time for dinner. Then afterwards, walked along the corniche, and went to a cafe (ah-hoo-a) for shay (tea) and sheesha (hookah). PHEW!

THEN we came back to the dorm in time to be serenaded with our third dinner, prepared by the adorable dorm girls, so sweet! Dance party in their room, we played the egyptian version of spin the bottle which is actually a lot like truth or dare. Sang LOUDLY in arabic! crammed about 20 girls into a dorm room. They are all the sweetest people i have ever met. And here I am! Good night. Maasalaaamaaaaa!