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."