Author Archives: edrevets

Jul 22 2011
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Anecdotes, Humorous, The Cairo Metro, Two minute read

The lone cowboy of Tahrir

I see him standing there, above ground or below, standing or wandering in his area, that general area that is the now urine perfumed American University exit of the Sadat metro station. Since he started coming around a few days ago, I feel a greater level of personal safety when walking in the thirty yards he patrols on the daily during the late afternoon, though he cleverly disguises this patrolling as chatting with friends or aimless meandering interspersed with standing.

Though I do not know what his job is, I am confident he has been charged with very descriptive tasks such as “maintaining a presence” or “keeping the peace.” It is equally likely that no one else knows what his job is or has purposefully not given him any tasks whatsoever, and yet he continues to be a “presence” and remain “active.”

His political activity of choice: wearing a cowboy hat. He undertakes all real or imagined missions with the easy confidence of one wearing ridiculous headgear, in this case a black cowboy hat like the outlaws of old and the pop country stars of today. His slim fitting jeans and tight white t-shirt with a black faux vest sewn on the front complete with contrasting buttons only confirm my initial impression that this is a shab (young man) of the shabbab (young men) that the people of Egypt can firmly place their trust in.

Was this one of the shabbab that wanted the foreign press to know they won’t be leaving Tahrir until their demands are met?  If so, may the foreign press also be aware that the shabbab demand more ridiculous fashion trends and to be taken seriously while wearing them. If this appears to be a conflicting request, then let it be known that the shabbab are completely capable of ignoring said contradiction and increasing the impossibility of their demands. Should the foreign press desire to know more details, the lone cowboy of Tahrir awaits them somewhere in the area around the AUC exit of Sadat. He will be wearing a hat, and he will not be messing around.

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Jul 20 2011
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Best blog posts, Humorous, Lists, Three minute read

34 ways to express cowardice when confronted with a difficult test

The end of the summer portion of the CASA program is near and we are currently in what might be called finals week. Normally, final tests have some relation to the material presented throughout the course of study, measuring the cumulative progress of the pupil. In the case of the tests of Professor Harb, however, the test has no purpose aside from inspiring fear and hopelessness among her students. Let the incontinent student beware:  you might need a fresh pair of pants after glancing through the exercises on the test and realizing no amount of studying would have saved you from the ensuing humiliation.

In other words, Professor Harb’s test was difficult. After finishing the 2 hr and 15 minute long affair, I rose from my seat and limped to her desk to turn in the test, my left foot having fallen asleep while my brain was being crushed by the Arabic language. Cackling at my pain, she says, “What, you can’t even walk?” I whimper, “The test was hard….” She gets up from her chair, walks around the side of the desk, slaps me across the face, and says, “Shame on you. The test was not hard.” I made up that last portion, but she might as well have slapped me. With the one exception of the entrance exam for CASA itself, this was the hardest Arabic test that I have faced in my life, but it is over now and there is nothing left to do in Prof. Harb’s class except for doodle and drool during the 2 hours I have with her tomorrow.

But in all honesty, Prof. Harb is great and she’s probably one of the best professors in the program and I’m happy to be in her class because I learn things and she loves teaching. She considers us her children and I consider her a non-hostile life form, so it’s not like I’m unhappy in the class. But the test was hard, so here are possible routes of action I thought for the future (read: fall) when faced with a similarly difficult test.

1. Stealthily climb out the window and down the side of the building.

2. Jump out the window and end it all.

3. Jump out the window and onto the pergola 20 meters from the side of the building. Climb down the pergola to safety.

4. Hide behind a curtain.

5. Hide under your desk.

6. Hide under someone else’s desk.

7. Hide under professor’s desk.

8. Go to the bathroom for the entire class period.

9. Hide behind the projection screen and hope she doesn’t see your feet.

10. Camouflage yourself by putting the wastebasket on your head.

11. Plead insanity.

12. Plead stupidity.

13. Sit for a while and try to take the test, then pretend to realize you’re from a different class and don’t belong amongst the test takers.

14. Pretend you’re someone else and only look like the student who was supposed to take the test.

15. Kill the professor.

16. Kill the other students, then the professor.

17. Kill yourself, then the other students, then the professor.

18. Close your eyes and hope it all goes away.

19. Close your eyes, lift your hands towards heaven, and offer the test as a sacrifice to God, pleading for Him to consume it with an all consuming fire.

20. Set the test on fire yourself, claim your classmate did it, then run out of the room screaming.

21. Make a paper airplane out of the test and then set it on fire.

22. Eat the test instead of taking it, claiming to have misunderstood the exercise.

23. Return the test to the teacher with a spit mark on it saying you found it insultingly simple.

24. Report the test as an incident of abuse.

25. Report the test as an act of terrorism that inspired fear in the heart of an American.

26. Use the test as a diary to talk about your feelings and hope that’s good enough.

27. Explain that you never actually learned how to read.

28. Hide the test and say you lost it. Repeat as needed.

29. Sprinkle soil and grass seeds on the test, moisten with water, plant in the earth and watch it grow the answers. Harvest answers and turn in the test.

30. Vomit on the test. Repeat as needed.

31. Say you appreciate the offer but you really couldn’t take a test today. Make sure you’re sincere.

32. Claim a religious reason: Arabic tests are considered an abomination on the 20th of every month according to Leviticus.

33. Try bargaining with the test; talk it down from its level of difficulty.

34. Stir up philosophical questioning amongst the students, aiming for a mass walkout: “What’s the point of all this anyways? In a few billion years when the sun blows up and the earth becomes a potato chip, who will care how we did on a stupid Arabic test?

35. Take an aspirin and then take the test. Obtain a tissue for the ensuing nosebleed. Schedule an MRI to make sure everything is still okay up there afterwards.

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Jul 19 2011
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If these family members could speak

Recently we hired a cleaning lady for our apartment since the amount of filth that piles up around here in a matter of days is simply incredible. Dust coats everything in record time and if one so much as sneezes in the vicinity of the white tile floor, it instantly turns brown, the moist droplets propelled out of the nasal cavity attracting every dust particle within a ten yard radius before becoming permanently attached to the ground. Keeping the place clean would be a full time job, and since none of us brought our mothers (just kidding) or our roombas with us, it was necessary to find a solution. Having maids in Cairo is very common for upper class families I think, and though we are not necessarily upper class, we are certainly a family so we thought on that basis we might as well try the culture out.

Our cleaning lady, who I will call Nancy, was wonderful. The two times she has come, the apartment feels like it sparkles after she leaves if ratty carpets, embroidered artwork, and Louis the XIV style furniture could sparkle. But something strange happened last week: Nancy didn’t come. We waited for her knock at the door, but heard nothing. We called her cell phone and she didn’t pick up. In fact, it was turned off. We waited a little bit longer, but still no Nancy. Then we began to worry.

She had become like family to us, kind of, like one of those family members you don’t really talk to that much. Like a family member that asks to be paid in return for cleaning your entire apartment. Like a family member you can’t really communicate with because they speak a different language and are busy most of the time they’re around. Like a family member that randomly disappears and doesn’t call to let you know that they’re okay but not going to be able to make it to the apartment because of an emergency on the other side of the family. Like a family member that you thought was really reliable and then turns out they sometimes just don’t show up to their expected appointments even though there hadn’t been any change of plans.

In other words, she was almost a sister to us. She is supposed to come tomorrow, and we are all holding our collective breath and crossing our fingers that she makes it and not only for the sake of our apartment’s level of cleanliness. We really do hope everything is okay with her. If not, then not only will I have to spend hours wondering what happened to her, but we’ll have to find another family member to replace her, and that’s never easy.

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Jul 18 2011
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Anecdotes

Eau de Tahrir: l’urine

Currently we’re in the last week of  the CASA summer session, and I think I speak for most of us fellows when I say we

There are more of these now...and no cars

DON’T WANT IT TO END.  PLEASE GIVE US MORE READING! GRAMMAR GRAMMAR GRAMMAR! Just kidding, most of us  are ready for freedom, ready to have time to go exploring in Cairo, sleep in later, watch television, movies, read books that aren’t in Arabic, not feel guilty about frequenting websites like when parents text, etc. All of us will, however, forget Arabic completely in our 6 week break, so that’s kind of a shame.

Many of us will also no longer have the great pleasure of observing the sit-in that continues to occupy Tahrir square on the way to class. Recently, I accidentally read something informative about Egyptian politics, courtesy of Sandmonkey, a well-known Egyptian blogger. In his recent post, he discusses how  the state within a state of Tahrir Square has begun to exhibit on a miniature scale the same social problems that Egypt suffers from as a whole. In the face of what I considered brilliant social commentary, my blog post on damp pants syndrome no longer seemed as ground breaking….but we can’t all be writing biting social commentary, especially since most of us are incapable of doing so. Anyways, take a look at the blog post and see for yourself what’s going on from the inside as opposed to my glancing-out-of-my-peripheral-vision-as-I-round-the-corner-and-turn-instantly-away-from-Tahrir-and-towards-the-relative-paradise-of-AUC-viewpoint.

One thing Sandmonkey forgot to mention was the direct connection between the length of the sit-in and the growing reek of urine steaming off the ground right outside the metro stop I emerge from on the way to class. He also didn’t mention where all the sit-inners go for their other bathroom needs. I haven’t seen any porter potties out there in Tahrir, but then again, I’m not sure what an Egyptian one would look like. It’s possible it could look like a white tent, in which case Tahrir square consists only of porter potties.

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Jul 17 2011
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Anecdotes

A rabbit goes home

When I was in first grade, I wrote a short story about a bunny named Snow that had fur that was white as snow. The story was a paragraph long and recounts the emotional journey of a young girl who loses and then finds her bunny: she was sad and the she was happy. Today, the story has a slightly different ending: Snow’s fur is stolen and he is cooked in a stew, devoured by the people who once loved him.

After our “Cultural Exchange” today, I went rabbit hunting with a fellow who hosts meat nights, when we eat different kinds of meats like camel or in this circumstance, rabbit. The hunting process turned out to be fairly simple, taking place in the old Bab al-Louq market downtown. Unlike forests where one must watch out for witches and outlaws, the main danger at this market is inhaling the noxious fumes emanating from various stalls and patches of earth, smells frightening in their strength and physical proximity to food. The market’s ceilings are bizarrely high since it used to have two stories, and a deep feeling of faded grandeur pervades the place. It feels a place half-forgotten with characters that defy being swept away by time, sticking around year after year in the dimness as the place becomes more dilapidated and the smells multiply on top of one another like flies on the vegetables. The venue is available for weddings and bar-mitzvahs, if you’re interested.

We entered the cavernous market with the goal of getting us a rabbit, and find one we did at a certain butcher stall. To the left of the front counter was a tall narrow cage with different levels, the top one holding all of our furry rabbit friends. After we asked for a kilo of rabbit meat (we as in the fellow I was with), an eight year old climbed up the side of the cage, reached in, and grabbed a fluffy white bunny. It was at this point that I remembered the short story I had written so many years ago, and stopped to ponder how it was my life had led me to this point. “Capitalism,” I concluded. But then things got interesting, kind of. The boy took the bunny to the back of the stall, a long knife in his hand. To make an obvious story shorter, moments later the white fur was streaked with blood, and a few minutes after that we left the market carrying a little over a kilo of chopped up rabbit meat neatly packaged in a Styrofoam container.

Later that evening we ate a rabbit stew that was actually quite tasty, though I have to admit one of the reasons I liked it was because it reminded me of the meal Sam cooked for Frodo when they were on their way to Mordor, except for they had two rabbits that Gollum had caught for them, and we just had the one that an 8 year old had killed and skinned for us.

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