Jun 25 2011
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Best blog posts, One minute read, The Cairo Metro

Metro Slime

Descending into the Doqqi Metro station and striding into the spacious hall bookended by turnstiles, I can never help but feel fear despite the relative comfort of the air conditioning and soothing decor. It’s because I know there is a clock ticking down my sweet remaining seconds of freedom before I meld with a pixelated blob of people mashed inside an un-air conditioned tube that collectively counts down the amount of stops it must survive.

This is only one aspect of the fear, however; the other aspect involves metro slime. The metro might be bursting with humans or relatively calm depending on the time of day, but regardless of hour, season, or year, every surface in the metro is covered with a fine layer of slime. As my hand grooves fill with pharaonic grime and lose all form of traction, even the slight bumps and jolts of the metro become a challenge to withstand.

Every time I enter, I know I will have to touch a pole or a handle covered in metro slime, and I know I will forget to wash my hands before eating my next meal. This is what we call in colloquial American English a lose-lose situation.

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Jun 25 2011
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Anecdotes, One minute read

Don’t say no to Panda

I ate Sudanese food for the first time tonight and it was amazing.

We exited the metro station, walked about a block, went behind the crumbling wall of a half-built building, wound around an alley filled with sand, and entered a restaurant, the very definition of a hole in the wall. We ate chicken with sauce, meat with sauce, beans with sauce, lentils with sauce, chewy bread with sauce, and roasted whole Nile fish. Unfortunately, the word sauce doesn’t quite convey how delicious it tasted but just take my word for it: the spices were mixed up just right. The fish was also incredible…I plucked hot meat right off the ribs of a fish that someone had just strangled in the Nile itself. What a beautiful thing.

Next week roomies and I are starting a schedule where one of us takes one night a week to cook so hopefully I’ll start getting nourishment soon in the home. I don’t know the nutritional information of Hobnobs but I’m sure a diet solely relying on them is a quick route to scurvy.

This commercial for Panda Cheese, an Egyptian brand of cheese, is really funny. Enjoy.

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Jun 23 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt

Revolution and naptime

I’m sure most people have heard about the Egyptian Revolution of Jan. 25. If not, a simple google search is a great place to get started; a world of interesting political and social commentary awaits discovery. The Revolution is a huge part of current political discourse and enters into many everyday conversations. It was a watershed, portent, harbinger, tidal wave, landslide, rockmelt, volcano, etc. of the current and past political situation here in Egypt. There is no way I will understand the phenomenon of the revolution fully in the short amount of time that I am here, and I certainly don’t currently understand it or its consequences fully.

That being said, and I feel like I speak for most of the students in CASA, I do not desire to sit in a lecture from 3:35-5:00 (30 minutes overtime) on any topic on a Thursday, the beginning of our weekend. First of all, most of us have classes that end at 1:00, so we’re forced to wait around for hours before the lecture begins. Some of us use this time to do homework, others use the time to complain about having to be sitting around waiting for a lecture.

Our lecture today was to be given by a political activist highly involved in the opposition movement Kefaya, which also played a role in the revolution itself. Normally this kind of stuff is riveting, but the circumstantial factors inhibited the students’ level of interest. The lecture took place in a room that could also refrigerate meat on account of the temperature. I opened a window to try to let in some of the hot Cairo air, but the main effect was allowing flies into the room. Their erratic movements and buzzing proceeded to occupy my attention for much of the lecture. The activist did not breathe for a moment in the space of an hour and a half, rattling off fascinating detail after fascinating detail about the revolution and its causes. Her voice began to blend in with the flies after a while. Many students fell asleep, a natural reaction to refrigeration and exhaustion. Some of us asked questions at the end of the lecture, to our own disadvantage; we had to stay to listen to the answers.

Some enjoyed the lecture; some learned much. I doodled a little bit and then thought about what kind of Egyptian outfit I want to buy on Saturday. One day I’ll blog about something relevant to a world outside my personal experience. But that day is not today.

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Jun 22 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Humorous, Two minute read

Excuse me, do I have something in my teeth?

One of my favorite aspects of Cairo life is the fact no one knows where anything is, and thus at any point in time at any given place, someone is asking for directions. Every .25 seconds, another innocent bystander is accosted by a woefully lost human. Fully one million people are probably asking for directions at this very moment in the city.

Of course asking for directions is nothing special or specific to “overseas,” but I especially love observing the process in moving vehicles. For example, our taxi driver has no idea where he should take us as he’s going down the highway, thus he rolls down his window and shouts to the driver parallel to him “Pizza Hut??”. Without fail and without hesitation, the driver will answer back to the best of his knowledge, which usually is not sufficient. The process is repeated a few times over, often encompassing shouting to people we’re passing on the street or traffic police as we’re going around a traffic circle and so on and so forth until we finally reach our destination.

Cairo’s a big place and of course it’s not logical or possible to memorize every street, so until robots replace humans (soon hopefully!), this seems an appropriate strategy.

I don’t think other questions are as welcome in the midst of the daily commutes…but one day, in addition to the game involving making the fastest car stop, I want to ask something like the above title.

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Jun 21 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Two minute read

From the desert to the desert

Libyan rebel flag

In contrast to our normal weekday routine of returning to our hovels immediately after class and studying the punishing Arabic language until the 12 am call to prayer, 2/3rd of my apartment attended a Libyan cultural event at a cultural center in a posh part of Cairo, Zamalek. Since I knew my dirty t-shirt and wrinkled linen pants would make me stand out even more, I put on the closest thing I have to an appropriate nice outfit: a business shirt, jeans, and sperries. One day I’ll fit in somewhere.

After only minor difficulties finding the place, which is literally built into the underparts of an overpass, we found the oddly shaped but surprisingly nice venue bedecked with Libyan art, much of it pertaining to the current events going on there and the ever hated Qaddafi. The Bengazian band playing on the stage in front had just announced a brief intermission for the purpose of food and liquid consumption. Never had I seen such a hoard of people crowded around a buffet table….one would think there were a famine in Egypt and this was the first sighting of sugar and butter in months. I realize food prices are high nowadays but these people are from the upper class of society and attend “cultural events” surely they’ve eaten in the last week, right?

I managed to shove my way through the swarm and grab the most delicious cupcake I’ve ever eaten in my entire life…it was especially fulfilling as I’ve been craving western sweets ever since watching that dumb Australian cooking show centered on a child’s birthday party and ergo… cupcakes.

The band’s performance was by far the best part of the night, not for the quality of its music, which was so so and tended to be pretty cliché, but for the overall experience. Imagine, if you will, a small seated crowd emitting hubbub amidst the glare of bright lights and waving Libyan rebel flags in front of a band rocking out to pop ballads revolving around martyrs and revolution and blood and sacrifice to tunes on the same emotional level as a deeper N’Sync song. The most important component, however, were the kids that got on stage and were waving Libyan flags the entire time, sometimes blocking band members from sight for entire songs and/or threatening to injure them with the enthusiasm of their movements. At one point in the night, the rapper MC SWAT was forced to switch sides of the stage in the middle of breaking it down because of the peril he faced from one little girl with braids and ribbons in her hair.

The songs revolved around love of Libya and its unity and/or revolution. One of my favorite lines from the entire night was part of a description of Libya: “From the desert to the desert.” I guess it was hard to find another distinguishing geographical feature and from the border to the border wouldn’t work.

Another highlight of the night was actually hearing formal Arabic being used in the poetry reading. My heart delighted in hearing the sound of vowelled texts and my soul was nourished with sweet teshkeel. I love the importance of poetry in Arab culture…it’s great for revolutions, resistance, politics, love, insults, competition….everything.

I hope to see more cultural events and eat more free treats from this center under the bridge.

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