Tag Archives: egypt

Oct 12 2011
2 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Lists, One minute read

We are a Bunch of Nerds

the resident nerds of tahrir

Next semester, we students of CASA have the opportunity to take courses that are not solely focused on language and have academic content as well. Moreover, we get the chance to suggest courses ourselves. Since we are all a bunch of nerds, there has been a flowering of emails suggesting all kinds of courses that we could take…subjects you couldn’t even imagine, like a course focused on the fantastic animals described in pre -17th century Arabic travel literature.  This is the stuff of nerd paradise.

I have decided to hop onto the feverish academic bandwagon and offer a few course titles myself, so without further ado, may I present to you

CASA Spring 2010: Course Suggestions

1. Inequality Manifest: Spoiled American Students and Their Experience in Egypt

2. Pant Usage in Post-Colonial Egypt and the Tailoring of a Transformation

3. Applied Poetics: Arabic Poetry’s Place(s) in Your Daily Life

4. Advanced Reality Grasping: Calling a Spade a Spade

5. The Effect of Unicornic rule on Imaginary Arabic Literature

6. Fountains on the AUC Tahrir Campus: Why?

7. American Arabic Students and the Contemporary Blog Post

8. Cairo: Fragrant and Musical, or Stinky and Noisy?

9. Hadith and Blogging: What the Prophet Said

10. Intermediate Time Machine Installation and Usage

11. Arabic Grammar Nerds: Their Function as a Social Phenomenon

12. CASA Students: the Relationship between an Unhappy Home Life and the Rate of Expatriation

13. Improvisation: Telling People Why You Study Arabic

14. Arabic: What Do the Squiggly Lines Mean?

15. 15th Century Egyptian Embalming Techniques: a Practicum

16. Advanced Media: Building Effective Emotional Barriers to Bad News

17. Your Parents and Medieval Islamic History: How to Make Them Care

18. The Healing Qualities and Mystical Powers of Advanced Arabic Rhetoric

19. Vowels: Accessory, Amenity, or Need?

20. Horseback Riding, Power Lifting, and Calligraphy

21. Pharoanic Hygienic Standards: a Practicum

22. The Futility of Love: Arabic Literature Expressing Hopelessness and Loss

23. Arabic Media: How to Fold Newspapers into Planes and Hats

I, along with the rest of CASA,  look forward to an academically enriching semester and one that will no doubt be extremely useful in all our personal, professional, and facebook  lives.

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Oct 10 2011
2 Comments
Serious-ish, Two minute read

P.S. I’m Still Alive

Like the situation in Egypt, this puddle stinks

Look, I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but things don’t seem so great here in Egypt, and I’m not talking about the disgusting puddle outside of AUC’s Tahrir campus.

Even as we were all doing cartwheels and singing “ding dong the witch is dead” after Mubarak’s departure in February, some questions lingered in the background like “What next?” and “How difficult could it be to set up a democracy in a country crippled by poverty, corruption, and decades of political stagnation under the rule of dictators?” Turns out it’s pretty difficult, especially since it seems the egg of democracy has been shoved into an iron safe guarded by the general of the armed forces of the chicken coop for “security purposes.” Iron safes aren’t good places for eggs.

We already knew that the economy was going down the tubes, people were still hungry, and the political transition was moving slower than cool molasses. And then you have Sunday, October 9, 2011. There are conflicting reports of what exactly transpired (obviously), but basically, Christian protesters in Cairo were attacked by thugs of some kind and then the army stomped in with its big ol sticks and started putting down the demonstration violently: 26 dead and over 300 injured–the worst case of violence since the winter revolution and a painful indictment of the current political situation and its major players.

How do we feel about this? Not great. Though I am merely an Arabic student here for a short time, I find it incredibly disturbing and disappointing to see this kind of violence. Frankly, it makes me want to vomit when I think about the ploys the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is using to stay in power: sectarian strife, the fear of chaos, the promise of security even while it attacks citizens protesting peacefully. Is it not disgusting? But what can anyone do about it? What’s the alternative? People are tired of revolution and disillusioned about the future….why couldn’t prosperous democracy just happen? Why can’t it be like Idahoan instant mashed potatoes that fluff up into a delicious side dish within seconds?

And as if the violence itself wasn’t enough, state television got creative and its portrayal of the events differed significantly from what other independent channels like Al-Jazeera were broadcasting. Sounds like someone read Mubarak’s diary: “Today, I told the people at TV to just make it all up. Go crazy! Use your imagination! Make me look awesome!” And also the army attacked the building of an independent TV station (Al-Hurra).

So….it’s hard to say what’s going to happen in the coming weeks, but I hope people get angry,  forget their revolution fatigue, keep on fighting the fight. If you have any suggestions for how they should do that please direct them to peopleofegypt@yahoo.com since I’ll be too busy in class to do anything really.

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Oct 10 2011
2 Comments
Humorous, Serious-ish, Two minute read

Current Obsession > Egypt’s Future

My cool Swedish friend, also brother.

STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING!

There’s this song that I’m OBSESSED with and you’re going to love it too! Give me your computer and I’ll find it on YouTube so you can listen to it! It’s only 6 minutes long, and with loading time that makes a total of 10 minutes you’ll have to wait to hear it! It’s not very mainstream but the lyrics are really ethereal. The true essence of the song only hit me on about after the 18th listening but I remember the first one being really awesome too.

Oops I closed all your windows…you didn’t need those open did you? Here, we can share headphones. Or I could just watch you while you listen to it? Okay I’ll stand in front of the computer and you can either look at the screen or directly into my eyes for the full six minutes while you decide whether or not you like the song and I decide whether or not we can remain friends. Remember this is one of my favorite songs so it’ll really hurt me if you don’t like it. Think about that as you’re trying to avoid eye contact with me. Also, you can’t just say you like the song; you have to say something profound, like “The music really brings together the disparate thematic elements in the lyrics” or “it’s like he described the feeling of almost remembering a childhood dream in a completely new way.”

Do you mind if I sing along? I don’t know all of the words but I can hum to fill in the blanks. What? There are violent clashes going on between the army and protesting Copts near Tahrir? 19 dead and 150 wounded? Tear gas and the sound of gun shots floating over the Nile? Okay fine we can look at Al-Jazeera after we listen to this song and then…oh wait! There’s another one that’s really awesome and I bet you’ll love it. You like “noise” music right? It’s music that makes a statement by purposefully avoiding any kind of melody, tune, rhythm, or order. It’s really big in Scandinavia right now, and my super cool Swedish friend is really into it. This one’s only 9 minutes long but it’s totally worth it, and then after that we can look at the “news.”

Say, I hope we don’t have class tomorrow…it would be so awesome if this post-revolution violence paid off for us!

(should my belabored writing have not made it clear, this post was facetious. I don’ t mean most of these things, but you’re left to guess which ones).

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Oct 08 2011
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Fiction, Humorous, One minute read

Wait Don’t Go! Bring Me Some Cheese!

Sure is flat out there

I saw a foreign man riding a bicycle in my neighborhood, and it inspired this post:

One summer day, a Dutch man put on his jean shorts and went for a bike ride. Out the wicker gate he flew, peddling as fast as he could, unimpeded by inclines and worries on this bright morning. He waved to his neighbors as he whizzed past: “Hallo Greta! Hallo Pieter!  Hallo Klaas!” Off he sped into the calm tilled farmland of the low country, a collage of yellow and varied greens underneath a familiar powder blue sky.

He slowed down once he made it past the last obvious vestiges of civilization and was left to silent contemplation of the surrounding cultivated greenery. The questions that had seemed so important to him in the city faded away as he was confronted with the unchanging cycle of the world around him, a rhythm that would precede and outlast him by millennia. Who was he on this green earth, a peach colored pinpoint in a landscape that stretched beyond the crusty surface of the world and into the stars? The wind tickled the tops of the green things all around, and the world answered his question very clearly in a language he could never understand.

His bike rolled along lazily, savoring the pavement. He came upon an intersection. He looked both ways and then proceeded to pass through it. At that very moment he was sucked into a vortex more powerful than both time and space, and was teleported to Zoharia Street in Mohandiseen, Cairo, along with his name brand sunglasses and jean shorts. 20 feet away and at the same time, I was returning with toilet paper from our local mini-mart and I saw this foreign apparition as he sailed along on his bike, oblivious to the world around him. No doubt he hadn’t time to recognize the sudden change of scenery or had so completely engrossed himself in contemplation of tree fluffiness that he was incapable of seeing the reality around him.

I distinctly remember he was not whistling. But still, he carried a whistle-y air about him, something that made everything else seem like an afterthought. Away he passed, out of sight and back to the re-entrance vortex where he could once again continue his summer thoughts. I thought I saw the air shimmer around him with the last preserved summer rays, but then the moment was gone, and I went home, trudged up the 5 flights stairs with my toilet paper, and began making dinner.

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Oct 06 2011
4 Comments
Anecdotes, The Cairo Metro, Two minute read

I Am the Shwarma

200 people fit in here

I thought I had beaten the topic of the Cairo metro to death, that all the humidity, sweat, inexplicable haze, and involuntary contact with strangers had been discussed to its furthest extent. But I was wrong, pathetically wrong, and today I touched, tasted, smelled, and saw the depth of my ignorance.

Though I did not think it was physically possible, metro use has increased due to strikes on other forms of public transportation. Practically, this means the metro cars turn into a more treacherous, sweaty, place than they have been. People and children under 4 feet tall stand a good chance of suffocating should they dare to ride.

This morning, the women’s metro car rolls up, and it is already stuffed to the gills. I can almost see a puff of steam emerge as the doors open and a few fight their way off the train, leaving just under enough space for me. I and a few others shove our way on, our body masses absorbed into a greater entity created out of metro riders like a giant shwarma leg. A woman had to suck in her stomach in order for the door to close, and I thought to myself, “the fate of this entire train just depended upon the extra 3 inches of that woman’s newly concave stomach. Lord help us.”

For the next 6 minutes, I was tossed about like a baby at a potluck. Though I wasn’t holding onto anything, it didn’t matter since it was impossible to move independently of the nest of people I was firmly snuggled into. As a result, I was pushed against my will several times into a woman standing next to the door. I thought she realized I was powerless in the matter, but finally, at the stop where we and 80 percent of the train were exiting, she said, “Why are you pushing me?! I swear I’m getting off!”

Had I the language skills, I wish I could have cooed, “Yes, friend. I am pushing you because I alone out of the countless women here in the car can move of my own free will and I have decided to use this power to pester you, oh chosen one. I am glad you are ignoring the kinetic thread of female bodies behind me that might transfer energy and placed blame directly on me for your discomfort because I am, in fact, completely responsible. I am also malicious and worthy of your hatred.”

The metro doors open at Sadat and “plop!” a mass of women is spurted out onto the platform. Someone hits me in the back, and I’m not sure whether it was on purpose or whether they had temporarily lost control of their arm because of metro fever. As I was ascending the escalator  I thought to myself, “I’ve got to blog about this.”

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