Social media has vastly altered one's ability to not simply observe and absorb but now even experience and help shape events. There is no longer the filter of institutions or editorial oversight, and this has vastly altered how we understand the world and the nature of information. With the recent protests in Iran and the Twitter response, we've seen many of the positive powers of this sort of revolution. This isn't a people's movement, this is a global people's movement. Are all revolutions going to be like this in the future? Are they going to incorporate cyberwarfare as a major tactic? Will they be similarly transnational and non-governmental? As a historian of foreign relations--in other words, of how America, broady defined, interacts, broadly defined, with the world--I am fascinated by these sorts of developments from an academic level. As a human being, I am moved and hopeful at the democratic power such tools represent, and hope that we will see them used in ways that will further the common good.
Such technology, however, also holds frightening possibilities. We are beginning to hear that the Revolutionary Guard, for example, is creating fake Twitter accounts and writing tweets meant to spread disinformation. The same tactic could be used to lure large groups of people into stings organized by the IRG or Basij. And that's where the lack of oversight or editorial control stands to inhibit the ability of social media to truly replace "traditional" news sources. If everyone is a reporter, and everyone a critic, and everyone's perspective legitimate and newsworthy, how do we filter the wheat from the chaff? How do we know what is real and what is simply opinion or worse, fiction? What does credibility mean in such an environment? Accountability?
I fear the risk of democratizing information to the point that the internet becomes the world's largest echo chamber. Someone says something, and it will be nigh on impossible to check its credibility, because legitimate sources of facts, ways to check the veracity of an idea disconnected to a quote on the internet, will have dried up. For example, Shane Fitzgerald's recent test of media accountability was telling. He put a fake quote on composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page a few hours after the man's death, and it ended up in news outlets of varying types, from individual blogs to major newspapers, in the US, Britain, France, and Australia. This even despite the fact that Wikipedia's fact checkers removed the quote twice because of lack of attribution. Is this where we are headed?
This isn't to say that social media is all bad (not by any means!), but the challenges it poses to how we treat knowledge in our society are massive. As someone studying for my doctorate, I will have had to read hundreds of books, go through numerous exams, and take as well as teach many courses on my field before I achieve a degree that is meant to convey that I have a specialized and significant knowledge of something (in my case foreign relations). But in reality, my opinion on a blog, or worse, in a book will possibly matter exactly the same to the average reader as Joe Blow (or, to be political, let's say Joe the Plumber), who graduated high school but doesn't have any specialized knowledge beside what he sees on TV, but who has a snappy turn of phrase and writes a popular blog. Maybe this sounds totally petty, given my investment in the system, but shouldn't my opinion, my knowledge of American history, be given more credibility than Joe's? I was tried, and proven credible, he was not. (This isn't to say that academics can't lie. They have, do and will. But I would argue an academic has a greater onus to be meticulously credible than Joe does.) The difference is one of editorial oversight, if you will. I fear we will lose the idea that education matters, that specialization matters, that expertise counts for something. This matters less for things like Iran, where mass corroboration of events serves as a pretty strong safeguard for the truth. I am worried more about the more refined type of news and information services. We can already see it with the grassroots Right's abuse of the term "socialism" to mean, essentially, any policy of the Democratic Party.
I think we are sort of having a Promethian moment here as a culture. We've been given fire, are we going to warm ourselves or burn the house down around our ears?
(This was original a comment I wrote on a friend's blog post, but I thought I'd post it here for my own posterity.)
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
yowm mu'ataad
I know. I know. Believe me, I know. You go exotic places, you tell me, and then you never update!
In my own defense, there has been precious little to update about here once I got settled in. I get up. I study Arabic. I go to bed. The routine would bore you, but for the fact it is Cairo, and therefore at least something is catching my eye. But more often than not they are just fleeting thoughts I have in between diagramming sentences. Thoughts such as, I wonder if the boys who carry trays of tea to and fro on the streets to waiting groups of men are paid for their effort, or if they are just gofers serving their fathers/uncles/brothers/family friends. Or, where does the muezzin live? In the mosque? One wonders these things. One could try to find them out, but that would take the mystery out of life.
So I thought I would describe my neighborhood here in Zamalek. What it is like to wander around here, on my walks to the store, or church, or down to the bank in the Marriot to cash a travelers check.
Zamalek has always been the cosmopolitan part of the city. It is an island in the middle of the Nile. Khedive Ismail named it the Jardin des Plantes, and proceeded to build an enormous palace on the east bank of the island and make the place a giant greenhouse for exotic plants from all over the world. The Khedive's opinions on those pesky issues of East-West and modernity can probably best be summed up in this quote: "My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions." He said this in 1879, the same year the British kicked him out when he refused to listen to the European bankers who effectively owned his country, so when he said "we are now part of Europe" it was not just in a metaphysical sense.
The Europeaness of Zamalek has stayed, despite the number of transformations the place has undergone. From being the hangout for pashas and European dilettantes and colonial elite to a lower middle class neighborhood post-1945, to once again becoming one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, the area has seen a lot of social change, and it doesn't bother to cover the scars from those changes. Imagine St Germain, the Parisian neighborhood, if you dipped it sand and let it bake in the desert for one hundred years or so. There are houses here that one is tempted to describe as once having been palatial--certainly their enormous size suggests a sumptuous past--but now lie in ruins. Their windows are boarded over or broken, various debris lie in their yards, the wrought iron gates ineffectual against decay and disuse. Miss Havisham could be living in some of these places.
Not all of the old colonial hangouts are wasting away. Many have been converted into apartments or schools, or, as is common here in Zamalek, art or music academies. There is an art academy on Mohammed Thakeb, the street my old AUC dorm is on, that has a lovely garden filled with all sorts of odd sculptural odds and ends for the students to draw or paint or whathaveyou. I think this is also the reason for the seemingly large number of art supply stores that are here on the island. There is also a very large music academy a block or so up from the church that I go to here. I'm never there during school hours, or I suppose I could hear people playing.
Zamalek also feels European in both its planned street grid (it has far fewer rabbit warren-esque patches than other areas of Cairo) and in the trees. Paris is again a good comparison--there are trees everywhere. Go to Google Earth and type in Cairo Egypt. Zoom down a little so you can distinguish Zamalek in the middle of the river. Compare your birds eye view of it to the right bank of the city. The island is green, the right bank beige. The trees are lovely, and make it very nice to walk around here, and are also a sign of the wealth of the place--who else but the wealthy would have the means to ensure that this many trees could grow in the desert? We are, I suppose, in the river, but nevertheless. The trees were a 19th century status symbol for the Khedive. Now it seems that sod has become the new status symbol for the well-to-do here. I passed by a house the other day, on Mohamed Mazhar, the street I live on, that had the most vividly green lawn I have ever seen. I only caught a glimpse of it behind the very tall ivy-covered iron fence surrounding the house, but it was so green it looked like it was in Technicolor. There were flowerbeds, and a little brick pathway leading up to a white house, all set off by this electrically green lawn. There were a few people seated around a wrought-iron patio table in the shade on this lawn, talking, and no doubt drinking something cool. Not four feet of actual space separated the dusty, baking sidewalk where I stood from this deep green cool carpet. Just a giant fence.
White is also a symbol. Who would try to build a white house in a country so perpetually covered in dust? I suppose there might be a heating/cooling reason behind it, but the mansions in Islamic Cairo, the places where the uber-wealthy medieval traders dwelt, are not white, they're brown and tan, and those were houses built to stay cool with no air conditioning (and having been in one in the middle of July I can attest to the fact they do indeed stay cool with no air conditioning). The white to me smacks of pretension. Much like the deep green lawns. They are building this big complex down the road from the grocery store I go to. I have no idea what it is. It is fairly large, and has these odd brown canvas tents stretching from its roof to the ground, but has a very modern look to it. And it is blindingly white. It is so white it almost hurts to look at it when the sun is shining on it. To me, when I pass it, it seems to gloat. How pristine I am, it says to my dirty dusty self. Again, to stay that clean in this climate is a sign of status, and of money.
Zamalek is also a place of embassies. Hundreds of them. I live across from the Jordanian embassy. When I walk to the 26th of July St, the island's main thoroughfare, I pass the embassies for Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, Iraq, Armenia (which looks like it was built by a group of nostalgic Bavarians...a more German looking building I could not imagine), Latvia... The list really goes on. I can't even recall them all. Bahrain is building a new embassy on Brazil St. The presence of all these embassies means that there are guards everywhere. This seems like it might be intimidating, but honestly, these are some of the most bored young men I have ever come across in my life. They have these tiny little wooden huts they sit in, really no more than a phone booth-sized ply wood creation with a shelf low enough to sit on, or sometimes a chair. And there they must sit, or stand in front of, all through the long hot day. Some of them make cat calls at you as you pass, but most look as if they were busy counting the grains of sand blowing by their feet. It must be an awfully tedious job. They have these ostentatious guns, guns that look like modified AK-47s, but if you look closely many don't have a trigger mechanism. Toy guns for toy soldiers.
I pass untold numbers of these guards on my way to any given place. Any walk is also likely to take me pass old men in white turbans and galabiyyas, long dress-like garment that covers you from your neck to your wrists and ankles. It has a slightly Islamic connotation, I suppose, but here it is mostly signifies lower class status. Many younger men wear these too, but it is almost exclusively wizened old men who wear the turbans with them. Even during the day the vast majority of people on the streets are men. When you see a women, she is almost always wearing hijab, although there are more uncovered women in Zamalek than other places, because it has such a high proportion of Europeans living there, as well as a sizeable Christian community (Coptic Christian and otherwise). Often times these men are sitting together, in groups of two or three or more, chatting in front of stores or apartment entrances. Or they are gathered around a car in the middle of the road with its hood popped, discussing the finer points (I assume, I don't speak much 'Ammiyya) of how it could be fixed. But men, groups of them, all over the places. And often groups of young boys (shebab) playing soccer, or riding bikes around. Men, everywhere. And many of them stare. The catcall is fairly rare (although I got one the other day). Much more common is this weird "hiss" that Egyptians do. It has lots of meanings. Sometimes it just means, I am approaching you from behind, usually with a large cart or on a bike or I am carrying something, so be aware. Sometimes it just to get the attention of someone. And sometimes it is done at women, as an attempt to get their attention and like a lesser version of a wolf whistle. Zamalek is not very bad for this, especially compared to places like Downtown around AUC where the men would just STARE at you, but it is still noticeable at times.
I wish I could adequately convey the dirt in this country. A fine layer of dust is over all outside things, which is to be expected. But there is also a decay that it is a bit hard to convey. I mentioned the decrepit buildings intermixed with the still vibrant stores and shops and galleries and restaurants of this neighborhood. But the sidewalk will often be cracked and broken, which large chunks missing in places, filled in with piles of dust. Glass is often on the sidewalks. Piles of garbage are here and there. It is just the way it is when you live in a country where the state has so thoroughly failed to take care of its citizens the way it should. Egypt's economy choked on its bureaucracy years ago, and everything has stayed in this state of disrepair. I read a wonderful book last year, The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al-Aswany, an Egyptian author. In it, the author uses a few characters to voice his own sadness and anger at how Egypt has decayed. It used to be gorgeous, the downtown rivaled Paris, says a character. And now everything stands on the edge of ruin.
And amidst all this dirt and decay and ruin are people, masses of people, vibrant and loud and living. Cars are everywhere. Even on quiet streets there is a line of cars on either side of the road, sometimes two deep. One is just as likely to see a Mercedes or a Toyota parked next to a Volkswagen circa 1960. Cars so old and thin and seemingly rusted through you wonder how they still run wedged in next to newly bought Peugeots and older little Fiats. A melange of machinery. And the cars are not shy here. They don't stop for you. They don't swerve around you. You simply must walk, sometimes trot, and they will miss hitting you, in sha allah. Crossing the 26th of July is like going through a gauntlet, but I am getting pretty good at it again. If they are honking at you you know you are doing it correctly. The big streets are always a little amazing. Lanes are non existent. People weave between oncoming traffic as if death were not hurtling at them at 40 miles an hour with no intent to break. The lights at some intersections are more like suggestions. White and green city buses whizz along stuffed to the gills with people, mostly young men, all of whom seem to stare at you as they go past. And the honking. Always the honking. And the occasional screech of tires. And the smell, of gasoline, and exhaust, all vaguely heated by the sunshine.
The 26th of July is not like the quieter backstreets in the residential area. This is an artery, in every sense of the word. It carries people going from one side of the river to the other for work or home or pleasure, men on motorbikes delivering everything from groceries to fast food orders to important documents, yet other men, carrying boards on their heads piled high with flat bread while riding their bicycles down this riotous thoroughfare in a seemingly impossible feat of balance and skill, the occasional horse cart, and, as always, the black and white taxis, as mobile and as ever present as gnats. On either side of this road are all sorts of shops--shisha places, kushari places, many clothing shops and toy shops (I passed a place that had Hannah Montana and HSM3 posters in the window), upscale antiques shops, electronic shops, fruit and vegetable stands, cell phone stores, butchers' shops, gas stations. Like any big city, but unmistakeably Egyptian. If for no other reason that the little children who wander around selling packs of tissue, or the little cart selling roast nuts, or the newspaper sellers who, unlike any other city I have been in, line their papers up in a swath on the ground so that you have to look down to see the headlines.
There are mosques about, although fewer than in other areas of town perhaps. I live across the street from a pretty mosque, of a fair size, with a dome and minaret that look old although I have a sneaking suspicion they are more recently built impostors. There is also a very tiny little mosque that I pass on my way to the store. If you wander around here on Friday before jumu'ah (Friday prayer) you will see the men rolling out carpets and setting up canvas tents for people to come and pray outside. The streets become mosques. It is quite a cool thing, actually.
And with that I will end with the ahdan from my apartment window. The zooming that occurs during this video was me attempting to get the camera to pick up on the river that I can see just through the trees, but I am not sure how well it came out. I live a block off the river here. There is a line of apartment buildings, and then a big road, and then the river. I can look on to Cairo's real skyscrapers through the gap in the buildings.
In my own defense, there has been precious little to update about here once I got settled in. I get up. I study Arabic. I go to bed. The routine would bore you, but for the fact it is Cairo, and therefore at least something is catching my eye. But more often than not they are just fleeting thoughts I have in between diagramming sentences. Thoughts such as, I wonder if the boys who carry trays of tea to and fro on the streets to waiting groups of men are paid for their effort, or if they are just gofers serving their fathers/uncles/brothers/family friends. Or, where does the muezzin live? In the mosque? One wonders these things. One could try to find them out, but that would take the mystery out of life.
So I thought I would describe my neighborhood here in Zamalek. What it is like to wander around here, on my walks to the store, or church, or down to the bank in the Marriot to cash a travelers check.
Zamalek has always been the cosmopolitan part of the city. It is an island in the middle of the Nile. Khedive Ismail named it the Jardin des Plantes, and proceeded to build an enormous palace on the east bank of the island and make the place a giant greenhouse for exotic plants from all over the world. The Khedive's opinions on those pesky issues of East-West and modernity can probably best be summed up in this quote: "My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions." He said this in 1879, the same year the British kicked him out when he refused to listen to the European bankers who effectively owned his country, so when he said "we are now part of Europe" it was not just in a metaphysical sense.
The Europeaness of Zamalek has stayed, despite the number of transformations the place has undergone. From being the hangout for pashas and European dilettantes and colonial elite to a lower middle class neighborhood post-1945, to once again becoming one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, the area has seen a lot of social change, and it doesn't bother to cover the scars from those changes. Imagine St Germain, the Parisian neighborhood, if you dipped it sand and let it bake in the desert for one hundred years or so. There are houses here that one is tempted to describe as once having been palatial--certainly their enormous size suggests a sumptuous past--but now lie in ruins. Their windows are boarded over or broken, various debris lie in their yards, the wrought iron gates ineffectual against decay and disuse. Miss Havisham could be living in some of these places.
Not all of the old colonial hangouts are wasting away. Many have been converted into apartments or schools, or, as is common here in Zamalek, art or music academies. There is an art academy on Mohammed Thakeb, the street my old AUC dorm is on, that has a lovely garden filled with all sorts of odd sculptural odds and ends for the students to draw or paint or whathaveyou. I think this is also the reason for the seemingly large number of art supply stores that are here on the island. There is also a very large music academy a block or so up from the church that I go to here. I'm never there during school hours, or I suppose I could hear people playing.
Zamalek also feels European in both its planned street grid (it has far fewer rabbit warren-esque patches than other areas of Cairo) and in the trees. Paris is again a good comparison--there are trees everywhere. Go to Google Earth and type in Cairo Egypt. Zoom down a little so you can distinguish Zamalek in the middle of the river. Compare your birds eye view of it to the right bank of the city. The island is green, the right bank beige. The trees are lovely, and make it very nice to walk around here, and are also a sign of the wealth of the place--who else but the wealthy would have the means to ensure that this many trees could grow in the desert? We are, I suppose, in the river, but nevertheless. The trees were a 19th century status symbol for the Khedive. Now it seems that sod has become the new status symbol for the well-to-do here. I passed by a house the other day, on Mohamed Mazhar, the street I live on, that had the most vividly green lawn I have ever seen. I only caught a glimpse of it behind the very tall ivy-covered iron fence surrounding the house, but it was so green it looked like it was in Technicolor. There were flowerbeds, and a little brick pathway leading up to a white house, all set off by this electrically green lawn. There were a few people seated around a wrought-iron patio table in the shade on this lawn, talking, and no doubt drinking something cool. Not four feet of actual space separated the dusty, baking sidewalk where I stood from this deep green cool carpet. Just a giant fence.
White is also a symbol. Who would try to build a white house in a country so perpetually covered in dust? I suppose there might be a heating/cooling reason behind it, but the mansions in Islamic Cairo, the places where the uber-wealthy medieval traders dwelt, are not white, they're brown and tan, and those were houses built to stay cool with no air conditioning (and having been in one in the middle of July I can attest to the fact they do indeed stay cool with no air conditioning). The white to me smacks of pretension. Much like the deep green lawns. They are building this big complex down the road from the grocery store I go to. I have no idea what it is. It is fairly large, and has these odd brown canvas tents stretching from its roof to the ground, but has a very modern look to it. And it is blindingly white. It is so white it almost hurts to look at it when the sun is shining on it. To me, when I pass it, it seems to gloat. How pristine I am, it says to my dirty dusty self. Again, to stay that clean in this climate is a sign of status, and of money.
Zamalek is also a place of embassies. Hundreds of them. I live across from the Jordanian embassy. When I walk to the 26th of July St, the island's main thoroughfare, I pass the embassies for Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, Iraq, Armenia (which looks like it was built by a group of nostalgic Bavarians...a more German looking building I could not imagine), Latvia... The list really goes on. I can't even recall them all. Bahrain is building a new embassy on Brazil St. The presence of all these embassies means that there are guards everywhere. This seems like it might be intimidating, but honestly, these are some of the most bored young men I have ever come across in my life. They have these tiny little wooden huts they sit in, really no more than a phone booth-sized ply wood creation with a shelf low enough to sit on, or sometimes a chair. And there they must sit, or stand in front of, all through the long hot day. Some of them make cat calls at you as you pass, but most look as if they were busy counting the grains of sand blowing by their feet. It must be an awfully tedious job. They have these ostentatious guns, guns that look like modified AK-47s, but if you look closely many don't have a trigger mechanism. Toy guns for toy soldiers.
I pass untold numbers of these guards on my way to any given place. Any walk is also likely to take me pass old men in white turbans and galabiyyas, long dress-like garment that covers you from your neck to your wrists and ankles. It has a slightly Islamic connotation, I suppose, but here it is mostly signifies lower class status. Many younger men wear these too, but it is almost exclusively wizened old men who wear the turbans with them. Even during the day the vast majority of people on the streets are men. When you see a women, she is almost always wearing hijab, although there are more uncovered women in Zamalek than other places, because it has such a high proportion of Europeans living there, as well as a sizeable Christian community (Coptic Christian and otherwise). Often times these men are sitting together, in groups of two or three or more, chatting in front of stores or apartment entrances. Or they are gathered around a car in the middle of the road with its hood popped, discussing the finer points (I assume, I don't speak much 'Ammiyya) of how it could be fixed. But men, groups of them, all over the places. And often groups of young boys (shebab) playing soccer, or riding bikes around. Men, everywhere. And many of them stare. The catcall is fairly rare (although I got one the other day). Much more common is this weird "hiss" that Egyptians do. It has lots of meanings. Sometimes it just means, I am approaching you from behind, usually with a large cart or on a bike or I am carrying something, so be aware. Sometimes it just to get the attention of someone. And sometimes it is done at women, as an attempt to get their attention and like a lesser version of a wolf whistle. Zamalek is not very bad for this, especially compared to places like Downtown around AUC where the men would just STARE at you, but it is still noticeable at times.
I wish I could adequately convey the dirt in this country. A fine layer of dust is over all outside things, which is to be expected. But there is also a decay that it is a bit hard to convey. I mentioned the decrepit buildings intermixed with the still vibrant stores and shops and galleries and restaurants of this neighborhood. But the sidewalk will often be cracked and broken, which large chunks missing in places, filled in with piles of dust. Glass is often on the sidewalks. Piles of garbage are here and there. It is just the way it is when you live in a country where the state has so thoroughly failed to take care of its citizens the way it should. Egypt's economy choked on its bureaucracy years ago, and everything has stayed in this state of disrepair. I read a wonderful book last year, The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al-Aswany, an Egyptian author. In it, the author uses a few characters to voice his own sadness and anger at how Egypt has decayed. It used to be gorgeous, the downtown rivaled Paris, says a character. And now everything stands on the edge of ruin.
And amidst all this dirt and decay and ruin are people, masses of people, vibrant and loud and living. Cars are everywhere. Even on quiet streets there is a line of cars on either side of the road, sometimes two deep. One is just as likely to see a Mercedes or a Toyota parked next to a Volkswagen circa 1960. Cars so old and thin and seemingly rusted through you wonder how they still run wedged in next to newly bought Peugeots and older little Fiats. A melange of machinery. And the cars are not shy here. They don't stop for you. They don't swerve around you. You simply must walk, sometimes trot, and they will miss hitting you, in sha allah. Crossing the 26th of July is like going through a gauntlet, but I am getting pretty good at it again. If they are honking at you you know you are doing it correctly. The big streets are always a little amazing. Lanes are non existent. People weave between oncoming traffic as if death were not hurtling at them at 40 miles an hour with no intent to break. The lights at some intersections are more like suggestions. White and green city buses whizz along stuffed to the gills with people, mostly young men, all of whom seem to stare at you as they go past. And the honking. Always the honking. And the occasional screech of tires. And the smell, of gasoline, and exhaust, all vaguely heated by the sunshine.
The 26th of July is not like the quieter backstreets in the residential area. This is an artery, in every sense of the word. It carries people going from one side of the river to the other for work or home or pleasure, men on motorbikes delivering everything from groceries to fast food orders to important documents, yet other men, carrying boards on their heads piled high with flat bread while riding their bicycles down this riotous thoroughfare in a seemingly impossible feat of balance and skill, the occasional horse cart, and, as always, the black and white taxis, as mobile and as ever present as gnats. On either side of this road are all sorts of shops--shisha places, kushari places, many clothing shops and toy shops (I passed a place that had Hannah Montana and HSM3 posters in the window), upscale antiques shops, electronic shops, fruit and vegetable stands, cell phone stores, butchers' shops, gas stations. Like any big city, but unmistakeably Egyptian. If for no other reason that the little children who wander around selling packs of tissue, or the little cart selling roast nuts, or the newspaper sellers who, unlike any other city I have been in, line their papers up in a swath on the ground so that you have to look down to see the headlines.
There are mosques about, although fewer than in other areas of town perhaps. I live across the street from a pretty mosque, of a fair size, with a dome and minaret that look old although I have a sneaking suspicion they are more recently built impostors. There is also a very tiny little mosque that I pass on my way to the store. If you wander around here on Friday before jumu'ah (Friday prayer) you will see the men rolling out carpets and setting up canvas tents for people to come and pray outside. The streets become mosques. It is quite a cool thing, actually.
And with that I will end with the ahdan from my apartment window. The zooming that occurs during this video was me attempting to get the camera to pick up on the river that I can see just through the trees, but I am not sure how well it came out. I live a block off the river here. There is a line of apartment buildings, and then a big road, and then the river. I can look on to Cairo's real skyscrapers through the gap in the buildings.
Friday, May 29, 2009
shaqa ashraf. aydan, la uhibu an akuna mareeda.
So not long after writing the end of the last post, things took a turn for the better. Ashraf called and offered to meet me during his lunch in order to let me into the apartment so that I would not have to stay in the sketchy hotel for the afternoon and could have internet and non-sketchiness. So luckily I had not really unpacked, because he called and said can we meet in half an hour at Sequoia? and I said yes! and then realized I had to check out and get a cab and get over to Zamalek, and that was not necessarily going to be the quickest process. But I went and checked out (do you know how much an international phone call costs? A LOT) and then the clerk at the desk asked if I had sent for a car. I responded I just wanted to take a taxi, and he so he sent the clerk out to the main street (the hotel was on a bit of a non-busy side street) and he came back after maybe 10 minutes with a nice cabbie. A cabbie who did not make me put my suitcase on the roof of his car, like most cabbies! He had a functioning trunk, wonder of wonders. I ask (in Arabic) if he knows the Sequoia restaurant, where we are going, but he does not, so I can see it is going to be another case of giving the cabbie directions around Zamalek (this was the case in, oh, every single cab ride last summer). With my directions (I spoke in Arabic to him, he chuckled and spoke in English to me) we managed to get to Sequoia, the restaurant a few blocks away from the apartment where Ashraf was meeting me.
Deposited safely at the apartment, I spent most of the day chilling--sleeping, catching up on internet type things that I could not do when I got in because of the lack of internet at Salma, and more sleeping. A little after 5 I went out to get a new sim card for my cell phone, and decided to go once again with Mobinil, the service I had last summer (because I always seemed to have better coverage than the Vodafone users). So I wandered down Mohammad Mazhar suddenly recalling how a walk is never ever boring in Cairo. There are so many things go on in the streets that there is always something to catch your eye. There are also many many men to AVOID catching the eye of. On the way there one of the security guards in front of the Vatican Embassy totally called out to me (in Arabic, so I am only maybe 75% certain this was what he said) where do you live? Yeah, buddy, keep dreaming.
Anyway, cell phone achieved not too long after, I decided to go grocery shopping. I could have stopped at Saudi market on Maraashli, it was closer, but I decided to wander down to Metro market instead, mainly because I like them more, and also, I wanted to wander past the old AUC dorm. The only funny grocery story I have is, a kilo is apparently absolutely meaningless to me. I got 1/2 kilo of hummus from the deli thinking this would be, oh, a medium container of hummus. Nope. TWO medium containers of hummus. Sheesh. 1/4 of a kilo next time I think. Silly metric system. But I did manage to employ my lessons from living in London--do not buy more groceries that you can lug across town to your apartment! In London this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I could take a bus from my door to just down the street from the store, but the first few times I went up to the Sainsbury's, before I had really learned the wonders of the 73 bus, I bought way too much food to comfortably carry back, and ended up killing my hands. Using reuseable canvas groceries bags actually helps, because you have a visual sense of how much carrying space you actually have, and thus tend not to overshop. Anyway, I remembered this lesson fairly well, and didn't die carrying my groceries back to the apartment (which was maybe .6 mile from the store). Although I did get hit on by this guy, who offered me the creepiest line I have ever heard from anyone, this summer or last summer: "I could have you if I want?" Yes, it was a question. No, that does not make it any less sketchier. La'a, dude, la'a.
Once back at the apartment I just chilled, ate a little dinner, showered (oh glorious shower) and went to sleep. My beauty rest was interrupted by waking up at 5:30 shaking and really nauseous. Joy. I was sick all morning, until I was finally able to fall back asleep around 10 AM. I lay in bed, alternating between what felt like fever and chills (do you know how weird it is to be freezing when it is 80 degrees?) and thinking, great, I probably have some sort of exotic flu now and am going to die. I literally felt that awful. I don't know what it was that made me sick. I really do not believe it was either water or food, because if those are going to make you sick they make you sick really quickly, not 8-9 hours after the fact. I just hope it does not happen again.
Because of my odyssey with illness this morning I didn't go out today. I mean, it's Friday, so nothing is open before 2 or so anyway (listening to noon prayer from the nearby mosque was fun), but I didn't want to push going out in the heat and making myself sick again. So I've been a bum today, and studied up on my Arabic a little. Tomorrow is travelers cheque cashing and more Arabic. And apparently the carpenter is coming to put together our bed frames, although I quite like the boho chic I have going in my room at the moment, with my mattress on the floor.
Deposited safely at the apartment, I spent most of the day chilling--sleeping, catching up on internet type things that I could not do when I got in because of the lack of internet at Salma, and more sleeping. A little after 5 I went out to get a new sim card for my cell phone, and decided to go once again with Mobinil, the service I had last summer (because I always seemed to have better coverage than the Vodafone users). So I wandered down Mohammad Mazhar suddenly recalling how a walk is never ever boring in Cairo. There are so many things go on in the streets that there is always something to catch your eye. There are also many many men to AVOID catching the eye of. On the way there one of the security guards in front of the Vatican Embassy totally called out to me (in Arabic, so I am only maybe 75% certain this was what he said) where do you live? Yeah, buddy, keep dreaming.
Anyway, cell phone achieved not too long after, I decided to go grocery shopping. I could have stopped at Saudi market on Maraashli, it was closer, but I decided to wander down to Metro market instead, mainly because I like them more, and also, I wanted to wander past the old AUC dorm. The only funny grocery story I have is, a kilo is apparently absolutely meaningless to me. I got 1/2 kilo of hummus from the deli thinking this would be, oh, a medium container of hummus. Nope. TWO medium containers of hummus. Sheesh. 1/4 of a kilo next time I think. Silly metric system. But I did manage to employ my lessons from living in London--do not buy more groceries that you can lug across town to your apartment! In London this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I could take a bus from my door to just down the street from the store, but the first few times I went up to the Sainsbury's, before I had really learned the wonders of the 73 bus, I bought way too much food to comfortably carry back, and ended up killing my hands. Using reuseable canvas groceries bags actually helps, because you have a visual sense of how much carrying space you actually have, and thus tend not to overshop. Anyway, I remembered this lesson fairly well, and didn't die carrying my groceries back to the apartment (which was maybe .6 mile from the store). Although I did get hit on by this guy, who offered me the creepiest line I have ever heard from anyone, this summer or last summer: "I could have you if I want?" Yes, it was a question. No, that does not make it any less sketchier. La'a, dude, la'a.
Once back at the apartment I just chilled, ate a little dinner, showered (oh glorious shower) and went to sleep. My beauty rest was interrupted by waking up at 5:30 shaking and really nauseous. Joy. I was sick all morning, until I was finally able to fall back asleep around 10 AM. I lay in bed, alternating between what felt like fever and chills (do you know how weird it is to be freezing when it is 80 degrees?) and thinking, great, I probably have some sort of exotic flu now and am going to die. I literally felt that awful. I don't know what it was that made me sick. I really do not believe it was either water or food, because if those are going to make you sick they make you sick really quickly, not 8-9 hours after the fact. I just hope it does not happen again.
Because of my odyssey with illness this morning I didn't go out today. I mean, it's Friday, so nothing is open before 2 or so anyway (listening to noon prayer from the nearby mosque was fun), but I didn't want to push going out in the heat and making myself sick again. So I've been a bum today, and studied up on my Arabic a little. Tomorrow is travelers cheque cashing and more Arabic. And apparently the carpenter is coming to put together our bed frames, although I quite like the boho chic I have going in my room at the moment, with my mattress on the floor.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Al-wasool
This is the most absurd country. I'm calling it. Other countries maybe just as hectic or crowded or bureaucratic or any number of other things that you can call Egypt, but they are not Egypt. TIA. This is Africa. It is more than a motto, it is a truism.
After killing several more hours in Heathrow (changing some money so I would have some EGP on me when I got here, which, as things ended up I am VERY GLAD I did), reading a bit, surfing the internet. As you do. My flight finally got a gate around five and I went down to wait to board.
I sit down at the gate. Within two minutes every seat around me is filled with Arab men. Fun! (That was slightly sarcastic.) They are all friends, apparently, and the guy who is sitting next to me, Walid, speaks the most English of them, I gather. He was apparently studying in Edinburgh to get his TOEFL degree, and now is moving back to Cairo. Walid was very friendly, as you might expect him to be. He asked me what I was going to be doing in Cairo, I explained about school and how I had been there last summer as well. He asks me how many hours I will be doing at school, and I say five days a week, about five hours a day. And he goes, oh, that is a lot, too much to do anything else other than study. And I was like, yes, it is. And he goes, too bad because I was going to offer you a job. I didn't bother to press what type of job he was going to ask me to do. At this point I was a little weirded out.
Anyway, since he knows I have some Arabic now, he has me read the warning page on his Egyptian passport, in Arabic, and then has me translate it. He was really nice, actually, and helped me with the Arabic, and I knew a bit more than I remember. And one of the older gentlemen sitting next to him complimented me on my Arabic reading, but I think he was just being nice. Anyway, then Walid gives me his phone number. And then he asks if I have a cell in Egypt. Now, I lied and said I didn't, because I thought that my Mobinil SIM would still work in Egypt, not knowing then that it seems to have shut itself off during the nearly one year that I have been out of the country. Anyway, he asks if I have an email address, so I give him my school account (like hell I was giving him my actual gmail address). At this point, I am now like, you are too nice! You can't be this friendly to random Arab men! But anyway, all he has is my email address, so I can ignore him easily enough if I want.
The flight was uneventful, once again there was no one in the middle seat (I sat on the aisle), so I could stretch a bit. I watched Transformers. Good Lord is that movie not very good. I felt dumber after having watched it. Seriously. And then I watched the first 45 minutes or so of Twister and I had no idea how many people were in that movie! Like every single bit character is someone you recognize. TWO of the random bit players went on to be on LOST--yes, both Daniel Faraday and the guy who played the security guard that Sawyer trapped in his house for a few days (he was also on Mad Men) are in Twister. With, seriously, A TON of other people.
We finally arrived in Cairo, about twenty five minutes late (which wasn't terrible considering we left London an entire hour late). I managed to get off the plane very quickly. It was odd, actually, I was seated in this upper little section of coach, that was maybe 5 or 6 rows, located before the galley and just after Club World. This section was, with two or three exceptions, entirely Europeans or Americans. Then the whole back section, separated from us by the galley and another set of curtains, was the rest of coach, which was where everyone else was, and it was heavily Egyptian. I couldn’t figure this out. My only guess was maybe all the people in my section are savvy with the online check-in feature at BA.com? I am not sure, but it felt slightly weird, sort of segregated in a way. Anyway, by virtue of sitting really close to the front, I managed to be out before most of coach. I also bobbed and weaved through slow people in the corridors, and was thus among the first little clutch of 15 or 20 people to get stopped by the swine flu medical officer people. This was a prime example of somewhat pointless Egyptian bureaucracy. We were handed a little blue card and told to write our name, address in Cairo, and our nationality on it. We then handed it to one of three or four harassed guard type people, who read it and then collected it, assuming you were satisfactory. I assume that to be satisfactory all you had to prove was that you weren’t Mexican? I have no idea really. Through a little turnstile thing, and then we were stopped again by these people who were… well I really have no idea what they were doing. At first I thought they were taking digital photographs of us. There were these camcorders set up on tripods, and everyone had to step up to this little yellow line and stand in front of the camera for a few moments. But I don’t think they were taking our pictures, I actually think that the camera was a heat sensor, and it was a way to tell if someone was running a fever. Really, I know that sounds crazy, but I think that is what they were doing. There was no flash, no movement made as if to snap a picture of us—we just stood for a few seconds, the dude operating the camera looked seriously at the little view finder screen, and then cleared you to pass. I am so glad I managed to get by that before the rest of the plane descended on the two little camera lines.
My luggage actually came out in a timely manner this time around (unlike last year where, honest, my bags were the dead last ones to come out on the carousel. I suppose they were the first into the hold or something). I threw everything onto a cart and walked out to the arrivals line (oh wait, I went through customs, which involved me smiling at the man in customs and him waving me through) and saw the driver holding my name on a little print out. Success. He takes my cart and we load onto the little parking lot tram. While on the parking lot tram he introduces himself as Mohammad, and I am a little confused, because my driver was supposed to be Karem. Then Mohammad tells me that I am staying at Hotel Salma. No, Hotel Longchamps, I correct him. He looks at me a moment and says, No Salma. We go back and forth on this for a few minutes, and then he pulls out this printout that has my pick-up info on it, and it does indeed say Hotel Salma. Well I am not sure what is going on, because I had a reservation with Longchamps (two, actually, because ILI said they made one for me, and prior to that I had made one for myself!) I decide not to bicker with this guy who is very kindly carting my heavy bags around the airport at 1:45 in the morning. We get to his car, which I am shocked to see is only a few years old and in really good condition (I was expecting something that was more beat up—like, you know, it was actually driven around Cairo). As we set off from the airport, I bring up the hotel issue again. At this point I feel bad for Mohammad, because he doesn’t quite have enough English to get what I am saying about the other reservations and he just keeps saying he has to do what is on the sheet. It turns out that Mohammad is Karem’s son. He drives people around the city (tourist stuff) in his own right, and he was actually the best driver I think I have ever had in Cairo. Not once did I fear for my life, which is a little shocking, really. He also very nicely kept telling me what roads we were on. He was totally lost and didn’t know where the hotel was, which resulted in us driving up and down Gama’at al-Duwal for ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually he dropped me off at this Hotel Salma. It reminds me a lot of the hotel AUC put us in at Mt Sinai. Actually, a step or two up from that. But very much a midrange Egyptian hotel, which is about the level of a non-chain motel in the States.
The only thing I was really annoyed about was that in switching my hotel reservation (and not notifying me about it) the ILI didn’t really put me in a comparable place to the hotel I was going to stay in. Longchamps: very nice, small European-esque place, internet, modern amenities. Salma: shabby, very old, run-of-the-mill mid-rate Egyptian hotel. Sketchy? More than a little. My biggest problem though? No internet!
So I manage to sleep for something like three hours (I couldn’t get to bed until 5:30 or so, and considering I got here around 2:30, this was a lot of time bouncing off the walls in this little room…silly jet lag), get up, and attempt to connect to the spotty unprotected internet that is range of my computer. I have an email from Ashraf, who says, give me a call, I’m in work until 5, but we can talk and have a time to meet up. I call the number, but not before having to make an excursion down to the reception desk to ask if I was somehow dialing the mobile number incorrectly, because the line kept disconnecting. Apparently a “local” line is different from a “mobile” line, and when you call down to the reception people, who probably are sick of me at this point, you have to ask for specifically a mobile line. Anyway. Once I learn this trick, I manage to place a call to Ashraf’s cell but no one picks up. At this point, I can feel myself getting supremely frustrated, so I take a moment to center myself. I pray. I take deep breaths. I realize that things could be much worse. And then I go to send Ashraf an email, and the internet works for a few blessed minutes and allows me to do so. I give Ashraf the hotel I am staying in and the number, and receive a phone call within a few minutes.
So, Ashraf is a boy. Surprise! I have absolutely no idea why I thought Ashraf was a girl’s name (damn my faulty Arabic!) but I am glad that I discovered this fact over the phone rather than in person where it would have been totally noticeable that I was shocked at his gender. Anyway, he is a very nice sounding guy, and had to run into a meeting, but is going to call me back in a bit and we can work out what’s the what with the apartment for the evening. It is looking like I am going to need a place to be (well, more importantly, my luggage needs a place to be) until 5PM or so this evening. Check out is at noon, but I am hoping I can stay here for the afternoon. Even if I have to pay. I seriously do not feel like having to wander the streets of Cairo for five hours. I would much rather stay here and sleep for the day. That will probably totally screw up my time adjustment, but I have to ease myself back into the city, and having to wander for several hours is not how I feel like doing it. Sleep and decompressing here, even in this dingy room, is better I think.
After killing several more hours in Heathrow (changing some money so I would have some EGP on me when I got here, which, as things ended up I am VERY GLAD I did), reading a bit, surfing the internet. As you do. My flight finally got a gate around five and I went down to wait to board.
I sit down at the gate. Within two minutes every seat around me is filled with Arab men. Fun! (That was slightly sarcastic.) They are all friends, apparently, and the guy who is sitting next to me, Walid, speaks the most English of them, I gather. He was apparently studying in Edinburgh to get his TOEFL degree, and now is moving back to Cairo. Walid was very friendly, as you might expect him to be. He asked me what I was going to be doing in Cairo, I explained about school and how I had been there last summer as well. He asks me how many hours I will be doing at school, and I say five days a week, about five hours a day. And he goes, oh, that is a lot, too much to do anything else other than study. And I was like, yes, it is. And he goes, too bad because I was going to offer you a job. I didn't bother to press what type of job he was going to ask me to do. At this point I was a little weirded out.
Anyway, since he knows I have some Arabic now, he has me read the warning page on his Egyptian passport, in Arabic, and then has me translate it. He was really nice, actually, and helped me with the Arabic, and I knew a bit more than I remember. And one of the older gentlemen sitting next to him complimented me on my Arabic reading, but I think he was just being nice. Anyway, then Walid gives me his phone number. And then he asks if I have a cell in Egypt. Now, I lied and said I didn't, because I thought that my Mobinil SIM would still work in Egypt, not knowing then that it seems to have shut itself off during the nearly one year that I have been out of the country. Anyway, he asks if I have an email address, so I give him my school account (like hell I was giving him my actual gmail address). At this point, I am now like, you are too nice! You can't be this friendly to random Arab men! But anyway, all he has is my email address, so I can ignore him easily enough if I want.
The flight was uneventful, once again there was no one in the middle seat (I sat on the aisle), so I could stretch a bit. I watched Transformers. Good Lord is that movie not very good. I felt dumber after having watched it. Seriously. And then I watched the first 45 minutes or so of Twister and I had no idea how many people were in that movie! Like every single bit character is someone you recognize. TWO of the random bit players went on to be on LOST--yes, both Daniel Faraday and the guy who played the security guard that Sawyer trapped in his house for a few days (he was also on Mad Men) are in Twister. With, seriously, A TON of other people.
We finally arrived in Cairo, about twenty five minutes late (which wasn't terrible considering we left London an entire hour late). I managed to get off the plane very quickly. It was odd, actually, I was seated in this upper little section of coach, that was maybe 5 or 6 rows, located before the galley and just after Club World. This section was, with two or three exceptions, entirely Europeans or Americans. Then the whole back section, separated from us by the galley and another set of curtains, was the rest of coach, which was where everyone else was, and it was heavily Egyptian. I couldn’t figure this out. My only guess was maybe all the people in my section are savvy with the online check-in feature at BA.com? I am not sure, but it felt slightly weird, sort of segregated in a way. Anyway, by virtue of sitting really close to the front, I managed to be out before most of coach. I also bobbed and weaved through slow people in the corridors, and was thus among the first little clutch of 15 or 20 people to get stopped by the swine flu medical officer people. This was a prime example of somewhat pointless Egyptian bureaucracy. We were handed a little blue card and told to write our name, address in Cairo, and our nationality on it. We then handed it to one of three or four harassed guard type people, who read it and then collected it, assuming you were satisfactory. I assume that to be satisfactory all you had to prove was that you weren’t Mexican? I have no idea really. Through a little turnstile thing, and then we were stopped again by these people who were… well I really have no idea what they were doing. At first I thought they were taking digital photographs of us. There were these camcorders set up on tripods, and everyone had to step up to this little yellow line and stand in front of the camera for a few moments. But I don’t think they were taking our pictures, I actually think that the camera was a heat sensor, and it was a way to tell if someone was running a fever. Really, I know that sounds crazy, but I think that is what they were doing. There was no flash, no movement made as if to snap a picture of us—we just stood for a few seconds, the dude operating the camera looked seriously at the little view finder screen, and then cleared you to pass. I am so glad I managed to get by that before the rest of the plane descended on the two little camera lines.
My luggage actually came out in a timely manner this time around (unlike last year where, honest, my bags were the dead last ones to come out on the carousel. I suppose they were the first into the hold or something). I threw everything onto a cart and walked out to the arrivals line (oh wait, I went through customs, which involved me smiling at the man in customs and him waving me through) and saw the driver holding my name on a little print out. Success. He takes my cart and we load onto the little parking lot tram. While on the parking lot tram he introduces himself as Mohammad, and I am a little confused, because my driver was supposed to be Karem. Then Mohammad tells me that I am staying at Hotel Salma. No, Hotel Longchamps, I correct him. He looks at me a moment and says, No Salma. We go back and forth on this for a few minutes, and then he pulls out this printout that has my pick-up info on it, and it does indeed say Hotel Salma. Well I am not sure what is going on, because I had a reservation with Longchamps (two, actually, because ILI said they made one for me, and prior to that I had made one for myself!) I decide not to bicker with this guy who is very kindly carting my heavy bags around the airport at 1:45 in the morning. We get to his car, which I am shocked to see is only a few years old and in really good condition (I was expecting something that was more beat up—like, you know, it was actually driven around Cairo). As we set off from the airport, I bring up the hotel issue again. At this point I feel bad for Mohammad, because he doesn’t quite have enough English to get what I am saying about the other reservations and he just keeps saying he has to do what is on the sheet. It turns out that Mohammad is Karem’s son. He drives people around the city (tourist stuff) in his own right, and he was actually the best driver I think I have ever had in Cairo. Not once did I fear for my life, which is a little shocking, really. He also very nicely kept telling me what roads we were on. He was totally lost and didn’t know where the hotel was, which resulted in us driving up and down Gama’at al-Duwal for ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually he dropped me off at this Hotel Salma. It reminds me a lot of the hotel AUC put us in at Mt Sinai. Actually, a step or two up from that. But very much a midrange Egyptian hotel, which is about the level of a non-chain motel in the States.
The only thing I was really annoyed about was that in switching my hotel reservation (and not notifying me about it) the ILI didn’t really put me in a comparable place to the hotel I was going to stay in. Longchamps: very nice, small European-esque place, internet, modern amenities. Salma: shabby, very old, run-of-the-mill mid-rate Egyptian hotel. Sketchy? More than a little. My biggest problem though? No internet!
So I manage to sleep for something like three hours (I couldn’t get to bed until 5:30 or so, and considering I got here around 2:30, this was a lot of time bouncing off the walls in this little room…silly jet lag), get up, and attempt to connect to the spotty unprotected internet that is range of my computer. I have an email from Ashraf, who says, give me a call, I’m in work until 5, but we can talk and have a time to meet up. I call the number, but not before having to make an excursion down to the reception desk to ask if I was somehow dialing the mobile number incorrectly, because the line kept disconnecting. Apparently a “local” line is different from a “mobile” line, and when you call down to the reception people, who probably are sick of me at this point, you have to ask for specifically a mobile line. Anyway. Once I learn this trick, I manage to place a call to Ashraf’s cell but no one picks up. At this point, I can feel myself getting supremely frustrated, so I take a moment to center myself. I pray. I take deep breaths. I realize that things could be much worse. And then I go to send Ashraf an email, and the internet works for a few blessed minutes and allows me to do so. I give Ashraf the hotel I am staying in and the number, and receive a phone call within a few minutes.
So, Ashraf is a boy. Surprise! I have absolutely no idea why I thought Ashraf was a girl’s name (damn my faulty Arabic!) but I am glad that I discovered this fact over the phone rather than in person where it would have been totally noticeable that I was shocked at his gender. Anyway, he is a very nice sounding guy, and had to run into a meeting, but is going to call me back in a bit and we can work out what’s the what with the apartment for the evening. It is looking like I am going to need a place to be (well, more importantly, my luggage needs a place to be) until 5PM or so this evening. Check out is at noon, but I am hoping I can stay here for the afternoon. Even if I have to pay. I seriously do not feel like having to wander the streets of Cairo for five hours. I would much rather stay here and sleep for the day. That will probably totally screw up my time adjustment, but I have to ease myself back into the city, and having to wander for several hours is not how I feel like doing it. Sleep and decompressing here, even in this dingy room, is better I think.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The pilot actually said Cheerio. I wonder if he meant it jokingly.
I update from London. My flight was uneventful. I managed to watch Revolutionary Road (oh dear Lord don't ever watch that movie on an airplane. It is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, and the ending was gut wrenching, and not the sort of thing you want to watch when you can't express emotion freely). I also "watched" Valkyrie, by which I wanted to see how absurd it was, but fell asleep maybe five minutes and woke up exactly at the moment that Tom Cruise and all the other random non-Germans playing Germans put the coup plan into action. So I saw maybe the coolest part of the movie? I don't know. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that great either. I then watched Bride Wars (if you could not tell by now my airplane entertainment philosophy tends to be either things I wanted to see in the theaters and missed or things I would never pay to watch but can view now for free in order to see how bad they are). That movie was not as horrible as I expected it to be, although, it was not really funny either.
Interestingly, we had some sort of weird European band on our flight. I don't think they are actually a famous band, or even a band that makes music for a living, but it was definitely six or so guys, who spoke very little English (but did speak French, although only to the stewardess, to each other they spoke something that sounded possible Eastern European?), and who had various instruments of different types, a few guitars, a keyboard thing of some sort, and cymbals. They were sitting in the rows across from me on the plane, and then we ended up going through the security checkpoint to get into the departures area of Terminal Five together. I wish I hadn't lost them coming out of security because I really want to know what language they were speaking. But I decided that washing my face, brushing my teeth, and generally trying to feel human again after a seven hour trans-Atlantic flight was more of a priority than stalking random European bands.
It did not help that it was, quite literally, 80 degrees in Heathrow when I got out of security. Why? Given the fact I was wearing two shirts, and that I had managed to spill orange juice on both of these shirts during breakfast on the plane, I decided to change. Once I did this, and the aforementioned face wash/teeth brush, I felt human again and not perturbed at the general population of England for their freakishly hot airports.
So I have many hours to kill until my onward flight to Cairo. I think I will catch up on email, eventually get lunch, wander through the WH Smith's. Soak in the last bits of relatively normalcy before I depart for the lunacy that is Africa...
Interestingly, we had some sort of weird European band on our flight. I don't think they are actually a famous band, or even a band that makes music for a living, but it was definitely six or so guys, who spoke very little English (but did speak French, although only to the stewardess, to each other they spoke something that sounded possible Eastern European?), and who had various instruments of different types, a few guitars, a keyboard thing of some sort, and cymbals. They were sitting in the rows across from me on the plane, and then we ended up going through the security checkpoint to get into the departures area of Terminal Five together. I wish I hadn't lost them coming out of security because I really want to know what language they were speaking. But I decided that washing my face, brushing my teeth, and generally trying to feel human again after a seven hour trans-Atlantic flight was more of a priority than stalking random European bands.
It did not help that it was, quite literally, 80 degrees in Heathrow when I got out of security. Why? Given the fact I was wearing two shirts, and that I had managed to spill orange juice on both of these shirts during breakfast on the plane, I decided to change. Once I did this, and the aforementioned face wash/teeth brush, I felt human again and not perturbed at the general population of England for their freakishly hot airports.
So I have many hours to kill until my onward flight to Cairo. I think I will catch up on email, eventually get lunch, wander through the WH Smith's. Soak in the last bits of relatively normalcy before I depart for the lunacy that is Africa...
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Setting sail...
I leave my apartment in about a half an hour to go to my friends' condo, from whence (oh, yes, I said whence) we drive to Washington to deposit me at the airport. And then begins the 26 hours of international travel fun! That was slightly sarcastic.
It is raining here, we shall see how it is in Washington, and if it will delay my flight at all...
Here's hoping for smooth sailing. Inshallah!
It is raining here, we shall see how it is in Washington, and if it will delay my flight at all...
Here's hoping for smooth sailing. Inshallah!
Friday, May 22, 2009
T-minus 4 days
I leave, once again, for the Middle East in four short days. I have not retained enough Arabic. I feel this in my bones. What do I do in an attempt to remedy the situation? Write a blog post? Sure. Why not? Am I really going to re-learn inna and kanna and their sisters in the time it takes to write this? Well, possibly, but I became quite good at procrastination this semester, so I am going to continue the trend a bit longer.
I was very bad at updating last summer while I was in Cairo. This I attribute to a few reasons, mainly that I was going through a lot of personal issues last summer, and two that the program I was on was incredibly intense. Have you ever been to summer camp? You know how everyone seems to bond at warp speed because everyone is thrown in together in very close quarters and is spending pretty much all their time together? Imagine that experience, but you are also learning Arabic and living in the Middle East for the first time. That was my summer last year. It was wonderful and amazing and there were precious few bad moments, but everything was experienced at the extreme ends of the spectrum: very high highs, very low lows, and a great depth of feeling on everything that happened to fall in between.
I called last summer's experience "Middle East with Training Wheels," because we were held in the warm (and by the end somewhat stifling) embrace of AUC, where you can never feel too divorced from your American-ness, and where you experience Cairo from rather rarefied atmosphere. We lived in the AUC dorm, were taken to school every morning by the AUC shuttle, were within the little island of tranquility that is the AUC campus for 6 hours or so a day, and at night we had the run of Zamalek, the pretty island in the middle of the Nile that is possibly home to more expats than it is Egyptians. Cairo is not an easy city, even when you have the comforts of Western wealth and privilege supporting you, but nevertheless, it was a very coddled experience in many ways.
My experience this summer I am expecting will be much much different, but hopefully in ways that will make it easier for me to actual document the experience and will help me more in my Arabic acquisition. (Which, after all, is the whole point of the exercise. Supposedly.) I will not be living in a dorm, but rather sharing two apartments over the course of the summer. I won't be going on out-of-town trips every weekend (with city tours on the odd weeks we stayed in Cairo), but rather staying put in the city more. (Although I am hoping to make it to the Western Desert. And maybe Dahab. And there are tentative plans for Rome and Jerusalem at various points over the summer. And this is STILL less travel than I did last summer.) I will be attending a private language school, but less exclusive than AUC, and far less coddling in how they treat students. This, in short, will be in the Middle East without Training Wheels, but I am more prepared for it after last summer, and I am going to be in a far less intense emotional state (hopefully!) and thus able to blog the experience.
Saying I am actually going to blog something seems to be the kiss of death to my actual blogging it, but I kept up (for the most part!) the Lent blog, so I have hopes I can keep up the Cairo blog as well.
I post this because I think it is one of the better encapsulations of the chaos that is Cairo. The traffic as a metaphor gets old, but it works. The cars, the buses, the random horse cart... I think my favorite part of the video starts at 1:29, when you can watch the guy walk across all the lanes of traffic totally unfazed. Need to get back in the habit of doing that...
I was very bad at updating last summer while I was in Cairo. This I attribute to a few reasons, mainly that I was going through a lot of personal issues last summer, and two that the program I was on was incredibly intense. Have you ever been to summer camp? You know how everyone seems to bond at warp speed because everyone is thrown in together in very close quarters and is spending pretty much all their time together? Imagine that experience, but you are also learning Arabic and living in the Middle East for the first time. That was my summer last year. It was wonderful and amazing and there were precious few bad moments, but everything was experienced at the extreme ends of the spectrum: very high highs, very low lows, and a great depth of feeling on everything that happened to fall in between.
I called last summer's experience "Middle East with Training Wheels," because we were held in the warm (and by the end somewhat stifling) embrace of AUC, where you can never feel too divorced from your American-ness, and where you experience Cairo from rather rarefied atmosphere. We lived in the AUC dorm, were taken to school every morning by the AUC shuttle, were within the little island of tranquility that is the AUC campus for 6 hours or so a day, and at night we had the run of Zamalek, the pretty island in the middle of the Nile that is possibly home to more expats than it is Egyptians. Cairo is not an easy city, even when you have the comforts of Western wealth and privilege supporting you, but nevertheless, it was a very coddled experience in many ways.
My experience this summer I am expecting will be much much different, but hopefully in ways that will make it easier for me to actual document the experience and will help me more in my Arabic acquisition. (Which, after all, is the whole point of the exercise. Supposedly.) I will not be living in a dorm, but rather sharing two apartments over the course of the summer. I won't be going on out-of-town trips every weekend (with city tours on the odd weeks we stayed in Cairo), but rather staying put in the city more. (Although I am hoping to make it to the Western Desert. And maybe Dahab. And there are tentative plans for Rome and Jerusalem at various points over the summer. And this is STILL less travel than I did last summer.) I will be attending a private language school, but less exclusive than AUC, and far less coddling in how they treat students. This, in short, will be in the Middle East without Training Wheels, but I am more prepared for it after last summer, and I am going to be in a far less intense emotional state (hopefully!) and thus able to blog the experience.
Saying I am actually going to blog something seems to be the kiss of death to my actual blogging it, but I kept up (for the most part!) the Lent blog, so I have hopes I can keep up the Cairo blog as well.
I post this because I think it is one of the better encapsulations of the chaos that is Cairo. The traffic as a metaphor gets old, but it works. The cars, the buses, the random horse cart... I think my favorite part of the video starts at 1:29, when you can watch the guy walk across all the lanes of traffic totally unfazed. Need to get back in the habit of doing that...
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