Back from the dead

So, I haven't posted in ages, and that's probably a bad thing. And to save time and everyone's eyes (if everyone hasn't stopped checking this thing), I'll bullet and highlight the details of at least what's been going on.



- First stomp into Cairo-- covered the northern City of the Dead, so named because...well, let's just say it's a bunch of people squatting in a graveyard. A very big, very old graveyard. Mosques of ibn-Tulun, the Ghuri complex, and baksheeshed our way into a bunch of others. Climbed my first minarets-- also with baksheesh in hand. Discovered the seediest bar in Cairo and ran into Charlie in the street-- back from Ethiopia and the Sudan (miserable traveling, he says)-- essentially christened the place as the watering hole before departures elsewhere. Serves tomatoes as barfood. Not a bad idea. Exhausted (must have walked twenty miles between everything).

- Rosetta. Most medieval town we've been at to boot: awesome. Nothing much except a lot of Ottoman Delta-style buildings with a plethora of mashrabiya work on the windows. Like a scene from the Arabian Nights. cobblestone alleys. Nice day trip-- recently restored (albeit not functional) Turkish bath. Incredible. Have to hang around the Delta a little more. Cheap, too.

- Managed to get out to the Anfushi district south of Ras al-Tin: old Ottoman quarter with a few mashrabiya windows and winding alleys. Supposedly a large Sufi contingency there. In Durrell's time it was the drug-and-prostitute quarter. Very rustic. Very atmospheric. I might move, it's so deliciously so. Constant attention from children. They're always flabbergasted when I start talking to them-- when they ask "You can speak Arabic well?" I ask "Can you speak English well?" Some nod their heads yes and try it out. I've developed the Egyptian habit of clicking my tongue instead of saying a simple "no," and the "Ah" for "yes." It's kind of irritating.

- Winter is officially here, announced by one hell of a rainstorm the other night. Breathtaking-- couldn't sleep so I threw on my raincoat and went for a walk on the Corniche at 3 in the morning. Not a soul awake-- waves splashed into the street occasionally. I felt very Durrell.

- Mt Sinai. After one failed attempt, one aborted attempt, and one man down, Norman and I spent our Thanksgiving on the mountain of Moses. I'm going to stop here because I've got a headache, but rest assured, a link for pictures and a proper post shall follow.

Some notes on awkwardness and Orientalism

So, my birthday has come and gone. Most of the Brits were off on their respective adventures-- Charlie wandering around somewhere in the Sudan (apparently he can do that) and Alex was off making desert romance in Siwa, an oasis I have yet to visit and am more or less reserving for our "Thanksgiving" break. We all headed down to Cap d'Or for the night and proceded to celebrate the landmark day in the only fashion worthy of it-- drinking bad bad Egyptian beer. The atmosphere was nice, at least-- so nice that, once Sheikh Ali caught wind of the occasion, he spread the news among the rest of the bar and we ended up having a round bought for us.

Classes have suddenly become serious-- can't really avoid that. Eagerly anticipating the trip the Sinai this coming week (Norman and I have planned for the best and the worst--I think Alex is coming too) and will be a relief for the ongoing torpor.

Most awkward moment of my life was yesterday-- had a massage at the Cecil Hotel (Durrell's old place). Expected there to be a male massuse...there wasn't. So, standing there, speaking Arabic to an extremely pretty Muslim girl (as I discovered later) and only wearing a towel...only to be rubbed down with lemon oil by her and then questioned (as she giggled) about "how it was possible for me not to have a habiba" and that she would like to "find a nice man like me"...made for some awkward moments. Worst massage ever. Unfortunately there are no Turkish hammams here as there are in Cairo. Damnation.

I had a snob moment, too: when I was inquiring after the price of a massage (in Arabic) and the two receptionists (one of which was the girl who would massage me) were giggling over my Arabic, saying I "was of honey" (quite literally), a random, very seedy looking man in a suit who was reading a poster on the wall turns and says, in English: "I was shocked to hear you speaking our language. Normally foreigners don't bother."

I was so irritated at his tone and his sort of sneer at the word "foreigner" that I answered, slowly: "Normally, a person begins a conversation with 'Salaamu-'alaykum' or 'Good evening.'" He was somewhat shocked-- and the girls were scandalized. Later, they told me he was the head engineer for the building--hence the haughtiness. Doctors and engineers here are akin to godlike figures; working men have little worth. Actually, it's pretty common to see what I remember my father referring to as a "cocaine nail" -- the pinky fingernail grown out about an inch-- just to indicate that the person doesn't work with his hands. This man had very long fingernails.

Then began the round of personal questions, after which I told him he was rude and asked the girls for a massage. I suppose that's a landmark: by now, I've gotten used to the class mentality, the chauvinism, the strange invasions of one's personal life. But it doesn't mean that I have to incorporate them into my personality-- accept them only as far as is necessary to survive and appreciate them as the idiosyncrasies of a culture very different than my own (despite its efforts to the contrary).

A note on Orientalism, because I've been accused of it a lot as of late. I think that, at least in the American university system (and I recognize that Midd doesn't represent all), in the field of Eastern studies we are extremely well-equipped to recognize our outsider-ness and search for the uniting factors common to the human experience. In fact, I've never really felt tempted to say that "the East" as place was something uniformly backwards and sensual and all that jazz. However, to say it is the same as "the West" is just as wrong-- there is certainly a gap between the two-- and to say that "the West" is the problem, that in art, literature, common experience, we project the negative or undesirable aspects of our culture onto the East is also the problem.

Interestingly, every Egyptian I've spoken to on the matter has been much more of an Orientalist (in the Bernard Lewis sense) than I am: they speak of progress and the "old Egypt" and the virtues of the West more than we do. Technology, politics, development...even down to how clean the streets are-- old men in coffeeshops look to Europe and America as the paradigm of what Egypt should be, rather than what it is presently. Is this a product of colonialism? I don't know exactly. It could just be that, after occupying the country for so long and imposing our own viewpoints on the people that they have simply taken them for their own. But I don't think so.

There is such a think as what is good, what is bad. The British were here for decades and left a liquor impact here to such an extent that the word "al-whisky" is used to refer to all alcohol, not just whisky proper, I'm assuming that's because it's all they drank. But the whisky that's made here is awful, and they don't know it. The beer is terrible, and they don't know it. The decorations are awful, and they think they're amazing. I'm actually sort of distressed by that: I remember Vera telling me that Mona pointed out a head of Cleopatra (one of those awful touristy things) and saying it was amazing. And I get criticized for wanting brass trays and cushions on the ground because they're "backwards" and Bedouin (interesting relationship that the populous has with the Bedu...to be discussed later).

Anyway, I've got to stop being depressing.

Fear and Loathing in Iskanderiyya

So, I'm sitting on the windswept granite benches of the library stealing internet to download the latest episodes of Bones-- which is my one English junkie addiction that I couldn't even break in the States and really just don't want to. But it's closing time and I get to watch the confounded whole college of arts walk by to catch minbuses and all the hijabbed librarians exit, some stopping to chat, others to use the ATM. It's quite a nice exercise in birdwatching.

Alex after Ramadan is an interesting place. After finishing Durrell's Justine and nearly getting decapitated by Mona for saying it was the most beautiful thing I've ever read, I think I understand a little more about the place. It's coping with a past, and the whole thing seems to breathe like a damaged girl-- so I suppose I can't really blame the inhabitants for not really seeming like the rest of Egypt. There are no Greeks or Jews or English here anymore, but the whole place seems to want to imitate another time, another location-- it has modernized too fast to the effect that the emulation of Western fashion is misunderstood, that the buildings are garish and gaudy, and all elements of the past that might make the place a little more beautiful for the environment fall to pieces or are covered over by advertisements. All history is left entirely to the memory-- and that, truly, is the shame of it all. The most historical city in the world with the least to physically offer.

There is a proverb: "Weep for those that weep for the past." I do not weep for the past. I weep that it is not remembered.

This is the City of Memory. Why does no one remember here?

Nile cruises, Ozymandias, and bad Egyptian beer

Sound exciting?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Those lines from Shelley became something of an obsession this week-- after reading that Shelley was inspired by the largest colossus ever constructed in Egypt-- that of Rameses II, which lies toppled in the Ramsseum (the largest temple complex ever constructed, but, alas, little remains of it on the west bank of the Theban Necropolis). The name Ozymandias, interestingly enough, is a Greek corruption of one of Rameses' titles-- User-maat-Re (the Ruler in the name of Ra) which was carved on the colussus' right arm.

Irritatingly, we never got to see the colussus itself-- due to the inflexability of our tour group, we merely drove by (I did manage to glimpse the enormous, toppled structure, though driving by), but the words constantly haunted my thoughts the entire trip. We were, after all, seeing things which very much had the same sentiments about them. Rameses in particular was obsessed with the idea that he should remain remembered throughout history-- so much so, in fact, that his cartouches are engraved deeper than any other pharaoh's-- often to the point of several inches. And it certainly was a danger-- Hatshepsut, Akhenaten...along with many others that had serious religious and political conflicts with one another...had their names literally scratched out from the very monuments they had erected-- even the names of gods whose cults some pharaohs wished to suppress were chiselled from (seemingly) the walls of their history. The Copts had this nasty habit, too; most every temple we visited bore the marks of a "cleansed" space with images of gods and men effaced and Coptic inscriptions and crosses to mark that the place had once been used for the then-underground Christians.

Back track.

The tour company screwed up several times and Nehad's paranoia about traveling with seven girls on the less-than-quality Egyptian overnight train led to us taking a minibus down to Aswan, which is an eighteen hour overnight drive. Bad move. I later met a student from AUC at Luxor who, in addition to providing Norman and me a couple of couches for this weekend in Cairo, informed us that the overnight carriages, though simple and a little cramped, were completely fine.

Arrived in Aswan early--checked in to the M/S Ra around four. Norman and I spent the afternoon clambering over Fatimid gravesights and searching for the "unfinished obelisk," in the local granite quarries-- alas, it was closed early for the last night of Ramadan. Supposedly, this particular obelisk was to be the largest in existence (even larger than the "Lateran" one in Rome...outside St. John Lateran Basilica, hence the name), but was abandoned when a flaw was discovered in the stone. Whoops.

Actually, around sunset, we stumbled over a hill into an unlabelled part of the graveyard (all but the most recent graves are unlabelled-- a freak rainstorm washed away the tablets and now are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo) and encountered tombs that had collapsed in on themselves...revealing the bones of their occupants. It was kind of unnerving around dusk. Especially with stray dogs sniffing about the cliffside.

Meanwhile, the others slept. Losers.

The nitty-gritty details of the trip I'll omit, but to give you a general idea: we cruised north to Luxor, stopping at Edfu and Esna and Kom Ombu temples along the way, exploring (or rather, touring) the Theban Necroplis on the west bank of the Nile. The best moments were abandoning the tour to go off on our own-- Norman and I crossed the Nile to Elephantine Island at one point, where an ancient Egyptian settlement had guarded against the Nubians for years-- including a Aramaic one from the early Ptolemaic period that has revealed that practicing Jews guarded the Egyptian "gates of the Upper Kingdom" as part of the Elephantine garrison. I think I like the south better-- the streets are shoddy, but swept and clean, and the houses crumbling, but brightly painted (most often in blue, which is to ward off the evil eye).

Also managed to practice my bargaining skills-- Aswan is reputed to have the best souk outside of Cairo (certainly better than Alex's) and it looks like something out of the Arabian Nights. Finally bought a chess set (alabaster...knocked the guy down from 300 quid to one hundred) and particularly pretty box, along with many gifts. Also stumbled into maskouri glass-- popular in the medieval period, it's a kind of bubble glass that is extremely inexpensive...and incredibly beautiful. It's kind of the specialty of the south (along with beadwork). ALMOST bought a camelhair blanket...until I realized that I'm in Egypt, and although it gets chilly, I don't live in the desert.

Sunsets were incredible-- managed to get a few letters off while we were cruising north-- and the song that kept playing in my head was RT's "Banks of the Nile." I've never seen a place so desolate and yet so breathtaking.

It's good to be back in Alex, though-- borrowed the Quartet and started reading (still have to buy it...I'm only halfway through the first book and have to return it)-- and the weather's changed (a little chillier). I think the more you go away from a place, the more it feels like home. And I'm thinking it works the same for friends: the more you leave, and the more you can come back, the more they have a place in your heart.

Love to all. Miss everyone.

Apologies, Sufism, and the first of a series of very large headaches

First off: I want to apologize to all my readers (all eight of them) for the commonplace spelling errors that have occurred on this blog. I've thought about it for some time and have realized that, while typing, my mind has gone immediately to the phoenetic spelling of a word, rather than the correct one-- perhaps this is due to actually having a phoenetic language? It's happened quite often with the words "do" and "due," as well as "there" and "their." Others are most likely due to the fact that the keyboards around here have the tendency to stick n one key or aother. See: it just happened-- the n sticks with this one. I feel the need to apologize as both an aspiring writer and an English major. Haram on me.

Anyway, just got out of the first class on Sufism-- it's one on one, which I think is all but unheard of here, at least on the undergraduate level, and it was quite enjoyable, albeit headache-inducing. I was pleasantly surprised, in fact, to discover I got most of what he was talking about-- either that or he was merely jogging my memory with what I know of al-Ghazali and the three pillars of Islamic theology-- either way, I got it. But I also discovered that I can't write very fast in Arabic-- at least mildly legibly. The professor is quite a guy-- quoted the Gospel back to me when I started off with the "Man does not live by bread alone..." and I think he was pleased with my familiarity at least with the general idea of the system of thought.

I have to buy books. That's going to be a pain in the ass. All on theology. Shit. What am I doing in this country...

Flyboys at the Spitfire

Cut out of the expat party for Amy and headed over to Alex's place to check out the digs-- place is nicer than mine, which says a lot. I'm envious of his furniture and curtains, which are darker and thus make the place look a little more cozy. And he has a sea view. Bastard.

Ended up at the Spitfire to have a few beers-- ran into the first students from the TAFL Center who, according to them, never quite left the bar from the night before. The three of them have since parted ways, working for various and sundry British organizations abroad (one's in Dubai, another in Beirut) who proceeded to pay for our drinks and get wasted. Amazing how much beer they could drink. Eventually headed down to Mohammed Ahmed's for the "midnight feast" of fuul and falafel that we paid for (a ridiculous sum of 30 pounds Egyptian for five people...about five dollars).

Heard far too many war stories for my own good. Nice night, though. Don't feel like writing about it, I'm afraid.

Member of the Portugeuse Club and more...

Last night witnessed everyone at the TAFL center (Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language...the "institute" we all gather at)-- Britishers, Germans, and Americans alike-- gather for the Iftar (sunset breaking of the fast). Aside from the prune-juice being a little too strong for my liking, it was quite tasty.

Ended up upstairs and talked with the professors (who had sequestered themselves off on another level. I insisted that there was a caste system at work, much to Nehad's embarassment and what seemed like their bemusement). Then the stories from summer school came out-- mainly from Nagua and Nehad, who told everything about my chess addiction to dandyism on test days (they seemed impressed, actually) to chasing after the girls in the Spanish and French Schools over the summer. THAT was a little embarrassing, though I got a few conspiratorial winks from Mahmoud. We laughed loudly until the time for the evening prayer rolled around and the head table disappeared into the carpeted back room.

Interestingly enough, all of them wear the exact same shoes, only in different sizes. While they were absorbed in prayer, shoulder to shoulder, Magda (the office go-to, as it were) in her brightly colored turban decided to mix up their shoes behind them. When I pointed out that she was being mischievious while they were being pious, she turned to Nehad and asked her "Did you see Michael switch the shoes?" I'm very fond of the sense of humor here.

We caught cabs with the Brits down to Rushdy, which is something of th known expat quarter, to get into the Portugeuse Club. To enter, you have to knock on a giant gate to a villa, and you're hard pressed to even see a sign-- it all reminds you of a speakeasy, until you get past the grumbling doorguard into the courtyard, which is very tastefully lit and makes ample use of shadow. It's not much, as far as clubbing goes, but everyone inside is a foreigner (they actually don't allow Egyptians inside unless their English is unparalleled) and you buy your bottles of Stella five at a time. Chef's pretty decent, too-- we had a pizza that, despite lacking tomato sauce, was fantastic. Ended up buying a membership from the bartender-- won't have to pay to get in and now get twenty percent off drinks.

At the bar inside met a couple of guys from Stateside that hailed from Alabama-- one was an electronics instructor to the Egyptian Navy (who has no cultural sympathies whatsoever) and two maritime inspectors. All had been here for more than two years, and the first questions they asked me were: "How many times were you cheated from the airport to the house?" and "Does it suck yet?" Was actually quite embarassed for my own culturally empathetic tendencies. But it was still pretty nice to kick back a beer and a cigarette with a couple of blue-collar guys. Wouldn't trust them further than that, though.

Smoked so many cigarettes last night-- it was absurd. Largely do to sitting down next to an extremely interesting economics major from England who has a pure Orientalist interest in the Sudan. Made an agreement to go to Damascus with him in the winter.

Then the subject turned to Islamic theology.

We must have argued extremely vocally for quite some time-- I think I was the only academic with any background in the subject, the rest were Muslims, albeit knowledgeable ones, putting the quotidian spin on the religion. Unfortunately, I kept combating with scholastics. Snobby as it sounds to say that, it was remarkably unhelpful; everyone knows that the religion as an orthopraxy differs from the orthodoxy of the belief.

When we got into Sufi interpretatioins of certain ayahs, I looked at my watch, realized it was 3 AM and that I had had quite enough to drink. Said my goodbyes, and Lauren and I stumbled home.

What a night.