Mule

Today's my first payday, at long last. As of three days ago, I was down to ten pounds ($1.70) and struggling to make it through today. I would have, but then I remembered I had to pay the maid this morning (one of the conditions of my basically free apartment is that I keep and pay a maid once a week, who cleans the house for LE25). Luckily, in searching through my important documents under the bed, I unearthed 13 genuine American dollars, so I changed six of them at the grocery store this morning.
A guy I met in a bus station unwittingly tore through my Ukrainian alias. I was looking for a city bus in the direction of an Arabic institute where I was hoping to take classes (no luck this session), and he helped me find the right bus. But in the small chat that ensued, he turned out to be an entrepreneur strangely keen to conduct business with Ukraine. Despite my very bad salesmanship in trying to stifle his interest, he promised to pay my workplace a visit:

Businessman: So you import steel to Egypt. Is it good quality?
Me: Not really. South Korea or Japan has much better steel.
Businessman: But it's very cheap then?
Me: No, actually it's sort of expensive.
Businessman: How much is it for 100 tonnes of steel?
Me: I don't know exactly . I'm a new employee.
Businessman: I have decided to buy 100 tonnes of steel from you. When can I come by your office?
Me: Give me your phone number and I'll call you later, God willing.

Given that he didn't seem to be the most savvy investor in the world, I probably could have asked for a down payment on the steel in cash on the spot, and walked off with it. Oh well.

Even though yesterday was the biggest national holiday in Egypt, celebrating the 23 July 1952 overthrow of King Farouq and expulsion of the hated British, it somehow didn't occur to me until I was drifting off to sleep that it was July 23rd, my dad's birthday. D'oh!
To commemorate the occasion, President Mubarak gave the same rousing speech he's given for the last 22 years, i.e. the Revolution is a great inspiration to the 3rd World, it is still alive today, but we face great challenges as well as great possibilities.
I'm back in the internet cafe to do some research on the Ukraine. When I was talking with some accountant I met along the Nile beach the other day, I blanked and couldn't remember the name of the president when he asked. I tried to blurt out some incomprehensible, long name in a Soviet submarine commander's accent, but only said "Mar..kov. Markov. Yeah, Boris Markov." in a very unconvincing way. He just looked at me blankly, so I abruptly changed subjects and went off on a tirade against the post-Communist management of the economy. Well, I wish it could qualify as a tirade, but it was constrained by my vocabulary, so it was more like "The economy is smaller now, and there is much unemployment."

President--Leonid Kuchma
Prime Minister--Viktor Yanukovych
Foreign Minister--Anatoliy Zlenko

From my experience in Jordan, I decided before I came to pretty much always lie about my nationality. Not that I ever felt physically threatened in Jordan as an American, just as far as language goes it's much better to pretend I don't speak English. More so than Jordanians, Egyptians love showing off their entire repertoire of English at any passing foreigner, especially if they only know 10 or 15 words. In Jordan, I always said I was American, and after a few months, just tried to force the conversation into Arabic. So while whoever I was talking with spoke in semi-intelligible English, I would use even worse Arabic, often causing people to impatiently say "What's wrong with you? Why don't you speak in English?".
So here in Egypt I've just been denying that I speak English at all from the onset. Plus, thanks to our government's foreign policy, I now don't really feel safe saying I'm an American anymore. I never got this feeling in Jordan except twice, once just after we started bombing Afghanistan and I was leaving Arabic class with a group of Americans and we noticed the square in the middle of campus at the University of Jordan was more crowded than usual. It slowly hit us that we were completely surrounded by girls wearing hijab and sort of standing in line, and right after we passed through an anti-war/anti-American demonstration began. The other time was when I was riding a bus in downtown Amman and the guy next to me turned out to be an Iraqi refugee who had fled to Jordan after the sanctions. Luckily I had told him I was Norwegian, and he had a particular affinity for Scandanavia since his sister had been granted asylum in Sweden.
So in Egypt I said I was Norwegian from the onset. This worked fine at first, and I would pretend to be completely befuddled when people said "Welcome to Egypt" or "Do you speak English?", usually managing to force them to speak Arabic with me, although some lost all interest in me when they realized I wasn't going to teach them English. But then with one friend, the Muhammad Zeeku I mentioned earlier (since Muhammad is such a common name, everyone named Muhammad has a nickname on top of that), Norway's wealth became a problem. Muhammad, who has worked in various tourist jobs and has told me the story three times of how he once was working at the hotel where some Italian pop singer stayed overnight, kept talking about how he was 'choked' in Egypt and wanted to get out, to anywhere in the developed world. Maybe a half hour after we met, after reaffirming that we were best of friends and should do anything for each other, he suggested that I call my dad and have him find Muhammad a job and wife in Norway. (A few days later, after I refused his offer of helping me find an Egyptian girlfriend, saying that I only liked Norwegian or Swedish women, he claimed that he, too, had always only been interested in Norweigan or Swedish women).
Summoning up my scant knowledge of Norway, I've told Muhammad horror stories to try to discourage him, with little effect:

Me: Nine months of the year, there is very cold weather with the sun only two hours a day.
Him: Good. It's so hot here, that'll be refreshing.

Me: There's no entertainment in Norway. Only alcohol and women, and for this reason the suicide rate is the highest in the world.
Him: Alcohol is taboo, but I like Norwegian women.

Me: The food in Egypt [which generally is not very exciting] is better than the food in Norway. We only eat lutefisk, which is a disgusting raw fish.
Him: I really love fish!

So my story of being a Norwegian student just graduated from the University of Oslo in political science and economics, not speaking a word of English, and working at Al-Ahram "researching Norwegian, Swedish, and German newspapers" wasn't working out as planned. I decided I needed something more Eastern European. People sometimes mistake me for Russian, but I thought there could be antagonism there because of the bloody war in Chechnya against Muslim separatists. So I became a Ukrainian who moved to Cairo seeking a better life (on the World Bank quality of life list, Ukraine is actually just below Egypt), and working in a import-export business owned by a Ukrainian businessman, near the Al-Ahram office.
Now I just have to remember who thinks I'm Norwegian, Ukrainian, or American. Luckily the change in nationality roughly coincided with my move to Ma'adi, so everyone in Ma'adi thinks I'm Ukrainian, while the scattered people I know downtown think I'm Norweigan. It's pretty tricky. I may at some point have to 'tell the truth' to Muhammad Zeeku, namely that I'm actually from Ukraine, and only told him that I was Norwegian because I knew that good Muslims don't like godless Communists and Ukraine is still dominated by its old Communist leadership. The Norwegian connection might be worked in saying that Mom or Dad was a Communist who fled Norway in the late 60s.
Of course, maybe I'm just making this way too complicated. A very white British guy I happened to meet said that people would believe anything he told them, and that he had taken to saying he was Chinese or Mongolian. But I am staying for a while, so I need to iron out my story a little bit. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions.

I just spent the afternoon at Al-Azhar University, hanging out with my friends Amin and 'Abd al-Baseer, both Afghanis studying Islamic law there. I couldn't actually get into the university, because the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University was giving the Friday sermon at the mosque there. Since he's the leading interpreter of Islamic law for the world's billion or so Sunni Muslims, security was tight, and though I showed them my International Student Identity Card as if that would prove I wasn't a CIA assassin, they denied me entrance, and made me wait in a cafeteria holding pen with several Senegalese Muslims who were just trying to go pray. Security was kind enough to wave down the first passing Afghan and have him go get Amin and 'Abd al-Baseer for me, then we went out for liver and tea. Mmmm.
Right now I'm back at the internet cafe again cause I have an hour and a half to burn before I need to head up to Shubra in northern Cairo, where I'm meeting my friend Mohammed to play billiards, basketball, and sitting around drinking tea while Mohammed begs me to pressure my dad into getting him a Norwegian visa. (Mohammed, and a few other friends, think I'm a Norwegian who can't speak a word of English, while currently I'm telling everyone who doesn't know better that I'm Ukrainian, so as to avoid the problem of people wanting me to issue them a visa. More on nationality issues later). Tomorrow, back to Al-Ahram Weekly. I've also decided I still have time to enroll in part-time Arabic classes, maybe two mornings a week, which hopefully will start in early August.

If I ever get demoted from sub-editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, maybe I can get a job upstairs on the 13th floor restaurant editing their menus. I ate their for the first time on Tuesday, and the English version had its share of typos, such as a main dish advertised as "Bird Things." Much more revolting, however, was the description of the dish I ordered. It was a tasty Lebanese chicken dish in an herb sauce, but unfortunately Arabs have no letter "P" and often confuse "B" and "P". Apparently the restaurant menu editor did have a program with spellcheck, but this just made things worse. The menu, verbatim:
Lebanese Chicken with Rise in a Herpes Sauce.

Just a little introduction for those of you I haven't been in touch with much...
After graduating from Swarthmore College June 1st, I went home to Tennessee for 10 days, then flew off to Cairo, Egypt. My plans were kind of vague, but working on my Arabic is the main reason I'm in Cairo and not Murfreesboro, Washington, or Philadelphia. Despite my limited planning beforehand (or as Egyptians would say, thanks to my trust in God) I managed to find an apartment and a job after about three weeks here. The apartment, kindly lent to me for free by a Swiss woman leaving the country for two months, is in Ma'adi, a suburb of 1.5 million or so south of Cairo. One large neighborhood in Ma'adi, Digla, is home to much of Cairo's European and American expatriate community, and has an abundance of foreign-language schools, karate classes for five year-olds, and the like. I'm sort of on the edge of Digla, bordering the working-class neighborhood of Al-Arab, which means I'm close to a dusty open-air market full of cheap fresh fruits and vegetables and a good bakery, but far away from the Alfi supermarket in downtown Ma'adi. My apartment is surprisingly nice, though, two stories and three bedrooms just for myself. On the downside it's on the fifth floor with a broken elevator, has a major ant infestation, and no air conditioning. These drawbacks apply to probably 9 out of 10 apartments in Cairo, so I can't complain too much. I've only seen two working elevators during my month here, and was afraid to actually use them lest they break down in transit, not to be fixed for years.
Job-wise, I'm working as an assistant editor at Al-Ahram, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ , the English-language international weekly edition of an Egyptian newspaper. It's good work, with Thursdays and Fridays off as well as every other Wednesday.
Gotta run, I'm meeting a Mohammed for lunch and then going off to work. I'll post more in a few days, and I'll try to get over the boring basics of where I am and what I'm doing, and get to posting horror stories about my mishaps with Egyptian plumbing.