Mule

I went to my first Arab wedding Sunday night, between the best friends of a good friend of mine. I'd met the groom once in a coffeehouse somewhere. The festivities took place in a dusty alley in the working-class district of Shubra (pop. 5 million, twice the size of Kiev). There were strings of colored lights strewn from window to window across the alley, and a lot of the residents who lived there watched from their balconies. Two gigantic speakers blasted Arabic music so as to make any conversation virtually impossible. The wedding convoy, which according to long-standing Arab tradition always goes by a Kodak place for wedding pictures, with the cars in the caravan, jam-packed with people somehow managing to dance within the vehicle, are all honking their horns, flashing their lights, and singing. I have the fortune of living five stories above a Kodak so the party never stops. Anyway, the wedding was supposed to start at 9:00, but the wedding convoy was a couple hours late, so everyone was sitting around having their eardrums liquified by Arab party music. Around 10:30, trying to entertain the guests, the groom's elderly father got up on stage and did a belly dance. I slipped out to go to a coffeehouse around the corner and watch the Al-Ahly versus Zamalek game. These are the two best and most popular soccer teams in Egypt, and their showdowns always leave the streets of Cairo unusually quiet as everyone's off watching the game. I'm a Zamalkawi (Zamalek fan) just because I happened to buy one of their shirts, but I like them more since they're the perpetual underdogs (they were thrashed 6-1 at the championship last year, and lost this match 3-1). I've tried to explain why I like Zamalek to people, since maybe 75% of Cairenes of Ahlawis, but there isn't a word for underdog. I've tried to explain the concept using the metaphors of the Israelis and Palestinians, Yankees and Red Sox, or Americans and anyone, which sometimes gets the idea across. Anyways, I ended up in a coffeehouse full of Ahlawis, and after Al-Ahly went up 1-0, a 70+ year-old man did a victory dance in front of me, singing incoherently and flapping his arms like a chicken.
Back at the wedding, the newlyweds and my friend Sharif finally showed up in their rented car, and the festivities began. The bride and groom went on stage to receive visitors bearing money (since weddings are very expensive, it's customary to just give money, so I did like the Egyptians and palmed 100 pounds to give to Walid when I shook his hand). The rest of the night wasn't extraordinarily exciting, though one guy decided that the foreigner wasn't dancing enough, so he dragged me up to the middle of everyone and forced me to dance, helpfully handing me a cane as a prop. Eventually Sharif and the groom's father came to my aid and started dancing with me. That was pretty much the night. I thought, with how expensive weddings are, there would be a massive banquet at which I could gorge myself, but all we got was free soft drinks.

I have only two weeks left in my current apartment before I have to start paying rent somewhere. Ideally, I would love to live with an Egyptian family, but that's kind of hard since it's not really kosher for strange foreign guys to live with a family that has girls. One chance has come up, and I'm torn as to whether I should take it. It's with a really nice family that I know from the first few weeks when I was living downtown, and I would have a spacious second-floor flat all to myself, but still eating with the family. The one issue is that they live way out in the boonies, and it would be about a 90 minute commute between home and work each way. I would have to ride the Metro about 8 stops to Giza, take a bus to the end of Pyramids Road, wait for a microbus in view of the Pyramids (doing that every day should take all the charm away from them) for another 40 minutes way out into the countryside. The village is really charming, reminding me of Jordan a lot more than Cairo does, and the kids in the family (15 year-old boy, 8 year-old girl, 3 year-old boy) are really enthusiastic about having me move in. I should decide in the next couple days what I'm gonna do.
Right now I'm going to meet Nori's mom at a coffee, sheesha, and chess joint. Stay in touch.

It's hard to believe that today it's been a year since Eric died. I still remember perfectly vividly standing by the computer talking on the phone to Schwartz when he broke the news. When he first called I was just surprised, not having been expecting a phone call from Schwartz or any Swatties. Pretty quickly though, just as he got around to the reason he was calling, I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that something bad must have happened. Roban happened to be in Tennessee visiting his grandmother, and so when someone, Amelia I think, finally got in touch with him, we were able to fly from New York to Providence together, where Schwartz and Rob Lopez, one of EJ's best friends from home, picked us and drove up to Boxford, MA. It was really comforting to be able to be with Roban for the surreal trip to Eric's funeral, and then with Amelia, Nori, Misha, Farid, Rishi, Ben Ben, Wayne, Schwartz, and other Swatties that made it to the funeral. Roban and I joined the five Swatties that had rented a van and driven up from Philadelphia on the way back after the memorial service.
Eric's absence really changed our senior year for the worse. I know Roban and I both missed EJ regularly bursting into our rooms unannounced, to try to get us to go out and party with him, or throw around a frisbee, or go to Sharples and wolf down a burger, fries, and a few bowls of frozen yogurt in under five minutes, as he was wont to do. I think guilt about not having spent more time with him contributed to my burning out towards the end of senior year, and finally giving up perpetual studying during the last couple weeks before honors exams. I couldn't help wondering who among Swatties I was never going to see again after June 1st and later regret not having spent more time with. The last I heard from EJ, about a week before he died, was in response to a belated birthday message from me (he had just turned 21 and had a wild party in Boston with all his friends from home) He only wrote a couple lines, but said that he was having a great summer (unusual enthusiasm on his part), that work was ok, and he was looking forward to going back to school.
I meant to write more, but I've been sitting for a while now, and I couldn't sleep last night, and the news from Israel and Iraq isn't exactly improving my mood. Just two weeks ago I edited a long, none-too-exciting interviewing with Sergio de Mello, in which he urged the Arabs to give the interim government a chance. Now he's dead, along with a bunch of other aid workers and UN personnel. Looks like the UN's attempts to help restore stability put them too much on the American side for some parties in Iraq. Sorry Jimmy, but I don't think I'll be visiting anytime soon. Take care of yourself.

On the Metro on the way downtown, I was standing not too far away from a guy who turned out to be from Swaziland, and was clearly not at all Egyptian. Further down the car, two young Egyptian women kept staring at him, making racist remarks, and laughing. Finally, after about ten minutes of this, clearly angry, he said something like "Stop already. I understand everything you're saying. How can you be so rude?" This kind of thing happens a fair amount in Egypt. Despite the relative abundance of foreigners, a lot of Egyptians will still shamelessly stare at anyone who looks different, and of course assume they speak no Arabic. It can get pretty annoying, although sometimes it's fun if I can pick up on what they're saying and get in a clever parting remark before I get off the Metro (not very often).

This is the kind of atrocious writing I sometimes have to deal with at Al-Ahram Weekly ; metaphors as horribly tortured as a dissident Islamist in Syria and as over-stretched as that militant being made to fit into a bed of Procrustes. Here's a sample:
"In spite of the fact that a band in Washington, which has pirated the WMD record to play against Syria, has woken to the fact that everyone knows that the record is scratched and liable to backfire, when Damascus moved from the defensive to the offensive and appealed to the UN Security Council to issue a resolution to issue a resolution [sic for the whole quote, of course] to make the Middle East a region free of WMD, the band in Congress that had been frustrated in its drive to push through the Syria Accountability Bill because it is detrimental to US interests and threatens to needlessly complicate relations with Damascus hoped to compensate by calling for an investigative hearing on Syria's WMD programme and its ramifications with regard to US security and regional stability...
For the US to repeat the WMD ruse with Syria would be a strategic blunder, all the more so because the very ruse has proven itself far from foolproof. Perhaps the situation can best be illustrated as follows [unlikely]: We have an American elephant that produces a third of the global production and whose dollar represents two-thirds of the global currency flow. On its back rides an ant, called Israel, which the elephant coddles, protects and listens occasionally to the advice it offers. Standing in the way of that ant's ambitions for expansion is an obstacle called Syria. Is it in the interests of the elephant to remove that obstacle on the spurious pretext of WMD when Israel is bristling with an arsenal full of such weapons? Of course not. And to pretend otherwise is to set aside all accepted norms by which great powers pursue their interests and to promote instead for the types of conspiracy theories that are no less absurd here than in the case of Iraq. Moreover, if Israel does indeed expand geographically, its relatively small population does not permit for a commmensurate demographic density, which will render Israel much like a dinosaur [or ant] with a huge body and small head, and destined for extinction."

A day or two after I got to Egypt, the state censors decided to ban Matrix Reloaded, as they had done with the first Matrix. The reason? Not the violence, apparently, as the censors praised the graphics. But the depiction of the Architect of the world as an Colonel Sanders-type figure was deemed potentially offensive to good Muslims and Copts (as well as the couple dozen Jews still in Egypt) they said:
"Despite the high technology and fabulous effects of the movie, it explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in."
There was also criticism of the repeating theme of Zionism in the film.

Politicians start blogging:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/opinion/13DOWD.html

I was at work until 8:30 PM last night editing this poorly-constructed piece on Syria by some guy David Hirsch, only to come in the next morning and find out that all my changes had been undone. Apparently he's an elderly bigshot who usually writes for the Guardian and only gives up articles on the provision that we don't change a thing. His piece, which was 2,000 words, had no paragraphs, and only 12-15 sentences, but with a few dozen semi-colons. But a superior patiently explained that with David Hirsch, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said, we are not allowed to even correct grammatical mistakes. The result being, of course, that sometimes one of those three writes a god-awful piece that we print verbatim, as I've seen happen with Noam Chomsky.

No work today. Hosni Guindi, our editor-in-chief, and the founder of Al-Ahram Weekly fourteen years ago, passed away last night. He was 63, but had always been really frail and sickly, and for the last two weeks had been in intensive care. Much of the paper is being reworked as an obituary in his memory. Right now, everyone's going off to his church.

Woke up yesterday morning with a sizeable chip from a front tooth missing. Put me in a philosophical mood, pondering my own mortality as the 15 passenger microbus (unlike Swarthmore, Egypt has unsurprisingly ignored recent studies about their greater risk of rollover. just not really a priority, understandably) zoomed down the Nile Corniche at breakneck speed. Usually I take the much safer Metro to work, but yesterday I had to go downtown to Tahrir Square to get a bogus International Student Identity Card made--once I pick that up tomorrow morning, I can get a three month Metro pass, good for both lines, for LE25 ($4), and from then on out I'll always be taking the Metro. August 4th used to be such a day of joy and happiness for me, as Roger Clemens' birthday. Playing Oregon Trail on the Rickards' computer in the late 80s, I would always commemmorate the occasion by going hunting for food instead of continuing on the trail. It wasn't the best time to go hunting, since by then the fat, slow buffalo that I could slaughter four or five of in a day and leave to rot were increasingly rare, while the speedy bears of the Far West were still a ways off. But sometime I could shoot a few squirrels or bag a deer, for the Rocket. And then he went Yankee. Let us never speak of this again.
I had an interesting conversation with Gamal Nkrumah, editor of the International page and coincidentally son of former President for Life Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana http://www.ghana.co.uk/history/presidents/kwame_nkrumah.htm
He grew up in Egypt, and was reminiscing about the huge cultural change that really happened pretty quickly at the end of the 70s and in the early 80s. He said back in the 60s and 70s, it was almost unheard of for women in Egypt to wear any kind of veil. It had been fashionable with the upper-class for a while in the 1920s and 30s, but had almost completely vanished, except for the rare hijab (headscarf), which was kind of a trans-Mediterranean fashion, as prevalent in Italy as Egypt. Veiling was something that people considered to be a phenomenon of the ultra-traditionalist Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia. But then after 1979, with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the growing influence of the Gulf States throughout the 70s, and who knows what cultural factors, hijab and other forms of veiling came into style. Gamal told of one friend of his who had grown up in Egypt, but left in the early 70s, and returned for a week-long visit a decade later. She said "Egypt's been through a lot of changes. And I couldn't believe how many Christian nuns there were around!" --having never seen fellow Egyptian Muslim women wearing the hijab before, she thought they were Coptic nuns. It's interesting to watch the older Egyptian movies, from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, since they look so much like white-bread America from the same period, down to the teenagers with a rock band in the basement. One famous old movie I saw a bit of, I think from 1975, had both the rock band and a family of eight kids run by a single mom who was also a corporate executive. Gotta go to work, take care.

The paychecks for the Al-Ahram Weekly staff due Wednesday didn't come then, or Thursday, or Friday, or today. That combined with my general lethargy on Thursday made for an unexciting 22nd birthday (yeah, you forgot didn't you. tsk tsk). Spent it studying Arabic, eating the last of my tomatoes, onions, green beans, and potatoes, then going out for ice cream along the Nile Corniche with Ashraf. Financial resources now down to five piastres (less than one cent). Food supplies running low. Must conserve precious personal pronouns. Seriously, though, I'm fine. A co-worker is floating me a LE10 loan to cover me till tomorrow so I don't have to break into my hard currency account back home.
In other news, the early wave of proselytizing attempts has died down. Oddly, most of them were by Coptic Christians determined that I abandoned my heretical American Lutheran/Norwegian Lutheran/Ukrainian Orthodox ways, but Muhammad Zeeku (who I'm no longer seeing at all) gave a good try for the Muslim side. One Copt (Copts make up about 10% of Egypt's population) gave me some nice pamphlets, an Arabic New Testament, and showed me the Coptic worship rituals. Saints play a big role, as with folk Islam in Egypt, and Coptic Christianity has both saints familiar to us from the Bible, and ones originating in Egypt. Examples of the latter include Mar Girgis, a martyred Roman soldier who was adopted by invading English crusaders as St. George, and Abu Sayfayn (Father of Two Swords), who was fighting Berbers but only had one sword until Jesus miraculously appeared and gave him a sword made of fire to help slay the pagans.