Mule

Life in Abu Seer is very different from anything else I've experienced. It's the first time I've lived in a village anywhere, and the sounds of city or suburban life are utterly lacking. It can still get pretty noisy in its own way though. While it's quieter than living in Worth or Willets dorm at Swarthmore, I still am usually awoken early in the morning. In the place of loud, angry fraternity brothers knocking over trash cans while bellowing incoherently, there are water buffaloes doing likewise. No groundskeeping crew on power lawnmowers or traffic on College Avenue, but there is a truck which hits the dirt paths at dawn with a very staticky loudspeaker saying "Water, Giza Water, Giza Water, Giza, Water, Giza!" ad nauseam.
The Pyramids at Abu Sir are pretty modest, really. They are standing proof that, no, extraterrestrial beings didn't build the pyramids, as some have believed after seeing the enormous structures at Giza with their millimeter-precise measurements. But then you go south a little bit, and you start seeing what led up to Giza, like the Bent Pyramid, which starts off looking good, but then halfway up the designers must have realized that the whole thing was going to fall and had to change the angle drastically. And in Abu Sir they don't even look pyramidal in shape unless you're seeing their silhouette at night. During the day they just look like an oversized child's playdough creation. But it's still moderately impressive, so there are a handful of tourists that come by every day, coming through the entrance which is typically overmanned by six to eight local guys sitting around chatting.
I've gotten more or less used to the 90 minute commute to and from Al-Ahram Weekly and Abu Seer, but it can still be pretty exhausting. During Ramadan, it'll be worse since everybody's going home at roughly the same time, plus people are hungry, parched, and really needing a smoke, so it'll be a rough combo. Ramadan starts either this Sunday or Monday, depending on the moon's mood. My Coptic friends in Zeitoun at the printer repair place were a little upset today to find out that I'll be fasting for Ramadan. Neveen, who's a Coptic choirgirl and the most religious of the bunch, seemed really offended that I was fasting for Ramadan, and not during any of the 140+ days a year when Copts have various fasts going.
Sean, who works with me at Al-Ahram, has started coming out to Abu Seer on occasional Fridays, to enjoy the good life there. My little sister Hasna', who keeps trying to recristen me "Captain Tuyoor" or "Captain Birds" instead of Khalid, and who successfully renamed Julia "Warda" or "Rose", has decided that his name should be "Samak Qirsh" or "Shark". All of these are supposedly because we like birds, roses, and sharks, successively. Hasna' is an absolutely adorable eight-year old, I'll have to get some good pictures of the family to bring back to the States. Anyway, when we're together somewhere in Abu Sir or Cairo, Sean will often play along with my Norwegian identity, and we'll try to speak solely in Arabic and/or Jibberish. An actual conversation at a KFC -in Cairo, not Abu Sir- whose toilet we were hitting up:
Some annoying dude: Where you from?
Me: [Norway. I don't speak English]. Daat zee go.
Sean (impatiently): Evil Knievel Smorkin Borkin!
Me (concurring): Smorgasbord da Trondheim.

In accordance with the fans' wishes, in the future there will be fewer NY Times links and more long, rambling stories.

Interesting article on Christian (and Muslim) Pentecostalism.

I'll finally be getting out of town. Ahmad (my little brother), Amin (an Afghan at Al-Azhar), Sean (an American co-worker) and I are all taking a bus to Basata, on the Red Sea near the border with Israel.
It's good to know that foreigners aren't the only ones with communication problems in Egypt, Arabs have trouble too - One of the other copyeditors, Muna Hamzeh is a Palestinian, so her dialect isn't too different, but she's still had some issues. While sick a couple weeks ago, she went to the pharmacist, complaining of a cough. "Cough" in Palestinian dialect is 'aHa but in Egyptian dialect is kaHa. This in itself wouldn't have created too much of a stir except that the same 'aHa in Egyptian dialect means "f--- you". She ended up leaving the pharmacy without any medicine, having almost gotten into a fight with the shocked pharmacist, later figuring out the Egyptian word from someone else. Another time, at a Chili's, she asked an attractive young waiter for shee bitiHri' , trying to get a spicy dish, but apparently in Cairo that has much more of a "hot stuff" sexual connotation.
Yesterday was a national holiday, the 6th of October. Egypt marked the 30th anniversary of its 'glorious victory' in what is variously called the October, 1973, Ramadan, or Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria (not to mention Jordan) had lost territory in the 1967 war, and Israel had a sense of invulnerability against the Arab armies, and was no hurry to bargain over Sinai or Golan. Sadat, after expelling all the Soviet advisors the previous year, coordinated with the Syrian leadership on a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, when most of the Israeli forces would be on leave. It started out very successfully, with Egypt breaching the Bar-Lev line and reclaiming both sides of the Suez Canal, but all the grandiose documentaries and speeches tend to leave out the later days of the war, when a Israeli tank thrust led by Ariel Sharon (who just keeps popping up in Israeli military history, from cleansing Arab villages in the Galilee in the 50s to the present day) broked through the Egyptian lines and could have captured Cairo, if he had wanted to. Yesterday was also the 22nd anniversary of Sadat's assassination, when he and several other people were machine-gunned by Egyptian soldiers in the Islamic Jihad. I've been kinda surprised that Sadat seems to be relatively popularly with nearly everyone I've talked to on the subject, despite/because he made peace with Israel. I'll post more on that later.