Saturday, September 25, 2004
Saed and Amin had an interesting story to relate to me. They've been meeting up every Friday to go to prayer together at a different mosque around town. Last week they were at Al-Azhar, the biggest and best-known one in town. The imam gave a typically apolitical sermon (the imams are mostly or all government appointed in Egypt and steer clear of any interesting topics) on the importance of cleanliness in Islam, to an indifferent reaction from the crowd. At the end of the sermon, though, a man stood up in the middle of the crowd and starting yelling out his own. Citing Kofi Annan's denunciation of the US invasion as "illegal" and Turkish anger at the US for killing off some Turkmens in northern Iraq, he said that the entire world was united in condemning the American aggression in Iraq except for the Arab governments. He didn't go so far as to directly criticize Mubarak, as there were a couple hundred storm troopers massed outside the mosque in case of demonstrations, as well as plainclothes agents all over the mosque whispering into walkie-talkies and so he wasn't dragged away immediately. He did probably get some interrogatin' afterwards, though.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
We went to see some belly dancing last week, our first such experience. We had been warned that belly dancers in Egypt were usually oversized Ukrainian or Russian women, but had to at least try it out. The better known places along Sharia Al-Haram near the Pyramids are pretty expensive, the cheaper ones having a LE 50 ($8) cover charge, but we found a joint a couple blocks away from our apartment. I had been by to ask about the price for the nightclub/oriental show, and had been told by one guy after much stalling ("the price? you want me to tell you the price of admission? yes, i shall now tell it to you" as he calculated how much he could get away with) that it was LE 25, but somebody else later told us that it was LE 5. The same thing happened this time, with the guards trying to get LE 10 per person out of me, John, Ryan, Amin, and Saed Atshan (Swarthmore, class of 2006, in Cairo for the fall and Beirut in the spring), which we were able to get down to LE 5.
The place was definitely sketchy, attended only by 30-50 year-old Egyptian men who for the most part looked like they had smoked too much sheesha, and with a varied decor, generally resembling something out of the 70s and including a large plastic Santa Claus at the back of the stage. Though the show was supposed to begin at midnight, right when we came in, we ended up waiting 40 minutes without any entertainment other than the short mix CD playing over the speakers. It consisted of four songs, first the James Bond theme, then the Loony Tunes thyme, followed by Egyptian pop star Amr Diab, and finally some Celine Dion or something. It was under ten minutes long, so we got to hear it all the way through a good four times. At some point Amin asked a waiter what was holding the show up, getting the cryptical answer "the blind keyboardist went down to drink some coffee". The said keyboardist finally came up and was helped into place by an assistant, and soon joined by four other musicians. The host tried to entertain the crowd by singing, eliciting no reaction from them whatsoever. He then pointed to John, who had been clapping along in his seat, and motioned him to come up to the stage to dance. Our table was enjoying it and waving LE 0.25 notes at him, but the rest of the crowd still looked bored.
The belly dancer proved to be a not-too-ugly, but not very attractive either, 30-year-old Egyptian woman. Although her dress was too tight, revealing her rolls of fat, she was not showing any belly whatsoever, in accordance with Egyptian law for the past few years. It didn't matter much, as she wasn't a very good dancer, going for the standard Egyptian style of lots of arm movement without doing much with the feet, but also kept her hips and belly basically immobile. We had just wanted to see what it was like, and were planning on leaving early anyways, but ended up getting kicked out. The manager, disappointed that we had order none of the LE 15 sheeshas and beers, came up to explain that there was now a LE 30 per person minimum charge, so we left.
In other news, there were some demonstrations/riots at the UNHCR headquarters near Melanie's apartment in Mohandiseen at the end of last month. Apparently a lot of Sudanese refugees, according to different sources either upset at the threat of losing their refugee status or protesting the Egyptian government's friendliness with the Sudanese government during the Darfur crisis, were demonstrating until the government showed up, dispersing them with liberal amounts of tear gas. The Egyptian media, Al-Ahram Weekly less so, has generally been portraying Darfur as only a pretext for Western intervention in Sudanese affairs to get at their (rather modest) oil reserves.
The place was definitely sketchy, attended only by 30-50 year-old Egyptian men who for the most part looked like they had smoked too much sheesha, and with a varied decor, generally resembling something out of the 70s and including a large plastic Santa Claus at the back of the stage. Though the show was supposed to begin at midnight, right when we came in, we ended up waiting 40 minutes without any entertainment other than the short mix CD playing over the speakers. It consisted of four songs, first the James Bond theme, then the Loony Tunes thyme, followed by Egyptian pop star Amr Diab, and finally some Celine Dion or something. It was under ten minutes long, so we got to hear it all the way through a good four times. At some point Amin asked a waiter what was holding the show up, getting the cryptical answer "the blind keyboardist went down to drink some coffee". The said keyboardist finally came up and was helped into place by an assistant, and soon joined by four other musicians. The host tried to entertain the crowd by singing, eliciting no reaction from them whatsoever. He then pointed to John, who had been clapping along in his seat, and motioned him to come up to the stage to dance. Our table was enjoying it and waving LE 0.25 notes at him, but the rest of the crowd still looked bored.
The belly dancer proved to be a not-too-ugly, but not very attractive either, 30-year-old Egyptian woman. Although her dress was too tight, revealing her rolls of fat, she was not showing any belly whatsoever, in accordance with Egyptian law for the past few years. It didn't matter much, as she wasn't a very good dancer, going for the standard Egyptian style of lots of arm movement without doing much with the feet, but also kept her hips and belly basically immobile. We had just wanted to see what it was like, and were planning on leaving early anyways, but ended up getting kicked out. The manager, disappointed that we had order none of the LE 15 sheeshas and beers, came up to explain that there was now a LE 30 per person minimum charge, so we left.
In other news, there were some demonstrations/riots at the UNHCR headquarters near Melanie's apartment in Mohandiseen at the end of last month. Apparently a lot of Sudanese refugees, according to different sources either upset at the threat of losing their refugee status or protesting the Egyptian government's friendliness with the Sudanese government during the Darfur crisis, were demonstrating until the government showed up, dispersing them with liberal amounts of tear gas. The Egyptian media, Al-Ahram Weekly less so, has generally been portraying Darfur as only a pretext for Western intervention in Sudanese affairs to get at their (rather modest) oil reserves.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
We had a great, if extremely long, trip to Siwa, an oasis in the middle of nowhere on the Libyan border. The only real town between Cairo and Siwa is Marsa Matrouh on the Med, about six hours from Cairo, so we stopped there Wednesday a little past midnight to break up the trip and do the remaining four hours in the morning. Unfortunately, Matrouh has beautiful beaches and is very popular for vacationing Egyptians in August, and we couldn't find a room in the eight hotels we checked at. For some reason, only in Matrouh, every single one used the word "complete" when explaining, otherwise in Arabic, that there weren't any rooms. I guess it's just another one of those English words whose meaning is altered slightly when used in Arabic, like "fresh", which across Egypt means "chill" or "cool".
So we were about to hit up the more expensive hotels on the corniche in hopes of finding an unoccupied lobby with nice couches, when some traffic cops happened to befriend us. The owner of the budget hotel back where we had come from owed one of them a favor, so the cops took us there (they said we could crash at their apartment, if not for Melanie's presence). There still definitely weren't any empty rooms, though, but after a good 20 minutes of pleading, the owner agreed to let us stay in a two bedroom apartment that some Egyptian cousins were renting out for a couple weeks. The owner was under the impression that the cousins were staying elsewhere that night, so he let us in. The place wouldn't have been too bad if it had been decently looked after, but as was, it was an absolute hellhole, with half-eaten pieces of bread, bowls of okra, and spinach soup lying around all over the place. The toilet had also apparently been non-functional for at least several days, but had still under intensive use, while water from the only working sink went directly onto the floor. The other sink, meanwhile, had been converted into an auxiliary toilet.
Nonetheless, we were grateful to all have beds, and tried to settle down to sleep, to the soothing noise of a man directly under our window clapping along incredibly loudly to unheard music, with no rhythm whatsoever, for a good hour straight. And then suddenly the furniture which we have piled in front of the door (it doesn't lock) began to move back as someone tries to come in. Ryan and I leap up, thinking we'll have to defend ourselves from intruders, and then three guys about our age burst in, looking a little bewildered. They turn out to be the cousins, not expecting their apartment to be occupied, in an Egyptian version of Goldilocks ("...and this sink doesn't have enough rancid fecal matter decomposing in it!").
They turned out to be cool, though, and were very apologetic for waking us up, and let us stay in half of the apartment, on two beds and the floor.
So we were about to hit up the more expensive hotels on the corniche in hopes of finding an unoccupied lobby with nice couches, when some traffic cops happened to befriend us. The owner of the budget hotel back where we had come from owed one of them a favor, so the cops took us there (they said we could crash at their apartment, if not for Melanie's presence). There still definitely weren't any empty rooms, though, but after a good 20 minutes of pleading, the owner agreed to let us stay in a two bedroom apartment that some Egyptian cousins were renting out for a couple weeks. The owner was under the impression that the cousins were staying elsewhere that night, so he let us in. The place wouldn't have been too bad if it had been decently looked after, but as was, it was an absolute hellhole, with half-eaten pieces of bread, bowls of okra, and spinach soup lying around all over the place. The toilet had also apparently been non-functional for at least several days, but had still under intensive use, while water from the only working sink went directly onto the floor. The other sink, meanwhile, had been converted into an auxiliary toilet.
Nonetheless, we were grateful to all have beds, and tried to settle down to sleep, to the soothing noise of a man directly under our window clapping along incredibly loudly to unheard music, with no rhythm whatsoever, for a good hour straight. And then suddenly the furniture which we have piled in front of the door (it doesn't lock) began to move back as someone tries to come in. Ryan and I leap up, thinking we'll have to defend ourselves from intruders, and then three guys about our age burst in, looking a little bewildered. They turn out to be the cousins, not expecting their apartment to be occupied, in an Egyptian version of Goldilocks ("...and this sink doesn't have enough rancid fecal matter decomposing in it!").
They turned out to be cool, though, and were very apologetic for waking us up, and let us stay in half of the apartment, on two beds and the floor.
