Friday, November 20, 2009

City Center and Christmas Lights: The best things since sliced aish!

Thursday is the new Friday in Cairo, and what does one do on a weekend evening, you might ask? If you’re me, you go to the Carrefour hypermarket to purchase a plethora of Christmas decorations.


City Center in New Maadi is a shiny, new mall built around an all-inclusive supermarket. It’s a french chain, so its pronounced carfoor, but if you’re me you regularly butcher it and end up telling everyone you’re going to kara-four or car-four. What can I say? I took Spanish.


Lucy, Ben, Henry, and I hailed a city cab, and by hailed I mean Lucy called 2 hours ahead of time so they would know to drive into the desert to come and get us.


I was on a mission, and upon arrival we immediately wrangled a ginormous cart from the corral and I proceeded to the center of the store where I had spotted the decorations last week, nearly avoiding crippling small children with my cart-driving skills on the way.


Seeing the crazed look in my eye, my friends eventually scattered and there was nothing left to stand between me and bucketfuls of tiny, deranged Santa Claus figurines, silver pine cones, and enough Christmas lights to tastefully dress the Pyramids of Giza.


I grabbed a medium-sized faux tree for the coffee table in my apartment and added it to the growing assortment of baubbles and trinkets in my basket. Fake snow, check. Garland, check. Santa wall hangings, double check. I forgot about a tree skirt and had to make due with some fabric I had picked up in Tanzania in 1998. I knew I brought it for a reason!


Navigating my way to the checkout counter, multiple children pulled on their mom’s skirts and exclaimed on the splendor of my decorating choices.


Getting a taxi back to campus was easier, and in a fit of joy (most likely induced by the high levels of lead in the decorations) Lucy and I decided to sing every Christmas carol we knew. I gave the driver an extra 5 pounds for putting up with me, but that probably wasn’t enough.


So here I sit now, with my little nook in Egypt all jazzed up, and enough hot cocoa mix to supply the entire women’s side of the dormitories. Next order of business...Christmas party!



P.S. That's Domo at the top of the tree

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Top Ten Things I Love About AUC


10. It's in Egypt ( 'nuff said)

9. Shiny new campus (Have you seen this place? No? I posted a pic)

8. Desert nights (90 during the day but 55 in the evening)

7. A Plethora of palm trees (They're just so cool)

6. Gym located 200 ft. from my door (because the gym 10 minutes from my house in VA was too far)

5. Banana juice (made fresh and available 24/7)

4. Classes chock full O'knowledge (that don't begin until 2pm)

3. Apartment fully equipped with 3 awesome roommates (U8 1A holler!)

2. Ben, Henry, Lucy, Johan, and the disenchanted graduates downstairs (Yay for cool people!)

1. Everyday adventures (They happen, like, everyday)

Monday, November 16, 2009

Breaking the Rules with Football

This isn’t a story about football, not really.

Egypt vs. Algeria. The intensity of the game was only matched by the intensity of the fans. Apparently, there is some type of rivalry harkening back to a match from 1989. A multitude of 17-19 year old students were seen wearing red T-shirts that proclaimed, “I was there in 1989”, (Yeah, 2009-1989=20, I know).


Football here is not just a game, so much so that I received an email from the warden of the U.S. Embassy that basically said don’t leave your house or go anywhere near Nasr City or the stadium because you might die and we can’t help you. At least that’s what I took from it.


Everyone in Cairo would either be at the match or watching it on television, even those people who were working. And this is when my bolder alter ego (I’ve named her Raquel) decided to buck the system, and the actual story begins.


The dormitories on the AUC campus are segregated with the men on one side of the compound and women on the other. Each entrance has a sign-in area that is maned by an AUC staff member who makes sure everyone entering is allowed to be there. No men are allowed past the women’s desk and vice versa. Not following these rules will result in shameful points being added to your residence record and the end of life as you know it! (7 points and your out!)


There is someone at the desks 24/7, but on the night of the football game, all bets were off.

The entrance to the boys side was closed and required my friend to swipe his ID card to enter the area. I watched as he opened the door and was greeted by nothingness. The ever-vigilant staff were glued to the flat screen TV only meters away.


We were a group of about 5 and I expected him to hear us and look over. When he continued to be enraptured by Abou Trika’s fancy footwork, a little voice in my head told me to run for it. Maybe it was the almost 26 year old in me that balked at being treated like a hormonal teenager who’s not able to control herself around the male population. Or maybe I was just bored, and as a grad student, thought I was “too cool for school”. Whatever it was, I ran through the now open doors and through a second set until I stood amongst the boys’ dormitories (Insert *gasp* here).


For a moment I imagined myself reaching the summit of Mount Everest or some other place that few women have trod. I was a rebel for about 8.5 seconds until my friend freaked out, started yelling about 7 points, being kicked out of Egypt, and proceeded to push me back outside the bounds. It wasn’t until I was back in the common area, cackling like a mad woman, that the staff member looked my way. Egypt then scored a goal and I was once again ignored.


If I was able to get away with the impossible feat of crossing into the forbidden area, I can only imagine the hijinks that happened around Cairo with the majority of the police force at the stadium. There is another match next week (Egypt vs. Algeria in Sudan), maybe I’ll see if I can get away with playing cards while wearing shorts and a tank top.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Cedars of Lebanon

Sometimes, I think my thighs resemble the great cedars of Lebanon which is completely unfair for me being only a quarter Lebanese, don’t you think?


I’ve never had an identity crisis until coming to study in Cairo. People from school stop and say, “oh, so and so told me you were Lebanese,” and all I can do is inhale and get ready to repeat for the umpteenth time the limited story I know of my great-grandparents and a boat and something about everyone trying to assimilate; and what it really boils down to is that no one in my family speaks arabic, only three of us even know how to make waraq 3einab, and I look like the adopted red-headed stepchild at every Thanksgiving. I’m not bitter over the fact that my sister can tan,nope, not at all.

“You look Lebanese,” they say, which is funny because the guy running the spice stand in Khan Al Khalili just told me I looked Egyptian and in Spain, people literally stopped me in the street to ask me if I was German, ¿Es Alemana, no? I must have one of those faces.


“What? You’ve never been to Lebanon!?” they say with shock. I shake my head no. It tends to be kind of a long flight from Virginia and I’m pretty sure my fifth cousin, twice removed who may or may not exist, wouldn’t like it if I just popped on over. Especially if the rumor about some land we might own (that is currently inhabited by said cousin), that is supposedly just waiting for a Ramey descendent to claim it, is true. Because really, my whole family has been waiting to return and start an olive farm.


In America, everyone is a little of everything it seems. The only time I really think about my “heritage” is every May when St. Anthony’s Maronite Catholic Church roles out the plastic chairs and forces every kid in youth group to dress up and perform Dabke for the annual food festival. Don’t get me wrong, I love that minute amount of Lebanese-ness that makes me feel slightly superior to the masses of “non-lubnanee” (as we say in Arabic, er, mostly Arabic), because when I’ve finished inhaling kibbi, tabouli, and enough hummus to brick a house, I know that the correct pronunciation of that yummy, flaky pastry covered in honey is Baklawa.

But here in Egypt, I feel like the impostor. The little Arabic I do know is not in the Lebanese dialect, my kitchen is too small to cook any traditional dishes in order to prove my authenticity, and I just realized I probably can’t even locate Beirut on a map. I won’t even mention the fact that every time someone talks about the majestic shrubbery of Lebanon, all I can think about are those little blocks my grandmother uses to keep moths away from her fur coats.


All in all, this really makes me look forward to having kids and one day listening to them explain how their one-eighth Middle Eastern roots have an impact on their daily lives.