Yesterday we had evening classes, from 3:45 p.m. to 8:00. A solid four hours of fusHa (with a short break for dinner-snackish-eat-time that offers vegetarian fare as often as it doesn’t) is enough to make anyone lethargic and somewhat anxious. During a short top-o-the-hour break, I steeped some green tea that our language center generously offers us in mildly warm water. And I tell you what: halfway through the next hour, Arabic started making sense to me. I loved the language, I loved the class, my classmates were witty and charming, and I loved everything about Egypt. I was considering signing up to participate in TWO voluntary plays being offered by the center, and maybe forming a regular extra-curricular study group just to go over the finer points of the grammar that hadn’t sunk in yet…

Then it occurred to me that I don’t drink much caffeine here.

Oh, caffeine highs, how sweet you are while you last. And how wretched the feeling of lying in bed after a long day with green tea bubbling through my veins, keeping my brain in third gear when the only thing I want in this world is to sleep.

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I do like walking back to our hotel after evening classes. By 8 p.m., Alexandrians have ventured from jobs and air-conditioned apartments to window shop and socialize. The road we take to our hotel is lined almost entirely by shops, and this is the only time I can unabashedly look around. I mentioned a couple posts ago that locals are very eager to catch the eye of a foreigner and use that connection to invite her or him in to shop, or consider a lifelong legal commitment with said owner of the shop; for this reason I often wear sunglasses during the day and use those lenses as privacy shields behind which I can soak in Alexandria. At night, everyone is out, looking around. I openly observe brightly-lit shop windows offering Alexandria's hippest ideas on fashion, at the movie theaters that show Terminator (and X-Men Origins *sigh*) alongside slapstick Egyptian family comedies, and shops that sell mango juice that is the bane of every foreigner’s digestive track. Shopkeepers still catch our eyes, but we are just a few of hundreds of people ambling past a shop at any given time in the early evening.

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At last: I have exercised!

Although it requires a taxi to get to and from, the F Club allows women in, whereas many gyms walkable from our hotel don’t. My female classmates and I have been deeply grateful that, the times we’ve visited, its small but suitable workout room has been deserted. We have now exercised our American desires to utterly ignore those around us: self-imposed blinders that allow us the personal freedom and mental space we need to perform the monotonous, controlled movements emulating natural movements that are relics from another life.

Although it takes a solid three-hour time commitment, navigating TWO taxi drivers who may or may not know where the fitness center or our hotel is and may or may not want desperately to know our marital statuses, dropping 20LE to use the facilities, and the usual mental preparation necessary to enter voluntarily into the world of pain that is running or StairMastering, it never doesn’t feel fabulous afterward. In our rooms at the hotel, we have a 4’x7’ square of open space (depending on each individual room and its occupants’ organizational habits) in which to stretch, sit up, push up and meditate. At the club the space is perhaps 8’x7’. It feels like a ballroom.

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After being dumped by my first “language partner” (a partnership required under the terms of our program), I’ve finally met with my replacement. M is a sweet, small, incessantly enthused woman just a couple years younger than I am. During our first meeting and lunch of kosharee(link), she told me “You know, Liz, I really love you a lot.” She took me shopping afterward, teaching me all the important words for a young woman to know in the Egyptian dialect: skirt, leather bracelet, open-toed summer shoes, closed-toe summer shoes, and silver. I asked her what she thought of the Iranian elections, and she told me she’s not interested in politics.

A few days after this meeting my class and I left to go to Siwa. Upon our return from this three-day, intensively-structured trip M and I met to get hot chocolate at one of the large local malls. The first thing she told me once we were outside the language center was “You know, Liz, I’m really very mad at you.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp – why on earth would she be mad at me?! “You didn’t call me ONCE while you were in Siwa.” Okay, NOW I wanted to laugh. My first face-to-face experience with young adult friendship in Egypt continued to unfold. I explained that we were actually VERY busy (a true statement!) and when I did have a spare moment (at night, to sleep) I didn’t have cell phone reception. (What I DIDN’T tell her was that calling her didn’t occur to me once while we were gone.) I talked to a few of my female peers, who shared similar stories about their language peer interactions. Some receive 8-10 calls a day from their “special friend.” Some meet several times a week to go shopping, or go to the beach, or get secretly set up with their language partner’s friend’s friend (that’s a friendly shout-out, You Who Know Who You Are).

I’m a bit afraid that M wasn’t joking when she told me she was very mad at me: I did my best to, well, make an effort at being an over-present New Best Friend and sent M not one but TWO text messages (one in Arabic!) and haven’t heard back from her.
I spend enough of my waking moments fretting over confusing interactions with people of my identical cultural background and the reproductive parts I prefer, and have concluded that if I have already lost a friend who I barely had, the world will not cease to revolve on its axis. And I’ll have more time to study fusHa.

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The walk TO class has started to take on something of a routine. My peers and I have two main routes we take. One is straight and simple, stretching along a major shopping route. But it takes us slightly out of our way and, at night, can double the duration of the walk due to congestion (izdihaam!) on the sidewalks. The other is a bit more convoluted, but half of it takes place under the sweet shade of trees and takes us right past Alex’s medical school.

In my last post I mentioned the culture of honking in Egypt. I’ve discerned that cars here have somehow equipped their horns to surpass the decibel level of jets. But not every car has a soul-shattering honk – which makes the game all the more exciting! Will the next taxi to pull out of a hidden driveway and honk in surprise at your presence merely inform you speedily of its rapid approach? Or will it pierce the very flesh that comprises your ear drum and render you dizzy for the remainder of your walk, perhaps bloodying your eye sockets and chipping away at your molars?

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This entry’s rendition of “damn, I’m glad I brought [noun]” will trend toward the practical.

-I bought a few pairs of cheap sunglasses last year that were advertised at a 5k run I participated in. The quality was no better than that you’d find at Target, but the internet-based company appealed to my sense of pride for having voluntarily competed in a sporting event (guh-hyuck!). One pair, absolutely nondescript in every way possible, came with a hard, zip-together case to protect it. I schlep this hoagie-sized vessel everywhere with me. And it’s in this fashion that the most boring pair of sunglasses I’ve ever owned have lasted this long.

-Undershirts + sweat = semi-composure. Were it not for these simple tank tops I grabbed from Target in the days before departing, I would sweat through every shirt I wear. Every day. But they kindly soak up my salty sheen, and don’t trap too much of my ample body heat during the hottest parts of the day.

-I almost didn’t bring my textbook from last year’s Arabic class with me. My suitcase was embarrassingly heavy, despite my delightful plan to keep it light and simple. But the class I’ve been placed in is spending the summer slogging through the second half of this textbook (somewhat of a review for me) before moving on to the next volume in the series. And every day I secretly laugh when I open my thickly-thumbed book to an exercise that I’VE ALREADY DONE and don’t need to spend an additional two hours deciphering. (Folks in my class, I’m really sorry. That’s just the way it worked out!)

-More about shopping at Target. *sigh* In the last hours before I left Minnesota, I made a sickeningly practical purchase. There is nothing compelling about this librarian-bag. I needed something to triple as a backpack, a beach bag and my carry-on suitcase. Although boring to its very core and utterly uninteresting, this bag has been excessively practical, and (CPS, I’m looking at you) it was an unfortunately wise purchase. But I REALLY wanted a sea-green number with less space and fewer uses – it had so much CHARACTER…



See? Boring.

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While walking to class today and exchanging mutual sighs of mental exhaustion, my roommate – a PhD candidate at Wash U in St. Louis – gave me the best advice I’ve received thus far on this trip: Just imagine that this is “intellectual boot camp,” and the deluge of vocabulary and homework and obligations and structured daily activities is all part of an organizational schema that WE HAVE NO PART IN PLANNING.
Today in 3amiyya (Egyptian dialect) class, we practiced counting, and writing exceedingly large numbers on the board and reading them aloud. I was deeply struck by how empowering it is to be able to recite such large numbers. This, combined with the continual discordant manner of discovering, barely-verbally, the pedagogy of our class, leads me to feel much younger than I am. I may know an answer, but it's not time yet to give the answer. It's time to play a game in which we recite certain things BEFORE giving the answer! It’s like second grade all over again.

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We live in an area called “Mahatat-Raml,” or Raml Station. (I learned last week that raml means “sand.”) It is so named for the tram and train stop that’s 30 feet from the entrance of our hotel. But the small square is more than just a train stop. To the best of my knowledge, the trains run 24 hours a day, and there are always Alexandrians waiting to board on either side of the multiple tracks. The small-ish strip of raised concrete that constitutes the rest of the square (perhaps the size of a Starbucks parking lot, for those of you familiar with driving culture lingo) also provides space for people to pray, and when prayer rugs aren’t spread out to bear prostrators pointing to Mecca, the green rugs are neatly rolled and stacked behind a concrete slab that signals the end of one of the train lines. There’s a circular stand that cells 360 degrees of popcorn (only 1LE, or about 20 cents, for a cone of perfectly-salted snack!), ice cream and stamps (or so I’ve heard). A low building on the far end of this square opens up at night to sell books and black-market movies. I bought UP yesterday for about $1.90. (Have yet to see if it works, though.)

And at night, my roommate and I fall asleep to the near-silent hum of our air conditioner, and the rumble of the hotel’s foundation as another train delivers its load to Sand Station.