The Balcony

If I was Monet, I think the balcony would be my Japanese bridge.

Balconies have become an obsession for me here. Whether they are bare, marked only by a mother looking over the city with her children or an old man smoking a cigarette, or decorated by the clean laundry of an entire family, baby-size shirts to dress pants and full-length jellabiyas...I am captivated. There is something fascinating to me about the idea of a space that is both so public and so private, all at once.

Sometimes there is striking contrast: aging building, bright laundry, babies' clothing, evidence of new life. Other times there is just this sense of complicity between the balcony dwellers, as if when you step out onto the floor of your balcony, you are stepping onto the floor of the city, the shared ground of 4 million other lives.

A less dreamy, romantic reason would be that it is easier to take pictures from a balcony without calling attention to myself...always a welcome advantage. :)

(note: most of these pictures are from my old neighborhood in mouharrem bek, alexandria, but the last two shots I took from my friend max's apartment in cairo)

Babytea!

Caitlin and I go to the supermarket at least twice most weeks. Sometimes we don't even buy anything...we just look around and see what's there. This is a more entertaining activity than you might think; sometimes we find products like the following:

Baby tea....tea for your baby. I especially like "baby calm"...tea to make your baby go to sleep. I almost bought that one for myself.

Correction:

In my second post about the strike, I said that there were 'apparently' no protests in Cairo. This, happily, is not true. Read more here in the New York Times article summing up recent events. I have to agree that the quiet still sent a very powerful message, especially in a country where noise almost seems to be a staple of life.

"Don't go anywhere"

edrab 3am = "general strike"

(The number 3 stands in for the Arabic letter ع in the Arabic chat language.)

goodbye, mouharram bek

Now that I am living in a new area of Alexandria, it seems like a good time to post some pictures of my old neighborhood in Mouharram Bek (pronounced Mouharram Bay...I still haven't been able to figure out why it's spelled with a 'K', even in Arabic I see it spelled with the equivalent of the K sound).

Mouharram Bek street is along the yellow tram line. Since the name of our street is the same as the name of the district, we often say we live 'along the tram' to clarify.

Another shot of Mouharram Bek street.

The roof of the girls' school next door, the one that starts our mornings (after the athan, of course) with a half hour of warm-ups, chanting, xylophone playing, Qur'anic recitations, and nationalistic songs. When I was in Jordan I got to see these more close-up, and I do have to say that I think having students do public speaking every morning (the students are responsible for most aspects of the warmup, including a short lecture usually proceding the qur'anic recitation) does help build confidence and public speaking skills. I don't think any school in America prepares its students as consistently for public speaking. That's Jordan, though...and I don't think there is all that much to be said for Egyptian education as a whole.

students at work/using super-spy capabilities on my camera

Construction scene, across from my bedroom window (but several floors higher). A lot of the buildings here are left unfinished at the top, so that new flats can be built above them.

someone peeking out the window during classes......

Oh, never mind.

Well, it turns out that the police seized the textile workers' factory in Mahalla, which was supposed to have started the strike, so there are no demonstrations, apparently not even in Cairo. It is quieter...there is a lot less traffic. It looks like more people did stay home today, but that's about it. Link to the story on Reuters: http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL06355028.html Yay emergency rule.

Apparently the elections on Tuesday will also be a fairly ho-hum affair, since most of the 'independent' candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood were either arrested or not allowed to register.

Although these are obviously disappointing developments as far as the future of Egypt is converned, I guess it's a win-win situation for us...we have no classes, and we get to stay home on what looks to be a very windy, blustery day.

More later, since obviously I have nothing else to do.

idrab....

It's a shame I put off the transferral of my journal entries from Jordan, etc. for so long....because real life has finally caught up with us. Earlier today, we received a text from Nehad, saying: "All classes tomorrow are cancelled. There will be strikes all over Egypt and it will be difficult to move around." We haven't received any emails from the State Department about it...officially this is not supposed to happen here, but the internet is buzzing. The most thorough coverage is coming from blogs among activists and freelance journalists here in Egypt (like this one and this one)...though any decent google search will turn up dozens of articles, mostly talking about Mubarak warning against the strike. There is apparently a facebook group for the strike, called "April 6". When I visited their page, I recognized the poster....these fliers are all over the walls across the street and around the University of Alexandria. They must have just gone up recently as well....I noticed them (I saw more than one man stopping to read), but in my usual attempt to walk quickly and avoid making eye contact with members of the opposite sex, I mixed up the word for 'strike' with the word for 'taxes'. I remember wondering to myself why there were posters up about a general tax!! Now that I think of it, this man was stopping to read posters right by a cluster of street policemen.

A while ago I remember reading an article talking about how agitation from the labor groups was what was really going to shake Egypt up (as opposed to solely political movements, like the pro-democracy 'Kifaya!')...we'll see if that's what is happening now.

Anyway, the facebook group has a long list of commands/demands, which I am sure are translated elsewhere, but I will translate them here:

Don't go to work.

Don't go to University.

Don't go to school.

Don't go to the store.

Don't go to the workshop.

Don't go to the precinct (police station).

Don't go to the market.

We want salaries to live on.

We want to be employed.

We want education for our children.

We want humane transportation.

We want hospitals to treat us.

We want medicine for our children.

We want fair elections.

We want safety and security.

We want freedom and dignity.

We want apartments for newlyweds [If you read the New York Times, you should have noticed an article about how young people in Egypt are unable to get married because of the rising costs]

We want bread and food.

We want social justice.

We want to cultivate, to build, and to manufacture.

We want trials for thieves.

We want to know our rights.

We want the Constitution to protect us.

We want our country to be for us.

We do not want rising prices.

We do not want favoritism.

We don't want thugs for policeman/officers.

We do not want torture at the precincts.

We do not want royalties.

We do not want corruption.

We do not want bribery.

We do not want arrests.

We do not want to fabricate issues.

We do not want empty speeches.

We do not want promises of prosperity.

We do not want to pass judgement.

We do not want forgery.

We do not want aid from America.

We do not want to have to resort to Israel.

As yet, we haven't heard anything about demonstrations in Alexandria or where they would be. It may just be that everyone stays home and the city goes dead. Since I now live in a fairly central area of the city, I'll probably know if anything happens. And if not, now that we have internet in our apartment again...we can find out that way.

perspective

It has been exactly one month since I last posted here. That is a much longer gap than I originally intended, but I guess it is just another manifestation of what I predicted in my last post--that the real story starts when you come out of the clouds. Before leaving on any study abroad adventure, the typical student will hear hours, perhaps days of rhetoric about 'intercultural exchange', 'the immersion experience', and of course the usual talk about language learning and academic standards. Yet, at least as far as study abroad in Egypt is concerned, I am coming to think that the value of study abroad is much less specific, and probably a great deal less ambitious (at least on the surface) than any study abroad brochure will tell you.

My biggest struggles in Egypt have not really come from any so-called 'clash of civilizations', or even, really, the famous 'culture shock.' What has exhausted me most, (even kept me from posting for quite some time) is not my experiences themselves, but the struggle to keep perspective on everything I experience. Before leaving home, I had several encounters with people who expected me to come back with a particular story of Egypt--one that either focused on the glory of the Ancient Egyptians (and ignored both the existence, and the history, of any Egypt after that point), or the threat of radical Islam, terrorism, fundamentalism, misogyny, etc.

Here, I find myself in conversations with professors, random people, etc., who expect me to be the kind of American they saw in action movies and music videos on satellite television (every time I see a Britney Spears music video in a coffee shop, I think there must be another American businessman I want to kill...or at least permanently injure...) Side note/crackpot theory: Satellite tv, which I think is responsible for most of the world's view of American culture aside from foreign policy, is full of the worst of American television. When I'm not expected to be a stereotypical American, I am expected to have stereotypes about the Middle East like 'everyone rides on camels' and 'all Arabs are terorrists.' Barring that, I am expected to admit that Americans are just like Egyptians and in fact everything is exactly the same. Except Egyptians are friendlier. Of course not all, or even most of my conversations run this way, but enough of them do. I end up feeling caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between these defensive discourses about America, about Egypt, about the 'East', about the 'West'...so caught up that there is hardly any room for me to have any impressions of my own! Part of the problem, of course, is that I kept seeing myself as that 'student ambassador' that study abroad programs love to glorify, rather than a person.

Living in Egypt, or living in the Middle East at large, means (for a westerner) living in the middle of one of today's most problematic cultural misunderstandinsg. This is difficult for professional ambassadors, let alone students, to handle. We are in a particularly strange position as we are neither connected to an expat community, nor truly immersed in Egyptian society. Over the past month, I began to realize that as long as I viewed myself as this mythical 'student ambassador', I would feel frustrated and anxious. The real benefit of study abroad, I've come to believe, is something much more subtle and simple.

What we are learning here, bottom line, is how to make a life for ourselves in a new place. This is something that is hard to do; it involves making a certain amount of sacrifices, but it also involves making decisions about what aspects of your culture, your identity, your history, and your privilege you want to preserve. It also involves huge questions of identity, adaptation, and growth. Of course, making a life for one semester under the care of a college study abroad program is much different than making your life over as an immigrant or refugee in a new country, but some of the basic questions and issues are still the same. I do think that what I learn during my time here will be valuable in helping me to understand other people...I don't think that the most valuable aspect of this time will have been 'learning to appreciate Egyptian culture.' I could just as easily have done that from the U.S., by 'appreciating' Egyptian cinema, music, literature, etc., and not having to even think about the many problems in Egyptian society, or even those aspects of Egyptian society that, while they are not necessarily problems, make me uncomfortable.

I'm not saying that I don't appreciate Egyptian culture, or that living here has made me appreciate it less, but I do think that our program directors are missing a huge part of the picture when they sell study abroad as a way to learn to appreciate something. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you choose what you will and will not learn to appreciate. I think it would be very easy for me to live here and learn to dislike, even hate, huge parts of Egyptian culture. It would also be very easy for me to live here and pretend for six months that I had forgotten American culture. Neither of these options is at all appealing or even helpful, aside from being very crude survival tactics. What I am here to do, bottom line, is to learn...good, bad, ugly, and to grow.

I am still figuring out how and where to grow, but ever since I came to the above conclusion, I have felt much less anxious about my position in the middle of America's testy conversation with the Middle East. I am trying to make a life in a new place; sometimes that means listening to myself more (and listening to the 'rules' less), and sometimes that means pushing myself farther, to meet new people, to build new relationships (even if they don't always work out). I think an understanding of that process will ultimately be much more helpful than acquiring a taste for Egyptian movies (which I actually don't mind, they're sort of a weird in between step, part Hollywood, part Bollywood, and part hurry-up-and-get-it-over-with), eating foul and falafel every day, or watching hours of music videos on satellite television.

this is the post about saturday, which explains why I said "mostly"

On Saturday Caitlin and I went to the national museum. We got dropped off at the wrong place again (the Greco-Roman musem), but we found our way. I made some sketches of my favorite pieces at the museum. I am starting to feel friendly with that place.

We figured out how to walk back to our neighborhood from there, and got programs from the French cultural center on the way (which are only in french and arabic). We found a place to buy an iron becase our clothes always come off the line full of wrinkles. I remembered the word for iron from our last ‘amiya class. Across the street from that shop was a fresh juice place. We bought fresh lemon juice for a pound each, and sat upstairs so we could look out over the street, but this little girl and boy were sitting by the railing, so we sat farther back and watched them instead. They reminded me of those greeting cards with children posing as adult couples, it looked like a version of the ‘French bistro’ pose, or Paris. It was a great neighborhood, right along Nabi Daniel Street, which is lined with booksellers, which means it is literally lined with books. We started to finally feel comfortable with our place here and competent in taking care of ourselves.

From there we walked to Mohatat Masr, the train station, and through a busy fruit and vegetable and olive and bread and cheese and meat market , and bought a pirated dvd which didn't work (for less than two dollars, oh well), and found a church. We were walking in the wrong direction and we knew it, but we kept going because the building was so huge and majestic, and the neighborhood looked poor, we wanted to see what it was. When we got closer we knew that it was a church, and it was huge, but there were gigantic cement blocks in front of all the entrances, like someone had finally had to abandon it and didn't want anyone to get in. We could see over the cement blocks through the grill to the inside. There was beautiful greco-roman detail on the columns.

I wanted to know whose church it used to be and what happened…about four or five years ago there were a lot of very violent riots in Alexandria, which is where the Muslim Brotherhood is based. Had it been cemented up then? Or much earlier? Is it just another place that Alexandria doesn’t have the funds or the organization or the impetus to preserve?

The district all around the church looked like a car repair district, men were grinding off paint and welding things and all the chemicals in the air were making us sick so we turned back.

We walked through the market again, and we found our way to a fatir restaurant on our street called Ana Misho. They also serve koshary, pasta, and apparently hamburgers, and we decided to try some of those other dishes but they weren't very good.

Still, we felt that we had made progress because the last time we were there our waiter kept changing the music to 'gasolina' over and over again, and smiling at us as if we liked it, as if we wanted to hear gasolina playing every time we walk into a fast food restaurant (this has happened to us before. I don't know why). This time they left the music playing as it was.

As we were walking home we spotted another juice place across the street. This one had coconuts, and since our food was so unsatisfying we thought it might be a good time to try a new juice drink. We especially want to try more places in our neighborhood, so we don’t feel we have to go far away to eat and drink well.

Just as we were about to enter, I saw this man approaching out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t really take notice of him, there are always men in my periphery vision, talking to me, even, but I can’t respond and so I have taught myself almost not to notice them.

But suddenly this man leaned in and spit in my face.

It was a very fine spray, actually. I remember noticing that, and appreciating it.

The men on the street yelled at him:
'Why did you do that?'
'Why?!' he yelled out, 'Because they're asses!'
We decided not to get any juice.
And I started to cry.

Egypt makes me very emotional, all my emotions are right beneath the surface and constantly getting triggered, good and bad, one after another.

I know the guys who had yelled at the man saw me crying, they were staring at us when Caitlin put her arm around me. We walked the whole way back to the apartment like that, me with my hand over my mouth.

Caitlin had to buy more water from Fathalla, the market on our street, so I went back up to the apartment by myself. While I was sitting alone in the apartment waiting for Caitlin to come back and not knowing exactly what to do because Mona was in Cairo I wondered...idly…if he was someone we had pissed off in particular. If he was a cab driver, or some other person, maybe, who we hadn't paid more than he charges everyone else…and he recognized us.

I almost like that idea better. The reason I don't lie when people ask me where I'm from is because I think we need to represent ourselves well when we get the chance. But when we are just walking down the street we don’t have the chance to represent anything, our face means whatever it means to the people who see us.

It is frustrating to run into that without having the chance to explain. I know that a lot of people experience that in America, this is just a short slice out of my life, and that it probably won't even happen to me again.

But I felt hurt because I am putting so much energy into this venture, and I really care about each and every thing that I do here and what kind of a story I take back with me when I go home. So it disappoints me, even though I know that that man is not a representative of his country.

Just as I am not really a representative of mine.

a (mostly) successful weekend…

Staying in Alexandria this weekend (instead of heading off to Dahab with the other Middlebury kids) turned out to be a good idea.

On Friday, Caitlin had a ballet class in a neighborhood called Kafr Abdo, where we’d never been before, so we took directions from Mona (who was in Cairo this weekend) and got in the cab. When we arrived, we realized that we had finally found at least one of Alexandria’s expat neighborhoods. It was almost funny how quickly we realized it…first we thought ‘expat’, and then we started looking for the clues that had tipped us off. Cars parked in the street, garages under apartment buildings, more trees, American and European clothing stores, a general feeling of spaciousness…we quickly realized (despite the initial lack of any obvious foreigners besides ourselves in the streets) that we were right. While Caitlin tried out the class, I sat in the café across the street and copied all the cultural centers, galleries, artists’ names, projects, etc. in their magazines and newspapers. It’s a pretty good list, and I hope to use it as my personal guide over the next few months.

Despite the Tamareen Center’s location on a dead end street, we were still able to catch a cab back to the Faculty of the Arts, where we planned to meet Helene. Unfortunately, the cab driver spent the whole long ride trying to chat us up in Arabic. We couldn’t really get out because there weren’t that many cabs in the neighborhoods. On the other hand, he talked almost exclusively about food, which helped reinforce last week’s vocabulary lessons in Amiya! And we told him that we don’t own cell phones (although I had used mine in the cab to text Helene…I guess he didn’t notice), so once the ride was over we escaped.

I met Helene at the center just this past week, where I found out that she was a Middlebury alum from Norway who had just arrived a week ago. Since Caitlin and I were planning to explore Alexandria this weekend, I invited her to come along. We got to play tour guides and psuedo-mentors to her, even though she’s 26 and has lived abroad in Singapore, Vermont, South America, and Tanzania. It amazes me every time I reaize how true it is that immigration and language learning press a kind of reset button on age…the usual hierarchies kind of fall away in the face of practicality.

First we went to Citadel, or the Qatbai Fort. I was worried that it would be gross or dark or boring after the way that Fatma (our friend from Alexandria) described it, and worried again after we accidentally got tickets for this weird fake aquarium-diorama section in a section of the Citadel, rather than entrance tickets to the Citadel itself. But when we finally went in, it was beautiful. The weather was amazing, and families sat in the courtyard, children running around. The passages and corridors reminded me of the kind of imaginary places I used to like a child, and the windows and arches inside framed the light and the people beautifully. It made me very sad that my camera isn’t working yet. All of us were equally impressed, and decided that it was a good location for a picnic, or a return visit on a day when we wanted to just be somewhere nice. The air off the water is clean and from the roof of the citadel we could see the brightly colored boats in Alexandria’s harbor.

The boardwalk outside the Citadel reminds me of boardwalks in the U.S….there are men selling cotton candy and ice cream and tacky gifts made out of shells. Couples and children and families are all around. In general, I love the fact that tourist destinations in Egypt are also tourist destinations for Egyptians. Although it is startling to run into large tour groups from other countries and suddenly see more foreigners, there are always plenty of Egyptians there exploring their own city, their own country, or just enjoying it. And one of the nice things about running into tourists is being able to act as their guide. At the Citadel we met a family from Lahore who somehow had gotten a non-English speaking driver. They were only in Alexandria for a day and they wanted to know a good place to go. Maybe a shopping district? Caitlin and I were very proud of ourselves for telling the driver to take them to Menshia, because it is the perfect combination of tourist destination, shopping, and a real part of the living city. Hopefully they enjoyed it…

After the Citadel, Caitlin and I took Helene to Mohammed Ahmed. It was so much fun to watch someone else realize for the first time how good their food is and (afterward) how cheap. All along the way we taught her important Arabic phrases and directions to important, useful places. It was a great exercise, because we were finally able to see how much we had learned and how much more at ease we were in this city. Helene was also an awesome person to spend the day with. She’s had all sorts of interesting experiences, and she remembers Middlebury, and UWC (I think once you dip into the world of United World Colleges, even if you never go there, you can’t escape..), and also she was able to pull a very helpful trick when guys tried to bother us: speaking Norwegian. Maybe we can get her to teach us a few phrases so we can do that ourselves.

(Another reason why the language pledge is not that helpful: the best way to get rid of bothersome men is to pretend that you don’t understand them.)

I’m already looking forward to next weekend, because I’ll be going with Helene and her host family on a church trip to the St. Mina monastery. Her host family are Copts, and apparently they go on trips like this frequently.

good news

It may seem like a funny coincidence that just as the Lenten season begins, my new life in Egypt is starting to regain some of the comforts I had to give up during the past month. I know I have repeatedly complained vaguely about my unsatisfactory 'internet situation', and I've been here long enough to know that a new 'situation' could easily develop within the next few minutes, or days, or months, but at the risk of jinxing myself I do want to celebrate this: Caitlin and I have internet in our apartment! The coverage is still a little uneven between the two of us (the wireless works for her, doesn't for me), but I am finally able to do my internet business from home, without worrying about the life of my laptop battery or the closing hours and ridiculous security protocol of the Alexandria library.

Now that I have internet, of course, I feel overwhelmed. How can I possibly 'catch up' with everything that's happened, not happened, and mis-happened over the past month? How many of the entries that I promised I would write can I even remember, let alone organize? Maybe it is time to take a step back and try to find a 'big picture.'
I've said repeatedly in conversation and emails (and even quoted myself as saying here) that I love Egypt. Yet in all the craziness, I've really only had time to relate a few 'amusing' anecdotes that do more to show why I might have trouble adjusting to life in Alexandria and Egypt, than to show why I feel coming here was a right decision. They certainly don't explain why I am considering coming back next fall. So maybe it is time for a feel-good, self-indulgent, why-I-want-to-stay-in-Egypt-long-enough-to-know-it-better post. Consider yourselves warned.


Reason #1: Beginnings


I've been trying fruitlessly not to romanticize Egypt--Masr--since before I got here. I told myself that I would take everything, absolutely everything, just exactly as it was, no more, no less. But Masr is too huge, too old, and too complex a place and a concept to experience without feeling something...something a lot like romance. And to make a huge, but I believe accurate, generalization: the culture, the music, the art here are all extremely emotive. Masr inspires laughter, love, and even anger or fear...but it honestly doesn't make sense to live in Masr without getting carried away.


The feeling that most often carries me away is the feeling of origins. This is true for several reasons, some personal and some historical. Masr sometimes calls herself 'Omm al-Doniya' or Mother of the World, mother of civilization. I don't need to give a lesson in Ancient Egyptian history to explain that one. But it is not just that old-ness that touches me...knowing I am at the source, now, after almost twenty years of museum halls, tours, exhibits.

As I mentioned in my first post, my name has Persian and Arabic roots, and tends to get 'taken back' here. To me, my name is a very important part of my identity. I have never met anyone with the same name, and I have been able to see my name and my self as almost inseparable, rather than one being representative of the other. And as someone who believes (whether I acknowledge it or not) that everything has a reason, a meaning, I have always connected ideas about my name to ideas about my self. For example, my name's real-life source was a book (now out of print) that my mother read. She liked the name, and the fact that in the book (called Jessamy, by Barbara Sleight), Jessamy was the name of all the eldest daughters. For years--and, honestly, even now--I (have) believed that this has influenced the nature of my attraction to literary and creative worlds and perhaps, even, to ideas of tradition and inheritance. I may see myself as a character in a story (for better or worse) because that is where the first idea of me and my name came from.
In this context, Masr has a huge influence on my identity and self-exploration. I almost feel that I am exploring the secret roots of my name, one of the places that had to exist for even that first character to have been invented (I personally think that Jessamy came to English through Arabic and not directly from Persian, because my little crackpot linguist self thinks that the Y to J transformation came through Spanish, which I then tie to Arab connections with Spain...no fussing about details from me, haha). It is also curious to find myself suddenly in a place where my name is almost normal (some people have even reminded me of that singer from the Persian Gulf, Hussein al-Jassmy, who I originally picked up as proof that Arabs *could* pronounce my name correctly, not as Yasmeen), and every time I meet someone new I find myself getting another lecture about its roots.
Of course, this also means that Masr is making me see myself as more of a fictional character than ever before. Jessamy Part 2. Or "Jessamy" (the word) gets de-colonized. I always have to laugh when I think about a white American girl de-colonizing her name. I think that's the only reason I even have that idea in the first place...to laugh at it. :D
The third, and maybe most important beginning, is a religious one. I don't talk very much about my religious feelings, mostly because I am still in the process of hashing them all out, but one of the major results of my Middle Eastern Studies...studies...has been a real cementing of the feeling that all the Abrahamic faiths (and personally I think more than these) do worship the same God, and beyond that, the incredible closeness between these religions.

Sometimes this comes out as language. Although our Arabic textbook hinted that Christians would be more likely use to use the word 'rub' or Lord than 'allah' for God, I've found this to be emphatically untrue as far as conversation is concerned. Arabic is full of 'allah', full of 'thank god's and 'god willing's, and god bless yous and god keep yous etc. And Christians say them just the same way as Muslims do, rather than having some kind of 'special version.' That's not saying that there aren't some language differences, and Christians do use a different word for God in church services (as far as I've been told)...but there isn't any sense that Muslims own the Arabic language more so than Christians do (*Jews in and of Egypt deserve their own entry at some later point...it's too long, complicated, and sad a story to just stick in here). If someone ever seemed offended at my saying 'inshallah' or 'alhamdulillah', I would probably be offended right back.
I've sort of veered off topic here. My point in bringing up religion was to say that as a minister's daughter, and someone who does take matters of faith seriously (to the point that it kept me from being confirmed in any particular doctrine just because that happened to be the church I was born into/belonged to), there is something very stirring about being in the home of the oldest Christian church in the world: the Coptic church. In fact, we get our word for Egypt from a corrupted version of the word for Copts (correct me if I'm wrong). This is a picture of a Coptic Church on an island in the Nile. There's something about seeing a church in this country that makes me excited and curious...it may just be that they're more beautiful.

This isn't one of the most beautiful churches I've seen...though pretty much all of the churches I've seen here have been gorgeous. Sometimes the architecture makes me feel that connection between faiths even more strongly; more than a few of the churches I've seen look like mosques with crosses stuck on the top.

This brings me to Reason #2: Visuals

Unfortunately, some continued technical difficulties with my camera have kept me from sharing this experience as I would have wished, but I often feel that I experience Alexandria and Egypt most strongly as an artist and an appreciator of art. Alexandria is a very colorful city, from clothing, to cars (especially those made-up chevrolets), to the boats in the harbor, to the murals and tiles in the tunnels, to the strange cartoonish artwork and disney characters that seem to populate many of its walls. Even the strange experience I had being dragged into a sort of seedy performance of 'Sufi whirling derwish' (the package deal!) on the stuffy airless bottom floor of a Nile cruise boat in Cairo touched me as an experience of color.

As always, there is still so much more to write, but this post is far, far, far, too long. More coming later (and hopefully more regularly, and in more manageable chunks).

an anti-terror mystery...

First, I should say that we do have internet at the TAFL center, alhamdulillah, and so whenever I am able to use my computer between/before/after classes, I will. Now for the mystery!

The very first time I watched television here in Egypt, I noticed these strange anti-terror ads that came with a very strong, clear message: Terrorism has no religion, no homeland. The production was all very slick, but with no announcement saying who the message was from. I finally was able to write down the website that flashed at the end of the ads: noterror.info. But the website was also extremely mysterious. Finally I sent notices to two sites about the ads, one of which (http://www.muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com/) put up a post about it. Today I saw that someone had posted a link to an article in the comments:

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=7612

I recommend that anyone interested in the U.S., the Middle East, "terrorism" in all its definitions, Iraq, the media, communications, government, etc. read it. Read it even if you aren't interested in any of those things. It's an interesting mystery...I'd like to hear your theories. Actually, while I'm here I'm collecting conspiracy theories as a kind of hobby. I think this is going to go on the list.

honeymoon's over/ PSA about internet in the Middle East

First, I just wanted to let you all know that I probably won't be posting for a while, and that my email situation is equally spotty, because the internet all over Egypt is kind of....broken. Apparently the cables that connect us to Europe's internet service through the Mediterranean were cut by an anchor during the last storm, and the internet for the entire Middle East is right now being routed through South Asia. There are a few good spots, so I'll try to touch base when I find myself in one of them, but it is going to be at least a week until they fix this. Apparently these cables went to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and maybe Libya? My flatmate read the BBC article, but I didn't hear everything. So you can do your own research....conspiracy theorists are having a field day, and though I don't personally agree, the bloc of countries affected is, uh, amusing at the very least.



In the meantime, here is the post I typed yesterday, thinking I'd be able to put it up that night:




Everyone knows that traveling, living, and studying in a foreign country will eventually lead to culture shock, whether it occurs in the airport the day you arrive, or moments before you leave. Throughout my weeks here in Alexandria I’ve been waiting for the ‘shock’ to hit. Although I’ve definitely experienced frustration, fear, and irritation…nothing so far had really distinguished itself from the frustrations, fears, and irritations I experience in my ‘normal’ life in the U.S.

* * *

Yesterday Caitlin and I had to be at Naya’s apartment by 6:15 in the morning (according to her host family) in order to leave for Cairo. We got up at 5:00, shoveled some leftover koshary in our mouths, and hopped in a taxi. Being up at that time of day was beautiful…no traffic, the weather was nice… We all made resolutions to get up earlier more often (although we also complained about having to be awake so early after our late-night, mandatory concert).

Then we began what turned out to be a long day of constant, constant noise. The trip to Cairo was organized by a group of 20-24 year old Egyptian students (friends of Laila and Khaled, the children in Naya’s host family), who happily met all our problems (like not having enough seats on the chartered bus) with lots of singing, yelling, and eventually…another plan? By the time we arrived at our first stop, the pyramids, it was around 1:00 and all the Americans (five of us: Naya, Michaela, Helena, Caitlin, and me) were hungry, but very excited to see the pyramids in real life for the first time. It was already getting hot…hard to believe it’s February here, too.
For a while we all milled around the entrance to the pyramids, and then suddenly the Egyptian students started pulling us along with them into a tightly packed line. A mother who had been sitting next to us on the bus pulled me in next to her and kept telling me in Arabic to “look at the ground, look at the ground.” I realized that when the organizer bought the trip as a package, she had entered everyone as Egyptians. They were trying to smuggle in the foreigners.


They hadn’t met us before this trip…maybe they thought we would look more Egyptian (Helena and I are both ‘blonde’ by Egyptian standards, and as I’ve said before, any Egyptian woman as white as us is definitely mohajjiba)….if we’d known we would have at least tried to disguise ourselves a little better.

Naya got in, but the guards at the entrance started yelling at Michaela when one of the mothers tried to drag her in, and soon we were all cordoned off outside the gate. The guys kept trying to negotiate a way for us to get in at a reduced price, because we’re students at an Egyptian university, but we would still have to pay at least 25 pounds, which was way more than what everyone else was paying. On the other hand, 25 pounds is less than 5 U.S. dollars…but the group was only planning to look at the pyramids for 20 minutes or a half an hour. It wasn’t really a big deal from a logical, mathematical, financial perspective (although 25 pounds would have taken out half the cash I was carrying at the time…I needed to go to an ATM), but there was something about seeing the group we came with inside the gate, and everyone talking around us and about us while we stood outside, and being so close, and realizing that no matter how long I stay here, or how good my Arabic is, or what my purpose is, or whether I even have an American salary to justify being charged American prices, or how much I really connect with the people around me…I’ll always get hassled by taxi drivers, officials, guards at tourist sites, what-have-you, and people will always try to get the most money out of me that they can, thinking that they deserve it (and on one level I really understand it, and it makes sense, even, if you’re a tourist on a vacation taking time off from your high paying English/American/European job) and I’m being stingy and cheating them if I try to pay normal prices etc. etc. etc. etc…….that pushed me over the edge. My eyes started to water and I felt I had to concentrate very, very hard in order to keep myself where I was. Oh no, I thought, there it goes....


Later that evening, when we finally got away from the group of students, Max took us to see his friend Safi, who is Sudanese and has lived in Egypt for a long time. Safi asked me what I thought of Egypt. I said “Ana baheb Masr…” (I like/love Egypt). Safi interrupted me.
“No, no, I’m not Egyptian, you don’t have to tell me that Egypt is beautiful and nice…what do you really think?”
“There is a second part to the sentence,” I told him. “I do love Egypt so far…that’s true. But I don’t like to be a foreigner in Egypt. And I don’t like to be a foreign girl in Egypt. It’s hard.”

I think the first wave of culture shock is a kind of milestone. This weekend was the first time I’ve cried since I got here, and I think I needed to. The story is going to be a little different from now on, but I don’t think it is going to be sadder or worse in any way. Just more real.


As always, there is much, much more to tell, but I only have so much time and energy…and this post is already very long and convoluted. Stay well until next time!

patterns to set

After the other "newbies" (alguddad) finished their fusHa class today, we went to a tiny little foul&falafel place that Helena found. The boy working there (actually he's probably about our age) made fun of our mixed-up 'amiya/fusHa, and messed up Helena's order, but the food was good and cheap, and I think we'll be going back there more often (if only to speak better Arabic and try to prove to that guy that we are goofy because we're new, not because we're stupid). Michael, Helena, and I took our sandwiches along with us in order to see the National Museum in Alexandria before it closed at 3, and we had class at 4. None of us exactly remembered where it was, but two nice men showed us the way in the end, and our wandering helped us get a better idea of our surroundings.

The museum itself isn't exactly amazing as far as layout or presentation is concerned (and some of the English translations were a little hooky), but like everything we've seen here so far, the actual *stuff* is incredible. I can't really describe it...I'm going to go back and try to sketch some things when I'm not lugging around my laptop. And, though I don't think a photograph is necessarily what I need ( I felt like I'd seen some of the statuettes before in multimedia presentations, either here or at the Brooklyn Museum this summer), I decided today that I am not going to be embarassed about taking pictures in the future (especially since I usually want to take pictures of different things than other people...like that sign with the cherries&onion).

What made me determined to become an obnoxious photo-snapping tourist was not the beauty or the age of the art around me...it was three cute little school girls from Alexandria, all sisters, who insisted that I take a picture with them. When I asked them why they wanted me in the picture, they told me "Because you're beautiful!" I couldn't really refuse then (though don't get the wrong idea...if they'd been male they'd have gotten a completely different response), so I just smiled for the camera.

The point is that if I'm going to be the object in somebody else's photograph, I might as well take a few of my own. It's only fair play, right?

I do wish I had talked to the girls a little longer, because that would probably would have disspelled some of the awkwardness and made me feel like less of a...curiosity. In general, this kind of exchange makes me a little bit sad, because I feel like white skin, light hair and eyes are so over-glorified here(at home is another story). All of those girls (probably aged around 13, 9, and 7) were gorgeous, and today is definitely not one of my better days (those mosquitoes in our apartment--gah!). The same goes for my host sister Mona, and her sister Safa'. Safa' and her children (but mostly Mayor, who is the oldest) are always talking about how pretty I am, amongst themselves and to me. Some people have even explained it directly in terms of color. I would rather people treat me as a crazy foreigner/tourist/westerner for my skin color than automatically admire me because of it. And I'm about to dye my hair.

The first day I arrived here, Baba told Mona (she's a teacher) to bring me in to school with her so that her students would do well on their exams. Why? They'll be inspired by my beauty. "No, Baba," she told him, "They'll just be distracted." I think I prefer the calling and hissing in the streets from guys to the kind of looks I sometimes get from girls. Hopefully they don't think that they themselves are any less beautiful, and it is just a fascination with what's different, but I think there is a little more to it than that.

Going to the museum in between classes (and it was the perfect amount of time to do it...) really made me regret not studying in New York or another culturally interesting city. I would have loved to visit museums before and after class, wander around, make sketches and doodles...communicate with my surroundings. At Middlebury the environment is occasionally interesting and often forbidding, the classes and the workload are restrictive, and the location is isolating. It seems strange that I should have had to travel halfway around the world to have the student experience I always wanted to have.

That is basically the crux of why I'm so happy...or...before that, even, relieved to be here. Finally, my schooling is not getting in the way of my education! All this free time that I suddenly have doesn't mean I am bored, or dull, or dumb...it means I have time to make connections, to explore, to have good conversations with friends and strangers, to write and to learn, learn, learn. I have time, finally, to reply to emails, to read the news (!), and to discover things on my own. I even have time, amazingly, to study. The more I get acquainted with the city, the more I am able to do for myself, and the more I am able to teach myself.

It makes me angry and sad when I realize how hard I had to fight at "real"/American Middlebury to be the kind of person and the kind of student I wanted to be. I've only been here a few weeks and I feel I am quickly getting all the tools I'll need to find my own path for a thesis project...I feel I will be capable of putting together a program for myself in the fall if I can stay.

I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss New Jersey, I miss New York (probably in the opposite order...after that experience with the Biblioteca, I really want a job in New York and to spend my summer in the New York Public Library system), and I miss the amazing professors I've had at Middlebury...but I want to come back here next fall.

...i saw the sign..

One of my new interests here is the concept of 'street graphics', which really just means I like looking at advertisements, announcements, and graffiti. I made Caitlin take a picture of this sign because the Arabic says "Not everything big is sweeter..."

It also seems like a good stand-in for a lot of Alexandrians' attitude toward their city versus Cairo. When I was in Cairo, all the native Alexandrians I met said it was a much better city, more beautiful, cleaner, and the people were nicer. Less chaotic than Cairo, they said. Smaller. Sweeter. A lot of native Cairenes worried that I would be 'bored' because Alexandria was 'basically just one street.' Both of these are probably huge exaggerations, but I have to laugh at the idea of Alexandria being made up of one street. It may be smaller than Cairo, but it's still pretty huge. I wonder what the people of Cairo would have to say about Middlebury? Probably ' it's basically just one house."

...go places...

Even though Caitlin's and my exploration of the city of Alexandria has been fairly limited, we are still creating a sort of personal map of important places. Our first important place is of course our home in Mouharram Bey.

We live right along the yellow tram line and within very close walking distance of two mosques and one absolutely beautiful Orthodox Church. At the end of our street is Fathalla, the local supermarket where we do most of our grocery shopping (and where we have to avoid 'the pepsi boy', a 13 to 15 year old kid who tries to simultaneously chat us up, hit on us, practice his english, and sell us pepsi...multitasking is definitely not an american invention). There are tons of small shops and cafes and carts (fruits, meats, baked sweet potatoes) on our street and just off of it. One of the first turns as we are walking toward Fathalla leads straight into a fish market. The ground there is always wet.

The next important place--by default, not through affection--is the TAFL center at the University of Alexandria's Faculty of Liberal Arts. We started walking to and from the center recently...it's about a 25 minute walk...in order to get more acquainted with our surroundings, and also to avoid using all our change on taxis (you constantly, constantly need small change here, and for some reason Caitlin and I have a lot of trouble getting it...sometimes our plans will actually revolve around how much change we have and ways to get it when we don't). On the way we pass the Alexandria Stadium, the Ibrahim Mosque (I'm not sure if that's the full name...I'll check and correct later), a park and remnant of the old Islamic wall, the Shalalat gardens, and a very old and beautiful Coptic church with a huge cemetary. The center itself is right across the street from the infamous Alexandria Library.

Ah, the Alexandria Library. I call it infamous, because it was one of the places I was most excited about seeing when I got to Alexandria. And indeed, seeing the Alexandria Library--inside and outside--is amaxing. It's a beautiful facility, and the tour left all of us feeling very impressed. They also have some very interesting exhibits inside. Sadly, that is where the love stops. When I tried to actually study in the Alexandria Library (okay, so I was really just trying to use their internet, but still!) this is what happened: (excerpted from a very disorganized email to my brother)

First the guy at the ticket window insisted on speaking English to me, then he kept telling me to "take the ticket!" when he hadn't given me one. I just stared at him until he (grumpily) gave me my ticket. Then I tried to enter the library, at which point the guard ( a really tall guy with freckles) kindly informed me (again in English) that I couldn't enter the library with my bags. I explained that my bag had my laptop in it, and I needed it to study. Then he told me that I could register my laptop and bring it in, but I couldn't bring in my other bag. I tried to protest, but he said that purses weren't allowed in the library. When I looked at him strangely, he said that I could put my pens, wallet, and cellphone in my laptop bag but I had to put my purse in the locker room. Then I went back to the locker room to leave my purse there, and when I got there one of the employees started following me all over the place (at that point I gave up speaking in Arabic...what was the point...I was already being treated like a lost, mute, foreigner anyway) in order to help me. He 'helped' me register my laptop (which was actually necessary...I had to go in this back door, it's totally not marked as a place that library visitors would need to go), and then took me into the main entrance. After they looked through my bag, and finally told me I could go in, I was so disoriented and desperate to get away from the (very polite, very friendly, but annoying and stress-inducing!) guy that I walked straight into the glass door (I think the Biblioteca is the cleanest thing in Alexandria). Embarrassing! Then annoying guy felt like he was really necessary "Be careful, why didn't you wait for me?"

Finally I went through security and left annoying guy behind (maybe I should have given him a tip, but I don't know if this is one of the places where they're banned, and honestly I really didn't want to) and found a desk and sat down. It's a really beautiful library, lit almost completely by natural light (the ceiling is one huge, tilted, window)...but I'm not enjoying it right away like I thought I would. I keep being afraid that annoying guy will come over and ask me if I need help with something else, like plugging in my computer, or registering my sketchbook or something weird like that.

When Caitlin tried to go there the next day, they didn't even allow her to bring in her notebooks. What is the point of a library where the staff is paranoid that you will try to 'steal' a book (so you obviously can't take any of them out), and you also can't take a notebook with you in order to take notes on the books you are reading? I may still try to go back there (their internet is faster than our connection at home, and it is still a very nice place once you actually get inside), but I guess I'll have to throw another temper tantrum and get an overly nice staff person to follow me if I want to bring in anything other than my laptop.

In order to end on a happy note, I have saved the best for last: the most wonderful place in Alexandria, if not the world, is Mohammed Ahmed, a foul and falafel/fast (Egyptian) food restaurant. Their food is delicious and they have the best falafel in the city according to many (and me, though I don't really count), but they are also the most efficiently-run organization I have ever encountered in my life. Literally the second we walk in the door, someone comes to hurry us to a table. As soon as we get a table we get a menu. Almost as soon as we order, the food is served. The check is always brought promptly, we can always get change, and we always, always, always leave happy, garlicky, and full.

First few messy impressions...

Nehad Heliel, the director of our program in Alexandria, describes Egyptian culture as "a chaotic culture." My flatmate and friend Caitlin calls it 'functional chaos.' So far...and this may just be the impression of any foreigner who finds herself having to put together a new life in a new place...that seems to exactly fit my general impression first in Cairo, and then in Alexandria. Even if there is a method to the life around me, it is all so new that it seems like chaos. Even things that aren't new are less clear, either because I don't understand all of what the people around me are saying, or because people treat us like crazy westerners/foreigners and just allow us to do stupid things instead of telling us what's really going on. I don't know if the last is true, but I've suspected it a few times.

Life doesn't exactly move quickly; lateness is almost expected (from Egyptians...woe to us if we arrive late to our classes!), and conversation, friendliness, helpfulness, hospitality, and anything that could be construed as one of the above all seem to come before time commitments. But while life doesn't move quickly, or necessarily on time, it is definitely always moving. There is always, always noise coming from the streets and schools outside our apartment building, and if New York could see Alexandria's (let alone Cairo's!) cafes at night, they would quickly give up their title as the "City That Never Sleeps". On the other hand, I guess a lot of people do sleep in the middle of the day...

My point in mentioning the chaos, however, was to say that right now there is just so much going on around me that I feel that all I am trying to do is to function amid what seems--right now--like chaos. Our victories are small, like crossing the street smoothly in between cars (yes, that's how you do it here...I feel all those video-game fans must have an advantage), managing to arrive at a new destination without asking for directions (or understanding directions when we ask), and getting our grocery shopping done at the local supermarket before it closes for Friday prayers.

Sometimes the chaos is invigorating. On the way to Alexandria, my friend Baher (who was driving me there), joked that "In America, you're not allowed to talk on the phone while you're driving, right? And you have to drive inside the lanes....ah," he shook his head, "In Egypt, we're free." There certainly seem to be a lot less rules....sometimes. Other times there are more, for example the wall around our campus has different doors for all the different colleges, and we are only allowed to enter the door for our college, even though all the doors lead to the same place, and once inside you can exit through any one of them (we think....Caitlin and I once exited through 'Faculty of Education' and the guy in front of us tried to close the door behind him).

That is the tip of the Egyptian bureaucracy iceberg. Anyone who knows me knows how much trouble I have with bureacracy in general, but the beautiful thing about Egyptian bureacracy is that apparently with the right connections (or, even, perhaps, the right tone of voice?) you can easily circumvent it. And as with the doors, you can sometimes ignore it entirely. During our Orientation week, Nehad carried a stack of business cards around with her everywhere we went. These cards got us free admission, special services, and entrance to all kinds of places.

I am now convinced that the reason I was allowed to bring my notebooks *and* my laptop into the Alexandria Library (while my friends who came later were not), was because I had lost so much of my patience that morning that I actually argued with the guard (like six feet tall) about the no bags rule. Maybe it works like bargaining...? More on the Alexandria library later...

There is so much more to write about (and hopefully I will stop expressing myself in generalizations which I am sure to disprove later), but it is late. More coming soon....

Hello, hello!

First, I want to explain that 'becomingyasmeen' is not supposed to mean that I am on some sort of undercover mission, that I am taking on a new identity here and losing my old one. It's just that here my name, which is an anglicized version of the originally Persian and Arabic word, tends to get taken back to its roots. To people here, if I am not 'Jessi' (which I usually don't like to be called, because it takes away everything that's special about my name), then I must be Yasmeen, or--as a compromise-- Jassmyn. So living in Egypt is kind of like becoming Yasmeen. And being called Yasmeen doesn't mean I am losing my name, it just means being called by another version of it. I think that makes sense, because living in a foreign country requires you to make some changes that don't necessarily keep you from being yourself, but they do cause you to discover another version of that self. I expect that to happen during my time here, though it is not really the point of this blog.

The point of this blog, actually, is to maintain contact with all of you...my family and friends in the U.S....and to tell you about my life in Alexandria, and more generally Egypt and the Middle East.