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.