Covered in Mediterranean Salt

I had the most amazing day on Friday!  The American girl that I have been hanging out with (who unfortunately left today to go back to the U.S.) had been teaching an adult class, and two of her students wanted to take her out.  She very kindly invited me to go with them.  So I went to Montaza and Mamoora, two beaches in the eastern part of Alexandria, with an American girl and 2 Muslim sisters, all of us twenty-somethings.  What a crew we were!  Both Leyla and Maha wear higab (veil that covers you hair but not your face), but they are not terribly conservative.  Maha, the younger, is definitely the more rebellious of the two!  Except for their higab and the fact that they were wearing jeans and a jean jacket on a hot summer day, they looked quite Western.  I later wished that I had been in jeans like them, but of course I was in a mid-calf-length billowy skirt and linen blouse, which made climbing over fences, riding mopeds and swimming in the Sea slightly more complicated than I would have preferred. 

 

Adventure #1: Climbing over fences

Leyla and Maha decide to scale a fence and join the fishermen on the breakwater for a better view of, well, the water.  Christine and I – both in skirts – are a little reluctant, but follow them nonetheless.  I notice there is a male guard and a couple of young men watching us intently, probably hoping the wind will come to the aid of our skits in their already somewhat perilous ascent of the gate.  And let me clarify that by “perilous ascent” I am talking about a fence that is maybe 3 feet high.  Anyways, we no sooner get over when who comes along but the guard!  The guard who has been watching us this whole time and yet conveniently waits until we are on the other side of the fence to inform us that we need a fisherman’s permit to be over there.  Right, so now not only do we have to climb back over, but the commotion that has been caused by him barking at us in Arabic and us looking bewilderedly over at Leyla and Maha has called a small, yet significant, crowd of half-naked men in their swimsuits to the scene.  All are sweaty, shiny-haired, less than a meter away, and blatantly staring at us.  We watch Leyla and Maha hop over nimbly in their jeans.  “Mashee, mashee! come on, it’s easy!” they say.  Christine and I look at each other and know there is nothing we can do but give it our best and laugh nervously, in hopes of getting half the amusement that the men are getting for ourselves.  I think we succeeded.  In being amused, that is.  Or maybe even hysterical.    

 

Adventure #2: Riding mopeds

This was Leyla's idea.  And these were not just any mopeds: they were mini-mopeds.  For children.  But no matter; we were obviously going to ride them anyway.  Except Leyla.  Who chickened out at the last minute.  Funny since she was the reason we were doing this in the first place.  Maylish, oh well.  So off we go bumping and skidding down the crowded Corniche, frantically dodging small children, teenage girls in tanktops (which would never be permitted anywhere but on the beach) and even some women in full burka (full black robes with veils covering their faces and even sometimes their eyes.  Some of these women even wear gloves).  The best part was either that the mopeds had no breaks or that two young boys chased after me for maybe five minutes, shouting in English, “Do you speak Arabic?  Do you speak Arabic?”

 

Adventure #3: Swimming in the Mediterranean

I have to admit I didn’t think I’d actually get to swim in the Mediterranean.  I also have to admit that I never thought I’d go swimming fully clothed.  Well now I’ve done both.  Maha donned a t-shirt and a pair of knee-length boarding shorts for the occasion (and also took off her hiagb!), and Leyla opted to stay onshore, but Christine and I – who had only the clothes on our back – decided that this was far too small an obstacle to stand between us and the water on a hot summer day in Egypt.  So we stumbled through the salty pummeling waves and throngs of men and children and a handful of women and into the Sea!  My skirt instantly transformed into a transparent deadweight that either flew up over my head or got suctioned down to my ankles with each passing wave.  I couldn’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been less scandalous to just take it off, since it was obviously causing more trouble than it was worth, but when I looked over at Christine I knew she was having the same problem and all we could do was laugh.  From that moment, I don’t think I stopped laughing, even when I was underwater.  Utterly ridiculous isn’t quite an accurate description.

Then we sat on the beach amidst the sea of white plastic chairs and Coca Cola umbrellas (it is considered haraam, or against Islam, to lie on the ground) and watched the little children running around, the men playing paddle ball in close quarters, whacking the ball with all their might as though they were competing in an Olympic sport, old women with their chairs in the water, their long robes floating carelessly in the water, and a scattering of women in “burkinis,” or loose-fitting bodysuits with nylon bathing caps for Muslim women athletes. 

 

Adventure #4: Smoking a hookah

Which women aren’t really supposed to do, but there are those that do.  Because a hookah is a water pipe, in Arabic you actually say you are “drinking” instead of “smoking.”  Sheesha is the tobacco you smoke in a hookah, not to be confused with hasheesh, which is not tobacco. 

 

Adventure #5: Leyla and Maha's house  

Leyla and Maha live on the 9^th floor and there is no elevator.  Phew.  They live with their mother, who is a dear and speaks no English so I am hoping if I hang out with them more often I can try to speak Arabic with them.  I definitely need to work on my Arabic, because even if I have a rudimentary understanding of Standard Arabic, I know virtually no Egyptian Arabic, and the two are very different.  So far, with Leyla and Maha we have been communicating in English, mostly because Christine was their English teacher and also because I don’t even want to think about how all of our crazy adventures would have turned out had they been in Arabic.  But that is something to work towards. 

For dinner we had sugary fatir (sort of like fried dough) and guava juice.  Then they showed us pictures of their brother, who is a construction worker in Jordan.  They originally wanted Christine to marry him, but now that she is gone, I am wondering if I am going to become the next available candidate.  Their cousin Ahmad also wants to marry me.  I have already told them that I have a boyfriend but I have been toying with the idea of telling them that we got married last night over the phone just in case…

Both Leyla and Maha have been engaged and broken off the engagement.  From what I can tell, they would have been arranged marriages.  Their mother divorced their father.  Women are allowed to divorce but they have to give up everything.

 

More stories later.  I have to go plan for my children’s class tomorrow.  I’ve had a couple of days to recover and am hoping that class will go better next week.  A huge thank you to anyone who sent me some discipline ideas; it was very encouraging and wonderful to have the support.  I have also heard that most of the teachers at Amideast cried and thought they shouldn’t be teachers within their first week of teaching kids’ classes, so I am feeling a little better about that.  I will let everyone know how it goes this week.     

Doves on Rooftops

On Sunday I met up with will-be roomate’s Egyptian friend Islam.  We strolled along the Corniche through the old section of Alexandria, and as he pointed out all of the Greek and Roman architecture, as well as a billion and one attractions on the over-sized English map of Alex that I bought at the bookstore, my attention drifted away from the eagerly imposing army of very useful but-entirely-too-much-for-my-brain-to handle-all-at-once information and caught sight of a splendid ball of fiery hibiscus lava melting into the Mediterranean.  My first African sunset!  I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I immediately recalled the Circle of Life scene from the Lion King with the sun rising over the Pride Lands and thought that it pretty much looked just like that!  Except this one was over water, which totally beats Disney any day!

 

As we continued through the narrow, winding streets that seemed to be where Greek/Roman city planning meets the Hebron Harvest Fair for all the giant stuffed animals (at least they were stuffed and not real!) being sold, I began to notice doves flying overhead and perching on rooftops.  Islam explained to me that Alexandrians are fond of breeding doves.  When I asked him why, he shrugged and said they just like to.  Maybe I am too much a of romantic, but something about living in a city where symbols of love and peace are bred for pleasure just made me smile. 

 

For dinner, I had (not all at once) subiya (vanilla coconut milk), sugar cane juice and popcorn!  All three were equally exciting J 

 

I started teaching on Monday and am still recovering… I don’t want to make any judgments yet, because it has only been two days (today is a national holiday, apparently something to do with a revolution in 1952 hooray!).  For now let’s just say that my main challenges are going to be discipline and figuring out how to teach them critical and creative thinking.  They are about 8 years old, but in terms of behavior I would say they seem more like kindergarteners (that is, at least picturing my own elementary school and the one I worked in up in Alaska).  Also, they are not taught to think creatively or critically the way American students are, so a lot of the activities that I thought of doing are actually going to be too difficult for them.  For example, on Monday I asked them to write a story about a superhero they made up, but they didn’t understand the concept of making up a superhero.   They all wrote about Superman and Batman, and when I tried to tell them that they had to use their imaginations, they were baffled.  Most of them went back to their desks, sat there a while and then brought me back the same story again.  So I am going to have to work on trying to get them to be creative and invent things.  Anyone with ideas please feel free to share! 

 

My landlord came by today to bring me some clothespins because he saw that I had hung my sheets on the clothesline outside and one had blown off onto a tree!  So that was very kind of him.  When he came in, he noted that I had quite a few bug bites, and he asked why I leave me windows open at night.  I said because it was hot!, to which he responded, “oh, then I can get you an air conditioner!”  I think my jaw must have dropped when I heard him say air conditioner.  I had not expected him to offer to get me an a.c., and it certainly never occurred to me to ask!  So we’ll see how that goes.  Then he asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him.  I looked at my watch and saw that it was already 3:00 in the afternoon was wondering whether he meant tomorrow.  Then he added that he would be leaving in about two hours.  So I am currently awaiting my 5:00 lunch date!

 

More exploring in the days to come, and in the meantime I am occupying myself by trying to learn two main things: key words in the Egyptian Arabic phrasebook and how to cook.   

Day 4 of Ceaseless Adventure

After some scrubbing, rearranging of the furniture and some key purchases (a pillow, bath towels, some food for the fridge, etc.) this place started to feel like somewhere I could live for a little while.  After some additional key purchases (some candles, incense, tea & a tea kettle, and finally, popcorn and a popcorn kettle (yes, I bought a big kettle special for popping corn)), this place has just begun to feel like somewhere I could live for a little longer while. 

 

It’s actually quite nice.  To start off, it’s huge (or maybe it’s just that I’ve never had whole apartment all to myself and have been using up a fair amount of my creativity brainwaves trying to figure out what to do with all the space.  For instance, there are six big chairs and a couch in the living room.  I’ve arranged them all so that if I were to ever have, say 9 guests all at once in my living room, they could all sit and chat quite comfortably.  It is, however, unlikely that I will ever have 9 guests over, seeing that I only vaguely know five people in Egypt, and one of them is my landlord.  I think I have personally sat in all but two of the chairs and have found them all equally agreeable.  Two of the chairs are armless with a floral pattern roughly the color of dirty sand.  Or perhaps sandy dirt; I will have to think on that.  The others, all with arms, are a faded red and pink with a hint of olive, made of a durable fabric, and sporting a design that can best be described as a cross between the mitochondria cells we looked at in my 10^th grade bio class and the CT state seal (which we looked at in my 4^th grade class). 

 

As you have probably guessed, I am sitting in the living room.  I have situated one of the chairs just in front of the open patio doors so as to catch the Mediterranean breeze on my back and the breeze from the ceiling fan on my face.  This brings me to the heat.  Put simply, it’s hot.  Damn hot.  Although I think it is actually a bit cooler than Cairo because of the sea.  I don’t know what I would do if it weren’t for the breeze and the ceiling fans (note that presence of ceiling fans is equal to absence of a.c.). 

 

And as for the Mediterranean, I am not sure what it is but I am so drawn to it.  I have always loved to say the word (which is weird because I hate the word "medical" and I'm not even particularly fond of "mediate" so there must be something else beyond phonetics).  I think it may have to do with my whole thing about balance and the middle and bridges and those places where two things meet.  I mean the Mediterranean is Middle Earth, right?  Who speaks Latin?  It is where the East and West meet and maybe that is why I had to come here.  Anyways yesterday I drove down the Corniche (boardwalk, roughly equivalent to the Rambla in Montevideo) along the Sea and the sun was at this angle that it shone so brightly off the water that everything reflected gold and it hurt your eyes to look at it but it but it was so compelling that I couldn't look anywhere else and for maybe 5 seconds I cried a little bit in the taxi.  Then the driver started harassing me about how much I would pay him and so I stopped.

 

Speaking of the Mediterranean, I had a doofy moment today when I was trying to ask someone how to get to the tram stop and I kept confusing North and South.  I know this is not hard to believe, considering my sense of direction is about that of an intoxicated lab rat wandering through one of those mazes so the psychologists can study the affects of alcohol on the brain and determine that it makes you more likely to get lost.  Unless you’re me.  Because in that case you’re almost always lost to begin with.  Needless to say, I was slightly frustrated by my inability to distinguish North from South, when I realized that the Mediterranean is actually to the North of Egypt!  I have lived in two coastal cities in my life (Anchorage and Montevideo) and in both, the water has been to the South.  So apparently in my head, the Mediterranean must be south as well.  Oops.

 

Let’s wander back to my first night…

It was probably 8:00 p.m. when I set out to find food (and by “set out,” I mean that I headed out my front door and immediately adopted the look of, again, an intoxicated lab rat in a maze, until a middle-aged man approached me and said something that I did not understand.  I quickly deliberated with myself about whether or not I was supposed to talk to men in the street; decided that I probably wasn’t; and proceeded to ask him anyway.  To my credit, he was the same guy who had helped my cab from the airport find my apartment on the street, so I figured he already knew I was foreign and lost.  I mumbled something in Standard Arabic (I found out later that none of the words I had used are actually said in colloquial Egyptian Arabic so I must have sounded pretty funny).  The guy somehow knew what I meant, or maybe he just guessed, because what else would someone be looking to buy on their first evening in a place they’ve just moved to?  So he brought me to a tiny corner store.  Of course this was not a supermarket where I could browse and find things on my own.  No, this was a place where I had to ask for everything I wanted.  Which was tricky because I didn’t know how to say most things.  So I ordered milk and water and was attempting to describe cereal to them (I later found out the cereal is not at all common in Egypt, which may be why they had no idea what I was talking about) when I finally gave up and pointed to a bottle of dishsoap on the shelf because, well, I supposed I would be needing that as well.  After that I was too embarrassed and exhausted to try any further, so I trudged back to my flat (behind the man who was, of course, carrying my grocery bag) with water, milk, and dishsoap.  Nice dinner.  So I ate the trail mix that I had leftover from the States and went to bed.  But being hungry gave me a tummyache (I hadn’t eaten since the in-flight breakfast nearly 24 hours ago) so I got up and tried to watch an Egyptian soap opera, which have me a headache, so I shut the t.v. off and wrote in my diary, thought about how nice it would be to have some tea, and contemplated my state of sheer alonness in a country where I couldn’t even buy cereal for breakfast.  (I would soon find out that I was not entirely alone, as the cockroaches in the kitchen would be more than happy to keep me company.  Thanks to Jack’s savvy investigation on the Raid website, however, we determined that they may have been attracted to the dirty dishes I left in the sink, so I will try not to do that again.)

 

Cockroaches are not the only hazard here.  There’s flooding in the bathroom (which, as you can imagine, if left to oblivion, the way I sometimes leaves things, quickly becomes flooding of the entire flat, which I had to squige (how do you spell that?  Little mop thing with a head that looks like a windshield wiper) the living room, 2 bedrooms and bathroom, and hang a couple of carpets out to dry, all the while praying that it wasn’t leaking through the ceiling onto the neighbors below me, especially because if they had come up to pay a visit, I would not have been able to communicate much except by showing them my clever mess all over the floor. 

 

The only other “hazard” I have come across (insh’allah (Arabic for “God willing”) there will not be ones much bigger than this) was a construction site with a bunch of debris lying in the street.  There was a big cement top of a pillar that had tumbled into the middle of the road, and just as I was walking by, a car hit it, causing the obstacle to come rolling towards me at a reasonably high speed, as far as rolling chunks of broken pillars go.  Anyway, it was fast enough that I had to more or less leap out of the way to avoid toe crushing.  It was totally Indiana Jones.

 

My last story is about pillows.  I was trying to buy a pillow and I asked the guy at the store for an almohada, which is actually the word in Spanish, but it’s a loan word from Arabic, so I figured it might be close.  Turns out it is actually the same word, except that my non-Spain Spanish accent used a softer, as opposed to gutteral “g” and these are two different letters in Arabic, so the man didn’t know what I wanted. This is something I am quickly growing accustomed to.  So I tried to act out sleeping and say, “for sleep.”  To my surprise and delight, he said, “oh yes, we have that!”  I was priding myself on my survival communication skills when he came back with a can of Raid.  Right. (too bad I didn’t know about the roaches yet, because I ended up going back the next day for that very same bottle of Raid).  You know, the Universe  tells you all sorts of things; it’s just a matter of listening.

With that, I’m going to listen to my yawning face and head off to bed.  I start work on Monday and have actually met a couple of English-speaking companions at the Amideast Center, where I’ll be teaching, so I’m feeling a little less alone.