One of the things I love about the Arabic language is all the crazy ridiculous complicated (but powerful!) grammatical rules. The language is pretty much infinitely extensible, and was designed/developed such that if you master certain basic grammatical techniques, you can rapidly expand your vocabulary to a shocking degree.
For example, if you wanted to talk about teaching and learning in English, you need to know two wholly unrelated words. In Arabic, though, you just need to know the root ج ر س ("da-ra-sa"), which conveys ideas related to studying. You can take that triliteral root, plug it into any number of grammatical formulae, and come up with most of the vocab. you could need to talk about things related to learning. For example, درس - يدرس (darasa - yadrus) mean "He studied" and "He studies," respectively. If you take that root and add the prefix م (ma-), which means "place of [root's meaning]," you get مجرسة (madrasa), or "school."
Side note: this is one of the reasons the Right's attacks on Obama during the campaign were so ridiculous. OF COURSE he attended a MADRASA! MADRASA just means school, you ignorant knuckleheads!! What the hell ELSE was he supposed to attend?
Anyway, you can also change the root in other ways. One way is to put it in what's called "Form II": essentially, you double the middle root (i.e., d-r-r-s instead of d-r-s) and change the internal vowelling a little bit (to u-a-i from a-_-u). This lends a transitive, causative, and intensive quality to the meaning conveyed by the initial root. So now, instead of "learning" or "studying," you get درّس - يدرّس (darrasa - yudarris), which means "He taught" and "He teaches." Instead of كرس (karasa), "to break," you get كرّس (karrasa), "to shatter" or "to smash." Instead of قتل (qatala), "to kill," you get قتّل (qattala), "to slaughter."
Pretty cool, right? Well, there's one more nifty feature of Form II, and it's the most important for our purposes. You can take a noun and sort of "verb-ify" it. What do I mean? Well, take the word ملح (malH), which means "salt." If you put it in Form II, ملّح (mallaHa), you get "to season."
YES. THIS LANGUAGE IS JUST THAT AWESOME.
The best example of this that our professor gave us involved مصر and مصّر. The original word is maSr -- "Egypt." By Form II-ing it, you get "to Egypt-ify." ("Make Egyptian," but I like Egyptify better.) We wound up talking about an Egyptified version of Romeo and Juliet.
In the Egyptified version of Shakespeare's classic work, the lovers don't die.
Umm...Whaaaat?!
Yeah, that's right. They don't die. In FACT, they get married and have three kids. THEN, they give one kid to the Montague family, one kid to the Capulet family, and keep one for themselves. Thus do they resolve the longstanding feud between the families.
I nearly noseshot my water when our professor told us this. I am certain the Bard is rolling over in his grave.
* * *
Just one quick final note. I've been frustrated by my progress in Arabic. Things are getting better, but there's SO FAR to go...and sometimes I just don't feel like I am getting much of anywhere. Progress is marginal at best.
BUT. It appears that being here has sharpened some of the other language corners of my brain. There are songs in French that I've been listening to since about 9th grade, and while I've understood the meaning and about 85% of the words, there were always a couple of lines I couldn't quite make out. Well, they've all been falling into place recently. Crystal-clear, like. I dunno what the deal is, but it's kind of neat.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Doing battle with the bureaucracy - Cairo 05.19.2008
I am SO thankful I waited until Tuesday to take care of the visa issues at the Mugamma. I had heard that things there can get pretty hairy, and also had read someplace that it closes at 2pm. So, it being 11:30 by the time I was done at Kalimat on Monday, and with my brain being more or less fried by the absurd heat, I decided to sit tight and tackle the issue of getting my visa extended first thing on Tuesday morning. All in all it only took three hours...but it was an adventure nonetheless.
The first thing that is problematic about the Mugamma is the fact that the interior of the building is laid out in an oval. This means that people tend to be VERY sloppy in giving directions, because no matter which way they point you, you'll *eventually* get there...at least in theory. What this means practically is that you spend a lot of time walking through hallways that all look pretty much identical, trying to decipher signs on doorways the whole way, and by the time you snap out of it you realize you're exactly where you started in the first place.
When you go up to the second floor, which is where all the visa stuff gets handled, you have two choices at the top of the stairs. Red pill, blue pill...just kidding. If you go left, the hallway is blank, there's an old wooden desk which may or may not have a dude sitting in it, and he may or may not look up or even notice when you pass. If you go right, there's a metal detector and an airport security-style scanner for bags. Now, remember - the building is laid out in a circle. So if you go left, you can very easily get anywhere that you could get by going right...so why would anyone go right?
I went left the first time, wandered around the building twice, and then went back downstairs to try to get some better information. Having struck out, I came back up the stairs and went to the right, since the place I was trying to reach was apparently slightly closer if I took this tack. Nobody was staffing either the metal detector or the scanner, and three or four men and I strolled through in quick succession.
I finally located someone who could help me, and when I told him I was looking for the visa section, he asked me why. The conversation went something like this:
Officer: "Why do you want to extend your visa?"
Tim: "I am a student, and I wanted to spend a little time studying Arabic."
O: "Do you have a letter of affiliation from your school?"
T, digging it out: "Yes, it's called the Kalimat langua-"
O: "That's a private school, isn't it?"
T: "Why, yes, but-"
O: "Then your letter is no good. Letters from private schools don't count."
[This was news to me, because the folks at Kalimat said that wielding this thing should allow me to float right on through any kind of opposition I might encounter, and reports from other web denizens suggest that letters from ANY academy are good.]
T, mouth agape: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "Show me your passport." [Glancing at it.] "What do you need an extension for? This visa is good for six months!"
In fact, I have no way of verifying whether this is the case. A little backstory:
There is no expiration date marked anywhere on the visa stamped in my passport, only my date of entry (May 6th). Further, there has already been confusion in this regard. When I checked the Egyptian Embassy website back in March before I flew out, the section on consular issues said that tourists got "3-month renewable tourist visas." Perfect!
But then when I got to RDU and tried to check in, the Delta lady told me that their system had listed Egypt as only offering 15-day, NON-renewable visas to tourists. Umm...what? I pointed out to the lady that this conflicted with the policy *I* had read, and she insisted that I was wrong. I suggested that perhaps the policy had been changed in the last six weeks, although I thought this unlikely...but when she probed further, she found that their system now seemed to say tourists could get 30-day visas, renewable only by leaving and re-entering the country. Hmm...not what I wanted to hear, but better than 15 days. She then claimed, however, that if I didn't have proof that my itinerary had me returning back within the 30-day window, I'd be denied a visa at the airport (where it is universally agreed-upon that you can purchase a visa for US$15)...so they had to change my flight itinerary to show me leaving on June 7th rather than on August 9th - and this would cost me a cool US$400. UGH. (Thankfully, it turned out that I'd only need to pay my change fee upon check-in on the way out of the country, so it wound up not being a problem - and now I can change it back to be the way it was.)
At any rate, when I actually touched down in Cairo, the guy who gave me the visa didn't even look at me, much less check my itinerary. He just desultorily chucked the visa at me after I'd counted out the dollars...so I guess all of that rigmarole was for nothing.
Okay, back to our fearless hero:
T, utterly confused: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "You need to go buy 11.10 L.E. of stamps at window 14, then come back and go to window 2."
Okay...I can do this. I set off in the direction he indicated, counting windows as I go. 10...11...12...13...15...16... *blink*
Wait a minute. Where's number 14?
I went back and looked again. Sure enough, to my left the numbers increased from 15. To my right, the numbers decreased from 13, all the way down to 0 and thence onto 85 or something. (Remember, the building is round on the inside.) Directly in front of me is...a stairwell. Empty. Hrmmm...
Well, I know I need stamps, so I just started wandering until I found someone who looked to be handing out stamps at windows 33-36. I bought them, and then returned to window 2 -- only to be told that I needed to go downstairs, get a passport photo taken, and make photocopies of my passport pages. I go downstairs and deal with both of those quickly -- possibly due to the stations' being staffed by young, as-yet-unembittered ladies. When I return and attempt to take a left at the top of the stairs, the guy at the aforementioned table gets agitated at my attempting to pass that way and angrily sends me back to go through the metal detector. This time, 15 minutes after I last passed through the doorway, both the metal detector AND the airport scanner-thing are being staffed, and these guys are SERIOUS. They go through my bag, ask me questions, etc. etc. - and all this time I'm thinking, "Where were you 15 mins. ago, and why am I so dangerous all of a sudden?"
Released by the security guys, I head over to window 2 and hand over my documents. The guy fills out the requisite spaces on my forms, noting everything in a massive logbook in front of him. (This seems as good a time as any to mention that the only computer I have seen anywhere in this massive building during the course of my perambulations is the one used by the young lady who took my passport photo and printed it off using a Kodak Easyshare cradle.) He says "Go to window 38." I keep standing their expectantly, waiting a) to be told what exactly I am supposed to DO at window 38, and b) to receive my passport back from him. I am absolutely PETRIFIED of leaving it here in their hands, and my fears are NOT assuaged when he takes these massive 14.5x8.5 sheets, stuffs them into my passport and, without looking, tosses the ensemble back over his shoulder in the general direction of a table. "Oh, crap," I think. "My passport is going to fall off those papers and I'll NEVER get it back."
Well, he's beginning to stare at me, and he's already repeated that window 38 is my next destination, so off I go. When I get there, a very surly woman awaits.
"What do you want?" she barks at me.
"I have no idea," I tell her. "The man at window 2 told me to come here."
"After TWO HOURS, not NOW!!" she practically screams.
Yikes. Okay then. I wander off in search of a place to sit and read, and spend the next two-odd hours alternately reading or catnapping my seat. When I wake back up for good at 11:15 am, the joint is PACKED. And, in true LDC fashion, there are no lines. It's just a matter of how much pushing, shoving, and cutting you can do without arousing the collective ire of your fellow favor-seekers and having them close ranks in front of you.
I head back to window 38, where a small gaggle of Chinese women, an Indian man, and a couple of tall Africans are crowding around one window. I manage to sidle up and sneak in front of all but the shortest Chinese woman, finding myself about three feet away from the window 38 woman. This provides me the perfect vantage point to watch her - literally, and without exaggeration - shuffle papers back and forth (without writing A THING in them) for nearly ten minutes. She had two piles in front of her, another two to her left, and some kind of accordion file to her right. She proceeded to pick up files, stare at them a bit, shift them to another pile, look at some other files, move one pile atop another, and then undo everything she had just done. It was absolutely mind-boggling to watch her do NOTHING, and so convincingly. From any position other than mine, it probably looked like she was hard at work.
The other thing I managed to observe during my ten minutes of waiting for the woman to actually *do* something was the Mugamma's proprietary filing system. As I mentioned before, everything that transpires there is recorded in logbooks - so you already know that loads of paperwork is floating around. What you may NOT have realized is that all this paper can't possibly fit into filing cabinets -- the combined weight of documents + metal storage would probably cause the entire edifice to sink through its foundation. Solution? Stack the papers loosely...by the windows...which are open.
Oh. Dear. God.
My passport, and all the paperwork related to extending my visa, is sitting in a stack of papers not six inches removed from a 2 story drop into the public square -- and I've already mentioned how windy Cairo can be. THIS is how the major government agency handles documents? My fear back at window 2 comes rushing back to me. Thankfully, at that point I was not aware that a major dust storm would come flying through town later that afternoon, with powerful gusts of wind whipping up clouds of debris and making it almost impossible to keep my eyes open for parts of my walk home. Had I known THAT, I might've been so discomfited by the location of my passport as to address the window 38 woman before she deigned to acknowledge me...and I can't see that as being a winning strategy.
As it was, she eventually grew tired of playing around with the papers, looked up and saw me frowning, and with a huff checked something off in my passport and handed it back to me.
Total time and money spent in the Mugamma? Only about 3 hours and 6 bucks, but it could easily have been much worse. Thankfully, except for window 38 lady, everyone was nice and tried to be helpful...but I can't help but wonder how much better it would all work if they canned two-thirds of the staff and just replaced them with computers. I don't know whether this is *actually* the reason for the Mugamma's bizarre system, but for a long time the Egyptian government maintained a policy whereby all college graduates were *guaranteed* a job in the civil service if they wanted it. Maybe all these thousands of employees are left over from the early days of this policy? I dunno...but that might explain why there are apparently so many people doing a job in the single most labor-intensive way possible, and some of those even see the need to 'pad' their day with the busywork of shuffling papers back and forth.
Alhamdulillah for a mercifully brief experience!
The first thing that is problematic about the Mugamma is the fact that the interior of the building is laid out in an oval. This means that people tend to be VERY sloppy in giving directions, because no matter which way they point you, you'll *eventually* get there...at least in theory. What this means practically is that you spend a lot of time walking through hallways that all look pretty much identical, trying to decipher signs on doorways the whole way, and by the time you snap out of it you realize you're exactly where you started in the first place.
When you go up to the second floor, which is where all the visa stuff gets handled, you have two choices at the top of the stairs. Red pill, blue pill...just kidding. If you go left, the hallway is blank, there's an old wooden desk which may or may not have a dude sitting in it, and he may or may not look up or even notice when you pass. If you go right, there's a metal detector and an airport security-style scanner for bags. Now, remember - the building is laid out in a circle. So if you go left, you can very easily get anywhere that you could get by going right...so why would anyone go right?
I went left the first time, wandered around the building twice, and then went back downstairs to try to get some better information. Having struck out, I came back up the stairs and went to the right, since the place I was trying to reach was apparently slightly closer if I took this tack. Nobody was staffing either the metal detector or the scanner, and three or four men and I strolled through in quick succession.
I finally located someone who could help me, and when I told him I was looking for the visa section, he asked me why. The conversation went something like this:
Officer: "Why do you want to extend your visa?"
Tim: "I am a student, and I wanted to spend a little time studying Arabic."
O: "Do you have a letter of affiliation from your school?"
T, digging it out: "Yes, it's called the Kalimat langua-"
O: "That's a private school, isn't it?"
T: "Why, yes, but-"
O: "Then your letter is no good. Letters from private schools don't count."
[This was news to me, because the folks at Kalimat said that wielding this thing should allow me to float right on through any kind of opposition I might encounter, and reports from other web denizens suggest that letters from ANY academy are good.]
T, mouth agape: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "Show me your passport." [Glancing at it.] "What do you need an extension for? This visa is good for six months!"
In fact, I have no way of verifying whether this is the case. A little backstory:
There is no expiration date marked anywhere on the visa stamped in my passport, only my date of entry (May 6th). Further, there has already been confusion in this regard. When I checked the Egyptian Embassy website back in March before I flew out, the section on consular issues said that tourists got "3-month renewable tourist visas." Perfect!
But then when I got to RDU and tried to check in, the Delta lady told me that their system had listed Egypt as only offering 15-day, NON-renewable visas to tourists. Umm...what? I pointed out to the lady that this conflicted with the policy *I* had read, and she insisted that I was wrong. I suggested that perhaps the policy had been changed in the last six weeks, although I thought this unlikely...but when she probed further, she found that their system now seemed to say tourists could get 30-day visas, renewable only by leaving and re-entering the country. Hmm...not what I wanted to hear, but better than 15 days. She then claimed, however, that if I didn't have proof that my itinerary had me returning back within the 30-day window, I'd be denied a visa at the airport (where it is universally agreed-upon that you can purchase a visa for US$15)...so they had to change my flight itinerary to show me leaving on June 7th rather than on August 9th - and this would cost me a cool US$400. UGH. (Thankfully, it turned out that I'd only need to pay my change fee upon check-in on the way out of the country, so it wound up not being a problem - and now I can change it back to be the way it was.)
At any rate, when I actually touched down in Cairo, the guy who gave me the visa didn't even look at me, much less check my itinerary. He just desultorily chucked the visa at me after I'd counted out the dollars...so I guess all of that rigmarole was for nothing.
Okay, back to our fearless hero:
T, utterly confused: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "You need to go buy 11.10 L.E. of stamps at window 14, then come back and go to window 2."
Okay...I can do this. I set off in the direction he indicated, counting windows as I go. 10...11...12...13...15...16... *blink*
Wait a minute. Where's number 14?
I went back and looked again. Sure enough, to my left the numbers increased from 15. To my right, the numbers decreased from 13, all the way down to 0 and thence onto 85 or something. (Remember, the building is round on the inside.) Directly in front of me is...a stairwell. Empty. Hrmmm...
Well, I know I need stamps, so I just started wandering until I found someone who looked to be handing out stamps at windows 33-36. I bought them, and then returned to window 2 -- only to be told that I needed to go downstairs, get a passport photo taken, and make photocopies of my passport pages. I go downstairs and deal with both of those quickly -- possibly due to the stations' being staffed by young, as-yet-unembittered ladies. When I return and attempt to take a left at the top of the stairs, the guy at the aforementioned table gets agitated at my attempting to pass that way and angrily sends me back to go through the metal detector. This time, 15 minutes after I last passed through the doorway, both the metal detector AND the airport scanner-thing are being staffed, and these guys are SERIOUS. They go through my bag, ask me questions, etc. etc. - and all this time I'm thinking, "Where were you 15 mins. ago, and why am I so dangerous all of a sudden?"
Released by the security guys, I head over to window 2 and hand over my documents. The guy fills out the requisite spaces on my forms, noting everything in a massive logbook in front of him. (This seems as good a time as any to mention that the only computer I have seen anywhere in this massive building during the course of my perambulations is the one used by the young lady who took my passport photo and printed it off using a Kodak Easyshare cradle.) He says "Go to window 38." I keep standing their expectantly, waiting a) to be told what exactly I am supposed to DO at window 38, and b) to receive my passport back from him. I am absolutely PETRIFIED of leaving it here in their hands, and my fears are NOT assuaged when he takes these massive 14.5x8.5 sheets, stuffs them into my passport and, without looking, tosses the ensemble back over his shoulder in the general direction of a table. "Oh, crap," I think. "My passport is going to fall off those papers and I'll NEVER get it back."
Well, he's beginning to stare at me, and he's already repeated that window 38 is my next destination, so off I go. When I get there, a very surly woman awaits.
"What do you want?" she barks at me.
"I have no idea," I tell her. "The man at window 2 told me to come here."
"After TWO HOURS, not NOW!!" she practically screams.
Yikes. Okay then. I wander off in search of a place to sit and read, and spend the next two-odd hours alternately reading or catnapping my seat. When I wake back up for good at 11:15 am, the joint is PACKED. And, in true LDC fashion, there are no lines. It's just a matter of how much pushing, shoving, and cutting you can do without arousing the collective ire of your fellow favor-seekers and having them close ranks in front of you.
I head back to window 38, where a small gaggle of Chinese women, an Indian man, and a couple of tall Africans are crowding around one window. I manage to sidle up and sneak in front of all but the shortest Chinese woman, finding myself about three feet away from the window 38 woman. This provides me the perfect vantage point to watch her - literally, and without exaggeration - shuffle papers back and forth (without writing A THING in them) for nearly ten minutes. She had two piles in front of her, another two to her left, and some kind of accordion file to her right. She proceeded to pick up files, stare at them a bit, shift them to another pile, look at some other files, move one pile atop another, and then undo everything she had just done. It was absolutely mind-boggling to watch her do NOTHING, and so convincingly. From any position other than mine, it probably looked like she was hard at work.
The other thing I managed to observe during my ten minutes of waiting for the woman to actually *do* something was the Mugamma's proprietary filing system. As I mentioned before, everything that transpires there is recorded in logbooks - so you already know that loads of paperwork is floating around. What you may NOT have realized is that all this paper can't possibly fit into filing cabinets -- the combined weight of documents + metal storage would probably cause the entire edifice to sink through its foundation. Solution? Stack the papers loosely...by the windows...which are open.
Oh. Dear. God.
My passport, and all the paperwork related to extending my visa, is sitting in a stack of papers not six inches removed from a 2 story drop into the public square -- and I've already mentioned how windy Cairo can be. THIS is how the major government agency handles documents? My fear back at window 2 comes rushing back to me. Thankfully, at that point I was not aware that a major dust storm would come flying through town later that afternoon, with powerful gusts of wind whipping up clouds of debris and making it almost impossible to keep my eyes open for parts of my walk home. Had I known THAT, I might've been so discomfited by the location of my passport as to address the window 38 woman before she deigned to acknowledge me...and I can't see that as being a winning strategy.
As it was, she eventually grew tired of playing around with the papers, looked up and saw me frowning, and with a huff checked something off in my passport and handed it back to me.
Total time and money spent in the Mugamma? Only about 3 hours and 6 bucks, but it could easily have been much worse. Thankfully, except for window 38 lady, everyone was nice and tried to be helpful...but I can't help but wonder how much better it would all work if they canned two-thirds of the staff and just replaced them with computers. I don't know whether this is *actually* the reason for the Mugamma's bizarre system, but for a long time the Egyptian government maintained a policy whereby all college graduates were *guaranteed* a job in the civil service if they wanted it. Maybe all these thousands of employees are left over from the early days of this policy? I dunno...but that might explain why there are apparently so many people doing a job in the single most labor-intensive way possible, and some of those even see the need to 'pad' their day with the busywork of shuffling papers back and forth.
Alhamdulillah for a mercifully brief experience!
Monday, May 18, 2009
Enjoying the morning after - Cairo 05.18.09
As many of you know, yesterday was my birthday. It started out in a decidedly inauspicious manner, but thankfully ended on a much higher note...due entirely to the efforts of my beloved. Here's how it all went down.
On Saturday evening, I had gone out to a little Italian café with my friend Amb. to work on our Arabic. We'd each bought something nominal to justify our presence in their air-conditioning, and mine happened to have been an espresso. I didn't think twice about it, until I found myself sitting in the lobby of the hotel at 2am on Sunday morning. To be fair, I *had* been doing battle with Linux and trying to get everything squared away so I could Skype with Anna in the morning, and I *do* tend to get a little engrossed in my work...but not to that extent. My eyes had been heavy for a long time, but in that way where even if you can't keep your eyes open, you're not going to be able to sleep, either...know what I mean?
So, anyway, that meant that bedtime and wake-up on my birthday were only a tish over 4 hours apart. And no rest for me, either, since Sunday is the first day of the workweek...so I dragged my carcass off to the office for the single worst day of work so far. I spent the entire 10 hours there in a sort of fog. Part of it was certainly the lack of sleep (you know that sensation where you feel like you're having to push through molasses every time you move? Yeah...that was me all day), but the other part was the heat.
Sunday was the first day of truly oppressive misery since I arrived. It was like the worst days we had in Benin, and just as sticky. Compounding this problem were the three power outages we experienced during the day (the first of my time in Cairo, which makes me think maybe they were related to thousands of air conditioners snapping on at the same time), which naturally took with them any hope that our fans could keep us comfortable.
Anyway, putting these things together made for an extremely long day, such that I nearly fell asleep standing up while riding the metro back to downtown. I made myself walk back to the hotel, since I needed to stay awake until at least nine o'clock.
WHY did I need to stay up until nine? Well, this wasn't totally clear. I suspected Anna might have lined up some sort of surprise, but I couldn't be sure. All I knew was that the Big Boss at the Mayfair called me aside on Saturday and said that he was going to need my hand with something on Sunday. When I told him I was available right then, and that I'd probably be at work until at least 9:30 the next day, he told me to just do my utmost to get back by nine and we'd deal with it then.
Well...in classic non-U.S./German/Swiss fashion, the idea of a fixed hour for some given occurrence proved to be -- how shall I put this? -- malleable. I parked my tuchus on the couch by about 8:00, and did my best to remain upright and make small talk with folks. Nine came and went, though...and then so did ten. At this point I IMed Anna, who had been hanging out online waiting to hear how things went, and told her I was going to call it a night.
When I tried to leave, though, my buddies the Ahmeds refused to give me my keys! "No sleep for you tonight!" said Ahmed, so I parked my behind back on the couch and spent another 45 mins. chatting with G. and trying to predict the broken plurals of various vocab words the other Ahmed chucked my way. It finally took Amb. getting up to go pack - she was planning to move out on Monday morning for a hostel closer to her language school in Heliopolis - for them to essentially say we were going to get the show on the road.
They called me into the big boss' office, where I found a massive birthday cake! They'd laid out sodas, plates, etc. etc. for a little party, so G., Amb., the hotel staff and I chowed down...at 11 pm. The cake was amazing - half of it was a vanilla layer cake, with pears in buttercream icing between the layers, all topped with rows of cherries, apple slices, and pineapple slices, and the other half was layers of dark chocolate cake held in place by chocolate mousse, all topped with a hard chocolate ganache - and incredibly rich. Between about nine of us I think we killed off maybe a quarter of it...which meant the rest was supposed to come with me. Yikes! That's the LAST thing I need - a massive cake sitting in my little mini-fridge and calling my name every day.
Well, we cut it off two-thirds/one-third, but the staff refused to take the larger portion and sent it upstairs with me. So if I can figure out a way to get it to work, I'll foist off all those calories on them...if not, well, I guess there'll just have to be a whole lot more walking in my future.
Anyway, it was a wonderful little surprise. Anna had tried to figure out how to make me feel special on my birthday, and got the idea of doing something like this...so she called up Ustaaza, who then had Cowboy A. place a call and line this up. 'Twas wonderful!
...of course, all the sugar and caffeine from the soda meant that I couldn't sleep anyway...so I was up until 1 am. Thankfully, I was already planning to stay home from work on Monday to try to take care of a visa extension. I'm not in danger of being illegal or anything, but if I don't get my visa extended, I'll be forced to leave the country for a moment and then re-enter. Of course, I never really get to do all the traveling I want to do when I'm in a given area -- I tend to get there and just kind of hunker down until my sojourn is over -- and this provides a built-in excuse to go see Petra, which has been a lifelong dream of mine since the first time I watched "The Last Crusade." Unfortunately, this solution is MUCH cheaper than that would be, and as cool as Petra would be, it's not the sort of thing you really want to do just by yourself...so I'll be getting the visa thing fixed, and spend the rest of the summer (and my life, if I fail to get back to the region like I've promised myself I will) trying to convince myself that this was the better choice.
Dealing with the visa extension involves descending into what several bloggers have described as a "Kafkaesque nightmare," the central government building known as the Mugamma. Apparently the entire process can be greatly facilitated if you have a letter of affiliation, though, so that was step one -- hoofing it over to Mohandesiin and actually setting foot inside my future school to snag one of these. It being the day after my birthday, and sweltering hot, on the way back I decided to seek refuge in the Donut House I featured in one of my first little videos home.
This wound up being a better idea than a reality. I had one of those discouraging conversations wherein the person waiting on me stared blankly at me no matter what I said until I turned to English. Further, apparently in Egypt when you order milk to go with your donut, they think you mean HOT milk -- essentially a latté without the espresso -- which is, surprise of surprises, NOT refreshing. It does not serve to cool you down relative to the outdoors, neither can you quaff it in a gulp; it was only with utmost restraint that I avoided buying an ice-cold smoothie to quench my thirst. Ultimately, though, I decided that I'd probably already had enough sugar in the last 14 hours, given the previous evening's festivities and the cinnamon donut I'd just gnoshed (and which rivalled the best such donuts from Yum Yum in CA, or Mr. Donut in El Salvador) and resisted.
It was a little odd to me that I was the only American in the joint, since I never think of donuts as being particularly big hits with anyone but Americans. It *was* 11 am on the second workday of the week, but still -- it was basically myself, the pink-and-black-attired workers, and a half-dozen Egyptians who appeared to represent a broad range of occupations. Who knows. I'll have to ask around to find out what other Egyptians think about donuts.
Anyway, today has proven to be quite restful, largely because I decided to leave the Mugamma for first thing tomorrow morning. I hear it's best to get there around 8:30 - not 11, when the staff are already 75% of the way through their workday - so I'm going to *try* to sneak it in before work tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. That means, though, that I'm going to call it a night early...so a HUGE "Thank you!" goes out to my beloved Anna, and I'll write some more soon.
On Saturday evening, I had gone out to a little Italian café with my friend Amb. to work on our Arabic. We'd each bought something nominal to justify our presence in their air-conditioning, and mine happened to have been an espresso. I didn't think twice about it, until I found myself sitting in the lobby of the hotel at 2am on Sunday morning. To be fair, I *had* been doing battle with Linux and trying to get everything squared away so I could Skype with Anna in the morning, and I *do* tend to get a little engrossed in my work...but not to that extent. My eyes had been heavy for a long time, but in that way where even if you can't keep your eyes open, you're not going to be able to sleep, either...know what I mean?
So, anyway, that meant that bedtime and wake-up on my birthday were only a tish over 4 hours apart. And no rest for me, either, since Sunday is the first day of the workweek...so I dragged my carcass off to the office for the single worst day of work so far. I spent the entire 10 hours there in a sort of fog. Part of it was certainly the lack of sleep (you know that sensation where you feel like you're having to push through molasses every time you move? Yeah...that was me all day), but the other part was the heat.
Sunday was the first day of truly oppressive misery since I arrived. It was like the worst days we had in Benin, and just as sticky. Compounding this problem were the three power outages we experienced during the day (the first of my time in Cairo, which makes me think maybe they were related to thousands of air conditioners snapping on at the same time), which naturally took with them any hope that our fans could keep us comfortable.
Anyway, putting these things together made for an extremely long day, such that I nearly fell asleep standing up while riding the metro back to downtown. I made myself walk back to the hotel, since I needed to stay awake until at least nine o'clock.
WHY did I need to stay up until nine? Well, this wasn't totally clear. I suspected Anna might have lined up some sort of surprise, but I couldn't be sure. All I knew was that the Big Boss at the Mayfair called me aside on Saturday and said that he was going to need my hand with something on Sunday. When I told him I was available right then, and that I'd probably be at work until at least 9:30 the next day, he told me to just do my utmost to get back by nine and we'd deal with it then.
Well...in classic non-U.S./German/Swiss fashion, the idea of a fixed hour for some given occurrence proved to be -- how shall I put this? -- malleable. I parked my tuchus on the couch by about 8:00, and did my best to remain upright and make small talk with folks. Nine came and went, though...and then so did ten. At this point I IMed Anna, who had been hanging out online waiting to hear how things went, and told her I was going to call it a night.
When I tried to leave, though, my buddies the Ahmeds refused to give me my keys! "No sleep for you tonight!" said Ahmed, so I parked my behind back on the couch and spent another 45 mins. chatting with G. and trying to predict the broken plurals of various vocab words the other Ahmed chucked my way. It finally took Amb. getting up to go pack - she was planning to move out on Monday morning for a hostel closer to her language school in Heliopolis - for them to essentially say we were going to get the show on the road.
They called me into the big boss' office, where I found a massive birthday cake! They'd laid out sodas, plates, etc. etc. for a little party, so G., Amb., the hotel staff and I chowed down...at 11 pm. The cake was amazing - half of it was a vanilla layer cake, with pears in buttercream icing between the layers, all topped with rows of cherries, apple slices, and pineapple slices, and the other half was layers of dark chocolate cake held in place by chocolate mousse, all topped with a hard chocolate ganache - and incredibly rich. Between about nine of us I think we killed off maybe a quarter of it...which meant the rest was supposed to come with me. Yikes! That's the LAST thing I need - a massive cake sitting in my little mini-fridge and calling my name every day.
Well, we cut it off two-thirds/one-third, but the staff refused to take the larger portion and sent it upstairs with me. So if I can figure out a way to get it to work, I'll foist off all those calories on them...if not, well, I guess there'll just have to be a whole lot more walking in my future.
Anyway, it was a wonderful little surprise. Anna had tried to figure out how to make me feel special on my birthday, and got the idea of doing something like this...so she called up Ustaaza, who then had Cowboy A. place a call and line this up. 'Twas wonderful!
...of course, all the sugar and caffeine from the soda meant that I couldn't sleep anyway...so I was up until 1 am. Thankfully, I was already planning to stay home from work on Monday to try to take care of a visa extension. I'm not in danger of being illegal or anything, but if I don't get my visa extended, I'll be forced to leave the country for a moment and then re-enter. Of course, I never really get to do all the traveling I want to do when I'm in a given area -- I tend to get there and just kind of hunker down until my sojourn is over -- and this provides a built-in excuse to go see Petra, which has been a lifelong dream of mine since the first time I watched "The Last Crusade." Unfortunately, this solution is MUCH cheaper than that would be, and as cool as Petra would be, it's not the sort of thing you really want to do just by yourself...so I'll be getting the visa thing fixed, and spend the rest of the summer (and my life, if I fail to get back to the region like I've promised myself I will) trying to convince myself that this was the better choice.
Dealing with the visa extension involves descending into what several bloggers have described as a "Kafkaesque nightmare," the central government building known as the Mugamma. Apparently the entire process can be greatly facilitated if you have a letter of affiliation, though, so that was step one -- hoofing it over to Mohandesiin and actually setting foot inside my future school to snag one of these. It being the day after my birthday, and sweltering hot, on the way back I decided to seek refuge in the Donut House I featured in one of my first little videos home.
This wound up being a better idea than a reality. I had one of those discouraging conversations wherein the person waiting on me stared blankly at me no matter what I said until I turned to English. Further, apparently in Egypt when you order milk to go with your donut, they think you mean HOT milk -- essentially a latté without the espresso -- which is, surprise of surprises, NOT refreshing. It does not serve to cool you down relative to the outdoors, neither can you quaff it in a gulp; it was only with utmost restraint that I avoided buying an ice-cold smoothie to quench my thirst. Ultimately, though, I decided that I'd probably already had enough sugar in the last 14 hours, given the previous evening's festivities and the cinnamon donut I'd just gnoshed (and which rivalled the best such donuts from Yum Yum in CA, or Mr. Donut in El Salvador) and resisted.
It was a little odd to me that I was the only American in the joint, since I never think of donuts as being particularly big hits with anyone but Americans. It *was* 11 am on the second workday of the week, but still -- it was basically myself, the pink-and-black-attired workers, and a half-dozen Egyptians who appeared to represent a broad range of occupations. Who knows. I'll have to ask around to find out what other Egyptians think about donuts.
Anyway, today has proven to be quite restful, largely because I decided to leave the Mugamma for first thing tomorrow morning. I hear it's best to get there around 8:30 - not 11, when the staff are already 75% of the way through their workday - so I'm going to *try* to sneak it in before work tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. That means, though, that I'm going to call it a night early...so a HUGE "Thank you!" goes out to my beloved Anna, and I'll write some more soon.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Eaten alive (Cairo, 05.15.09)
...by work. That's the best way I can describe this week. I looked at my internship hour log last night, and it claims that this was a 52-hr week. I beg to differ. It sure felt a hell of a lot longer than that.
The interesting thing about working here and at AYB-SD is that the work is fun, interesting, important, and engrossing, and Egyptians are incredibly warm, friendly people. What is the upshot of this? Well, I start my day at the office around 9am, with either my immediate boss/supervisor/partner R.Abd-N. or my 'qamuusa'(dictionary) Alya' rolling in shortly thereafter. This means that relative peace and quiet reigns, and we get to plug away pretty efficiently all morning. Time usually flies, and it's often around 1pm or 2pm before I notice the clock. The rest of the staff has rolled in around noon, at which point 'breakfast' is ordered.
Breakfast is a jovial affair, with 6-8 people sharing two or three dishes of a puréed black bean-and-tahine mixture called fuul, a plate of sliced tomatoes, a large block of salty cheese mixed with diced jalapeño, and a sesame-based dip, all of which are scooped up using hunks of hubz baladi, which is essentially a very dry, pita-resembling bread. No silverware, no problem!
After breakfast, everyone goes to work, but Egyptian culture is such that people are constantly wandering in and out of each others' offices. Work at this point is generally significantly less efficient than earlier in the morning, but also very enjoyable. This may be why work is still going strong at "lunchtime," which is between 6-7pm. Dishes eaten at lunch vary considerably. Two days ago we had kushari, which is a very famous Egyptian dish consisting of lentils, chickpeas, pasta, onions, and tomato sauce, all covered with a spicy vinegar dressing very reminiscent of Eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce. Last night it was a sandwich of spiced ground beef stuffed into a pita soaked in some kind of indescribable sauce. Again, one or two dishes are ordered for everyone to share, and it appears that people take turns paying for dinner.
(It would have been rude for me to not accept my friends' offers of food all week, so starting on day 2 - Monday - I began joining them wholeheartedly instead of just nibbling at something they offered me. This is fine, but a meal for the entire office can cost 40-50 L.E., or 8-10 dollars. This doesn't sound like much, but my coworker makes something on the order of 200 bucks a month, so I feel guilty letting everyone pay for me all the time. I put my foot down with R.Abd-N yesterday - in private, because she and I work well enough together that we can be completely open about cultural expectations and the like - and said that I insisted I be allowed to "handle" dinner for everyone. So, alhamdulillah, I was able to feel like I was contributing rather than just taking. I think I'll plan to put my foot down once a week or so, just so I don't feel like a parasite...)
At any rate, work after lunch generally turns into meetings (at which I am usually too tired/fried to have many useful insights) or cultural explication sessions. Two nights ago I sat with a couple of guys and discussed the importance of individuality to Americans in comparison to the importance of communal life for Egyptians. We also had an interesting conversation about homosexuality in Muslim countries, which I think may have been a tangent from comments about the hole in my ear and the inappropriateness of men wearing gold (rings, necklaces, watches, etc.) in Muslim cultures. According to my friends, the proportion of the population that practices homosexual behavior in Egypt is on the order of 0.1% of the population, and even that is in private. When I expressed my utter disbelief, they hemmed and hawed and said that maybe it was 1%. But THEN they said that pre-op transgendered individuals are probably about 5% of the population. SO...what I THINK may have been going on is that they were reluctant to admit that men may wish to have sex with men (and women with women) WITHOUT those individuals actually being pre-op transgendered individuals. (Why the latter should be more culturally-acceptable than the former is a mystery to me.)
Anyway, meetings/cultural explication time generally lasts until 8 or 8:30, at which point I have to begin my hourlong trek home. There is a metro stop about five blocks from the office, so that's not bad. But the metro itself takes another 20-25 minutes to reach my downtown stop, at which point I am faced with a 2-mile walk home. Despite the fact that the walk home is beautiful - Cairo at night is gorgeous, and there's a powerful breeze of the Nile most of the day, so the temperature is often in the low 70s or high 60s by the time I'm heading home - I was often too tired to deal with it, and just decided to pay the dollar it costs to get a taxi ride back to my hotel.
The taxi rides have been informative, as I've been exposed to tons of different regional accents among the cabbies, but they can also serve to ruin my day. It's easy to come awfully close to tears (especially at the end of a day that began about 14 hours earlier, with 10 of those hours having consisted of intense focused effort) when you realize how hard you have worked over the last two-plus years and how little you can actually understand or express.
The hotel requires you to leave the key at the desk when you head out for the day, so that means I've got to interact with a couple more people before bed. At this point, even though it's 9:30 or 10pm and I'm exhausted, stupid extroverted Tim goes into People Mode, and I usually spend another hour or two chatting with the hotel staff in mixtures of English and Arabic. Bed has not been happening before midnight, and the next day begins at 6:30 with a phone call from my beloved.
I need to leave the computer aside for a bit and work on reviewing some Arabic, so I'll leave installment number 1 of 'Cultural Potpourri' for later this evening.
The interesting thing about working here and at AYB-SD is that the work is fun, interesting, important, and engrossing, and Egyptians are incredibly warm, friendly people. What is the upshot of this? Well, I start my day at the office around 9am, with either my immediate boss/supervisor/partner R.Abd-N. or my 'qamuusa'(dictionary) Alya' rolling in shortly thereafter. This means that relative peace and quiet reigns, and we get to plug away pretty efficiently all morning. Time usually flies, and it's often around 1pm or 2pm before I notice the clock. The rest of the staff has rolled in around noon, at which point 'breakfast' is ordered.
Breakfast is a jovial affair, with 6-8 people sharing two or three dishes of a puréed black bean-and-tahine mixture called fuul, a plate of sliced tomatoes, a large block of salty cheese mixed with diced jalapeño, and a sesame-based dip, all of which are scooped up using hunks of hubz baladi, which is essentially a very dry, pita-resembling bread. No silverware, no problem!
After breakfast, everyone goes to work, but Egyptian culture is such that people are constantly wandering in and out of each others' offices. Work at this point is generally significantly less efficient than earlier in the morning, but also very enjoyable. This may be why work is still going strong at "lunchtime," which is between 6-7pm. Dishes eaten at lunch vary considerably. Two days ago we had kushari, which is a very famous Egyptian dish consisting of lentils, chickpeas, pasta, onions, and tomato sauce, all covered with a spicy vinegar dressing very reminiscent of Eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce. Last night it was a sandwich of spiced ground beef stuffed into a pita soaked in some kind of indescribable sauce. Again, one or two dishes are ordered for everyone to share, and it appears that people take turns paying for dinner.
(It would have been rude for me to not accept my friends' offers of food all week, so starting on day 2 - Monday - I began joining them wholeheartedly instead of just nibbling at something they offered me. This is fine, but a meal for the entire office can cost 40-50 L.E., or 8-10 dollars. This doesn't sound like much, but my coworker makes something on the order of 200 bucks a month, so I feel guilty letting everyone pay for me all the time. I put my foot down with R.Abd-N yesterday - in private, because she and I work well enough together that we can be completely open about cultural expectations and the like - and said that I insisted I be allowed to "handle" dinner for everyone. So, alhamdulillah, I was able to feel like I was contributing rather than just taking. I think I'll plan to put my foot down once a week or so, just so I don't feel like a parasite...)
At any rate, work after lunch generally turns into meetings (at which I am usually too tired/fried to have many useful insights) or cultural explication sessions. Two nights ago I sat with a couple of guys and discussed the importance of individuality to Americans in comparison to the importance of communal life for Egyptians. We also had an interesting conversation about homosexuality in Muslim countries, which I think may have been a tangent from comments about the hole in my ear and the inappropriateness of men wearing gold (rings, necklaces, watches, etc.) in Muslim cultures. According to my friends, the proportion of the population that practices homosexual behavior in Egypt is on the order of 0.1% of the population, and even that is in private. When I expressed my utter disbelief, they hemmed and hawed and said that maybe it was 1%. But THEN they said that pre-op transgendered individuals are probably about 5% of the population. SO...what I THINK may have been going on is that they were reluctant to admit that men may wish to have sex with men (and women with women) WITHOUT those individuals actually being pre-op transgendered individuals. (Why the latter should be more culturally-acceptable than the former is a mystery to me.)
Anyway, meetings/cultural explication time generally lasts until 8 or 8:30, at which point I have to begin my hourlong trek home. There is a metro stop about five blocks from the office, so that's not bad. But the metro itself takes another 20-25 minutes to reach my downtown stop, at which point I am faced with a 2-mile walk home. Despite the fact that the walk home is beautiful - Cairo at night is gorgeous, and there's a powerful breeze of the Nile most of the day, so the temperature is often in the low 70s or high 60s by the time I'm heading home - I was often too tired to deal with it, and just decided to pay the dollar it costs to get a taxi ride back to my hotel.
The taxi rides have been informative, as I've been exposed to tons of different regional accents among the cabbies, but they can also serve to ruin my day. It's easy to come awfully close to tears (especially at the end of a day that began about 14 hours earlier, with 10 of those hours having consisted of intense focused effort) when you realize how hard you have worked over the last two-plus years and how little you can actually understand or express.
The hotel requires you to leave the key at the desk when you head out for the day, so that means I've got to interact with a couple more people before bed. At this point, even though it's 9:30 or 10pm and I'm exhausted, stupid extroverted Tim goes into People Mode, and I usually spend another hour or two chatting with the hotel staff in mixtures of English and Arabic. Bed has not been happening before midnight, and the next day begins at 6:30 with a phone call from my beloved.
I need to leave the computer aside for a bit and work on reviewing some Arabic, so I'll leave installment number 1 of 'Cultural Potpourri' for later this evening.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
For Laurethie, wherever this may find her
Prior to arriving here in Cairo, I hadn't posted on this blog consistently since mid-June 2008. That's a LONG hiatus, and Laurie was (in her gentle way) prodding me to, you know, THROW US A FREAKIN' BONE HERE! and mention why, what all had been going on in the meantime, etc.
Well, I promised Laurie I'd write it all up when things calmed down a tish, and as I'm sitting here with family and friends either at work or running errands (and hence not available to chat) and a gargantuan file trying to download (I'm getting fed up with the slowness of XP, which will have driven me into the arms of Linux just as soon as this file arrives), there's no time like the present to stare at a single, unchanging webpage and try to explain things. :-D
When we last left our intrepid RaleighSlade family, we had picked up and left Raleigh for Parts West, namely the wilds of Utah and Brigham Young University. The purpose of the summer out there was to get me through an intensive Arabic course offered at the uni., on the theory that spending the two grad school summers studying Arabic first domestically and then abroad would be a more effective sequence than the converse. I arrived moderately well-prepared in terms of formal Arabic, which is what newspapers are written in and newscasts presented in. Unfortunately, I was woefully behind in Colloquial Arabic, which is what everyone *actually* speaks, and in all too many ways bears merely a passing resemblance to formal Arabic. Ugh.
SOO...I wound up spending simply ungodly amounts of time in the library and our little married housing suite working to catch up to my peers in that regard. This killed off basically any time I would've spent blogging, and the day after our term at BYU ended it was time to hit the road for home. We had exactly four days to make it cross-country before Anna was due to start work, and only two more days after that until classes started for me. We managed to sneak a day or so visit to Colorado Springs to introduce Anna to my Aunt Sharrie and Uncle Kenny (as well as show off the little man, of course). I then drove them up to Denver, from which they flew out to see Dan and Vicky in West Lafayette, IN. I had a longish drive from Denver across Kansas, where I spent a night with an old cousin I hadn't seen in about 17 years, and then had a delightful lunch with my old climbing partner and her husband as I made my way through St. Louis. I got to spend a night at Vicky and Dan's with Anna and the little guy, dropping them off at the Indianapolis airport the next morning on my way to Winston-Salem and my friend Jen's place. Needless to say, it was something of a whirlwind, and blogging weren't gonna happen.
Fall term was fairly busy, although nothing too crazy. I had two classes that could've been excellent and were made merely okay by some individuals who shall remain nameless, and my Arabic class was a major letdown after BYU. I still love Ustaaza, but our resources at NCSU were such that Arabic was 2 hrs. per week, rather than 2 hrs. a day -- and that's a MAJOR step down in language pedagogy. I began meeting with a fellow Arabic student about once a week to practice chatting, and that's about all that kept my skills from degrading completely. Then Thanksgiving/Christmas hit, throughout all of which the little guy was fighting off an ear infection and the croup. Ugh. Then he shared it with ME, generous little man that he is, and wiped me out until a few weeks into the Spring term at school.
Spring term was, to put it mildly, frustrating as hell. There were two bright spots - my Arabic translation class, and the Global Problems class with Dr. Boettcher. The other stuff, well...boo. I swear, one of these days I'll have the time and energy and focus and preparation to write a thesis-type thingy I can be proud of. As it was, the course overload (to say nothing of the class I detested which took up nearly twice as much time as it ought to've, largely due to the efforts of the repeatedly aforementioned MouthBreather) was such that my Capstone wound up being significantly less interesting, thorough, or insightful than I would've liked. On the flip side, I learned tons about Iran and did some Deep Thinking about development praxis, so that was good. Maybe it'll help me with the work I'm beginning tomorrow.
So...Anna was planning to head off to San Diego to live with her folks and work on a 13-week Travel OT contract, since the idea of staying around Raleigh and trying to be Super Single Mom for the summer wasn't hugely appealing. She's employable everywhere, and I'm apparently employable practically nowhere, so we figured once I got back from Cairo we'd follow me wherever I could find a job. As of this writing, prospects are nebulous at best, imaginary at worst. We'll see if the summer catalyzes anything.
This kind of leads us to today. What on Earth is Timmy actually DOING in Cairo? Well, apart from the language study, which will begin in mid-June, I'm chasing down the last three credits I need toward my degree by doing an internship with an NGO. The group is named Alashanek Ya Balady, which translates roughly as "For your sake, O my country." It was founded by an AUC grad (who I guess is now a PhD candidate and/or adjunct prof.) who is sufficiently awesome at what she does to have earned the group (and herself) a number of major international awards for the quality of their work. I'm hoping to learn TONS from her, whatever I wind up doing.
...and, honestly, it's TBD what I'm going to be doing. I started taking the class I detested so SPECIFICALLY because it addressed what AYB wanted me to be doing...until they didn't, because they came up with a new Strategic Plan. So now it's not clear what my role will be, although I'll be meeting with the bosslady tomorrow and she will no doubt fill me in.
Yesterday, as I mentioned in my post, I hoofed it back to Zamalek from Maadi and the NGO's headquarters. Well, I decided to take it somewhat easier today, since I'm getting blisters in places I didn't even know I had. So I woke up late-ish, had breakfast and spent a couple hours being shown how little Arabic I ACTUALLY know despite having been a pretty big fish in the NCSU Arabic pond (humility is GRRRRREAT!), and then napped for a couple hours to the sound of Arabic music videos. Once I decided I'd wasted enough of the day and couldn't stand the thought of looking at my textbooks, I decided to see if I could find my future school.
This revealed to me the Truth of something I'd read in a book on Egyptian culture. Egyptians will, indeed, do their utmost to help you find a place...even when they have no Earthly idea where it is. This generally results in their giving you very explicit, detailed directions which take you nowhere near the place you're trying to get, but WILL take you beyond their sightline. Then you gotta ask someone ELSE who has no idea how to get where you're going, and just kind of hope you eventually wander in the right direction. I spent an hour walking around within about three blocks of the street I was trying to find, and NOBODY's advice was any good until I stumbled onto it by accident. Oh. My. Goodness. Best of all, it turned out to be less than five minutes from the first people I asked for directions.
On my walk home from the school, I decided to visit those helpful folks again (traffic cops, all three of them) and let them know where it was for future reference. Well, it turned out that none of the three I had seen two hours before was still on duty, but I didn't recognize that until I had already struck up a conversation with them. So THEN had to somehow explain to them that No, I wasn't lost, and No, I didn't need anything, I just wanted to be helpful and tell the guys I had spoken to earlier that I had found the street that they had sworn up and down didn't exist in this neighborhood, and it was just one street down, a right turn, and then the third street down on the left. Easy.
Well, sure, except that I was tired, and seemed to have forgotten all of my Arabic, so it was a disaster. Anyway, I ultimately managed to convey everything, and then it was off to home. But goodness, was that frustrating.
Thankfully, I had already had 4 or so interactions with people that validated me a little bit. So far, people are about 0 for a dozen on guessing my nationality properly -- which, generally, is a good thing. The leading contenders have been Dutch, French, and English (2x each), Spanish once, German once or twice, and assorted Scandinavian countries. When I tell them I'm American, I can see their preconceptions crashing down around their ears. And I LOVE that.
That's one of my goals, I guess. To dismantle people's stereotypes of Ugly Americans, one conversation at a time. Thankfully it appears that the bar for Americans speaking non-American Arabic is significantly lower than it is for non-American Spanish and French, so people have been moderately impressed even though I, by my estimation, suck pretty hard at this game at this point.
NEway, it's getting cold out here again -- how is it that it NEVER occurred to me that I would experience this sensation in Cairo, and it's the biggest problem I've had so far? I CAN'T GET WARM!! -- and I need to track down something to eat. So I'm wrapping this up.
Before I go, though, a funny story about food...earlier today, I asked the front desk guy what some good food would be. Roughly "Maa huwa aakl gayyid fil mintaqa dii?" He looked at me and said, quizzically, "Mukh?"
Which means "brains." I rather emphatically said no, and he said "Well, we eat it here!" To which I replied that I might eventually, at the end of three months, but certainly not by the end of Day 3. Honestly, I doubt I'll be trying it even after 3 months -- memories of the presentation I did with Kristi Schneider and Katie Hill on Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (a.k.a., mad cow disease), prions, and massive plaques in people's brains still loom far too large in my head -- but some kind of kushari or shwarmar is probably in order before too long.
P.S. Bonii for whomever can identify the song to which the title of this post pays tribute...(Artist, too.)
Well, I promised Laurie I'd write it all up when things calmed down a tish, and as I'm sitting here with family and friends either at work or running errands (and hence not available to chat) and a gargantuan file trying to download (I'm getting fed up with the slowness of XP, which will have driven me into the arms of Linux just as soon as this file arrives), there's no time like the present to stare at a single, unchanging webpage and try to explain things. :-D
When we last left our intrepid RaleighSlade family, we had picked up and left Raleigh for Parts West, namely the wilds of Utah and Brigham Young University. The purpose of the summer out there was to get me through an intensive Arabic course offered at the uni., on the theory that spending the two grad school summers studying Arabic first domestically and then abroad would be a more effective sequence than the converse. I arrived moderately well-prepared in terms of formal Arabic, which is what newspapers are written in and newscasts presented in. Unfortunately, I was woefully behind in Colloquial Arabic, which is what everyone *actually* speaks, and in all too many ways bears merely a passing resemblance to formal Arabic. Ugh.
SOO...I wound up spending simply ungodly amounts of time in the library and our little married housing suite working to catch up to my peers in that regard. This killed off basically any time I would've spent blogging, and the day after our term at BYU ended it was time to hit the road for home. We had exactly four days to make it cross-country before Anna was due to start work, and only two more days after that until classes started for me. We managed to sneak a day or so visit to Colorado Springs to introduce Anna to my Aunt Sharrie and Uncle Kenny (as well as show off the little man, of course). I then drove them up to Denver, from which they flew out to see Dan and Vicky in West Lafayette, IN. I had a longish drive from Denver across Kansas, where I spent a night with an old cousin I hadn't seen in about 17 years, and then had a delightful lunch with my old climbing partner and her husband as I made my way through St. Louis. I got to spend a night at Vicky and Dan's with Anna and the little guy, dropping them off at the Indianapolis airport the next morning on my way to Winston-Salem and my friend Jen's place. Needless to say, it was something of a whirlwind, and blogging weren't gonna happen.
Fall term was fairly busy, although nothing too crazy. I had two classes that could've been excellent and were made merely okay by some individuals who shall remain nameless, and my Arabic class was a major letdown after BYU. I still love Ustaaza, but our resources at NCSU were such that Arabic was 2 hrs. per week, rather than 2 hrs. a day -- and that's a MAJOR step down in language pedagogy. I began meeting with a fellow Arabic student about once a week to practice chatting, and that's about all that kept my skills from degrading completely. Then Thanksgiving/Christmas hit, throughout all of which the little guy was fighting off an ear infection and the croup. Ugh. Then he shared it with ME, generous little man that he is, and wiped me out until a few weeks into the Spring term at school.
Spring term was, to put it mildly, frustrating as hell. There were two bright spots - my Arabic translation class, and the Global Problems class with Dr. Boettcher. The other stuff, well...boo. I swear, one of these days I'll have the time and energy and focus and preparation to write a thesis-type thingy I can be proud of. As it was, the course overload (to say nothing of the class I detested which took up nearly twice as much time as it ought to've, largely due to the efforts of the repeatedly aforementioned MouthBreather) was such that my Capstone wound up being significantly less interesting, thorough, or insightful than I would've liked. On the flip side, I learned tons about Iran and did some Deep Thinking about development praxis, so that was good. Maybe it'll help me with the work I'm beginning tomorrow.
So...Anna was planning to head off to San Diego to live with her folks and work on a 13-week Travel OT contract, since the idea of staying around Raleigh and trying to be Super Single Mom for the summer wasn't hugely appealing. She's employable everywhere, and I'm apparently employable practically nowhere, so we figured once I got back from Cairo we'd follow me wherever I could find a job. As of this writing, prospects are nebulous at best, imaginary at worst. We'll see if the summer catalyzes anything.
This kind of leads us to today. What on Earth is Timmy actually DOING in Cairo? Well, apart from the language study, which will begin in mid-June, I'm chasing down the last three credits I need toward my degree by doing an internship with an NGO. The group is named Alashanek Ya Balady, which translates roughly as "For your sake, O my country." It was founded by an AUC grad (who I guess is now a PhD candidate and/or adjunct prof.) who is sufficiently awesome at what she does to have earned the group (and herself) a number of major international awards for the quality of their work. I'm hoping to learn TONS from her, whatever I wind up doing.
...and, honestly, it's TBD what I'm going to be doing. I started taking the class I detested so SPECIFICALLY because it addressed what AYB wanted me to be doing...until they didn't, because they came up with a new Strategic Plan. So now it's not clear what my role will be, although I'll be meeting with the bosslady tomorrow and she will no doubt fill me in.
Yesterday, as I mentioned in my post, I hoofed it back to Zamalek from Maadi and the NGO's headquarters. Well, I decided to take it somewhat easier today, since I'm getting blisters in places I didn't even know I had. So I woke up late-ish, had breakfast and spent a couple hours being shown how little Arabic I ACTUALLY know despite having been a pretty big fish in the NCSU Arabic pond (humility is GRRRRREAT!), and then napped for a couple hours to the sound of Arabic music videos. Once I decided I'd wasted enough of the day and couldn't stand the thought of looking at my textbooks, I decided to see if I could find my future school.
This revealed to me the Truth of something I'd read in a book on Egyptian culture. Egyptians will, indeed, do their utmost to help you find a place...even when they have no Earthly idea where it is. This generally results in their giving you very explicit, detailed directions which take you nowhere near the place you're trying to get, but WILL take you beyond their sightline. Then you gotta ask someone ELSE who has no idea how to get where you're going, and just kind of hope you eventually wander in the right direction. I spent an hour walking around within about three blocks of the street I was trying to find, and NOBODY's advice was any good until I stumbled onto it by accident. Oh. My. Goodness. Best of all, it turned out to be less than five minutes from the first people I asked for directions.
On my walk home from the school, I decided to visit those helpful folks again (traffic cops, all three of them) and let them know where it was for future reference. Well, it turned out that none of the three I had seen two hours before was still on duty, but I didn't recognize that until I had already struck up a conversation with them. So THEN had to somehow explain to them that No, I wasn't lost, and No, I didn't need anything, I just wanted to be helpful and tell the guys I had spoken to earlier that I had found the street that they had sworn up and down didn't exist in this neighborhood, and it was just one street down, a right turn, and then the third street down on the left. Easy.
Well, sure, except that I was tired, and seemed to have forgotten all of my Arabic, so it was a disaster. Anyway, I ultimately managed to convey everything, and then it was off to home. But goodness, was that frustrating.
Thankfully, I had already had 4 or so interactions with people that validated me a little bit. So far, people are about 0 for a dozen on guessing my nationality properly -- which, generally, is a good thing. The leading contenders have been Dutch, French, and English (2x each), Spanish once, German once or twice, and assorted Scandinavian countries. When I tell them I'm American, I can see their preconceptions crashing down around their ears. And I LOVE that.
That's one of my goals, I guess. To dismantle people's stereotypes of Ugly Americans, one conversation at a time. Thankfully it appears that the bar for Americans speaking non-American Arabic is significantly lower than it is for non-American Spanish and French, so people have been moderately impressed even though I, by my estimation, suck pretty hard at this game at this point.
NEway, it's getting cold out here again -- how is it that it NEVER occurred to me that I would experience this sensation in Cairo, and it's the biggest problem I've had so far? I CAN'T GET WARM!! -- and I need to track down something to eat. So I'm wrapping this up.
Before I go, though, a funny story about food...earlier today, I asked the front desk guy what some good food would be. Roughly "Maa huwa aakl gayyid fil mintaqa dii?" He looked at me and said, quizzically, "Mukh?"
Which means "brains." I rather emphatically said no, and he said "Well, we eat it here!" To which I replied that I might eventually, at the end of three months, but certainly not by the end of Day 3. Honestly, I doubt I'll be trying it even after 3 months -- memories of the presentation I did with Kristi Schneider and Katie Hill on Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (a.k.a., mad cow disease), prions, and massive plaques in people's brains still loom far too large in my head -- but some kind of kushari or shwarmar is probably in order before too long.
P.S. Bonii for whomever can identify the song to which the title of this post pays tribute...(Artist, too.)
Friday, May 8, 2009
A long walk home - Cairo, 5.08.2009
This'll be a longish post, and the first on the hyper-touchy Asus keyboard, so bear with me. History has shown that when I chat with Anna, lots of letters get inadvertently struck twice in succession, so if there are a lot of typos that I don't catch, well...bear with me.
I arrived in Cairo yesterday around 10 a.m.-ish, and spent most of the day getting myself situated. I took a cab ride to the hotel in Zamalek (an island in the middle of the Nile where a lot of embassies are situated) from the airport, paying ~120 L.E. (more or less 25 bucks) for the 45 min. ride. I apparently overpaid by about 30-40 L.E. (about 6-8 bucks), but for my first cab ride I just didn't feel like haggling.
Once I got myself squared away at the hotel, I decided to go for a walk in search of the Fatted SIM Card. I ultimately snagged one, although not at the "supermarket" the desk guys had tried to point me to. I think I just would have felt odd walking into what was essentially a closet-sized room full to overflowing with fruits and vegetables and trying to explain my need to people who a) would not expect me to speaking any Arabic in the first place, and b) would not be primed to understand my "news anchor-style" formal Arabic, which is substantively different from the colloquial these folks would be speaking. Also, there would be about a zillion different things I could be asking about. At least by walking into a Mobinil store, it's fairly clear that I'm looking for phone stuff, and the context is sufficiently narrow that I could make my Arabic go a little further.
Fast forward to today, since nothing much else happened last night. I overslept my alarm clock (because I failed to set it), and so didn't have time to avail myself of the hotel's complimentary breakfast on the terrace. So now we were at 22 hours in Cairo without eating a meal. Hrmm...not ideal. Thankfully, I managed to snag a cabbie almost the moment I stepped onto the main drag, and we sped the 30 mins. from Zamalek to Maadi, where my friend D. lives with her husband H. and her son Little D. They've got a beautiful apartment on the 8th floor, and since they're on the Corniche El-Nil, they get an amazing breeze and a great view. There was very little smog today, so we were able to count 12 pyramids from their balcony. Wow.
We attended the service at the Maadi Community Church -- yes, they meet on Fridays, since Friday in majority-Muslim countries is pretty much equivalent to Sunday in the States -- followed by a short ride to H.'s photo studio. The Big Thing in Egypt is apparently getting large portraits (on the order of 3' x 2') made into...HOLOGRAMS! SO cool...so there was a photo of these two sisters, and depending on which side of dead-center you stood on, you would see a photo of just the one little girl, or just the other. Really neat...although nothing compared to the graduation ceremony photo for the Cairo American College. There was a shot of ~100 kids chucking their mortarboards into the air--a couple hundred yards in front of a pyramid!! Oh, MAN! I gotta say, Spring-Ford, Alma, and NC State had NUTHIN' on that.
Anyway, after lunch at Mickey D's -- I know, I know, ugly American, etc. etc....but it's Little D's favorite restaurant, and he desperately wanted to share it with me. I redeemed it by getting a MacArabia, which is basically a spiced chicken patty wrapped in a pita, with yogurt sauce, tomatoes, and lettuce -- and a short while hanging out with the Ds at their place, I decided I was going to go for a walk and see if I could track down my future workplace.
I managed to find it, about 2 miles away from the Ds' building. There was actually someone there today, working on his off-day...so he was quite surprised to have anyone knocking on the door, much less some American kid he had no idea was going to be coming this summer. So Ah and I hung out and chatted for about an hour before I got going on my way back to the hotel.
Here's where I REALLY should have rethought my plans for the afternoon. The expats, upon hearing that I was planning to walk from Maadi to Zamalek, had said "Oh, no, that's MUCH too far!" Perhaps I should've listened to them, right there at mile zero. OR, I could have listened to Ah, who said exactly the same thing at mile 1.73, and mentioned that it would cost me 1 L.E. (about 20 cents) to hop the subway to within another mile or so of my hotel. OR I could've listened to the nice Cairene policeman who said "What?! No, that's too far. Get a taxi!" when I asked himn for directions. At mile 6.85. Once I got that far into it, though, I was NOT gonna give up. EVERYONE had told me this was a bad idea, and it was sure beginning to look like it, but dammit, I was NOT going to quit at this point! So I kept going, periodically pulling my iPod out of my pocket to check the distance I had covered. I watched 8 miles pass...9 miles...10 miles (at which point another dude I asked for directions tried to snooker me into paying for the privilege of receiving a "gift" of a traditional Egyptian scene painted on REAL PAPYRUS!!! for the low, low, price of 20 dollars)...ugh. Finally I made it onto my island -- which I had not realized until today is the 2nd-northernmost of the 4 islands hanging out around this section of the Nile, which meant that on two previous occasions I had THOUGHT I had reached my island, but really hadn't -- and walked on past the soundcheck for some kind of big concert happening at the Gezira Sporting Club. When I finally set foot in my hotel lobby, the iPod said 12.65 miles and more than 1800 calories expended (which is significantly more than I have consumed as of the end of day 2 in Egypt -- something tells me this is not sustainable), and my body was SCREAMING.
A long shower/laundry session helped a little. Apparently, there is no such thing as a laundromat in Cairo - if you don't wash things yourself at home, you take them to professional cleaners who charge about a buck an item. Well, I'm cheap, and I've got soap in the shower. So 30 mins. of glorious showering later, I had handwashed two sets of undergarments, a pair of jeans (those'll NEVER dry, I'm sure) and a pair of shirts. If I wear outer garments twice or three times before washing them - which shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't make a habit of walking 13 miles wearing them - I don't think this system will get too onerous. We'll see. Maybe I'll break down a few weeks into this.
Anyway, it's now 8:30 local time, and I still need to write some work-related e-mails and get some school stuff squared away, so I'm going to sign off.
(Ms. DeYoung, your update is coming. Since I anticipate tomorrow is going to be a slow day -- not only will my body be needing a break, it's also the second day of the Egyptian weekend, so not much will be going on -- I promise to spend part of the day writing it, and will hope to have it posted by mid-day your time.)
I arrived in Cairo yesterday around 10 a.m.-ish, and spent most of the day getting myself situated. I took a cab ride to the hotel in Zamalek (an island in the middle of the Nile where a lot of embassies are situated) from the airport, paying ~120 L.E. (more or less 25 bucks) for the 45 min. ride. I apparently overpaid by about 30-40 L.E. (about 6-8 bucks), but for my first cab ride I just didn't feel like haggling.
Once I got myself squared away at the hotel, I decided to go for a walk in search of the Fatted SIM Card. I ultimately snagged one, although not at the "supermarket" the desk guys had tried to point me to. I think I just would have felt odd walking into what was essentially a closet-sized room full to overflowing with fruits and vegetables and trying to explain my need to people who a) would not expect me to speaking any Arabic in the first place, and b) would not be primed to understand my "news anchor-style" formal Arabic, which is substantively different from the colloquial these folks would be speaking. Also, there would be about a zillion different things I could be asking about. At least by walking into a Mobinil store, it's fairly clear that I'm looking for phone stuff, and the context is sufficiently narrow that I could make my Arabic go a little further.
Fast forward to today, since nothing much else happened last night. I overslept my alarm clock (because I failed to set it), and so didn't have time to avail myself of the hotel's complimentary breakfast on the terrace. So now we were at 22 hours in Cairo without eating a meal. Hrmm...not ideal. Thankfully, I managed to snag a cabbie almost the moment I stepped onto the main drag, and we sped the 30 mins. from Zamalek to Maadi, where my friend D. lives with her husband H. and her son Little D. They've got a beautiful apartment on the 8th floor, and since they're on the Corniche El-Nil, they get an amazing breeze and a great view. There was very little smog today, so we were able to count 12 pyramids from their balcony. Wow.
We attended the service at the Maadi Community Church -- yes, they meet on Fridays, since Friday in majority-Muslim countries is pretty much equivalent to Sunday in the States -- followed by a short ride to H.'s photo studio. The Big Thing in Egypt is apparently getting large portraits (on the order of 3' x 2') made into...HOLOGRAMS! SO cool...so there was a photo of these two sisters, and depending on which side of dead-center you stood on, you would see a photo of just the one little girl, or just the other. Really neat...although nothing compared to the graduation ceremony photo for the Cairo American College. There was a shot of ~100 kids chucking their mortarboards into the air--a couple hundred yards in front of a pyramid!! Oh, MAN! I gotta say, Spring-Ford, Alma, and NC State had NUTHIN' on that.
Anyway, after lunch at Mickey D's -- I know, I know, ugly American, etc. etc....but it's Little D's favorite restaurant, and he desperately wanted to share it with me. I redeemed it by getting a MacArabia, which is basically a spiced chicken patty wrapped in a pita, with yogurt sauce, tomatoes, and lettuce -- and a short while hanging out with the Ds at their place, I decided I was going to go for a walk and see if I could track down my future workplace.
I managed to find it, about 2 miles away from the Ds' building. There was actually someone there today, working on his off-day...so he was quite surprised to have anyone knocking on the door, much less some American kid he had no idea was going to be coming this summer. So Ah and I hung out and chatted for about an hour before I got going on my way back to the hotel.
Here's where I REALLY should have rethought my plans for the afternoon. The expats, upon hearing that I was planning to walk from Maadi to Zamalek, had said "Oh, no, that's MUCH too far!" Perhaps I should've listened to them, right there at mile zero. OR, I could have listened to Ah, who said exactly the same thing at mile 1.73, and mentioned that it would cost me 1 L.E. (about 20 cents) to hop the subway to within another mile or so of my hotel. OR I could've listened to the nice Cairene policeman who said "What?! No, that's too far. Get a taxi!" when I asked himn for directions. At mile 6.85. Once I got that far into it, though, I was NOT gonna give up. EVERYONE had told me this was a bad idea, and it was sure beginning to look like it, but dammit, I was NOT going to quit at this point! So I kept going, periodically pulling my iPod out of my pocket to check the distance I had covered. I watched 8 miles pass...9 miles...10 miles (at which point another dude I asked for directions tried to snooker me into paying for the privilege of receiving a "gift" of a traditional Egyptian scene painted on REAL PAPYRUS!!! for the low, low, price of 20 dollars)...ugh. Finally I made it onto my island -- which I had not realized until today is the 2nd-northernmost of the 4 islands hanging out around this section of the Nile, which meant that on two previous occasions I had THOUGHT I had reached my island, but really hadn't -- and walked on past the soundcheck for some kind of big concert happening at the Gezira Sporting Club. When I finally set foot in my hotel lobby, the iPod said 12.65 miles and more than 1800 calories expended (which is significantly more than I have consumed as of the end of day 2 in Egypt -- something tells me this is not sustainable), and my body was SCREAMING.
A long shower/laundry session helped a little. Apparently, there is no such thing as a laundromat in Cairo - if you don't wash things yourself at home, you take them to professional cleaners who charge about a buck an item. Well, I'm cheap, and I've got soap in the shower. So 30 mins. of glorious showering later, I had handwashed two sets of undergarments, a pair of jeans (those'll NEVER dry, I'm sure) and a pair of shirts. If I wear outer garments twice or three times before washing them - which shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't make a habit of walking 13 miles wearing them - I don't think this system will get too onerous. We'll see. Maybe I'll break down a few weeks into this.
Anyway, it's now 8:30 local time, and I still need to write some work-related e-mails and get some school stuff squared away, so I'm going to sign off.
(Ms. DeYoung, your update is coming. Since I anticipate tomorrow is going to be a slow day -- not only will my body be needing a break, it's also the second day of the Egyptian weekend, so not much will be going on -- I promise to spend part of the day writing it, and will hope to have it posted by mid-day your time.)
Monday, December 22, 2008
New! Excedrin - Racial Tension Headache
Posting this here because FB is apparently on the fritz and is making things difficult.
Best line? "Excedrin RT. Takes me from 'Ohhh, no you DI'INT!' to 'I wish a mother%*&^$er would...' -- just like that!"
I LOVE Queen Latifah. Little Arabic tidbit for ya: 'Latifah' = nice/kind, (f). So she's the nice, kindly queen!
Best line? "Excedrin RT. Takes me from 'Ohhh, no you DI'INT!' to 'I wish a mother%*&^$er would...' -- just like that!"
I LOVE Queen Latifah. Little Arabic tidbit for ya: 'Latifah' = nice/kind, (f). So she's the nice, kindly queen!
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