The summer's gone and all the flowers are dying...

This story is about an adventure I had two weeks ago - sorry for the delay, this blogging thing is harder than it looks.

Acting spontaneously on a desperate need to get out of our dorms (more on that later) and out of Alex, Marisa and I decided to head to Port Said in the delta for the weekend.  Port Said's main claim to fame is as the home of the Suez Canal, but to Egyptians it's mostly famous for having the best shopping in the country (because it's a duty-free port).   The city saw a lot of action and destruction in the Suez Crisis and the Yom Kippur/October 6th War, but has recovered economically in recent years.

We went just because we needed to get away.  We didn't really know anything about the place, had no train tickets, no hotel reservations, just a little preliminary internet research.  We stayed up all night so that we could get the 4 am train to Port Said - our only other option was a 4 pm train, which would have cost us a whole day there.  But unfortunately, our horrible old dorms lock us in at night and the guards absolutely refused to let us out.  After considering scaling the courtyard walls and bailing out a second floor window down a drain pipe, we decided we would just wait until 8 am and get a bus from downtown Alex.  The bus turned out to be much faster and a little cheaper (Egypt doesn't make sense sometimes) and surprisingly clean and comfortable.

We arrived in Port Said, amazed to have even made it this far, grabbed a taxi and headed to the nice hotel we'd read about online.  After bargaining and jockeying for a room, and inspecting the beautiful pool, we settled in for our long weekend of relaxation.

We lay out and sunned for at least 3 hours every day.  We both caught up on our pleasure reading.  We drank fresh mango juice while dangling our feet in the pool.  Just feeling the sun on my bare skin was such a precious sensory pleasure.  Upper arms, shoulders, legs all got their first sun kiss in 6 weeks.  It was wonderful.

We wandered around the town, did some window shopping, bought some ugly tee shirts with fuzzy bears printed on them, and saw the Suez Canal.  We couldn't get up close to the canal, because it's super high security, so we just hung out by the ferries, watching them cross from Port Said to Port Fuad and watching the sunset and moonrise.  

We wandered along the beach, got our feet wet, had ice cream, smoked delicious sheesha, played a public park with swings and seesaws, and explored the city a bit.  There was a wedding in our hotel on our second night, and after I had stood watching the bride and groom be circled by drummers and bagpipers for about 20 minutes, two little girls in the wedding party came up to me and shyly asked me my name and where I was from.  I told them, and we talked for a moment, and then they smiled and ran away.  When Marisa and I went out onto our hotel's balcony for our sheesha,  the little girls followed us and brought some of their friends!  We ended up talking with them for quite a while - some Arabic and some English.  They asked if we were artists, and I told them that I was a singer, they would not be satisfied until I sang.  I tried everything to talk them out of it - I'd been smoking sheesha for half an hour! - but they wouldn't take no for answer, so I sang them a verse of "Danny Boy," and they couldn't have been happier.  Then one of the girls sang an Egyptian pop song for us, and one sang an English nursery rhyme, and they left.  Marisa and I laughed and laughed - and then they came back!  We talked some more, and I had to sing again.  This time one of the girls requested "you know that song of love from Titanic" - and so there I was, sitting in a sheesha cafe in Egypt, singing Celine Dion with a bunch of Egyptian girls.  What a strange country.

We did have some bad experiences in our hotel, but they got resolved without too much problem and we tried not to let it affect how enjoyable the rest of our stay was.  Egypt is a land of extremes, and it was too much to hope that any experience could just be all good.  

But what really made the weekend wonderful was how self-sufficient we were.  We set off on our own, with no plans, no reservations, no information, no guides, no prep at all - and we made it work all on our own, in Arabic and English, and had a lovely time.  We both felt so proud, and felt that we had really come a long way.

This current weekend marks the halfway point of my first semester in Egypt.  I've been here seven weeks, and I'll be here seven more.  One of those will be blissfully spent in Italy with people I love, and one will be spent cruising down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and Abu Simbel.  My program responded to all of our complaints and health concerns about the dorms we were living in, and has moved us into gorgeous new apartments (hopefully I'll be able to get pictures up soon).  We're in the nicest, poshest neighborhood of Alex, we have a huge kitchen, a balcony, a sun room, three separate living rooms, a dining room, two bathrooms, picture windows - it's probably the best apartment I'll ever live in, actually.  Some of our friends came up from Cairo to see the place this weekend and with a bunch of Alex resident friends, we christened the place with a proper hefla (*party) and feel very settled in now.  Having this beautiful, comfortable living space in a neighborhood where I feel safe is going a long way to change my feelings about Egypt.  I feel stronger and more willing to take risks knowing that I have a safe and lovely space to come home to.  

So, seven weeks to go - midterms and finals and travels, oh my.  But it feels like these next seven weeks will be drastically different from the last seven weeks in all kinds of positive ways.  It's still Egypt, so it'll be crazy and impossible as usual, but better.  Definitely better.


And the cool weather has just moved in for fall.  Yesterday, I stood out on my balcony to catch the first rain of the season, and let my bare arms and head get soaked.  The change of seasons and time is in the air.

Salaam,

Helen

Trying to be a better Jew

I always meet the hidden part of myself in holy places.

And if the holy places are hidden, the revelation is ever greater.

Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue, the only synagogue in Alexandria, is certainly hidden. It took my friend Liana and I good while wandering around downtown Alex to find it, and the entrance was tucked away down a sketchy alley and surrounded by guards.  The building was originally a church, but the Coptic community sold it to the Jews because they couldn't afford to pay the taxes levied on them by the Muslim rulers.  We're all people of the book, eh?

I wish I could show you pictures, but my internet connection is way too slow here to upload pics to this blog, so I'm putting in a link to my facebook album - I hope you can all see it fairly easily.

Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue

I'd read about the synagogue in some of preliminary research on Alexandria, and really wanted to cross it off my list.  Liana was interested in it herself, so we went together.  I'd found a phone number for the "gaon," Ben Youssef, in my friend's Lonely Planet guidebook, so I called and made an appointment to see the place.  When we got there, Ben Youssef was there to meet us and couldn't have been more welcoming and warm.  He asked us a few questions about ourselves in good English, took several animated phone calls in Arabic, quoted in Hebrew and, when he couldn't remember a word in English, slipped into French for a minute.  Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear French in Egypt, and picked right up with him, chatting away.  French turns out to be the native tongue for most of the Jews left in Alexandria, so he was very much at ease speaking it with me, and I was so happy to get some practice.  When I saw the old and well-worn volumes of Moliere and Racine on the shelf behind him, I knew I was in a good place.

The synagogue caretaker, Abd el-Nabi, took us around the synagogue, while Ben Youssef did whatever you have to do to run a defunct synagogue.  The place itself is absolutely beautiful - and beautifully maintained.  The temple (المعبد اليهودي, in arabic) was in its heyday when Alexandria alone had a population of around 40,000 Jews - a thriving, European ex-pat community filling up cosmopolitan Alexandria from around the turn of the century to the end of World War II.  After the creation of the state of Israel, Nasser's nationalizing spree, and the Six Day War, Egyptian Jews began a second exodus - today there are only 4 Jewish men and 17 Jewish men in Alexandria, all over 65 years old.  21 Jews.  They don't have enough men for a minyan, so they only have services on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot.  They import a rabbi, and invite Jews from Cairo and from Israel and all over the world to fill their beautiful, ghostly synagogue.  

Abd el-Nabi is a Muslim, but he's worked at Eliyahu Hanavi for 25 years, and his daughter works there now too.  He speaks Hebrew, has read Torah, and works with Jews every day.  He knows more about the synagogue than most anyone else.  He's got a wicked smile, a welcome for everyone, stories to tell all day and all night, and a constant perfume of cigars.  I liked him a lot.

After we wandered around the synagogue to our heart's content and listened to Abd el-Nabi's stories, we went back to the office to say goodbye to Ben Youssef.  We exchanged phone numbers and he declared that we have a father in Alexandria now.  The Jewish community here is so small, so endangered and so indestructible, and they welcomed us with open arms.

After we left, we went to a delightful French pastry shop and had ice cream and coffee looking out over my favorite vista in Alexandria, Saad Zaghloul square and the Mediterranean.  Waving palm trees, blue water, consulates and hotels, horse-drawn carriages crawling by, good food and good company.  On impulse, we took a horse-drawn carriage with red wheels and bells back home, and just soaked the atmosphere of an Alexandria that had treated us well that day.

Some good news!

 Check out this article - At least I can afford some retail therapy here.

You could either be successful or be us...

Egypt and I aren't in the best place right now.


Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying - Belle & Sebastian

Catch up - yalla bina!

You're in luck - today I had a really excellent Arabic class, which has finally put me in the rare position of being in a good mood while having some downtime in my room. I've put on some Miles Davis, looked back through my pictures, and I'm ready to blog.

There's so much to say - the last time I posted was 10 days ago! I can't believe time has gone so silently - it's already mid-October (Miles, with his melancholy flamenco sketching, seems to feel the same way). Every day is full, every week is long, and when I wake up suddenly a month has gone by. It's been one month and one day since I arrived here. When I look back on my expectations for my first month in Egypt, I feel like I have accomplished nothing and will never get solid ground under my feet again. But when I stop expecting, judging, comparing and evaluating everything, as a wise person reminded me to do, I find that, like time, good things come silently and knit themselves into your daily life so you never notice them. There will be a time for introspection, for evaluation - but it is not now. Now is the time, the moment, the instant -

"There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world."
- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

So that's my new approach, my new mindset. We'll see if it makes the next month any easier than this one has been. Egypt is madness all the time, a rush from extreme thrill and joy to misery and confusion, with never a chance in the middle to catch your breath. But hey, I'm young and that's what I should be doing. I remember last year, around this time, looking at pictures of friends studying abroad, and feeling strangled by all the placid pastoral community of Kenyon around me. Now, part of me wants that friendly familiar embrace, but the wiser (more annoying) part of me knows that this experience is really what I want - that breathing sea air is better than being strangled.

Stories this week in list format - it's just easier that way.

- A day bopping around tourist Alexandria. The lovely Marisa and Kasandra came with me to explore Pompey's Pillar and the Catacombs of Kom el-Shokafa, two of Alex's main tourist attractions. The Pillar itself was beautiful and very tall, but that was pretty much it. The legend from which it draws its name is that the head of Pompey, a great Roman general who led the wrong side of a civil war against Julius Caesar, was beheaded in Alexandria after he came seeking sanctuary, and his head was placed on top of the pillar as a gift to Caesar. This is very charming and all, except that pillar was actually built to celebrate the victory of emperor Diocletian over an Alexandrian uprising - over 200 years after Pompey was killed. Awkward.

But there was lots of ancient art and sculpture around the pillar that was exciting to look at. And more excitingly (Get ready, I'm about to really nerd out), the remains of the ancient temple of Serapis! Serapis was a syncretic Hellenistic-Egyptian god - basically, the Ptolemies who took over the leadership of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great needed a way to control their recalcitrant Egyptian citizens, and shamelessly manipulated and invented religious figures to help bridge the gap between the Greek and Egyptian culture. Serapis was the foremost of these, seen as the full manifestation of the Egyptian god Osiris, and also as the Greek god Hades, who served a function similar to Osiris in the Greek pantheon. Crazy, right? See I warned you I was going to nerd out. The temple of Serapis also functioned as the "daughter library" to the Great Library of Alexandria - any books that didn't fit there were kept in the temple. The books in the temple were also completely open to the public, unlike those in the library which were only open to a certain class of people. The Coptic Christians destroyed it at the end of the 3rd century CE. RUDE.

But, like everything ancient and precious in Egypt, it was pretty much unguarded, unmarked and uninterpreted. So when Marisa and I found a way down into an underground passage, of course we went in. We got a cell phone flashlight, slipped through the hole in the wall, and down a small tunnel, and there we were - two American girls crawling around the ancient temple of Serapis, the world's first public library, a mighty symbol if the religious syncretism of the ancient Mediterranean. And it was really creepy and dusty too!

After that, we walked along the Corniche looking for a famous fruit juice place. Walking, we realized that a car in the near lane had slowed to keep pace with us - a car full of young Egyptian men. Frustrated, we kept walking, assuming they'd move on. No such luck. So we stopped, figuring no one would stop their car on a six-lane highway. Wrong - they stopped. So we walked backwards, knowing no one would reverse on a six-lane highway. Wrong again. And this time one of them got out of the car and stared at us. We kept walking forward, getting more and more upset and freaked out. They got back in the car and kept following us. Now I'm all for being sensitive to cultural relativism, and I know that women here are not expected to lose their temper or even acknowledge this kind of behavior - but this went beyond cultural relativity for me. No human being, anywhere, should be treated like that. So I lost my temper, screamed at them, cursed, and they drove off. I'm not proud of it - it's just that I simply could not have kept enduring that a moment longer. You can only be dehumanised for so long before you have to raise your voice.

Needless to say, after that, a delicious kiwi juice overlooking the Mediterranean, and then a quick splash, fully-clothed, in the sea itself, was more than necessary.

- So, on to another day. The Alexandria Opera House. Everyone on our program had bought tickets to a concert of the music of Sayed Darwish, a beloved Egyptian composer. We got all dressed up, looked sensational, taxied over to the Opera House, admired the remarkable cleanliness and elegance of the hall, and then listened in horror as the music began. It was a noxious children's chorus, conducted by a decrepit tenor with delusions of grandeur, backed by an exhausted-looking middle aged half-orchestra. It was bad. Bad. For the first time in my life, I bailed on a concert at intermission. And I have no regrets.
Two of the other girls left with me, we went back to our rooms, changed into jeans, and headed out to our favorite ex-pat dive bar where we started the dance party and had an absolutely fantastic night. Did you ever expect that I would leave a classical music concert half way through to go to a dive bar? I guess I'm growing up...

- Class continues on, and some days are terrible, some days are excellent. I'm not used to feeling like the stupidest person in the room, so it can be hard on my ego, but I do think I'm learning.

- This weekend, I went back to Cairo again with most of the people on the Alex program to see a production of Aida staged in front of the Pyramids. I really don't like the opera itself, so I figured this was a perfect opportunity - the best thing about the Aida is just the massive spectacle of it all, and there could not possibly be a more spectacular setting for Aida than the Pyramids. So I could see it here, and no matter the quality of the performances, feel like I had done the opera justice and would never have to see it again. The music was not great, though the soprano singing Aida was actually very impressive, but when the background to the Triumphal March is the actual Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, you're really not listening all that hard.

After the opera, our friends in Cairo took us out to an amazing sheesha place - incidentally, lemon-mint is the best sheesha flavor in the whole world - and we had milkshakes and sheesha until 3:30 in the morning. We got up early the next morning, bought some pastry and brought 5 of our Cairo friends back to Alex to show them our city by the sea. We had an amazing time, showing them the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, our favorite fish restaurant and juice place, the beaches, the antique and awesome tram line, the ancient Catacombs and some of the cooler neighborhoods of the city. Showing other people around the city made me love it a little more, and made me feel a little more at home in it. Maybe by the end of the semester, it'll feel like my city. I hope our Cairo peeps come back soon and often!

And today, after that whirlwind weekend, it was back to class, to the mental whirl of amia and fusha, homework and vocabulary drills. It can be hard to care about schoolwork here, with everything else there is to do.

Hopefully, this weekend will be another get-away weekend, somewhere cheap and exciting, and preferably near a beach where I can wear a bikini!

Salaam,
Helen

Running running running

It's very easy to lose momentum for blogging when life is so busy and confusing.  I'll try to have a new one up for you guys soon.  As every day goes by and more things happen, it gets harder to imagine going back and remembering and retelling.

And besides, my new resolution is to live more fully committed to the present moment and not compare or judge.

Size Matters

A week ago today, I stood at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
And really, the thing that makes the greatest impression is just the sheer massiveness of the pyramids.

The individual stones are massive.  Each pyramid is massive - even the smallest one is incomprehensibly huge.
After the size, what impresses most is the ancientness of them.  The oldest is almost 5,000 years old.  Maybe it's because I'm the daughter of two historians, or because I'm an American and therefore a cultural infant in the global sweep of things, but the age of things has always had a powerful effect on me.  And the wonderful thing about the pyramids - as opposed to the ancient sites of Alexandria, for example - is their endurance.  The rush of continuity and eternity that runs through you when your fingertips touch the stones is impossible for me to put into words.  I know, I know, this is a blog, I'm supposed to be describing these things for you.  But that's where the title of this blog comes in - as much as I try to explain and describe what I do, the experience is at heart a wordless one.

But to imagine a man laying down a stone 5,000 years ago - a member of my own species, speaking a language and worshipping gods, eating fresh mangoes and drinking Nile water, struggling every day with his body to support a family - and then to feel that same stone under your own hands, I felt so incredibly human, and felt that I understood a little better what it means to be human.

I also understood what it meant to be hot, dirty, tired, and heckled by pushy camel ride salesman and skinny children selling postcards.  This is the way it is in Egypt - a constant rush from one extreme to another.

I went to the pyramids with one of the guys on my program who's studying in Cairo this semester, and we decided not to get a guide or take a tour at the site, but instead just to enjoy it at our own pace.  We really took our time, and I actually enjoyed not learning anything about the place - just drinking it in.  And Josh and I had some good talk about Bernard Lewis and Edward Said - I'm still working my way through "Orientalism" and falling ever more torturously in love with Said.  Not to mention that he's beginning to color my experience here in interesting ways.

After the pyramids and the Sphinx, Josh and I went on to the best part of the day.  I had done some research at home about horseback riding in Cairo and had found one stable that looked really good, and Josh was more than game, so we had made plans for a two-hour horseback ride across the Sahara between the pyramids of Abusir and Dahshur/Sakkara.

Yes.  A two-hour horseback ride across the Sahara.

If you know me at all, you know this was one of the best moments of my life.

We had a wonderful guide, an international endurance riding champion, I had beautiful horse named Umm Kulthoum, Josh was great company...but really, I was just on such a high from being ON A HORSE IN THE SAHARA DESERT.

No helmets, no set track to follow, we just rode.  And rode and rode.  And though my out-of-riding-shape body was aching the next morning, I couldn't have been happier at the time.  There was a moment when, having ridden a bit ahead of the other two, I stopped and look all around me.  All around, all there was was desert.  I looked down and saw horse, looked up and saw sun, and couldn't have been happier.

We walked, trotted, cantered, got up some serious speed.  I hadn't forgotten everything, even though my Western habits amused our English-trained guide, but when I figured out the my horse could neck-rein, it all worked out.

But there it is.  I can tell you that cantering across the Sahara desert, wind buffeting my face and blowing my hair, sun burning my face, sand in my eyes, and strong horse carrying me, is as good as it gets.

Highlights of next post: kiwi juice overlooking the Mediterranean, how I finally snapped at men harassing me, and how Marisa and I snuck into the ruins of ancient temple.

Salaam,
Helen