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
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