Beyond Occident

To the courageous international (but largely American) student body toiling away in the heat of Cairo, Friday has ceased to be a concrete day. It can no longer be found wedged between Thursday and Saturday or as a distinct set of 24 splendid hours. No, Friday exists in the minds of hard working students here as an idea, a set of guidelines or a certain frame of mind one embraces whenever they finish that last test. Thursday is our last day of the week, but Monday is too for some of us, and a lot of us have classes on Sunday and Saturday. So really, there is no concept of a ‘weekend’ or a ’school week’. Thus, when a girl burst onto the terrace this morning, where I was devouring a particularly delicious Egg McMuffin (they use real eggs here) before heading off to Arabic, and exclaimed “It’s FRIDAY!” (technically, it was Thursday), everyone let loose a wild hurrah!!! instead of laughing behind their instant coffees at some buffoon getting the days mixed up. Of course, for the international students lucky enough to only be attending AUC for pass/fail, the doctrine of Friday is more of a lifestyle, only suspended when one must show up to enough Arabic classes to avoid getting a Fail.

“But Narrator,” some of my observant readers may point out, “if it is a Friday, why are you writing this blog post and not participating in the shenanigans that are no doubt reducing Zamalek to shambles around your room at this very moment?”.  This is an astute observation. However, since I missed a couple days of class this week while suffering from some food poisoning (which I have a sneaking suspicion was at the hands of the double layered veggie pizza pie I had earlier that afternoon), I have quite a backlog of papers/internship stuff/Arabic/etc that I really must get done over the next couple days. In the interests of procrastination and my mental health, I am writing this here blog post to avoid the mind-numbing effects of rentier economies on political development.

If I had made the bold decision to abandon my academic career’s ship this evening, you could really simplify all my options down to two simple choices:

1. Participate in the Egyptian version of a good evening: Drink tea (or Turkish coffee is you’re feeling especially daring), smoke shisha, play backgammon and watch football in a cafe along the Nile with some hilarious natives and students who are genuinely trying to learn the language.

2. Participate in the International (read: American student) version of a good evening: Rent a 100 person felucca, buy a ship-ton (harharhar…)  of alcohol and collectively thumb your noses at the Egyptian cultural stance against public intoxication. Also risk almost certain death in case the boat runs into a glacier or rogue Somali pirate ship and begins to sink. Even if you are somehow in any condition to swim to shore, you will surely contract several different strains of Schistosomiasis.

But I chose neither of these options. Instead, I recognized an unavoidable need for coffee and pudding in order to make any progress this evening, and so I went off to the grocery. Along the way I made an observation:

I previously thought that Egyptians were simply truly horrendous parallel parkers. Once, while waiting for my favorite falafel joint to finish moping the floor, or whatever the Egyptian version of moping should be called, I witnessed a car take a good ten minutes to navigate its way into a generously large spot, slamming into another car and backing up traffic for miles. But tonight I realized I am only half right. They also just don’t care about the condition of their cars as long as it leads to a good parking spot. I saw three parked cars in a row with more than a love tap going on between them. For the rest of the trek, every bumper I looked at was in less-than-pristine condition. Given my rather unfortunately poor record of keeping my car’s bumper at home in presentable condition, my father will surely be thrilled to just let me keep a damaged bumper in case any additional mailboxes or parked cars violently run into my car again.

Eventually, I made it to the grocery. I just now realized I forgot to buy a bunch of fieldwork notebooks, which is unfortunate, but at least I remembered to get my daily rations of bread, pudding, instant coffee and apples (still have a sizable stockpile of yogurt). A word on instant coffee:

There is really no “American” style coffee here. It is either Turkish or instant. And since Turkish is probably dangerous to drink in high quantities, I turn to instant for my caffeine needs. And believe me, I don’t think anyone turns to this stuff for their taste needs. The brand I get is Nescafe, and it must have an absurdly high caffeine content. The first night I drank it, I was still awake at 7 (and productive) in the morning. Normally, coffee will keep me somewhat awake but also in a zombie-like state. This does not. So I suppose this too might be dangerous in high quantities. But the Egyptians drink it a lot so what’s the worst that could happen? (Egyptians also drink the tap water a lot and this leads to the Ramses Runs, followed shortly by the spontaneous creation by mutant limbs and the generation of a radioactive field around one’s body.) But some chap really had their thinking cap on one day and came up with the brilliant idea of 3 in 1 instant coffee. This is a coffee, sugar and cream (or some chemical fraud prancing about pretending to be cream.. either way, fooled me) powder mixture in a little plastic packet. This actually tastes good. However, the list of ingredients is rather long and unappealing and carries the dubious distinction of being the first item I have seen here with corn syrup as an ingredient.

This is a picture of 3 in 1 coffee. Also featured is one of my new ultimate shoes (they're sweeet!), the strange deodorant dispensers here, apple juice and a sideways papyrus map of Egypt.

Does this post seem random and unorganized? That’s probably because A. It is, and B. I practically wrote it in my head on my way back to the dorms. But is there a topic or aspect of life in Cairo/Egypt that you want me to cover? Sound off in the comments!