Friday, July 04, 2008

l'chaim

i've been hanging out down here at the french cultural center for entirely too long looking through blogs about cairo. how is it possible that i didn't know until like a week ago that google had its own blog search? i fall more and more deeply in love with google every minute. so i googled several things, including "cairo foodie" (no significant yield), and in my search for "american in cairo" randomly turned up the blog of pauline, a good friend of shubra's from michigan who is really great and has been here in cairo for the past year on a fulbright. so now i feel creepy because i am stalking almost accidently stalking a friend via the internet, but whatevs. even more creepy, from pauline's blog i found liz from casa's blog which i read a little bit of, and i am now going to repost an article that she posted a couple weeks ago, because why not.

With a word, Egyptians leave it all to fate

this was a pretty interesting and accurate piece from the international herald tribune (which probably means the new york times, really, but who knows) about the widespread use of the phrase "inshallah" here in egypt. my favorite part is the last line (i feel like i've seen a lot of punchy last lines lately), a quote from a cab driver: "I'm going to take you to your house, arriving there in a decent amount of time is already a miracle. Of course I say inshallah!" i can just picture the guy yelling this SUPER LOUDLY and gesturing wildly at the millions of cars inching past him on the street.

last night was super fun party time at sequoia in zamalek from tim, joseph, and khulood's birthdays. this bar is pretty unbelievable, it's right on the nile and joseph (who has been raving about this place from pretty much the moment we arrived in cairo, and after having seen it i understand why) reserved the area around a little fireplace right on the nile for all of us. there was amazing food - sushi and sambousek (little fried pockets of pastry with cheese) and toum (garlic - god i love garlic) and tabbouleh YUM - and really good orange juice from which they made an overpriced vodka and orange juice cocktail, plus kind of crappy wine. there was a 100 pound minimum, which is super expensive for here but that's really $20, which is not actually so bad for a night out if you convert it to dollars. which i did because there are certain things for which you have to pretend that you're not supposed to be living entirely off of a 2550 LE ($400) monthly stipend.

so that was a fun time, and then today i spent pretty much sleeping, making vocab flash cards and watching friends, and cleaning the kitchen. nothing too adventurous. i was going to go to a fourth of july party at the british school (beautiful irony) in maadi (i think) but now i'm thinking i might skip it and do homework and eat koshari instead. tomorrow i am planning on going to khan al-khalili with henry, his girfriend liz (who is here visiting for i think the whole month), and i think tim and katie and michael but i might be totally making that up. if anyone who is in cairo reads this (mona mentioned that she did yesterday, and said it was like a livejournal, which is not shocking, but i don't know if anyone else does) and wants to come, let me know.

and, in other news, another thing i wanted to post several days ago is this:
Roger Cohen: Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque

katie and i both read that article i posted a couple of days ago about obama and muslims and we talked about it on our way back from school that day. we tried at first to talk in arabic and that was obviously completely futile because neither of us could quite express the details of what we were saying so we didn't understand each other and both came off as kind of ridiculous, so we switched to english and turned out katie had a point. i was saying pretty much what i wrote in here, that i think he should say that he is not a muslim but make sure to say that he respects islam in the process so as not to alienate muslims (and arabs, south asians, etc, because let's face it we all look the same if someone is going to be a bigot). katie was basically saying that it's not politically expedient for obama to do that because of the fear/hatred against islam and muslims.

and she's right, it's not politically expedient. he can't get elected by talking about how much he respects islam when that statement is going to get sound byted to death on fox news. on the other hand, (and maybe i'm too much of an idealist, and maybe roger cohen is too), but i really liked this:

I’ve no doubt that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel. But what I find as important is that he would come to Islam without prejudice. That’s the precondition for dialogue, whether with Iran or between Israel and Palestine.


he's right. it's impossible to actually make any changes without talking to iran, without talking to hamas, without talking to the people who are giving you trouble, i think. and in order to actually have a productive conversation with people, you have to respect them as people on a fundamental level. you don't have to respect their ideas, you certainly don't have to agree with them (i mean if you agree with them then (a) what the hell are you arguing about and (b) what the hell are you thinking?), but you have to come to the table with something resembling a clean slate. so i guess maybe it's not a good choice to visit mosques as a a presidential candidate, because then you don't get a chance to get elected, but in order to follow through on his whole "yes i would talk to iran" idea, obama needs to change his way of talking about islam.

but then again, everything i say is ridiculous and way too optimistic to actually happen in real life.

a small, vaguely related note:
"you know, for someone so evil, mahmoud ahmadinejad is kind of hot."
-katie jernigan

and then my dad was hilarious:
we're in Montreal, drove all day Thursday, which was the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City by Champlain (non stop info on radio....vive le Quebec libre!!!). And today is US Independence Day, in case you forget (vive George and Martha!!!!).

Papy HarbMoolah

(he has taken to calling himself papy warbucks because he gives me money to finance my extravagant lifestyle, but apparently now we can translate that into half arabic/half outdated slang)

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