welcome welcome ya gameela

reuters today published a story saying that two-thirds of egyptian men harass women. and i'm leaving off the question mark that they used in their headline because... there's no question about it. is the question mark supposed to be some kind of cultural sensitivity? don't lie for the sake of sensitivity, that's just stupid.

well, it's not really news to me that two thirds of egyptian men harass women. the most upsetting part of the article was:

Some 53 percent of men blamed women for bringing on sexual harassment, saying they enjoyed it or were dressed in a way deemed indecent. Some women agreed.

"Out of Egyptian women and men interviewed, most believe that women who wear tight clothes deserve to be harassed," the survey said. It addehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifd most agreed women should be home by 8 p.m.

The survey said most of the Egyptian women who told of being harassed said they were dressed conservatively, with the majority wearing the Islamic headscarf. The harassment took place on the streets or on public transport, as well as in tourist destinations and foreign educational institutions.

i'm sorry, but what are women supposed to do? people walk around wearing the hijab and still get harassed. my roommate's teacher who wears hijab got flashed in a supermarket once. like full-on flashed.

i wear my ipod as my armor, then i can't hear them.

on the other side of the women's dress question:

A Veil Closes France's Door to Citizenship

is anyone really surprised? i'm not gonna say anything because i don't think i actually understand anything about france and its laws, but i really hope/don't think that kind of thing would fly in the US.


anyway, my life is good. i am coming home in less than a week for the last week of july and whole month of august! yay!

tonight - well actually in 10 minutes - i am going out to dinner at a yemeni restaurant in doqqi with a bunch of casa people and then to watch caramel, this lebanese movie that is pretty exciting, at tim's. i've never had yemeni food before so i'm excited to find out what that's all about. i spent all day trying to do homework with joseph and t, but it turns out that doing homework with them/other people in general turns into exactly the same kind of mess that ben and ryan (and sometimes sarah) and i always got ourselves into and so we wound up talking about israel and boys.

i miss amer's.

oooh i get to have amer's in a week! oh my god so much honeycup mustard.

bonjourain

so i was in lebanon this past weekend, and that was pretty wonderful. instead of staying in beirut where it's really ridiculously hot right now (it's totally worse than cairo because of the humidity - and this egyptian guy that i met on the plane said something about how all the *good* lebanese are in the mountains in the summer anyway. he was just haughty enough that he could have been lebanese himself if he hadn't said gabal instead of jabal), i was up in a hotel in naas which is just a little above bikfaya with my grandparents and dany (my aunt) and my cousins sandro and silvio, who are 7 and 5.

and the view from my hotel room was pretty excellent.



the first day i was there, friday, i pretty much just did a lot of getting pretty stuff. i got my haircut and my nails done and etc. that was exciting. my grandma wasn't allowed to see my feet before i got my nails done, so it was a good thing we did that the first day first thing.

saturday i went down to my mom's aunt leila's house in jounieh and met leila and her daughter suha and her granddaughter naya who is 2 and so so so cute but kind of shy, then we immediately went back up the mountain to leila's other daughter rana's house in ballouneh. rana has a new baby named antoine and he is SO CUTE.

we ate a delicious lunch, obviously, and drank almaza and admired the incredible view. at lunch i went to take a bite of french fry with garlic dip stuff and my aunt was like "well do you have a date tonight?" and i was like no... and she was like okay, go ahead and eat the garlic. so odd. even weirder, i was at another restaurant on sunday and i met my dad's cousin for the first time and we were chatting throughout the meal. and when the garlic sauce came again i was like "mmm i love this stuff," and took a bite of chicken with it, and her immediate question was "do you have a boyfriend?" so strange. couldn't i just brush my teeth?

then monday i had lunch at dany's friend lina's house with a whole bunch of dany's friends, and lina's daughter joelle whom i really like. she is moving to paris to do a master's in something about physics? very cool.

then i came back to cairo monday night, and as soon as i walked into the gate for the egypt air flight back to cairo, the catcalls started once again. i don't actually get very much harassment myself, but it was just so disappointing. the best thing about the whole weekend was being able to wear whatever i wanted - i wore no sleeves the whole time, and knee-length skirts - and not having to worry about being stared at and bothered on the streets. just that, and the food, made it a really nice break, in addition to getting to see my family.

it was kind of strange that i was back there at the exact same time that the war started two years ago. and big deals happened while i was there, like a new government, so people we all politics all the time, but that's really the usual. because of the areas that i went to, i didn't really see much in terms of political posters the way you normally do in beirut - pretty much everything was kataeb, and bikfaya was all pictures of pierre gemayel. when we went to lina's house there was a big picture of michel aoun at the entrance to the village, just to let you know what that village thinks about politics. but because i was in the mountains and visiting people i know most of the time and didn't really go downtown at all, it felt like hizbullah had disappeared. it's strange how you can sort of create an imaginary situation for yourself.

two years later

i'll update this post later with details about my trip to lebanon this past weekend, but for right now, i wanted to post this from the BBC news coverage of the hizbullah-israel prisoner swap. hizbullah returned the bodies of the two israeli soldiers, ehud goldwasser and eldad regev, whose capture started the july war two years ago (in addition to, as the bbc has it, "body parts" of other israeli soldiers who died in the war), and israel returned five hizbullah prisoners, including samir qantar, who has been in prison since 1979 and is kind of a big deal as far as prisoners go, in addition to the remains of 200 lebanese and palestinians.

The BBC's Crispin Thorold in Beirut says the exchange will be a moment of jubilation for Hezbollah, who are claiming the deal as a victory.

The leader of Lebanon's mainly Maronite Christian Free Patriotic Movement and former army commander-in-chief, Michel Aoun, said the swap proved Israel had been defeated.

"I believe today is the crowning glory of the [2006 Israel-Hezbollah] war... There is national unanimity to welcome the prisoners and the martyrs' bodies. Everything calls for optimism and a new revival in Lebanon," he said.

But Ehud Goldwasser's father, Shlomo Goldwasser, said he was mystified by the Lebanese celebrations.

"I cannot understand what the Lebanese are so glad about and happy about," he said.

"They sacrificed over 700 of their best warriors and all their economy, and what they get for what they did is a murderer, a bloody murderer of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl and her father - and for this they are making all this glory, for this they sacrificed so much. So I feel only pity for them."

-BBC News

goldwasser is so right. i don't know very much, but i know enough to realize that these celebrations are kind of disgusting. michel aoun disturbs me most of the time (well, most of them disturb me at this point, but he does now in particular), but this is really going above and beyond. what is this new revival he's talking about? is he crazy? revival my ass. people are dead, and your reward is a murderer. this is no revival.

and israel says they identified the bodies - does this mean that they have been alive these last two years in prison, and that they only just killed them, or is that because of some kind of dna test? because it wouldn't be surprising if they had killed them just now, to create this horrifying false victory for themselves.

it's a sad week, a sad anniversary.

sarah johnson is my hero

in response to the flies on lollipop hijab thing, sarah, my favorite person in the entire world as of this moment, created this:



her translation and comments: "You can't control what women wear, you pigs, but you can protect yourselves from their revenge/vengeance." Hopefully you've noticed the phallic reference in the banana. I'm hoping I"m not the only woman who has beat the crap out of some feely jerk.

walk like an egyptian

today on my way home an egyptian woman stopped me to ask for directions. i didn't know where the place she was asking for was, but still, so exciting! apparently all the harassment is not because of my american appearance but rather entirely because of my stunning good looks.

last night we went to see a film about hasan al-banna in maadi. it was super long and i wasn't a huge fan, but i think ben would have thought it was pretty cool. the bookstore we were in was really great though, it had books in english and arabic (and i think other languages like french). i read the introduction to a spelling dictionary. apparently those exist. also, there was a book by giles keppel called "bad moon rising," so he officially gets all the middle east nerd cool points.

then we went to metro, one of the big supermarket chains, to try and get sour cream for the chocolate cake katie made tim for his birthday. unfortunately sour cream was nowhere to be found and for the life of us we couldn't figure out how to say it, so katie improvised. more importantly, metro was pretty incredible but kind of unbelievably expensive. i wanted to buy granola bars but they cost 38 LE. insane. katie spent about as much time choosing baking supplies as i do choosing pens and notebooks, so that's good.

then today was just class. i've been kind of exhausted all day because i was up till 2:30 last night for absolutely http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnot reason. and i had the delicious taamiya with fries sandwich for lunch again. as usual, although tomorrow might be time for a change.

yup, slow day.

and, to continue to the parade of (really great) new york times columns:

Bob Herbert: Lurching With Abandon

this is pretty much what i'm talking about with the obama problem, so i'm not even going to bother to repeat what he said (way better than i ever could). just this section is particularly important i think:

Mr. Obama is betting that in the long run none of this will matter, that the most important thing is winning the White House, that his staunchest supporters (horrified at the very idea of a President McCain) will be there when he needs them.

He seems to believe that his shifts and twists and clever panders — as opposed to bold, principled leadership on important matters — will entice large numbers of independent and conservative voters to climb off the fence and run into his yard.

Maybe. But that’s a very dangerous game for a man who first turned voters on by presenting himself as someone who was different, who wouldn’t engage in the terminal emptiness of politics as usual.

of course i still plan to vote for him, but i'm worried that, while he means to get more votes by playing the dirty political games and swinging right, he is actually losing a lot of support - and, more importantly, he is losing the appeal he had to independents.

fa3lan waheeda

who knew that maha could be the source of so much anger? she must be feeling pretty popular right about now.

the washington post (come on now, washington post. shame.) published Teaching Arabic and Propaganda a couple of days ago, written by some kid from harvard law school (because that makes you credible).

seriously.

the bad thing is that for awhile i was kind of right there along with him. why is it that we first learn things like "i'm very lonely" and "my mother died in a car accident." then again, my friends here and i have been talking about how we didn't learn how to say any of the negative words for a long time (we could say we were doing well when asked how are you, but didn't know how to say we were doing badly).

anyway, yes, it's a legitimate criticism of arabic teaching that the characters are just so depressing, but i don't think that needs to be taken quite as seriously as he is taking it. and, perhaps in reality this sad picture points to something a little bit accurate about the sorry economic and social state of a lot of the arab world.

but THEN. then pollak started complaining about the inclusion of a speech by gamal abd al-nasser, an "anti-Western hero," and of footage of rallies for the nasser with narration about the "dreams of my youth." additionally, he talks about the last lesson in al-kitab part one, where we meet maha's mother, a palestinian who grew up in jerusalem and left after the 1967 war. pollak complains that al-kitab ignores "egypt's defeat in the six-day war" and paints a picture of maha's mother as a "refugee, but the images suggest that she left voluntarily after the Six-Day War, when Israel offered citizenship to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem."

according to pollak, these materials should not have been included because they are propaganda. so rather than learning through the original sources about nasser and the people who lived under his rule, we should only pay attention to sanitized, translated versions of these stories. and we should never learn a palestinian's perspective on leaving jerusalem in 1967.

this is ridiculous. al-kitab isn't making this stuff up. that "mournful music" in the jerusalem chapter is an actual song by fairuz (al-quds). to deny these stories would be denying people the ability to speak for themselves. yes, it's a perspective, and you don't have to agree with it, but you have to see all the perspectives.

pollak goes on and on and makes an ass of himself for two pages. he says that most language classes take care to avoid politically sensitive topics, but there are two important problems with this argument. first of all, that's a total lie. i've also taken french and spanish, and in both of those classes we learned about historical and political topics through articles, literature, and discussions. you have to learn about that stuff if you expect to get a realistic view of the culture that speaks the language you're learning (and if you aren't going to learn about the culture, why are you learning the language? oh right. terrorists. duh.).

second of all, if you're going to learn arabic, ESPECIALLY in a post 9/11, war on terror, scary scary world, you HAVE TO learn about politics. regardless of whether you agree with the arab perspective on things like the 1967 war, you have to understand the arab perspective in order to understand arabs. and you have to understand arabs in order to get what you want. so there you go, you don't have to actually care about them - you just have to understand them so you can manipulate them. if you can't bring yourself to be an actual human being who cares about other human beings, that argument at least should work for you.

and this argument about feeling like early language courses should not have any political perspective is actually very much at odds with what pollak says at the beginning of his article.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the number of Americans studying Arabic has more than doubled. Nearly 24,000 U.S. students enrolled in Arabic classes in the fall of 2006, the Modern Language Association reported in November. In 2002, 264 colleges offered Arabic; as of the 2006-07 academic year, 466 did.
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Young, ambitious Americans are responding constructively to our country's new challenges by demanding Arabic classes. But there are not enough teachers to meet this demand, and the available textbooks are suffused with the stale prejudices and preoccupations of the pre-Sept. 11 Middle East.

what are these "stale prejudices and preoccupations?" if they're stale, then what are the new prejudices and preoccupations? you can't ignore pre-9/11 history when trying to understand the arab world. that's absolutely ridiculous. you can't understand 9/11 without pre-9/11 (if you can even understand 9/11). pollak implies that the majority of students who are learning arabic today are learning it out of a concern for history and politics - so how does it make sense to leave history and politics out of teaching the language?

one of the very first words in the first chapter in al-kitab part 1 is "united nations." we asked our teacher why it was like that, and she told us that it's because the majority of people learning arabic are learning it because of the role of the arabic language in world politics. yes, you learn the arab perspective when you're learning arabic; of course you do (show me a hebrew text book that pretends that hebrew is not closely tied in with the idea of zionism and the protection of the state of israel; show me a german text book that doesn't apologize for the holocaust; show me a french textbook that doesn't mention charles de gaulle). but al-kitab absolutely reminds its students that the arab world is tied into the rest of the world with that very first set of vocabulary words.

plus, maha and khalid are both pretty hot.

suckers

i saw this image on arabist.net today (it's i think a couple weeks old but sue me, i don't have time for this stuff, except apparently today because my fusha class got cancelled for tomorrow). i had heard about it before, but hadn't actually seen it. the text on the image says "you won't be able to stop them (literally forbid them), but you can protect yourself," referring to the problem of harassment in egypt and asking women to veil to protect themselves.

because men can't possibly help themselves. they are animals, they cannot control their actions, they are not responsible!

this is the problem. if men can be responsible for everything else, why can't they be responsible for themselves.

boo egypt.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm going to beirut this weekend!!
yayyyyyy!!!

that's not all i have to say, but i'm pretty jazzed, and i just got my passport back and it's just so beautiful. my fusha (standard arabic) class got cancelled for tomorrow morning, so i'm having a little trouble bringing myself to reread the stories that we have for that class over the weekend, but i'll do it eventually, i swear i will.

and next weekend i will attempt to do homework while sandro and silvio scream at me and the mountains and the sea are RIGHT THERE! i am skipping next monday of classes because i couldn't get a reasonable flight that would get me back to cairo in time for them. i don't think my teacher will care, though; next weekend there is an official trip through the ALI to luxor/upper egypt and that trip doesn't get back until monday evening, so they must be expecting some people to be gone on monday anyway. so whatevs!

ohmygodi'msoexcited!!

IN other news, yesterday was my first actual tourist sojourn into areas of cairo other than tahrir/mounira/sayyida zeinab/doqqi, so that was a party. actually, i've done a lot of discovering this weekend, it's a good thing i didn't have too much homework.

of course thursday nigth was the sequoia party, so that was great, but i've already talked about that quite a bit. it was only the beginning of the ridiculous amount of money i've spent on food this weekend, though.

on friday night katie's friends from texas who are in alexandria for the summer doing the flagship program were in town (apparently texas has an institutional grant like the one that rammuny is trying to get for michigan which means that they get money from the boren people or whoever but they don't have to do any service). they went to the pyramids, which i am boycotting for the summer (so is katie, she did not go with them), and then called katie and invited her (and by extension me) along to dinner at an indian restaurant in mohandiseen. it was named something about kandahar or something, and was absolutely delicious and relatively inexpensive. i mean obviously any restaurant is way more expensive than regular cairo food because regular cairo food is expensive if it costs more than a dollar, and this place was in the 25-30 LE range per meal i think. so that was great and i'm looking forward to going back there.

then on saturday i did homework in the morning/afternoon, then went touristing with henry, henry's girlfriend liz, henry's mom, tim, and tim's friend skye. first five of us, minus henry's mom, piled into a taxi from auc to al-azhar, which is apparently illegal and so cost us an extra five pounds. we met henry's mom outside al-azhar and went inside, where we took off our shoes and the girls put on headscarves and abayas (giant potato sack robes that cover our luscious and irresistible bodies). it was really beautiful on both the outside and the inside. tim, ever sensitive to the cultural importance of ancient religious buildings, pointed out that the arrows painted on the outside of the minaret looked like dance dance revolution (he does not lie, pictures will be posted later). we had an awkward tour guide who mumbled in pretend english (for some reason people think they speak english when they really don't so they just say things like "mosque" over and over for no reason), and henry and tim, being guys and therefore Real People, negotiated with this random dude who apparently wanted a 15 pound baksheesh for no reason.

after that we went into the market and that was pretty awesome. i can't really explain it without the pictures, though, so i'll load the pictures later and stick a link in here. it was just really cool looking. we didn't buy anything really expect for a delcious mango popsicle. i still feel very uncomfortable just throwing trash on the ground, so skye and i both walked around holding the wrappers from the popsicle for like an hour. finally i gave in and just dropped it on the ground, and then literally five steps later found a dumpster. i hate the environment way less here, but i think that's just because i feel so bad for it. miskeen.

speaking of miskeen, the damn cat is still sick. she just cries and cries all day and neither katie nor i knows what to do about it. it's a problem and she makes me really sad.

anyway, more about yesterday. after walking around the market for awhile and seeing cool stuff that i will post photos of later, we decided to take a cab to the al-azhar gardens to watch the sunset. i also took lots of photos of that. the gardens were absolutely beautiful, and it was wonderful just to get away from the crazy noise and everything outside. i want to go back there once a week just to get a chance to calm down for awhile. the gardens used to be a giant trash dump, and then apparently they (i don't know who they is) found this old wall around the trash dump that had been build during the abbasid period or something? i don't know, i think that's what henry said. so they turned the dump into this park. and so it's really high up and you can see a pretty amazing view of the entire city while sitting on top of this former trash dump. cairo is all minarets and satellite dishes. we could see all the way to cairo tower in zamalek, which is really far away from where we were. and when the sun set all of the calls to prayer started going off at once, but from the gardens it was sort of peaceful and nice instead of just another loud thing happening, which is what it feels like on the streets in the city.

after that (yeah, seriously, busy day), i went home and katie and i went online for awhile and i got to talk to dany and jeddo on skype (yay!) and planned my beirut trip for this weekend (triple yay!). then we were going to order food on otlob.com (which is like eatblue or whatever, only for cairo), but we wound up finding out that there is this lebanese restaurant called taboula in garden city pretty close to our house, and it didn't look too expensive, so we decided to just go there. it was sooo delicious, i got an enormous order of chicken fatteh (which is basically rice and bread and pine nuts and chicken and garlic and yogurt all kind of piled on top of each other) which i ate half of last night and half of this morning for breakfast (breakfast food is stupid). turns out also though that when you think about how much a meal is going to cost in cairo, you can't think just in terms of the price of the food, because in addition to the food there was a water charge, a cover, and we ordered diet cokes that wound up being 8 pounds each (ridiculous). so that came out to be more expensive than planned, though still delicious. and the atmosphere was really nice too, it was a lot of cushiony benches and people smoking shisha and it felt kind of cool like a basement nook kind of thing. i want to go back there with a lot of people and just order a lot of mezze and sit for awhile.

this morning i skipped the service learning class because i didn't feel like wasting two hours of my life AGAIN, and just came into campus to work on vocab with some people from my fusha class. and now i'm sitting in an air conditioned classroom at auc and i'm going to do homework.

but before i do, i will leave you with this frank rich column:

Wall-E for President

i am SO EXCITED to see this movie when i go home.
but more importantly, i feel like (well i haven't been reading much lately, so someone else might already be saying this) i'm really glad frank rich said what i've been thinking about obama lately:

Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency.

i feel like he's sort of lost his spark lately, and i wish he would stop being a run of the mill depressing politician and get back to being inspirational. i miss 2004 convention obama.
/corniness

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)

excited awwy

i am currently once again sitting in the super air conditioned computer lab here at auc because i have reached a point where getting online is no fun because i know it means i have to go down and then back up six flights of stairs to use the internet at the french cultural center. it's thursday, which is the same as friday here, so it's the first night of the weekend which means i flat out one hundred percent refuse to do homework. tonight we are planning on going to sequoia (this fancyish bar in zamalek) for tim/joseph/khulood's birthdays, so that should be fun, and i feel like after a long week of studying and being way too hot all the time, i need a drink.

that's probably not a good thing.

the amount of harassment on the streets has been getting really taxing, and i don't even get the worst of it. it's just unbelievably frustrating to have to walk outside and have people staring at you and making comments as you're walking down the street. it's like, do they think they're being original? do they think if they yell about how beautiful we are, and welcome!, then we'll turn around say oh god i must have you now? it's not really scary or anything, it's just not very comfortable to always feel like i'm on display as i'm walking down the street just minding my own business. it's strange, because i never thought of myself as a person who was particularly invested in the anonymity of american culture, but turns out the anonymity really plays a big role in feeling comfortable in daily life. i just never feel invisible, never feel like i'm on my own, never feel like i can just mind my own business, because there are always a million people around and million people staring at me. it's just exhausting to live daily life.

in other news, i may have mentioned earlier that katie adopted a cat off the street while i was in alexandria a few weeks ago. and that was all okay, and we have been trying to find a new home for the cat, but now the cat is sick. she can't really walk or hold herself up, and so on tuesday we got home and realized that we absolutely had to take her to the vet. turns out the only vet that was available to see us that day was in maadi, which was about a 20-25 minute cab ride away, which really isn't as bad as i thought it was going to be in cairo traffic around rush hour. so we took her to the vet and turns out she has a calcium deficiency. so that's a little bit of added stress, but hopefully the cat will be okay and we'll be able to pass her on to someone else very soon.

our main topic for this week in my standard arabic class was copts in egypt. my teacher told us this story about how when he was younger, he really liked to read and he wanted to learn more about the stories that were in the quran, so he went a bought a bible (they have a lot of the same stories, but the bible tells them in more detail). so he was sitting in class reading the bible and this big coptic guy came up to him and took the book away and was like "you can't read this, this is our book!" and my teacher looked at him and said, "no, this is my book. i bought it, i paid for it." so he and the coptic guy got into a fistfight and wound up in the principal's office and both got suspended for a week from school for fighting. after giving them their punishment, the principal told the coptic guy he could go, and then said to my teacher, "look, you crazy guy, why were you reading these infidels (for lack of a better translation) book? what do you think you're doing?" the school was totally mixed between muslims and christians but still there was a lot of prejudice an hatred between them. and the principal wound up bringing my teacher's parents in for a meeting to warn them that he was worried that their son was going to convert to christianity, they better be careful with him, etc etc. the thing was that my teacher's mom's best friend was also coptic, and he had grown up kind of between these two households, one muslim and one christian, so his family didn't take the principal's concerns seriously of course, but it's still kind of a crazy story.

or maybe i only think it's interesting because i'm actually here.

other than caring way too much about school, i think this weekend i'm going to try and go to both the egyptian museum and khan al-khalili (which is this big market here in cairo). hopefully. i don't think the homework will be too bad this weekend, but that means i really should spend some time reviewing.

i don't know. in general i'm having a really good time here, but there are a lot of things that just make living here so uncomfortable that i can't help but complain. i'm really excited to come home in august, but i think (i hope) that as soon as i get home i'll want to come back.