Pyramids...Not!

When I first started planning this post last night, I thought I would be regaling you all with a long and exciting tale about my expedition to the Pyramids - Pyramids, I should add, which I have been trying to see for almost a month now. That post is going to have to wait, because while I've found a group of people who would like to go with me, we didn't end up making it to Giza. I did, however, have a pretty awesome day, so I'll have to tell you about that instead.

To give you the complete story of my weekend to date, I'll have to start with Thursday (remember, Thursday is the new Friday here in Egypt) evening. If you'll recall last week's admittedly whiney post (I get to take out my frustrations on you all, since you are a captive audience), I mentioned that I met a guy named Mina during my ordeal with the swindlershopkeeper Tariq. As I said there, we hit it off pretty well and talked about meeting up in the future. Those vague plans became concrete when Mina got in touch with me earlier this week; we agreed to meet yesterday at 8 pm in Coptic Cairo to hang out. At first, some other AUCians were going to come with me, but ended up bailing/doing other things instead. So, with some trepidation (I was, after all, going to a foreign part of the city and meeting up with a guy I'd only met once and with whom I share about 1/3rd of a language in common), I hopped on the metro and rode out to Mar Girgis station (at the heart of Coptic Cairo).

I arrived about 10 minutes early, and Mina showed up soon thereafter. We walked over to his part of town, which is (if I had to guess) middle class by Egyptian standards. I don't have a good sense of economic scale, since the wealth structure of society is so stratified; the difference between the richest 1% and the rest in terms of living conditions appears to be quite dramatic. Mina's family's apartment, from what I saw, could fit inside one or (maybe, if I didn't see some rooms) two dorm rooms here in Zamalek. The building is cramped, with a steep, narrow staircase and poor lighting. On the other hand, the streets were regular, clean and relatively wide, and the apartment itself was clearly in good care and boasted a computer with DSL. Mina's parents are very nice and clearly very supportive of Mina and his brother (who I haven't met yet). I can't remember where his dad works, but I remember that he was fortunate to have a good job (unemployment here is very high). Mina himself recently graduated from Cairo University (not AUC, despite the similar name) with a degree in accounting and finance, along with enough english to manage well enough with me. He's also a competent programmer, and he showed me the website he designed for his church (along with introducing me to some of his favorite music and showing me some pictures from his time at the university). My impression is that his family is relatively well to do and generally happy, but suffers from a stort of stagnation that from what I can see is both endemic and specific. I'll try to explain.

Despite Mina's university education, he is currently working for Tariq for 10 egyptian pounds ($1.60) a day doing what essentially amounts to menial/fetch-and-carry labor. His skills go to waste except for where he puts them to use in his own individual capacity (like his church's website) From my limited understanding, Mina is a part of the "intellectual middle class," which has been through university and has graduated with advanced and marketable skills, but is effectively stifled by the current economic and political situation here in Egypt. Most of the jobs for educated people who are not directly employed in a major national scale business are with the government, which while large, is quite unable to hire more promising employees (if anything, they are trying to downsize). Legal, social and economic barriers (hopefully, i'll learn more from my studies) appear to block entrepreneurship and upward mobility for people of all classes. Many men (I say men, because their situation is more apparent than that of women at the street level), young and old, pass their time on the street in coffeeshops and shisha (hookah) bars, with nothing to engage them but conversation. Those with regular work have little to look forward to; people who are waiters or servers will always be waiters or servers, whether they work hard or not. This is what I mean by "endemic" stagnation - everyone seems to be locked in place, with no ability and thus no incentive to try and change their status or station. Mina's problems, specifically, are compounded by the fact that he is a Copt, and is therefore disadvantaged in a preponderately muslim state. Mina has told me that when he goes to do things, from activities to job applications, that fact that his name is Mina (apparently, there's a Saint Mina) or that his brother's name is Peter automatically disqualifies them from what opportunities that do exist. Men with good muslim names like "Mohammed" or "Ahmed" take precedence; Copts need not apply. From what I can gather, this sort of mistreatment is widespread but assymetric - not everyone in Egypt treats the Coptic minority as second class citizenry, but enough do that the community feels that even the government holds them in low regard, and is at least guilty of looking the other way at abuses.

I don't intend this post to be all gloom and doom; Mina's situation isn't horrible, it just lacks the opportunities that someone of his obvious intelligence and skills should have available to him. He isn't being actively oppressed per se, but his opportunities for advancement are repressed by the structure of the society around him. Despite that, he does have a rich social life (I met some of his friends) and a clear devotion to his religion and church (they are building a new one, incidentally, and from what I saw, when it is finished it will be beautiful). We spent a lot of time socializing, both about the social problems in Egypt and his perspective on it, and on more mundane matters like football (soccer, for those Americans who've forgotten) and food. I also learned some new words in arabic (and taught him some things in english) and we hope to teach eachother in a more structured way in the future. Next Thursday, I'm going to try to bring some more people along with me to play football; Mina is going to reserve a field. I'm a horrible player, but I think it will be a lot of fun.

Though I left Coptic Cairo around 11:30, I didn't end up getting back to the dorm until about 4 am, because I met up with a bunch of people in Garden City (an area slightly south of AUC where a bunch of international students - mostly female - live) and hung out. Garden City is a popular hang out because some of the apartments are unrestricted by doormen or behavioral rules. The Zamalek dorms prohibit males from the female section of the building and vice versa, and many of the other AUC residences have strict visiting hours and rules. We end up going to these apartments so that we can associate in mixed company at hours past 10 or 12 pm (since the country doesn't go to sleep until 2 am, this is both more natural and necessary than it is back home in the States). We made a brief stop at a jazz club in the Nile Hilton, but spent most of our time socializing in the Garden City apartments. In addition to a good debate on the Iraq war, I had a particularly good discussion about Consitutional Law with a judicial conservative. I won't bore you with details (and I remember them impressively well considering I had a slight beer induced buzz at the time), but I had a good time. I also slept until 12:15 pm the next day (today), which helps to explain why we didn't end up making it to the pyramids. I, of course, wasn't the only one to sleep in so late, and by the time the group I was going to Giza with had assembled, it was almost 2 pm. When we learned that the Pyramids themselves close to the public at 4 pm from a friend in the lobby, we (now reduced to four) decided to scrap the plan until next week (Giza is not the closest part of Cairo to Zamalek). Instead, spearheaded by my friend Jhale, a Brown student of Pakastani descent, (who incidentally almost went to Swarthmore - for those of you who are Swatties, I think she would have been a great fit), we went out to Garden City, met up with some other girls and went for Indian Cuisine at a place called Asia House. It was expensive, but extremely good. It's the first properly spicy food i've had in a month, and I really enjoyed it.

After Asia House, we wandered over to a pastry shop by campus and bought a lot (literally, 2.5 kilos) of assorted baked and delicious items to use as both dessert and future snack food. My favorite kind is something akin to a Fig Newton, but differs in two important ways: First, the filling is dates, not figs (dates are sweeter and figs are fruitier, in case not everyone is up on the distinction - I certainly wasn't before I came) and second, the pastry itself is orders of magnitude more excellent than the mush they wrap Fig Newtons in. They are is light and flaky and crisp and oh so deliciously good. I've creatively christened them "Date Newtons" for ease of recognition.

After getting dates, we met up with yet another girl (I keep mentioning the people we're "adding" because it will be important later) and went out to the Nile. The highlight of the night came went we rented a boat (called a Felucca for reasons utterly unknown to me - we think it might be italian or something) for an hour long cruise along the Nile. It was dark out by then, and absolutely spectacular. Thanks to Jhale's incredible mad bartering skillz, we also only paid 60 pounds (with a little tip thrown in at the end), which was hot.

The final leg of our trip came when we returned to the Zamalek area and went to a place called Versailles Palace for tea and shisha. At this point, we were a group of four girls: Jhale, Vivette, Shamiss (who's name I'm probably horribly mispelling) and Kate, as well as me. This is important primarily because both Vivette and Shamiss cover their hair, and Jhale is Muslim and fairly dark skinned. Kate and I were the only pasty-white Americans in the group (though I think everyone in the group was an international student). Now, Versailles palace was fairly crowded when we got there, so we waited some 15 minutes before being seated. This wasn't so much of a problem, except for the fact that there was a side room with a bunch of tables that wasn't being used. When we asked a waiter about available seating, however, he told us to wait and not to sit down there. Well, thirty seconds after we sat down, a group of 8-10 obviously western tourists came in, and were immediately seated in this vacant area (still leaving plenty of space for several more groups, incidentally, and Versailles palace so far as I know doesn't bother with reservations). When Jhale confronted the server about this obvious injustice, he basically blew her off. He seemed pretty irritated too, which showed up in his treatment of us. It took us forever to get our drinks, and the shisha pipe Jhale ordered never arrived. We asked about it several times and never had a breakthrough. The server did his best to ignore us, not meet our eyes (people here know when they are being jackasses, and usually won't look you in the eye if they have done something and know you know) and generally fail in his role as a server. Finally, we got frustrated and just asked for the check. No sooner than had we cancelled the shisha order, four shisha pipes were wisked over to the table of the western tourists. After demanding the check several more times (and having the server storm off like a petulant child on the last occasion, without even bothering to respond to the question), we just figured out our total ourselves from the menu, left the money on the table, and left. We had barely made it out the door when our erstwhile server came running up to us, claiming we hadn't paid the entire total. Amazingly, he was both able to move quickly AND produce the check in a timely manner when it was his wallet on the line - you'd almost think he had been, you know, deliberately holding the check and not providing it for us out of spite. It turned out we had understimated the tax slightly and so were short a few pounds. The way he confronted us though was pretty ridiculous, and again targeted at Jhale, who he'd been working to piss off all night. Rather than just go, Jhale blew up at him and basically ripped him a new one right in front of the restaurant. It was really great to watch, because we'd all been in similar situations before and felt we had to let it go because we were trying not to offend the shopkeeper or whoever, and create a bad impression of Americans. In general, Egyptians (and when I say Egyptians, I don't mean all Egyptians, but more specifically a certain class/group of shopkeepers and such) interpret the American's desire not to offend as some combination of weakness, stupidity and ignorance, as if we don't understand that we are being cheated, abused or ridiculed. They seem to figure that if you aren't actively taking umbrage, that they have managed to successfully hoodwink you with their incredible wits and sparkling intelligences.
Well, Jhale, being Muslim and possessing a much stronger command of arabic than most of us (though Vivetta and Shamiss I think are native speakers), refused to just go quietly. She gave him a piece of her mind that probably still has his ears stinging. I thought it was really powerful; she spoke with passion and righteousness that all of us have but most of us most of the time are afraid to tap into. Speaking truth is a scary thing, but beautiful in its own way.

Sorry this post is so long (and sorry for the lag time). I've got another post I'm working on on class descriptions that should hopefully be out soon. I hope all is well back home (and various places abroad!)