Shimmy till you're sore.

It's not exactly that I'm homesick. But as I prepare to pack up and move from my host family's building to an apartment in Garden City, I'm suddenly more aware of where I am and how long I've been away. The move, along with passing the "one month" mark on the 29th, has jostled me awake out of my pleasant rhythm of life here, bringing to mind all that I've left behind and how long it will be until I see home again.
I lay in bed last night, listening to the ceiling fan and the sounds of my host family's voices next door, tracing in my mind every inch of Seattle. I slowly brought to mind every tilted corner and homey smell of my old apartment, the color of the wildflowers in the 12" grass out front, the feeling of a steering wheel and gear shift in my hand as I drove through wide, clean streets, the rustling of leaves in the loop, Cuban toast and Mexican mochas at el Diablo, swing dancing at the century. Each place is marked with so many ordinary moments, so many strange phases of life.
It's not exactly that I'm homesick, but compared to the endless barrage of beige and grey here, memories from Seattle took on a tangible, technicolor quality in my mind that were somehow more real than anything in Egypt. It was like waking up from Kansas in the Land of Oz. I miss the rain and all the colors that it brings.
In my mind, I walked more steadily, saw more clearly, felt closer to the ground back home. Maybe that's just because the streets and sidewalks here are all lopsized and cracked. Maybe this is nothing but asthetics.

All the same, there are moments when I realize how at home I feel here now. Two days ago, I submitted a proposal about a cultural forum to the A.L.'s office in DC for approval. My director ordered pizza hut to celebrate. As I sat eating pizza with my director and another colleague, bullshitting and laughing about life in Egypt, I couldn't have been happier—and the fact that it was my first pizza since the States certainly didn't hurt, either.
Last night, bungled Arabic with my host family had us all laughing to the point of tears, and expertly plucking falafel and beans from communal plates with pita bread with some other co-workers last night, I realized how comfortable I had become. Meals with Egyptians used to strike terror into my heart when I was studying here before, unsure how to eat with just one hand, unsure how to put off their endless petitions to eat more! Eat more! Oh yes. I am a savvy pita bread eater these days.
We realized a few nights ago, after discussing the alarming list of health problems my host family has, that they had never heard of back rubs. They had never even seen a back rub before. What?
To continue our Feminine Diplomacy (electric heat pads will be en route to the family in a matter of weeks), we've now begun dishing out back rubs to the family as fast as they can request them, mostly under the expert hands of my roommate E. A lot of their problems—high blood pressure, domestic violence, husbands working overseas, a poor economy—we can't do much about. But sore backs? Done.
I started packing my bags last night, since we'll be moving to our new apartment tomorrow morning. I couldn't bring myself to do it, though—it was too sad. This family has become very dear to all of us. We're sending ourselves off with a bang, however: I'm buying kilos and kilos of desserts tonight, some liters of fanta (hey, Egyptians are already suffering from a bad diet—one more night of sugar won't hurt any), and all of our favorite bellydance cassette tapes. Shimmy till you're sore. Laugh until you forget. It's the Egyptian way.

Seeing more clearly.

A few days ago I was complaining good naturedly about getting jostled and jammed in the women's car in the metro. Even still, the women's car continues to be a bit of a safehaven in my morning commute. The women's cars tend to be less crowded than the men's, and you don't have to worry about getting scoped out by the 12 year olds who call you "honey" every time you pass by them.

But as I've commuted to and from work on the metro every day for the past month, I've realized that Egyptian women can be as ruthless as they are sweet and smothery. The worst is at the downtown Sadat station. 3pm is quitting time for most downtown workers, and by 3:10, the underground subway station is hot and nervous, like soldiers in the trenches waiting to rush the enemy the moment they get the signal.
The signal is the opening of the metro car doors. As the metro pulls up to the station, the women start gathering on the painted red line, close enough to the moving train to have the wind from its movement sweep through your hair, just far away to keep your nose and fingers from getting lobbed off. The train stops. Inside the car, twenty Egyptian women waiting to disembark stare into the whites of our eyes. We stare into theirs.
This is going to get ugly.
The doors don't stay open long enough to let 20 women exit first before another 30 get on. The result looks something like rugby, and I swear that if these women weren't mostly wearing veils, there would be hair pulled out as the women shoulder and shove to try to force their way on or off the train. The trick is to wait by the sides of the door, so you can squeeze on while the exiting women tend to be in the middle of the doorway.
This trick is regularly foiled by my new Egyptian nemesis: the elderly pitbull. There's a few on every metro car. Short, plump, aggressive mothers who get their head low and bulldoze their way through the glittery fabric and barrage of handbags—the kind of women you know can spank a child while balancing a rack of pita bread on her head and simultaneously haggling for the best price in the whole market place—and getting her way.
I got shoved hard by one such woman the other day, and ended up not making it on the train before the door closed. I growled inside my head as she contentedly took her seat on the crowded metro car while I toed the red line once again, waiting to try again on the next train.

I was relaying this all to a friend last night, and felt a twinge of guilt for resenting these bullish women, or for depicting them as such. It's hardly the inner attitude I want to cultivate, and aren't I here to learn to better know and appreciate Egyptian culture?

Last night my roommate told me that it occurred to her yesterday that Egyptians die.
I nodded. I understood what she meant.
For the first few months of cultural adjustment, Egyptians still seem more spectacle than human, more like subjects in a continual anthropological display or characters in an interactive cultural event. It's a gradual process to simply see them—and relate to them—as ordinary people:
We attend the weddings of our Egyptian friends half out of a feeling of friendship, half wanting to see what Egyptian weddings are like.
We spend long hours drinking tea and laughing with our host family, half because we enjoy their company, and half to gain insights into their lifestyle and beliefs.

What my roommate was saying was that she had begun to understand the ordinary humanity in those around us. Egyptians die, just like us. They aren't eternal, static fixtures in an exotic culture, following a foreign social script for all eternity. They age. They change. They die. Some of the people we know now will die sooner than later, and it will be tragic for us and those around them. It will be real.
As if to drive the point home, my director told this morning that she'll be leaving early to attend a funeral. As I become more integrated into Egyptian culture, the cycle of life begins circling closer and closer to home.

While I don't justify waging a personal war against the short, fat, aggressive women of the metro, I think it's part of this same process: acknowledging that some Egyptian piss me off. Some are obnoxious. Some are rude. Others aren't. They're people, with the same mixture of flaws and virtues. While I need to check my inner irritation, my annoyance with these women was a step in the right direction, taking Egyptian culture off its pedestal and seeing the individual humans who compose it.
I'm still somewhere in between seeing Egypt for what it is, and seeing it how I choose to. Maybe now I'm just more aware of that process.

On approaching our one month anniversary.

Dear ones.

It has been a week of rest. Celebrating the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy on Wednesday with a day off from work, and finding myself already in the weekend, I've managed to sleep away all but the dying remnants of the black lung and find myself surprisingly (but refreshingly) listless, especially on the heels of 3 intense weeks of transition, work, and study.

In 4 days, we will celebrate our one month anniversary in a country with 7,000 years of continual civilization. One month doesn't seem like very much, but then, we do already feel remarkably at home and well-settled. Perhaps it's just an illusion, but my roommate and I have all been impressed with our ability to show up, find jobs, secure housing, make friends, and improve our Arabic. For one month in, we've done well for ourselves. 

I've been surprisingly fatigued this week, despite the rest--or maybe because of it. I slept until almost noon today, something I don't, and can't even manage to do, in the States. But the darkness and heat, the white noise of the ceiling fan... it can entice you into a complete coma. I woke up this morning and finished the rest of "Season of Migration to the North," a novel my friend Alexander gave to me for my birthday. The day before I finished Alice Munro's delicious collection of short stories, "Carried Away," which Justin gave me as a goodbye present. Both books were so moving, and reminded me of such dear friends, that the combination made me a bit homesick. Just enough to make me feel a bit tired inside, despite how much I have loved--and still love--my time here.

I've finally been feeding myself well enough and consistently enough to start to feel a bit soft and slothy. Enter: Bollywood Burn, the light of my life. Hemalayya perked me right back up. 

So it turns out that in-house bellydancing parties are completely ordinary facets of life here. Whenever there's loud pop music wafting in through the window late at night, the women in the house start clapping and urging us on. Entertaining one another is the name of the game. A few days ago we decided to spice it up a bit, so my roommates and I busted out our other lesser known dance skills: I showed them some hula and bollywood, E. showed them traditional Korean dance and hip-hop, and K..... well, K just sort of does her own thing, but provides more entertainment with her endearing but awkward signature dance moves, which leave our host sisters howling. 

Work continues to go extremely well. I've been following Obama's trip through the region, drafting talking points for an upcoming speech, helping to plan a cultural dialogue forum. Every week I've ended up submitting a few brief reports to the cabinet to read. Not bad! The internship has exceeded my expectations in every possible way. 

In the meantime, I'm occasionally reminded that despite my ease and familiarity with Egyptian culture, I'm still not as savvy as I'd like to thing. Indeed, I'm still often a big, soft, white American target for all sorts of ridicule and ripping off.

Example. 

I had a near miss two nights ago with potentially conniving neighbors. I was walking home from the metro stop later than usual, around 9:15 or so, just before my curfew with the family. It was a pleasantly cool night, with this nice breeze winding through the alleyways. I remember thinking htat I could really fall in love with Cairo, and maybe with this neighborhood specifically, with all its unique smells and noises and village flavor in the middle of such a sprawling, crowded city.

I was listening to my iPod and doing my deadpan "I don't see men" face and walking purposefully through the market, when two 12 year old girls rushed up to me and started talking rapid-fire. "What's your name?" "Where do you live?" etc etc, all in Arabic. I had a hard time understanding them. 

Right around us, there was a group of men singing and dancing and banging on a drum, and I thought that there might be a wedding celebration going on. The girls insisted that I follow them upstairs to their apartment. A bit foolishly, I followed them--thinking all the while that it must have something to do with a special celebration. Upstairs they introduced me to the 5 or 6 family members who were sitting around in their pajamas. Lifesize pictures of Mary, Jesus, and the coptic archbishop on the wall tipped me off that they were Christians. Ok. So maybe they know my host family then, right? I relaxed a bit. 

They made quick introductions, poured me 7-up, and continued firing questions at me. I told them that I had to leave, since I had to be home by 9:30, and the two girls insisted on walking me back to the start of my street. One of the girls demanded to listen to my iPod, and I got nervous that it would be the last time I ever saw it. Luckily, she gave it back. They demanded my cellphone number and insisted that I come over on Saturday. Ok, I think. Neighborhood kid friends. That's alright.

I went home and asked my 16 year old host sister if she knew the family. She didn't, and asked me why. As I relayed the story to her, she got really serious and told me that under no circumstances should I ever, ever go home with a family from her neighborhood, Christian or not. They think you have money, and they think you're loose, she said. They could have done anything to you inside that apartment, out of the sight of the neighbors on the street.

I felt pretty stupid for having gone along with these girls, savvy traveller as I usually am. I suppose it was mostly out of a sense that I "should" get to know more Egyptians and be open to meeting new people and such. Especially when I'm operating in another language, I can be a little slow to pick up on b.s. 

In any case, I'm glad it worked out alright. 

I had hoped to spend this weekend at a monastery just south of Cairo, called Anafora. They were booked full this weekend, though, so I found myself unexpectedly free after work on Thursday. So I crossed the Nile from work and went to a park on a large island in the middle of the river. I bought a large bowl of Kosheri (kind of like Egyptian spaghetti) for 50 cents and sat by the Nile, reading and watching the sailboats pass by as the sun was setting. 

There are so many moments of frantic chaos here, and so many moments of complete calm and serenity. The trick is in trying to find them in equal proportion to one another. 

For now, I think I'm doing alright. 

Testy moods in the City of Sand.

In my previous post, I had neglected to mention one downside of this communal home life with women: coordinated ovaries. Collective PMS can be a formidable thing.
Yes, all of the Egyptian women in our humble apartment building are suffering through the feminine plight this week. It's a bit like coming home, expecting all of the warm, happy faces you're used to--only to find that all of your friends have turned into cowseals, beached and bellowing on the seashore.
Luckily, this has provided ample opportunities for cross-cultural exchange and commiseration. Last night, Gigi and 16 year-old Sara were hanging out in our room, escaping for a few moments from the clamoring babies and cramping women next door. We were on the subject anyway when Gigi spied my stash of 800 some tampons.
Tampons, near as we can tell, simply do not exist in Egypt—not even in the ex-pat import stores full of peanut butter, white bread, and brie. I can't provide an educated answer as to why that is, though it serves me well to remember that tampons were still fairly scandalous within my parents' lifetime, reserved for tarts and floozies and bra burners.
"What are those?" Gigi asks me with alarmed curiosity. I open one to show her, and try to explain the mechanics a bit. Gigi's eyes bugged out. "But why?" she gasps, as if she were staring at a paper-wrapped medieval torture device. My explanations were not terribly convincing.
Heat pads were a huge success, on the other hand. One of the girls was complaining of terrible cramps. One of us had brought these disposable, one-time heat pads that relax your muscles and reduce cramping. It was a hit. We explained to her that they also have electric ones in the States, which you can use over and over again. She immediately put in a request to have our friends bring some over with them to Egypt, that she would pay for them, no matter what the cost. If we were wondering what a good "thank you" gift for the family would be, we just found it!

In other health news, my sissy lungs have once again succumbed to the dust and pollution. It's not exactly that I have a cold…. It's more like I have the black lung. Everyone here has a different suggestion for a remedy—from the strong, cheap drugs the pharmacies dispense by the fistfuls, to a spoonful of black honey 3 times a day, to taking a vacation outside of Cairo every 10 days to de-dust my lungs, to only taking showers in the evening (you might catch a chill in the morning, apparently).
My roommates think that I have Cairo-induced asthma. My real concern is that I'm developing an allergy to dust. That would cut short my career in the Middle East pretty quickly!

The black lung has dampened my mood here slightly. Two nights ago I woke up around 2am with a coughing fit. I couldn't find any water nearby, but scrounged around in the fridge until I found a pineapple juice box. That should do the trick. I finally stopped coughing and laid back down to go to sleep....only to realize that the family of shrieking children that lives across the street was still up. And not just up, but outside, playing in the streets. Normally, I think this is kind of a funny--and cool--cultural phenomena, that people here stay up all night because it's so hot during the day, and that the kids are part of that, too. The downside is that I actually have to wear ear plugs in order to sleep through them. At 2am, hacking up dust and smog, I was not having any more of this. In my head, I believe I actually said the phrase "Put your kids to bed, you old coot." I called the father a coot. A coot. It was one of my more juvenile moments here. But hey, I'll appeal to extenuating circumstances.

In other news, we officially signed a lease on our new apartment over the weekend. We'll move there on the 1st of August---it's a block away from the Nile in a really pretty, green neighborhood, (fittingly) called Garden City. It was the headquarters for the British colonial community back in the day, but there really aren't any foreigners who live there now. It's just a nice, ordinary Egyptian neighborhood—but within walking distance (kind of )to downtown!

If you want to send any letters, my address is:

6A el-Diwan Street, Apartment 16
Garden City, Cairo
EGYPT

No packages yet…I don't know how that works, so hold off for the moment. But letters would be most welcome!

Take care, my friends.

News and Notes.

"Lissa" means "Not Yet" in Arabic. I haven't decided yet what I want to read into this, but I rather like it.

In any case, "Alissa" (or, with Arabic pronunciation, "Eleesa") serves me rather well here in Egypt. Bringing American names into Egypt can actually be a bit trickier than you'd think...there are some that don't translate well. Examples:
My friend Matt, which means "dead."
Or Eunice, which sounds just like the name Yunis…which is a man's name here, the equivalent of Jonah.
Or Anna, which means "I." There was also a story of a girl named Anna ("I") from Iowa (which means "yes") which confused all the Egyptians to death.
"What's your name?" "I." "Where are you from?" "Yes."

There's actually an Arab pop star from Lebanon named Elissa, so I get some cred by association. One of my co-workers obviously used this as a mnemonic device to remember my name, however, and has repeatedly called me Nancy…as in Nancy Agram, another pop star from the region. Whatev. I roll with it.

In other news:

1. I successfully made myself a tomato, cucumber, and lemon juice salad last night, and it didn't even taste like bleach!
For those of you who remember the saga of the bleach salad, the last time I attempted to make salad I had a sore throat for 3 days after neglecting to wait until all the bleach I had used to clean the vegetables had evaporated….

2. I dreamt of Arabic grammar last night as I was tossing and turning. The past 2 days have been oppressively hot. According to weather.com, the high yesterday peaked at 99 degrees, and my room seemed to be acting as an insulated oven. The word I was conjugating all night: yuaad. To sit.

3. My roommates and I are going to an Egyptian wedding tonight for one of our neighbors! Preparing for wedding requires intensive beauty treatment. All week, our host sisters have been waxing their arms, giving each other facials, practicing with their make-up and trying on outfits. My roommates and I didn't really pack expecting to be attending a lot of weddings, but we have at least 2 more within the next month!
I'm wasn't even planning to shave my legs for the party tonight, right, since my legs won't be seeing the light of day for the duration of my stay here.
Last night, one of my host sisters (who used to work as a beautician) insisted on 'threading' my eyebrows to shape them. For those who haven't spent much time preening your eyebrows, threading is kind of like tweezing, only you use thread to rip out each hair. It sort of feels like having lasers scrape at your skin. But hey, for the sake of joining in the festivities, right?
I should say that when one of my roommates underwent this treatment a few days ago, it ended in weeping.
But, mustering up all of my zen concentration (after all, I've gotten 2 tattoos, I should be able to handle a little thread, right?), I managed to endure the whole procedure without biting through my lip or kicking my host sister. Flinching, but no tears. Just like a fierce, independent woman should.

4. My painful eyebrow grooming happened at the end of a long and difficult day after my roommates and I decided to face down the formidable and infamously anarchical Mugamma, Egypt's central bureaucracy building. Back in the 1950s, the Egyptian president promised every university graduate a job. Whoops. Mugamma has deliberately been turned into a maddening, over-staffed and inefficient maze so as to create as many jobs as possible. For every one person working behind a numbered window, you can see 6 or 7 sitting behind them, doing nothing.
Our temporary tourist visas were set to expire within another week or so, and we needed to apply for 6 month extension. 2 applications, 1 photo, 2 photocopies, 5 government employees, 100 Egyptian pounds (to pay for 9 stamps which had to be licked and affixed to our application by 2 very irritable ladies prone to forget to give you change or the correct number of stamps), 3 separate trips to the building and 22 hours later, I now have my passport back in my hand. If I can do this, I can do anything.

Life in the Red Tent.

All aspects of identity are public facts here. Religion is printed on your state-issued identity card (Christian, Muslim, and Jew only, which is rough for the Baha'is). The district you live in is on your license plate. Countless other facts about you (religion, lifestyle, economic status, piety) can be communicated in an instant by the way you dress.
Of course, clothing communicates information like this in the States and everywhere in a similar fashion. More so than in America, though, these status markers inform the social scripts that you operate by. If you're a Christian you wear this, if you're a Muslim you might wear that. If you're from the lower classes, you do these kinds of things for fun and live like this, if you're from the upper class, you might do those kinds of things for fun and live like that. And—as westerners are always keenly aware—if you're a man, you socialize one way, if you're a woman, in another way.

Now, I'm always wary of discussing gender in the Middle East with people back home, whose mental image of life in the Middle East is more informed by Fox news than by first-hand pictures of life on the street in Cairo. It also must be reiterated that each country in the Middle East has distinct customs and cultural norms—you can't paint the region with one broad brush.

It wouldn't be completely accurate to say that the public sphere belongs to Egyptian men. After all, women attend university in as great of numbers as men, working as engineers and dentists and doctors without any stigma in the slightest—indeed, women must work, with the Egyptian economy in the state that it is. Even the most fully veiled women drive and can be seen walking in the street with friends and family at any time of the day or night. In the workplace, women are respected as equals and colleagues. They can choose who they marry. Though a thorough and substantive reflection on the role of gender in Egypt deserves to be had, I want to impress upon you, gentle readers, that Egypt does not fit neatly into any simple statements about gender in the Middle East.

My family in Maasara feels like a family of women. Part of this is simply for the fact that women generally socialize inside the house. While men and women both attend to their business outside the house and luxuriate inside with their families, when it comes to social time, men generally head out to the tea and hookah cafes, and women lounge with each other inside the house. Although the family occupies 3 apartment units, when my roommates and I come home, we can usually find all of the women (who are all related by blood or marriage) together in the downstairs apartment, chatting and eating and playing with the babies, taking care of housekeeping chores together, cooking, napping.

Another reason that it feels like a family of women is that the men really are gone. One young husband is working in Kuwait as a mechanic and forklift driver, and won't be back for another year and a half. His wife is all of 21 years old, with a daughter who's a year and a half old. Marcel's father has only seen her once. I asked if he was at least making a lot of money, to mitigate the difficulty of his long absence. No, they tell me. Maybe $200 a month. His brother got a visa to the States and is working in Nashville. They're not sure what he does, but they're hoping to apply for visas to go visit him. He sends pictures back sometimes. They don't know when they'll see him again.

But the women band together and have each other, the figurative village that's raising the child. And they have a raucous good time together. Every evening, once we've had a chance to rest and clean up after work, we put on our pajamas and join their warm, affectionate women time in the living room of their apartment.

2 nights ago, we were joined by a girl from Peace Corps Ethiopia who was passing through Cairo and needed a place to crash for the night. The women were amped. After tea was passed around and I had used up all of my Arabic vocab as a rudimentary translator, someone mentioned how the 5 year old girl was a sassy little belly dancer. Someone brought out a pan to use as a drum, and lo and behold, Lydia begins popping these hips like she came out of the womb belly dancing. Things escalated quickly—clapping and ululations, a small stereo and then an even bigger one were brought with bellydancing music cassette tapes, more pans for drums, and soon all of us (one very pregnant woman and our Peace Corp friend included) were belly dancing in the small room, beneath the life-size picture of Jesus on the wall.
We danced for an hour, until our clothes were drenched in sweat and our sides hurt from laughing and contorting our hips into unfamiliar movements. The 16 year old videotaped it, which we watched last night. Pretty BAMF, if I say so myself.
After we returned back to our apartment, after lots of kisses for the children and compliments for each other (so beautiful! so clever!), I thought to myself that this—this community of support, this time to care for and tease one another, this time to let our cares simply fall off our shoulders and out of our minds—is what sustains us here. Sure, the men have a lot of fun and can be more carefree, playing dominos and backgammon and smoking sheesha in the streets, roaming around and joking with each other outside. I won't pretend that I don't wish I could join in with that part of the culture, too. But give me life in the Red Tent. It's a healing time.

Last night, though, my roommates and I gained a very different insight into the reality for some women here. Now, I should say again that my family is Orthodox Christian, not Muslim, so what I'm saying here shouldn't be taken as proof for the oppression of women under Islam or anything like that.
Gigi is 29 years old and one of the married daughters in the family. Not that we have favorites in the family, but she's one of my favorites. She's also 7 months pregnant and shuffles around in that endearing way that enormously pregnant women do. We love her.
Last night we arrived back at our apartment late, at nearly 10pm. We heard a knock on the door and worried that someone in the family might come over to tsk tsk us for coming back this late at night. Instead, it was Gigi, and she just wanted to come in and chat with us. We got her two chairs so that she could elevate her feet—she had gone to the doctor a few days ago with high blood pressure, and her feet and hands are painfully swollen. Being a pregnant woman in the heat of the Egyptian summer is a rough state to be in.
Conversation ambles in fits and starts, thanks to the language impasse, from one topic to another. Somehow the subject of her husband comes up. Now, her husband lives in Cairo, but in another neighborhood. We were under the impression that she was back home with her parents because of her pregnancy, so that her mom could help take care of her—not unusual in Egyptian culture at all. Last night we got the fuller story, though. It turns out that this is actually her 2nd husband. She was first married at 19 to a man who, after the wedding, turned out to be a drug user. He also used to beat her. She said that they slept in separate bedrooms and never had a child together. They divorced a few years into the marriage.
She married again at age 27 to a man who was 51, divorced as well, with two children from the previous marriage (they live with their mother). I told her that I was so happy that, despite the horror of her first marriage, things were going well for her now.
No, she said. This husband beats her, too. That's the real reason she's home now, and the reason for her high blood pressure. The doctor had forbade her to live with her husband during the pregnancy out of concern for her blood pressure and health. But I knew that she and her mother had just taken a trip earlier this week to visit her husband—why had they gone?
It turns out that she had gone to ask her husband for money to visit the doctor for her pregnancy. He refused. Her father told her that he would pay instead for their own doctor to take care of Gigi. It turns out that when she went to the doctor yesterday, she found out that she was going to have a girl. My roommates and I were ecstatic. No, she said. Her husband really wanted to have a boy, and wants her to have an abortion.
The whole conversation was devastating for all of us. She said that she'll stay with her family for a while after the baby is born, and then wait and see what she'll do from there.
We asked her if this was common for women in Egypt—not necessarily, she said. The husbands of the other women in the house are wonderful husbands and fathers.
We told her that we're going to be her daughter's aunts, and we're already gearing up for the birth and the big party that happens one week after.
After Christmas, we'll be bringing back baby clothes and such for her—if any of you have things along those lines to donate, I'll be happy to get them from you.

In any case. There are no easy answers—it's been a lot to think about.
But for now, here are some reports from the Red Tent.

a lesson on leisure from Egyptian families.

According to a thermometer on my travel alarm clock, the temperature in my bedroom has not dropped below 91.4 degrees in the past week.

In my air conditioned office, I can wait out the heat of the day without much difficulty—even if the spontaneous-sweat-pufferfish phenomena continues to plague me during my morning and (even worse) afternoon commute via metro and microbus, walking a few blocks down a tiny dirt-paved alleyway as I weave past donkeys and boys riding their bicycles. You get used to the heat surprisingly quickly, however. And, as our Egyptian friends and neighbors often point out to us—this kind of heat lasts only through July and August. There are somewhat distinct seasons here, and the fall cools down to a really enjoyable temperature.

But on the weekend (Friday and Saturday here), left to loll about in drowsy heat of our apartment without respite, I wasn't sure how I would pass the time.
Happily, my old host sister from my study abroad program, Nesma, gave me a call after work on Thursday afternoon. Would I like to hang out with her family on Friday?
So in the (relative) cool of the morning, I slipped out the front door in some of my best Muslim-appropriate clothing and made the trek to Imbaba. Raucous, crazy Imbaba, with some million inhabitants, always at the brink of anarchy. It resembles my current neighborhood of Maasara in some ways, such as in the relatively high donkey-to-human ratio, the narrow unpaved streets, the labyrinth of alleyways and buildings as you go deeper into the heart of the district. Only in Imbaba, it's all heightened to the nth degree:
Tea and hookah shops spill out into the street, shanty tv screens broadcast soccer games and comedy shows, open air markets appear unexpectedly behind walls and corners, 4 foot speakers are dragged into the alleyways after dark to blast arab pop music for Egyptian teenagers, mosques mark nearly every corner, colored plastic bags cut into strips and tied onto clothes lines wave in the hot air as decorations, 3 wheel "tuktuk" taxis nearly crash into the people and cars on the road. To walk the streets of Imbaba is to feel truly alive.

On Friday morning, though, it's relatively quiet. No one works on Friday, so people are sleeping in. I arrived around 10am, waking up the sleepy members of my host family (they told me to arrive at 9, but I knew better….no one in my family goes to bed before 4am!). Though most of them were still sleeping, bollywood films were on tv. We sat around watching the Indian movies and drinking tea. They loved it, watching with a kind of confused but enamored curiosity. The hindus! Look at what they're wearing! So strange! So beautiful!

By eleven, we're eating a huge breakfast of falafel and cheese sandwiches, tea with milk, pita bread with jam. Eat more, they insist—your American stomach is too small. Eat! Finally convinced by my protests that I was going to erupt if I ate one more piece of falafel, we all put our pajamas back on (I was loaned this terrific Egyptian mumu) and lounged in the coolest bedroom in the house. As the ceiling fan circled overhead, I taught the 8, 11, and 14 year old how to play Go Fish, learning the Arabic word for Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in the process (walad, bint, shaeb, and wahed, for those keeping track at home). It was a huge success. The 8 year old is wicked good at cards, and kept beating all of us.

We all dozed off after a while. By 6pm, it began to cool down, and the family started to come alive again. More cards, more songs, more games. In this family, the 8 year old and the 25 year old and all of the siblings in between hang out with each other, no problem. To be an honorary member of the family is simply to bask in all of the affection they have for one another.

The problem is that the oldest brother just got a job as an electrical engineer in Qatar. It's an excellent job and phenomenal opportunity for him. The problem is that he's never lived away from home before. As he explained to me, Egypt does not help people be independent. Every morning, he has woken up to his mother, father, and siblings. With nervous excitement, he asks me about airplanes, about culture shock, about living away from home. "You'll do wonderfully," I assure him.
He's just one of the tens of thousands of Egyptians who have to find work in the Persian Gulf. In my current host family in Maasara, two of the men in the family are currently living in Kuwait, one is living in America. Their wives, children, and siblings are all back in Egypt. It's hard on everyone.

Later in the evening, I was told that they had a surprise for me. I closed my eyes. They turned off the lights. When I opened them, they had brought in a huge chocolate cake with a big candle in it. "Happy Birthday to you…" they started singing in Arabic and English. "But it's not my birthday!" "Nevermind, Alissa, this is just our 'Happy to See You' party." I guess there isn't a better song to sing! It was sweet.

I spent the night with them and left fairly early in the morning, after drinking tea with milk and practicing my Arabic with the father and the oldest brother. I left feeling revived. I have loved living with friends here, but there's something about having a whole family to take care of you when you're away from your own. Getting to be a guest in their affectionate community, with multiple generations to enjoy and draw from….from the 8 year old girl doing my make up to the 14 year old holding my hand down the street to the 50 year old mother fussing over my food….having all ages around is something intrinsically important for the human soul. Again and again I'm so grateful to have a supportive community here in Egypt.
Even though our apartment in August will have air conditioning and hot water, I'll be sad to leave the watchful care of the host family. I think Essam is right—Egypt doesn't teach you to be independent. But instead, it teaches you about the importance of interdependence, which—for a fearless American woman as myself—is a lesson I need to learn.

Fumbling toward self-sufficiency.

One of my Egyptian co-workers turned 21 yesterday. While eating cake and wishing her a happy birthday, she explained that turning 21 in Egypt means that she is now officially an adult: she can move out of the house, withdraw her own money from the bank, and marry without her parents' permission.
If this is the definition of adulthood, then I suppose I reached it at 16, or 18, at the very least, and should be a well-seasoned, confident, mature adult by the ripe age of 23. I mean, right? I've signed a lease on an apartment before, successfully managed to pay off my credit cards, I have a college degree, and I'm fairly confident I know how to check the tire pressure on my car. All of this says "adulthood," yes?
Now, I know what some of you are going to say. "But Alissa, isn't it true that you thought you could live off a diet of hot pockets, scrambled eggs, and bloody marys for a year?"
Yes, it's true. My one remaining hurdle towards true self-sufficiency is nutrition. It seems like the mark of a true adult is being able to consistently feed yourself without developing scurvy or diabetes. If I struggled with this in the States, where my impatience with cooking led to developing a taste for preservatives and Microwave-ready packaged meals, I knew I had my work cut out for me in Egypt. Tellingly, my old roommate handed me a bottle of multivitamins as a going away gift. "Good luck," she said, with the total seriousness of a NASA control center scientists packing freeze-dried meals for an astronaut. You're going to need this.
So I rejoiced this week when, for the first time since arriving nearly 14 days ago, I managed to feed myself nearly all the food groups in regular portions at regular intervals. I ate watermelon and couscous with cheese, pita bread, strawberry yogurt, juice, water. Real food, like a real adult. (True, I had just finished washing my clothes with dish soap in the same tub that I shower in since I haven't managed to find any detergent yet and that tub is really the only option we have, but we'll stick to one challenge at a time.) I won.
Feeling fancy and self-confident, I decided to make myself a glass of cinnamon tea before bed. Uh, and I should point out that making tea in Egypt really isn't any different than making tea anywhere else. Heat water and go, right?
Like my old apartment in Seattle, I have a gas stove top. No problem. Turn on the gas, light it with a match, and we're good to go. Our teapot is metal, though, and as you can imagine, heats up really quickly. We don't have a top on the teapot, either, so the steam rises up and heats up the handle. Knowing this, I grabbed a towel to use as a pot holder as I poured the water into my glass. While I was pouring it, I realized that I had lit the towel on fire. I drop the teapot back onto the stove top, which splashes the boiling water. The towel is in flames. I quick drop it into the sink and put the fire out.
I nurse my wounded ego for a moment, ashamed that I had managed to botch something so simple as pouring tea.
I pick up the towel again, being careful this time to keep it out of the flame. In wrapping the towel up more tightly, however, I exposed my fingers to the steam. The water had been at a full boil for a good 10 minutes, and the steam burned my hand. I dropped the teapot again, and ran my fingers under the cold water. I give up. Stupid tea.

Yesterday, I forgot to carry any water with me throughout the day. I didn't drink any until I had come home from work and the language school where I'm studying Arabic. In total, I had been on 4 micro buses and 3 metros in the heat of the day. When I got home, I drank a liter of water and fell asleep around 7pm. I was so exhausted, I didn't wake up until 7 this morning.
So, we're still working on it! Today I'm sufficiently armed with food and water, so I'm expecting good things. Now, if I can just find some laundry detergent, I'll be good to go…

The Daily Life of an Intrepid Intern.

My day begins at 7:20 a.m. to the soft chirping of my traveler's alarm clock. A slow moving ceiling fan is drying the sweat that has covered my body throughout the night—but the heat no longer keeps me awake at night. My roommates and I had the intention of following the Egyptian custom of having a kind of open bed rotation, sleeping in whichever room is open at the time that drowsiness finally overtakes you and your eyes close despite the Arabic pop music coming in through the open windows, the sound of children playing outside well after midnight, or the occasional unhappy donkey. Falling back into the American instinct for property rights, however, we've more or less claimed our own bed. I have a small bedroom all to myself, with a firm and lumpy but satisfactory mattress, bottom sheet, and thin blanket. The blanket rarely leaves the foot of my bed, however—though our apartment stays reasonably cool and has good circulation, it simply is too warm to be necessary.

I shake off the grogginess and make my way into the bathroom for a shower. Now, "shower" is a bit of a loose term here. We have a bath faucet that protrudes out of the wall about 3 feet off the ground. There isn't a tub or a stall or anything…the water simply comes onto the bathroom floor. We've put a large plastic tub on the ground (like something you might handwash clothes in, about 3 feet wide and 1 foot tall). We squat in the tub, letting the cold water run over us. We use a cup to pour the water over our hair. Now, this might sound a bit rustic, but it is blissful, blissful luxury. I actually prefer this to a normal shower fixture—having streams of cold water running over you after coming in from a hot walk home, or to have a cool, clean start to the morning—it's one of the absolute highlights of my day. I take 2 or 3 of these shower/baths a day, content as content can be. When we're done, we pour the water in the tub down a drain in the floor, and the bathroom actually stays fairly dry.
Now, most Egyptians don't shower in a tub like this….there is a shower fixture, but it's broken. But it is normal to have "efficiency showers" like this, where there is no tub and you just squeejee (sp?) the floor dry when you're done.

For breakfast, I purify and boil water for tea, eat a slice of watermelon I bought from a street vendor by the metro, drink some yogurt and eat some bread and cheese. It's so hot, I haven't had much of an appetite—I've actually lost quite a bit of weight already. But I know I'll be hungry once I'm sitting in my air conditioned office all day, so at the very least, I stuff some cheese or yogurt in my purse to eat later.

Now, this is the easy part. Once I'm showered, dressed, and ready for the day, the real adventure begins! First, I need to wake up my host family, who live in the apartment unit directly across from ours (lest you get the wrong mental picture, this "apartment building" is maybe 2 or 3 stories tall, and has only 4 units total, all of which are occupied by family members) so that they can unlock the padlock on the front door. I make my way down a flight of crumbling concrete steps in the dark, through the front door (kiss my host sisters on the cheek goodbye), and step out onto the dirt street.

Egyptians sleep late, stay in the house during the heat of the day, and then emerge at night, staying up until the early hours of the morning. So at 8am, the street is uncannily empty. It's peaceful. In the shade of the buildings and a few trees that line the road, I can stay fairly cool in the shade. The air smells pleasantly tangy from the mixture of people and livestock, cooking food, exhaust fumes from the cars and microbuses. A few people are milling around, opening up their small convenience shops or groceries for morning business. As I walk into the large marketplace (sooq), 2 women are herding a dozen or so goats down the road. People notice me walking by, but no one seems too ruffled, or even too curious. I appreciate that I can feel at ease and—if not inconspicuous, at least that I don't feel too on display.

A group of microbuses sit in the sooq. Microbuses are 12 passenger vans of various shades of quality—I was in one yesterday that was missing sections of its roof and had smoke rising out of the gear shift. The one I took this morning had nicely cushioned seats. It just kind of depends. The microbus system is another manifestation of this local economy-by-necessity. The metro stop is a 15 minute walk from the sooq. I could walk, or I could pay 10 cents to ride in one of these vans. There are enough people that would rather hitch a ride that 7 or 8 men have purchased these vehicles to get people back and forth. As soon as one fills up, it takes off, and people begin to fill up the next. First in, First out. The microbuses are microcosms of the whole neighborhood—Muslims and Christians, professionally dressed and those in rags, those commuting to work on the metro and those who just need a lift across the neighborhood. Some women will ask us where we're from and welcome us to Egypt, but for the most part, people ride in silence, and we don't seem to make people uncomfortable, provided we're dressed modestly, which we always do.

Outside the metro station, there are a dozen stands selling fruit, Doritos, Fanta, and cigarettes. I slide past the vendors, buy a metro ticket for 20 cents, and wait for it to arrive. The metro system doesn't reach a lot of Cairo, but it operates well where it does. A train arrives every 5 minutes, at least. Even still, they are CROWDED. There are women only cars, though some women occasionally ride in the men's cars without a problem. As a foreigner, though, I'm not really looking for the kind of attention I would get if I showed up in the men's car! So I go into one of the women's cars. In the morning, I start out with a big of standing room and space around me. At each stop, more women arrive until we are body to body, where even carrying a purse is a nuisance to those standing around me because there simply isn't room for it.
When we arrive at the central downtown station, the women in the car literally surge forward so that you sort of fall out of the train car and hope you land on your feet. Not the best feeling in the world.

The metro station is literally right next to my work, which saves me from needing to cross the chaotic and anarchical traffic lanes.
At work, I'm in a different world. All of my co-workers are fluent in English, having studied abroad or attended private elite schools in Egypt. You can have coffee, tea, or sandwiches delivered to you at any time simply by dialing the building's café's extension. I have my own desk (though that's fortunate…there are 2 other interns in my office who aren't so lucky and end up doing filing work on their laps) and computer, which is a blessing since my host family definitely does not have internet!

Work has been lovely…I really enjoy my work, and they keep me fairly busy with projects. When I don't have something specific to work on, I browse the news online. It's a good life!
I just signed up for Arabic classes, which I'll do three times a week for 2 hours at a time. Since my host family doesn't speak any English, this is a must! Already I've been improving and learning a lot.
Until next time…. Take care, habibi.

Life in Maasara

My roommates and I are now living with a conservative Orthodox Christian family in the neighborhood of Maasara, a good 30 minutes south of downtown by the metro. Maasara is a "fresh from the village" kind of neighborhood, and poor. As in many parts of Cairo, the streets are exactly one car-width wide as endless rows of shanty concrete-brick apartment buildings, corner stores, make-shift vegetable stands, outdoor markets, and impromptu tea shops form the backdrop to the residents' daily lives. My street is paved for the first two blocks, and then, like all the other streets in Maasara, turns into a dirt road peppered with bits of discarded papers and wrappers, vegetable matter, and fruit rinds.

In such a poor neighborhood, the local economy operates fluidly and spontaneously, as people improvise ways to fill needs and earn some money. Often, this means trying to adapt rural economic survival tactics to this uber-urban setting. So some families nearby keep goats in the alleyways, or roosters on their roofs. Donkey carts weave between the taxis and microbuses to carry fresh produce to sell next to the metro station. At night, the donkeys and goats graze the garbage heap for food—which helps reduce the amount of garbage. So it all works out in a haphazard kind of a way.

I should mention that as a "fresh from the village" neighborhood, it is culturally very conservative. My Orthodox Christian family does not go out past 9pm. They do not allow photographs to be taken of them. They do not socialize with men. And they are VERY concerned that we do not socialize with men, either! They insist on accompanying us everywhere in the neighborhood, even though we are quite safe and well-treated, despite being a bit conspicuous as foreign nationals. Our walls are also adorned with life-size posters of Jesus, a glow-in-the-dark Mary figurine sits on my bedside table, and stickers of crosses are affixed to every mirror, table, counter, and otherwise available surface. Like many Orthodox Christians, they also have a small tattoo of a cross on the inside of their right wrist—children get this done when they are 1 year old. I thought this might mean that they would like the cross tattoo on my foot….nope, no dice. My nose piercing got equally uneasy treatment, but they're so sweet and hospitable that they leave it at curiosity and don't press it further.

The Muslim population in the neighborhood is equally conservative. A much higher percentage than usual of women wear face scarves (Nikab) and gloves, in addition to headscarves and such. As I was walking through the market last night, I noticed that even on a Monday night, all of the mosques were packed for the 8pm call to prayer! Normally the big prayer service is at 1pm on Friday, though some people go to the mosque to do any or all of the 5 calls to prayer that occur every day. All this to say that religious observance is a large part of the culture here, for both Christians and Muslims.
As always, there's more to say about life in Cairo, but I'll leave you here since this postis quite long already. But for now, here's a small update and a big "I miss you" from Maasara, Cairo.

An Egyptian Fourth of July

I love the 4th of July. It's a perfect holiday--a sense of unity that goes beyond race, class, gender, and religion; fireworks, good Midwestern corn, blueberries and strawberries (good thing we picked delicious colors for the flag!), and laying down on blankets late at night, staring up at the sky as we watch the fireworks, feeling that sense of smallness and awe. 

Now, there's simply no replicating that outside of the United States. But with or without a national holiday to celebrate, it was the weekend, and my roommates and I were feeling very proud of our first week in Egypt. Proud, and ready to rest! It was the 4th of July and our first day off, and we were going to celebrate.

We found out that a few other Americans (whom we had met through out hostel, but didn't know well) were planning to rent a van to go to the Red Sea for the day. I was pumped! All my ventures to the Red Sea before had involved 13 hour bus rides across the Sinai...I thought that was the only way to get to a beach from here. It turns out that to get to the very closest NW corner of the Gulf of Suez takes only 2 hours from Cairo. Perfect.

We left at 8am, under the careful watch of our jovial driver Farek (who has become our 'Egyptian Baba'), and picked up the other 6 Americans. They're all undergrads from Ivy league schools here to teach English for 2 months. 

We drove past the Cairo city limits and entered into the Saharan desert...stretches of mean, jagged sandstone bluffs and barren sand as far as you can see. Happily, we were taking this all in from the comforts of an air-conditioned deluxe van with cushioned seats. If you were wondering if it would ever be fun to get lost in a desert, though, let me assure you: not fun at all.

Finally, we see a stretch of blue along the horizon, and pull into a beach comprised of 1 restaurant, 2 small convenience stores, and a wire fence marking off the public beach area. We all chip in $3 to rent this palmbranch canopy to protect us from the unrelenting sun. We are the only foreigners there. This being the weekend, the small beach is bustling with Egyptian families: veiled and unveiled women with their children, elderly parents fanning themselves in the shade, young men showing off to their friends, fathers playing in the water with their families. 

Having been to an Egyptian beach, before, we knew to expect two things: modesty and crowds. Unless you're in one of two resorts that are on the Sinai Peninsula, that's a given. Unfortunately, no one had clued our American friends into that fact before hand--they were picturing stretching out on a wide, quiet beach in their bikinis. Whoops. Understandably disappointed from the difference between their expectations in reality, they remained total sourpusses the whole day. Refusing to let my glorious beach day and 4th of July to be dampened by their grouchiness, K. and I went waded past the 12 year old boys ("What's your name? Where you from?" in incessent choruses) to swim out in the perfectly clear, warm, salty sea. The Red Sea is the Carribbean, only with yellow sand.  

Pictures will come soon, but the whole scene just warmed our hearts to a place of perfect contentment. The sky was pure blue and wide open. The water was warm. Turning in the water to face the beach, you saw the craggy sandstone desert cliffs towering right over the sand--here we were luxuriating in perfect comfort, but with the largest desert in the world encroaching right upon us. Women wearing face veils ("nikab", the Egyptian equiveleant of the Burka) or brightly covered head scarves were splashing each other in the water and riding paddleboats with their children in their arms. On the beach there were Muslims and Christians, Arabs and foreigners, conservatives and liberals, all varities of dress--and everyone was enjoying it together.

After we had enjoyed enough swimming, we returned to doze off under the cool shade of the palm branches. Naps on the beach are the best.... 15 minutes is enough to die to the world completely and come back in complete contentment, when your body is too happy to even be able to move. We laid there completely limp and happy as clams.

Our tranquility was disrupted by an MC setting up enormous speakers on the beach and blasting Arab dance music. We sat up to see that the men had formed a big dance circle and were doing a belly dance dance-off with each other. They kept at it for a good hour, at least, until the Call to Prayer (Friday, the big weekly service). Words simply cannot capture a beach full of bellydancing men. awesome. 

We came back to Cairo and got huge hamburgers with bbq sauce from Spectra, a nice-ish restaurant we used to go to when we were students here. With bellies full of french fries and fried beef, we went to sleep for the last time in our hostel. A happy Egyptian 4th of July, indeed.

Today we're packing up from the hostel and getting ready to move in with a host family on the south end of the city. 

Until then, take care!

A Working Woman.

We are now three Americans in a downtown Cairo hostel, looking at the lights illuminating the government building, listening to the chorus of car horns in the street below, washing the dust off our feet from a day well spent. My 2nd roommate for the summer, E., arrived at the airport at 8pm--the best time of the day in Egypt. The sun is setting, turning the shanty brick apartment buildings, marble mosques, and dusty skyscrapers a hazy yellow. K. and I drove with our friend Farek the Taxi Driver to pick E. up from the airport. Although Farek was getting frustrated with the traffic (he started making up a catchy song, "the traffic in Egypt is so bad, I think I'm going to kill myself..."), K. and I actually really enjoyed the scenic trip through Cairo. Having been limited to the downtown area for the past week, it was good to remember just how much there is to Cairo! You could never exhaust this city. There will always be more to see. This time around in Egypt, I've been noticing more nuances than before--the varieties of skin tones, class differences, political opinions, religious expressions, lifestyles... With fresh eyes, I'm simply seeing differently than I did the last time.

8pm in Egypt also means that it's finally cooled down to a bearable temperature! Every morning as I leave for work (more on work later), dressed oh-so-professionally in my Hillary Clinton-esque pant suit and pearls, my whole body bursts into sweat. Like a puffer fish suddenly inflamed, my entire body instantly beads into droplets of perspiration. If you've never experienced this kind of spontaneous soiling, I don't wish it upon you. 

My entire commute to my internship involves crossing one street. Ha, you say. Easy. Oh, no, my friend. This is easily a 15 minute endeavor.

First, I either walk down 7 flights of stairs to the street, or risk my life in the janky elevator that fits 1.5 skinny people, is completely open on one side, and shudders as you shake and wobble down into the utter darkness of the elevator shaft. 

Second, I step over the cracked sidewalk, slide through double-parked cars, buy a large bottle of water for the day from a young street vendor who is not impressed with my fledgling Arabic, and finally to the street corner.

I am now faced with 10 improvised lanes of traffic. No traffic lights. No crosswalk. No traffic cops. Having cut my teeth on this real-life version of Frogger during my last stay in Egypt, I feel a certain fatalistic boldness this time around. I stare at the taxis and buses as I step in front of moving traffic. I see you. You hit me, I'll kill you. I own this road. 

The trick is actually to pace yourself with another Egyptian crossing the road, and to walk when they walk. But even with a crossing buddy, you invariably find yourself pausing mid-lane to let cars narrowly pass you on either side before continuing on. No, they will not stop. You're lucky if they swerve.

Once I'm successfully across the street, beading sweat, huffing and puffing from my lethal jaunt across traffic, I'm hardly feeling like the bright-eyed, intrepid intern off to learn the ropes of Arab politics. I mostly feel dishevelled and ridiculously over dressed for the climate. 

The Egyptian Museum (home to King Tut, 20,000 stone busts without labels, and 600 tourists in skanky shorts and tank tops) is right next store to my building. This means I first need to pass through museum security. Dressed in my classy pant suit/pearls combo, I clearly am no museum monkey. The museum police know me by now, and greet me with a kind of amused look on their face as I walk through the metal detector.

At least 10 minutes have gone by, and I'm no more than 100 yards from my hostel. I walk briskly past the museum, past a swanky western hotel, to the front door of my building. Another security check. My purse is x-rayed, I'm metal detected, and I exchange my American drivers lisence for a visitor's badge with the skeptical reception security staff. 

Whew.

My office is air-conditioned, though, so I at least have the solace of knowing that I'll air dry as the day goes on.

In reality, my internship is phenomenal, better than I could have imagined. There are some confidentiality issues, which is why I'm sticking with a lot of acronyms and shortened names. But I'm working for the Department of the Americas, which deals with the relationship between the Arab World and the Western Hemisphere. They have me working on a project for the North American director that is way beyond my qualifications, but I feel lucky and honored to have been given this kind of responsibility. 

There's always more to tell, but I think I'll leave it here for now. I just spent a relaxing evening with my roommates at an outdoor tea and hookah cafe in the old European part of the downtown. It was nearly midnight, but the streets were more full than ever. It's so much more pleasant to be outside at nighttime that all the stores open up and the people come pouring into the streets, strolling arm in arm with loved ones or shopping with girl friends, guys sitting together to drink tea and joke around. We could have sat out there forever. But with my 5-hour work day calling, we had to be responsible and turn in for the night... 

In the meantime, thanks for all your blog comments, facebook messages, and emails. It's great to hear how all of you are doing--please keep me in the loop with life back home! I miss you all.