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.