A village wedding.

Before this week, there were two things in Egypt I had yet to see: a wedding, and an Egyptian village.
Now, some of you may remember that I was supposed to go to a wedding several week ago—I may or may not have misunderstood the time of the wedding and caused my entire host family to miss it. Whoops.

When we first arrived in Cairo, my roommates and I spent a week living at the Desert Safari Hostel downtown. Consisting of 4 rooms on the 7th floor of an apartment building, it was also the second home of our first Egyptian guy friends: Farek, Amir, and Ahmed, all on staff at the hostel. Egyptians are famous for their sense of humor, and these 3 men are at the top their game. Long after we moved in with the host family, we continued to stop by the hostel after work, drinking tea and laughing until the tears rolled down our faces.
These three are quite the characters, too: Farek, the sensitive taxi driver featured previously on the blog, has learned all of his English from hostel guests and therefore often bursts out with random phrases that don't quite fit the situation. Yelling "Life is delicious!" is one of his favorites. Whenever I see him, he says "Pasha, I swear by God three times, I love you very much!" He supports his entire family with his severely dilapidated taxi, and is getting married in October.

Amir lives in the Delta, and commutes a few hours to and from work. He graduated with a degree in English literature (having studied Latin and politics, too), but spends most of his time giggling and making fun of Asian tourists, as well as trying to marry my roommate E.

Ahmed is also from the Delta, and is Amir's partner in crime—it's impossible to talk about anything serious when the two of them are together. By himself, though, Ahmed is a perfect blend between Amir and Farek—as funny as Amir, as sensitive as Farek.

And Ahmed was getting married. He insisted that we all attend the wedding, which was going to be in his village an hour and a half north of the city limits. A wedding and a village. We were pumped. There were 8 or so of us who drove together—including Farek and some of his relatives, an American college student teaching English in Alexandria, and a Turkish sociologist who had been a guest the hostel for the past two months straight (who showed up with an Egyptian lady friend, despite having a family back in Turkey—quite the intrigue). It was a little bit like Gilligan's Island.

As we drove north of the city, concrete buildings eventually gave way to plots of corn. The banks of the Nile were marshier. The roads ran straight and the traffic thinned. And—ahh, when we opened the windows, the air smelled sweet again.

We couldn't just drive straight to the wedding, of course. First, Farek wanted to borrow a car from a friend so he wouldn't show up driving a taxi (plus, it's possible that the car wouldn't make it). We stop for a half hour or so to do this. Another man coming to the wedding, Tamir, had been joking a little too frequently in the car ride about how it's possible in Islam to take a second wife. "Where is your wife now?" we wanted to know. "Ah," he said. "Let me call her." It turns out that, due to our questions, he decided right then to bring her along. Another detour. We wait twenty minutes. Finally a woman emerges from the apartment building, a little harried with make-up freshly applied. She had a very chubby 10-month old boy with her.
"Uh, Tamir, there are already 5 of us in the car. Where will she sit?" He popped the trunk and for one very alarmed moment, we thought he was going to stick the baby there. Nope, just the car seat.
So mom and baby sat in the front seat, while 4 of us jammed our hips into the backseat and just barely managed to shut the door.
NOW we were off to the wedding. An hour and a half later, the sun had finally dropped behind the corn stalks, and we could drive 20 minutes at a time without seeing any buildings. From Cairo, one of the densest cities on the planet, it was a striking change.

Now, the term "village" might be a bit misleading. Yes, the donkey-human ratio was high, and animals were clearly a means of local transportation, too. There were also some fields around us. But people still lived in apartments in the same 3 story brick-concrete structures that dominate most neighborhoods in Cairo. This wasn't a "hut" kind of place.

Finally, we saw a big outdoor tent covered in Christmas lights. We had found the wedding.
Despite the delays, we still managed to be quite a bit early. Some 200 chairs were under the large light displays, and at the front, there was a stage with two red velvet thrones, where Ahmed and his wife would eventually sit. Someone ordered tea—and with it came an entire dining room table, pulled out from someone's house nearby, God knows where. Farek started taking sugar orders. "Two spoons or three?" Knowing that when Egyptians put in sugar, "two" always means something closer to "four," I stick with only two. I start passing the tea out to the women next to me. "No, no, honey," one tells me. "That one doesn't have enough sugar in it. I'll have Farek make mine."
As soon as we drank our tea, however, we realized that they had delivered it to us sweetened already--Farek hadn't needed to put sugar in at all. I'm sure there was now nearly a half cup of sugar dissolved in 8 ounces of tea—even the Egyptians were gagging on it slightly. But, down it goes! Type II Diabetes can always be treated later.

More guests start arriving—all of the men are wearing galibayyas, which are like ankle-lengthed button down shirts. I spotted two western suits in the whole place--one worn by Ahmed, one by Amir. Some of the women arrived in taffeta prom dresses (with long sleeve shirts underneath). Some arrived riding astride donkeys, one came on a horse. The boy on the horse rode it into the crowd, which spooked the horse and threatened to bring down the entire tent and back rump-first into our table. Thankfully, we were able to jump up and get out of the way before a tragic horse trampling occurred. The boy kept bringing the horse back in the crowd--I think he was actually trying to make it "dance", if any of you have ever seen Arabian horse shows. But having 200 people crowded around it mostly made the horse--and us--nervous.

The requisite DJ repeating the same 3 songs was there, and the children and men started bellydancing (adult women don't dance in public often, especially in this more conservative environment). It was at this point, sitting around the table talking to Amir and Farek, that I learned that Ahmed didn't even know his wife before he got engaged to her. He had heard about her from a friend, called her father, and asked to get married to her. That's how things are done in the village, I'm told. What? Over the past year, they've been going on chaperoned dates. Now, they're beginning a life together.

Hind and Ahmed finally arrive—the women started trilling and the men danced. We got invited up in groups to go up to the stage and pay our respects to the new couple. After that, they invited our group inside the house next door to eat. They had slaughtered an ox for the occasion, which was the first red meat I had eaten in a month! We stuffed ourselves, and were then invited to watch the wedding from the balcony of his family's apartment.

We spend the rest of the evening there, enjoying the dancing and laughing and the occasional firecrackers and blanks that people were shooting off, pleasantly surprised to find ourselves the guests of honor without feeling too out of place (thanks to the fact we were with Egyptian friends of the groom).

I'm having trouble uploading photos, but will do so as soon as I can. I'm going to another wedding tonight with my host family in Maasara—this one promises to be as crazy and colorful as the last.