a nearly American Halloween.

My friends.

That is, those of you who are still my friend after the verbal assault of my last post. 

I offer no apology; that was the best studying technique for learning all those vocab words that I can think of. 

In any case! Halloween indeed visited the Mother of the World (that is, il-Um il-Dunya, Egypt). And we did our damndest to bring a little piece of Apple-Pie-America to our Egyptian friends, even if they didn't quite appreciate our antics. 

We opted for an admittedly untraditional Halloween Dinner Party--but in full costume. We startled and bewildered our darling family from Maasara by greeting them at the door as a jazzercise instructor, vaguely Asian woman, and flight attendant, respectively. This despite the fact that we tried to warn them about "costumes"--but really, try to explain the concept of a costume, much less the rationale behind it. My 16 year old host sister Sara, thanks to some reading she did for an English class once, was the most with it. 

"Ah, yes, Halloween. You will dress strangely. Like a cat?" Still, they apparently weren't quite prepared for the spectacle.

Without candy corn (ah, how my heart pines...) and fun-sized snickers, we did our best to recreate a homey, festive ambiance. We made some legit apple cider and chai, and--goodness knows where she found this thing--one of my roommates came home carrying a 20 pound pumpkin from the open-air vegetable sooq. 

Our Egyptian guests were decidedly anti apple cider ("what? Hot apple juice??" they sputtered), and completely baffled when we got out 3 large kitchen knives and started hacking into our enormous pumpkin, scooping out seed guts with enthusiasm with long orange pumpkin strings sticking to us up to our elbows. They loved our Halloween cake, though, and--once Jafar the Jack o' Lantern was complete--decided that the whole pumpkin-as-lantern thing wasn't so crazy as they first thought. And hey, even a little cute. 

After our dinner guests left, we decided that we needed to venture out into the ex-pat partying community--just this once. We found ourselves at a French Halloween party, courtesy of an invitation from a French-speaking guy from Niger (prompting a furious discussion whether the adjective of Niger in English is Nigerian or Nigeran--a dilemma we did not solve to anyone's satisfaction). 

While France apparently does not normally celebrate Halloween, there were apparently some 20 French people in Cairo eager to dress up as Bedouins and/or harem girls, and we soon found ourselves crammed in the midst of them, shouting over the music to see if anyone in the room spoke any English at all (Although, I find that if you try speaking English in a french accent, you actually get further along in French than you'd think).

We ended up spending most of our evening chatting with an English-speaking Egyptian who's working as a fashion designer for Tommy Hilfiger, an amiable French man who had followed his girlfriend down to Cairo and was actually wearing a wedding ring to get past Egyptian social mores, two Brits, an American from Arizona, and a variety of young French guys who have apparently been buying daggers and old-school sultan swords across the Middle East. One brief drunken sword fight took place, but luckily, everyone emerged unscathed. 

So, a Happy Halloween to you all. Jafar the Jack o' Lantern is sitting happily on our balcony, awaiting his eventual reincarnation in the form of a pumpkin pie. 

The parties aren't over for us in the city of sand, however-- the U.S. Embassy is throwing an all-night party (9pm-9am) at the Hardrock cafe for election night. The 6:30am breakfast with a bunch of diplomats following an all night party seems a little "morning after" and awesome--I don't think I'll be able to resist the invitation.