Speaking French.

Dear readers—

I write to you again from the lovely, smoggy, bustling city of Cairo. Flying back to my adopted home at 3am today, I’m a bit too jet-lagged to know what to make of this loud and dusty environment after 6 weeks away. At the very least, my heart strangely warmed at the endearing familiarity as I woke up once again to hear my roommate hit her alarm and groggily mutter, “what time is it?” as I stretched out on my lumpy bed and breathed in the smell of my mothball scented sheets. I’m not sure anything in Cairo is as beautiful as the snake charmers and stark white mountains of Marrakech, the blue walls of Chefchaouen, or the pristine mosques punctuating Istanbul’s skyline, but aesthetic beauty isn’t really what I’m after. Six weeks away from Cairo, I’m ready to be back with my roommates, colleagues, and host family again. Ah, yes. It’s good to be back.

And sucks, too.
Yes, your savvy traveler/intrepid intern has become a big softie over the past few months. I may have spent a few weepy moments at the Ataturk airport trying to delay the inevitable end of my 3 week trip, crying like a big blubbery cliché into an overpriced airport beer. The super depressing Turkish violin music piped into the airport food court wasn’t helping anything, either. Damn Turks and their melancholy. In any case, rather than bore you with an account of long-distance relationship heartache, let me instead begin to catch you up on a few more misadventures from my recent travels.

Speaking French.
Between the two of us, Nod and I are somewhat conversational in a variety of useless and semi-useless languages: Amharic, Oromifa, Farsi, Japanese, Egyptian Arabic, Spanish. Notably, we speak not a single word of Moroccan Arabic, French, or Turkish, which was going to make our travels through Morocco and Turkey a bit tricky. Armed with a Lonely Planet phrasebook, we were determined to teach ourselves a few French phrases to help us get around. Plus, who doesn’t feel a little vampy speaking French? Ordering a glass of orange juice (Excusez-moi, avez-vous un jus d'orange?) suddenly makes you feel like a charcter in a film noir. The trouble is that it’s a little tricky to figure out pronunciation just by looking at a French-English dictionary. I find that speaking English with a Hollywood French accent actually gets you a little further than you’d think, but we knew that we were bound to get ourselves into trouble eventually.

Some moments of linguistic confusion were more demoralizing than problematic. At one rooftop terrace in Marrakech, overlooking the snowy Atlas mountains and a colorful plaza of acrobats and snake charmers, we decided to sit down for a small Moroccan lunch. In addition to discovering a mutual love for fried pigeon with powdered sugar, mint tea, and cous cous with raisins and cinnamon, I had also become smitten with Moroccan almond juice. Now, in a pinch, most anyone can rely on a simple point-n-grunt method to ordering food off of a menu in an incomprehensible language. We had been in Morocco for a few days at that point though, and I felt pretty good about my budding French food vocabulary.

Jus d’amande, s’il vous plait? I asked, batting my eyelashes like a good French/Moroccan/film noir girl should. The waiter repeated my order back to me in French. It sounded a little different than what I said, but hey, I don’t actually speak French. It’s a little tough to hear all those silky smooth syllables clearly.

What arrived on my table was a beautiful glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Not almond juice. I should also mention that orange juice usually makes me gag.

“No, no,” I said, immediately switching back to my broken English I have a bad habit of using with non-native speakers abroad, “different. Not this. Almond. No orange. Almond. Amande. Amand? Amoond.” I tried different pronunciations to see if I could hit it right. Almendras? Hey, maybe Spanish might work.

The waiter looked back and forth at Nod and I. “Speak French?” He asked.
“Non,” we responded, defeated.
“Oh my God,” he muttered, shaking his head disapprovingly.

Bringing out the menu, we resorted once again to the point-n-grunt method, but couldn’t convince him not to charge us for the orange juice I didn’t order. Or didn’t mean to order. Or, who knows. Maybe I ordered it.

Our most epic night of butchering the French language (which we have now both resolved to learn in earnest once we return to the United States) came a few nights later, in Fes.

The story begins with a wicked sweet tooth. Or rather, make that two—you have never seen true sugar addicts until you see Nod and I together. Throughout our travels, we ate at least 6 kilos of baklava and Turkish delight, and at least another 3 kilos of raw sugar in the form of sweetened mint tea. Nod was happy to discover that Moroccans had another sugar-drenched pastry called Chebakia that was close to an Iranian dessert he grew up with. That one was so sweet it could almost make you faint—naturally, we ate it almost every day in Morocco. And that was when we were trying to exercise a bit of restraint.

In Fes, we noticed an abundance of cafes with big, neon “Glacier” signs. Given the pictures of bright, sweet, colorful balls of ice cream accompanying said signs, we figured Glacier must mean “ice cream shop,” and that we were in a kind of ice cream utopia. Even though it was less than 10 degrees Celsius outside and we were losing feeling in our hands, we couldn’t get ice cream off our minds. Dreaming of hot fudge sundaes, we put on our parkas and wool socks and embarked one night to find the best glacier in town.

From a few days of French menus, I was pretty sure (and incorrect, it turned out) that the word for ice cream was “glace.” We sat for a minute flipping through our guide book until we were fairly certain how to form our first, real French sentence: “avez-vous glace?” “Do you have ice cream?” We took turns marching up to French waiters up and down the main street, cheerfully and confidently asking, “avez-vous glace? Avez-vous glace?”

One by one we were turned down—or, more often, told “oui, oui,” seated, and then found out that, non, non, they did not have ice cream. Quoi?? Are there not “glacier” neon signs above each and every one of these shops? Granted, it was mid-January, but our ice cream cravings do not stop for the seasons.

Finally, we found one lonely “glacier” sign down a dim-lit side street, where one man sat behind an ice cream counter with his cat, watching the news together on a staticky tv screen. Hardly able to contain our excitement, we began pointing and ordering big, sweet scoops of chocolat and nougat, (“how do you say 'strawberry' again? Oh, oui, monsieur, strawberry would be great, merci”).

It was only a week later, when we were talking with some French Canadian backpackers on a bus, that we realized we had been walking around asking all those cafes if they had ice, not ice cream. Savvy travelers strike again.

More to come. In the meantime, today is the last day of my internship. I’m wrapping up some final reports for them this afternoon. After that? Jeans and t-shirts every day, baby. My skin is nearly singing with excitement.

Of course, my internship has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had and could have ever asked for, and I am sad to be finished. It has been a solid six months with them, though, and I’m eager to begin focusing more seriously on Arabic class, as well as resume English teaching and volunteering with Sudanese refugees. It’s also nice simply to be free right now to look into any opportunity that might come my way. I welcome all of your thoughts and prayers as I begin to transition back into and reconnect with life here in Egypt. Cairo can be a tough city.

Take care and be well, my friends.