Well, I’m well in the middle of the next part of my life now. I’m no longer in Egypt, I have little time or support for continued Arabic studies, and I’m still figuring out some of the things I learned from Egypt. So, I’d like to take one last opportunity to tell you about some things I didn’t expect upon returning – reverse culture shock.

For a number of reasons, returning to the States after a four-month departure was easier and without the reverse culture shock that I expected. One large part of the transition was the climate. I left Alexandria in the middle of the season they know as winter, as a proper Northern Hemisphere location, and arrived in the Midwest in the middle of winter. The difference was stark: Alex’s winter is full of windy, thunderless downpours and beautiful skies. Iowa: well, if you don’t love the recreational opportunities snow and cold offer, you’ll not be a fan of proper winter. When the family Libbey/Landgraf arrived back in Chicago, we arrived in the middle of the Christmas Cold Snap – there’s not been the proper amount of winter since. While I physically took about three days to adjust to the weather (I wandered around the 70˚F house in a blanket and extra layers), mentally the difference provided a perfect difference to separate my experiences. Other reasons for the easy switch included the change in stress levels, change in tasks, and human surroundings.

The upshot of all this change is that reverse culture shock didn’t express itself in conscious reactions. Only when I didn’t pay attention to details did I experience reverse culture shock. For example, cocktails (minus alcohol) in Egypt cost about LE 18, and on the flight home cocktails were priced at $6. Not paying attention, my mind logged the difference in price as cheaper…whereas in reality $6 is LE 36 – one rather pricey drink! Other moments included smelling a memory in orange juice (I only recognized this by the tiny jolt of disgust upon tasting the juice), accidentally asking three German couples in a row for directions around the Frankfurt airport, assuming they were American, and being surprised upon finding Président cheese in a supermarket (I saw that brand in the hypermarket in Sporting). I was disappointed when Chicagoans foiled my trust in people, fostered by Egypt: I asked an older couple whose entire behavior, reading material, and linguistic style screamed “Midwestern grandparents” to keep an eye on baggage for a minute only to find them apologetically refusing me. Honestly, the largest “shock” factor has been hygiene-related – the first five days I hesitated just so slightly before brushing my teeth…I took three weeks to adjust to the American way of dealing with toilet paper.

I’m at risk for completely shutting out my Egypt experience from my daily experience…except not really. In free time over Christmas Break, I read G. Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque, which kind of turned my memories of a colorful and varied experience into a black and white story. In turn, I sneered in one evaluation when asked to describe the overall impact of four months in less than two paragraphs. As a management intern in a central Iowan museum staying with family friends, I’m reveling in an environment of extremely reduced stress. There’s two cats, a dog, and a Norwegian exchange student at the house, plus the family – they’re a great crew. While I’m currently only utilizing the lessons learned from living in a large city, my Egyptian experience is percolating and has ramifications in my future. And, currently, I have three or four outstanding messages from Egyptian friends on my Facebook.

(For what it’s worth, news is filtering down with worrying signals. A $4.5 billion grant from the IMF to Egypt is at risk of falling through. Currency conversion at the beginning of the semester gave me about LE 6.07 for every US dollar. Today, 1/10/2013, $1=LE 6.54. Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s daring satirist, has been charged for making fun of the president – testing the boundaries of freedom of speech. Egypt’s federal path concerns me.)

Knowing my writing style, I’m impressed if you read even most of those posts. I hope I was partially entertaining and somewhat educational. Enjoy life!

Hope you have a great new year!

First thing’s first: I’m back in the States. I moved from IFSA housing the day my family arrived in Alexandria, spent three days or so in a hotel, then flew back to the States, into the waiting arms of family in Illinois (عمي + عمتي = عميني؟). Spending a night with those relatives, we drove back to the farm, where another aunt and uncle had already arrived for our Christmas gathering. Over the next three days, more family trickled in until Dec. 30, when everyone began leaving, New Year’s Eve took my brother to his flights home; the next day we visited my grandfather (و زوجته), and Jan 2^nd I drove north to Minnesota to spend two days with my best friend. Needless to say, I’ve been welcomed back to America with substantial support from family and to a new house filled with family and food. In time away from family, I realize that my Christmas break was far shorter than I’d assumed – life moves on!

The accompanying video contains material from my stay post-IFSA. My parents, brother (Drew), and maternal grandmother arrived in Egypt on the first Saturday Egypt voted on the Constitution, Dec. 15. Leading up to their arrival, and the vote, US media portrayed Egypt as if all people were involved in demonstrations – on a personal level, I found new graffiti on the Corniche while my family pondered putting a contingency plan (going to Germany instead) in action. Due to stress coming from IFSA to decide whether we needed to leave early, I Skyped my family everyday leading up to their departure, including the day they boarded a plane. Before their arrival in Alexandria, they spent time in Cairo and Luxor. To the despair of their guides, Mom and Drew even snuck peeks around Tahrir Square! (Drew reported there wasn’t much going on, though there were tents. I responded in typical sisterly fashion: “I told you so!”) While they were on a guided tour of the cities, they were afforded different opportunities than I – they saw a banana plantation and alabaster workshop. They also met with an employee of the US Embassy, one whose brother had worked for my parents. (Who says that wasta – connections, واسطة – are only for the Egyptians?!)

Our hotel in Alexandria was in the district known as Ramlh Station. Before I met my family, I turned on a TV for the first time in months to watch news. There was a demonstration that turned violent about three blocks from my hotel – which you couldn’t tell by the demeanor of the people in the street. People throwing rocks, running up on statues to wave flags, police forming and reforming human barriers, even a couple city buses burned. Later that evening, we walked around the area to get to a restaurant for supper, and almost turned down a street filled with demonstrators. While I kept fielding calls from Moutaz and Dr. Mohamed, I felt completely safe walking around, and the hotel’s guards thought nothing of me going out. This was an experience new to my family, and they were very surprised that this set of circumstances was the reality of what I’d explained to them – the real picture of Egypt, not the sensationalized media. Dr.s Heba and Naglaa in Politics and Social Media class had impressed us with the effect media has: misconstruing ground reality as completely conflict-filled; visiting Alexandria brought this realization to my family. (Today, seeing my grandfather, he had the same realization as well!)

While the family was in Alex, we trammed a lot – to Montaza Palace, the Bibliotheca (twice, as I dropped off my phone for the next semester of IFSA students), and to Ft. Qaitbey. We also visited the restaurant Bamboo (where friends took me out for my birthday), the Alexandria National Museum, a tasty schwerma shop, the used bookseller strip, several fruit juice vendors, and many Alexandrian mosaics (I’ve been taking their beauty for granted), and met Brannon, his girlfriend Sarah, and Radwa for supper. I had to adjust to bargaining for two taxis while trying to hustle family away from harassment inherent in being non-Egyptian. I also had to adjust to the fact that, while I had no classes, I wasn’t in charge of my free time; the family’s priorities were my priorities, and I had to give up slacklining with Brannon and Sarah one last time. Also, I adjusted to moseying with my grandmother and parents, who didn’t have the physical endurance to walk at my normal pace, an endurance built from living in Egypt for four months. Honestly, though, while we didn’t walk around Manshiya or visit an ahwa in the evening, I really enjoyed sleeping on the same schedule as my exhausted family.

I admit, I was excited to have family around – these are people who are completely willing to engage in deeper conversations I’ve been missing, who are completely agreeable, trusting, and supportive, reciprocating care and communicating in ways I completely understand and to which I instinctively react. Also, having family in Egypt signaled the end of my sojourn here, an end I am and am not sorry to see. (The food and welcome from every family member was probably the most perfect way of welcoming me back to the States.) Part of my personal release around family meant I could complain more than I’ve allowed myself – I found myself presenting a skeptical and cynical and jaded version of my experience to the people most deserving of the truth. For example, I found myself condemning the street treatment of single women more viciously than I ever minded being catcalled.

All in all, as fun as it was to show off my very small achievements: two friends, a tiny Arabic, a touch of knowledge of the “system,” I wasn’t totally comfortable. (Examples of working the system: I got Drew, who is a full-time engineer, into Ft. Qaitbey under a student ticket. Later, I got the whole family into the Bibliotheca as students. Bureaucracy only exists, as far as I’m concerned, for people to use it to their advantage – can you tell I’m not a fan of bureaucracy?) I was suddenly a tourist in a city in which I’ve lived, yet I still thought of myself as a resident – the two are treated by Egyptians, including Alexandrians, in very different ways. Immediately I began losing the Arabic I’d worked to gain, as I conversed, thought, and was intellectually stimulated in the English of my home. And the people around me frequently made Orientalist statements that were difficult for me to unpack and de-Orientalize. The city I’d worked to partially understand in the face of roommate drama and time and safety restrictions slipped away like a disappointed vendor. I don’t know that I have better words than these to explain.

Last weekend Ben, Brannon, and I were reacting extremely negatively to the safety measures implemented for our safety. This weekend I am bidding these two goodbye, along with everyone else I’ve met in Egypt, and bidding my family hello! In the intermediate time, we went slacklining like crazy (Brannon worked on backflips and I landed my first spectacular face plant), I got frustrated at a young man (what’s new there?), Brannon and I went bouldering (FINALLY!!!), we went to an incredibly expensive Lebanese restaurant, we attended a party, I laughed a lot, and I gave and received a ton of hugs.

Safety considerations included the first round of voting on a draft of the Constitution that will pass, against many people’s better judgment. Half the country voted last Saturday, with the other half voting this coming Saturday. We got the low-down from Radwa, who spent most of Sunday filing violations. According to her activist group, this split election could most definitely be considered fraudulent. According to the Muslim Brotherhood website, the election is most definitely legitimate – how dare you citizens question that! Not only do I trust Radwa over the Muslim Brotherhood, I agree with our politics professors that the Brotherhood patronizes, even insults, the intelligence of the average Egyptian.

I found out that insulting my intelligence is a sure-fire way to rile me up on Tuesday after class. Brannon and I went slacklining again, having nothing else to do, and set up two lines in our original location. A man about university age, named Muhammad Azizi, approached us looking for recommendations for English universities. Um, I’m not British – I’m American, even though we are in the British Gardens. After repeated assurances I knew nothing of British univeristies, he wanted to take us to dinner. Next he wanted to go for coffee. He tried slacklining a couple times; but he stuck around long after decency dictates departure in the face of refusals. I spoke Arabic to him the entire time, but I couldn’t get him to believe that I understood what he was asking and still would refuse him. Brannon employed a very successful ignoring policy, which landed me with dealing with Muhammad. He was frustrating.

I finally turned in my second, and final, final paper. This one was for Radwa, and later I was disappointed that we hadn’t time to properly discuss our papers with her. All three of us continue to wait for comments. Sunday my ECA prof, Emad, interviewed (in Arabic) me for 10 minutes and expressed his joy at having me in class. I really enjoyed Emad’s class. (The clips in the video of Marco, Carolina, and I playing with my bouncy ball in our ECA classroom come from us wasting time between interviews and MSA.) Also Sunday, we took our 2 hour MSA final. That seriously sucked – I had to leave a couple questions in the listening section blank as I didn’t have the appropriate vocabulary. I appreciated the skills Zehad forced us to use, but I didn’t appreciate the test. Zehad was extremely gracious and gave me a nice grade – thanks!! Later on Sunday we recorded a skit in ECA for Emad, which Brannon stayed up til 4 am to edit – thanks so much!!! Monday we miscommunicated with Dr. Naglaa and ended up having 1.5 classes with Radwa. Tuesday was a day filled with evaluations. Wednesday Radwa invited an American Muslim from another program, Flagship, to answer questions. That was fun, and that was the end of our classes.

For the end of the semester (and the end of IFSA’s program), we have to vacate IFSA housing by tomorrow at 10 am. I’m the last to leave – Ben left today to catch the 3 pm train to Cairo and Brannon caught the 8:15 am train to Cairo to pick up Sarah. Both have been very excited – Brannon’s showed it more obviously! Instead of our weekly meeting with Dr. Mohamed and as a surprise dinner, he took us out to eat (beginning at 10 pm) at a new Lebanese restaurant down the street. In my blog on construction, I mentioned I’ve watched the renovation of a villa en route to school – about two blocks from the apartments. Turns out that villa’s actually a restaurant: Leila from Lebanon. It’s very upscale, and the number of cars has significantly increased since it opened a couple weeks ago. That supper was very fun and full of very good, Lebanese food, topped by incredible desserts that I’ve not had since Jordan, but even better than what I had in Jordan. Yum!

Also, TAFL Center (in charge of our classes) threw a party at an old, sumptuously decorated house-building. I love the fact that so many places in Alexandria have deceptively bare/old/crumbling facades that open to luxury. Honestly, IFSA students weren’t dressed to the same standards as the others, but the other students exhibited a range of formality, so we fit in perfectly. We got certificates, ate great food (I wish I’d been hungrier), laughed at Rina’s nose and the clown mask Brannon wore, greeted other students from our classes and our professors, enthusiastically laughed and clapped and booed at a play (in MSA!) put on by Zehad and students, talked briefly with TAFL’s director (she’s a power in of herself!) and took a ton of pictures before hugging all our professors and language partners farewell. So far, I regret to report no pictures have made it to Facebook tagging me…

At the party, Dina (my language partner) impressed upon me the importance of continuing to use Arabic. (She also wanted my blog posts shorter – a refrain I hear from many places, including from my father. I like to develop thoughts – sorry.) Emad has offered to Skype with us to help us use Arabic. The opportunities going forward are numerous, including summer programs. I love Arabic (and Islam), more than expected, and was astonished at my internal impulse to continue with it – the knowledge that the language unlocks a huge corpus of literature is a huge lure – but Luther College doesn’t support Arabic. It’ll be one of my jobs next semester to find myself a niche of supporting my Arabic studies (and another niche for continued research into the rationale of Islamic scholars) – and I have a hunch or two where to start!

Oh – I have three updates. A) Tomorrow, I pick up my family from the train station in Alex. They’ve been traveling in Egypt without me for some days; they’re finishing a two-day stint in Luxor right now! B) My arthritis is gone… C) For all my videos in Egypt, my YouTube channel is “Jess Landgraf.” Check it out!

I’ve grown up around decomposing things: there’s a wood across the road from the farm, let alone the 3-6 large compost piles on the farm itself. So, when I realized the amount of food waste that would go straight to the trash, I set up my own compost. I figured that at the end of 4 months, I’d be able to have some humus perfect for invigorating the tiny woody plant that sits on the balcony, and I’d deal with the rest of the rotting waste at the end of the program. So, I set up an empty water bottle box with a lining of several plastic bags (that’s one way to reuse plastic, right?) on the balcony, and encouraged vegetable, fruit, and grain scraps into the box for all but the last week.

I encountered some issues in setting up a compost:

1. Moutaz had apparently noticed it on the balcony, but decided not to ask me about the large “trash bin.” Mariam, on the other hand, confronted me about trash etiquette one day immediately upon my arrival from school. “You know, Egyptians throw trash into the garbage. They don’t leave it on the balcony,” she said. I think the situation was humorous in hindsight, but I got frustrated that my wonderful idea of a compost pile was considered “trash”! Anyways, I reassured her that it was compost, not trash, that I was fully aware of Egyptian trash customs (pretty much exactly the same as your average city-dwelling American), and that I would deal with the box when the time came.

2. Later, I found non-compostable items in the box, and eventually put up a sign at the balcony door requesting that no bones, grease, oil, fats, skins, restaurant food, etc. enter my compost pile.

3. I also found out that pouring nasty-tasting orange juice on the pile wasn’t a good solution – that got all over the balcony until the Oct. 6th rain.

The contents of my compost pile before I dismantled it.

Well, the time to clean up the pile came today: tomorrow I leave the apartments. I waited until Mariam was out and rain quit for a bit, so that she wouldn’t be disgusted by the odors floating from the pile. I found that there was some useful humus – I mixed what I could grab with the spoon in with the hardened soil around the base of the woody plant, and found out that I would more bags than originally planned. Turns out the pile was good at retaining moisture, especially around, between, and below the bag-liners (partially, I’m sure, because Alexandria’s weather has been incredibly rainy overnight). So much water was retained that the box bottom disintegrated and the central layer of compost was  almost literally dripping. I spooned all remaining rotting food into the new box, set the closed box in the trash stairway, and stuffed the old box in pieces with the bag liners into two bags, layered for protection. What I could scrape of the spilled food from the balcony linoleum went into a second pair of layered bags, and after rain quits, I’ll go out and sweep more on the balcony.

Sorting through the pile…

 After I realized the old box had separated from its bottom layer…

It’s done! And you can see all of my footprints. Ha.

I learned with this experiment: I really need more than 4 months to allow proper decomposition. I also need to stir my pile at least once, to make the water more evenly distributed – the edges were very moldy and dry. Banana peels almost immediately disintegrated, but grape stems from September and early October were still visible. Pomegranate peels (the last ones I had were a couple weeks ago, as their season has more or less ended) didn’t break down easily. Bread didn’t break down either, and individual seeds and grains appeared indestructible. But the fact remains that it worked. I saved a few bits of food from trash, provided my material with an environment conducive to heating up (the first stirs released small puffs of steam, a good sign) and decomposing organic material.

A couple posts ago I re-mentioned a bunch of questions I’d leveled at myself prior to flying over here. Actually, I had those questions prior to fully thinking through what I’d need to pack. One of those questions had to do with water. At the time of questioning, I was coming off of nearly 5 weeks at camp, where I guide canoe trips, down rivers. Water is not only an essential part of what I ensure my kids intake, it is the road upon which we travel, and a daily part of how I enjoyed beauty. My college, Luther College, has dedicated itself to sustainability and to that end my first two years featured a cross-campus dorm challenge to see which dorm can reduce both electricity and water usage in one month a year. Both years my dorm didn’t win, and last year my dorm (Miller) was nearly last – only because we were reducing prior to that month! The third reason I was conscious of my water use was my week in Jordan in January, where I saw signs at hotels reminding visitors that Jordan is a desert country.

 Alexandria on a recent rainy day.

Egypt is a desert country as well; one thing I read estimated that up to 97% of the nation is desert. I’m not sure about that accuracy…whatever. Anyway, me being me, I was slightly surprised when, during orientation, the woman IFSA brought in to show us how to make koshary corrected my method of washing dishes. She wanted me to leave the water running the entire time! On the note of washing dishes, I grew up with no dishwasher, and I don’t trust the dishwashers in the dorms in which I’ve lived. Also being a guide, I wash dishes. I am surprised at the effort involved when I cook supper and the guys wash our dishes for me; they also leave the water running. Leaving the water running, whether for brushing teeth, washing hands or dishes, or even the parts of showers when you’re lathering up, uses unnecessary amounts of water, and I’m surprised mainly at the strength of my negative reaction!

Strange as it seems, my shower doesn’t have a tub faucet, and the depression is just about as wide as I am.

The other thing – I didn’t realize this would irk me either, but I remember thinking that using hot water in September, October, and even most of November was really wasting the energy necessary to heat the water. For the first months, all I wanted in water was something to cool me off. I’d hear showers run, and later hear reports of someone getting burned on the exposed hot water pipes, which suggests to me that the hot water was running. I honestly don’t feel comfortable leaving water running the whole time while taking showers – it’s better for me if I shut off water between rinses.

My glorious and well-used hotpot.

I found my answer as to how conservation-minded are the Egyptians I live with and if I could shuck American use of water. I use less excess water than the Egyptians around me, and have in comparison less of an American use of water. As for recreation and personal space around water…I’ve found that more or less impossible except at Ain Sokhna and Siwa. Our morning taxi ride, requested to go via the Corniche every morning, only sometimes takes us by the sea. While I thrill to living by the sea, beyond weather and those taxi rides, the Mediterranean is not a part of my life. Except for the couple times the guys have gone swimming with me (laps are kind of frowned upon in a public beach, which probably is closed now), I’ve not entered that water (see pollution post on why). At one point I found a neat spot destined for me to read alone by the sea, although with background noise of the Corniche, but the second time I visited, some guy tried charging me 6 LE. I wouldn’t have it, and ended up winning my first argument in Arabic when he insisted on following me a quarter mile down the Corniche. Truly, I’m looking forward to returning to my river on campus (it’ll be too cold to swim until May at least) and camp come summer.

My last full box of water.

As for intaking water, I really dislike having to drink bottled water. As weather turned cool enough for me to retain pants inside the apartment, I turned to boiling water for tea, drinking up to 6 cups of tea a day (that’s two tea bags). I estimated to a friend on Skype at that point that I’d drunk 76 cups of tea in about three weeks…I know that number has increased significantly since starting research on my papers. Thanks to being a guide, I know that the instant your water boils, it’s sterilized. I really dislike the amount of plastic I currently go through, both in plastic bags and in plastic bottles.

Photo of table, and attendent water and homework, taken a day before Jeanette left.

Update: I forgot to mention this in the evening entertainment post, but often, and only after dark, somewhere in the city the night will light up with fireworks. We were surprised at the number of fireworks that would go off in one night, let alone the fact that these pyrotechnic events are inside a rather crowded cityscape. Moutaz told us that each set of fireworks (usually 4-8 at once) is a wedding. Well, the first month we were here, up to 4 nights a week would feature up to 3 weddings. While that’s petered off since, I’ve noticed kind of a resurgence of wedding-inspired fireworks. It seems that now about two nights a week have one or two weddings. But still, that’s a lot of weddings!

Brannon, slacklining like normal, began doing a new trick. Attempting this new trick – he gets to tell people about it – accidently catapulted him into a very spiky bush with some velocity in both x and y directions. When he emerged, he had spikes, thorns with a small, almost barblike end, poking out of hands, wrists, and legs. Again, thanks to being a guide, I had the first aid materials with me to save him a trip to a local pharmacy like our Egyptian friends directed him. I chopped vegetables for supper with Ben and Brannon (based off of food from Siwa) while he sat in my kitchen, clipping away bits of flesh until he could grab the end of a 2 mm spike that had broken off at least 0.5 mm inside the base of his thumb. Thankfully, he is sore in many places, but he is not infected and is healing.

Also, the title comes from an ad I remember for PBS Kids (I watched Arthur, Wishbone, Recess, and Redwall) from early elementary school. The ad was a sing-song voice reciting a poem accompanied by drawings that may have been with crayon.

“Water water everywhere/and not a drop to spare./Water in the ground/water in the air./Though it may evaporate/it never goes away:/Snows on to your mountaintops/flows into my bays!/Animals need water/people need it too./Keep it clean for me,/and I’ll keep it clean for you.”

As this semester begins to wind to the end (and, trust me, I know), I thought I’d share some of the more stupid/silly/ironic things that have happened to my person that I’ve not shared. I hope you enjoy!

While staying in Cairo over orientation, I was entranced with our balcony. I didn’t yet have it in my head that pretty much everyone has a balcony, so I went out to enjoy it. Being a sustainably-minded person and knowing the air conditioning was running in the apartment, I shut the door behind me, as I’d gone out to read and take some pictures before we had to be at the IFSA office for more orientation. I finished my time outside, and realized the door couldn’t open from the outside. I’d locked myself out. I hadn’t brought my phone, either. After looking around at my options – do I climb to that open window at least three feet away across smoothly vertical concrete? Do I attempt to climb down a floor? Can I reach the next floor up? I ended up pounding on the balcony door and yelling for Jeanette to wake up for the next 15 minutes. As this was the second time in as many weeks that I’d locked myself out from a porch door, I needless to say was amused.

By mid-October, I’d realized that my method of brushing my teeth and cleaning my retainer, with sparing amounts of bottled water, was leaving light deposits of some mineral-like material. So, in attempts to clean my retainer (which is one of those supposed-to-be-invisible plastic shells), I scraped off as much as I could with a fingernail or Q-tip. One day, however, while I was scraping the new mineral deposit off the inside of a molar, my retainer just snapped. What?! So, I now have two sides to my retainer: one piece covers about three teeth, the other piece the rest of my jaw.

Sometime in early November, I was cooking myself breakfast. By this time, my breakfast pattern had changed to oatmeal, fruit, yogurt, and granola. The first time I had a big bag of oats, I used them sparingly enough that perhaps 10 days after purchase I still had some in the bag. I noticed there was some movement in the bag, but didn’t think anything of it until I opened the bag and out crawled a couple of small bugs. Yuck. Searching a little through the oats, though, I found nothing, so I cooked my normal amount of oats. Later, though, I found at least one boiled bug among my oatmeal, and I think I crunched on at least one other. I made myself continue eating, so I have now eaten bugs from my grains.

Personal update: My arthritis has unsurprisingly continued, but it’s strangely low-level this round. I’ll live with that! Also, as I look to the end of the semester, I’m facing the uphill task of cleaning my apartment alone, as once more I’m at the center of interpersonal drama. (It’s a rather big apartment to clean alone.) One significant complicating factor in cleaning my apartment is the amount of finals we smashed into two weeks…or supposedly. Due to political pressures, most of my teachers were requested to move our finals up a week. So, with a two-day notice, our 10-14 page Politics paper was due a week early, and our ECA class had to reduce class to no final. My MSA teacher was distraught at the news, so our final is Sunday (he couldn’t stomach giving us a surprise 2 hour final). Thankfully my ICH paper (6000 words = 20 some pages) is still due tomorrow, but I’ve had to put that nearly at the end of the list with Politics and ECA taking priority. Once I’m fully done with homeworks and the drama of figuring out how and when I leave the country, I’ll be able to begin searching through this experience and highlighting what I’ve really learned. Right now, back to paper writing.

Notes about the video: Moutaz was very casually dressed when we started doing tongue twisters, and when I started recording, he asked to be not shown. Now, my current software skills don’t stretch to blurring someone out, so I hopefully respected his wishes by pretty much blacking out the image. Anyways, the audio is what’s important in those clips. The day I recorded the game of Slaps – four games in about 45 minutes – we cracked our playing table. Brannon especially was feeling rambunctious, Moutaz worried about disturbing our neighbors, and when Jeanette came down, the guys all thought she was a disgruntled neighbor. Ahh life in the Apartments!

Throughout my time in Egypt, I’ve had nearly every evening free. My previous four semesters have consistently had me out of my dorm up to 6 nights a week, for professional performances, student or faculty recitals, lectures, inter-building games, cross-campus games, recreational sports games, club meetings, dance club practice (for the three semesters I participated in Ballroom/Swing Club), floor meetings, floor parties, Free Movie Night downtown (which has apparently been disbanded this semester!), dinners off campus, church services, or any combinations of those. I’m used to being so busy that I have to squeeze in homework around socializing, or socializing around homework, and I have to micromanage my days. My friends are the same way, and this semester it’s been really weird communicating with them, still in the midst of that hubbub, and I have a ton of free time. I didn’t know what to do with myself!

So this semester, since I don’t work (that would take time away from homeworking in the middle of the day, but I enjoy my job!), and until this last week and half the homework’s been rather light, I have learned how to procrastinate. I’ve been incredibly on top of my YouTube submissions, writing letters back home, emailing parents, friends, relatives, dreaming about other places around which to travel, and reading. I have read more books this semester outside of class than any other college semester. I should have brought more books from home; normally the books I have around me get stuck on a shelf until I pack them up to go home.

So, outside of homework, cooking and cleaning (I’m really obsessed with having clean public spaces in this apartment), and small hints of boredom, I’ve found answers. One large solution has been going out to the district Mahatat Raml with my language partner, Dina. Not only has she helped me learn and utilize new vocabulary and is a significant reason I can coherently string together sentences, she’s taught me a lot about the city. She’s a history buff, and has told me stories (in Arabic, mind you) about Alexandria’s gloriously cosmopolitan bygone years in vivid enough terms that I too wish I could have lived in the years when gentlemen wore tarbushes (you in the States know them as the fez that Salah wore in Indiana Jones). She’s also taught me a lot about the highlights of modern Alexandria – city life just flourishes in Mahatat Raml, as people hawk wares to the teems of Egyptians out for the night. Restaurants are everywhere, as people mingle over food, always conversing in fast Arabic. Dina showed me the Opera House, where I wish I could return, and is keyed into a lot of the social networks that have really clicked with me. She’s always right – I should get out more.

However, my favorite place to visit in the evenings is also the gathering spot for many of the demonstrations that have shut down the Corniche and/or other main thoroughfares. I have not been back to Mahatat Raml since the 22nd, when a group of friends took me out to dinner for my birthday. The 22nd is also, ironically, the day Morsi declared himself, in effect, a dictator. While he’s stepped back from that position, he’s still pushing for the vote on the Constitution on Saturday. IFSA and TAFL, my two acronyms that are in charge of my stay here, have unilaterally kept us away from the Corniche on protest days. So, while I’ve spent most of the last week to 10 days doing lots of homework (researching and writing final papers – this is a break from writing my second and last paper), I’ve been strongly encouraged to remain in and around my apartment.

Another strong line of evening entertainment has been cards. This entire semester Moutaz and Brannon have been challenging each other for title of champion of Slaps, also known to me as Egyptian Rattisker, Egyptian Rat Screw, and Egyptian Rat Sphinx. Beats me why there’s so many variations on the name. Anyway, originally we all got into the games, and have even got Mariam playing. Jeanette kind of backed off when she broke her finger, and Ben will participate about half the time now – he pays a lot more attention to news than we do. In the last month, rare is the night that we don’t play. Lately, we’ve attempted to broaden our game repertoire with games like Indian poker (we spent more time arguing about rules of betting than actually playing) and Doubt/Bluffing Game/BS/Shakak (Arabic name for it). I even brought out cards and challenged Brannon to Slaps between classes at TAFL on Sunday, which was way fun.

Honestly, while I maybe would have preferred accessing social clubs and outings like I tap into at Luther, I’ve used my experience to learn. I’ve learned about social contacts in Egyptian society, about safety measures and traffic patterns around demonstrations, city life in Alexandria, exciting places within large cities, and creating fun out of enclosed situations and a small number of people. Remember, this is also my first prolonged experience in a city with over 10,000 people, including the student population. Had I known this is what life Fall 2012 would be like, I don’t know that I would’ve signed up. Yet, stepping into that ambiguity has been kind of an interesting journey, and one I shall learn from down the road. Now, as I demonstrate my capacity to procrastinate, I’m going to go work on a paper.

Notes of updates: finals, including tests and papers, were moved up a week suddenly. TAFL made this decision to ensure we are awarded appropriate grades (and “gain our degrees” as the translation goes) for our semester’s work, even if the country’s really fluid situation requires us to evacuate. I’m not super worried about evacuation, but the potential for that action has hovered over us in the last five days.

My arthritis returned in the last three days, this time centering on my left elbow and left knee. Alexandria’s been really windy and rainy in that time period, so maybe the change in weather’s really put my joints to the test.

Well, I went back to Siwa. Woot! And this time, I took Ben and Brannon with me! We met Brannon’s friend Kevin (first met in Brannon’s post about Dahab) in Siwa, as Kevin’s from Cairo, and subsequently had a blast. We rocketed out to the desert, climbed a couple mountains, saw the world’s oldest footprints (again), swam (in chilly salt water, luxuriously warm iron and sulfur water, and ridiculously cold fresh water), slacklined, ate incredible food, bounced around on dunes, saw a meteorite (!), saw new fossil spots, sandboarded the freaking largest sand dune ever (and had to walk up it too), and ended the day at a desert camp. Ben wasn’t feeling tops, so Brannon and I introduced Kevin to our evening staple of the card game Egyptian Rattisker (also known as Slaps among IFSA), played on what Kevin called “baladi tables.” After a scrumptious supper of chicken, salad, rice, and soup (kind of reminiscent of Jordanian food, but spicer), we sat around a palm-leaf fire and traded American songs for Siwi songs. As the night progressed, Kevin brought out a bottle of Egyptian whiskey and a beer can, and the Siwans brought out their vodka and tea. Next to one of the Siwi’s bong…well, there’s a first time for everything, I guess. An hour of lame jokes later, we wrapped up in big, thick, wool blankets and slept around the fire underneath a full moon…I miss camping.

The next morning dawned clear, and we drank coffee and tea waiting for Ben to return from wanderings. I found out that my camera no longer zooms – I think sand got in it from the previous day. Shucks. Our driver brought us all back into Siwa, transporting the other three Siwans via the Toyota Cruiser’s roof. We breakfasted in Abdu’s Restaurant, checked Kevin into a hotel for a night, and went off to rent bikes for the day. We first biked to Cleopatra’s Bath, where Ben, Brannon, and I had shivered and watched the sun rise the day before. Local Siwans were cavorting around, so Brannon and I set up a slackline behind a fence in cultivated date palms. But for really persistant flies, that was awesome. By the time we were through, locals had disappeared, leaving the spring to just us. We took the opportunity to cavort ourselves. We then decided it would be neat to attempt to climb a nearby mountain, towards which we ended up off roading through really soft sand. Hiking up it went smoothly, with a couple stops here and there for Kevin and Brannon to boulder on the soft rock. We spent some time up top, then went to the higher peak, where Brannon showed off some yoga at what may have been a flagpole…? On our way down, we stopped at a wall of cracks for the two of them to boulder. Ben and I joined in for a bit, then Ben went off for personal time and I spotted the two climbers. Next, we biked furiously to Lake Siwa, the salt lake I’d watched the sun set two weeks previously. We found a different island and waded a bit among the salt water. All the trees on the island were dead, with their crowns lopped off at a specific point. Odd, but their flat surface enticed an egret to land while I watched. Headlamps helped illuminate the route back, and we got caught in a wedding celebration of donut-spinning men on motorcycles for a whirlwind minute, then we sat above Siwa’s noise and dust for supper until it was time for our bus!

Again, the bus rides were not my favorite part of the trip. Ben didn’t think so either, and the next three days after our return to Alex, he was hit by some sort of GI bug. (Ironic, that we learned the MSA verb “to throw up” that Sunday…)

Our first summited mountain was not the same pile of limestone and sandstone riddled with tombs that in local oral tradition date back to Roman times that I’d climbed two weeks previously. When asked where the bodies have gone, our driver, Hameida, responded that they were thrown out by fleeing Jews during World War II and disappeared. I have my doubts that Allied or Axis forces would want to steal the mummies for their museums, but you never know. Apparently, similarly to the caves of central Turkey, people retreated to these caves during times of persecution. I don’t have any facts to back really any of this up, so this is all hearsay.

The encounter with that bit of hearsay got me pondering something that’s tickled my mind since going to Aswan and Luxor. Our tour guide then talked about the importance of the inner most room within the temples we visited, putting an emphasis on telling us the importance of it before going into the room, in order to lend it some of the room’s original sanctity. While I don’t remember his term for the room in Arabic or in Pharaonic Egyptian, the English know the room as “Holy of Holies.” Presumably, at some point, the room and the spirit inhabiting a cult statue housed within the room would strike a chord within the two people allowed in there: the pharaoh and the high priest. They would recognize with their being something of the sacred. The room’s connection with that feeling is long gone, and the floods of tourists that pour in, around the central stone slab, and out again marvel at the room as an oddity with preserved carving rather than as some revered sacred holy site.

So that got me wondering about what bestows upon a place that sense of sacredness, and how to honor that sacredness after the society of origin has disappeared. In our anthropomorphic history, long stretches of time passed before humans separated holiness/sanctity from exclusivity; case in point are rooms such as the Holy of Holies, where two people are allowed, one of whom only at specific times. Tourists of all kinds and levels of respect for archaeology are allowed without cease into the room, and I felt no emotive reverence, only respect from a scholarly/archaeological perspective. Does the society around the place bestow it as sacred? Can a place spontaneously be sacred to one person? Regardless of a place’s claim to sacredness, how can museums and curators of sites recreate that sense, even a little bit, for their audience? How can something like a cemetery, or mountain punctuated by tombs, lend a sense of reverence to its visitors?

This trash dump from a potential construction site was my first real encounter with trash cultures similar to Egypt. This is in central rural Turkey from January.

I wish the surrounding air didn’t look like this picture from early October. Recent air quality has been worse – more tan/grey hint to the haze. My Egyptian friends call it “fog;” but this fog doesn’t dissipate with the day’s progression.

The last couple days have featured ridiculous air. I don’t mean interesting clouds, cleansing rain, intense lightening, searing heat, or even snow. (Sigh. I miss snow, like always.) I mean the air. I look out the windows of the apartment and realize that I can’t see the sea. I can’t see past the first row of buildings on the other side of the open area to the south of the apartments. What I do see is haze, brown or grey, hanging in midair. Then, I have to walk through that haze, which at street level begins to obscure buildings two blocks in front of me, to nab a taxi or tram to university. I have pet theories of why there’s a ton more haze the last couple days, but those theories aren’t based on anything scientific, so I’ll save you from them.

I’ve hinted for the last three months in various posts that Alexandria has a pollution problem. Yes, that’s a relative statement: compared to Beijing air, Alex is clean. Compared to Siwa or my family farm, though, Alex streets are a landfill. (I think Cairo’s streets and air are worse.) So, this is my official pollution post. I’m interested in raising awareness not than gag reactions, so please bear with me.

I’ll start with the streets. Egyptians seriously think nothing of throwing stuff on the ground like the ground is a giant trash bin on which we live. I’ve watched innumerable children rip open packages and throw the plastic packaging on the ground, people of all ages finish a juice box and pitch it out of transportation (both tram and cars), cigarettes get tossed everywhere, and young men fishing toss their fishing poles into the very body of water in which they just caught fish. President Morsi at one point promised (in the spirit of all idealist political promises) to clean up cities’ streets in 100 days. He’d have to change culture in 100 days, which of course didn’t happen. The result is a kind of obstacle course – sidewalks are often full of garbage, tree clippings, or are super uneven, so people walk in the streets, which aren’t the smoothest.

Trash tends to gather in certain areas, such as along the tram rails or in street “gutters”. I’m not sure who’s in charge of cleaning up the tram rails, but the preferred method of cleaning up the litter is burning it. Yes, burning it. The majority of the trash is packaging from junk food (chips, chocolate), juice boxes or water bottles, cigarettes, and plastic bags of various kinds. Invariably the smoke from such burning sites is black, and later black smudges coat various spots along the tram rails where previous burns happened.

I snapped this picture in late September walking along the tramline. The trash fire was a common sight there, and these fires are subsequently killing this tree.

On streets, the situation is slightly different. Every so often dumpsters (small in comparison with US dumpsters, but the largest trash collection receptacle in Egypt) appear along streets. Almost always these dumpsters are filled and overflowing to the street around it. There is a “class” (I use that word cautiously, but there’s a definite sector of the population who do this) of men who dig through the dumpsters for materials that they can sell to factories or someone for a pittance. These “zibela” men make their tiny living by digging through the trash, collecting it on horse-pulled carts, and competing with each other, the official city garbage men, and the “robabikia” men for remarketable products. (I saw my first city garbage truck this morning with Brannon en route to school.) Robabikia men have donkey or horse-pulled carts, and drive through residential areas screaming a version of “robabikia” at the top of their lungs; they’re looking for broken but generally usable furniture to resell. Of course, all these men do still leave trash on the streets and in dumpsters. There is a small army of men employed by (hopefully) a government to hand sweep the streets’ dust, sand, and trash into hand-pulled trash cans; these get emptied into larger dumpsters. These trashmen are distinguishable from the zibela men by their dingy though bright orange pants and grey shirts that have the recycling emblem encircling a pair of stylized hands holding a world. Even with robabikia, zibela, and trashmen, trash accumulates everywhere.

The culture of dropping trash extends past the streets and into the sea. Brannon at one point attempted to swim in the Eastern Harbor but desisted after he saw the petrochemicals covering the water’s surface and noticed he had to fight trash to get to open water. Even at our usual swimming spot at Stanley Beach, trash mixes with the beach’s sand, water jugs rest on the sea’s bottom, and trash floats through the water. I’ve seen people walking across Stanley Bridge think nothing of dropping a water bottle into the water. Stanley’s one of the oldest beaches in the city, which makes me assume that some care goes into keeping it customer-friendly. Honestly, it’s kind of disgusting walking and swimming through trash, and Stanley doesn’t have an obvious problem with petrochemicals.

Views of the Eastern Harbor.

When we were on our cruise from Aswan to Luxor, streams of oil emanated from our cruise ship as well as from the others idling at their docks. Clouds of smoke from the combustion engines also unfurled their tendrils into the air behind each ship. The ships docked such that each bow was closely behind another’s engine – diesel smoke coated each ship bow with a soot black covering. The Nile is straight up disgusting, at least between Aswan and Luxor. The water is not only slightly stagnant; it was filled with algae and other things to make it opaque. Between our ship and its dock in Aswan, discarded food lay at the bottom of the Nile.  Along our route, trash periodically littered the water. Farther down the Nile, in Cairo, people fish from the river and sell the fish as fresh and healthy in restaurants. Before coming to Egypt, I read up on the Nile – the CDC among other agencies recommend not swimming in the river, as there’s some disease contractible simply by contact with skin. Such fish as caught from the river are therefore not my choice.

View of ships at dock. Look closely, and you can see the contaminated water exiting the engines close to the water level.

Image from our felucca ride around Elephantini Island, Aswan.

This plastic bag washed up along the shore in Aina Sokhna, at the otherwise clearer Red Sea.

Cities are not normally my preferred location, partially for reasons of increased pollution, so the trash level in Alexandria has been something to which I have had to adjust. Periodically over the last three months I’ve noticed the air quality inexplicably degrading for a couple days at a time, but those times are accompanied by an unmistakable trash-burning smell that I now recognize immediately. Since coming back from this past weekend at Siwa (I went again), there’s been a thick layer of smog covering the city with no particular smell. I blame this new degraded air for the sore throat I’ve developed the last couple days, but also Ben’s sick, so I may just have a small cold from him. Christmas at home will be a welcome break from the pollution of big cities.

If you read my blog from the very beginning, in June and July I posted some questions I thought might require steep learning curves. Food has definitely been one of those learning curves, as my transition to eating in Alexandria has been full of trouble. I intimated to some of my diet-related troubles in previous blogs. I dedicate this blog to food because I believe in food’s power to bring together communities, to influence our bodily experiences, to give us true health, and to give insight into a new place. You all know that I grew up on a farm in the US’s Midwest; fewer of you know that I began this journey reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Pollan calls Americans “corn people,” borrowing the term from the Mayan self-referential term, after all the corn Americans ingest through processed, packaged, and restaurant food. The idea that we are what we eat – i.e. an extension of our larger environment – is found also in a Navajo story about “long bodies” that I use at camp. The story of my long body includes the edible environment in which I live, which means I’m no longer a corn person. Habitual checking ingredients of packaged products, I find nearly nothing here is made with corn products, except my popcorn and corn oil. (I only use corn oil when making popcorn, otherwise I use olive oil.) I learned, in the process of checking packages, where my food originates. Though Egypt does not require country-of-origin labeling, I can pretty safely assume that most of my raw ingredients come from within Egypt; however, I know my bananas come from Ecuador and I’ve accidentally purchased apples from Washington State. Thus, I am no longer made of corn but of international products; combined with the fact that my passport says I’m American necessitates the label of “foreigner.”

I’ll spare you the dirty details, but I have diversified my diet and where I exchange printed paper rectangles for edible ingredients. Fruits I buy from large carts set up by street vendors, usually in the neighborhood called el-Ibrahim; if I’m in desperate need of fruit I’ll buy from the market-filled street Khalil el-Khayat (it’s more expensive). Both are en route from the apartments to the university, which makes fruit shopping really easy. As I don’t know how fruits are farmed (i.e. with what chemicals), I generally only buy fruits that are peeled, which means I buy a lot of pomegranate, bananas, and oranges. Earlier in the semester I bought grapes, too, but their season has since ended. Dates I’ve not purchased, but in Siwa I climbed trees to eat the drying fruits. I buy apples, too, but I cook them with cinnamon and water – love me some cooked apples! I also really love pomegranates – since I knew I was coming to Egypt I’ve looked forward to the pomegranates. Guavas I’ve purchased a couple times; they’re one of the new foods I’ve encountered. I really don’t know what to do with guavas beyond drink them.

All over Egypt there are juice shops. They’re one of my favorite things to visit – fast food in the form of fresh fruit juice. The bigger chains offer fruits from other places, those that aren’t in season, such as the pineapple, avocado, apricots, dates, plum, strawberry, kiwi, and grapes offered by one shop we frequent in Sporting (another neighborhood).  Your basic juice shop offers mango, pomegranate, orange, and sugar cane. Normally the fruit is squeezed at the shop, which means that every shop has a sugar cane press – I mention it only because you’d never see one in the US. Sugar cane juice is not as sweet as I had expected, nor is it as thick as banana juice. While you can get just one kind of juice, my favorite purchases are combinations. Some of my top combos are banana and pomegranate, or date and mango, or sugar cane and orange. I really don’t like mango in any other context.

Growing up on a vegetable farm and attending a college dedicated to providing its students local and/or diverse vegetables (among other produce), I’m used to having a lot of access to good and diverse vegetables. Though I could buy more veggies, I don’t want to deal with cleaning every head of lettuce or cabbage purchased from street vendors. So, my vegetable intake is more or less limited to carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, green (and red and orange and yellow!) peppers, tomatoes, eggplants (the fat, bulbous, dark purple kind), and some veggie that’s a mix between a cucumber and a zucchini. I eat the cucucchini like I would a zucchini. If I purchased frozen veggies, I could also buy molokhiya, peas, and green beans. Molokhiya is a leaf finely chopped before being boiled into a gooey soup. The only molokhiya I’ve not found disgusting is that of Siwa, which I could eat half the bowl – molokhiya is a traditional Egyptian dish.

There are small “supermarkets” everywhere – there you can buy oil, tea, sugar, coffee, Nutella (of which I have only bought two containers, as I’ve not purchased the equivalent of pretzels!), honey, cleaning products, diapers, eggs, pre-made food, cheese, milk, juice, yogurt, pop, chips, chocolate, bread, butter, canned food, etc. I used to frequent one called Dinosaur on Khalil el-Khayat Street, but now I go to the larger, more Western Acceptus Hypermarket in Sporting. The hypermarket actually straddles the Corniche, but is underground. Brannon and Ben tipped me off to this place; now I buy dried apricots, oats, granola, juice, yogurt, and dark chocolate there. I’ve treated myself twice to dark chocolate and once to “Istanbolly” cheese (there’s something sharply bitter about its taste) and a small bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice. (The latter was termed “non alcoholic malt beverage.”) Eggs are still cheaper at Dinosaur, but nearly everything else is cheaper at the hypermarket.

One of my largest troubles the first month or so was reconciling my food ethic – source over price – to the situation in Alexandria. I tend to prefer local/organic/small business to large, Western-style packaged markets. In Egypt, though, I get bulk things like spices, oats, cocoa powder, and dried apricots and nuts in places like the hypermarket. But for their bulk section, the hypermarket and Carrefour (where I got all my spices the first week of class) would be classic Western supermarkets. So, now I go for the least packaged and cheapest first. The process of changing that food ethic was really difficult.

I don’t eat meat outside of restaurants. Even then I don’t eat a lot of meat: I love beef, but I tend to not eat beef outside of home, because my parents buy local, naturally-raised cattle. Pork is basically banned in this Muslim-majority country, and I miss ham and bacon. One of my favorite dishes is creamed ham on cornbread – Midwestern to the core. A week can go by without me ingesting any obvious protein expect the peanuts I eat at breakfast every morning. The pictures in the video of the butcher shops should be explanation enough of why I don’t prepare meat. I could buy frozen meat, but I feel the same about frozen meat as about frozen veggies.

Restaurants are delightfully varied in Alexandria – this is an unexpected perk of living in a giant city. I’ve bought two meals of falafel for 2 LE total (that was in Siwa) and a full meal of koshary (carb city!) for 3.5 LE or I could easily spend nearly 200 LE feeding three people  at the Italian or Spanish restaurants just across the street from our apartments. Besides Egyptian fast food restaurants that offer koshary, delicacy meats like liver and heart, pizza, and falafel, there are a host of international food-based places, including the small Indonesian restaurant a bunch of friends took me out to dinner to for my birthday.

I’ve also had issues figuring out how to get lunch during the middle of schooldays. If I wait until I return to the apartments, I’ll eat lunch between 2 and 5 pm. My options around the university is mainly an Egyptian fast food chain called El Tibawy. I’m not necessarily a fan of supporting any sort of franchise. So, I often eat sandwiches prepared by the floor cleaning/drinks/food lady, Karima. She’s from Upper Egypt and speaks no MSA, but she has a huge heart and will help with our pronunciation and conversation skills in ECA.  Karima’s sandwiches are bread with cheese (either “Turkey” or “egg” cheese), peppers, and tomatoes, then microwaved and wrapped in paper towels. They’re a healthier and mostly satisfying substitute for oil-soaked koshary.

A couple of notes related to the video: I emphasized the kitchen because my favorite meal is often breakfast. At Luther, breakfast was my least diverse meal, and I looked forward to my lunch salad and dinner smorgasbord. Here, oatmeal with pear juice, granola, pomegranate/banana/apricot, peanuts, and/or honey and cinnamon/cocoa powder, with a side of mint tea and fruit juice (I just finished a container of pineapple juice) and cinnamon-honey toast is my normal breakfast. Doesn’t that sound good?

Also, I searched through my iTunes and found few songs related to food. (Why doesn’t our musical record contain more about our relationship with food?) The ones I found accompany the photos. The last song, in Portuguese, has the title of “Sanduicé,” and I hope the words mention food. Anyway, enjoy the product of my day off!