The Middle East hit hard yesterday. The Flagship group and our Egyptian roommates and language partners took a bus to a region just outside of Alexandria called Agami to spend the day at a beach house. I’d been looking forward to this day all week – we’ve had about 12 hours of orientation activities a day for 8 days straight and the Americans are all wiped-out and brain-dead,[i]so the beach seemed like just the respite we all needed. As soon as we boarded the bus, though, the driver turned on music videos that played through blown-out speakers at the volumes that dance clubs use to reduce club-goers to masses of jiggling ass. We entered an industrial district that seemed like a parody of First Worlders’ impressions of the Third to a song called “Hot Pepper”, which was about some sluts convincing a nerd to not be a nerd anymore and start being a slut.[ii]The smell of sewage suffused the bus and the music blared as we passed salt fields, lakelets colored poison-red, smoking refineries and the slums of the people who worked in them. The cumulative effect was heap-big white guilt, the sense that “holy shit this is foreign”, and just, like, deep-brain terror.
Grousing aside: Alexandria is awesome. Falafel, tea, and Turkish coffee are great and practically free, there’s good gelato pretty much everywhere, my apartment looks out over the sea, and the weather is constantly perfect. Last night we went to a bar called Mermaid along the Corniche– the main thoroughfare that runs along the Mediterranean - that fucking rules. It’s dark and dank, stays open until dawn, serves pints of the horrible Egyptian national beer, Stella, for about $2, and is lazily nautically themed, with fishing nets hung more or less everywhere. The DJ blasts American R&B, rap, and pop from the mid-90s, but will apparently use your iPod if you ask him to. As we left, my friend Bruce asked for a paper bag for his half-finished beer. What he got instead was two napkins that were supposed to the bag’s job. It’s apparently quite easy to be a drunken foreigner here, though Mermaid is mercifully close to my apartment and Stella is bad enough that I’m not liable to drink much of it in a sitting.
Things with funny names: an ice cream shop named Mr. Creams and a liquor store called Drinkie’s.
Politics in Alexandria is surprisingly low-key at the moment, probably in part because Mubarak’s trial isn’t being televised. There’s revolutionary graffiti everywhere and we’ve seen a few small protests, but otherwise you’d think a revolution hadn’t just happened here. Our group went to the Alexandria Opera a few nights ago for an homage concert to Said Darwish, and Egyptian composer from the early twentieth century, and about 45 minutes was devoted to nationalist anthems, which is basically fine and unsurprising. The only time anything seemed like it could turn sour was when a bunch of high-school kids asked me if I “loved Israel”, which was a really convenient way for them to phrase that question.[iii]
Tomorrow classes start and I’m jazzed. Pixx on their way.
[i] The car exhaust here is thick, and my theory is that adjusting to serious air pollution is kind of like adjusting to altitude: your body manages to do more with the smaller amount of oxygen it gets as time goes on. That being said, Alexandrians seem to be really into coffee breaks and naps.
[ii] Which isn’t all bad, given the social context, but the presentation was pretty gnarly.
[iii] I was like, “no way!!”
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