jolito double bear

Alexandria is constantly loud, just all the time. There’s a specific honking pattern people use when they’re driving in a wedding celebration caravan down the Corniche. I hear it from my apartment at least three times a night and find myself humming it sometimes. Aside from using their horns to celebrate, Egyptian drivers also use them to let everyone know where their car is, all the time. It makes sense, given how nuts traffic is, and Egyptians naturally seem not to notice how fucking loud the street is, but I think I’m getting shell shock.

So Egypt still feels really alien and kind of hostile, and apparently I seem ungodly foreign to most Egyptians. Every single time I go to work one of the library staff stops me, says “Go where?”, and I have to explain that no, I’m not a lost tourist who accidentally wandered into the library’s offices. The director of the program has lived here for three years and still pays the foreigner price for his haircuts, so I think I’ll be explaining to a library employee that I’m not a tourist on my last day working there.

Also last night I had my first wacky language mix-up. Someone asked me at dinner how I felt about Egypt, and I tried to that the only problem is that everybody looks at me constantly (I didn’t know how to say “to stare”) when I ride the tram. Instead I said that the only problem with Egypt is that everybody kisses me constantly when I ride the tram. For some reason, the two verbs are almost identical in Egypt. Ugh.

But we’ve started assimilating in some ways. When we talk about the revolution we say “the Egyptian people” without specifying which people, and use the word “martyrs” for protestors who died in the revolution, without raising any of the eyebrows that would have been raised in the same group of people in a classroom in the U.S.

Also I’ve been learning come-ons. One goes “Your mom must have been a bee to make all that honey.” The guy who taught it to me, Ahmed, said it was “medium-respectable,” and that in some circumstances it’s just a normal and acceptable compliment. I think he’s trying to get me slapped. There’s also one that goes “Your mom must have been a water buffalo to make all that cream,” which is hilarious.

“America killed the martyrs of the revolution of January 25^th and put the thugs in power in Egypt…” To be fair, the shells of the tear gas grenades that the riot police used against the protestors during the revolution did have “Made in the U.S.A.” imprinted on them. You’d think that wouldn’t be standard practice.

Jolito Double Bear

night cat