When Youssef told me we’d be going to the supermarket, ah, such visions I had. I could almost see the gleaming, Johnson Wax-polished aisles laden with canned goods, shelf after shelf of sliced bread tucked in plastic bags fastened with metal twist-ties, jars filled with heavily advertised name-brand condiments of all sorts. There would be whole chickens lined up like a chorus of dancers behind the curving glass of a refrigerated case. Beside them, familiar cuts of beef would rest on parsley sprigs.
It would all be worth it. Worth searching in the blistering August sun for the bus stop, waiting for the right bus to come along, riding it in 100-degree heat without air conditioning for the half-hour ride, give or take, to Al Ghurdaqah, better known as Hurghada. After more than seven weeks in a Cairo dormitory that sorely tried my patience, I had rented an apartment with Western-style kitchen on the Red Sea coast for a few days.
Finally, I could look forward to cooking.
Finally, there was the bus.
As soon as we settled into our seats, I was planning menus in my head and, with sweating hands, swatting at the dust that filtered through the open windows.
A year ago, I’d never have imagined getting myself into this: This heat, this bus, this apartment, this desert in the height of summer, this daydream of homemade hamburgers and store-bought buns. This time last year, I was setting off for a three-week trip through Egypt–a work assignment–that I thought would more than satisfy my desire to see the country’s famous sights. And it did.
I went back on my own for the other Egypt, the one whose landmarks lie beyond the grasp of travel guides, whose monuments are fashioned not from stone but from the cloth of daily life, where the sounds of very different voices drift through the air like so many particles of dust.
I went back to learn the language and meet the people.
I just hadn’t counted on the school making that so difficult.
The American University in Cairo has an outstanding reputation, the Harvard, the Cambridge of the Arab world. Wealthy Middle Eastern families and sometimes ex-pat Egyptians in the U.S. send their kids there. It’s expensive. The summer intensive Arabic program cost $2,900 for seven weeks of classes. Housing in the dorm was $1,200 because I didn’t want to share a room. Air fare from Chicago added another $1,200 or so to the tab.
Before I left home, the best laugh about my pending adventure was a phrase from the dorm rules, which arrived with my acceptance letter. Anyone caught crawling along the fifth-floor ledge, to travel between the men’s side and the women’s side, would face expulsion.
The university may have been American in name, but it was Middle Eastern in its mission to protect the virtue of its students. Men and women could mix only in the dorm’s lobby, lunchroom, computer lab and courtyard, so long as there were no public displays of affection. A guard was posted ’round the clock at the door to the women’s section, a virtual harem.
I never noticed any male students worth my risking a crawl along the fifth-floor ledge. But for toilet paper, I just might have.
At least one of the male students made a habit of carrying toilet paper from the dorms to keep himself supplied during the 9 a.m.-4 p.m. school day. Some of the female students confessed to taking toilet paper from the bathrooms on campus to supplement the dorm rations: five half-sized rolls issued at the beginning of the semester, though not everyone received even that.
The campus was in a neighborhood very close to the Egyptian Museum, about an hour’s walk from the dorm. Classes in the American University’s Arabic Language Institute (ALI) started out small, 10 students or so, and got smaller as time went by. As late as the fourth week of the seven-week program, some students–and I was one of them–were still dropping or changing classes, trying to salvage their investment and find a combination of courses that made sense. One woman who had been a Vietnam War nurse left the program early, presumably for Iraq, saying she’d rather be shot at there than see the ALI program through.
One of the challenges of learning Arabic is that, like English, it’s not just one static language. Imagine someone whose never heard English trying to memorize an unfamiliar alphabet, read Elizabethan vocabulary and converse in American slang. Yet that’s the sort of mess I got myself into by signing up for the program, or track, that included the so-called modern standard Arabic, the Arabic of the printed word, and Egyptian colloquial, the Arabic dialect that people actually speak in Egypt.
I had some excellent teachers, bless their hearts. One even invited me home for dinner and tutoring. But their talents were as much a casualty of the academic constraints as my enthusiasm was–with the result that about a third of the material I would learn in one class, I spent un-learning in the other.
One of the textbooks we used, the 1982 “Yalla-Ndardish bi-l’Arabi,” was a source of further confusion. Its English-Arabic glossary listed the same word, walid, for both father and son; the same word, balad, for both country and downtown; and the same word, yimin, for both right and left. And in a country where one of the highest tourism officials personally described Egypt to me as “a nation of farmers,” this very same textbook that gave translations for broker and consultation and subscription, didn’t have translations for farmer or donkey or cart.
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So, with a full day of classes, six or more hours of homework each night, a textbook I didn’t trust and a school whose unofficial policy, it seemed to me, was to maintain a rigid separation of the haves from the have-nots, I found myself with little opportunity, and even less confidence, to practice speaking with the very people I wanted to talk to. Except on the weekends.
Before my first trip to Egypt, I had zero interest in learning Arabic. But during those three weeks last January, I eavesdropped on delicious sounding dialogue I could understand only through circumstance and body language: a mother shushing a fretful child, a couple murmuring over dinner, a fellow trying to get out of paying the highway toll, and the toll booth attendant trying not to lose his temper as he insisted the toll be paid.
I became enchanted with the soft and harsh, the smooth and coarse, the breathy, gravely, flowery ebb and flow of Arabic. From a sensual standpoint, I missed those tones and rhythms when I came home.
From an intellectual standpoint, it began to bother me that the only Arabic most of us hear in America, if we hear any at all, is a news sound byte of an angry someone yelling threats. This reminded me of old newsreels I’d seen of World War II where the only German heard was from a screeching Hitler. It’s a subtle form of propaganda through linguistic prejudice, a way of demonizing an entire people through selective editing of language–I’ll go ahead and call it media bias–and I wanted to do something about it.
When I approached my bosses here at the paper with the proposal of studying Arabic in Egypt, they figured it couldn’t hurt to have an extra person on staff who could speak Arabic and take an interest in Middle Eastern culture–we’re encouraged to seek avenues of professional development–and allowed me leave time.
I’ll confess that intellectual reasons alone, however well-intended, or even professional advancement, would never have convinced me to empty my savings account and just go. Hey, that was my facelift money! There were spiritual reasons, or as a missionary friend put it, it was “a God thing.” And so I went.
But if it hadn’t been for Youssef, I wouldn’t have learned as much as I did.
At school, the “girls’ grapevine” had it that the guys from Jordan were the best looking in all the Middle East, with Palestinians coming in a close second. The grapevine’s Jordanian contingent, however, argued that although their male countrymen were attractive, they also were conceited. These women much preferred Egyptian men for their charm; they try harder. It was an argument I could agree with.
Sure, when I went to school in the summer, I heard, along with the other female students, the catcalls in the street: aasal (honey) and ishtah (cream) and, strangest of the lot, oomi (my mother). Coming from a city where a woman can get robbed, raped, shot, stabbed, dismembered or run over by a wayward bus, I found these oral assaults laughably benign.
This sort of verbal attention frightened and disturbed some of my younger classmates. One woman from Santa Barbara, Calif., who was taking Arabic as the foreign language requirement for her major in Middle Eastern studies was so offended by this behavior, so disenchanted with the school and so aggrieved by the culture shock of Cairo that she was ready to quit and go home, at least initially.
I might have felt the same way if I hadn’t experienced more chivalrous encounters on my first trip. In January, men whose only point of contact with me was that they spent a day driving me and my guide, said farewell to me with candy and flowers. A man I met only in passing, a friend of one of my guides, gave me postage stamps of the new library in Alexandria because he felt bad that it was closed the day I was there. One invited me home for Christmas dinner (Coptic Christmas is Jan. 7) to meet his wife and family. A man on the train was eager to find me a husband, and it just so happened that a doctor friend of his was looking for a wife. Several others offered to show me “the real Egypt,” which suspiciously didn’t come to life until at least 10 p.m., or that’s the line I was fed.
From grown men who could have been my sons, I heard things like “you are my moon,” “meeting you is the best day of my life” and “you are an American apple,” the latter accompanied by the explanation that in Egypt, an American apple is the very best kind there is.
The Egyptian people as a whole are the most welcoming, the most nurturing I’ve met in all my travels. Some of the men take that a step further: They’re equal-opportunity flirts without regard to age, size or ethnicity. They smile. They make eye contact. They’ve had a lot of practice.
As a matter of fact, Egyptian men are so charming that the American University’s student handbook, the U.S. State Department’s Consular Information Sheet on Egypt and the chat room of at least one Web site, www.egyptsearch.com, warn women about these guys: men in their 20s or 30s, in the service professions, willing to deceive for a green card or eager to ink a phony, or urfi, marriage.
Personally, I think all men should come with warning labels, so I can’t help feeling that these cautions, though well-founded, are a little unfair. After all, who else is a female tourist likely to meet? Not doctors or engineers, not farmers or factory workers. Unfortunately, it’s equally unlikely that tourists will meet Egyptian women because so few of them work in positions that would allow contact.
At first glance, Youssef profiled as one of the warning-label men. But he didn’t come on with the pick-up lines or the smiles. When we met he made small talk, and we stayed in touch the way friends do. He was a gracious host when I was desperate for a weekend break from the frustrations of school and the chaos of Cairo. I visited him in Luxor–by the way, the warnings go double, apparently, for Luxor men–most frequently at an open-air rooftop restaurant, Ali Baba’s, behind Luxor Temple.
The open-air part is important because Egyptian society doesn’t recognize friendships between men and women. There’s simply no such thing. An individual either lives with the family, is engaged or is married. But in the event an unengaged unmarried man and woman meet one another, it’s least offensively done outdoors.
I helped him with his English, and he helped me with my Arabic. And you know, there was something educational about chatting on that rooftop, with the clatter of horse hooves and traffic below, the shade from the lattice above and the sweltering heat all around.
From my previous trip in January, I understood that family was important to Egyptians to a degree few Americans can appreciate. So I had brought family photos with me when I went back for school, thinking they would serve as a talking point. One of my most vivid memories of the summer was of Youssef pronouncing bint-uckhti (my niece), with my family photos spread across the table before him, the columns of Luxor Temple just over his shoulder and the Theban Hills in the distance.
I’ve decided that one of the drawbacks to my classroom Arabic, even in Egypt, was that it was a relatively sterile place. We sang songs and watched videos, but there was too little sensory input, too little of what makes learning a language in a foreign country so effective, too little of Egypt there. I remember showing my family photos in class one day and introducing them by name and relationship, in Arabic. No one there caught the irony that in an intensely family-oriented society, the vocabulary for my more complicated relationships–those beyond mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister–was something I had acquired outside of school, from a man the university and the government wouldn’t have approved of.
I’ve been pretty hard on the American University in Cairo. I think that’s because its mission is necessarily academic, and mine is personal. Certainly there were students who did well in the academic vein. But if I had it to do over, I’d sign up with the British-headquartered International Language Institute, also in Cairo. I can’t say its Arabic programs are any better because I haven’t taken them. But I suspect that there’s a distinction in focus: where the AUC’s focus is academic credit, language learning is the ILI’s only business. In the event that the ILI’s program is not so good, at least it’s not so pricey: $590 for the five-week, 90-hour equivalent of the $2,900 program I took at AUC.
For months, I’ve been bitter about my experience at AUC. I felt I didn’t get my money’s worth, even though I passed with flying colors the one class I stuck with. But I’ve started to view that differently. Really, I did get my money’s worth; it just came in other ways. I learned all sorts of other things, about Egypt and about myself. After that bus ride to Hurghada, for example, I learned a new recipe, sort of.
Having helped me locate a seaside apartment where I could recharge once school was out, Youssef felt responsible for helping me stock the pantry. So off we went on the bus from El Gouna, a modern, master-planned marina suburb of Hurghada.
I was expecting a supermarket like the American-style ones I’d seen in Cairo. What I got was a street market off what at home I’d call an alley. Our steps stirred the dust of the dirt lanes. Beautiful fruits and vegetables beckoned, but beneath a buzz of flies. And for meat: chicken or beef? I chose beef, only because I feared having to pick out the live chicken to be slaughtered. The beef was already dead, its carcass, with tail still attached, was hanging in the 100-degree heat draped in a cloth to keep the flies away.
So, Youssef asked, did I want one kilo or two? What’s a kilo, I wondered, as I told Youssef to decide. Here I was ignoring another warning label: Tourists oughtn’t eat street food of any sort.
Back at the apartment, I learned–OK, this lesson took place indoors, but we ate it outside!–how to wash and wring-out the meat repeatedly until it was free of blood, salt it for good measure, boil it thoroughly until done and then saute it in butter. It was wonderful and I didn’t get sick.
The saying goes that if you survive Cairo, the rest of the world is easy. Now that I’ve done that, and know how to handle a kilo or two of open-air beef, I’m ready for anything.
As long as there’s plenty of toilet paper.
———-
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Toni Stroud’s first travel love is Hawaii and hopes Hawaii doesn’t hear of her affair with Egypt. You can swap stories about Arabic lessons, Egyptian men or anything Hawaiian with her at [email protected].