February 2004
I was woken up this morning by a sound which, through my haze of sleep, I interpreted as a chain saw or a lawn mower. I must have thought I was either in Vermont or in Rockport and it was summertime. But as I woke up a little more, I realized that at 8 am on a Saturday morning in Cairo there would be neither a chain saw nor a lawn mower and maybe I should go see what was this unusual noise. Well, it turned out to be a fan in my kitchen that was not plugged in, but was being whirred around by the tremendous wind storm we were having outdoors. The day before I had lain in the sun and got sunburnt, an hour later I emerged from the gym and found a rain-soaked Cairo (apparently everything was soaked in the ten minute period of rain that fell) and now we have the wind! This morning it was still a bright and sunny sky when I got up but now the sand is blowing by my window and sometimes through the cracks under the glass doors of the balcony. I still love sand storms here, maybe because I never grew up with them.
It seems early in the season to have a sand storm. But this is the second this year. I'll have to check the Herald Tribune tomorrow and see if they wrote down snow for Cairo. In the past they never had anything to indicate sand storm so they have used sn which normally means snow! I actually stopped paying attention to the weather reports pretty quickly after I arrived in Egypt. I still look at them religiously in the summer in New England, but here the changes in weather don't seem to dramatically affect my plans and so I let it go. But my Egyptian colleague checks the five day forecast every day. I teased him, "What's the difference between hot and hotter? Why do you need to look at a weather forecast to know it will be hot?" And he pretends to ignore my obvious ignorance about the subtleties of one degree changes in temperature.
I still love noticing the differences in culture over here. Amazing that after five years, I'm still seeing them just as often as in the first year. It's probably different things I notice but now I realize I am writing them down less. It's things that someone says, that make me smile, but then I forget what it was. Small things, like when I asked the student what time he was allowed onto the web for web-registration and he answered, "tonight!" I was surprised at that answer and so I asked him to clarify what exact time and he replied, "at 6am." Obviously, 6 in the morning was still night time to him. Or, my Arabic professor when I was trying to make sentences and said, "I'm lost, I'll ask the policeman to help" replying, "Oh, don't ask them anything, they never know!" I still enjoy getting cash from the cash machine at the Seoudi Market. They keep a Koran right on top of the machine, exactly at eye-level. When you finish your transaction, the machine tells you to "take your card and your advice." I guess the machine means to say receipt but with the Koran sitting there, it adds a whole other dimension to the experience. Nadia, the woman who cleans, tells me that she wants to do the Haj (go visit Mecca) but her husband won't give her permission to travel outside the country and the law won't let her travel without his permission. She tells me that if he won't go with her to the Haj she will be allowed to go on her own once she turns 50. I think that has something to do with her being past child bearing age...Traditions go on.