It's been a while.

Our exodus* is little over one month away, and of course, it occurs to me that I have not been terribly attentive to this bloglet of mine. I've had terribly many things to write about, and many sources of inspiration, but not enough discipline to commit my thoughts to shape and words. I won't attempt to draft up any intensively remedial writing projects in our remaining time here. Rather, I'll simply say that I hope to etch out many of the things I've wanted to illustrate and haven't yet. And, as I mentioned in my first post, I intend this space not to be limited by the borders of the country I am currently in. Verily, that would be quite a shame considering the plentitude of countries I will soon be in! And, while I can't say I will update this blog with any degree of consistency over the next four months, the duration of my travels until I return to the States, I will write when I can, trying to capture the spirit of the moment, the local(e)s, and the tea. Oh, so much tea is ahead of me. 

More about this soon, worry not!

A rainy view from an airport shuttle. Wishful thinking?

This is the eve of yet another historic election in Egypt's history--the first (hopefully) free and fair presidential elections in thirty years. A standard greeting here has become good morning, and who are you voting for?-- launching all parties into perpetual dialogue and speculation as to what would be best for Egypt. Suffice it to say, I have no idea what to expect, though I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to a run-off between Abou el-Fotouh (a moderate Islamist) and Amr Moussa (formerly a Foreign Minister in the old regime). Most people seem convinced that either option will not be terrible, and really what everyone is looking forward to is the ability to know that in four years, they can elect someone else. This level of political uncertainty is something I've never experienced, given America's comparatively stable (and often stagnant) political transitions.

Hurriya - Freedom (made of cilantro)

Street art in progress.

One might expect that with all this, my Arabic vocabulary is expanding to include political terminology. While this is somewhat true, much of my Arabic these days has for some reason become focused on Egyptian proverbs, which are endlessly delightful to me. For example:

1. ما يعرفش الألف من كوز الذرة (ma ya'arafsh al-alif min kooz al-dura) - "He doesn't know the letter alif from a corncob." He doesn't know anything.

2. خنفسة شافت ولادها على الحيط، قالت لولي وملضوم في خيط. (khunfisa shafet wilaadha fil Heyt wa qaalat looli wa malDoom fi kheyt) - "A ladybug saw her children on a wall and said 'my string of pearls!'" A mother always thinks her children are beautiful (regardless of what they look like). 

3. الأقرعة بتتباها بشعر بنت أختها. (al-aqra'a bititbaaha bisha'ar bint ukhtaha) - "The bald woman boasts of her sister's daughter's hair." People always want to associate themselves with greatness, especially when they lack the qualities they are boasting about.

Clearly, I need to work on my translation skills, as I can't think of comparable proverbs in English (though, this isn't surprising to those who know me well-- I frequently stumble through them). What are your favorite proverbs, in any language?

* I fondly like to refer to our leaving Egypt as such, owing to the similarity of our trajectory (Egypt - Israel) to that of the Israelites-- only, instead of crossing the Red Sea by foot, we'll travel by plane. I guess we're not thaaaat epic.

Disorderly Thoughts on a Disorderly Time

On the eve of the first stage of Egyptian parliamentary elections, I am reminded of the eve of the 2008 presidential elections. I remember the anticipation, the excitement, the world of hope we had built up, for some a first experience in political awareness, as a motley assortment of us crammed into a dorm room hovering over a peer's computer screen watching CNN's live coverage of the elections. I imagine the Egyptian Revolution of January 25th (sometimes called thawrat al-shabbab, the Youth's Revolution, not unlike our elections in 2008) felt like that, but this time, the Second Revolution, as some are calling it, has felt less hopeful and more immediately like peoples' lives are continually at stake.

What should I write about the Revolution? I have so many thoughts, so many fragments of a whole picture to construct of my experience of the Revolution. I have no answers or conjectures other than that I know that things will settle down, as they already are, and hopefully for the better. There is some glory in it, but mostly, it has been messy and regardless of one's views on the legitimacy of the Revolution, the government, the everything, it's been painful to witness at all levels and for everyone because of the simple and undeniable weight of losing human life. As with anything that is as complex as political events and the narratives that shape our understandings of them, I find it difficult to declare anything about the Revolution other than the trite old aphorism: it gets worse before it gets better. And hopefully we've seen the worst of it.

Here are some observations, anecdotes, and feelings I've had in the past week:

- It is jarring when life at the University, wherein people are up in arms about their grades and (in some cases) their professors' unwillingness to allow food in the classroom, is so sharply contrasted with events 50 km away, in which people are up in arms (this time, literally) about their government's lack of legitimacy and want to not be able to voice dissent without being sprayed in the face with teargas and blinded by rubber bullets. It's not that that kind of extreme perspective-taking* should always lead to a denial of peoples' feelings and subjective experiences about matters that are less dire. I don't think the whole country should put its lives and concern on hold indefinitely as it watches its country convulse with political uncertainty. But, it is dislocating.

- It has been really, palpably impossible to piece together any kind of cohesive truth (I mean more so than anybody's usual lack of objective truth) about what's going on in Tahrir without being here, but also, from what I hear, even being there, peoples' reportage of events does not mesh with what a variety of media sources say. Everybody I know here, myself included, has been consulting at least 5 different sources (Facebook, Twitter, Al-Jazeera, Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egyptian state papers, Bikya Misr, etc.) to derive any ability to utter a statement they can safely consider to be factual. I've gathered that this is the usual state of affairs with the media in Egypt (and, if you'll remember from my earlier accounts, with basic geographical knowledge), but it really makes one feel crazy.

- As I stood in line with a few of my colleagues at the AUC campus clinic to donate blood for those wounded in the past week's violence, one of my colleagues suddenly crossed out all her contact info, thinking it might be unwise to give the Ministry of Health your whereabouts in case the government decides to crack down on anyone who might in anyway be supporting the protests.

- It's easy to get swept up into believing that because there are 100,000 people in Tahrir, and because it's all everyone talks about, that everyone believes in the goals of the Revolution, or even that the goals are as united as they may seem from outside of Egypt. While most people I know are in favor of some kind of broad sweeping governmental change, it's not reasonable to say that everyone supports what's happening now. Humanity's myriad viewpoints cannot be confined and boxed into solidarity with any one cause, even one as basic as what underlay the January Revolution, or even any one way of demonstrating solidarity. It is clear now that with the floodgates of free speech and free thought opening, that as in any attempt for democracy, the very ideals upon which a State is built differ from one person to the next and as such causes a wide range of divisions between people, from healthy debate, civil discussion, and nascent friendships to major rifts in families that deepen as the Revolution continues.

- It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to stand up to voice their discontent by all and any means, when eleven months ago nobody discussed politics, religion, or the government in public. It's as though a spell was broken in January. I came here having a hard time believing that things were really as tyrannical as they seemed, and I am still not sure how exactly this daily oppression manifested itself really, but this seems to be the word on the street. Every street.

- I've been frustrated by what I've perceived as people being overly preoccupied by the knowledge that the tear gas and weaponry used against the protesters is American/foreign-made. While this is obviously true (it's written on every canister and is not surprising given the relationship between the American and Egyptian militaries) and should be considered and dealt with as people see fit, I think the more immediately pertinent problem is the fact that Egyptian security is using such weaponry, regardless of the source of their manufacture, against civilians. This anger protesters have at having been attacked using foreign goods is now being leveraged by the current government to insist that the Revolution is the result of "foreign hands" interfering in domestic affairs, which (regardless of which side one is on, if there are sides as such) seems to undermine the validity of the revolution as expressing the interests of the people at all.

- As I was reading Twitter posts about supplies and needs in Tahrir one afternoon, I was struck by how Scav-like the network of communication was-- everyone interconnected to a web of instantaneous information and supportive team members scurrying about the city procuring any number of things (biscuits, blankets, masks, gauze, jackets) to complete the task they've dedicated themselves to in feverish excitement, anticipation, and sleeplessness.

- It has been beautiful watching people honestly question themselves and engage in dialogue about their beliefs and actions and their roles in this movement, recognizing when they are called upon to act selflessly on behalf of the needs of others as well as the limitations and problems of group-feeling, even if it has felt empowering to them and has, they feel, given them a voice for the first time. It has been amazing watching people make this experience their own and authentic to what they each, as individuals, believe.

On a more amusing and lighter note, it may interest you to know that my father continually (and not in jest, mind you), refers to epicenter of the Revolution, Tahrir Square, as "Tahini Square." I call that wishful thinking. Appa, if you're reading this, I think you may be onto something...

* Extreme perspective-taking: a new sport?

UPDATE, Nov 28: While I've not been the polls (as I'm not voting, claro), everyone I've talked to today has regaled me with tales of how uplifted and happy they feel having voted and the smiles on peoples' faces and songs on peoples' lips at the polling stations, some run with remarkable efficiency and others where people are likely still standing in line.

Luxor

It was wondrous indeed. Can you imagine this being in your backyard growing up?

Look at that smile. After our trip to Luxor, I think I understand, Mr. Giant Head.

Before we left, everything I read convinced me to steel myself, that I was about to enter the hasslers' Mecca of tourist sites in the world. I was so, so pleased to find that this was not our experience at all. Perhaps due to the fact that we were traveling during the Eid holiday, in which people had better things to do with their lives-- eat lamb, visit family, be merry, or maybe because we look less like tourists than most of the other tourists in town, or perhaps because in general we've learned to walk at all times like we know where we're going--whichever of these happy boons graced us, the city felt open to our exploration and without the apparently usual inconveniences of twenty hawkers grabbing at our hair, foisting camel statuettes on us.

We studied a few maps on the train so we could hit the ground running, anticipating a similar level of disorder and illogic about the urban planning as Cairo. Our studiousness proved to be useful, but somewhat unnecessary given the fairly logical layout of the city and the fact that it is tiny. You can essentially walk the length of the city in approximately 30 minutes. This made Luxor an optimal 2-day destination, as after about half a day of wandering around, without really trying, we began to intuitively understand where most things are.

After a long night on the train, we arrived at 7 AM at the Luxor station. I expected to exit the station doors only to be greeted by an unruly human wall of hotel and market touts, but thankfully, as I was then reminded, 7 AM is generally too early for most of humanity to enact their full capabilities, even despite the exceptional ambition of hawkers and salespeople. We walked to our hotel, Hotel Oasis, one of these budget hotels whose shabbiness is commensurate with the pittance paid for it. We dropped our things off and set down the street for breakfast and the Temple of Luxor.

The Temple of of Luxor, despite the glory and magnificence of everything we saw after it, remains one of my favorite sites we saw in Luxor. It seems to boast far less of the skilled intricacy and mythological wonder of the tombs. But one step onto the temple premises and, despite the hoards of tourists, the incessantly screeching car horns, and the dissonant floodlights on the perimeter of the temple, I was entranced in a kind of solemn homage to the insane epicness of everything around us. We tend to imagine the Great Wonders of the World and the famed sites of history we grew up revering and dreaming of as being gargantuan, improbably-sized, and often, they disappoint our wide-eyed, youthful thirst for marvel, adventure, and majesty. Apparently, many people report feeling this way upon seeing the Sphinx (which always begs the question, "are you really, actually, saying the Sphinx isn't big enough?") But I understand this feeling entirely. Of course it's disappointing when the world fails to live up to our projections of its ideal forms. Well, I can honestly say that the Temples of Luxor and Medinet Habu (the mortuary temple of Ramses III) do not disappoint in this regard. Note this giant foot):

This dude's got some serious foot fungus going on there.

We went to the Luxor Temple early enough that the slight haze of fog still rested eerily over everything, contributing to our wonderment, as we felt like we were the archaeologists who discovered this great treasure, who would decipher the numerous engravings surrounding us (despite the critical and ornery gazes of the crows circling creepily above us).

Further downstream, we went to the Karnak Temple, which every guidebook warned we would be ill-advised to attempt to explore all at once, lest we inevitably fall, clutching our heads in a corner, overwhelmed by the grandeur and brilliance of it all. It was grand, and it was brilliant, but we were fine. It felt like something of a playground, not so far off from its ancient purpose as a continuously in-progress monument, cumulatively contributed to by 30-something pharaohs, including some big names like Ramses II, Akhenaten, and Hatshepsut, over a period of more than 2,000 years.

On our second day, we took the local ferry across the bank to the west side of Luxor, rented bicycles to pedal around the sites, and then taxied up to our first stop: The Valley of the Kings, the cavernous eternal home of hundreds of ancients. We saw three tombs: those of Ramses III, Ramses IV, and Seti (I can't remember which one). They were each exquisite and surreal in their own ways, but also somehow defiant of our expectations of ornate gilding-- perhaps humbled by the toll time takes on all things, or perhaps by the fact that fundamentally everything underground is still dark and dusty. After this, we biked down the gravely path downhill, dodging cars and tour buses as they too wound gloriously around the hill, gleaming in the sunlight, destined for enlightenment and illumination! This being the first time I'd biked in perhaps 10 years, I was a bit rusty at first (not unlike our bikes), but as I gained speed down the hills of Luxor, I fondly remembered galloping (at astonishing speeds, I might add) through the desert with Stacy from Giza to Saqqara and back when she came to visit. For some reason, my mode of tourism in Egypt consists of undertaking semi-athletic ventures for which I am perhaps ill-prepared, but so thoroughly enjoy, even as the hot midday sun beats upon my brow. Lawrence of Arabia would be proud, I hope.

After this, we stopped at the base of the hill and were told by some local police we could find food at some thatched-roof hut nearby, but we were soon scooped up by a twinkly-eyed runt of a boy, Ramadan, who insisted on helping us find food. We followed him as we spiraled through his village, Naga', whose houses were not much taller than ourselves, as he asked from door to door who might still have a bit of lunch. Finally, we arrived at his house, where his plum-cheeked mother and four siblings welcomed us in, brought in our bikes and insisted we eat of their food. After lavishing us with hugs and kisses and exclamations of the honor we had brought to them by setting foot in their modest, earthen-made house, they then seated us on cardboard stools and presented us with pots of piping hot molokhiyya (one of my favorite local foods-- a soup of innumerable cloves of garlic and the mucilaginous leaves of a kind of jute plant), rice, bread made from the family's giant clay oven, and enormous hunks of lamb meat, to be found in every home during Eid. They refused to eat with us, insisting that they had already eaten hours before (unreasonable, considering that immediately upon our arrival the food was piping hot, leading us to conclude that they had not yet eaten), but instead sat with us as we all watched Arthur and other children's programs on the TV. Their adobe walls were lightly decorated with pictures clipped from various sources-- a page of Arabic calligraphy, a few family photos, and amusingly, a typically Indian depiction of a mother and a child. After they gave us tea and bestowed upon us many benedictions and expressions of honor (according to them, I was Dr. Ramya, just so you know; who needs graduate school to acquire more degrees?), we reluctantly took our leave of them and slyly tried to leave them some money under a hunk of bread, as we knew they wouldn't accept it. But, Ramadan's mother was too wise to our ways and stuffed our money back in our pockets despite our protestations and scolded us, demanding to know "would you ever try to pay your mother for feeding you?" Hours later, Ramadan called us to ask if we had safely returned to our hotel and to invite us back to his home any time we returned to Luxor. This is Egypt's famed hospitality, complete with syrupy sweet tea.

Uplifted by our encounter with this beautiful and gracious family and our gratitude to them, we rode on to Deir alMedina, the historic village where the workers who built the Valley of the Kings lived and constructed their own tombs. It is morbid, yes (but, what about the ancient Egyptians isn't?), but it strikes me as being an unintentionally tongue-in-cheek ode to the glory of the workers (Proletariat Unite!) that due to the fact that Orientalists, treasure seekers, and tourists have always been more covetously interested in more elaborate sites such as the Valley of the Kings, they are nearly perfect, showing almost no damage to the interior of the tombs and nearly no degradation in the illustrations' color. Brilliant!

As the sun set, we rode past lush agricultural lands and briefly traipsed through Medinet Habu, waved our salutations to the Colossi of Memnon, and then continued back to contemporary civilization, where we returned our bikes and took the ferry back to the East bank of Luxor. We spent the rest of the evening there drinking tea and steeped fenugreek, halba, and people-watching. Our trip wasn't without our share of requisite purchases in the suq, such as scarves that have proven much needed in the unpredictably cold Cairene winter.

Thanks for reading this tome of an account; I hope it will inspire you, beloved readers, to come visit us and experience this all for yourselves! I don't know when I'll go back to Luxor; there's so much I still haven't seen in Egypt (heck, I haven't even seen the Great Pyramids up close yet, and I live but kilometers away from them), but I'd love to take you there.

*Apparently, jute leaves are also called Jew's Mallow, and molokhiyya was often served as the maror, bitter herbs, on traditional Egyptian Jews' seder plates!

On the brink of vacation

In the middle of the desert, in one of the most arid climates I have experienced, somehow I manage to get water everywhere. Washing dishes, I am constantly assaulted by puddles of water I have created improbably, near-impossibly where no water could logically appear unless someone actually intentionally dumped it there. But somehow, I have a unique skill for transporting large amounts of water to parts of the kitchen, nay, the whole apartment, even while I have not ventured there in the act of doing the dishes. Really, though, this could be a highly sought after skill! Consider, it costs nothing for me to transport almost a liter of water mysteriously from my kitchen sink to the middle of my living room (really!), imagine what I could do for African countries in drought! I'll consider this calling.

Aside from working on solving world drought issues, I've been mired in Mid-Semester Assessments, a set of surveys, classroom observations, and focus-group type activities intended to assess how teachers here teach and how they can improve. Peppered throughout this has also been myriad lectures, conferences, discussions, meetings, all focused on the central idea of teaching (broad as that is), but which have all coalesced to provide with a lens through which I have intensively and acutely examined University, not just at the classroom level, but also its structures, mechanisms, people, goals-- such a mass of information about the system as a whole as I have never had before in so quick and intense a spurt.



I feel like I am holding between my two arms and balancing a brimming, dynamic, globe-shaped web of information (that is ever-swelling and might soon envelop me as it grows) into which I peer and glimpse the successes, failures, intentions, limitations, everything-- all the data points as they sit in infinite planes. In short, it's amazing and overwhelming. Now I need to figure out what to do with all this.


And now, I go on vacation to Luxor, a place I've always associated with the artifice and gilt plaster that is the city's namesake in Las Vegas (which displays a kind of human magnificence, not entirely estranged from that of the Ancients, perhaps. We still dream big.) I really have no idea what to actually expect though. This is the first really, thoroughly tourist endeavor I'm embarking on so far, and I'm very excited to just let go of the responsibilities of being settled somewhere, of having to know the right prices to pay for vegetables, of having to clean everything all the time (we just thoroughly scrubbed our apartment and it feels amaaaazing), of having to look like I know where I'm going all the time so I don't feel prey to curious eyes-- half of this battle is all in my head, all about wanting to fit in so I can get the same treatment as anyone else who lives here. But regardless, I'm ready to be open and excited about going somewhere I've never been to before, and it's wondrous.