firsts, parties, commonalities

Ok so its been awhile. I'm living in an apartment now, we left the family in El Masaara, and we're having our house warming party tonight. I've been here over a month now and its strange how quickly everything seems so normal and commonplace here now. Ya I go to the market and haggle over the price of a kilo of tomatoes on a donkey cart, measured with weights, while ten higabbed woman try to snatch the basket from me. Ya I am speaking arabic, ya I'm riding the metro squished between pregnant women and ambitious salesmen with "lump sugar," car covers or cell phone trinkets every day. Ya I'm walking home past THE NILE (where Moses floated!), ya I see horse carts full of garbage on the high way driven by 12 year old boys, ya the Muslim call to prayer is blasted over a loud speaker 5 times a day, ya there are weddings in the street at least once a day. And it seems so normal. Last time I was here I remember being in awe of how interesting and exciting and beautiful everything was. Now of course that's still true but also its just life. I commute to work, I work, I commute home, I hang out with friends, I cook and clean and shop, I look forward to the weekend (one day weekend), I talk with a variety of people.

These last couple weeks I've had a lot of firsts though, and a lot of parties. I went to my first actual wedding. Last time I was here I went to an engagement party, but this time it was an actual wedding of one of our friends from the hostel. It was way the heck out in the middle of nowhere almost, near the prison I visited when I was here for MESP. We were riding in the car of a friend of a friend for like two hours. We asked about his wife, which evidently he took as our request that she come to the wedding, along with his ten month old baby. Therefore, we had four American girls and a very chubby, grabby baby in the back seat, with Tamr and his wife bickering in the front. It was a sweet 2 hour roadtrip. The wedding itself was great, except for approximately 65 children surrounding our table, their eyes bigger than the lights strung up over this vacant lot. Dancing, amazing food (they slaughtered their ox, hehe), amazing people. I met the 13 and 9 year old girl cousins of the groom and got their phone numbers and to feed their fat fish (they didn't have names). On the way home with the windows down and the cool country breeze it smelled exactly like San Diego, desert and water and vegetation, and I could see the stars out the window, it made me a little homesick, but I also would never have wanted to miss that moment.

Also this week I had what I would call my first Egyptian slumber party. We went to another wedding with our Egyptian family in El Masaara. After being stuffed with food, hit on by random guys and watching some more dancing and the couple make their way up to their new bedroom amidst ululation, we walked back home and spent the night there. I ended up staying up till the wee hours of the morning talking to my sisters on the floor of their bedroom about everything from setting up an arabic/english study program with them every week to the tragic story of the bride from that night. This bride is the only girl in a family of five boys. Her family doesn't like girls and therefore sent her off to marry her cousin that she didn't really know in Cairo. The family wouldn't even come to the wedding, so our family substituted - they made all the food for the wedding and for the bride the week after. Mama and Baba from our family were very upset about this situation. Mama started crying again because we had moved out. It breaks my heart, that whole family just loves people and attaches to people with all they have. They can't help it. I thought I was bad with over attaching to people, seriously.

Other interesting event - one of my favorite students pulled me aside after class and very discreetly asked me to write her a list of all the parts of the human body, particularly the male and female anatomy, and all the slang words Americans use for going to the bathroom. She said she was embarrassed to ask in class but she wanted to know the non-scientific terms for everything. I agreed to help her, because this woman is not sketchy at all, but how exactly I will go about this I have no idea, and the more I think about it the more hilarious the concept is.

Also, I don't know what it is about me but people have always sought me out for relationship advice even though I have pretty much nothing of experience to draw from. This evidently holds true in Egypt as well (although this might be because everyone knows American girls get around, haha). I guess I'm the person to tell when you screw things up with a girl, but I am always told secretly and never allowed to tell anyone else. Haha. I actually kind of relish this role, being trusted with all these personal problems, even though keeping secrets might actually kill me, as you all probably know.

Wednesday night Eunice and I smoked shisha/drank tea with Egyptian men for the first time (sketchy), but really they're the guys we work with so it wasn't really sketchy, but we knew Dr. Dave our program director would be rolling over in his apartment if he knew what rebels we were. This experience involved giving money to random street children, watching fire swallowing woman, speculating on the identity of this scary rich woman who wore all pink and a miniskirt (this does not happen in cairo usually), and discussing Christianity and Islam, God and the day of judgment, hell and paradise, the Qur'an and the gospels. Oh I love those conversations.

Last night I finally got to really talk with my host brother from MESP. We walked around Zamalek for probably two hours, sat in a cafe for like two hours and then walked around for about another half hour. I finally got to hear his life's story about love and growing up and people changing and grief. He is a great storyteller, even in his second language. I almost cried a couple times. And then I got to have another conversation about God and religion and the Qur'an and the gospels and what religion I would have if I read the Qur'an every day instead of the Bible and why I'm a Christian and America and Egypt and who made the sky and what makes people good.

My friend Erin's coming to visit in about a week! We have our house party tonight! I'm going to start studying whatever Arabic I can for free (with my family and at the school I work at)! I'm going to start volunteering at my church! I'm pretty excited about my life, and its seriously such a good feeling to be able to communicate with someone here, in English or Arabic, when you can see that spark of recognition of humanity between each other. And its such a great feeling to be able to do things (buy nails to decorate our house, find our internet company and get technical support to set up our internet, buy an ethernet cord, teach English in an enjoyably way to Egyptian judges working for Children's rights as well as girls my age sick of their overbearing fathers and engineers and tour guides and university students, tell and understand an inside joke in another language, take care of myself). So life here is of course exciting and rewarding but at the same time I realize as I was telling Mohammed yesterday, no one here knows me that well. I miss people who know who I am and I know who they are and there are years of built up trust between us. Here that doesn't exist yet and even when I leave there won't have been enough time for that, although trust is slowly being built.

I should go make my tomato cucumber salad for this party...