July 21st, 2011
On Thursday I made it back to Alexandria at long last, which was an amazing, almost surreal experience. It was a little sad in its own way – not to the point of making me regret the trip, surely, but just enough to some half-way poignant feelings of nostalgia. I’d only lived in the city for about 4 months, but going back was like visiting a relative’s house – definitely not your own, but you know where the cupboard for drinking glasses is, and so on. I could also see why every last train ticket was sold out, given that the evening air in the breeze of the ocean was wonderfully cool.
But I suppose I should begin at the beginning, no?
As usual, things began with a metro ride, this time out to the Cairo Gate bus station up in the north of Cairo, east of the Nile. This required a bit of wandering around before I actually found the place, though luckily the station, a massive concrete-and-glass land port, had more than enough tickets for the trip. I wandered through some twisting alleys after buying my tickets, picking my way past butcher’s shops, fruit juice stands and blacksmiths over fairly uneven pavement, the occasional tree improbably twisting its way up towards the sunlight. Finally I made it out towards the northern end of Zamalek, the large island district in the middle of the Nile river. I was due to meet my Arabic teacher from back at Brown for coffee, so I went to the Cairo branch of the bookstore Diwan, proceeding to pick out a large wish list of books… only to have my Arabic teacher arrive before I could buy them all. I suppose I shall return before too long.
Mohammed and I walked around Zamelek a bit before sitting down at a cafe to talk and have tea. He was reminiscing about coming to Zamalek as a child (“in Sadat’s time”) and looking for a specific cafe called Seaman’s (closed since about 2000, as it turned out). He’s glad to be back, though unfortunately hasn’t been well enough to get out and about all that much for a good while. We cycled through our usual conversation topics – what he’s doing next, what I’m doing next, the Egyptian revolution, Ahly soccer – before he had to head off to meet with his publisher. I’m glad to have finally met him in Egypt, given that I’ve only seen him in the U.S. Before. He’ll be back in the U.S. This fall, though unfortunately not at Brown – he’s heading off to Wayne State University to teach Arabic and translation. I hope I get the chance to meet him out there.
From there, I was off on another journey to the Cairo Gate bus station, though this time with a more pressing deadline. Unfortunately, the bus was late by nearly an hour, cutting into my time in Alex, and we had to stop a few times to pick up random passengers (including a few hangers-on tourism policemen) and to check tickets (at entrances to various governorates). The journey itself was fairly uneventful, aside from the mildly amusing hit Egyptian film “Black Honey” (treacle?) about an Egyptian who returns home after spending a good deal of time in America. His often-lost American passport has near-magical powers of compelling respect or cooperation from others, and much of the film revolved around cultural differences between Americans and Egyptians, though seen from the other direction. For example, the protagonist “Masry” walks around his cousin’s house without a shirt on, embarrassing his cousin and his wife, and gets in trouble with the police after taking pictures of various government buildings. Among these buildings is the at-that-point unburned headquarters for the National Democratic Party – one of several subtle reminders that the film belonged to a different era entirely. There were a few catcalls from the audience when a scene set in a police department briefly flashed a massive picture of Hosni Mubarak.
Alexandria Decked out in Patriotic Bunting
By the time I had arrived at the Mowaf al-Gadeed bus station (and made it through the crush of people to buy return a return ticket) it was already 5pm – a bit late in the day to get going, but I’ll take what I get. The months rolled back (yes, this would be much cooler if it had been years) and I was standing outside of the McDonalds near the Shotby girls dorm, which now sports a massive, faded Egyptian flag banner tossed out of one of the windows. I walked the same, longer-than-it-seems walk to the Canat Suez intersection outside the Alexandria University Campus, past the same old shops and the same cafes. Like Cairo, the major difference was in the little things – paintings and posters all over the place without being two obvious. Walls that now ran with red, black, and white stripes. Expressions of Christian-Muslim unity, and Muslim Brotherhood banners extolling the virtues of the Hijab for women. Banners mourning the loss of various martyrs of the revolution, along with posters of Gamal Abdel Nasser calling for a return to the pan-Arab nationalism that once held far greater meaning for the region.
Poster for the Muslim Brotherhood
I ran into Khaled Darwish by pure chance outside of the library of Alexandria, with a few of his friends from the Alexandria Student’s Council. We barely had time to talk, though, because he had to run. I hadn’t mentioned I was coming as I’d somehow lost his phone number. I hope I didn’t offend. In any case, after a bizarre encounter involving a high school student and a police officer I had hopped into the car with Doctor Wessam, who has mainly been focusing on his normal University work after the Middlebury program was stopped. I spotted him and traffic and headed over, and soon we were on our way to dinner, chatting about life since the revolution. He’s been doing well, though currently there’s a bit of upheaval as the previously regime-appointed and -supervised University administrations across the country are being turned out in favor of newly-held elections.
Signs of the Revolution
We went to an upscale restaurant for dinner – Tikka Grill – with another Fulbright student (also named Andrew) who’s reasearching Egyptian nationalism – good timing, no? It was a great conversation over dinner, as we didn’t bother trying to catch up on everything but just hit up the specifics – I explained what things had been like on my side of the Atlantic, while Andrew and Wessam got me up to speed on a couple of the most recent events and developments, such as the publication of the newspaper Al-Tahrir (http://www.egarida.com/), which provides fairly critical coverage of events in Egypt, compared to other news sources. I was a bit lost amidst all of the different names, but I’m starting to catch on to the political glossary of the moment – Hizb al-Nur (the fundamentalist Salafi party), Nabeel al-Araby (current Egyptian head of the Arab League), etc. Wessam al-Meligi runs pretty far to the liberal side of the Egyptian political spectrum and has been a bit frustrated by the way things are going, but like all Egyptians knows how to make a good joke out of it as well. I heard about how current Prime Minister Essam Sharif is under an incredible amount of pressure, and seems to be hospitalized every other week – can’t blame him honestly. It was a good conversation, on the whole – enough reminiscing to catch up, but mostly focused on the present and the future. The food wasn’t bad, either.
Revolutionary Graffiti
Eventually, it came time to part ways. Fulbright Andrew and I went to the bookstore Dar al-Maarifa, where I set out on expanding my burgeoning Arabic-language library – I picked up a pretty interesting day-by-day account of the Egyptian Revolution, among other things. Since Andrew had to be on his way, I just wandered around the city at length. There’s a full-scale sit-in going on in Saad Zaghloul square (named for one of the leaders of the 1919 revolution), with rallies, tents, posters and more. There were tanks outside of the court and the branch office of the ministry of justice, and further sit-in protesters outside of the Suzanne Mubarak Center for the Arts – I stopped and chatted with them for a bit, and managed to get their permission to take a few pictures. The longer I stayed in Egypt, the more careful I was about taking pictures – perhaps I’m being a bit overly cautious, but the stories of the Israeli “spy” keep coming up.
It hasn’t been that long since I left Alexandria, but it feels like forever. Like I said, sad but in a nice way. Life continues on Alex, as I watched all sorts of people people pass along on the sidewalk. A 20-something girl balanced on the back of a like-aged guy’s scooter. People hopping in and out of battered microbuses as yellow-and-black taxis wove their way in and out around the milieu of traffic. The occasional horse-drawn cart. Fully-veiled niqabis walking next to their t-shirt-and-jeans husbands, women in capri pants, laughing guys sporting all kinds of sports paraphernalia, people just heading into or just leaving the water. A nice, cool breeze coming in off the water made it quite a nice time to just sit and watch.
The City at Sunset
I had one more meeting before I headed out. Mahmoud Gebriel was free for a few hours before I headed back home, so I met him at a cafe while he took a break from studying for Med school. When the protests first broke out, he went to Cauro for a few days, but then went back to the Sinai to be with his family. As things worsened in Tahrir, and their family’s farm came under threat in the Bahira region of the Delta, he headed back with his father and other family members to hold the place down – got attacked by government thugs on the way, but made it through all the same. He made his way back to Cairo and spent the last seven days before Mubarak gave up power in Midan Tahrir, saying that each day was better than the last, with millions swamping the square. He laughed a bit when he talked about the s now – nice, to be sure, but nothing like what it was. He’s back to studying now, trying to visit Boston this winter on a scholarship program. I hope he makes it – it’ll be nice to see him on the other side of the water.
- Mowaf Al-Gadeed
Sadly, time ran out on us there as well, and I had to head out. One slow taxi ride later, I was back in Mowaf al-Gadeed – the place still looks like a cross between a junkyard and a country fair, with vendors of everything from Chipsi bags to phone credit strewn about like so many bedouin tents, amidst ramshackle shacks selling bus tickets. I hung around until the bus finally appeared, got aboard and then fell asleep almost as soon as we got moving. Unfortunately, another Egyptian film (much harder to follow – seemed to revolve around a famous pop star trying to keep her father from knowing what she does for a living, in a crazy comedy mash-up of Goodbye, Lenin and Hannah Montana. I demurred. I was awake when we made it into the city itself, as I had to get the bus driver to stop at the side of the 26th of July bridge, letting me walk the length of Zamelek island to get back to my friend’s apartment, walking in and amongst the late-night fisherman on the banks of the Nile, the late-night partiers coming off the riverboat dance halls on the shore of the island, and the late-night shift of military and police guards watching the Syrian Embassy. Then I went to sleep.
Late-Night Fishing
July 22-24
Not much happened on Friday, aside from some book shopping and a party thrown at my host’s residence. I hit it off with the group of Egyptians who were the first to arrive, and chatted with a wide variety of 20-somethings studying Arabic or otherwise employed in the greater Cairo area. Rarely do I find myself entirely in the company of Arabic-studying, Middle-East traveling folks, at least not since the last time I found myself in Alex, so it was a pretty cool experience – some people had even studied in Oman, while others had a wide variety of experience in the Levant, Morocco, the Gulf and of course Egypt. Again, not since the Middlebury program have I been in a room full of Westerners who could comfortably switch back and forth between Arabic and English without a problem.
Unfortunately, amidst hearing of Study Abroad nightmares and hearing of travel plans for the CASA student’s upcoming break, my phone went off with a call from Heba Abdelgelil. She had finally found enough time in between grading tests at Damanhour University to meet up with me and my friend Jason (my host) out in Alex on Saturday, but I wasn’t sure what she could be calling about now. It took me a while before I understood, my phone conversation skills still not being quite the best in Arabic, but eventually I got the message and told her I’d check back in the morning. Then, following instructions, I searched Twitter under the hashtag #Alex – immediately a host of tweets popped up, noting police firing in the air around the Sidi Gaber army encampment, rocks thrown, thugs beating protesters, photos… When I looked through the photos, I realized the intersection – I’d walked by it every Sunday on my way home from church at the Jesuit Center.
The TAFL Center, as it always was
Jason and I checked on and off through the party and into the next day. We didn’t spot anything new so we resolved to head out but simply steer clear of the whole Sidi Gaber region – easy enough, as Jason’s friends had reported nothing out of the ordinary even as close as Sporting. One 3-hour inter-connected transport sequence later, we were listening to a taxi driver complain about all the Cairenes who had descended upon the “relatively” cool climate of Alexandria in droves – every so often somebody would roll down a window and call out for directions to Montaza gardens, or San Stefano, or Miami. Eventually we got off at the Port Said/Suez Canal St. intersection, strolling down the road and into the doors of the TAFL center. The place was a bit deserted, with fairly few programs in session, but I was able to find a few familiar faces – ran into Mataaz as I headed up the stairs, and Ahmed Gamal was around, fixing some computers. I talked to Ahmed for a bit, though we didn’t get much past generalities. Ahmed didn’t say much about what he got up to during the revolution, although he is now remarkably well-versed in ways to avoid Internet censors, bury IP addresses, hijack satellite dishes into remote Internet-uplinks, and shield hotspots, if this is any indication.
Patriotic Paint Job
The Biblioteca Alexandrina was closed, with the ticket booths shuttered and a few white-uniformed policemen lounging about in plastic chairs. At first we thought there might be a relation to the previous day’s confrontation, but I had simply forgotten that it was July 23rd– the date of the previous Egyptian Revolution, some 59 years before, a national holiday that drew much comparison to the present revolution. Jason’s friends wanted to meet for lunch further down the Corniche, so we decided to simply head out for a stroll along the water, stopping only to pick up mango-flavored ice cream. It was a beautiful day, with just enough clouds drifting across the sky to provide some occasional shade from the sun, which was strong but not overpowering. We passed the sit-in at Saad Zaghloul Square and the tanks parked next door in front of the courts and the ministry of justice, each sporting a half-bored soldier leaning on the pintle-mounted guns. By the time we got past Menshira the colorful fishing boats were beginning to collect in the water to our right, just as crowds of beachgoers mobbed the shore, accompanied by the tinny sounds of pop music being blasted over too-small speakers. A few more Egyptian flags fluttered among the boats than I recalled, and even a few Libyan opposition flags joined them. We walked on.
Tank Guarding Ministry of Justice
Lunch was a typical Alexandrian seafood affair – pick your fish, pay by the pound, choose your cooking style. We met up with a few other CASA folks on vacation and some of their Egyptian friends, and we made plans together for the rest of the day while comparing notes – a lot of us had been through the Middlebury program in Alex, with a combined experience in the city stretching back several years. Flashing forward an hour or so found us in front of Aseer Mekka, its status as juice-bar king of Sporting undiminished by the presence of a huge banner for one of the main Salafi Muslim partys, Hizb al-Nur, nearby. The tram rolled us back past artwork and posters thrown on the walls to either side, flags and slogans next to political banners and flyers.
Aseer Mecca
Selsela was much the same cafe as ever when we arrived, the fake palm trees rustling in the stiff breeze. Heba met us there, and we caught her up on the news of a few generations of Middlebury Alex alums, as she talked about what some of the Alex crowd were up to these days. The Middlebury administration/faculty in Alex are using the time off (the program is shuttered at least until the spring) to rework the program, aiming at a result Heba would only describe as “a surprise”. Conversation rolled on through cheap places to eat in Cairo and Egyptian actors blacklisted for being against the revolution. All too soon Heba had to be on her way, leaving us to enjoy the afternoon air and the beautiful view along the Corniche.
The evening wound its way to a close, slowly but surely. Other Fulbrighters, CASA students, and a few Egyptians descended on our position just down the steps of Selsela, and we sat as the sun sank into the west and the street lamps glowed against the sea spray. Conversation was entirely in Arabic, with only the occasional stubborn vocab word throw in to ease the discussion along. I broke off to grab a last few books for the collection, then came back to find that we were heading off to Halawiyat Masr, to check out if the desserts were as good as we remembered. Mahatat Raml was packed, and certainly not just with the protesters sitting and speechifying around Saad Zaghloul’s statue. It seemed like everybody from that part of Alex, and a decent number form Cairo as well, was out and about, either walking, driving, buying or selling. Struggling to remember travel times I could once pull from memory, I waited for Jason to finish his order and then suggested we might want to leave in order to beat the traffic. The taxi driver speculated darkly about what would happen if Tahrir protesters didn’t give the government a break, let things settle down. It certainly left us something to think about as we stepped away form the lonesome light-posts in Mowaf al-Gadeed to stare up at the stars.
When we returned news reports noted that 150 had been wounded in various Cairo protests during the day. By the time I woke up that number had risen to 230.
The final day ran like clockwork and passed quickly. I met Muhammad Gharib for juice (guava) not far from the Faisal Islamic Bank by the Sheraton, on the eastern bank of the Nile. One decent taxi ride later I was at the airport, waiting to board the 13:35 flight to Bahrain with a huge number of Malaysian Muslim women. By midnight I was back in Muscat, trudging my way over the freeway footbridge in order to avoid paying $30 for a taxi ride (I paid about $5).
It’s not as if I gained huge amounts of knowledge while in Egypt. I’m sure it was good Arabic practice, but I’m only slightly more literate about political events than I was when I left. The revolutionary atmosphere continues in Midan Tahrir and a few certain other areas, but most everywhere else if such events come up in conversation it is usually with a note of uncertainty, though also accompanied by laughter most of the time (this is Egypt, after all). If anything, what I took away was something a bit more basic, perhaps something too obvious to be worth mentioning. When I stepped away from the folks in Selsela back in Alexandria, I stopped by the sandwich shop past the Alexandria University campus, al-Tabawy. I was amazed – what had one been a single hole-in-the-wall restaurant now unfolds to the end of the block. Grime cinderblock had given way to shiny red siding, glass doors, gleaming chrome edging. The original sandwich shop was now adjoined with a koshery joint, an ice cream parlor, and a juice bar. It was all pretty impressive as I ordered my usual fare of one ful and one falafel sandwich. The revolution continues, the uncertainty continues, the problems and issues that plague Egypt certainly continue. Above all, though, life continues. For better or for worse.
