The Beginning of Ends

Salutations!

Today was a momentous day as I finished teaching children. We ended with a day on Greek Mythology. On Wednesday’s we spend the entire four hours in the morning together, so sometimes it takes quite a lot to keep them focused for the whole time, but we managed to pull through the early part of the morning and make it into the afternoon for the grand finale – a little drama in the garden. I asked them to work in groups to adapt different Greek myths (Perseus and Medusa, Theseus and the Minotaur, and Icharus and Daedalus) into short plays much like how we did Shakespeare. It actually ended up being far more professional and we were able to move outside into the delightful sunlight and idyllic setting of the garden for a little theater in the round (I make it sound much more romantic than it actually was). Although it was much less discombobulated than Shakespeare was (we laid down some ground rules this time for proper theater etiquette: no running around while people are performing, yelling, talking, milling about aimlessly…), there is still much room for improvement in their drama skills. No worry though – the scripts were spot-on which is all that matters for an English class. Anyhow, I think I’ll circle back to the kiddos by the end of this letter.

The adult classes will continue on for another week. I’m actually pausing halfway through writing my tests for them tomorrow in order to write this letter. The first draft of it was tragically lost about two hours ago – so all of my epic witticisms and poetic nuances will be lost in the depths of time, those beautiful moments before I lost an hour of my life and all of that labor, those moments before I yelled some expletives in the otherwise tranquil guest house, and before I regained control of my temper, cut my losses, and put my mind to something else. Never again will I write letters in risky fashion of the outlook textbox in my Brown webmail account… For those of you who don’t grasp what I mean by this (I’m sure few of you do), don’t worry. I’m just venting.

Anyhow, teaching becomes easier, it seems, with each class. Perhaps as it becomes more routine to stand and improvise in front of forty or more foreign people each day, it becomes more routine, and my demeanor less serious without compromising control over the class. I mean its getting delightfully more casual. I’ve discovered that my students love to hear anecdotes from their silly foreign teacher about how it is to be navigating in their strange and complicated culture for the first time. They enjoy hearing of how I discover the nuances that they are so familiar with and yet seem to bewildering to me. Egypt is a country that has an extremely large amount of tourism and very few immigrants from the Western world. So, I suppose there are few of us who pick up on the deeper aspects – the little things – and appreciate them as uniquely Egyptian. I’m sure it gives them a sense of pride and humor when I tell them about the new foods I’ve discovered on the weekends. So, we’ve started to begin our classes with stories. Typically my own, and I usually ask around for a while until an intrepid few offer up their tales of adventure for the class. Just last time one of my students who returned from Marsa Matruh (sp.?) talked about how hw sank a boat some distance of the coast and spent three hours swimming it back to shore. So we’re having more fun now and my students are all slowly earning their own dimension as my perspective shifts. Its like starting out with a two dimensional picture of these people and then slowly turning about all of them to see their different sides – how deep their characters go. I always find their stories fascinating as well as their opinions about various issues in the world. I often bring in articles for us to read. Recent ones include: Pamplona (the setting of one of Hemingway’s great works), food shortage and biofuel, the 2008 US election, a skyscraper being built in Dubai (a shape-shifting one!), the G8 summit, and so on.

Anyhow, last class I relayed some interesting stories to my students which perhaps this audience will find equally entertaining or of some meager cultural insight. When we last left off I had a successful Wednesday morning with my students as we discovered our great passion for drama. It was an epic afternoon of Shakespeare: tragedy that was redefined as comedy in Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Well, afterwards I spent the afternoon at the beach, and so on, awaiting m final class of adults the next night and our eventual trip down to Cairo on Thursday.

On Thursday afternoon before class Christine and I stocked up on delicious snacks for the 10:15 PM train ride from our new found bread shop and packed for the adventure. We taught our last class in the evening and left as quickly as possible. We had invited Gamel, a co-worker and friend, to accompany us on this weekend excursion: the more the merrier. So we three headed to the train station in a rush, made it there with minutes to spare, and in typical Egyptian fashion we waited about a half hour for our train (late per usual). I heard a recent expression recently (Pete) that usually goes with the army but I think it seems appropriate sometimes in Egypt: hurry up and wait.

We took the train down south to Cairo, slithering through the smaller towns at midnight. I slept most of the way and we arrived at about 2-2:30 AM. Last time I slept on the train Christine pointed out that I had black ink on one side of my face. It turn out that the plastic bag I was carrying with some soft things in it – an impromptu pillow! – turned out to be a poor decision as I had a nice string of Arabic numbers (phone number perhaps?) stamped across the side of my head for the weekend. But alas! We made it Cairo and hopped in a cab for Dokki. The Cairo team graciously offered us their apartment for the weekend as they would be absent, spending their time in hot, hot climate of Luxor/Aswan and soaking up the antiquities.

We set our alarms for 7:45 AM before crashing and Daniel arrived sometime in the night to complete our team (5:00AM?). Well anyway, he was up no more than three hours later as we departed for the bus station as our final destination for the weekend would take us out to the Fayyum: Egypt’s largest pseudo-oasis. We got on the bus about 15 minutes before it would take us for a 2-2.5 hour long trip through the desert. My knowledge is pathetically shallow for this topic, but I think that the Fayyum is about 100 miles from Cairo (in the SSW direction). Anywho, the bus was hot, unairconditioned, and full of interesting passengers, one of whom was particularly interested in our female companion, Christine, as he stared at her for the entire bus ride – literally.

We slowly made our way out of the city, out of the suburbs of Giza, and into the desert. The suburbs of Giza an Cairo are strange as they just seem to vast plains of towering apartment buildings of a drab, utilitarian style. Ugly to be frank. Everything is more or less the same dusty color, lacking in character, but in its own way unique. It is also a trend with many building to be left curiously unfinished as if a sudden plague swept over the works crews or they became extremely lazy, got up and left (or perhaps just figured their priorities of which construction was not one). 100 Years of Solitude anyone? Yet it is interesting because in all of these buildings we can see the process of Egyptian construction. On the first floor is the complete product, and gradually as the stories ascend they become less and less complete. The concrete finish gives way to a brick skeleton, and then at the peak are iron rods shooting into the sky suggesting that we are supposed to imagine that the rest of the building’s form would follow suit. Cairo, I think, is truly the anthill of the world. It seems to be a mound of infrastructure in a sandy patch of the map, sprouted up from the mysterious, life-breathing chasm that runs through it – the Nile. The metropolis: home to millions, quiet from a distance, and roaring with activity on this inside. Beyond the mound is nothing, but it tapers off a little in all directions until it stops at some point before the epicenter where life must be unbearable.

Anyhow, we soon darted off in this bus towards the Fayyum and I was soon asleep or not, I can’t exactly remember. I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. There is something about the desert that is very meditative. As in falling asleep, we first begin by allowing our minds to drift rapidly from topic to topic until everything is exhausted and thoughts slowly settle into themselves. Existence either quits or is extinguished and the idle fantasies of the mind either sprout up or not as in daydreams paradoxically inspired by vast planes of jejune wasteland. Anyway, at some point we are aroused from slumber and perhaps this is another dream? Hallucination? A dream, is something like the oasis of the mind, and is sometimes confused with reality: a colorful spot with wells from the imagination or sunken water tables that have somehow miraculously given life in these barren spots. With the Fayyum, waking up from this was something more like long stretch of lazily waking up and falling asleep again as on a Sunday morning. I had something of a “Charleton Heston wandering in the desert” expectation for my mental representation of “oasis” which would suddenly hit me (a bucket of water cruelly wakes one up in the morning from the trance of sleep) rather than a gradual Sunday morning laziness. But the gradual entry into to Fayyum was delightful. We passed through pastures of green first, dotted with homes in the distance, fig or date palms, and then slowly through the hamlet and into the bustling little town: medinat al-Fayyum.

We stepped off the bus and there was a simple process of thought that I experience that occurred in this order: 1.) This town is strangely large, how could this be an oasis? 2.) Now that I’m in the Fayyum, what do I do? The Fayyum’s center looked as if it could have been a couple city blocks taken from a quieter, more modest area of Cairo or Alex and dropped into the desert. Again in conflict with the image of date palms, tents, and a small watering hole that I had romantically envisioned. So, we had no idea what we would do in the Fayyum. Our knowledge pooled together probably consisted of little more than this: “the Fayyum is a small dot on the map about 100 miles SSW of Cairo. I have seen its name in print and therefore it is a destination to be beheld.” So, after talking with a couple taxi drivers, we decided it would be best to head to the closest café and sit and discuss our plans for the day over some fresh juice and enlist the help of a local waiter or two to assist us with our adventure.

After about an hour most of these goals had been accomplished as we sat in the second story of a quiet café with the remains of a couple rounds of mango juice in front of us. We decided that having a driver for the day would be the best way to see the area and he could take us to wherever he thought was worthwhile. Soon after some antsy waiting on my part (why do things in Egypt take so long?!?) our chariot had arrived and we climbed in and went to see what there was to see.

We stopped, oddly enough, at an uninspiring water wheel as our first destination. As intrepid journeyers we took the opportunity to stretch our legs, check out the novelty, and take a few pictures to document our day in the Fayyum. As Daniel, Christine, and I walked around this wheel and ignored the persistent merchants (they don’t see many foreign travelers in the summer) it seemed that Gamel had struck up a conversation with the tourist police who were hanging out by the wheel. And this along with the fact that there were merchants poised to sell us their cheap goods, confirmed the fact that this was actually a typical tourist hot-spot. The Fayyum seemed promising as it offered us this brilliant attraction: a simple wheel being turned by water. A point of pride indeed though for the people of Fayyum for it is the spot, I suppose, where all of the water that supplies them with life originates from. Anyhow, we wandered over to the tourist police and Gamel to see what was up. We took some (funny) pictures with them (they have very impressive “TOURIST POLICE” sleeve badgery) and asked what the deal was. Apparently when Westerners (especially of white, American or British variety) visit the area they are supposed to notify the police in order to get an armed escort for the day.

It seems, from what I gather, that years ago (in the 1990s) there was a series of deadly terrorist attacks on tourists in Egypt. Some of them originated from the Fayyum? After this there was some severe fallout: the tourism industry collapsed, international incident, etc. Now they are much more careful and ”police escort” seems to be one of the necessary precautions for visiting this charming oasis in the desert. Well, we were assured that it wouldn’t be a big problem if we simply told anyone who asked that we were Canadians! Alas! I can add “alternative identity source” to my list of useful aspects of Canada… Just kidding. But seriously.

Well we traveled to various places around the Fayyum: several more water wheels, a strange place called Seline where the police gave us a real fit about entering (oddly, there was absolutely nothing there to see really…), Lake Qarun, and pleasant drives through the countryside. It was simply nice to be out of the city for a day. It was nice to have very little to see. A lake, some fields, a little town. We ate the best Egyptian food that I’ve had yet in town – uncorrupted perhaps by however they mangle the same dishes in Cairo and Alex. All in all a nice, photogenic, relaxing experience. Lots of pictures of the dusty palette of color around the lake where the fishing boats seem to be resting on a mirror in the hot sun, the edge of the lake and far away desert melting into the sky…

Is this too poetic? Well we returned and spent the rest of the weekend in Cairo, watching some movies, hanging out, eating koshary, etc. We returned to Alex. on Saturday night and I spent the rest of my time before class the next day planning for the week an just milling around. Everything was more or less routine. Classes have been pushing through. With the kids we did pirates, magicians, and Greek mythology (as I already mentioned). We had some nice photo sessions and I think everyone was a little bit sad that the session was so brief (myself included). In my adult classes we’ve gotten into doing presentations every day and they always have interesting topics ranging from embryology (really…) to traveling abroad, Egyptian culture, personalities before and after work, the environment, a Tale of Two Cities (he botched this one on two occasions, but we’re waiting for the third), good manners, fuel cells, how to manipulate people… They’re very creative, but some are extremely shy. In fact, several have come to me now, curious to know how badly it will affect their grade if they don’t present at all. I’m sure they’ll all do fine though. Its very unusual for those who aren’t well into the business world to have to give these presentations. The Egyptian method of schooling is very much a “sit down and memorize” approach from what I gather. We’ll see.

I apologize for being so verbose this evening, but as soon as I finish writing this I must get back to work. I hope all who read this are well!

Jake