"Edward Said would forgive me," or, "Highlights from Syria and Jordan"

There's nothing like traveling by the seat of your empty-pocketed pants to restore your faith in humanity. I'm a little concerned about traveling when I'm no longer a student. I love being talked to honestly, not smiled at and babied like a tourist. I worry that becoming a real adult with money will change that.

Sorry for taking so long to post this. I'm safely home and busy with friends and my internship at Americans for Informed Democracy. Let's backtrack, shall we?

Jordan and Syria were amazing. AMAzing. I met some of the friendliest people I've met anywhere. It was honestly a bit of a relief to realize I'm not incapable of enjoying myself in the Arab World. Jordan and Syria are not like Egypt. The countryside is much more diverse, the cities are cleaner and less crowded, and the people don't hassle you to the point of cheating you or harass women constantly. It was nice. Heather and I both look forward to going back.

We skipped the stop in Siwa Oasis to give ourselves more time on the rest of the trip. After an 8 hour bus ride from Cairo, a 10 hour wait at the Nuweiba Port Authority (Egypt), a two hour ferry ride to Aqaba (Jordan), and an hour and a half in a taxi to Petra, I was over 48 hours without sleep and rather unhappy. Our hotel hosts welcomed us with fresh slices of outrageously delicious cantaloupe and sent us to bed. I snuck out to look at the stars in the cool, quiet valley air of Wadi Musa, and all the stress of the last few days and weeks and months melted away.

The next day was Petra, a Greco-Roman era city built into a red sandstone canyon, and Jordan's biggest tourist attraction. It was one of the most beautiful places I've been in my life, so brace yourself for lots of photos. Walking toward the canyon, you start seeing things like this and taking lots of pictures... not realizing that they're the tip of the iceberg.

Then you get into the canyon...

And feel increasingly insignificant...

Then you turn a corner and you're looking at the Treasury towering above you in bands of red and pink and orange.

Then you pass through some amazing streets of tomb facades...

Then you hike up a mountain for about an hour in the blistering sun and 110 degree heat to reach the Monastery. Anybody seen Transformers 2? This is the place.

Then you hike out to the viewpoints near the Monastery to look at the beautiful, rugged desert landscape. We could see the Dead Sea and Negev Desert.

Then you sit down for a while, drink some juice, chat with some flirty but kind Bedouin boys, wind your way back through the canyon at sunset, and feel wholly insignificant.

Then you return to your hotel, get some delicious dinner at a local cafe, and sit on the roof in the cool night breeze, chatting with the manager of the hostel (who is high as a kite on hashish) about politics, differences between Egypt and Jordan, and the treatment of women in the Middle East.

The next day we headed to Amman, which is not a very exciting city, so I didn't take pictures of it. Instead of exploring Amman, we went to swim in the Dead Sea for a few hours. It was amazing. The water felt oily because of all the minerals, and it burned your tongue if it got in your mouth. It was nearly impossible to float vertically because your legs refuse to be pushed beneath the surface. It was quite an ab workout. Anyhoo, we enjoyed the swim and covered ourselves in mud, as it's very good for your skin and extreeeeemely expensive to buy at spas and salons. There were huge chunks of salt crystals in the mud. Salt deposits in the water near the shore:

Stereotypical tourist picture:

Sunset over Israel:

Jordan was proving too expensive for us (1 Jordanian dinar = .7 USD... ouch), so we decided to head straight to Syria. This part was complicated. Americans are supposed to apply for visas 6 months in advance, but we didn't do that. The other option is to go to the border and wait for 5-6 hours for them to process your visa and sufficiently annoy you. We brought snacks and books and chatted with the border guards. I gave them an origami dragon when we left.

A Syrian named Basel was passing through the border when we got our visas and offered us a ride to the next town, where we would get our bus to Damascus. After talking with us a while, he offered to take us to his home to meet his family and eat some dinner. I hesitated. At the beginning of the semester, when we met our friend Abdul in Giza, my friends had all been extremely uncomfortable that I had talked with him and accepted his invitation to have lunch at his home. Apparently, however, Heather had learned to trust strangers since then. So we went with Basel. His wife was very kind and his 5 children were adorable. We played with the kids a while, ate dinner, and chatted... it was somewhat difficult because Syrian and Jordanian Arabic dialects are very different from Egyptian. We did alright though. Anyway, Basel dropped us off at the bus station and we arrive in Damascus a couple of hours later.

We fell in love with our hostel in Damascus. It had a beautiful courtyard, a family of kittens living on the roof, and the sweetest staff, including two brothers who taught us some Syrian Arabic.

We liked Damascus quite a lot in general, so we didn't rush to leave. The streets in old town:

A beautiful mosque converted into a market:

The world-famous souq (market) in downtown Damascus. This is one of the main covered streets, but there were also frighteningly crowded alleys everywhere.

This is one of the old inns in the souq. It was cool and quiet... I could have sat by the fountain for hours.

Fresh squeezed orange juice kept us going in the 100+ degree heat.

We did finally tear ourselves away from Damascus and its delicious orange juice to visit Palmyra, which is Syra's biggest tourist attraction, but not QUITE as cool as Petra. Landscape in central Syria:

Palmyra has some spectacular Greco-Roman era tombs and the ruins of a city.

We watched Obama's speech with the employees at our hostel in Palmyra and talked politics a while. One was a university student in Homs, Syria. We ended up hanging out with the guys from the hostel most of the evening... went to a touristy Bedouin dinner and dance performance (though we were on the Syrian side of the crowd - woo!) and went walking through the ruins in the moonlight. It was a great night.

Anyway, we returned to Damascus and flew back to Cairo to avoid the horrors of the Aqaba ferry, carrying the email addresses and phone numbers of a dozen new friends. I really can't believe how welcomed I felt in Syria. It was not only safe, contrary to what our media tells us, but full of the most wonderfully kind people I've ever met. It was a worthwhile trip. :)

So I'm in Washington for the time being. Still dreaming about getting back to Nairobi, but happy for now. I'll let you all know the next time I'm blogging.

Edward Said would be peeved with me

My last week or so in Cairo has been rather nice. My professors all decided against holding finals during finals week, so my last day of class (Thursday) was my final day at AUC. While everyone else finishes up their exams, I'm doing some shopping, sleeping lots, and seeing more sights around the city. Thursday, Heather and I are leaving Cairo for about a week and a half on the road. We'll be arriving back in the US on June 7th :)

All things considered, I'll be happy to leave. It's been a difficult semester in a lot of ways. I've made some incredible friends and will miss them very much, but plans to meet up in the States are keeping me from getting too upset about us going our separate ways. Cairo doesn't rank high on the list of cities I've visited. Like Mumbai, it's a fascinating place to visit, but in many ways a horrible place to live. I won't be missing much about it. Truthfully, it's hard to see the value of an experience like this right away, so I'm trying not to jump to any conclusions. My written Arabic is significantly better, and my Colloquial is much better than I'd hoped after starting at square one. I hope I'll be able to learn more one day. I've seen some really unique scenery, eaten quite a lot of unusual food, and walked through sandstorms to get to class. I've also struggled to find a comfortable place in a culture that's wildly different from my own, and have really grown to embrace my roots for that reason. Sorry, Edward Said, but there are some cultural generalizations I have to make.

I can't help feeling disappointed at how little contact I've had with Egyptians. I have a few good Egyptians friends here who I'll really miss, but I've honestly spent most of the last five months with Americans. This is partly my fault. In a lot of ways, I should have made more of an effort to get close to the Egyptians around me. On the other hand, this is easier said than done under the circumstances. I've done some thinking about it and concluded that there are aspects of my personality (and culture) that just haven't aligned with Egyptian culture. Growing up with brothers and male cousins and male friends taught me to be competitive, independent, and generally not very girly. I haven't felt these qualities have been very well-received here.... not because it's unacceptable, just because it's wildly outside the norm for women.

In Kenya, I enjoyed staring back at the people who stared at me and yelling hello back to anyone who yelled, "Jambo, mzungu!" to me. That doesn't work here. The stares here aren't friendly like they were in East Africa or violating like in India. I mentioned before the almost total absence of women in the public sphere; it's only men on the street, and somewhere near half of them will whistle at and/or verbally harass a foreign girl who walks by. Meeting someone's eyes only invites more harassment and more drastic efforts to get you to stop. I stare at the sidewalk when I walk here. The better my Egyptian Arabic has gotten, the more frustrating it's become to ignore the comments directed at me.

Additionally, friendships between men and women are highly uncommon here. Unmarried Egyptian women absolutely cannot go out with men without their parents' consent (meaning they basically need to be engaged), so it's considered strange for foreign women to do so. Hanging out at someone's house or entering the boys' side of the dorm are major no-nos as well, so spending time with my male friends means staying in public spaces where we have to spend money. Not a good thing on a study abroad student's budget. I can't express how much I miss hanging out.

We've met some nice Egyptian male friends who are slightly older, of course. At least I've been able to have some decent conversations that way. The problem is, any conversation inevitably turns toward my marital status. I experienced this when traveling in rural areas of East Africa last spring, but that was a two week trip. It got exhausting pretty fast this semester. I wear one of Ivan's rings on my right hand ring finger, which is where engagement rings are worn in Egypt, and I generally just run with that lie. It doesn't do me much good, though, as my imaginary fiancee isn't WITH me, and I am thus plenty eligible to marry any Egyptian man who comes along.

The treatment of women here is a fairly complex issue. My friend Jessica pointed out last time I wrote about it that the separation of space in society has a lot to do with us being ignored, catcalled, and generally treated as second-class citizens when we're outside the university. There's a lot of truth in that. It's still hard not to feel disrespected. I want to challenge expectations here and throw things back in men's faces, but it wouldn't accomplish much. It would just be culturally insensitive, really.

Egypt has been ranked the most religious country in the world in recent years. Modesty is very much embedded in Egyptian culture at this point, even for non-Muslims. I'm generally ok with this, but I'm also very much ready to be back in a place where I can talk freely to both sexes and wear short-sleeved shirts. The 100-degree heat is killing all of us girls. Going anywhere outside Zamalek or AUC means wearing jeans and long sleeves and often scarves. Not ideal.

Anyway, enough ranting. I haven't posted pictures in a while, and they usually helps balance out the negatives I talk about. Soooo... here's beautiful Alexandria on my second trip:

Just south of Alex is Lake Maryut. Effluent from several petrochemical plants has turned a section of it bright pink. Way to go, Egypt.

Coptic art and architecture seems to be pushed aside by Islamic art, but it's equally if not more impressive. This is the Monastery of the Syrians in Wadi Natrun, in between Cairo and Alex.


Mohammed Ali's mosque in the Cairo Citadel. Not very old or important, but still impressive.

Ibn Tulun mosque, which I believe is the oldest standing Islamic structure in Cairo that's still in use. Beautiful.

I finally made it to Al-Azhar Park for a picnic. It's Cairo's only major park, and it was built a few years back on top of a landfill thanks to a microloan. There was a little grass and some trees. I was happy.
And, at long last, a view of Cairo from above. I took this from the Citadel. It's been tough to call this city home.

Where university politics and world politics meet...

The last issue of the American University in Cairo's student newspaper, The Caravan, came out last week. It was a special report on the relationship between Egypt, AUC, and the US, and it was one of the most emotionally exhausting things I've ever read. It's a little funny... I wondered, before coming here, if I would leave Egypt a vehement supporter of Palestine. I won't. I despise US policies toward Israel, but I also despise the blind support the Arab world gives Palestine. I despised this conflict before, but I despise it infinitely more now.

This issue of The Caravan drew from interviews with 100 AUC students and, in a really respectable bit of student reporting, talked through some of the contradictions that exist at AUC. The university has received a huge amount of funding from USAID. An Egyptian newspaper recently accused AUC of spying for the CIA, actually. AUC students, despite their hyperconsumption of American fashion, American education, American food (everyone eats lunch at McDonalds and gets coffee from Cinnabon on campus), American movies, and American culture in general, HATE America. They especially hate that AUC is funded by the same government that feeds money and military support to Israel. However, they feel that consuming these American products is in their best interest. I agree that it sometimes is, but it also seems to me that it's these individuals, more than any other Egyptians, who have the economic freedom to boycott American things. They just don't, cause they want to look cool.

Though Egypt's official stance is relatively pro-Israel, Egyptians and AUC students are most assuredly not. A lot of Egyptians I've met outside the university refuse to talk about politics with me. The 100 students The Caravan surveyed all denied Israel's right to exist. There are a couple of outrageous quotes from the student body president in the issue, including: "having a group supporting Israel on campus or even off campus is contradicting our beliefs as humans and our beliefs as Egyptians."

Not exactly surprising, but still strong words. I think what bothers me most is that I once considered American attitudes the biggest problem in this conflict. While they are certainly a problem, these sweeping generalizations, stereotypes, and absurd propaganda are obviously coming from both sides.

There's an assumption here that the American people are 100% aligned with the American government, and thus 100% aligned with Israel. It's frustrating to all of us here, particularly since the vast majority of the exchange students are supporters of Palestine. I'm personally just frustrated that there can't be any kind of sane discussion on the subject. I understand that people in this part of the world can't become emotionally detached from the conflict, but it still seems absurd to refuse to discuss the issue or listen to alternative viewpoints.

Here's what I mean. We've broached the subject in only one of my courses, and it was nearly war in the classroom. Two American students attempted to defend Israel, largely in the interest of playing devil's advocate, and were positively crushed by the other thirty students in the class. There is only one side to the argument here, just like there is only one side to it in the American media and government. It's infuriating to read The Caravan and hear AUC students calls Americans closed-minded, prejudiced, and uneducated, when we can't have a constructive debate on the subject in a classroom at the best university in Egypt. AUC offers only a couple of courses on Israel because no one wants to take them. Meanwhile, several hundred American students, majoring in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic, are walking their hallways and struggling to get to know their classmates better. Yet we are the sole source of the problem, in their eyes.

Yes, I'm actually being defensive as an American, maybe for the first time in my life. I know we students here at the exception, and that many Americans really ARE ignorant and discriminatory, and that George W. Bush was one of the most hateful and blinded leaders the world has ever seen, but it still hurts and angers me to hear what these Egyptian students think of us.

Views of the Iraq War also haven't surprised me, but have still managed to shake me up a little. "George Bush ruined American's relationship with the Middle East" is something I've been trained to say as a Democrat, but I don't think I knew what it really meant until this semester. This war destroyed every shred of trust the Arab world had in the US. Why wouldn't it? Our invasion was immoral, myopic, and illegal in every possible sense. How could these actions NOT be perceived as an attack on Islamic culture itself, and a deliberate threat aimed at the greater Islamic world? By the time he left office, my hatred for George Bush had mingled with pity and faded to a dull ache, but it's now back and infinitely stronger than it was before. He and his administration were the elected representatives of the American people, and they've plunged our relationship with the Arab world into the Dark Ages.

My friends like to tease me about my insatiable optimism and make up their own ridiculous "Optimistic Rachel" statements. I have no optimism when it comes to this, truthfully. I'm doing the best I can. I'm here studying, making friends, and trying to show people what American people are really like. I'm dedicating my life to promoting cross-cultural communication, equality, and peace, but even in classrooms at AUC, so much of what I see is hatred.

So I'll try to lighten the mood next time. I know it's a sensitive topic, and I hope nobody is too offended (and I hope no AUC students read this... ever). I just needed to get it all written down. I'm in my last week of class now and am very pleased about it. The weather snapped into summer on Saturday, and it's now 100-105 degrees every afternoon. DC should be nice after this...