Egyptian Fashion

First Impressions

Cairo, Egypt

I've been thinking about this entry since I arrived in Egypt, and after discussing hijab in my MSA class all week, it seemed the perfect time to get it out there.

Now, when I discussed this idea with my new roommate Nellie, who has lived in Cairo for 4 years, she took issue with several of my observations. Bear in mind that they are only first impressions. That said, many of my classmates have lived in Egypt before, and the professor has lived here all his life, and they tended to agree with most of what I'm about to say. My search for good photos also revealed this blogger who agrees with many of my observations, as well as expounding quite beautifully on many more of her own.

This is the photograph in my textbook:

The two women on the left are wearing the chimar, the third woman is wearing the niqab, and the woman on the right is wearing the hijab. In Amman, the hijab is the primary mark of modesty you'll see, and rarely falls much below the shoulders. In rural southern Jordan, you see a lot of niqab, but not so much in the places I've lived. Here in Cairo, the niqab is far more prevalent, and even more so in the villages we passed returning from the North Shore. The chimar is rare in Jordan, but very prevalent here, perhaps especially among middle-aged women and under the niqab. The girls on the right side of this picture are also wearing skirts, which are much more popular here than in Jordan; in this weather, I prefer them, too!

I've also seen a lot more chador here, like the women in the background of this picture:

I generally associate these with Shi'ites, particularly Iraqis and Iranians. Our professor says that they are a very new phenomenon in Egypt, only becoming popular in the last few years. I've seen some very interesting use of the chador, too, incorporating it into a headscarf.

There's also a marked difference in style. In Jordan, most women wear their headscarves not much below the shoulders, if not tucked right into their shirt collars. Here in Egypt, however, fashion seems to favor very long hijab, falling to the waist, hip or even knee:

From Moving to Egypt

There are more images in my Web Album, but you get the picture. It makes me wonder if this style of hijab isn't somehow cooler, and thus more suited to this climate. A style that definitely is cooler is the so-called "Spanish style" that leaves the neck exposed:

From Moving to Egypt

I got this image from The Hijab Blog, an interesting site by a Canadian woman who just adores Cairene hijab fashion.

Another popular trend I've noticed is the layered look:

From Moving to Egypt

This I confess to not understanding at all, as this style must be HOT in Egyptian weather.

In general, I would say that Egyptian girls are more likely to wear hijab than Jordanians, and more likely to wear a more conservative style. This was primarily where my roommate and I disagreed, she claiming that plenty of girls wore "hijab in name only," paired with clothes so tight and revealing that they may as well not bother with the scarf. I've certainly seen those girls here, and there are plenty of them, but not nearly as many as I'm used to seeing in Amman, or even in more rural parts of northern Jordan.

A Note On Terminology
What you will not see in Egypt (nor probably in France, England, or anywhere else that it's generating legal controversy) is the burka, a distinctive and comprehensive covering pretty much exclusive to Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan.

This is not a burka; it's a niqab, but with an extra layer of material covering the eyes:

Technology Isn't Always the Answer

Garbage Dreams: The Zebbaleen of Cairo

Cairo, Egypt

My roommate took me to an incredible documentary last night, Garbage Dreams. Not only was it in Egyptian colloquial Arabic so I could pretend it was homework, but it was a poignant, intriguing story.

Until recently, Cairo didn't have a municipal garbage collection service. They had the Zabbaleen. Mostly minority Coptic Christians and all of them very poor, the Zabbaleen saw an economic opportunity, and for generations they've been collecting, sorting, treating and recycling Cairenes' waste. By recycling 80% of what they collect, they are able to earn enough money to live.

Well, they were. And then globalization. Cairo hired foreign companies to collect trash in Africa's biggest city. Now the Zabbaleen face the threat of losing the only way of life they know. Just as bad, those foreign companies only recycle 20% of the waste they collect. An economic and ecological disaster.

The best part of the film is probably when Adham and Nabil go to Wales to see how recycling is done in the "developed" world. While their hostess, who clearly doesn't speak Arabic, shows them with great pride the state-of-the-art facility in Wales, the boys are at times awed by the technology, but mostly aghast at how much recyclable material gets past the machines and ends up in the landfill anyway. Pie in the face of Western liberal green innovation!

If you have a chance to see this film, it's not nearly as grim and grimy as you might expect!

Not My Cup of Tea

Mersa Matrouh & Alamein, Egypt

I understand that a lot of people get pulled into war on one side or the other for geo-political reasons having very little to do with their personalities. They end up fighting for the "wrong" side because it's the side they identify more strongly with. It doesn't mean that I can feel great sympathy for Hitler's famous Field Marshall Rommel. Yes, he fought a "fair" war against Hitler's explicit orders to, for example, immediately execute all Jewish POWs. I still find it difficult to follow along when the tour guide says that Rommel was a great man.

On our way home from Mersa Matrouh today, we stopped first at the Rommel Museum in Mersa Matrouh itself. The museum has been established in a cave where Rommel had his headquarters for the Battle for Northern Africa, and is filled with personal effects brought to the site by Rommel's son. The first thing you see when you walk in is a big Nazi flag. I guess I spent too many semesters studying 20th Century German history to take that flag as mere historical fact.

Then we stopped at the Commonwealth Cemetery in Alamein, where the WWII dead of the Commonwealth countries and their allies, including Jordanians and Egyptians, were buried. As mind-boggling as the numbers are of dead and missing from the African Front, I found it hard to register any sort of feeling for the place. Then again, maybe it was just the overbearing heat....

Sandy Beach, Rocky Beach

Mersa Matrouh, Egypt

This evening, we took the bus further west along the coast to see some of the more famous beaches in the area. The Cleopatra Beach, where the last and most famous Queen Cleopatra (the one who married Julius Caesar and Marc Antoni) supposedly bathed, had great rocks. I could've stayed for hours, photographing from different angles.

From Beach Weekend

Then we went a little further along the coast to Agiba Beach, known for its interesting rock formations.

From Beach Weekend

Messing About In Boats

Mersa Matrouh, Egypt

There's nothing more worth doing than messing about in boats!

- Ratty to Mole in The Wind In The Willows

After too much sun and not enough sunscreen on the beautiful white beach in Mersa Matrouh today, the whole ALI/CASA group went down the street to climb onto a pair of boats and see the city from the water.

From Beach Weekend

The bay was beautiful, the water as blue and clear as could be. Out near the line of rocks that protects the bay from the bigger waves of the Mediterranean, we stopped for some swimming and a backflip contest among the military men in the group.

From Beach Weekend

They made great eye candy!

I only wish we'd had an opportunity to sail on some faluka. Just as much as swimming, I love sailing, and it's a treat I haven't been able to indulge in for a very long time!

From Beach Weekend

Life As a Taxi Driver

Cairo, Egypt

Today in our colloquial Arabic class we were introduced to Rida', who has worked for 20 years as a taxi driver in Cairo.  We were invited to ask the questions we've always wanted to know the answers to.

Initially he became a taxi driver because when he finished his Associates Degree he had the option to work in an office somewhere, but could make a lot more money driving a cab. This is no longer true, he says; there are now many jobs that make a lot more money than a taxi driver. Still, the money is better than many. Rida' drives a split shift with the owner of the taxi. Rida' drives 6 hours in the morning, and the owner drives 6 hours in the afternoon. He pays the owner a flat fee of LE60 (about $12) per day, plus the cost of the gas (he has to returned the car with a full tank at the end of a shift), and the rest of what he makes is his to keep. Sometimes that's LE50, sometimes it's LE100 or more in a day. Considering that many Egyptians make LE300-400 or less per month, it's not a bad living. Nevertheless, he's pushing his 3 sons to go to university and choose some other profession.

Rida' has a Class A commercial drivers license, so he can drive anything, and in the afternoons he drives a full size bus. In the past several years, he's also driven buses on Hajj to Mecca and Medina. I can't imagine the stress of that event. As he describes it, everywhere you go on Hajj, as many as 3 million Muslims are going the same way at the same time, by bus or on foot.

But the best question, I think, was when our student teacher Mahmoud said, "I drive in this city for just half an hour and I'm impossibly frustrated, and I don't have to deal with customers who sometimes try to rip me off. How do you keep your cool for 6 hours in this job?"

For Rida', it was a matter of faith.  He recited for us some of the dhikr, or invocations, that he uses to remind himself of the bigger picture. He was quite mellow and philosophical about it. Sometimes, he said, people did pay him far less than the trip was worth, but in his experience it wasn't worth getting upset over, because every customer who cheats him is followed by an overly generous tip, like the man who paid him LE50 for a LE20 ride.

Someone else asked him who were better customers: rich people or poor people? He looked quite embarrassed by his answer, knowing that by Egyptian standards his whole audience were rich people. Unfortunately, he said, rich people were more likely to underpay or fail to tip, and it's the poorer people who are more likely to give tips of 50% or more. He also said that sometimes a customer will stop him and say that they need a ride but have no money, and as long as they ask before they get into the cab, he generally gives them a ride.

There were many other interesting tidbits in the conversation, but I'd call those the highlights.

Sun Gods and Eternal Waters

The Great Pyramids

Giza, Egypt

I went to the Giza pyramids a year ago, but without a guide and immediately after an exhausting marathon 30 hour trip to Luxor, so I didn't get as much out of the experience as I could have. This time, I went with an art history professor from American University in Cairo, and while we didn't get much time to take artsy photos as I did on the last trip, I learned an awful lot, and saw a lot of things I didn't know were there last time I went.

From Giza by Tour Guide

Ancient Egyptians believed that an individual was composed of three parts: the body, the ka and the ba. The ba was what we conventionally consider the soul, it flies away to the afterworld at death, is often pictured as a bird with a human head, and returns in search of its body after death. The ka, which our guide characterized as the intellect, remains on earth and must be provided with shelter and sustenance (real or, in a pinch, symbolic food and water) after death. The pyramid is shelter for the soul of the pharoah, generally accompanied by smaller pyramids for his wife and important female relatives.

From Giza by Tour Guide

Beyond that are the mustaba, to shelter the ka of the pharoah's important advisers, nobles and hangers on.

From Giza by Tour Guide

Ancient Egyptians also believed that the ba had to cross the Eternal Waters in order to reach heaven. Water and its ebb and flow, of course, were crucial to the success of the great Nile culture, and understanding and navigating those waters was an important skill for an ancient Egyptian. They interpreted the Eternal Waters quite literally, and dug symbolic boat pits beside each pyramid to represent the vessel that would care the ba across those Eternal Waters.

From Giza by Tour Guide

But inside what I took on my last visit to be an incredibly ugly and incongruous monstrosity beside the Great Temple of Kufu turned out to house a treasure I never would have guessed at, an actual boat that was probably once used in service to the Pharoah Kufu himself, was buried with him, and has been reconstructed more or less in situ in the Boat Museum. I won't bore you with the details here, since you can find them in the captions of the photo album.

From Giza by Tour Guide

Same Thing, Different Country

Alexandria, Egypt

One of the things I did for all my new roommates when they moved in with me in Amman was take them on a trip with Tareef Cycling Club. So it was only karma that my roommate here in Cairo should propose a cycling trip with a Cairene excursion club to Alexandria. We met the Weekend Trips group at the crack of dawn for the long bus ride to the North Coast and Alexandria, second biggest city in Egypt.

From Cycling in Alexandria

We started at the east end of the Corniche, the road and promenade that runs all the way along the coast and separates the city from the beach.

From Cycling in Alexandria

It was a nice flat ride, easy going except for the part where you have to either dodge crazy Egyptian drivers, or unsuspecting Egyptian pedestrians. Cycling is rather new to Egypt....

From Cycling in Alexandria

We ended our trip at the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, commemorating the largest library of the ancient world, one of ancient Alexandria's major claims to fame. (The other was the Alexandria Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.) As we finished the 13km, there was a round of applause for each cyclist. They're an excellent group. There were also lots of group pictures in front of the library while they loaded the bikes back on the truck.

From Cycling in Alexandria

After our cycling trip, we had lunch at a lovely little Indonesian restaurant. The owner's daughter is a frequent flier on Weekend Trips, so when she offered lunch, we arrived with twice as many customers as she had tables.... The food was excellent!

From Cycling in Alexandria

Then we spent some time in Montaza Park, and along the seashore before heading back to Cairo. I'm really looking forward to more trips with this group!

Dealing With Harassment

A Comparative Study of Trainings

Cairo, Egypt

We had a speaker today, a professor who has lived in Egypt pretty much all of my life, since she was a CASA Fellow back in 1982 and married an Egyptian. She gave us some interesting vocabulary for the moments when you just can't keep your mouth shut, like "Act like a man!" and "You've been brought up in the gutter!" She also gave some interesting background to why tourists and other Westerners are such frequent targets of scams and overpriced goods. The average Egyptian teacher makes LE300, which is about $60 a month; the average government work, LE400. Our rent alone is twice that, our stipend 4x as much, so by Egyptian standards we're very, very rich. The economic disparity is far, far greater than Jordan, and the competition for what jobs exist is far tougher.

She told some really interesting stories about various students and friends of hers over the years, but it was still a lecture. I found myself comparing it to the lesson on harassment that we did way back in Peace Corps Pre-Service Training in Ma'in, and found myself almost laughing out loud in the middle of the lecture at a memory of Jesse.

Our main objective in Peace Corps was to learn the language, so after drilling the terms for a bit, Jenn had us roleplay harassment scenarios. Jeremy and Jesse, as the only guys, were naturally chosen to play the role of the creepy Arab man. Jeremy is too sweet of a guy to do a convincing creep, but Jesse.... Even after Jesse went back to his fiancee in America, we were still talking about how well he played his part. It quickly ceased to feel like a roleplay and started to feel like you really were being stalked...!

In any case, I've determined that I learned a valuable lesson in Jordan. When my roommate and I walk down the street in Cairo, she's constantly bristling at the hissing and whistling of the men we pass ... but I don't even hear it! And the last 18 months in Jordan, when I was making 8x what most Jordanians could make at the same job, I became quite comfortable with what this professor termed "noblesse oblige," the idea that the few guinea that we're scammed of on a regular basis here doesn't make much difference to us ... but can mean a rare opportunity for protein for dinner that night for an Egyptian.

Living In a Foreign Language

Cairo, Egypt

I had completely forgotten how exhausting it is to live in another language!

Way back when I was a ROTEX helping to host an Inbound weekend for Rotary Youth Exchange Scholars, two French girls took me aside in a very nervous, confidential manner. "We're very worried," they said. "Back in France, we get up at 6am, go to school, go out with our friends after dinner for beers, go clubbing, come back at 3am, and do it all again the next day. We get less than 4 hours of sleep a night, and we're not tired. Here in America, we go to bed at 8pm, sleep through the night, and are still exhausted all the time! We're worried that there's something seriously wrong with us!" So I explained to them that this is not unusual when you live in a country that speaks a different language than you do. Even if you think you're not doing much, your brain is working in overtime to process what you hear, and it's exhausting.

I can hardly believe that was ten years ago. How many immersion programs have I been in since that time? But I had completely forgotten what it was like, perhaps because I've been living an Arab country (Jordan) for two years without living in the Arabic language. In Amman, I worked as an English teacher, lived with English-speaking roommates, and spending my time with friends who, even though many of them are Arabs, preferred to speak in English.

Here in Egypt, though, as much as I am addressed in English in the streets, I spend hours and hours every day sitting in Arabic classes, particularly Modern Standard Arabic classes, a level of immersion I'm totally unaccustomed to, and I'm sleeping longer hours and still being more tired each day! It's just as well that our classes are only 4 days a week, because I think more would likely burn me out!

Definitely Not a City Girl!

Cairo, Egypt

"Umm ad-Dinya." That's what Egyptians call Cairo. "The Mother of the World." It's the largest city in Africa, the largest city in the Arab world, and the 11th largest city in the world. It's loud, crowded, dirty, smoggy, hazy and hot.

From Moving to Egypt

I've always known I wasn't a city girl. Living on the edge of Baltimore was adventurous of me. Living in Amman (only 15% of the population of Cairo!) was rather intimidating, and took some getting used to. Living in Cairo, well....

From Moving to Egypt

Cairo is overwhelming to me. Claustrophobic and nerve-wracking. Walking to class and back, okay. Following a group through the city, okay. Accompanying my roommate to the mall and the supermarket, doable. But the thought of having to find my way around this city by myself is almost frightening.

From Moving to Egypt

I mean, I can take a year here. There is a lot more green here than in Amman, tall deciduous trees more like the fauna I grew up with. Plus, the upside of being intimidated by the city is that I'll be more inclined to come home and study, and less inclined to go out and explore. That can only be good for my academic career. But I certainly don't want to live here for the long term. I'm a country gal, and I'm already looking forward to finding myself in a smaller town again!

Like Good Ole PA!

Cairo, Egypt

I remember this weather. I grew up with this weather: 98°F and 98% humidity! I hated this weather, I never got used to it, and I got away from it as quickly as possible!

Yes, Jordan can be very hot. Not as hot as Egypt, usually, but as hot as it's been this week. But Jordan has almost no humidity. My excessive sweating just disappears. Not so in Cairo!

I mentioned this at orientation today, and Prof. Iman said, "When I was growing up in Cairo, it was never humid like this!" While I appreciate what she was trying to do, it didn't exactly make me feel better. It's bloody humid here now!

New Classmates
On the other hand, I've met the other CASA Fellows (most of them, anyway) and they seem like a very nice group. I'm looking forward to the program, even if I'm less than enthusiastic about the weather! We've got a great program of trips and events taking shape, and a great group of people to share them with. I only wish that our tour guides on our trips would be English speakers, especially since we're all signing a language pledge to speak only Arabic while here....