Second Thanksgiving in Cairo

Happy Thanksgiving! Today's my favorite holiday, and this is the second year in a row I'm spending it without my family. Last year I went on the AUC trip out to the Red Sea monasteries, but this year's trip was to places I'd been already in the Fayoum. It's a strange feeling, being without my family on Thanksgiving. I'm not alone, though - I've received not one but two invitations to proper Thanksgiving dinners (tonight and tomorrow).

Today I've found two things to be thankful for. No, wait - actually it's three things.

I went out today to grab some fresh ingredients for my contributions to dinner(s). I knew there'd be no trouble with things being open, because Egyptians couldn't care less about Thanksgiving. Open stores on Thanksgiving - the first thing I'm grateful for today.

I decided to change it up a little and went to the souq down near Saad Zaghloul. I was there last week when I took the metro, and I was really surprised to see all the vendors around the metro stop. Today I stepped out into the brilliant sunshine and the warm air - the second thing I'm grateful for today.

I spent awhile browsing before buying. And here are my purchases:
5 beautiful peppers - red, yellow and orange ... 5 LE (overcharged)
6 fancy lemons, not the baladi ones ... 1 LE
1 bunch of dill ... 0.50 LE (overpaid without being asked)
1 bunch of cilantro ... 0.50 LE (ditto above)
6 gorgeous tiny sweet oranges ... 1.50 LE
1 bunch of mint ... 0.25 LE
1 kilo of green beans (what can I say, a whole kilo seemed like a good idea) ... 2.50 LE

And then I went to a greengrocer to round out my purchases (5.90 LE) with:
3 carrots (Egyptian carrots are great)
6 tomatoes
3 persimmons
3 spicy peppers

So all told, I paid LE 17.15 ($3.11) for all this fresh bounty:


And that's the third thing I'm grateful for - cheap, fresh food that I can walk to buy, to prepare for friends who have invited me into their homes. Brilliant.

Academic freedom

Somewhere along the line, I've forgotten to be grateful for one of the core values of my profession.

Maybe it happened when my third fall course was cancelled the week before classes started. Maybe it was when I realized my office had more dirt than electricity. Or maybe I'm most forgetful when I drag myself in the door after two hours commuting, two hours arguing with ungrateful students, and four more hours not actually accomplishing anything I'm trying to do.

But it's Thanksgiving, after all; time to count my blessings.

I'm reminded of them by Stanley Fish's article reviewing a new book on academic freedom in America. Fish uses words like "newness," "independence," and "inquiry" to push his point: that these career bonuses also come with the responsibility to use them productively and professionally.

I've complained often about the unprofessional attitude I see around me, not just here, but in my previous institutions. It's one of the main reasons I'm here in Cairo, actually; I was fed up by the culture I hated in grad school. To be fair, there was one main perpetrator, but when you're angry and depressed, it's easy to generalize. For every irresponsible academic I encounter, I do find ten or so who actually take their jobs - and their responsibilities - seriously.

It's not all four-week vacations for "conferences" and booze on the NIH's dime, after all. Some of us do actually teach - and value that teaching - while others see their contributions as focusing on research. I don't see many people who combine the two sucessfully. I'm sure not getting the research done that I "should" be.

I noticed this passage from the article: "Responding to an expressed concern that liberal faculty too often go on about the Iraq War in a course on an entirely unrelated subject ...."

Ahem. Guilty as charged. In my particular case, I use it as an example of 1) non-logical interpretation of evidence; 2) bias; 3) immunization against falsification; 4) the difference between ethics and morals. But I admit it, I have had to forcibly stop myself from "going on" in class about political matters. After all, I'm not a political scientist - just a paranoid, frustrated, expatriate scientist. Clearly I'm in no position to be thinking about the things going on around me.

I also liked Fish's clincher: "And you just have to love a book — O.K., I just have to love a book — that declares that while faculty must “respect students as persons,” they are under no obligation to respect the “ideas held by students.”"

Case in point: our recent class discussion on evolution. After our first small session, examining testable predictions of evolutionary theory and the empirical evidence upholding those predictions, I was packing my bag to leave the classroom when I happened to glance up.

All of my veiled students had surrounded me.

Oh my God, I thought, Here it comes.

To my surprise the initial assault came from an unexpected quarter. One of my shy 80-lb Christians flung herself at me through the circle of hejabis.

"But Doctor!" she announced, "Evolutionary theory contradicts what it says in the Bible about God creating Man!"

"Yes," I responded flatly. "Yes it does."

"But the Bible was written by God!"

"Actually, it was written by a bunch of men a few hundred years later." Never thought that particular piece of university knowledge would come in handy.

"But it's the word of God!" Her eyes were round, her arms were thrown out, she was practically quivering.

I started to get annoyed. "Based on what evidence?"

Indrawn breath from the whole circle. "What?"

I tried to rein myself in. "Look, this is a scientific thinking class. All scientific thinking is based on evidence. I'm showing you the evidence that the Earth is older than 6,000 years - directly contradicting what it says in the Bible. And I'm showing you the evidence that Man is related to all living things on Earth, and does not hold some sort of special place."

I pivoted to include the whole circle in my diatribe. "Your faith is your faith. Nothing I say is ever going to change what you've already decided you believe. The point of this class is to show you that there are other ways of thinking besides having other people tell you what to think. What you do with that knowledge, these tools, is up to you."

Of course, that's the party line. I do see that it's possible to hold two totally separate things - your faith, and your science - in your head at the same time. I, personally, have not chosen this path. It doesn't work for me. And while I respect my students' right to make their own decision, nowhere am I required to respect the decision that they make. As long as I don't cut anyone down in the classroom, I'm doing my job and fulfilling my responsibilities.

I think.

Photo journal 2

More candid photos from around town ....

That's right! This is the chopper for the discerning gourmand. But is it "particularly fast" and "certainly", or "particularly fast and particularly certainly?"
I get questions like this a lot over here.






This magazine cover was waiting for me the second I stepped into the Metro grocery store. It was like being thirteen again.
But now I'm noticing the second headline: Jack Black, Hollywood's Hottest ... what??? What could it possibly be??
I can't believe I cut this one off!



I used to love walking by this wall between classes.
My daily dose of democrazy is yet another victim of AUC's move to the New Campus.
I called it the "it could always be worse" wall.





This photo completely sums up Egypt for me.
Honest to God, I saw this switch in an elevator in a friend's building.
And yes, the camera is right side up.







The Christmas holiday bazaar where the embassies dump their commisary goods - including Christmas items - to alcohol and pork-starved khawagas ... all for outrageous prices.
Writing the word "charity" on your sign doesn't make me feel better about paying LE 100 for a sausage.
Eating the sausage will make me feel better about it.


There's a belly dancing festival in town.
The noise was unbelievable.

A little help?

How, for the love of God, can I get my cat to stop sitting on my laptop keyboard???

It drives me nuts. Every time I stop typing, the cat is sitting on the keyboard. I like to think she does it to get my hands on her instead of the keyboard. Or maybe she likes the warmth. I don't know.

But she's really good at messing up my Skype account, typing bizzare emails, and deleting entire Word documents I've unwisely stepped away from for a nanosecond.

I've tried yelling at her, throwing her off the keyboard, spraying her with water (not good for the laptop), and even hitting her (not a good tactic in any case). None of these things are working.

Is there some sort of widget that electrifies the keyboard unless you turn off the widget? I can see how this would also be good for small children and meddling coworkers.

Any ideas?

Phantom threat kills tourists

That's right, I said it. Anyone who's been to Egypt knows the ridiculous "convoy system" is more a danger than a help.

This particular rant is coming today because I just saw this story on CNN:

Six Belgians Die in Bus Accident in Egypt

A couple of weeks ago, a bus lost control on the road between Abu Simbel and Aswan. Surprise surprise, the accident was caused by "speeding, careless driving, and poor road conditions." I'll agree those things were all proximate causes - in Egypt, that's just called driving.

But the bigger issue is the government's instistence on the "convoy system," a relic of the security situation in Egypt in the late 1990s. Briefly, nearly 60 tourists were massacred in Hatshepsut's Temple in Luxor by Islamic militants looking to destabilize Egypt's government and tourist industry. The government attempted to save the tourist industry by reducing the liability of the tour operators - in other words, by jacking the "security" level through the roof. The government also spent several years wiping out the "terrorist" groups throughout Egypt. I'm whitewashing a complex issue here (I'm overlooking the bombings in Sinai, for example), but the core of the argument is valid.

So if the terrorists are gone, why are the movements of foreigners still strictly regulated?

In the major tourist centers such as Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel - in other words, basically anywhere outside Cairo or Alexandria - foreigners can only move between sites in large groups accompanied by a police presence (sometimes, incredibly, a helicopter). A few friends of ours have done the convoy, although I haven't been in one of the big ones. Here's a picture I found on the web:


So you've got at least one police truck leading, then a huge group of buses and minibuses, then at least one police truck following. There's frequently security inside some of the buses - which means a guy you don't know brings a gun (possibly even containing bullets) onto your bus without your permission. The police, of course, want to spend the absolute minimum amount of time actually working - and no doubt this job is excrutiatingly boring - so they lead the convoy through the desert at breakneck speed. The roads are terrible, the bus drivers aren't trained for racing, and for that matter, neither are the police. It's a recipe for disaster - and that disaster has struck over and over.

Now let me ask you a hypothetical question. Let's say you're a terrorist. Let's say you're looking to destabilize the political system in Egypt by killing a bunch of tourists and bringing down Egypt's tourist economy. You know that every single day, every tourist for fifty miles gathers in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. Here's the question - where, pray tell, are you going to put your bombs? Where's the most logical place?

I'm completely disgusted by this irrational nonsense. Last weekend I went to Minya in Middle Egypt with some of my colleagues. We were an official AUC event - we had two security men from AUC, my boss had arranged all our clearance in advance, and we were running late from the horrendous traffic in Cairo.

We got out to the first checkpoint out on the highway and our bus was stopped. Are there foreigners on this bus? You're not allowed to drive on this road at night! Turn around!

Granted, I loathe driving in Egypt at night. The drivers have this idiotic idea that driving with headlights off saves them money. Except, of course, just as you're passing another car, when you flip on your brights. I don't see how being dead is a tradeoff, but hey, maybe I'm the irrational one. And this highway is an exceptionally fatal one, due to all the heavy transport trucks speeding without headlights. So while I agreed with the decision on safety grounds, why in the name of God had we not been informed about this a week ago when my boss obtained our clearance for our travel schedule?

We turned around and headed for another highway. It got later and later. Finally we got to the first checkpoint on this second highway. And big surprise - since we were a busload of Americans, we had to have a police escort to drive on the highway. The cops had to be found, and woken up, and a truck had to be found for them to escort us ... all the way to the next local political boundary. Where the process had to be repeated from scratch (find cops, wake up cops ...) because no one called ahead to say we were coming. On the straight road. We didn't get to Minya until 2 in the morning.

And here's the best part. So we're going down the Corniche next to the Nile in downtown Minya. It's 2 o'clock in the morning and our police escort turns his lights and sirens on! Just in case there was a single terrorist in the 150 miles between Cairo and Minya who didn't know there was a busloads of Americans in the vicinity - our escort took care of that.

The next evening, after a long day's touring, a group of us wanted to go out, have a coffee, and smoke a shisha. Our security detail attempted to prevent us from leaving the hotel! So we're a group of AUC professors, who live in Cairo, and (to varying degrees) speak Arabic - and we're not permitted to leave our hotel in the evening! Needless to say, we weren't tolerating that bullshit. I learned how to say, "Am I a prisoner?" in Arabic. See? We're back to the Reverse Prison!

So why does this system exist at all? The government claims it's to protect its visitors - especially those notoriously lawsuit-lovin' Americans. But protect us from what exactly? If the government has wiped out all the terrorists - or had any effect whatsoever in reducing the threat of extremist violence - what do we have to be afraid of?

Along the same lines, if the government has wiped out all the terrorists, why do we have to have martial law in Egypt? Why is the constitution still suspended? Sadat was killed twenty years ago!

The answer is obvious. It is the perception of threat - not the threat itself - that lays the foundation for the suspension of civil liberties. Does this sound familiar, my fellow Americans? We agreed to a Pax Romana on September 12, 2001. God willing, we've finally thrown it off through the democratic institutions still left to us. I fear the Egyptians will not be so fortunate.

India likes caviar

I live a strange, strange life.

Late this afternoon I was literally clutching my stomach and groaning with hunger. I'd only eaten a grossly-overpriced croissant for lunch, and my propitiatory offering of late afternoon blackberry yogurt (my absolute favorite) was met sulkily by my tummy.

Then the doorbell rang. And when I answered it, there was a man holding three enormous boxes of food out to me.

I couldn't believe it - my own deus ex machina.

After an increasingly desperate month-long search, I'd finally realized that the only venue option for our "wedding" party here in December is my own flat. Everyone else is too interested in giving me rules that I am privileged to pay them to follow. An LE 150 per bottle corkage fee??? Hotels should be paying me LE 150 to drink Egyptian wine. My last effort finally fell through when my liason with the last venue ignored my emails and calls for 10 days, and then told me alcohol couldn't be served there. I actually called KC in a tearful shouting rage, I was so furious at having been jerked around for almost 2 weeks.

So in the end it was my place or nothing. And as God as my witness, no one will ever tell me what to do in my own house.

The boy with the boxes was coming from the caterer I'd talked to. Le Pacha wanted me to come down during the day to talk to a caterer. I explained that I have a job. They said sorry, it was impossible for them to give me information over the phone. I said sorry - you just lost a whole mess of business. A coworker finally introduced me to a caterer who was willing to meet with me on my schedule. And the boxes were the samples he'd sent over for me - 2 boxes of canapes, and one box of pastries.

Suddenly faced with the prospect of about 60 seafood canapes, I panicked. I called some friends upstairs to join me, the canapes, and a bottle of wine, but they backed out because they'd forgotten a previous engagement.

Meanwhile, India was trying to tear the refrigerator door off its hinges.

I gamely snacked through as many smoked salmon, shrimp, anchovy, crab, and pate canapes as I could manage. I had to ignore the caviar ones altogether - I don't actually like caviar, despite strenuous efforts in Russia. What can I say? I don't like eggs. Apparently any kind of eggs.

I pulled apart the remaining canapes to rescue the seafood from oblivion. But in the end I was left with a full plate of pate and caviar canapes that I didn't want. And it seemed positively sinful to give it to the cat (plus I feared her physiological retribution).

I rang the doorbells of my next-door neighbors; I even went upstairs just in case my friends were pulling my leg and just didn't want to come over. Finally I went downstairs with my plate in my hands to give the food to the parking attendants.

I couldn't find anyone. I had a plate of caviar and pate that I literally couldn't give away.

Finally I went into the passageway that led behind the lobby. I suspected that that was where my bawaaba lived, although I'd certainly never been invited back there. When my presence was detected, a ruckus ensued - but they took the canapes and washed my plate.

I felt strange. I felt like I was treating them like stray animals, giving them food I didn't want. I can't even tell if I offended them or not. Was it sharing or was it charity? I'm not sure.

I scraped a few stray fish eggs out of the box and gave them to India. In her greedy haste she knocked most of the eggs out of the saucer onto the floor, but she found every little caviar molecule. I decided that too many eggs would make her sick (based on what empirical evidence, I can't imagine), so I stirred the last eggs into her cat food.

So I guess everyone's happy tonight.

Back blog: Lebanon

I've realized that I'll never have the time I need to get everything done. So I'm going to make time and finally blog about a trip I took to Lebanon about a month ago, during Eid El Fitr. This is the "small" Eid that celebrates the end of Ramadan - and I had a few days off. For a couple weeks before, some friends and I had tried to come up with a plan to get out of Cairo. Nothing was coming to fruition - until YK suggested Lebanon.

Make it happen, I said, and I'll be there. Truly I'm a paragon of laziness. But he did make it happen - and four of us went to Lebanon for 4 nights.

On the recommendation of a Beiruti friend we stayed at the Mayflower hotel in Hamra. The hotel was perfectly serviceable - just fine for a base for a few days.

Beirut is wonderful - cosmopolitan, culturally rich, and simply teeming with good food and good wine. What a blessed change from Cairo! We had a spectacular Armenian dinner at Mayrig, which served to banish the experience a few hours earlier of avocado ice cream. What can I say? I thought it was a good idea - and I was wrong.

We spent a few days outside the city too. One of my students had urged me to go to the Jeita Grotto, so at my instigation we stopped there on our way to Byblos. The grotto is beautiful - upper and lower enormous galleries, filled with lovely stone formations. There was even an underground river - site of our bizarre encounter with the Lebanese McCain supporter. The whole experience was a little too Disneyland for my taste, but I had to admire the effort that went into developing the site.


Our next stop was Byblos, just up the coast from Beirut. We had a lovely fish lunch and a nice ramble through the ruins. More than once during our trip I found myself wondering what the hell Lebanese women were thinking when they got dressed in the morning. For example: ah, I know I'm going to the ruins of a Crusader fortress today, so why don't I get dressed from head to toe in scarlet, and don my huge red heeled mules? Can't imagine what this woman was thinking except for that:


On the other hand, I did manage to startle some other tourists. At Byblos there are very deep burial shafts with sarcophagi secreted in the bottom. I found an easier entrance to one of the chambers and scaled down the last few feet of the shaft to inspect the sarcophagus. I heard some very loud exclamations when I walked back into the sunlight in the shaft - followed by a shouted injunction to watch out for snakes. Not helpful.

That same night we took a cable car up the mountain behind the city to meet some friends for dinner at their house. Everything was lovely (except the cable car ride - I'm not a fan of dangling coffins) - the view, the food, the wine. Our host took a few of us (and our glasses of wine) for a late night tour of the Christian town. We hung out the sunroof of his SUV, picking cedar cones and pink peppercorns and carob pods from the trees on the cliffside. Their home smelled of basil and lamb and gardenia. It was absolutely magical.

Next day was spent in and around Beirut. NS and I made a special trip to the Beirut National Museum, a small but well-tended collection downtown. The most moving part of the experience was watching the movie about how the museum was both protected and damaged during the civil war.



















Next day it was off to the Roman ruins of Baalbeck in the northwest of Lebanon, near the border with Syria. This is Hezbollah territory, but other than a mildly alarming incident at a roadblock involving the "purchase" of propaganda, we had no trouble. I tell you, nothing says "people's choice" like a flag with the name of God and an automatic weapon.


I've seen a lot of ancient ruins in the last year or so - but Baalbeck blew me away. The sheer size of the place is overwhelming, and that's after seeing Karnak. These columns are famous for their size ... that's me, teeny-tiny at the base of the pediment. It never ceases to amaze me that cultures do the effort/money/reward cost/benefit analysis and come up with things like Baalbeck, and Maccu Pichu, and Masada. Of course, we've got the Iraq war, I suppose.


We stopped at the Ksara winery on the way back to Beirut for a tasting. To be fair, our first day in Beirut we'd gone to a grocery store and pre-emptively bought Lebanese wine (cheap and drinkable!!!), but we were glad to be in the wine country proper. I was impressed by the vineyard - not fantastic, but well-run, the tasting was free, and it was a hell of a lot better than anything I can get in Egypt.

The wine was our second run-in with Bekaa grapes that day - on our way up to Baalbeck, we'd pulled over by the side of the road and bought grapes from a woman for about a dollar a kilo. We bought three different kinds and spent the whole day with sticky mouths and fingers. It was wonderful. In fact, the last day kind of summed up Lebanon for me. Wonderful people, beautiful land, rich culture, outstanding food ... and a dumb-shit political climate. You reckon that's what people say about us? Well, maybe they don't talk about the food too much.

Kenya itinerary set

After more than 3 weeks of reading, wrangling, and ... erm ... arithmetic (truly), we've managed to settle on an itinerary for safari in Kenya.


Briefly, we're spending 10 days traveling among game parks in southern Kenya. We're going to Samburu, Ol Pejeta (Mt Kenya), Aberdare, Lake Nakuru, and Masai Mara. I'm satisfied with the price we're paying (KC got us frequent flier tickets!), our pace, and I'm pretty sure I've convinced the guy that I'm not interested in Disneyland. We'll see.

We've actually luxed it up a bit more than I'd originally intended, but I just couldn't match the departure dates of the camping/hiking safari I'd wanted. So I think we'll be more comfortable on this trip than we usually are. We're not really the "fancy hotel" types.

I've tried making a Google map of this itinerary, with links and descriptions.

Any suggestions or comments, let us know!

I love this country

Today I was starving when I ran out to grocery shop in Garden City. I know that shopping hungry is never a good idea, so I stopped at the local taameya place.

I elbowed my way through the galabeya guys to the register. I ordered one taameya sandwich and one eggplant salad sandwich. What I really wanted was two sandwiches that had both taameya and eggplant in them, but whenever I try this I inevitably get two separate sandwiches. I think there's a cultural lesson there, linked to how I can never get my students to combine concepts.

Anyway, I paid LE 1.75 for my two sandwiches.

I walked a couple blocks, bought my groceries, and then succumbed to temptation and went back to the taameya place to order some more.

I ordered 4, but the guy wouldn't sell me fewer than 7. I wasn't going to argue.

And he charged me LE 1 for the 7 taameya. They were hot, and greasy, and salty, and crisp - in all, the perfect food that I laid awake at night in New Jersey thinking about this summer.

So I got exactly what I wanted, stuffed myself silly, thoroughly enjoyed myself - and paid LE 2.75 for the pleasure. That 49 cents US, my dears.

Take that, Delicious Inc!

Still got it

I was just unpacking my groceries in the kitchen when India lunged from the table onto my chest and wrapped her arms around my neck.

Three billion years of evolution went screaming through my body.

Red alert!!! Red alert!!! Recently mutilated carnivore is lunging at my face and she's got her arms around my neck!! Danger Danger DANGER!!!!

Then she licked my cheek and nuzzled her face against mine.

I broke out into a cold sweat and thought, Oh my God, she's just being affectionate.

My searingly clear vision of my body on the floor, surrounded by tomatoes and green beans, with India worrying my neck, her white fur turning pink ... faded away.

Good to know the ol' fight-or-flight response still works. Reckon I'll need it in Kenya in a few weeks. Maybe India was just trying to help.