idreamofcairo

Istanbul

The city is a blue hotel room and soggy shoes
and sweet sweet coffee served
by tall dark and handsome baristas
grey-blue water on the Bosphorus
and long walks across the bridges
where old men cast their lines in hopes of fish.

Boots and raincoats in all the windows of all the stores
roasted chestnuts and corn on the cob and pretzels
for sale on the street
you find a hole-in-the-wall café
with fresh-made soup and crusty grilled cheese sandwiches
lemonade with mint and Tabu in Turkish.

The spires of the Aya Sofia point toward God
as the trolley glides into the station
and men hawk star and crescent earrings
five lira for a pair or eight for two
because you are beautiful
and the earrings make you moreso.

You laugh because it's expected
and blush because you don't take compliments well
and even though you know it's not actually a steal
you buy the earrings
because you don't know if you'll ever be back
and you don't have time for regrets.

The Big Lie About the "Life of the Mind": Some truth about graduate school. It kind of makes me want to go to cosmetology or culinary school...

The White Path: Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol's website. He's one of the coolest people we encountered in MESP, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about politics and religion. Articles of interest (to me, anyway) are An Open Letter to Israelis and Toward a Liberal "Political Islam"?

Mediocre Criminal Turned Top Jailhouse Lawyer: It is what it is. Kind of an interesting story - one that gives me hope for my own (possible) future as an attorney. (They may need to change the firm name to Stolz, Leo, Anders, Nistler, and Banks, though.)

As most of you know, I spent roughly three months in Egypt, living in a relatively conservative, predominantly Muslim neighborhood called Agouza. The way the program is set up, the thirty students live in four flats within a couple of blocks of the villa where we take classes, eat breakfast and lunch, and hang out. On days when we had class (four times a week), we walked to the villa. On days when we didn't, we walked everywhere else. If we wanted groceries, we walked down to Shaheen to the grocer. If we wanted Naema's (a fastfood place), we walked the five-ish blocks to the Corniche - the road that runs by the Nile. If we wanted to go shopping in Tahrir or to go to church in Maadi, we took a taxi to Midan Tahrir and shopped, or hopped on the metro.

If it was dark, we couldn't go alone, more because of our parents and home universities than because it was actually unsafe.

Then again, if it was dark, we ladies didn't really want to go out alone anyway. Not because we were worried about our safety (honestly, I was safer wandering Cairo completely alone than I would be in a group in cities of comparable size in the US). That wasn't the issue. The issue was that we knew walking alone would get us cat-calls, wolf-whistles, and potentially, slapped butts.

Before you freak out on me and start yelling, "ABBY WHY DID YOU NOT TELL US ABOUT THIS SOONER? WE WOULD HAVE LOADED OUR SHOTGUNS AND COME TO YOUR RESCUE!" I want you to understand something: despite the verbal harassment and blatant objectification, I never felt particularly threatened. I know that seems counterintuitive, but it's true.

(Full disclosure: My experience was vastly different from the experience of some of the other girls in our group. A couple girls had some horror stories of being groped on the train or having their butts pinched as they walked down the street. I was never physically groped, and I did not experience a lot of harassment in general. Whether this is because I was oblivious to it, impervious to it, or simply lucky enough to appear confident and assertive enough that men left me alone, I do not know. I can tell you, however, that the worst and most upsetting instance of harassment that I experienced was one of the last nights we were in Cairo. Brian and I had gotten takeaway for dinner and walked to the Corniche to eat it. On our way back, we had to cross the Corniche Road, and while we stood in the median, a taxi driver wolf-whistled at me. Brian - who is over six feet and well-built - was standing right next to me. I wanted to cry, and he wanted to punch someone.)

Even though I was called "ota" (cat) and "mozza" (meat) and told (repeatedly) "Welcome to Cairo" by men who sound like they're trying to be Antonio Banderas, I also was very aware that the verbal harassment was as far as it was going to go. Cairo -- and the rest of the Middle East in general -- functions largely as a shame/honor society. Men can get away with the verbal harassment because it has become a societal norm (which is a discussion for another post). However, if a man tried to physically assault you, all you had to do was start screaming and he'd immediately stop. You could be screaming gibberish, but everyone around you would drop what they were doing -- even if they didn't know you and had never seen you before -- and help you, and the man would be shamed. Being shamed is such a good deterrent that in many cases, all you have to do is say, "Hey!" and the men calling you a spicy girl would leave you alone.

So yeah. Even though the verbal harassment was bad, and it got to me a couple of times, I never felt like I was truly in danger. I didn't walk in fear of being assaulted or attacked or raped. I didn't ever feel a need to carry a knife on me or to keep my keys sandwiched between my fingers. For the most part, I walked through the streets with supreme confidence in both myself and my security, sure of where I was going, where I was coming from, and what I was doing.

So much has happened in the past several weeks and my internet time is so limited, that I'm not even going to attempt to tell you about everything until I get home. My computer battery got zapped, so I'm at the mercy of friends for computer use at the moment (which limits my internet use even further). I've been hard-copy journaling like crazy, though, so I will have things to say when I do my massive picture posts after my return to the states.

Possibly I should have known I wouldn't be updating this regularly, but oh well.

Write again soon.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to drop a note and let you all know that I've made it safely to Cairo. Sitting in a somewhat grimy internet cafe just up the block from our flat, listening to what sounds vaguely like Eminem (not kidding). Miss you guys lots - especially these first couple of days. Talk to you again soon!

So the first leg of my journey has been completed - the parental units and I are in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., until Tuesday, when I fly out.

I'm currently sitting in the lobby of the Homewood Suites, listening to the noisy people who apparently had a party of some sort. They might be tipsy, but I think they're just having a loud conversation about college and airplanes (ironic, no?).

Meanwhile, I'm trying to think through all of my packing and make sure I didn't leave anything important besides my well-traveled deck of cards at home (alas, my Neptune deck is sitting somewhere in my bedroom several hundred miles away from here - this trip will not be the same without it). I believe I have everything I need (besides that deck of cards), and probably more than a couple things that I don't actually need but think I do. I will have to do some rearranging of my suitcases - at the moment, my larger one is much too heavy (though I have things in the duffle which will be staying with the parents).

Random: the best part about being in a big city is that it's very easy to find movies that would never come to JC/E-town. For instance, The Hurt Locker is playing in at least a couple theatres here. If we wind up not going to the Nationals game tomorrow or Sunday, I'm gonna push for that, methinks. It looks amazing, and it sort-of fits with where I'm going, right? Right?

This week was the fourth annual International Blog Against Racism Week. There's a lot of interesting discussions going on, which have been linked at the IBARW delicious. Haven't had time to go through them all (likely never will), but it's something I like to skim through, to remind myself that racism is on-going and it's not just white-on-black.

Maybe someday I'll be smart enough to have my own post to contribute, instead of just linking.

I've come to the realization that it is easier to cross-post than to rss feed. For one thing, cross-posting is instantaneous with Dreamwidth. For another, this way, I can guarantee I get your comments.

That said, if you want to follow along at LJ, I am idream_ofcairo. All posts will be cross-posted there, with comments enabled only on Dreamwidth (which means you can stop following the rss feed). I should have done it this way in the first place.

There's a documentary that just aired on PBS called, The Mosque in Morgantown, about a woman who is trying to change the way Muslims pray. Yes, that's Morgantown, WV. There's an op-ed about it here. This is definitely something I need to check out.

I've been watching the news and the internet for news on the elections in Iran, and I'm not sure how to make sense of it.

It appears that the election has been rigged - with as tight as the polls had been prior to the actual election, I do find it difficult to believe that Ahmadinejad won by such a significant margin.

There have been stories of violent reactions to peaceful protests. Communication with the world outside of Iran has been difficult, even for the press; the foreign correspondent on Rachel Maddow had to use his satellite phone to broadcast just a few minutes of footage.

I don't know how this will end, or what it means for Iran or the world at large. I'm afraid that it may end bloody - possibly even with an assassination. That is the last thing that the Middle East needs.