Random Thoughts About Egypt

Women in Egypt are completely bundled up. Most have long sleeves and a scarf rapped around their head, covering their hair and their neck. There were even a few of the Afghanistan style veils where you can’t even see their eyes. In Cairo only there were some women that weren’t covering their hair, and this seemed to be accepted. We had an Egyptian inter-port student that got in the ship in India, and he explained how Egyptians think about it. He said that by covering themselves, women are respecting themselves. He then went on to say that if a woman respects herself that she deserves to be respected, and if she doesn’t respect herself that she doesn’t deserve to be respected.

Homosexuality is illegal in Egypt, and our inter-port student would get furious if gays were mentioned. He would get very angry and claim that homosexuals don’t actually exist. I don’t want to make him out to be a bad guy, just to show the attitude about women and gays in Egypt.
Cairo is a crazy place, and like New York it never sleeps. I read somewhere that living in Cairo is the equivalent of smoking 9 cigarettes a day, and I believe it. It was very polluted and the streets were clogged all day.

The food was super good, but pretty hard on the stomach. Our last lunch in Cairo, we were able to get ten falafel sandwiches and tea for about $1.75. If you eat at the right places and sleep in a cheep hostel, you could comfortably live in Egypt on less than ten dollars a day. Toward the end of our trip we were getting pretty confident in our stomachs and were even drinking tap water. This was a bad decision, and we both paid for it for about four days after we got back.

I was able to pick up a lot of Arabic, and towards the end I was stringing together some pretty good sentences and picking up a lot of what people were saying. The biggest hit was when I would roll into some place and announce “Ana mish minh henna!” which means “I am not from here!” People would laugh hysterically at this every time.

Before coming to Egypt, I had this picture in my head of a bunch of hostile Arab men that would hate us as Americans. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Egyptians were so friendly to us. It didn’t matter at all if we were white, American, Christian, or whatever. They don’t hate the West, and we were completely comfortable telling people where we were from. The military was pretty intense, but they were just there to protect us.

Recent terrorist activities had greatly shaped how I viewed Egypt before I got there. When we were traveling there, it was hard to believe that these extremists even exist. Egyptians, Muslims, and the rest of the Middle East are not a bunch of terrorists! A terrorist attack would be just as shocking and horrifying to them as it would be to us. These Islamic fundamentalists are a small group of people that attack western establishments, but most of all they are against secularism. They want to establish an Islamic state governed under religious law. They take a different interpretation of the Koran, and use violence to achieve their goals. The majority of Muslims are peaceful people who want absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or violence.

I spent a lot of time standing on the bridge in Dahab that had been bombed in April trying to imagine what it must have been like. There are memorials, but I couldn’t picture it. We were welcomed so warmly that it is hard to imagine that this kind of hate exists there. Bombings and violence seemed so foreign to the places I visited in Egypt. The main point that I am trying to make is that these extremists seem just as scary to Arabs as they do to us, and it is ludicrous to lump Arabs, Muslims, or the whole Middle East in the category of “terrorists.” Unfortunately, this is what most of America does.