Dinner and a Movie (and a Protest)

Effervescent Reader –

This week was far more eventful than last; where do I even begin?! Things started off with a bang as my roommate and I made our way up to Shubra, an area of the city about twenty minutes north of downtown Cairo (where I live). It’s also mostly inhabited by locals, which made me happy because we didn’t hear any English and didn’t see any bumbling tourists. We made the trek north in order to spend the afternoon with a gentlemen we’d met near Al-Azhar mosque in Old Cairo. His name is Hussein, and, as you know if you’ve ever spent time in the Arab world, it was not at all unusual for us to head over to someone’s house for dinner, having met this person casually on the street the week before. We ended up spending four or five hours at his house, which is in a building owned by him and his extended family. His wife conjured up an amazing chicken-and-rice concoction, along with baked potatoes and a thick, soupy sauce poured over rice called mulukhiyya. All very local food, and all outrageously scrumptious. We extended a dinner invite to him and his family at our apartment, per guest-host etiquette.

That was last Friday. The next day, I walked ten minutes from my apartment to Dahab Hostel (if you remember, this is the place I stayed during my first week in Egypt), where a married couple I made friends with were crashing for a couple of nights. We were to meet up with Tarek, a photographer for Reuters, who wanted to take us over to al-Azhar gardens in Old Cairo. However, he told us that he had an assignment to cover a protest happening on the street outside the hostel. It turned out to be less exciting than any of us had hoped; there were about fifteen total protesters (and one hundred or so cops, of course) making speeches in support of Moussaui and those demonstrating in support of him in Tehran. In particular, the protest centered on Neda Soltan, a student whose violent death at the hands of Ahmadenijad’s Basij militia has become a high-profile rallying point for Moussaui loyalists. We did end up going to al-Azhar afterward, though not without Iran on everyone’s minds.

On Sunday, I and the other students in my study abroad program went to Ma’adi, a large-ish neighborhood twenty minutes south of downtown Cairo, to see a movie. Yes. It’s called “Tell [the Tale], O Sheherezad,” and it’s about a talk show host whose floundering career gets a shot in the arm when she decides to begin airing women telling stories about their problems in love. (yawn) Not to sound like a snob, but it was apparently stereotypical Egyptian cinematic fare: violent, schizophrenic women; domineering, misogynistic men; and love scenes featuring little or no kissing, which is a fairly scandalous thing to show in film and television in the Middle East. It was nice to go to a theater in Cairo and hang out with other students in the program, though, and it whetted my appetite for the classics of Egyptian cinema. Like “The Candle of Om Hashim” (that’s a direct translation, not sure if that’s the name in English), which is based on a short story by Yahya Haqqi and is truly a masterpiece. More about that and other topics next week. Until then, friends.

Salaam,
K