Part 6

!!السلام عليكم

As-Salaamu Alaykum!!

Checking back in. First of all, language learning has been going well. I gotta give a shout out to the spot im at in Egypt called Arab Academy. They got great staff doing good work. If you find yourself wanting to learn Arabic in Cairo, this is the spot.

So it was my first time in a desert this past weekend. Like an actual desert. Deserts are big yo. Like you just keep going and going in the toyota with four-wheel-drive up and down something between a cliff and a hill and its sand as far as the eye can see.

I mean i guess if you go back far enough the whole earth was under water right? But its still pretty wild to see whale bones in the middle of a sahara. Like whales weren’t the first creatures on this sphere.

The weather is so nice this time of year, but there was quite a bit of wind so no sand-boarding this time. That looked like a good spot tho.

Some more general thoughts and info on Egypt and more specifically Cairo.

Egypt isn’t called Egypt. Its called Misr. A lot of countries in the Middle (of what) East (of what) are mispronounced in English, French and consequently many languages from outside these regions. Some are slight like Jordan/Ordun or Palestine/Filistine, but Misr? come on. Egypt doesn’t even sound like Misr. Cairo could be better anglicised as Qahera, i think. based on my current level of Arabic, that would still be beginner by the way. Indians(American) will always be Indians and Egypt will remain Egypt, eh?

But yo people are mad friendly here. Everyone is talking to eachother, a lot less people on their phones. An early 2000s parent’s dream lol. I mean everyone’s got a phone but folks just be more chatty, its dope. Not a lot of English unless youre in Maadi where all the “expats” live. Non-Sequitur, but expats are immigrants but Brits and Americans are tryna admit that they too can immigrate. Right? why we letting folks call themselves expats, stop being so DRAMATIC lol.

Back to friendliness. Almost got arrested the other day. Okay that was back to DRAMATIC, let me explain… Walking with the homie down the street, we are passing this area that is kind of gated up, a lot of security dudes and cops are guarding next to a metal detector. Time to pray Asr so we asked them if we could pray where they pray. Naturally they get a little sussed out that two random dudes are trying to check out the police masjid. Oddly enough, they said yeah go ahead and showed us where it was. We went in and did our salat while this security guard watched us. When we tried to leave he confronted us asking us where we were from and to show him identification. This is the part of the story where me and Khalil didn’t have any forms of identification on us. Now this is the part of the story where the security dude marches us over to his superior.

Now we are letting this larger young guy, probably 30, with gel pulling his hair back like a Scorsese film, search our bags. Hes saying something like “Okay so youre Libyan and youre American, but there is no way to prove it.” He lights his cigarette, inhales. exhales. Then its “come with me”

We follow him to an office where we meet his superiors, chilling. one is watching football, the other is rather large. The larger guy takes the lead and asks us for ID again. We cant provide that so instead Khalil is telling him our life stories. As the conversation continues, the tone gets lighter until the man watching football looks up and goes “welcome to Egypt” and i realize that no we are just chilling. They were bored and just wanted to talk at this point. So we chilled with them for a little bit telling them about our week and trip to Faiyoum and showed them pictures, told them a good spots to stay. First time i ever chilled with cops! A lot of firsts this trip.

Masalama!