My First Girlfriend

I am so excited. I think I have made my first real girlfriend in Egypt. Sure, I have made lots of contacts with women for my research, and a few other fantastic women have taken me under their wings, but I think this is my first real Egyptian girl buddy. For whatever reason, it has been harder to make friends with Egyptian women, so this is has been so delightful for me. Well, maybe I am getting ahead of myself. She is actually my tutor, but yesterday we had a lovely outing and I think we may have bonded. To properly introduce her, I should also say that she is an excellent teacher. In addition to being an excellent Arabic language teacher, she has also done extensive Islamic studies (graduating from the top Islamic seminary, al-Azhar University) and has been very patient with my slow, stumbling Quranic recitations. She had asked me if I wouldn't mind going with her to an information seminar on the Fulbright grant, as she is interested in studying in the United States. I happily agreed, and we scheduled our outing for Tuesday. Then somehow it came up that she loved to crochet, and I excitedly burst out that I loved to knit, and she firmly suggests that we go together to the crafts store after our trip to Fulbright.

After checking out the Fulbright Commission, we took the metro to the neighborhood of Shubra--no relation--and we begin to stroll in the sunshine. We try to think of some good projects for her to propose for her Fulbright application, and while I was pensively listening to her thoughtful description of America as a place where all nationalities, cultures, and races mix together and how she would love to study there, I some how slipped on a bottle cap. I teeter-totter for like 3 seconds desperately grabbing on to my new friends silk dress, frantically clutching whatever I could get my hands on (turned out to be her hip) while she gasps and tries to catch me. Somehow, I regain balance and begin to gush out apologies, hoping I haven't ruined our afternoon, but she is too concerned with me to even blink. From then on, my hand was held tightly as we crossed the streets.

We went and stopped for nuts, a popular street snack here, and eventually wandered to the shop. I picked out a soft green and cream for a scarf, and picked up a set of needles. Knitting in Arabic is "Tatreko", but this sounds like a European word that somehow slipped into the lexicon. Crochet is, well, crochet. Wool is "Soof", where the term "Sufi" comes from to describe an adherent of Sufism, or Islamic Mysticism. The store owner was very curious about me, and I could hear him ask my friend where I was from, if I was Muslim, if I liked Bush etc. I jumped in, as I am used to these questions, and he loved that I called Bush a donkey (himar, standard for idiot) and used the phrase "the time has come" for Bush to leave office. I didn't think twice of this conversation as I have had in hundreds of times, but my tutor was very embarrassed and apologized. I reassured her that I really didn't mind, and then we talked about how Egyptians are pretty good at separating their opinions of a government from opinions of a people, i.e. We may not like Bush, but you Americans are a-okay. Its always funny, because even if I didn't vote for him, we still collectively elected him. Sometimes I think that Egyptians give Americans more credit than we may deserve in terms of distancing us from our politics, after all, until November, this catastrophe is apparently the will of the people.

We finished off our outing with two glasses of sugar cane juice, and it was as delicious as it sounds. I will be finished with my tutoring this upcoming week, but I hope that my new friendship will continue. We may not have slumber parties, but I hope that we will have some knitting parties. Knit, pearl, politics, and culture, I can already tell that I am learning a lot from my new friend, as long as I watch out for the bottle caps.