Your correspondant reports

I have a confession to make: I don’t speak Arabic. It’s likely not the most profound confession you’ve ever heard, but I really am hopeless. Even if it weren’t an incredibly complex and complicated language, even if it used letters I recognized and sounds I could pronounce, and even if the distance between the Arabic I would have learned in school and what is spoken on the streets of Cairo is as great or greater than the difference between Spanish and Italian, I would still be hopeless because my first exposure to the language was on the car ride from the airport with Ahmed. I can now say ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘house’. That’s pretty much it. And that’s okay by me, in the sense that I don’t realistically expect to learn fluent Eyptian in the six weeks I’m here, as much as I would dearly love to.

The problem is, I can’t say anything to anyone. A smile goes a long way, and some creative gesticulations will get you most things, but there’s a pretty low limit to what you can accomplish from a communicative standpoint. And as such, it’s unsurprising that I know so little about so many things, and don’t know much about Egypt or Egyptians. I didn’t come here just to see buildings but to see life and to see people and to hopefully meet some. My colleagues at work are hence for me worth their weight in gold. Half of them are Germans who speak some measure (or very good) Arabic and have considerable experience living as a foreigner in Cairo, and the other half are Egyptians who also speak a language I understand and have told me a bit about their lives.

It astounded me to learn, for example, that many of my Egyptian colleagues had a commute of up to two hours each way—four hours a day in traffic. The younger staff live with their families, one practically by the pyramids, and sometimes take multiple busses in order to get to work. Our 8-hour day is their 12-hour day. Apparently (and here I generalize, inducting from the limited sample of my colleagues a conclusion which is probably limited only to Egyptians of similar socioeconomic standing), the concept of a lunch break doesn’t exist, and most of the Egyptians in our office don’t eat lunch or anything at all.

Last night we went shopping for wedding rings. No, I’m not getting married, but someone from my office (a German couple) is, and it’s a better value to buy gold in Egypt. So we took a field trip down to Nasr City and hit up several jewelry shops with my colleague translating between the jewelers and the Germans, and this lovely woman with flawless and lightly-accented German was a godsend. It’s worthwhile going to a reputable jeweler who won’t cheat on the price, and it was a reassuring sign to see several women (perhaps ten) waiting outside his shop for him to return from prayers. (She also helped me acquire a SIM card for my phone for the actual price of LE15 and not LE200, which is what my friends—mistakenly—paid). There I was suggested to stick closer to the single man of the group to avoid being hassled—though to be honest, I think the verbal comments to which I would have been subject would be considered abusive for Egyptians, but since I don’t understand them, they don’t bother me.

Egyptians apparently love malls, or so they tell me. And while they are more expensive, perhaps, than items you would find on the street (I am firmly convinced that everything is for sale in Cairo somewhere, and you find the most random combination of items in the most unlikely places), malls are cleaner and more convenient, and you can go shopping and even try things on as you would anywhere else.

Everywhere I go, it’s clear I don’t fit in. I didn’t expect to, to be honest, and although I am used to being a foreigner, I am used to looking like everyone else, more or less. And here, no matter if your skin color would let you blend in, no matter how well you speak Egyptian, you won’t ever be “from” here. Forget about going native. And I stick out, here, as an obviously Western woman. Most women here wear headscarves most everywhere I go, though quite a few don’t, and it doesn’t seem to be an issue (but what do I know?). I thought about wearing one, along the lines of “when in Rome,” but I don’t want to be making a mockery of anything or pretending to be something I’m not—not that it would bother me, but that it might bother them that I’m pretending I’m Muslim or something. If I were convinced it belonged to common decency I would do it, but there seems to be no expectation for visitors to also wear headscarves.

There’s the crux of it: foreigners and expats are welcomed here, perhaps jovially dismissed and often subject to the “tourist tax” or “white people tax” (which, within limits, is something we can easily afford), but there’s a double standard. In Europe, the foreigners are discriminated against; here, it’s the locals who are discriminated against. The way I hear it, foreigners can act with a certain amount of impunity (particularly anyone here in any kind of official capacity, though to whom normal diplomatic immunity would not extend). I wouldn’t go so far as to say that foreigners can act as they please, but no one seems to expect foreigners to blend in, and most expats continue on in happy indifference or ignorance of “the real life”. Those of us coming from countries with favorable exchange rates can easily afford the spacious and renovated apartments in Zamalek, can have our lunch ordered in every day and go to restaurants every night, and take taxis everywhere (gasp! the environment! gasp!), and spend our evenings sipping cocktails with the youth of the upper crust. Life is good, here, for those of us who can afford it—and that barrier is both startlingly low for Europeans and North Americans, and tragically high for Egyptians. As a lowly starving student I can live a lifestyle here I could never afford elsewhere, but that is just further evidence of the gap between me and most of the rest of the 18 million residents here. I’m not saying I need to go live in the slums in order to have the “real experience”, but it does make me think….