(Image from gigwise.com)

The metaphorical blizzard has hit and there’s no turning back. I think I’ve done fairly well this year in fact, but a little browsing on iTunes today brought me over the threshold: they have a ‘Christmas’ genre. Perhaps they always have had it, but today I spotted it. Don’t get me wrong, nobody in my house, whether living permanently or just popping in to read the gas metre is starved of Christmas music in December. It’s too catchy, too evocative, too cheery and calming. There’s Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ alongside Harry Connick Jr. singing ‘Let it snow’ (I know, I know, it’s Cairo, but still…), next to the Pogues ‘Fairytale in New York’ and ‘Silent Night’ from Kings College, the Ronnette’s ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa’, Bing Crosby & Judy Garland’s version of ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Run Rudolph, Run’, Burl Ive’s ‘Frosty the Snowman’ and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ – plus another 4.5 hours more of music (it was more, but I decided to delete dupilcate songs last year). I don’t even like Mariah Carey. I really don’t, but give me a Christmas song and well, I can’t really help myself.

About a week ago my cousin’s cousin (what does that make her to me) asked the question to her Facebook friends: is it too early to play Christmas music? I couldn’t decide. Now I say, “You go girl!”

I’m still containing my desire to hoist up the decorations. No Poinsettia can be purchase before 1 December. That’s my rule. But come 9am on that day, I shall be getting my Christmas Roses and (what will make do as a) Christmas tree. Then I will start the painstakingly delightful process of individually stringing stars up from a beam on the ceiling.

This year I started buying decorations in August. It’s not that I don’t have any, it’s just that I didn’t have those decorations (wooden angels that hang on the door). Yesterday I cheekily added a simple, white clay angel that holds a little candle to my stash. I guess this is the year of the angels. I’m itching to take her out of the wrapping, but no, no, I’ve been telling myself, wait a few more days, December will be here soon.

Mr S, coming from France, doesn’t share my UK/North American/German festive cravings. Candles, marzipan, chocolate, mince pies, Christmas cake, stollen (because of the marzipan), pfeffernusse, homemade truffles, cinnamon, spices and cloves. He just doesn’t understand. He didn’t even know what Christmas cake was until last year! Utterly unimaginable to me.

But I’ve started working on it. Bereft of advent calendars when he grew up, this year, aged 36 in a few weeks, will get his very first painted card with doors (not one of those chocolate ones, but one with different pictures behind every door – because what’s the point in knowing there’s the same thing behind every door?) at breakfast on 1 December. This year too, we will add mince pies (homemade by yours truly) to our December menu, and the arrival of Big Mama and Lil’ Bro should see stollen, pfeffernusse and Christmas pud pausing on his virgin taste buds.

“..There’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy,
When they pass around the coffee and the pumpkin pie
It’ll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives
These wonderful things are the things
We remember all through our lives.” (Sleigh Ride)

And a little PS for all you bah-humbug types: sssshhh!

I wrote a while ago about foreign women marrying Egyptian men. It led to a full inbox of questions. I thought I’d take it a step further and explain that there are two types of marriages in Egypt.

First is the ‘official’ marriage. This is where the bride is dressed up (usually in white) a large venue is booked, official photographs are taken, videographers are often present, and copious numbers of family, friends and colleagues gather, dressed up to the nines and celebrate as lavishly as the couple’s families’ budget allows. For Christians there is a church service beforehand and for Muslims the religious ceremony happens before the wedding party, sometimes months before, and will always involve at least the bride and groom’s close family members. This is because, for marriage to be fully sanctioned in Islam, it is essential that ’society’ knows about it. It is unheard of for a couple to disappear and come back together married.

The second type of marriage is called orfi marriage. This is a fully sanctioned Islamic practice. This wedding, however, does not involve the family, does not have a party and for, the most part, is done in secret. Within the religious culture there are explanations for its existence. In reality it has seedy connotations, (the equivalent of legalising prostitution), as well as romantic starry-eyed ones (students who want to get married but know their families would not agree). It is, however, regarded by NOBODY (the State included) as being an ‘official’ marriage.

The problem with orfi ‘marriages’ between Egyptian men and foreign women (perhaps the same goes the other way around too, I just haven’t heard of it) is that there is usually a huge gulf in understanding the concept of orfi ‘marriages’ between the two people. While the man/Muslim who has been brought up in a culture where he understands the difference from day one, and is used to the idea that the sanctity concept of the word ‘marriage’ applying only to the ‘official’ type, the woman/non-Muslim (or recent convert) often doesn’t fully understand this.

In reality, orfi ‘marriages’ are little more than a contract that allows the couple to live together and share hotel rooms together. They call each other husband and wife, but, and this is where the problems often come in for the foreign party: despite the husband/wife terms being used, there is absolutely no necessity for the underlying intention to be together ’til death us to part’.

The heartbreaking confusion that unfortunately seems to arise from this misunderstanding is common. Neither side is to blame – it’s just one of those cultural misunderstandings arising from cultural differences. It took me about five years of living here and watching how things work to get my head around the fact that when a man is calling someone his wife, it doesn’t necessarily mean she is his life partner if the marriage is orfi.

Perhaps most importantly, in an orfi ‘marriage’, there are no provisions for the wife if a divorce happens and fathers of children in orfi marriages have only recently been made to take some (limited) responsibility for them. The children, as I understand it, would not have a father’s name on their birth certificate. Orfi ‘divorces’ anyway rarely occur, a separation just takes place and both parties disappear into the ether in exactly the same way as they would had they been boyfriend/girlfriend in the West. In contrast, in the ‘official’ Islamic marriages, there are strict religious and social conventions that are followed before the marriage that set a framework for provisions in the case of divorce.

There are some common stories (involving foreigners) I’ve heard throughout my time here:

- A man from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait ‘marries’ a new Western convert. The wedding cannot take place in his home country for some reason that sounds fine to Western ears, convert or not, but is in reality socially implausible (as there is no instance where he would have an ‘official’ marriage without large numbers of extended family present).

- Egyptian man and Western woman get ‘married’. She believes they are now husband and wife…

- Egyptian man and Western woman get ‘married’. She understands it’s a contract, however, after months of referring to her partner/boyfriend as her husband and being referred to as his wife, the connotations of those terms begin, somewhere deep inside, to arouse feelings of the type of security she associates with ‘full’ marriage. When it ends, she feels her ‘husband’ wasn’t taking it as seriously as her.

So, bottom line: orfi ‘marriages’ are not marriages in the Western/Christian concept. Orfi ‘marriage’ = contract to live together without the police interfering.

Perhaps most importantly, not all Egyptian men are love rats. Not by any means. Just as not all American, French, Japanese or Outer Mongolian men are (or aren’t). There are huge cultural differences between this culture and Western culture, with both having some amazing points and both having points I don’t like quite so much. When two people from such different cultural backgrounds come together, particularly when the female partner is from the West, there is a labyrinth of problems that arise purely from cultural differences. Linguistic problems often conspire to make it even harder and of course, there are the typical issues that arise when two characters meet.

Relationships between Egyptian men and Western women can and do work out, but they typically take an enormous amount of time, effort, understanding and patience by both parties. And ultimately, the chances of success are limited if one party does not fully understand the framework of their relationship’s basis.

Someone I know is having an affair. It’s serious. It’s with a colleague. He wanted my opinion, so bearing in mind cultural differences, and what I knew of the situation, I gave it.

In response to a point he had made about the “other woman” liking his wife and that she would have liked to be friends with his wife, I pointed out that if that were true, she would have done so when she had the opportunity (long before the affair started – and then, perhaps, it might not have begun).

I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about Egyptian culture, but I do try to remember the pieces of the jigsaw I discover. After all this time, it is unusual for me to hear something about it that I have never come across before. A gem came in response to my observation: the “other woman” colleague could never have become friends with his wife.

Apparently, it is socially unacceptable for a colleague of the same sex as your spouse to become friends with your spouse.

Why?

Because it would ignite suspicions that your colleague has amorous intentions towards you and wants to get closer to you via your spouse.

I have no idea if this is the same in any other country/culture, but it baffles me.

And certainly did not work in this case.

Ask any Egyptian right now what’s on their mind and the chances are that the ever rising cost of living will be foremost in their thoughts (for more, read this).

The government announced on Labour Day (1 May) that it was going to up public sector salaries by 30% – an interesting figure given that the official rate of inflation is somewhere in the teens, but unofficially everybody knows it’s, hmm…30%.

So there were a few days of rejoicing coupled with queries about where this extra money was going to come from.

A few days later it has became all too clear: 30% increase in the price of cigarettes, removal of tax-free status for private schools and 35-47% fuel increases. The last one is the biggie.

The whole world is suffering the problem of increased commodity prices, but Egypt has far more people living on or around the ‘bread-line’ than most other places. A large swathe of society cannot absorb these rises in the way that the majority of the developed world can i.e. grumbling about having less spare cash at the end of the month. These people have no spare cash at the beginning of the month, never mind the end.

There are plenty of forecasts of doom and gloom out there about Egypt’s future. What I haven’t seen these predictions take account of is the natural resourcefulness of Egypt’s people. Many will suffer and I don’t mean to down play that, however, humans are great at finding work-arounds and I have to say that Egyptians are absolutely superb at this. So while health and safety is an unheard of luxury, money-saving devices and ideas are likely to be making an appearance sometime soon.

On a completely different thread, is the Grand Hyatt’s decision to go ‘dry’. It is a large 5 star hotel in central Cairo with Saudi ownership. Rumours abound about why the owner/chief shareholder decided to take this route with some newspapers citing his personal religious beliefs, some saying it was the result of a dispute with top management and others saying that in the competitive summer market for tourists from his native land and the Emirates it was a marketing strategy. The result is that the story has made all the newspapers in Cairo with further talks about the Ministry of Tourism downgrading the hotel to 4 star status or even that the Hyatt will pull out of this hotel.

Meanwhile, H&M is apparently going to open in Cairo on 5 June. Whatever the state of the economy, this place is going to be packed out. Fashionistas won’t know what to do with themselves: a foreign brand with fashionable clothes at equal to and cheaper than Egyptian brand prices. It’s pretty amazing really. Three years ago I still had to go out of the country to buy clothes (unless I wanted Versace and the like – not really affordable on an NGO’s salary!) and now there are: Next, Evans, Accessorize, Karen Millen, French Connection, Mango, Top Shop is coming and there are more that I can’t remember right now. Not bad for three years!

Lastly, to follow up from this – we did change the clocks! Apparently some other countries in the region didn’t and next year Egypt won’t either.

Actually, there are two words on the Street right now.

First is that we are not going to change the clocks this year. This has yet to be proven as we normally do it three weeks to a month later than the UK, however, the theory I’ve heard is that it is because of Ramadan. This year Ramadan is due to fall on or around 1 September, when the weather is still pretty hot. Last year, Ramadan started a week before the clocks normally change, so they were changed early (a week or two) – hence the ‘word’. We’ll see.

The second word is that tomorrow there is going to be a national strike. There has been no official approval for this strike, so we’ll see if people decide to stay indoors. The strike would be about (as I understand it) the rising cost of living. I’m not sure what the would-be strikers hope to achieve though, as with food, the government has been sheltering a sizable part of the population from what is happening on the global markets by way of subsidisation. With petrol, this is so for the entire population. Saying that, prices are rising far faster than salaries, and times are extremely tough for many. Again, we’ll see.

~~

Our bowab (doorman) works hard for the building. He is up every morning washing the cars, he cleans the stairs, which has been no small job with the number of workmen in the building for the past 18 months and generally keeps it looking good.

He also does a lot of running around town for The Lady Downstairs (TLD) who has a business and seems incapable of going to the bank or offices on the other side of town herself. The business has employees and sizable funds, given where it advertises, for marketing. Her mode of transport is a BMW, his, because she won’t give him a taxi fare (which is nothing here) is the microbus – Cairo’s most dangerous and crowded form of transport. His pay for all this is minimal. On top of that, she treats him as a verbal whipping boy. Living above her, I am treated to her daily (on average) screaming fits. The bowab isn’t the only recipient, however, being close at hand, he is yelled at daily for absolutely nothing.

The day before yesterday, I was waiting for the elevator and heard him downstairs ringing her doorbell. Someone came to the door (not TLD, probably her maid) and he told her he had the electricity bill. Next hurried footsteps came to the door, followed by TLD’s raspy screaming, “You’ve got the electricity bill for me? Give it here!”.

Nice, huh?

So, Mr Bowab told me last month that he would be leaving for his home in the South for a few weeks at the end of March/beginning of April because his wife is going to give birth. This would be the second time he’s seen her in the past 12 months as the job of doorman does not come with holiday time.

Yesterday I realised that it was well into April and he was still here. Why? Apparently TLD won’t let him go because she has too much running around town for him to do.

And she has him by the short and curlies, because everybody knows that jobs are scarce and people on his his salary have few savings. What he does have though, is a savings account of hatred towards here growing with compound interest.

First the stomach starts clenching. Next a rats nest of blazing fireball shoots up to my chest and sits, a burning cocktail of indignation and humiliation.

There are many things that caused this when I first moved here: taxi drivers’ roaming hands as they ‘opened’ the passenger door for me, getting ripped off, taxi drivers taking the ’short cut’ which always involved an extra 45 mins journey time (and therefore increased fare), sleazy comments made as I passed a group of men and being told something will take five minutes and then being made to wait an hour. And that is just for starters.

I have (I think) learned a great amount of patience on a number of different levels. I didn’t enjoy the process much, but it’s probably not a bad thing to have learned, especially as I held the double title of Miss Super Efficient and Miss Goody Two Shoes for all the years of my life pre-Egypt.

There are, however, two things that still get my goat and I cannot get over them. First up is the lack of respect for customers by supermarket staff. They have yet to realise that their behaviour towards customers impacts where the customer will shop in future. They have no qualms about pushing you aside to get past and under no circumstances if you meet where one needs to give way, like the entrance to a narrow aisle, will they give way to the customer. Ever.

The second fireball-inducing happening involves groups of pre-pubescent and teenage boys. For some reason, probably because they’ve seen their fathers/uncles/cousins doing it and want to be macho like them, they make sexually degrading comments (and depending on where you are, actions). Unlike the supermarket, where I show restraint, I am not usually so calm around these guys (and hey, better out than in, right?).

Today I passed six of them mincing towards me. The mutterings under their breath while simultaneously not taking their eyes off me was a pretty clear indication of what was coming. I knew they wouldn’t touch me, but the stomach clenching had begun. I let the first comment directly to me go unnoticed because sometimes they just leave it at that. This guy, incidentally the smallest of the group by a good half metre, obviously had to make up for his inadequacy by a second comment.

I have a bit of a frog in my throat (not from French classes) at the moment, which makes me sound like a 40 a day 60 year old fisherman’s wife, which happens to be a bit like an Egyptian Momma. “You think you’re so big? Huh?! You’re,” (hand gesture indicating 1 cm tall), “THIS small!” I growled loudly.

Of course, they cracked up repeating it and laughing. That’s normal (and hey, I have no idea how what I said actually translates socially/culturally in Arabic, it was just the first thing I could think of).

Part of the reason this enrages me so much is that, as is typical, when this incident happened, there were four fully grown men on the street, before and after the group of boys. Not one said or did anything, and they’d blatantly heard the comments.

Allied to this is the fact that it forces me to stop ignoring the fact that I am viewed by many, by virtue of my heritage and clothes (which were today, by the way, baggy, long sleeved and high necked), little more than a common hoar [ed. whore].

Not a good feeling to be left with.

The only thing I have found to make it better is to treat the next Egyptian male I meet with the respect I didn’t receive from the previous. Not always easy and not always reciprocated, but it makes Miss Goody Two Shoes feel at least she has the moral high ground.

Youssef was talking to the mango farmers.

“What does your father do?”

He knew this answer was going to be the end of their conversation – it always was.

“We’re zabaleen.”

“Oh right,” said the farmers looking at each other.

Youssef’s family lived and worked in the rubbish collecting area of Cairo. Bottom of the social ladder. If, indeed, it even registered on the social ladder.

The next day Youssef met the farmers again at his post in the delta. His stint of military service was over half way through.

“Do you come across mangoes?” the farmers asked.

A bit of a stupid question really, most of Cairo’s refuse ended up with the zabaleen.

“Yes.”

***

And so it was that one young man with one of the country’s dirtiest jobs, came to be the first and only mango seed collector in his area. Summer months are spent working 24hours a day collecting the discarded seeds of the city’s favourite fruit, drying them and transporting the kernel to his friends in the delta for replanting.

Nile FM is Egypt’s premier English language station (www.nilefmonline.com). On Sunday evening there was a drive-time show with a DJ asking the following question: “If you could import anything from the West, what would it be?”

I wasn’t in the car for very long. Despite repeated,and increasing in desperation, requests from the DJ to submit answers of things that could be imported, the responses were: education, education, education, self-respect, education, a good public transport system, cleanliness, a good public health system, education, dignity, plus some that were obviously too political for him to read them out (the station has NO political reporting or comments of any form).

I just read an interesting article from Egypt’s Daily Star (nothing like the UK one!). It is about men looking for foreign (note they actually use the word ‘blonde’) wives to finance them. I have seen this sort of thing time and time again here, with the foreign woman usually being a tourist when she ‘falls in love’ and not understanding that her beau could actually have ulterior motives. Why should she? He says such beautiful things to her, makes her feel so special, so wanted. He is so romantic (it’s a shame she doesn’t understand Arabic or she’d realise when song lyrics are being translated). Later comes the demonstrations that ‘he’s not like that’. Frequently divorce is on the horizon. Soon after that, I don’t know what happens with her, but he remarries: IT’S BUSINESS.

So, here it is, at last, in English and straight out of the horses’ mouth so to speak.

“Look at this plush block of flats,” said Mahbub, a taxi driver from Luxor, as he pointed to a white building shining across a field in the heart of Al Buaarat village in Luxor.

“It belongs to Redah, a friend of mine who has been married for the last few years to a Dutch woman. They bought the land from one of the villagers and they are likely to gain much out of selling the flats to the khawagas [foreigners],” said Mahbub.

“Why are you raising your eyebrows in surprise?” asked Mahbub. “The taxi I am working on was gifted to my brother by his French wife. She is 10 years older than my brother Alam who is 19.

“She goes back to her country for six weeks and comes here for a fresh honeymoon before she leaves again. My family owns a small plot of green land on which we are planning to build a block of flats with the help of my brother’s wife. She’s also got us a boat that we operate between the east and west banks,” said Mahbub…“There is no future here other than tying the knot with a blonde woman,” stressed Mahbub. “My diploma in agriculture is useless and I can’t keep driving a vehicle owned by my brother. You know the way out so why wait? One is already falling for me but I won’t give her the time of day until I am sure she’s ready to meet all my requirements.”

From Daily Star January 7th: Influx of Foreign Residents is Changing Upper Egyptian Ways.

In fairness, it also works the other way round: girls looking for a blonde husband. And this I’ve seen too, far less frequently. And I have to add that one of the most difficult things to watch is a friend being taken advantage of, especially one who refuses to see what everybody is pointing at.

While I understand life in Egypt is tougher by the day, it surely can’t be fair to enter a marriage you believe is for love, when the reality is that an entire family is plotting how to cajole you out of your money.

Words, beautiful or not, are cheap.

I recently got in touch with a friend I hadn’t seen since uni (the joys of Facebook), who commented that my Arabic must be fluent by now. I explained that my Arabic is good, but not fluent, primarily because I’m female and as such it is impossible to get into a situation where it could become fluent, without getting married (becoming a professional belly dancer excepted). He expressed his sadness that I must have been subject to sexism over my time here.

It did (and does) make me laugh to think about sexism in Egypt. It’s not in the least bit funny, and it has affected me greatly, but so ingrained is sexism here, that I don’t even consider it as such: it’s just (a big) part of the culture. Sexism is almost too lofty of an intellectual concept to be applied! I’d put it more in terms of sexual harassment and then add that it is on a daily basis – almost every time you step out the door.

It’s strange what we can get used to.