First, Happy 2nd Birthday to Princess Amelia :)
Second, I'm going to preface the gay bar story with typical behaviors and attires of young Egyptian men. Cause its just weird. First, their clothes. Some of the attire I've seen thus far on guys would fit in very well if they lived in Ptown or certain parts of San Fransisco. Im a personal fan of the jeans. They are usually blinged out and bedazzled skinny jeans, and I mean very skinny jeans. Sometimes they are faded, which usually just makes it all the better. Ed Hardy shirts are also pretty popular, as are pinks and purples; I've even see some pretty sparkly shirts that I wouldn't be caught dead in. All this would be manageable if not for the fact that Egyptians are very touchy feely. The guys here will go around in big groups and they will all be holding hands, or will walk down the street with their arms around each others shoulders. Yet you will see very few men and women doing this in public. Okay, yes, I know its all a cultural thing, and they probably think we're weird too, but when you put the bedazzeled skinny jeans on with purple sparkly shirts and start holding hands, most people assume you are gay. But the thing is, being gay in Egypt is not exactly accepted. Its essentially forbidden in the Quran; actually, I had a sub in my Quran class this week and he compared being gay to watching the windows screen saver all day: its pointless and unproductive. So that's why we had a hard time believing we somehow ended up in a gay bar in Alexandria. Because who knew they even existed?
Last Thursday, ALI had a trip to Alexandria, which is a little over two hours from Cairo. It turns out that you don't have to be a student to go on these trips; as long as one person is somehow affiliated with AUC and/or ALI, you can sign up your whole family if you so choose. Which people so chose. The first family was awesome. It was a young couple with a 10 month old baby boy, who sat behind us. The mother was an American from Minnesota who was in the Army and had been studying Arabic for the past ten years. Her husband was Yemeni and an Arabic professor who helped us with homework on the bus when we weren't playing with his son. They were very nice. The second family was more like a circus. As far as we could figure out, one of the guys was an Indian diplomat and his mother, his wife and family, and his two sisters, and their two husbands and all the kids. Yep. It would have been alright except they let one of the sons, who was about seven, run around during all the tours and push people out of the way and generally be disrespectful and disruptive every time we went somewhere. There was a collective sigh of relief when they finally left.
Anyways, the first night we got there we had a free night so a bunch of us decieded to go out. Some other people from AUC were planning on coming up for the weekend so we were going to try to meet up with them. In the meantime, we decided to try to find a bar, because we had heard Alex had a few good ones. So we hopped in a cab and asked the driver to take us to a bar called Cope D'Or. He of course had no idea where it was, but he told us he knew exactly where it was. After stopping a few times for directions, we get out on this pretty sketchy street and he says follow me. We go into this whole in the wall place and there is maybe 4 people in there, all guys. There is no sign saying where we were and we were convinced that the driver took us to the first place he could find and say that it was Cope D'or, because how would we know? So the cabbie leaves us there and we decided we would at least get a drink and then profitably try to leave. Well, one turned into two and two turned into four and all of a sudden there are a ton of young dudes in this bar. In their blinged out skinny jeans and popped collar Lactose shirts and fro-hawks. We weren't paying that much attention to them because the bartender looked like an Egyptian version of Steve Carrell until a few guys sat next to our guy friend and after about five minutes they are stroking his back. We of course thought it was hysterical and we just sat there and watched all this. I was one of two girls in this bar so me and my friend went to find the bathroom. We came out and there was a guy standing there. We didn't know what he wanted so we told him that this was the girls bathroom (it was the only room at the top of a staircase and he was blocking the way down) He said (with a hand wave) I know, its just like, cleaner then the guys bathroom. Oooookay. Back downstairs our friend now had more than one guy touching him, but one of them leaned over and said "When I was 16, I had eyebrow like him. Now I'm 27 and I wax . You like?" And on and on it went, with the comments getting more and more inappropriate, but said with pretty poor English so it was hysterical. This is so far out of the norm for Egypt; we had no idea what we had gotten into, but we had a great time. We got home around 430am.
As we didn't go to Alex for a gay bar, we did do all the typical historical tours the next day, which was very cool. We went to the catacombs, which only a third are excavated. The rest are still underwater and under the city. You could actually see the water that was flooding them. There were a few sarcophagus' that we were able to see. We saw Pompeii's Pillar, which has nothing to do with Pompeii, but was built for Ptolemy. Its still mind boggling to try to fathom how these things were built using very primitive tools and whatnot. The last stop for the day was the Roman Theater, which apparently still has productions held there. The rest of the day was spent at the Automobile Club, which had a pool overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Afternoon at the beach; it was fantastic. That night was much more uneventful, unless you want to count when we asked a waiter for the bathroom. We actually asked the guy where the pigeon was; thankfully he knew what we meant. The word for bathroom and pigeon is very similar, the difference is how long you pronouce an 'a'. Arabic at its best :)
Saturday was our final day there, and we went to see the Library. The original one of course burned, but the built a new one, which was very cool. An ariel view would show water surrounding it and an obelisk meant to represent the sun rising out of the water. They were able to save some of the texts from the ancient library and we saw those and took a few illegal pictures. All in all it was a really fun trip. Its so easy to get to Alex from Cairo so it is definitely a place to go back to and spend more time at.
The weeks are as always just go by in a blur. Last night there was a sandstorm. That shit's pretty legit. They actually canceled a trip that was planned for this weekend for it. There were chairs and tables and umbrellas overturned and now there's piles of sand where there usually aren't piles of sand. This coming week is a short one; we have Wednesday off, and ALI has a trip to Sinai and Sharm el Shek from Tuesday to Saturday. Maybe ill get to swim in the Red Sea. Who knows.
Happy Friday! Masalama :)
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