Part 1 -playing catch-up

Ramadan Mubarak! and happy saudi national day. to those of you who care.

so sorry about the lack of bloggingness. zee life een zee cairo ees zee hectic de temps en temps. but exciting. oh yes. always exciting.

sooo what have i been doing with this exciting life...

last friday i was an actor in a propaganda campaign funded by the egytian govt.

yeah you heard me right. totally random, somewhat sketch (ok who am i kidding, completely sketch) but ridiculous amounts of fun. how did i get involved in this? so i went out to dinner with a friend of mine and we were walking through downtown back to her apartment when this random guy walks up to us and starts talking to me. now, in egypt this is not unusual. what WAS unusual however was the fact that he was white, and that he wasnt coming on to me. i was intrigued (/trapped since we were already walking and he was just walking next to us) so i listened. he proceded to tell me that he was looking for some ppl to be extras in a commercial, and he thought i would fit the part. i, of course, being the girl my mother raised me to be, immediately assumed he was a fake and would probably drag me off into the dessert to be hung by my toenails from the ceiling of some cave and be head-butted by camels. i mean, honestly, how cliched is the "hey im a PROFESSIONAL and in my PROFESSIONAL opinion i think if you came with me to a secluded place and took off all your clothes, my PROFESSIONAL pictures/movies/modern artistic impressions of you would easily cause your non-existant career as an international superstar to take off". plus he looked kind of sketch - his front tooth was chipped and he had this slow way of talking (which i later discovered was a canadian accent. go figure) that had a slightly creepy tone to it. oh and his name was nova. such a porn-star name. who names their kids that? but im not judging. anyway, before i could drive him away with my mad tae kwan do skills, he mentioned that he was the guy who had planned this tourist trip into the dessert that a bunch of my friends had gone on. since this now put him in the category of someone who had taken small innocent ppl to an unknown destination and had resisted the camel head-butting, i became less suspicious, and more interested, and besides, being an extra in an egyptian commercial? who gets to do that. plus he specified i would get to keep my clothes on, which was very generous of him, i thought. so he took my phone number and said he'd call me later that night to verify that i should, in fact, come. oh, and did i mention that it was happening the next day? this was actually probably the only reason i did it - my spontaneous actions tend to be those of a person with a much lower IQ than my planned actions. this makes me unique and special.

anyway i went home and checked him out - called up my friends who had gone on the dessert trip to verify that this nova character with the chipped front tooth actually existed and had made an impression on ppl that connoted something other than a recruiter for the eastern european sex-trade. this is when i found out that a friend of a friend was also doing it and that settled the matter. i was not going to pass up the chance to be an extra in a commercial in egypt, even if it meant getting up at 4:30am, catching a cab to zamalek, and skipping all my classes that day. especially if it meant skipping all my classes that day.

so that is exactly what i did - on 4 hrs of sleep i was out trying to catch a cab. the trying was actually unnecessary. cairo truly is the epidome of the city that never sleeps - 4am might as well have been 4pm and i probably could have caught a cab if id been hiding behind a bush wearing that really unattractive camoflage outfit that evan wanted to buy so very long ago. i was dropped off in front of the auc dorm - another reason i felt ok about it all: we were meeting in front of the dorms so i was picturing a huge group of auc kids doing the commercial. in reality i was the only auc kid there; my friend of a friend didnt even show. no big. the ppl who did show up were really interesting. i suppose it takes a special person to a) be in cairo and b) let a random guy on the street convince you to be in a commercial. lets see... we had an australian guy who was taking a few years off from college and, having spent a while rampaging through south-east asia, was now living in cairo with the plan of buying a motorbike and driving it up to syria. cool, what? oh the restrictions of being female... and there was a german guy who was in egypt for a tennis tournament, 2 american girls, one who was a nurse who wants a job at the world health organization and another who was a yoga instructor in daha (who had left daha because "something happened" and now cant go back there...drama) and another american guy who had just gotten into cairo 5 days ago and had a job at an environmental sustainability firm (they have those in cairo?)...and then there was me. the little auc student. they were all really cool though - just meeting all of them was worth the 22 hrs straight i then proceeded to spend shooting the commercial.

the commercial itself was hilarious. none of us really knew what we were doing, but we were all pretty surprised when they dressed us all in clothing straight out of the 1970s. i was in the most normal of the outfits - hair parted down the middle, little flowered band around my head hippie-style, huge aviators, a halter top and these SUPER flared, fitted jeans with a monster belt and some really junky jewelry. so fashionable. the rest of the outfits were hilarious though - we had beads and fringe, mini-skirts and big hair, and lots and lots of neon flaurel prints. all of the guys were wearing these really tight, flared pants with these high-heeled shoes that came to a point at the toe. so sexy. and these outfits were not restricted to the westerners i mentioned up above. they had all these egytian actors to set the scene. picture middle-aged egytian men with those i-would-look-pregnant-if-i-was-female bellies in bright blue tiiiight flared pants and a fitted purple, collared shirt patterned with daisies. yeah. it was a sight to see. they put side-burns on everyone too. and handle-bar mustaches. it was beautiful.

so the idea behind the commercial was make egyptians treat tourists nicely. apparently they have problems getting repeat-tourists because people come here and, you know, some creepy taxi driver grabs their ass. or their wife's ass, i suppose. or someone grabs their arm and physically drags them into a shop yelling "pretty price for pretty lady!" and then wont let them leave until they buy something. who would have thought that would make a bad impression? so the plot line of the commercial was something along the lines of 1970s: good shop guy vs bad shop guy. 2006: good shop guy is rich, bad shop guy is in a hole. the egyptian govt is bribing egyptians to be nice to tourists, and im helping. i figure its my way of making a difference.

overall it was a pretty sweet experience. the director bonded with me. the producer asked me to marry him. and, as you may have noticed from earlier, they kept us there for 22 hrs straight. no big. i drank a lot of mango juice. oh and they paired me with the german tourist for most of the shots (yes i did have one speaking part - we werent actually extras; they didnt have any real actors there) and he was really nice/good looking, but unfortunately didnt speak english very well. so all of my clever little comments went unappreciated. and trust me, i had a LOT of comments to make on this situation. sigh. i am so abused.

ok this was very long. but another one will come shortly featuring, dum dum dum duuuuum, my trip to alexandria. get excited.