Oh Sweet Misery and a Rump

so i have now had my first really truly authentic egyptian experience: food poisoning! yes, as a result of an unpeeled cucumber, i spent a good 12 hours trying to regurgitate my small intestine. on the up side this then gave me a legitimate excuse to skip classes, and sleep for about 48 hours straight. oh the simple pleasures of a guilt-free conscience.

this was actually a good thing for me. no, really. if laziness had not conquered practicality in my lunch preparation, i would be in luxor this weekend. oh, the horrors! you think, and i agree. why? because, you see, i dont really sleep in egypt. now to those of you who know me from college, this may sound positively unrachel-like. and again i whole-heartedly agree because a happy rachel is a rachel who is just waking up at 1pm after 9 hours of sweet, sweet dreams. unfortunately, everything in egypt is conspiring to give me an average of 5 hours of sleep a night, making me a very unhappy rachel. despite all this, when my enthusiastic friends said this monday "yay! a long weekend! lets spend all of wednesday night on an 8 hour train ride (2nd class of course, without beds) going down to luxor, and then spend saturday night on an 8 hour train ride back, getting home just in time to go to class sunday morning!" my reaction was, "oh dear lord i am too exhausted to chew and i have more work than god, but that sounds like a brilliant idea!" because everything in egypt has a certain once-in-a-lifetime aura to it which makes it very hard to voluntarily sequester onceself in ones apartment for the weekend for the sole purpose of sleeping, no matter how tempting this may be. thus, even as i pondered taping my arabic flashcards to the inside of the toilet bowl as a way of multi-tasking, i was also secretly celebrating my anticipated guilt-free weekend of luxorlessness.

so now it is saturday and ive probably watched a grand total of 5 movies in the past 2 days, read one very poorly written book, and slept enough to make up christine's sleep debt, nevermind mine. now i must actually, tragically, work.

but because that sounds like such an unpleasant idea, first i will update you on what i did last weekend.

lets see... thursday night. happy hour at the american embassy! the marines thew a party. awesome. we attended for two reasons: 1) we heard there would be free drinks. this was a lie. more, the actual selection of drinks was not spectacular. 2) i mean, men in uniform. come on. but again, we were disapointed as not only were they not in uniform, they werent very attractive either. it was horribly disillusioning. i, in my friendliness, agreed to get together with one of them later, something that i also managed to dodge as a result of the food poisoning (so many silver linings!) although his incessant text msging means that ill probably have to reschedule for next weekend. my life is so hard.

post-marine happy hour we went to the british social club for their tex-mex night of marguarita madness. my title. they probably would have gotten more guests if theyd put me in charge of advertising. however, it was awesome. the british club is almost entirely middle aged, well, british people. our crowd of 20 or so college students showing up was quite a shock to their system. in a good way. really. but they played old music and we all danced like our parents. to top it off we were all sexually harassed by this one very drunk, very old, very british man. momteza. although the food was late, and since we were all starving we had a game of steal-the-peanut-bowl from the bar going for a while. i was quite good at it. until i was caught. awkward.

we went to khan al-khalili again on saturday looking for this tent market michelle had heard about. we didnt find it, but wondering around khan al-khalili is always entertaining. there was one very greasy shopkeeper who took a liking to a friend i was with. while i wondered into a nearby shop, he forced his phone number upon her, as well as a a brief photo-opp. when i came and found her, he exclaimed

greasy shop guy: you! you are gamilla (gamilla=beautiful)
me: thank you very much
g.s.g: but! you are not gamilla oawy (gamilla oawy = very beautiful)

he turns to my friend and, i assume, repeats something he had said many times already.

g.s.g: YOU are gamilla oawy

she shudders a little. i should mention at this point that my friend could perhaps be described as a bit more... well endowed than i am. the shopkeeper turns back to me

g.s.g: do you want to know why you are not gamilla oawy?
me: oh yes good sir. please share.

that is, actually, pretty much what i said. they never get the sarcasm.

g.s.g: you are too tall. too skinny. you are not REAL WOMAN.

ouch? in naguib mahfouz's "palace walk" there's a breakfast scene between the mother and her two daughters:

"For all of them, food, in addition to its nutritional value, ultimately served an aesthetic goal, because it was the natural foundation for becoming well rounded. They ate deliberately and painstakingly. They did their very best to chew their food thoroughly. They did not even slow down when they were full. They kept on eating until they were stuffed..."

There's another bit of the book where one of the sons is lusting after an opera singer:

"She draped the black cloth around her skillfully to reveal the details of her body's featurs and articulations. It especially highlighted her full, gleaming rump. Then she sat down at the rear of the wagon. Under the pressure of her weight, her buttocks were compressed and ballooned out to the right and left, making a fine cushion."

I love that. Full, gleaming rump. Obviously, if i want to be fully accepted into egyptian culture, I need to get me one o' those.