FuD: The Phd Years
Welcome to the long awaited sequel to Gullible Travels, to misquote a friend of mine " The Trueman Show of the internet" has returned. As most of you know, after my travels ended, I wasn't long back in Ireland when I decided I needed something else to do with my life, a new challenge. So after about five minutes thinking I came up with this : move to another country and go back to university. Here's how I got on...
For the non brit/irish types who may happen on this page, I occasionally have little rants about topics which are not necessarily related to the main thread of the episode. In England this is known as "Going Off on one". I take no responsibilty for myself in such cases :-)
Prequel : Irresistible force meets Immovable object
(or Logorithmo de las noches)
After a month of holidays split between London, Dublin and Galway I returned to the Uni with a large sense of unreality. At the begining it didn't feel like home anymore and that was worrying because if here wasn't home I wasn't sure where else could be a candidate. Luckily it soon passed and anyway I had bigger things to worry about - like my new job.
I'm not sure if it was a happy coincidence or an attempt at a sense of humour but I was given my cousins old office. Well I shouldn't say old, he moved out on a Friday and I arrive the following Monday. With three doctorats already in the family, its not like I didn't already have enough pressure but with the office I was no longer following my cousins footsteps, I was practically stepping into his shoes!! The first weeek, I was somewhat underproductive to say the least. I was swimming in a sea of terminology that had no meaning as I tried to learn how to speak software engineering as quickily as possible so I that I could make a contrubuttion to the team. The second week was a little better but I was soon to get a crash course in all the latest from the field as my supervisior was hosting a conference in the fanciest new hotel in town which conviently was only five mins walk from my appartment. The first day was tutorial day, hence there wasn't the full complement of conference go'ers which provided a good chance for me to get to know the few people who were there. It wasn't long before I got chatting to the Austrialian contingent and sampling some of their duty free gin. With all the papers being presented, so much new material to take in and the afterhours social activities (I was merely aiming to be a good host of course), by the end of the week I was quite exhausted. Paying attention in the afternoon sessions was hampered by being served a three course lunch eveyday and further aggrevated by having jugs of wine placed the tables during the lunches. The people seemed to have the makings of a friendly community and it was good for me to see the "demarche" of a conference, I had no idea they could be so tiring.
There was one paper being presented from a Dublin University and although the student presenting was in fact Romanian his supervisor was a true blue Dub. We got talking at one of the conference aperos and very quickly realised he was in fact the cousin of an ex-boyfriend. This did not surprise me one iota - bloody country! However this was only the first incident of its kind in a month. A few weeks later I was in London at a party thrown by my new boyfriends sister for the first birthday of her daughter. Are you following me so far? Good, pay attention its about to get complicated. Among the revellers at the party was an old school friend of the sisters, who was married to an irish guy. I went to talk to him (as ye do) and it turned out to be from the same city as one of my uncles. In fact he tunred out to have grown up next door to my uncle and (you'll never guess what) he was the brother of an ex boyfriend of mine from about 10 years ago - bloody country!
After the conference I felt that the mists had cleared somewhat and with an invitation from the Austrailian contingent to the conference they are hosting next year, I'm pretty motivated to get working now :)
Sept 2002Month 2: Clam down its only Tuesday
So I went away to England for three days and when I got back EPFL had woken from its summer sleep and all the students were back making noise and clogging up the lunch spots. I wasn't long back when I ran into the first of the new "puppies", our affectionate somewhat condescending name for the
new arrivals at the graduate school we were all subjected to last year (see the prequel). Not very long after I was taking up
my favourite role as fountain of knowledge - I was amused to here one of the new arrivals ask me (while I was in mid rant about the state of things here) how long I had been doing my Phd here. Clearly I was already sounding like part of the furniture!!
Over lunch that day, we discussed what the year ahead was going to be like, which professors to avoid and why but mostly the graduate school experience as whole was likely to do for them (or perhaps to them). It seems that the lack of confidence that afflicted our year is again present ,except for perhaps for the Indians. I know nothing about Indian education system but one thing I can say for sure is that anyone ... emerges from the other side with an unshakeable confidence in their own ability, which is something they share with the undergrads from this institution, and a vital ingredient which is sadly missing in most of the foreign students taken into the graduate school. It occurred to me that this is perhaps one of the subconsciencious reasons we are required to go through the school. Not that the school actually boosts
peoples confidence -- if anything the reverse, given that the Uni has mixed up the task of challenging students with that of frustrating them -- but, at least by the end of the year people seem to be reasonably convinced that they have been put through enough to deserve a position as a Phd candidate.
Again there is a recurring theme here with the Ocktoberfest -- that if you have some kind of barrier (be it a 2hr queue or a grad school) what you are offering suddenly becomes much more attractive and desirable than if you had
gained immediate admission. Its kind of a crappy reason to delay someone's career for a year if you ask me, but I could be biased. And besides I doubt that the powers that be ever thought anywhere near that seriously about what they do and why they do it.
Somehow or another i will have to get over the feeling of being responsible for everyone around here and let them geton with making their own mistakes, I could quite easily develop a reputation as a busybody which is as far from my true motivation as its possible to be -- but trying to convince people who don't really know me of that fact is quite another question. Still I have difficulty fighting the urge to save people from themselves. A friend once said to me that he was worried that I was going to expend myself by getting involved with everyone else's problems, that I would have no energy left for me. I say, if so, so what? I can think of much less worthy things to expend ones energy on, and (besides) the day I don't have time for people will be a dark day indeed. You might well ask why I feel the urge to help, the answer is simple: because somebody should. At the risk of sounding like a pensioner on one of those "in-my-day" rants - i think half the problem with modern society (or lack of it) is that we feel no responsibility to each other or at least that the circle towards whom we feel some responsibility has so diminished as to make it a joke.
Recently I picked up my certificate from last year. You may wonder why I hadn't already, well for me it doesn't signify achievement or anything like that. It means hypocrisy and pointlessness, and I’ll tell you why.
Approximately one hour after picking up my certificate I was sitting in the cafeteria with one of the new graduate school student. Dan was telling me how he had ran into one of my old classmates from last year and they'd been talking about his professors Stochastic Modelling course. Dan told my colleague he had decided not to take it because he heard it was difficult. My colleague disagreed and Dan then said he quit the course because the Professor had advised the class not to take the course if they were not very strong in Probability. "Oh", he replied, "That's just because there was some students last year that failed and he had to pass them ... well because he had to pass them". Now I already knew I didn’t deserve to pass that course, heaven knows I did enough worrying about that - I just never had a clue - but it was quite another thing to have my classmates and professors having my inadequacies as a matter of conversation and common knowledge. I'd had felt a lot of things on failing last year, not the least of which was a sense of having failed my old university -- hell if someone who was good there could do so badly here, how did that make them look?
So getting my grad school diploma was a hollow achievement, more or less meaningless. Indeed what use a diploma or a qualification or any "honour" if you feel you don’t deserve it?^I wondered to myself if this was how Olympic champions felt when they take the podium hoping they don’t don't get asked
for a urine sample. Its not like victory at all, more like self loathing, like dishonesty, like disrespect. And I have to say I have no respect for the institution which partook of this dishonesty with me -- yet without the institution doing so I wouldn’t be here in the only job I ever had that didn't bore me. Its that horrid sick feeling you get in some deep place at the core of your being, when you accept something that goes against your value system.
I decided f*ck them, it I hadn't proved myself in the area of understanding the course material nor in a real sense of passing the courses, I’d certainly paid my dues in pain and anguish and stress last year. Till though I remain with this niggling feeling that I have something to prove the establishment, and the sad thing is that I'm not sure that passing a hundred graduate courses here will ever rid me of it.
I started the month with another bout of the angst typically afflicting Phd students, although I will say I seem particularly susceptible. The research was not going well, which leaves a holes in the spirit which are soon filled with confusion and self doubt: you find that you are torturing yourself with questions like why I am here? what am I doing? Why does everyone else seem like they know what they are doing? Round about this time I also found that a student in this years Grad school was having serious problems, not unlike what I went through, except this student didn't feel at all supported by his classmates. This is probably the only thing that kept me going last year. It pained me to see that this type of thing was recurring, I mean, its supposed to be a formation/training year not something which sends you to a looney bin.
In the middle of the month I was beginning to suspect that there was a homeless person living in the corridor of my office. My corridor is the only one not locked out by key card access in the evenings and at weekends. Also some of the end offices have been vacated as they are now next to the building site which will at some far distant future time be a new Computer Science building. This guy would roam the corridors looking a bit spaced, I only ever saw him at night or in the late evenings and he was the only one staying later than me. A few weeks later I discovered he was an invited professor for abroad -- strangely this fact didn't seem incongruous with my earlier diagnosis as a homeless and possibly simple person. There's a fine line separating genius and madness as they say...
It was also about this time I sent my boss to look at webpage with a link to child pornography on it, inadvertently of course. We were looking for a graphic to go on our new lab website and I had found a suitable picture, so we had to run it by the Uni web team to make sure there were no copyright repercussions in using the image. Well to cut a ridiculous story short, my boss had sent the link with the child porn refs on to the Uni administration before either of us noticed. Oops!
Winter had definitely set in, i gave up cycling to work on the 9th of December when the first snow of winter arrived. I thought this was an opportune moment to try my hand some winter sports. First of these was to be ice skating, something had meant to try on numerous time in Ireland when I had visited people in Dublin, which has the only ice rinks in the country. It was pretty nerve wrecking but by the end of two hours and with the gentle persuasion of Rachele and Johannes, I had managed to let go of the side rail. I sweating bullets for the first hour, which made me extremely happy I hadn't tried my hand at skating that time I was passing the Phibsborough rink the morning after that whiskey nonsense with Arthur.
After having stayed in the one town for over 7 weeks I was getting itchy feet and decided on a little break in the ski resort of Zermatt, in the shadow of the mighty Matterhorn. No, I didn't try skiing - I was still reeling from this ice skating business. We got a great weekend for some treks through the snow in the mountains though. But I have never been so cold in my life!
Actually its a toss up what was colder: a trek to the little matterhorn or a day shopping in Strasbourg. There were some special "Rail Day Out" offers coming up to Christmas to see the famous Christmas Market in Strasbourg, apparently the biggest in Europe. Here we are kinda spoiled in the that lake keeps us warmer than the rest of central Europe so we were seriously underdressed for our shopping expedition. In this town Vin Chaud was not just a festive season money spinner it was a survival necessity!
Being born and bred on an island, cut loose from a continent and looking for all the world like it might float away towards Newfoundland, there are certain small things in living here that flip me out. Like having to take your passport to go shopping. We took the boat across the border in search of some cheap camping equipment, Rachele for her upcoming ski weekend and me for my Christmas jaunt into Egypt. I'd managed to find a reasonable last minute charter deal and given that an english woman I met travelling Australia was now living out there and working as a dive instructor in the Red Sea, there seemed no reason not to go...
Dec 2002It was a perfect calm day, with the sun shining on the desert and the Red Sea as I touched down in Egypt for the first time.
On arrival, even before leaving the airport, I had caused a stir. The officers at Passport control seemed to that that my being Irish was the most interesting thing that would happen to them all morning.
“Irlanda”, one called to the other, pointing at me and for the next quarter of and hour, all worked stop on both of their queues, as the boyos started quizzing my knowledge of Arabic. Just why the assumed I knew any Arabic for the mere fact of being Irish, I never quite grasped. However the looks of the faces of the people behind me being held up due to all these shenanagins was prize.
I’d already decided to give Sharm a miss until my friend returned and had fixed on a smaller town to wait it out. Dahab was a desert town / divers colony a couple of hours up the coast towards the Israeli border. I managed to sneak on to one of the Swiss tour buses at the airport and got an illicit lift into the centre of Sharm. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I think the bus driver had been well suss about my status as a package tourist, especially my grubby clothes coupled with the fact that the hotel I had chosen to invent as my place of stay was a five star joint and as an added bonus it seemed to be nowhere near the centre of town. I couldn’t get out there, it wouldn’t have worked given that the Swiss tour rep was accompanying the guests into the foyer to make sure they checked in ok. As the bus driver shot me a knowing look when I failed to get off the bus at the place I was allegedly staying, I was quietly panicking. At the next few hotels the same thing happened, the tour rep got the luggage off the bus and held it captive until the tourists checked-in. I was thanking my lucky stars I’d kept my bag with me. A while later we pulled up near a cheaper two star place, that was set off the street a little away from the bus. When the rep left and walked to the hotel, I took my chance, fled the bus and hid in a courtyard until it left. Heaven only knows what the others on the bus thought.
To make things worse, at the airport I wasn’t quite quick enough to notice that there had been another tour bus going to Dahab. So after a short cab ride I found myself at the local bus station tat 3:30pm to find that the next bus to Dahab was leaving at 5pm ! There was nothing for it but to pull out a book , order a sweet tea and wait. Amongst the only people who spoke to me was an Egyptian man with impeccable English, who told me he was a writer from Cairo and I did I realize that he thought I was someone famous when he saw me sitting there, as I was so “beautiful”. And that I had wonderful eyes. He didn’t explain the thought processes which might have lead him to think that anyone remotely famous might be waiting at the East Delta Bus company tea stall for a local bus up the coast costing $2.
By 5:30pm we were finally on the road, just at the end of sunset. Apart from a rather worrisome police checkpoint the journey was relatively uneventful. When we got to the town , in what transpired to be one of my best tactical moves of the trip, I asked a another European looking guy if he wanted to share a cab to the camps. Ben was a Canadian who had been coming to Dahab for several years. He had arrived back in Egypt this time a few weeks beforehand and was working for winter work as a dive instructor. He was to prove a willing, able and interesting guide and guru for all the local goings on. I picked up some much needed food and he brought me to the place he was staying , the improbably named “Fighting Kangaroo Oasis”. The place was cheap, clean and ruin by Bedouins, which Ben assured me was a guarantee of few hassles and sales pitches. Dahab and the camp was beginning to seem like a cross between Koh Samui and Mamallapuram, where colourful characters and local rip-off merchants mingled in equal measure , in a place which had started as a Bedouin settlement, moved to a hippy hangout and was going towards becoming a Sharm-like resort. The camp had more than just Ben as a semi permanent resident. There was JJ a French writer who had acquired an accidental son by a Sudanese woman now living in Cairo and Steffi the Alsacian art restorer and dive master. She told me once while under the influence that she couldn’t really apply to museums and galleries to be restorer as she had worked on stolen pieces of art. Her manner of recounting this was so flippant that I was inclined to believe her.
While getting my diving sorted the next day, I got talking to Mohamed the camp manager.
“Saddam Hussein changed my life”, he tells me, “when I think about my life before, it was…y’know…ruled by the clock. Now I don’t even wear a watch”, and he presents his bare wrist for my inspection.
Turns out Mohamed was Kuwati before the invasion he had been an air steward for Kuwati Airlines. His family had some Egyptian origins and when Saddam came they simply left and never went back. That afternoon I took a walk along the shoreline and sucked up the quietness along with the sea air. It was hard to believe I was looking across to Saudi Arabia…
Apparently I had fallen on a good moment to do some dives in Dahab. The full moon was in a few days and one of the staff instructors told me the conditions were always very calm in its approach. This is a boon indeed considering that the area is one of the prime spots for windsurfing and strong winds will reek havoc with underwater visibility.
There was other advantages to staying in the campsite. The night of the full moon the Bedouin owner of the campsite son was getting married and all the guests were invited to partake in the festivities. What I had was essentially an evening invite to a full Bedouin wedding, not an opportunity to be missed. Hours after we had been told we were going, we finally loaded in the back of a pick-up truck and drove the few miles to the Bedouin village on the outskirts of the tourist areas. The skies were completely clear and the moon was providing that blue/grey tinge like badly lit black and white movie. The evening was loaded with atmosphere even before we’d got to the village. We got to something resembling the village square, there were camels and children and rubbish strew about haphazardly. The smell was something else too, not unpleasant just indescribable.
Myself, Mohamed the camp manager and a few other blinking tourists from the camp piled out of the pick-up, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do and feeling more than a little idiotic. I threw Mohamed a “you brought us here, what the hell are we supposed to do?” look and he came and told me he’d never been to a Bedouin wedding. After a while he suggested we take a walk. Women were seated on the ground in the open “village square” area. The men were chanting in small groups dotted around the village, accompanied by drum beats beaten out on empty oil cans.
After some time one or two women got up to dance with one of the groups causing the other groups to play even harder and louder to attract dancers. Occasionally some of the men would even defect to groups with more dancers. The women were covered from head to foot in sheer black shawling, the upper shawl decorated with gold designs which reflected brilliantly in the full moon. The danced with their heads covered, occasionally revealing their faces to the male musicians, much to their approval. How they managed to produce the music they did with only oil cans and their voices is beyond me: tribal, hypnotic, resounding in the night as the women whirled and twirled and glittered in the moonlight.
We eventually happened upon the groom, a tall stocky man looking tired. He invited us to his house for Bedouin Tea – quite different from black or green teas you find anywhere else with a strong taste of sage and other herbs. We sat in his yard among concrete sheds that looked like they were still under construction. There were goats and chickens all over the yard: quite a contrast to the guesthouse building back at the camp his father owned, with ensuite bathrooms and ceiling fans in all rooms. A matriarch type figure appeared with the tea. She was probably not as old as she looked and although small in stature she had enormous presence. She and Mohamed spoke in Arabic, he occasionally translated for us but mostly we sat in silence enjoying the delicious tea and trying not to intrude more than we clearly were.
After a while we left and rejoining the singing and dancing in the main square. A truck pulled up and its strong headlights caught on one of the camels at the side of the square, projecting a larger than life camel shadow on the side of a tall wall. Just another surreal sight for the diary, but I wished I could have caught it on camera.
The Bedouins and especially the women have a way of looking through you as they pass. Something in their face, in their comportment says “I see you, I know you are there, but you have utterly no relevance for me”. Perhaps a survival mechanism, a result of being perennial outsiders to any and all rulers of their lands through time. It was most strange. I had the sensation of being invisible until some of the younger girls approached me smiling. The bravest one, under goading and encouragement from her friends, asked me if I spoke Arabic, it was heartbreaking to have to say no. She tried out one or two English phrases on me but soon lost interest, given my inability to communicate. She and her friends skipped off to join the party. Now the safest bet when you don’t know the local language is to find some under fives. They never seem to mind that you don’t speak their language as they communicate on altogether different channels. I remember in New Zealand a little girl from Hong Kong rabitted on to me for an entire bus journey either oblivious or ignoring my complete lack of Cantonese. I had noticed two younger girls playing clapping games and apparently acting out for my benefit. Soon I was sitting in the dirt teaching them a rather tricky clapping game from my youth (Under The Bambush if anyone remembers that one). The others from the camp headed off, but my teaching duties were not yet complete and only too happy to not be invisible anymore I stayed on a while. On my way home, the kids thinking I wasn’t sufficiently decorated for having been at a wedding dragged me into a local shop and put a temporary tattoo on me. At least that’s why I think they did it !
After that I decided that it was time to get moving and visit a English woman i knew, who was working as a diving instructor in the resort town of Sharm El Sheik. it had been years since we'd met on a four day tour of Kakadu national park in Northern Australia and i almost didn't recognise her. her place was very ex-pat style and in fact could have been an apartment in almost any town anywhere in Europe. Most of her co-workers were English too, as were the most part of their clients. They are all technically on residency visas but the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to people working in diving on residency visas in the Sinai peninsula. i had come there to spend Christmas with her and the other ex-pats, she and her flatmate had ordered a turkey especially for the occasion. apart from the widespread drunkenness the funniest part of the day was one of her friends who was Jewish making sarcastic toasts to little baby Jesus.
Shortly after I made my escape towards Cairo, I had no real will to leave the tranquillity of the Red Sea resorts but I figured it would be a shame to come to Egypt and not see the Pyramids…
Jan 2003
I was quite tired from being on the bus to Cairo most of the evening. In fact I’d been attempting to get to Cairo most of the day, having been denied access to that earlier bus in Sharm El Sheik. There was two hours to wait till the next bus, which of course didn’t leave for a further hour.
I met a French guy and his Egyptian friend while waiting for the bus. They had also been denied access to the 2:30pm bus. We got talking a little and due to either his bad understanding or my bad accent, he understood I was Dutch (ollandaise) rather than Irish (irlandaise), I was too tired and hung-over to bother correcting him. And besides i thought it was amusing, Irish people have the kind of accent while speaking English that often people think when we say "Ireland" we are saying "Holland", odd that it should work in French as well. Only problem is that he came back later and was asking me something about the Dutch language, I think I faked it well enough so he didn’t notice. Rather strangely he informed me that the title of the research paper I was reading, “Mariposa: WAN Databases”, meant butterfly in Spanish, which was also slang for homosexual men. Hmmm….
The journey was fairly uneventful except a full shakeout of the bus and id control for all the Egyptians at Suez. And of course being woken from a deep and needed sleep to be sold a tea that I didn’t even want from the bus’ ground hostess. I had only taken the tea as it seemed like the quickest way to get the guy to leave me alone so I could get back to sleep. I couldn’t though…
All this left me quite dazed as I arrived in Cairo at 1am. To my dismay the French guy and his Egyptian friend made a quick escape from the station. I was hoping they would help me with bargaining for a cab. To make things worse I wasn’t quite sure which bus station I was at, and hence wasn’t sure what fare I should be hitting for. The taxi driver that approached me spoke good English, which set alarm bells ringing right away. When I didn’t like the fares he was offering, he brought over his mate the policeman to verify this was the fare. Well it was either that, or he did it to intimidate me. I ended up paying more than I wanted, cause I was tired and I wanted to get away from the station and into bed. I made it to Hotel Dahab in the end, despite the taxi driver telling me it was no longer good (and by the way did I want to stay in his friend's hotel instead) and some guy at the door of the hotel building telling me it was full (and by the way did I want to stay in his friend's hotel instead). Hotel Dahab was a wonderful friendly shithole off the main square Talaat Harb, just the kind of place I love. I had regained some of my energy, or perhaps fallen into overtiredness, and stayed up chatting to the night clerk. I learned a new Arabic word “magnoona” – crazy, which was to be applied to me frequently during my brief sojourn in the country . Unfortunately, I wasn’t used to the city noise and didn’t get much sleep the first night. This happens to me every time I stay at some friends place in the centre of London too.
I woke up late the next day and got as far as the Egyptian Museum which was right beside the hotel. I had met some Dutch guys arriving that evening and they invited me to accompany them on a trip the next morning to see the (semi) famous weekly Camel Market outside Cairo. But first, a manager in the hotel arranged for about 10 of us to go to for an evening of Sufi devotional music in the old town. It was inside a splendid fortress that we were treated to the music and the whirling dervish style dancing at once mesmerising and hypnotising…
Fast Forward to the next morning and I somehow had a bad feeling about this cab idea. There was something dodgy in the guy just happening to be outside our hotel at 5am and offering to help. He also said he “friend” was a taxi driver and he would negotiate a good price for us. Indeed the price he was asking to take us to “near” the market was almost too good to be true. I always think when things seem to good to be true, they usually are, but the Dutch guys were set on the idea. However his idea of “near the camel market” was about 90mins away. In fairness we did get to the place where the bus left for the camel market but at an insanely inflated price. There wasn’t much we could do, the price had been agreed and we had to pay.
Over an hour later and in the depths of the countryside outside Cairo, we arrived at the Camel market. The sun was just coming up, it was cloudy, there were camels and white robed men as far as the eye could see. It was surreal and bizarre and just like the Bedouin wedding, now that we’d got here, I was wondering what the hell we were doing, I felt kinda dumb and out of place. In the back of my mind I wondered how we were going to get back. We'd come out on a local minbus, which was very good fun but could hardly be expected to have a regular schedule. I didn't fancy our chances on getting a good deal on a cab back to Cairo either.
We trailed a bit at the entry slightly dazed from the early start. Quite soon someone came to sell us "entry tickets", although it really could have had anything written on it. Well at least it wasn't too expensive. We wandered deep into the market and saw various herds of camels getting beaten by various owners. We passed some other Europeans and i was approached my the woman with them,
"Don't tell me you're enjoying this", she said.
Not quite sure of how to react, all I could say was ,"well it's interesting"
"I'm hating this", she says "i really can't take seeing animals treated like this.”
Somehow it didn't really bother me…she was German and had been teaching English in Cairo for two years. She'd been thinking about visiting the camel market for some time. She said she was glad she came but the look on her face said otherwise...
I will say the most impressive site besides seeing two camels being fit into the back of a pick up truck, was the slaughtering of a goat. It went from animal to food in approx 5 mins. Quite impressive! Not too long later we decided it was time to go and headed towards the Nile barrages which lay between the Camel Market and Cairo. One of the Dutch guys had told me there were some nice parks there to relax in. After the rigours of the camel markter we spent a fairly quiet day strolling through the park, having tea at a VERY local roadside stall and visiting an amusement park..
We walked down to the place where our guide book said we could get a ferry back to downtown Cairo. The Dutch guys had a vision of a relaxed cruise back to the centre along the Nile. What we got was a two hour, crowded downstairs, loud music upstairs rusting boat which seemed to take an age to get back to the downtown. The lower deck of the boat was full of families returning from a day out, Friday being the traditional day-off in Muslim countries. The upper open deck was full with teenagers seemingly coming back from a daytime disco. They were continuing their revelries with very loud Arabic pop music and outrageously good dancing. Soon the Dutch guys couldn't take the music anymore and returned the milder lower deck. I was left alone, which at the beginning wasn't really a problem but slowly i became completely encircled by a bunch of youths and began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I could always have escaped to the lower deck but i loathed seeming like i was fleeing and besides they were just kids. I stuck it out and in the end the few girls in the group made the others apologise for their behaviour. I wandered round the upper deck a little but continued to feel like i was getting too much attention and joined the others below.
The music was still audible even there and there were a few teenagers dancing on a make shift stage at the back. No sooner had I arrived than the people around us were asking who I was, what was the relationships and where I was from and did I like Egypt. At the time i was pretending to be married to one of the Dutch guys, it was just simpler that way (not to mention giving me an air of respectability). Soon some men asked me to dance but I declined thinking that it probably wasn’t the done thing. Then a little later a quite timid woman in a veil got up and equally timidly motioned for me to dance with her. We were in a quite corner of the boat and I saw no possible harm coming from a little dance with this lady, especially as I love to dance. I was wholly unprepared for what happened next.
The minute I got up to dance the entire lower deck of the boat exploded: not only were all eyes on me but there was a great outcry of whooping and cheering and cries of “Yalla! Yalla!” coming from all directions. Not to mention that quite a few people scattered around the crowded deck stood up and joined in the general mayhem with their own dancing circles. There was nothing else to do but get into and reveal in my new found stardom and soon I was getting requests to come and join other groups for a dance. By the end of the cruise I had danced with about half the boat, I was utterly exhausted but completely charmed by the residents of Cairo who had been offering me food, drink and conversation as well as dancing all the way back to the centre of town. I was amazed at the general enjoyment and sensuality of the women’s dancing to the pop music. Honestly its easy to forget you’re in Africa until you see something like I experience on that boat.
With another few days in Cairo I managed to get in most of the tourist trail including haggling at the Al-Khalili market, being descended upon by hoards of schoolchildren wanting to touch my hair in the backstreets, getting ripped off in an elaborate scam at the Pyramids, being greeted with a “Happy Christmas – Welcome in Cairo” by almost everyone we met and of course the essential “café” experience.
Being a Muslim country there are no pubs and bars only prohibition style cafés with darkened windows which serve alcohol. A few of us from the hotel went to check a local café out one night. Inside there were a few people scattered about the place, most seemed to be drinking alone. There was nothing approaching a convivial atmosphere in there which was a stark contrast to the lively coffee stalls in the rest of the town. Due to the fact that I work in an engineering university, I barely noticed that I was the only woman on the premises. However this point did cross my mind again while drinking my fourth large beer. I began to have a mild panic: if the general population didn’t drink and for sure women didn’t drink in public, exactly how likely was it that this joint had a toilet for women? As I say it was only a mild panic, as I knew in the worst case the hotel wasn’t too far. The guys had apparently been using a trough style urinal at the back of the pub and they weren’t too sure if there was a cubicle. What followed was one of my most interesting bathroom experiences. So small we hadn’t noticed it but the relatively unused women’s bathroom was in fact in the middle of the place, and looked to have been converted from one of those telephone booths you sometimes find in pubs. I took a deep breath and a double take on the table of men sitting right at the entrance to the toilet and went in. I could see most of the pub through the cracks in the door and decided it was better to keep the light off. I barely had room to readjust my clothes in this strange telephone booth toilet. Turns out I needn’t have been embarrassed, the men at the table, who had 2 inches of wood between their heads and me peeing, were as gentlemanly as possible under the circumstances.
By the end of my time in Cairo I had cracked the taxi fare strategy. I didn’t haggle, or try fractured Arabic, I simply hopped in the cab, gave the destination with a reasonably good accent and paid a pound or two over the odds, to avoid complaints. It worked like a dream. If I’d tried to ask the price and haggle I would have paid the same but it would have taken me twice the time – in a different league to anywhere else I have ever been , Egyptians are extremely hard bargainers. So gone were the days where i tried "Take me to the airport for a hamster?" out on the cab drivers. This was a turn of phrase the English ex-pats I’d met at the Red Sea employed, a mixture of Arabic, (the arabic word for five sounds like “Hamsa”) and cockney rhyming slang.
For the last two days of the holidays I returned to Dahab, which appeared ever more the oasis of tranquillity after Cairo, to relax and catch up with some people I’d met the first time around. I was extremely sorry to return to a cold and drab European winter, and when I saw a notice in a Dive shop looking for a receptionist I was, for the first time, regretful of having a life to go back to…
... Jan 2003