Gotta love foreign customs. Let’s talk about politeness.
MAJOR RULE: Greet everyone first; talk later. About a week ago, David was saying hello to a group of friends at the Grand Mall. A brief conversation spontaneously started as David greeted them one by one, there was a short exchange, and David moved on to the rest of the guys.
Next in line: “David, I am so angry with you (said with no inflection).”
David: “Why?”
Next in line: “Because you did not say hello to me.”
David: “But I’m saying hello to you right now. I just walked through the door.”
Next in line: “But you talked with Ahmed first.”
David: “ . . . ”
They take their greetings very seriously here, but it shows just how valuable good manners and civility are to this culture. As with all human acts, though, any good deed can be warped into something driven by selfishness or fear, but these are rare and extreme occurrences that only happen in old-fashioned, rural areas. A popular story is about some men who were held at gunpoint and taken hostage by their hosts so that they would have no choice but to eat dinner and spend the night at the hosts' house. The hosts would look incompetent and would be mocked by their neighbors otherwise, so the hosts really had no choice but to take drastic measures in order to keep their guests from shaming them. Again – a rare thing.
Other rules make much more sense than the greeting thing, such as “feet are dirty” and “so are dogs,” because feet are gross and and no matter how highly you regard your dog there’s just no way you’ll ever keep him from searching out and rolling in the most unholy refuse he can find.
Speaking of dogs, the dismissal of them as unclean has led to a hilarious misunderstanding of the domesticated dogs kept by European expatriates. Egyptians aren’t only afraid of all dogs, they fear for their lives when any dog, even one on a leash, gets too close. While it’s amusing, I don’t consider Egyptians to be misguided or even unwise for this – imagine if you were approached by a large, clearly predatory animal with which you have had no positive experiences and about which you have heard only bad things. Think you’d be friendly? I find it funny regardless of whether it makes sense, mostly because masculinity is so exaggerated here it’s kind of ridiculous to see a grown man try to evade a dog that’s less than half his weight.
Appearances are everything in urban Egypt. Walk down any street and you’ll see the destitute making calls with the latest, most high-tech cell phones. Being well-dressed and polite are common methods of achieving faux affluence. For example, David knows a guy who spends all his money on clothes and insisted on paying the bill for a party of seven even though pooling the money was an option and David’s the one in the group making an American salary. A much more interesting occurrence of this type happened in the Coptic district, where we were hanging out with someone we'll call Mr. A and a friend of his. His friend took a few photos, which somehow led to Mr. A pulling out a few glamor shots he kept in his wallet.
David: “These don’t look like you at all, Mr. A.” * hands photos to me*
Mr. A: “What do you mean?”
Jared: “You’re white in these photos, man.”
The Mr. A in the photographs had the complexion of a cave-dwelling fish. His skin had doubtless been edited by the photographer.
Mr. A: “I am white – it’s just that the sun is very hot in the summer, and sldkjfas;ldkfjasdfl...”
I was too deep in thought to hear the last part of Mr. A’s sentence. Blaming his complexion on the heat of the sun instead of the UV rays that are known to cause an increase in epidermal melanin seemed odd to me, then I realized I was an idiot and that the real issue was that he was trying to convince me, a semiprofessional geek of considerable paleness, that his skin was whiter than mine. It’s true that many Arabs can have pale skin, Syrians and Lebanese in particular, but Mr. A simply doesn’t have it. The guy’s dark brown, but he’s Egyptian, where dark skin is common. Why would he make up excuses?
He’s got two reasons to be ashamed of his color, both of them invalid and regrettable:
There's a European ideal: In every advertisement, film, music video, and television show, the featured men and women have white skin, and they appear to be selected based on how Caucasian they look. The noses, cheekbones, and skin tones of Egyptians in the media – and therefore the aesthetic standards aspired to by the population – are unmistakably European.
The other is class distinction: Well-paid people are businessmen; they are successful and powerful people, and, more importantly, are also the ones who work indoors. It’s an old aesthetic concept: if you’re pale, you look rich because you clearly don’t spend your time outside doing manual labor.
I’m guessing Mr. A’s excuse was motivated by a combination of these. That was a very interesting and lamentable event.
In other news, Egypt has left its mark on about half of my clothes, in the forms of ripped-off buttons and stains from air pollution, dripping food, and contact with literally every surface I have touched since my arrival. I don’t think of myself as terribly vain, but seeing garments intended for a 15-month journey being systematically eliminated within mere weeks tests my patience.
I’d get into the Egyptian view of Israel but I don’t think this entry should be longer than it already is. I’m going to Dahab either tomorrow or the day after; expect something good in the next week.
Cheers,
-Jared
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