Random Acquaintances

I was rattled awake at 2:30 am by a tugging on my pillow, finally opening my eyes after realizing it wasn't just the train jerking me around. I raised my eyes to a sturdy-looking cop asking to see my ticket. He thrust a thumb into his chest. "POLICE."

What's the problem here, Officer? ... "Fi Mushkila?"

"YOU SPEAK ARABI?"

A little. "Shuwayya." Again: What's the problem?

"HOW IS EVERYTHING? IT'S OKAY? YOU OKAY? NO PROBLEMS? THE SEAT IS GOOD? THE AIR CONDITIONING'S OKAY?" he barked in Arabic.

Yes, yes, my seat, the air conditioning, Egypt - I'm very happy here. Good night, Officer.

After having been singled out and embarrassed quite loudly in front of the entire Egyptian-populated train car - but with good intentions, I realize - I nuzzled back into my pillow against the window and shut out the noisy nighttime chatter. Again I was rattled away, this time by the car, and blearily glanced down at the wall below the window. I turned to the man sitting next to me.

"Excuse me...Is that a cockroach?"

He hesitated only a moment to adjust to my foreign accent, then quite abruptly leaned over me with his newspaper and smacked the litte bug there against the wall, where it would remain flattened beside me for the next 12 hours - some of which my fellow passenger spent reading to me from his book or snapping at any officer or attendant that tried to interrogate me again. Thus began another random acquaintance from this last weekend.

Walking in the souq street of Aswan the previous day, a tourist shop vendor noticed my bag of grapes and, scrambling to grab a potential customer's attention, called out "Ooh, fruit!!" A young Greek guy walking ahead of me seemed to take offense to this because he turned around to face the vendor. "He's not talking about you, don't worry," and I held up my bag. As we walked together down the busy street of heckling vendors, this chatty 19-year-old Greek guy, Angelos, immediately launched into an enthused recount of his day's purchases. He loves bargaining and can't get enough of these Arab markets. He's been voraciously traveling the Middle East, he told me over Turkish coffees at a streetside cafe. He interrogated me about my life in Cairo and voiced the observation that I don't dress very locally. "Well, I don't have the same taste as most local women on the street, my clothes are American, and anyway, my blonde hair stands out no matter what I wear."

Nodding along, he added, "And you're so...white."

Yeah, I've noticed.

"How old are you? American girls look so young; I can never tell."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know, 17?"

That, I hadn't noticed. But I took his enthusiasm as a good sign. "Would you come to a wedding with me?"

Perhaps the most random - and lucky - acquaintance of my weekend in Aswan, southern Egypt, was Mahmoud. I'd slept a solid and very peaceful 13 hours on the train from Cairo to Aswan, then dragged my feet and bags down the road to my hostel and crashed for another 3 hours. Still fatigued, I resorted to doing what any lonely tourist thinking "Right, guess I should actually get out and see something" would do, and paged through the Lonely Planet. It seemed all the pharoanic tombs and old fortresses required boats and full days of free time to access, and I had 6 hours of workshops to teach the following day. I weighed my lesser options. Elephantine Island: 2 pounds, 5 minutes away. Perfect.

It took some trial-and-error to figure out the Arabic word for "ferry" because asking for a "boat" just warranted condescending gestures at the armies of cruise ships lining the Nile. More difficult was finding the small ferry dock between such ships, yet the most alarming challenge was arriving on the island and realizing that I was smack-dab in the middle of a Nubian village. I felt like muttering, "Oops, sorry I was just leaving..." but remembered the island was a tourist attraction for the ancient ruins on its south end. Still, its silence and lack of visible tourists made me feel instrusive.

I asked for directions at what appeared to be the only shop in the village. The owner and a customer argued about the best way to direct me, until they agreed that I ought to simply follow the customer. Trailing behind him through narrow dirt paths between colorful mud and brick homes, I was possessed by the usual travel consciousness: should I be naively grateful for his help, or should I try to branch away as soon as possible and avoid any potential awkwardness such as "You pay me a tip now" or "Are you married?"

However, for the next 2 1/2 hours, I followed Mahmoud and continued to debate this in my mind, eventually accepting that his hospitality was worth a tip anyway. He took me to the granite cliffs of the island where we gazed across the Nile at the west bank's stretches of beige sand and at other small green islands full of perched white birds, speckling the trees. We saw the ruins carved with hierglyphics, which Mahmoud explained had been claimed and excavated by the Egyptian government, leaving dunes of rocks and shattered clay pots in a wasteland around the tourist site - land that used to belong to the Nubian villagers, land that had housed people.

We sat on the bank in the grass - real, natural, GREEN grass (I was in shock/heaven) - and watched the sun set over the cliffs and palm tree silhouettes. Mahmoud made fun of the bored-looking tourists passing by in motorized boats and resented the Egyptian tour guides who know nothing about the area's culture or history apart from what they learned in a university. He nostalgically recounted guiding his own groups of tourists, swapping stories and building campfires together on the banks of the river, and bitterly described working for Egyptian guides that hire a Nubian sailboat captain for 5 pounds and tell them not to speak to the tourists. Although expressing his sadness, he said everything with a smile and a rolling accent, and was grateful for the 3 sailboats he owns and the trips downriver with tourists to Nubian Islands or Sudan. We roamed through the village streets, watching villagers prepare for the wedding that night and ducking into gardens to see lush vegetable plots and mango trees, and to feed Mahmoud's cows.

As the daylight faded away I confessed to Mahmoud that I was harboring an evil and exhausting bacteria in my stomach and should head back to my hostel. I was also ready to rinse off the mud and sweat I'd collected over the past few hours. He invited me to the wedding later that evening and refused to accept any money for his hospitality. I'd heard the Nubian culture was generous but damn! What a nice day he'd given me while asking for absolutely nothing in return.

So I returned with Angelos around midnight and Mahmoud guided us around the shore to the small cafe -- that is, a shed with a stove for boiling water and a few benches of men in white galabeyas overlooking their docked sailboats. Everyone spoke a hodge podge of English and had a good-humored, slow and gentle way of speaking. It was an infectious calm, though my ears kept asking me if such quiet was normal. Soon the live Nubian band started blaring dance music over the speakers in the village center, and we walked - no, ambled is a better description of Mahmoud's pace - over to the action.

Barefoot and jovial, old and young men in white and women in black were dancing in circles around the bride and groom, or leaning back on the surrounding benches puffing on rusty-looking sheesha pipes. I was transfixed by the upbeat drumming and the expressions of sheer joy from the men's circle. Even at Egyptian weddings in Cairo and Alexandria, I'd never seen an all-male aggregation dancing with such contentment and wreckless abandon, a mix between marching and hopping, both jerkily and fluidly, with arms flailing above or flapping like wings. The women's circle was more predictable, dominated by hip shaking that still seems boldly seductive to my foreigner's eyes. Fortunately no one minded us foreigners oggling at the music and dance from our perch against the village mosque with Mahmoud and the other men from the cafe. I felt the music could carry me all night but finally Angelos reminded me to get some sleep for my workshops the next day. I walked alone down the souq street, quiet but for vendors tucking up their shops and some kids kicking around a ball, and wondered how people could be so simply kind and generous.