خلاص - End

خلاص   ("Khalas" - the 'kh' being that throaty hawking sound)

Egyptians say it constantly, and foreigners miss its catch-all meaning when they leave Egypt. I was racking my brain for the perfect English equivalent, leaning toward the word "finish", and as I doubted myself I gathered others' opinions in a forum online. The variety of answers depicts how stretched the word is:


   - khalas= stop it=enough=its used between ppl but not in arabic books.
   - khalas im gona kill u if u keep annoying me
   - 'Oh, come on, Khalas, you can stop now'
   -  'enough','stop' or 'end'. It is popularly used as a phraze akin to the English phraze 'All right-then'.
   - KHALAS! im tired!
   - khalas lets go eat! *growwl*


And finally:


   - This has been answered thoroughly, Khalas


These are all negative connotations, but you can also say khalas when you're finished with your meal and the waiter asks to take away your plate. At work the secretary asks me, "Did you send it, khalas?" Like, "Is it over?"


So now my time in Egypt is nearly khalas. I have about one month left here until I pick up my life and relocate to France. It's still sinking in as I try to imagine my future life and am starting to view my past and present differently, my Egypt experience already warped by retrospective vision.


I keep thinking about the most formative times. Making my way onto trains and midnight buses (some of which broke down) to smaller cities in Upper Egypt to teach workshops to teens about water and air pollution. Diving the Thistlegorm shipwreck. Diving with hammerhead sharks in the royal blue depths just days after getting my Advanced certification. Driving and camping for four days across the Great Sand Sea near Libya. Excursions to Petra and Beirut and Bethlehem. Getting interrogated and strip-searched in the Israeli airport. Losing my passport in Lebanon and relying on the kindness of my couchsurfing hostess to survive. And most of all, my first couple months in Egypt which were filled with confusion, homesickness, bed bugs, food poisoning (x2), unemployment, cultural lessons and fuck-ups, but also unimaginable opportunities, adoration for the new sights, people and language, and encountering lifelong friends. 


When I feel nervous about uprooting to France and starting over again, I try to remind myself that I didn't land in Egypt with very much to lean on - no Arabic, no friends in Egypt, no idea where/what/how I would be the next month, and not a whole lot of money either. Ryan and I arrived at 3 AM at the Alexandria airport, hopped into the bus waiting for us, watched as the driver navigated through endless potholes, stared at the black streets and closed shops, and I thought, nothing about this place looks familiar. I couldn't even grasp one thing to ground me. The next morning I missed the bus to class, where we would be trained as English teachers, and felt even more disoriented. Where and what was the food around here? Everything looked foreign (something I hadn't prepared myself for enough, obviously). When I arrived late to class, I sat in the corner during the lunch break and cried. 


An hour later, I was healed after meeting my classmates, including Noelle, who would get me through the next few years of obstacles.


Exhibit A: Noelle and me, at the start of my back-stabbing (literally) kidney infection during our trip to Fayoum Oasis


 

In trying to avoid dwelling on the upcoming goodbye, I'm looking forward to our next rendez-vous (see how amazing my French is?) planned at a friend's beach house in France in July. Noelle's been teaching me the French language basics to equip me to take on my new neighbors in that big scary European country where I'm headed. 


Mathieu has also been helping, and has assured me that Priority 1, after finding us an apartment, is getting me enrolled in French classes. Mathieu will be working at his company's head office in the inner suburbs of Paris (Rueil-Malmaison) (I'm proud that I can even spell that). I won't have a work visa for quite awhile. After we get the PACS (pacte civil de solidarité, French civil union), I will apply for a long-stay visa, and I think I'm eligible for a work visa one year later. It's a blur of rules and paperwork to me and I'm trying to take it all one step at time. 


Our PACS application has been in the works for 2 months now, even before Mathieu's company knew where to transfer him, and still I have frequent little fits of exasperation over these effing "documents". Bureaucratic procedures really bring out the Type A in me. Mathieu keeps calming me back down and saying that everything will work out. Ironically, after the French Consulate suddenly sprang a new form on us, I spent days of rage and stress calling the US Embassy to see if I could even get this form from them, and ASAP (lots of shameless pleading was involved). Then the French consular rep emails Mathieu and says, "On second thought, don't worry about that form." So, I should have taken Mathieu's advice and been patient instead of despairing and putting myself through hell just to make it work. I will try to remember this for the visa process!


On the more romantic side of this PACS process, we decided to get rings, even though there are no traditions since it was created in 1999 for gay couples to be able to marry. We wanted to make our own, so we found a workshop of jolly jewelers in a back alleyway of Khan el Khalili, a crazy old bazaar of winding streets with bright groundlevel shops and dark rickety workshops piled on top of them. Climbing up the stairs felt like climbing into a treehouse the size of a village. The rusting tools and contraptions in these workshops were amazing. Every piece looked retired and ill-suited for its task. Our jolly jewelers, lets call them Mustache and Chubby, were great teachers and hosts, calling us family, ordering us tea (though Mustache doubled our sugar intake when he thought we weren't looking; he didn't approve of our requested 1 teaspoon). Chubby looked at the simple design we'd brought on paper and went out to buy the silver at another shop. He showed us the bowl of gleaming pebbles and seemed to expect some kind of approval/reaction. Surprise was all I could muster. I'd never seen silver in the shape of Nerds candies. 


For 3 1/2 hours, we turned the pebbles into bands - torching, melting, pouring, pressing, pounding, cutting, more pounding, more shaping, sizing, welding, engraving, polishing, and kissing. Yes, afterward Chubby grabbed Mathieu's face between his hands and give him a big audible smack. He and Mustache, the polisher, the engraver, all gave us their utmost congrats. It was incredibly sweet. This is the design we chose:


 


More to come on the process as events unravel!