Nostalgia

I just found myself spending the last hour reading the blog of some AUC grad student from Tuscon. This I ran across searching google for pictures of places in Zamalek I never got around to photograph. I wish I had taken more pictures of the everyday places we went to, but at the time you think it impossible to forget places you go so frequently. Almost a year after my departure last winter I already find myself forgetting a bit of the layout of the place.

I enjoyed reading this other student's gripes about AUC (many of which I share) and also about her attachments to Egypt's idiosyncratic inconveniences (which I also share). I enjoyed reading her assessments of places I had also visited, and related to her rant about self-important American study abroad students trying to out-do each other in terms of "adventurous" voyages into exotic, non-white locales. (here's the link to the post. I hope she doesn't mind me linking to it, but its a public blog so... http://amandainschool.blogspot.com/2009/10/dont-go-for-students.html ).

I especially like that it was the group of Notre Dame students who "randomly" showed up at Petra and crashed the "echolocator's" party. That we would run into other AUC Americans in Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Petra, or Ramallah during spring break was something of which we were well aware. I do, however, relate to the echolocator's desire to do something unique and her disappointment that the arrival of other American study abroaders deprived her of that unique experience. We all desire to do unique things in order to make ourselves stand out, and in Cairo competing American students can sometimes forget that by simply living their daily lives in Cairo they are doing something unique. Instead your world narrows to the 100 or so other people abroad with you. A trip to Beirut or Petra is suddenly not so unique, as ridiculous as that sounds, because everyone abroad with you makes the same trip. I'm still at a loss though as to why she had not expected to run into other study abroaders at a place as famous as Petra.

This "self-important" girl reminded me of a group of American girls who studied at AUC the same semester as I. We referred to them as the Sorority Girls because of their loud voices, tendency to travel in packs, and insistence on pronouncing every Arabic word with a southern twang. I'd assume these are traits they only exhibited around Zamalek to appear cute to store owners, but I think the reason it really annoyed my close friends there is that their behavior was so different from our philosophy of trying to be as respectful of social customs as possible; to try to blend in, not stand out, not be that loud, obnoxious American stereotype.

I suppose the reason I just wasted the past two hours trolling the internet for information on Cairo is that I flat out miss the place. I've been sitting here in front of my poorly insulated apartment window working on my thesis and staring at the frozen Indiana tundra that serves as our parking lot, thinking about where I was a year ago today. I was at my home whiling away the days until my Jan 26 departure, getting extra passport pictures, buying non-branded clothes for fear that giant logos would draw too much attention or unfavorable looks (AUC put an end to those fears), wondering where I would travel, wondering if I would like the other students. I think about the cool mornings and evenings and the warm afternoons, getting lost in the HUSS building, walking half an hour from the Zamalek AUC dorms to Midan Tahrir.

Although I truly feel that my semester in Egypt in no way flew by, I now think about how short it truly was. I was in such a hurry to get in and out of New Campus so I could get back to the heart of Cairo that it was only at the end of the semester that I really developed any sort of relationship with some Egyptian students at AUC. I talked with a girl named Dina occasionally in my philosophy class, but it was not until the last day of regular classes that I talked to her outside of class. I got her full name and she told me to friend her on facebook and to give her a call if I ever made it back to Egypt. It was sad and awkward to finally connect with someone and on that same day know that in all likelihood I would never see her again. I almost felt like I betrayed her by becoming friends only to immediately leave, probably forever. Before the same class I used to talk with a guy named Mustafa. We both usually got to class about 20 minutes early and sat and talked in a courtyard in the interior of the engineering building. He was part Iraqi and for that reason had bounced around from country to country, saying that they usually told you it was time to go after a couple years. He had lived variously in Saudi, New Zealand, Egypt, and most likely a few other places. He was a film major and was working on securing funds to begin a career making documentaries. His first project was about the migration of some birds in southeast Asia. He told me all about Hurghada (apparently an even more Russified Red Sea town that Sharm) and compound culture in Saudi (residents of different American and British compounds would compete against each other in sports and hold mixers and formal dances, much like dorm culture and ND). I never thought to get any of his contact info.

I never got to know my neighbors in my dorm either (this might have been because our next door neighbor's blasting techno at late hours dissuaded us from engaging in any further interaction than the occasional "Hey can you turn that down? We're trying to sleep").

The Egyptian students of AUC see study abroad students turn over every semester. Each term hundreds more enter and at the end they all leave. At some point it must seem futile to attempt to found a true relationship with a study abroad student. You can only begin to know someone after four months. Then they disappear.

I don't mean to sound regretful. I loved my time in Egypt and don't feel that I "missed out" on anything. It is simply a matter that we were only there for four months. They say that to truly have an opinion about a place you must live there for over four months; anything shorter and you are still colored by initial reactions, disappointments, and thrills. It is only after this period of time that initial impressions recede and the place truly feels like a home, or at least a permanent residence. It was precisely at this four month cut-off period that we packed up and left. We were there long enough for the place to truly become not an extended holiday but simply the location of our daily lives, the background to our mundane activities. But we were also there for a short enough period of time that our abrupt departure, just as the place became like home, left things feeling severed, incomplete.