WEEK II and III: Being There

 – I’ve been kept from writing for a while, but I hope to complete an overview of my stay so far this week. –

I got used to the heat (and to wearing long sleeves or at least nothing sleeveless) and the traffic and the new surroundings quite fast, even to not eating or drinking in public, as Ramadan started shortly after my arrival and breaking the fast before sunset is not appreciated.

The structure given to my days and weeks by six hours/day, four days/week of Arabic lessons surely helped that a lot. In my beginners’ courses in Kalimat (Arabic for ‘words’) we are only three to four students, so the lessons are quite intense. Having studied some Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in Germany a few years ago, however, gave me a little head start and less exhaustion.

One thing I obviously cannot get used to is the southern phenomenon of sudden fall of darkness, a daily source of amazement to me. I make a note to check if the slow dusk will nevertheless surprise me when I am back in Germany.

And in the middle of settled in everyday business and an accepted level of feeling foreign it sometimes hits me quite unexpectedly on my way home from school as the bus crosses the Nile and the Gezira (Arabic for island, in this case THE island in the center of Cairo on which you find Zamalek, a major sporting club, Cairo Tower, the Opera, a metro station, some hotels and banks etc.) on one of the city highways: ‘You’re crossing the longest river in the world just like going to school! You’re actually staying in the freaking biggest city of the whole of Africa!!’

View north from the Marriot hotel in Zamalek: Cairo Tower, Opera House, Gezira Club

My evenings in this first period of my stay I either spend with my host mother and her friends in the club (though not in the corner with a public viewing of the day’s progress of the Mubarak trials), in my host father’s flower shop close to the church they attend or on the balcony, enjoying temperatures below 35 degrees and the possibility to wear sleeveless tops.  Quite often I also help my host mother in the kitchen thus learning how to prepare some Egyptian dishes.

A disruption in my daily routine is caused by another laryngitis (I blame the air conditioning in combination with demanding pronunciation exercises). Having experienced this before I more or less manage to keep my mouth shut for some days, not ideal during a language course, but it even starts to get better before I go to see a doctor who prescribes the expected antibiotics. Not being privately insured in Germany I find myself to expect a conditional connection between receiving medical aid and proving my identity – it does not, of course, work this way in the private practice not far from the language school. As long as I pay the fee I may be anyone, quite a new experience.

Languages

Some quick information about the languages, as there is not just one form of Arabic to study. I take Fus’ha or MSA for three hours in the morning, this is the language used in writing and official contexts. In the afternoon we study Ameya, the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) which is used in everyday life and acquired a written form mainly in times of facebook, instant messengers and the like. The good thing is, ECA is much less complicated than MSA and it is understood all over the Arab world due to movies and TV shows produced in Egypt (Egyptians, on the other hand, can hardly understand e.g. Moroccans). The bad thing, at least for me, you cannot practice the spoken language by reading, something that greatly helped me both in learning English and Latvian. Apart from that the learner’s life is complicated by the fact that only text books for young children print the little signs indicating short – in regular print you have to more or less know the words you are reading before you can read them, quite a different story from learning European languages written in Latin or Cyrillic script. I measure my reading abilities by the number of words running across the news bar on TV I can read (without understanding) before they vanish from the screen. After seven weeks in Egypt I now reached a number of two to three, more if I recognize ubiquitous expressions like ‘Israeli embassy’ or ‘Israeli ambassador’. My understanding of spoken language miraculously grows little by little, I can more or less grasp the key points in simple everyday conversations I overhear in the hospital, on the bus or at home, speaking remains the hardest part.

School

All levels of Arabic as a foreign language are taught at Kalimat by an experienced team of teachers. I like the combination of my Fus’ha teacher who is enthusiastic about her language and its grammar, something I have no difficulties relating to, and a more practical approach in Ameya. The students are a mix of diplomats, students of political science, Islamic or religious studies, people taking a gap year at various stages of their education and the occasional crazy scientist. Apart from a high percentage of Germans there are Americans, various Europeans and a girl from China all meeting on the balcony during most breaks. Due to the Ramadan restrictions of eating in public we usually order in traditional Egyptian fast food, mainly ful and tameya (the latter known as Falafel in Europe) – definitely better and also healthier than McDonald’s. The teachers are fasting and prefer to watch the Mubarak trial on TV in the office. Opinions among Egyptians on this matter are much more varied than the outsider might expect. In short they range from ‘they should kill him’ to ‘he is a sick man who deserves respect because of his old age and also the fact that he used to do good things for the country’ – trust in the actual success of the trials, whatever that might be, is limited.