Egyptology

To help me get Egyptian prices, as opposed to over-inflated tourist prices, I've been lying. I say that my parents are living in Alexandria and I am studying English in Australia so I can become a writer. Yes, sadly, it is necessary to create elaborate stories about your nationality if you want cheap stuff.

I sat down and chatted with a very lovely Muslim guy named Muhammed today. He runs a shisha and galabeya shop in El Souk st in Aswan. He started off trying to sell me something, and then when he saw that I could speak Arabic he asked me to come sit and talk with him. I usually fob off such requests, but today I relented. He seemed nice.

The vast majority of Egyptians are amazingly warm, welcoming people. They will sit and chat with anyone, offer them tea or food, even welcome them into their houses. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them who are also very poor, and try and remedy their situation by trying to cash in on the (comparitively) rich, ignorant tourist. Thus warm and welcoming become aggressive and annoying. Sometimes even criminal.

Because I told him the story about me being a student of Egyptian heritage, Muhammed sat and chatted with me, and gave up on the selling. He asked me about Australia, and talked (wistfully?) about how socially free we were. In Egypt (and most Islamic countries) men and women are very closely watched by their family and other Egyptians. In other words, no sex before marriage. No hanging out with the opposite sex before marriage. No talking about sex before, during or after marriage. So Australia must seem like some kind of amazing free-lovin' sexual paradise (or reincarnation of Sodom, depending on who you ask). I had a very similar discussion with this cute soldier on the train from Cairo to Luxor. He believed that in the West, the lines that defined acceptable behaviour had been pushed too far. He also had this idea that gay people had gotten bored with women and decided to experiment. I patiently explained that gay people (like friends of friends of mine) were not like that at all, and that they were gay because there was something inside them from the very beginning that made them who they were. He seemed to understand, or at least think about it.