I'll be honest. I was not looking forward to returning to Cairo for much of the summer.

We overpacked, but I wasn't about to let go of my two Roombas, printer (for some reason contraband in this country, but I was counting on lax customs), dozens of new books and gallon of Indiana Amish maple syrup. I did leave behind an embarrassing number of my own books, which I overbought based on selling out the first night of my tour. And some shorts I now wish I had back, if only for wearing around the house with the shades drawn.

In Amsterdam, an Amazonian KLM flight attendant was yelling at a very old man from my flight that if he had wanted a wheelchair, he should have ordered one ahead of time with his ticket. A young male airport worker joined in the scolding. I tried to butt in with my trivial question about an information booth, more to deflect their cruelty than for an answer, but I succeeded in neither. "What kind of people are these?" I asked Fhar, who responded disdainfully, "Europeans." I caught myself laughing at both our atrocious generalizing, and at the quite obvious but still somehow jetlageddly funny fact that you don't have to be American to be an asshole in other people's countries. On the way to security, we passed the gate where we had almost been prevented from boarding our plane out last June, because it was inconceivable to the private airport security guard that we could actually reside in Cairo and not be terrorists. Later, we walked past a middle-aged woman with a headscarf, pushing a baby stroller and crying big, heaving sobs. Fhar said it wasn't a good airport to be Muslim. Though I had to agree, it looked more like a family fight to me. A young woman who looked to be her daughter walked annoyedly about 5 paces in front of her.

In any case, I was eager to explore Amsterdam, an eagerness that was dampened somewhat by the fact that the Center felt like Pier 41 (t-shirts decorated with the words "I Amsterdam", and a plethora of unsurprising yet mildly irritating stoner and sex-related jokes), and somewhat, literally, by the constant cold drizzle. The bicycles, of course, were amazing. I'd heard about it, but it really was exciting to see a city that revolved around pedal pushers, not cars. In a pathetic show of my dependence, the thing that excited me the most in Amsterdam was the organic Rooibos tea, which I'd forgotten to grab on my way out of the states. These things become far too precious. Oh, and the Corporate Africa magazine I scored, for a mere 5 Euros.

Anyway, being in Amsterdam for too short a time to see its beauty, but long enough to catch a cold, made me look forward to getting to Cairo. We went back to the airport a little early—the jetlag was killing us—and napped in the comfy chairs upstairs. There are several thing that Dutch airports do way better than ours. One, obviously, is the comfy chairs, which I also remember being (in their own separate room) in the Seoul National University main library. Such an obviously good idea, though there is little opportunity to derive profit from sleeping people. Another advantage the Dutch have over us is bathrooms. I'm fascinated by scatological culture. Fhar has written about Egyptian toilets, which are simple and brilliant. They lack the creepy infoshit age features of Japanese toilets (e.g., emailing fecal analyses to your doctor), and combine the joy and good hygiene of a bidet with a regular sit down head. The Dutch toilets, though they were not as fabulous as their Egyptian counterparts, had a delightful feature: no lid. Why on earth does a airport toilet need a lid, anyway? Also, rather than seat covers, which always end up in a pile on the floor, waste an inordinate amount of paper, and still let OPP (figure that out) through, the Dutch have seat disinfecting spray. You grab just a little bit of toilet paper, press the spray fixture on the wall, wipe the seat, and you're good to go! So much better.

So, yeah, I went to Amsterdam, and what did I appreciate? Bikes (of course), former colonial ties and the teas they facilitate, sleeping, and toilets.

I started feeling Cairo, as one does, in the flight gate waiting area. It was nice to see so many Egyptians, and to hear Egyptian Arabic spoken all around me again. It also filled me with a sense of despair, as I realized how unlikely it is that I will ever become proficient in the language. I fear I lost more Arabic last year than I learned, and what remained was washed away by the summer. My environment here is in many ways more homogeneous and Anglophile than in the States. On the plane, I helped an out-of-place woman to open the plane bathroom door. She had just been standing there, as she explained to me in Arabic, and didn't realized the doors were not locked. When I say she said that to me in Arabic, I don't mean, by the way, that I understood it all as she said it; I could just tell that's what she was saying. This is why, even though I have a miserable vocabulary whereas Fhar speaks quite well and knows countless, sometimes obscure words, I sometimes understand what people are saying better than he does—even in less obvious situations than this one. It was funny that she spoke to me in Arabic as if I'd understand. I understand "shokran," in any case, and replied appropriately.

Quite inappropriately, I drank several glasses of red wine on the Ramadan flight to Cairo. At least it was after iftar. I then ordered another bottle, which I stowed in my purse. It's rather funny, how things I rarely ever do in my not-Egypt life, like drink alcohol or wear shorts, become desperate necessities when I am there. It's the inverse of the observation that my friend Maya made about the need to legalize drugs, when I told her that oxycontin, which I so enjoyed after my tragic yet lucrative fall through a mission sewer grate, held no appeal for me here, where I could call up the corner pharmacy and have it delivered if I wanted. Legally. Or rather, it's the flip side, leading to the same conclusion. Forget about all the illegal stuff—not only is it too available to be attractive, I was traumatized by Midnight Express as a teenager. And though the situation is almost totally incomparable (Egypt vs. Turkey, etc., etc., etc.) I'm sticking to that phobia. I've got no desire to see the inside of an Egyptian jail. My students, on the other hand, don't seem to share my caution. Or is it just that they are in their late teens/early twenties? For the study abroads, it's the study abroad thing. You know. And for the locals, consumption is heavily gendered, and deeply class-specific. This is all from third-hand data, if I am to believe my students whose usage stories are always about "a friend."

By the time we got to Cairo, I was thrilled to be home. We were met at the gate by the guy the university provides for a small fee to help us through customs. He was a godsend. We got all our luggage with only enough enough of a wait to begin to panic about its having been lost. And we bought our allotted eight bottles of booze at the duty free shop (open at 1:00am). Wait. Does moderately decent wine count as booze? It sounds so lowbrow. I think eight bottles of it might.

Outside, we waited for our driver (also provided by AUC for a fee) and reveled in the hot night air. When he pulled up in a big van, several men materialized out of nowhere to hoist our bags inside, then stood around while I doled out a few pounds each in tips, feeling proud of myself for not having lost my loose Egyptian money during the summer. As we were waiting to be driven away, I saw one of the tippees angrily gesticulating to the man who had helped us through customs, and pointing at me. I asked what the problem was, and he told me they don't change that money here. What? I had given him Honduran Lempiras. I apologized profusely and gave him a couple pounds instead, but he glared at me as we drove off. "He's so mad at me!" I said, exhausted and despairing. Hitting the nail of my crisis on my head, Fhar teased, "you think all brown people money looks the same." It was true, although I am not sure what kind of -ism othering currency falls into. I told myself that I would have done the same with Australian money, but it didn't make me feel like less of a jerk. It took longer than I expected to get to Rehab. People were out everywhere. Everywhere. And we were in the middle of nowhere. Example: two guys, jogging down a freeway exit ramp, at two in the morning.

Arriving home, since half my cash was newly out of commission, we lacked the change to give the driver a decent tip given the hour, the luggage, and the distance. Felt like a jerk again, although he was perfectly kind about the ten pounds we gave him. Our new home, Rehab, I should explain further, is a gated community in the Sahara. But that gives perhaps the wrong impression. It's more like a gated city in the Sahara. It's like a permanent, huge Burning Man installation, complete with the sense that what I am experiencing may all be a bad trip.

But let me clarify. First of all, it has nothing to do with the people. For the most part they're perfectly kind to us. It has to do with space, segregation, and sustainability. Imagine, my friends, irrigating a golf course lawn in the Black Rock Desert from Pyramid Lake, and allowing people from Gerlach to come in, but only as servants. It's about that ethical, and that sustainable.

Our floor was less dusty than we had anticipated, except for the kitchen. That room was coated in a very thick layer of dirt, thanks to the inch of space between the door to the sandstorm and the floor. We putzed around until 5am, and got up at two in the afternoon. Setting the roombas loose, I discovered lots of exciting things, like the cute little mice that run down the bathroom drains when disturbed, and the stalagtites growing under one of the (three) bathroom sinks. That's how minerally the water is here. Not that it matters, really, but my hair feels like straw after washing it, my eyes burn in the shower, and the aftertaste, even when boiled and GSEd, is something awful.

After spending our first full day cleaning, we decided to go bike to the grocery store and eat dinner, something much easier to do here than in downtown Cairo. I thought, "I'm in Rehab. I can wear a skirt if I want." I asked Fhar, who is no judge of fashion or propriety, and he said it looked fine. How could it be otherwise. Right? It covered my knees, it was a Cari, it even seemed formal. Wrong. First of all, it blew up exposing my knees on the bike. But secondly, even when I was walking around in the grocery store, I felt an overwhelming sense of nakedness horror. It was like one of those dreams, when you're late for the final exam in your favorite professor's class, having forgotten to attend lecture all semester, and you run in, breathless, only to discover you're stark naked and everyone is staring at you. That kind of abject shame. I am not sure to what extent I do this to myself and to what extent it is done to me, but I suddenly remembered why I only wear dumpy suits in Cairo.

On that topic, I am in the seemingly unique position for a woman of (at least when I'm not flashing ankle) never being harassed in this city. I fully believe all the stories I've heard about it. It just doesn't happen to me. I've tried to figure it—in various Latin American contexts (including the Mission), female friends of mine have told me that their weight gains have corresponded with increased catcalling and harassment (of course, the former is often the latter, but sometimes through mutual agency it's defined differently). But Latin desire is not uniform, and these guys aren't Latino anyway, despite the fat appreciation I enjoy in Naguib Mahfouz novels. Theories abound about whether harassment is worse with or without a head scarf, whether it's more extreme for foreigners or local women. All I can say is that, as a short, skinny, no-longer-very-young, white-but-not-blond woman who walks fast, avoids eye contact, exudes misanthropy and wears suits, it's not so bad. Until I get on a bicycle, at which point it's uncontainable.

On my bike, however, the shouts, many of which are just in amazement (Fhar gets them too, though he rarely notices), are offset by the delight in girls' faces as I zoom by. There are so few girls on bikes in Egypt, but more are coming. The Cairo Cycler's Club has lots of women, more Egyptians than expats. And out here in Rehab, I've seen Egyptian girls/young women riding around. It's nice, since I didn't see a single woman on a bike until my eighth month here, on my first ride out to meet the club at the Korba festival parade in Heliopolis last Spring.

So back to my narrative. For groceries, we reverted back to our Cairo staples. Ghee, fava beans, onions and potatoes, eggs. Foul has become my comfort food. That's pron. "fool," not "fowl," and we've become pros at cooking it. Eating out here, we've found, is more about the experience than the food quality. For example, after we came home so I could change into clothes that helped make me satisfactorily invisible (at around 11pm), we went to the Argentinean restaurant in the food area of our planned city. It has these swing seats covered in cowhide, which were all decorated with Ramadan fabric. Ramadan lanterns hung off the wagon wheels in the roof, and a Ramadan drama played loudly on an inside t.v. connected to outside speakers. A swinging couple nearby smoked shisha, ate parrilladas, and ignored their child, who found her own swing to play on. How can you beat that? The under-done steak, on the other hand, cost around USD$15 and had a "pepper sauce" that was A-1 with peppercorns. We called it A-5. At some point, a waiter came by with a fancy coffee cup on a tray, and announced grandly, "Nescafé?" Alas, it was for someone else.

On Thursday we went to the new campus. We bicycled through 9km of sand dunes on roads that were largely hypothetical. My racing bike with the too-long-cranks was perhaps not the ideal vehicle, but we made it there alive. Crossing the road was the scariest part. There was, of course, nowhere to lock up, and the confused guard told us to park our bikes in the parking lot. Luckily, my professor privilege got us in, and we've since been assured that the guards will be informed that bikes are halal. As regards the new campus, I have been implored (via mass emailings) by numerous administrators to "keep my sense of humor." And I'm doing that, though I'm not sure that's the best strategy for them, given my sense of humor. No need to detail the cluster here.

Friday brought an unfortunate event: an ex-pat pool party at a Maadi mansion. There is something about being a colonial that re-entrenches archaic gender relations. I found myself standing around with a group of perfectly kind idle women while their jocular oil men discussed the business at hand and their collective blond children swarmed about, being asked, "So what does your husband teach at AUC?" I got out before having to shoot myself, but not before making a somewhat cruel comment that I immediately regretted to the magnificently drunk woman there who was so wildly inappropriate that she could have been diagnosed as mad. She was great at exposing the cracks in their system, anyway, and it was fun watching everyone have no idea what to do with her. As the Honduran saying goes, "el niño, el bolo y el loco siempre dicen la verdad". "The child, the drunk and the madman always tell the truth."

Oh, and for the archive, I did these two small but fun events in Chicago, the first in a great little infoshop cafe by a charming little farmers market, the second in Quimby's, which has a nice zine collection, good comics, and the perennially entertaining Chick tracts, e.g.:

August 23rd@2pm, Backstory Cafe, Chicago flyer

August 25th@7pm, Quimby's, Chicago flyer