More photos getting pushed out of the queue.
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Month: October 2007
Yeah, that was like 2 months ago.
The first and last are probably give aways.
(which roughly means “Happy Ramadan”)
As has been written by any number of bloggers and others, Ramadan can be a stressful time. 12 hours or so of no food, no water, no caffeine, no sex, no nicotine (all those things that make like worth living) can make one irritable.
There is a great deal of lamenting in the local press about how “Ramadan just isn’t the same as when I was a child….”
People are more materialistic. They are too stressed about keeping up with the Joneses (El Din’s?) in regards to their Iftar spread.
People were kinder to people on the street
People knew what the meaning of Ramadan REALLY was…
The traffic is SO much worse these days
All in all, it sounds a lot like the grumblings one can hear and read in the Western press about how people have “lost the meaning of Christmas” in all the commercialism.
Apparently everything was skittles and ice cream in the old days.
Anyway, some of the taxi drivers we encounter are Coptic. Some of them are rather sarcastic about Ramadan. They will point to shouting matches and fights on the streets, smirk, say “Ramadan Kareem” and shake their heads.
And fights on the street are common towards the end of the day. Most fights in Egypt in general are little more than slap-fights with a bunch of shoving. Strangers will rush in to stop a fight before it gets serious. I am not sure if that is function of the over-crowding here, or some other aspect of the culture.
What it means is that one can be fairly confident that if one were to get into a scuffle, one would only get to throw (or receive) one punch. One could extrapolate that to mean that is one of the reasons that scuffles happen so frequently, because people know the chances of real physical harm is minimal. It allows a blow off of steam in a (mostly) harmless fashion.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t see fights “all the time” here. But I have seen more fights broken up on the streets here then I have in any period of my life, with the possible exception of junior high school 🙂
People were more cranky than usual the other day. On a taxi ride from campus to Zamalek (about 10 minutes drive, about a 40minute walk) I saw 3 separate fights.
The first involved 2 taxi drivers. I was moving past this one, so I did not see it in detail.
The 2nd involved drivers of private vehicles: both cars stopped and blocked traffic while they shouted and pushed at each other for a while.
Then the drivers got back in their respective cars, continuing to jabber at each other. Then they got BACK out of their cars for more nose-to-nose yelling. At which point the police came over and sent them on their way, mostly because they were completely blocking traffic.
The 3rd fight was in among a crowd outside the local post office.
It was this 3rd fight that prompted my Coptic taxi driver to wryly wish them a “Ramadan Kareem”
This is our 2nd Ramadan here in Egypt. However, it is new in some ways.
Last year, when we arrived, Ramadan started about 3 weeks after we arrived. People talked about the crazy traffic and the tiredness of folks that made it difficult to get things done, and the noise at night.
When we arrived last year, the traffic all looked insane, getting ANYTHING done took a ridiculous amount of people AND time, and the streets were always noisy with traffic and people.
When Ramadan arrived, the only real difference I noticed was that you could manage to get from one end of town to the other in about 10 minutes just before, during, and after iftar. [If you could find a taxi, that is.]. And everything was closed from about 2 hours before Iftar to about an hour after.
Looking back, all this was because we didn’t have a baseline of “normal” yet for Cairo. When you are still trying to figure out how things work and a major disruption like Ramadan comes along, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.
This year is different. We have adapted to what passes for normal in Cairo. This year, the disruption of Ramadan is much more noticeable. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the positive aspects of it as well, but we now see how different the days and nights really are.