Ramadan Kareem

(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”