Charming: Our First Evening in Cairo

In Canada, you need to be polite. In Egypt, you need to be charming.

My wife and I moved to Cairo in the heat of July, without a single friend in the country, any knowledge of the language, or the slightest idea where we were going to live. We had four boxes of possessions, acceptance letters to the American University in Cairo, and a reservation at a hostel downtown.

Our first evening staying in the hostel, we headed out to find food. Being unfamiliar with any local food and knowing that the next day would be hectic, we found a Macdonald's (yes, there are Macdonalds' in Egypt) and ordered a pile of hamburgers to last us several meals. Then my wife went back to the hostel with the food while I looked for a grocer which might have bread and jam for breakfast.

When I went back to the hostel, I passed through the front room, which, like all Egyptian businesses, was manned by one employee and two of his friends. When they saw me, they chuckled and patted each other on the back. I asked if there was something on my face, and they replied by saying that they were not expecting to ever see me again.

With this mysterious conversation still playing in my head, I went to our room and found my wife happily munching on a hamburger. "Why are the people in the front room laughing at me?" I asked.

"Oh," she smirked and raised her eyebrows glibly.  "When I came back, they asked me 'What happened to your husband? You left together, but only you came back.' So I said, 'I sold him.'"

"You sold me?"

"Yes, sold you. And they laughed and asked, 'What was the price?' And all I did was hold up the bag of Macdonald's."

"What did they say to that?"

"They said that I got a good price."

It was then that I realized that I had chosen the best traveling companion in the world. And that realization was proven right, over and over, as we found a flat, bought furniture, and arranged our new lives. There was no heart in the country that she could not charm or strike fear into. I optimistically believe that some of these powers have rubbed off on me, via her and the Egyptians I befriended, but honestly I will always be an apprentice in the subtle ways of the Egyptian wit.

How To Snatch Food From The Kitchen Without Getting Caught

Humans need to eat food. Sometimes, humans want to eat food even when they don’t need to. Sometimes, those humans share a kitchen with someone who doesn’t want that food to be eaten. The culprit could be your significant other, your parent, or a roommate, but their motivation for stopping you is always one of the following:
*They want to save the food for a special occasion.
*This particular food is actually an important ingredient for something they plan to cook.
*You specifically instructed them (in a moment of desperation or madness) to prevent you from eating the food, no matter how much you might beg or plead, since you lack the willpower to stop yourself.
*They want the food for themselves. (This is the most primal of the motivations, and, for that reason, the most likely, even if they claim one of the above.)

Regardless of which of these applies in your particular case, you need not feel guilty for snatching food. This is natural human behavior, survival of the most fit. If you are able to snatch food from the refrigerator without your competition catching you, that makes you the fittest. Food snatching is simply nature taking its course (pun intended).

Here are my tips for winning the title of fittest.

1)  Know your strengths and weaknesses. How much can you eat? How fast can you eat it?
2)  Know your competition’s habits and schedule. Any spy will tell you that this is the key to any espionage: know where your target is in space and time, and how long they are going to be there. How long are their showers? Could you consume an entire pie in that amount of time AND hide the evidence?
3)  Eat strategically. Your primary goal is to prevent your competition from ever realizing that you snatched anything at all, and the best way to do this is to nibble along the edges of anything too big to make disappear entirely. Instead of cutting a square piece from a half eaten cake, cut a long, thin piece from along the already cut edge. In some cases, one bite from every container in the refrigerator will draw less attention than five bites from one container.
4)  Minimize noise. Restrain the urge to scarf, gobble, or burp. Chew deliberately. Open doors slowly. Avoid noisy doors entirely. Maybe set a spoon aside somewhere, since opening the silverware drawer can be quite loud.
5)  Hide the evidence. Put the half-finished jello bowl in the back of the refrigerator. Rinse off the spoon. Bury any wrappers under the trash in the trash can.
6)  Move the food onto a smaller plate if you’ve eaten half of it. This makes the food item look just as big as it did before in proportion to the plate it rests on. This also works with zip-lock bags, Tupperware containers, and even cups.
7)  Pay attention to your breath. Smelling like peanut butter when there are five peanut butter cookies missing will blow your cover immediately, no matter what plate the cookies are on. Brush your teeth, or just keep out of smelling range of the competition.
8)  If caught, make outrageous lies. Crafty lies will make the competition suspicious. Ridiculous lies will distract them. Therefore, blame the family pet(s), the neighbor’s children, ghosts, trans-dimensional warping, spontaneous casserole combustion, etc.

A Halloween Story

Once upon an autumn, long ago, there was an especially wicked demon whose name no one remembers. They only remember him by the name of the holiday he helped create: Halloween.
Now on this particular autumn, Halloween had spent the whole harvest season in a small town, spoiling crops, pushing people into wells, and trying to convince half-drunken men to kill each other. Seeing these things happening so often and without proper explanations, the village priest teamed up with the village witch to capture the demon that was obviously running amok. Now, witches and priests don’t usually get along well, but it was possible in this case for two reasons: one, because this priest and witch were a brother and sister who had chosen wildly different career paths, and, two, because their mother was one of the people who had been pushed into a well.

Thus, they set a trap for the demon Halloween. They used branches from an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes to build a cage that the demon could not escape from. It was bigger than a bread box and smaller than a golden retriever, but light enough to carry. Then the priest simply stood at the edge of a nearby cliff and said, “Golly, I would die if I fell from here!” Within moments, the demon came rushing from the town to push the priest off the cliff to his death. But the witch was quick, and she leapt out of the bushes with the cage and caught the demon inside it. She slammed the little door behind it and locked it with some enchanted twine. And thus, Halloween the demon was caught.

The brother and sister agreed to keep the caged demon in the church basement for half the year and in the witch’s basement the other half of the year. Each time they carried the cage between basements, the demon Halloween begged to be let out, calling upon Christian charity and the gods of the earth for mercy. Twice a year he begged, all the way to the church, then all the way to the witch’s house. And indeed, he did slowly prevail upon the kind hearts of the witch and priest, even though they never forgot what the demon had done to their poor mother, and the evil that he would surely do if he were released.

And so they hatched another clever scheme. By this point, the priest and witch were quite old, so the whole town listened to what they had to say. They told all the townspeople that on the day the priest moved the demon’s cage to the witch’s house, they should all dress up like hooligans, ne’er-do-wells, and demons. Disguised thusly, they should go throughout the whole town pretending to be vile and evil: breaking things, laughing at death, pretending to push people into wells, and blackmailing the other townspeople with threats of violence to get valuables (which were, of course, to be prepared in advance).

The townspeople thought this was odd, but they trusted the witch and the priest, so, on the day appointed for moving the demon’s cage, which happened to be October thirty-first, they did as instructed. When they demon begged to be set free, the priest promptly opened the cage door without another word. The demon leapt out and scurried away, laughing and planning to do mischief. But when he came upon the town, he found that things had changed in the decades of his absence.

Demons bigger and scarier than Halloween filled the streets alongside every form of villain imaginable. Vandalism, violence, blackmail, and pushing people in the wells! Evil on a scale that Halloween had never dreamed of. Grotesque faces all around, laughing at death and taking what did not belong to them. The joy that Halloween felt at first quickly transformed to dread. Everyone committed evil without prejudice. What horrible things might they do to him? He did not wish to be pushed into a well or robbed. The faces all around were terrifying and suggested acts of evil they could do to him that even he could not imagine!

And so he fled back to the only place he knew he would be safe from evil: surrounded by the branches of an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes. He dashed back into the cage, which still sat at the waiting priest’s feet. “I’d like to stay here, if you please. Shut the door. It’s the only place in town safe from all that evil. I don’t envy you or the witch, out there, dealing with all those big demons  and dangerous townspeople. Let me out again when you’ve got things straightened out.”

And so the demon stayed in his cage forever, happy to be safe. Every few years, even after the witch and priest had died, the townspeople would dress up and pretend to be evil, and someone would bring out the demon in his cage so he could see that it was still too dangerous to come out. And the demon never discovered how he had been tricked, and the practice of frightening evil things with pretend evil things continued to this very day.

So next time you walk safely past a well without being pushed in, remember Halloween and the clever and kind people who inspired it.

A Purse Dream

There once was a thief who was extremely bad at thieving. Thus, he was extremely relieved when, on a dreary Thursday in March, he found a extremely unattended purse left on the bench at a bus-stop. It was your typical ugly handbag, stitched from so many colors that an observer could not recall any colors it wasn't.

"Stop!" cried a woman’s voice. The thief, who now had the purse in his lap and was in the process of finding his way into it, stood to escape."Don't do it!" cried the voice again. He spotted a woman some way down the road, standing and waving her arms as if flagging down an airplane. She was so short and so slight that she could almost be mistaken for a child. He turned to run, confident that he could outrun someone of her stature.

Suddenly something slammed into him with almost enough force to knock him down. He stumbled and found the same woman clinging to him, trying various grips and holds to encourage his body to the ground. He marveled, momentarily, at the speed with which she had covered the distance. He swung around and threw her off. She was fast but not strong. She landed on the sidewalk, and he dashed across the street, ignoring the traffic that honked at him.

He slid into an alley, dived through an open door into the empty back room of a small shop, and crouched in the shadows.  A moment later, he heard impossibly rapid footsteps approach, pass, and fade away just as quickly.

He sighed and slid down to sit in the comforting refuse of the abandoned room. He examined the purse at his leisure. It was just as ugly now as before, and he found that the reason he could not open it earlier was a lock holding the clasp together. He smashed this using a heavy piece of metal he found on the trash-strewn floor.

When he opened the purse, a hand reached out.

Screaming at an octave he had not known he could achieve, he dropped the purse. The hand felt the floor, as if it were merely someone reaching through a doorway instead of a disembodied hand flailing about on the ground. Then a head followed it out of the purse, which was attached to a chest, which was attached to another arm, some legs, and some feet.

A tiny man now stood up beside the purse, picking his teeth as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He wore simple robes and a tiny hat all of the same wide variety of colors as the purse. He examined his surroundings, the room, the door to the alley, and the thief standing slack-jawed in the corner. He lifted up the purse and shoved his head back into it. “It’s safe to come out everyone. We’ve been freed!” Cheers resonated from within the purse, loud enough to belong to at least three dozen people.

And sure enough, one by one, more tiny people scrambled and scratched their way through the purse’s opening and marched out of the room. The thief counted fifty, and then he gave up counting. They were all dressed the same, with the little hats and strangely colored clothing.

Once the flow coming out of the purse finally ceased, the first tiny man picked up the purse and marched up to the thief. “Thanks, pal.” He slapped the purse into the thief’s hands.

“What are you?” marveled the thief.

“Memories, buddy. We are all of her memories.” He bowed and left.

The thief threw the purse into a dumpster and ran home. He went back to school and then became a much better banker than he ever was a thief. One day, an extremely quick woman snatched his briefcase and escaped, but she found nothing inside but papers and a sandwich.

A Bedtime Story About Murder (part two)

"I met her in a construction site."
"Very romantic."
"And you would know?"
"I know lots about romantic!"
"Sure you do. Young people always think they know what romance is. I met her in the site because she was the contractor making a building for my boss.”
"What kind of building?"
"Uh... you know, I can't remember."
"You're not a good liar, Grandpa!"
"There never was a good liar in this whole world."
"I caught you fibbing, so tell me what kind of building."
"Ah. I think I remember now. It was casino."
"What's that?"
"Do you want me to tell the story, or do you want me to tell you what a casino is?"
"Hm..."
"She was exquisite in her hard hat and jeans. Commanding. Powerful. Dangerous. And she had these... ah well, she was very beautiful let's just say that shall we?"
"And then you loved each other. Yada yada yada."
"Yes. It didn't start as love, but it bloomed in time. But that was all the time we got. Within the year, she was dead."
"Dead? But why? Did you kill her?"
"In a way. It was my fault she died. You see, my boss liked me a lot, so he was going to give me a very important job in the business. But this guy I worked with, Vinny, he thought the job was owed to him."
"So he killed her?"
"So he poisoned my food. And by chance, she ate it before I did. She died in my arms."
"Wow. That's so sad!"
"Yes. I know."
"But it wasn't really your fault grandpa. You loved her. You didn't mean for her to die."
"That's true.”
"You didn't kill her, that Vinny guy did."
"Also true."
"So!”
"So what?"
"So this was the story of how YOU killed someone. But her dying wasn't you fault!"
"Oh, I see you are confused. No, she's not the one I killed. She's not the one I was referring to anyway."
"Then who was it?"
"Well, the next week, I cut the break lines of Vinny's sports car. He drove through a red light and got plastered across the side of a semi truck."
"Wow!"
"And that, dear child, is why you should always wear your seat-belt."
"That was a great story Grandpa. Tell me another!"
"No no, the story is over, and it's time for sleep."
"I'm not tired! Have you ever killed anyone else?"
"Lay down like a good girl."
"Okay, how about love! Have you ever loved anyone else? It's okay; you can start with 'once upon a time!' What about casinos? Tell me... or I'll cut your break line!"
"Goodnight, child."
"Nuts."

A Bedtime Story About Murder (told in two parts)

"Grandpa, have you ever killed anyone?"

"Hundreds of people!"

"No grandpa, I'm serious!"

"Now you stop worrying about such things and go to sleep. You've got your water right there and—”

"I'm not worried! I just want to know."

"Why would you want to know about that?"

"It's not to show off to my friends or something. I just want to know... to know."

"Little girls these days, asking about killings and murderings. What's the world coming to?"

"Please Grandpa?"

"Eh..."

"You're my grandpa! You have to do what I say!"

"Alright. I don't know why I'm doing this. You'd better not tell anyone else about it though."

"Why not?

"Or else I'll kill ya, that's what I'll do."

"So what's the story?"

"Excitable little sprout, aren’t ya? Just like your mother. Alright here we go."

"Was it with a gun? Did you shoot 'em?"

"Are you interrupting already?"

"Sorry."

"Once upon a time, a long time ago—"

"No Grandpa, don't start it that way."

"What's wrong with 'once upon a time?' It's a classic."

"Yeah, for stories! This is real life."

"Ah. Okay, as you wish. Now get comfortable and I'll start."

"Okay."

"Okay. Once upon a time—"

"Grandpa!"

"I'm sorry! I can't help it. A lifetime of storytelling is asserting itself!"

"Okay fine whatever. Just start the story."

"I thought you said it was real life, not a story?"

"Right. Start the real life story."

"Okay, once upon a time, a long time ago, I killed a man. But in order to understand why, we must go back in time a bit more to the day I met a woman."

"Did you kiss this lady?"

"As a matter of fact yes, how did you know?"

"Can we skip the love and go straight to—"

"No no. If you want to hear the story of how I killed a man, you have to suffer through the tale of how I kissed a woman."

"Fine. Whatever."

"Can I carry on now?"

"Yes. Carry on."

The Annoying Security Guard: A True Story from Cairo

(This story is my revenge on a specific security guard in Cairo who was really annoying and conceited.  Most security guards in Cairo were very nice to me.)

A long metal gate blocked access from the road to the bus station. The gate had been painted green nearly five years prior and was now colored green-brown hybrid that completely failed to draw the eye. For this reason, four and half vehicles had run into it in the last month. 

Beside this mangled gate there was a guard hut. It was simply a large metal cylinder stood upright with one side cut away. Inside there was barely enough room for one plastic lawn chair. On this chair there sat a security guard. He sniffed as he watched the cars drive and the pedestrians walk. When a car wanted to enter, he was meant to get up from his chair and drag the mangled gate open. When a person wanted to enter, he was meant to get up from his chair and check their ID as they walked by. 

On a normal day, he did neither of these tasks.

Today was a very normal day.

He leaned back in his chair, thrust his legs apart, and sniffed again. Maids in long dresses and simple hijabs meandered slowly past, avoiding his eyes. Women with pants and long hair sped by shouting into their mobile phones. Men in slacks and dress shirts marched through, nodding and muttering greetings. A delivery truck stopped at the gate and honked. The driver eventually gave up and opened it himself. 

Time passed. The security guard sniffed and checked his watch. His shift was nearly over. He let his arm fall limply back into his lap.

At nearly 3:45, a man approached that woke the security guard from his routine and, for the first time in hours, he was motivated him to stand up. The man could best be described as "long." He sported long legs, long hair, long arms, and even a long chin. His clothing attempted but completely failed to blend him in with the other passers-by. All these details were inconsequential however, because this man also had pasty white skin. 

The security guard lifted himself from the chair, and his legs seemed to remember their old purpose. He took a step forward and held out his palm to communicate that the man with white skin should stop. Once eye contact was made, he frowned to give an impression of seriousness, and also because it takes twice as many muscles to smile as to frown, and he did not want to strain himself.

“I.D.” was all the guard said. This was the first thing he had said in hours.

“What?” The white man said.

“I.D.”

“What I.D.?”

In order to clear up the confusion, the security guard thought it best to repeat himself in a clearer way, “I.D.”

“I live here.”

“What?” The guard’s ears had not quite woken up yet.

“I don’t know what you want from me, but I live here, I walk through this gate every day.”

The guard was only flummoxed for a moment. He knew how to handle this. Time to put his foot down. “You need an I.D.”

“I don’t have one. No one has ever asked me for one. And like fifteen people have walked through the gate without showing an I.D. since this conversation started.”

Ah, a tough guy huh. Well, the guard knew how to handle this kind of person: “You need an I.D.”

The white man stood there, looking at him, waiting for him to act. This pleased the guard; the complete dissipation of this citizen’s forward momentum, literally and figuratively, meant that the guard’s authority had been recognized. He stood for a moment, looking right to left and pursing his lips, just to be sure everything was at it should be. Then, with all the suave he could muster, he looked away and jerked his head towards the gate. The message was clear: I’ll let you off the hook this time, so go before I change my mind.

He returned to the guard hut and slowly lowered his weight into the lawn chair with the practiced focus of a man who has truly mastered the art if sitting. He leaned back and sniffed with comfort and superiority. Another job well done.

Anabas the Cat, An Introduction

Once upon a time in old Egypt, there was a city that the people named "Aswan." In this city was a small house. In, on, and alongside this house lived a cat who named herself Anabas. Anabas had piercing yellow eyes and fur so black that it shimmered blue on the edges in the sunlight.

There were several alleys, sheds, and houses that were hers, but this house in particular she made her center of operations. The other owner of this house, a human woman, objected to her choice. The woman thought that cats brought bad luck, so she shoo'ed her away with a broom whenever she could. She had a tiny baby human that slept in the back room, so she was especially worried about bad luck.

She lived her life in my particular way. She slept on the roof in the night and on the windowsill in the heat of the midday. In the morning and evening, when the sun burned orange on the horizon, she inspected her houses and alleys and said hello to the cats who lived nearby.

She caught mice and birds to eat, and sometimes she took them to her favorite house and left them on the doorstep as goodwill offerings. The woman didn't seem to know what to do with a plumb mouse or juicy starling, and Anabas felt sorry for this poor human who did not know more than a young kitten. So, she kept leaving these gifts for the woman; surely eventually she would learn how to handle food properly.

Anabas did not just sleep and hunt in her territory. She also protected it. When any dog, cat, or other hunter approached her area, she would call to them, "Hello fellow hunter. What is your business on my ground?" If the creature said they were hungry and hunting, she would let them continue, but watch them from the roofs. If they had some other reason, she would chase them off, unless it was a good one.

There were other creatures that she never gave leave to pass through her territory. Jackals, scorpions, and human ghosts were always unwelcome. She would hiss and spit at them until they left. If they did not run, she had her teeth and her claws, and she was so fast with them that even even the ghosts were hurt.

Thus, all the humans who lived within her territory were safe from these things, even from ghosts. But none of the humans seemed to fully appreciate this, especially the woman with the baby. But Anabas knew who she was, and she was who she was, and that is enough for any cat.