balzobt!

a piecemeal picture of my life, this week:

• Joel and I have been recording songs, using my ipod and italk. The songs are all entirely improvised and without any form of planning or rehersal. Some of them are good, some of them are quite bad. Most of them feature Joel playing guitar, and both of us singing. Sometimes I also do things like beatbox or clap or make weird noises or play harmonica. The other night we recorded 21 songs in two hours. We will be recording many more in the coming week, and then will cut them down to one album, which may very well be available for mail-order. Here are some quick descriptions of some of the highlights:

1. Joel plays an up-beat strum and I let loose with a solid beatbox over the top. He then sings the line "animals crying out for their dying young" over and over. The song lasts for one minute and ends with us meowing like sick kittens.
2. Kind of a reggae number, lasting 10 minutes, about how much we like black people, which ends up being effectively a list of every single famous African American we can think of, from P. Diddy to Rosa Parks to Thomas Jefferson's illegitimate wife.
3. A lullaby about engaging in warfare against developing countries, complete with bomb sounds.
4. A country number about Jackson Pete of the rodeo, his trip to Mexico and his adventures with the matadors there.
5. A Modest-Mouse inspired rock song about how hot the room was getting without the air conditioner on, and how nice it became again once I switched it on again, mid-song.

• It's Ramadan, and I'm hungry. Between the hours of sometime-before-I'm-ever-awake and, like, 7 pm, everything is closed, the supermarket, the falafel shop, the swanky cafes... and it seems as though the kushari stores have shut down completely for the month, their windows white-washed and big silver pots gone. I am left to raid my stash of Twinkies, or eat dry pita sold by the lady with one eye who sits on the road outside the house. The weirdest, and coolest thing, is the hour of the iftar, 5.30-6.30pm. The streets of the city, usually clotted and thick with traffic and shouting and smoke and car horns, are suddenly incredibly quiet. You can stand there, and hear no bleating for a full, like, 20 seconds. All across the middle east people are in their houses, breaking bread with their families. It's a beautiful thing, like the eye of a cyclone. Yesterday our house was without food stocks, and our three stomachs were growling in chorus, so Lisa made pancakes which we ate with jam and honey, our own little iftar. And we sang that R Kelly song but changed the words so it went "After the show it's the iftar party," etc, etc, oh the warm feelings of togetherness, etc.
• Yesterday, in order to scare me, a teenager was riding his bike very very fast towards me, as I walked in the otherwise mostly empty streets, and I didn't see him until he was about three metres from me and I looked up, and he quickly shouted "Hiwan!" at me, which means animal, and frightened me very very much and swerved his bike quickly out of the way. Later that night some kids asked Joel and I for money and when we didn't give it to them they threw some broken toy at my head.
• We have a new coffeeshop where we go at night, where the streets are throbbing with people and the soft colours of the Ramadan lanterns. We are still playing backgammon (/towla/sheshbesh/mahbouza) a lot, but have moved onwards, also, to dominoes, which truely is a game of champions. I had always considered it kind of a children's game for some reason, but these men, my god, they count the tiles and they know exactly what you have at all times and they are insanely good. We play on boards carpeted with blue felt, and are slowly learning to hold 7 tiles in one hand. We drink a lot of tea and karkadai, and every night make brand new friends.
• Tomorrow we have no school because it is Army Day. This is what I like to call it (Yaum al-Gaysh) but really it is October 6th, which is the day Egypt finally beat Israel in a war, after, like three attempts over 25 years, and managed to take back Sinai. So, we are all going to celebrate the valiant triumph of their crafty soldiers while simultaneously not eating, drinking water, smoking, or engaging in sexual acts, and we couldn't possibly do all this and have school on the same day.
• Balzobt means 'exactly' in Arabic, and it is my word for the day. When you say it, it actually sounds like Bezzobt. My word for the day yesterday was 'Benifsigi' which means purple.
• Things I saw during a walk in Fustat the other evening (Masr al-Fustat is the old old, mostly Christian city, which used to be a seperate city altogether from the later established Masr al-Qahira, but which today has, of course, been totally enveloped by the the urban sprawl, and is now mostly just called Old Cairo:

1. A boy riding a scrawny donkey with peroxided mane and hitting it hard with a rod to try and make it move. When he could not, he and some men just decided to lift the donkey up and into a cart pulled by another donkey. The peroxided donkey, despite its bruised ribs, looked proud to be transported this way.
2. An old Egyptian Jewish man, one of only 200 or so who remain in Cairo, who thought I was Jewish too, spoke to me in Hebrew and invited me to Rosh Hashana prayers at the old cobwebby synagogue last night. When I explained I was not, in fact, Jewish, he tried to sell me gold Coptic jewellery.
3. The spring where, according to tradition, the baby Moses was found in the bullrushes.
4. Little laneways, decorated with strings of paper flags.
5. The first mosque built in Egypt, although almost all of it has been rebuilt and it's not all that impressive, although it has nice lanterns all around it.
6. The violent red sphere of the sun through the haze.

Peace be upon you all.