Egyptian Countryside Hospitality

The view from the 2nd story
looking out back.

   I just got back from a village called Qranshu, which is the hometown of my friend Ahmed.  He works nights, so Anya and I met him early Friday morning to hop on a series of four mini-buses that took us from Maadi to Tahrir, from Tahrir to the northernmost limits of the Cairo metro system, from there to Tanta, and then from Tanta to Qranshu.  It was a quick trip without much traffic at all, largely because it was Friday morning.  Fridays, being the Muslim Sunday, don't get busy until after noon.  The noon prayer is the one that has the most important weekly sermon.

   It was a testament to the way that Egyptian public transportation works.  Trains and metros are all fine and good, but they are limited in their scope and tend to move relatively slowly.  The flexible, cheap system of minibuses acts as an alternative to the slowly developing or aging metro-train systems.  At the same time, these minibuses are subject to the whims of traffic and the roads can be suddenly blocked for seemingly inexplicable reasons and then cleared away just as suddenly.  On the way back from Tanta, we were stopped for so long that several men got out and started smoking cigarettes on the side of the road.  The cry to get back on the bus went out, and, just as quickly, the minibus started moving as then smokers clutched their cigarettes in their teeth while jumping into the moving vehicle through the open, sliding-door.

Riding the Mare around the yard

    The trip there was also a preview of the kind of hospitality that we were to expect.  Ahmed refused to let us pay for our travel, and he produced reasonable facsimiles of anger when we insisted, to the point that we gave up.  This game went on in at each stage of the journey.  He also told us that he would cut his break short to come back with us on Saturday night.  I finally convinced him on our second day in Qranshu that we could get back on our own.

    We arrived around noon on Friday, and despite the fact that everyone is fasting between about 4am and 7pm, we were given a lunch of freshly-made bread, cheese, eggs, and fresh honey from the backyard beehive.  We were taken on a tour of the barn in the backyard, which consisted of a small shed with cows and chickens.  There were a few goats penned to the mare-drawn cart.  Then there was the mare.  Ahmed had told me about the mare and showed me a picture of him riding her, and when they brought us outside to see her, she had her saddle on and the main animal handler (an in-law of the extended family) was ready to put us on the saddle.  It was quite an interesting experience.  She was pretty finicky, and I wasn't really that great at steering.  Whenever she wanted to turn around and go home, she would, and whenever I tried to get her to turn around at a particular point, she wouldn't.  Sort of the rusty-supermarket-handcart business.  The women of the house tried to get Anya to ride the mare with her long skirt on, insisting that this was normal enough, but she changed into jeans before giving it a sporting go.

this was very much NOT our idea...
we tried to do Egyptian Gothic...
but we couldn't stop grinning 

   The rest of the weekend was spent sitting around the house and the yard, playing the darts game that Ahmed brought back from Cairo as a gift that week, and eating amazing food.  Anya spent a good deal of her first evening going around the village with the wives, aunts, and female cousins of the extended family.  I spent my time walking around the village or the rice fields and sitting around the second-floor living room.

    Most of the family, including me (but not including Anya), stayed up until the village Misaḥḥaraati came to the house just before 3am to wake the household.  He beat his drum as he approached and then yelled the name of one of the household members.  Once he heard someone from upstairs respond to his call and thank him, he walked away.  I was told that if he didn't hear anyone respond, he would ring the doorbell and call again to make sure that the family was awake to eat their last meal before fasting began again.  After the meal, we all went to sleep until the late morning.  Hours during Ramadan are very different.

Anya learning to bake

    It was a fabulous weekend, but it was also exhausting.  There is much less privacy in a rural Egyptian home, and being around people non-stop tends to wear on me.  In this case, it meant being around people and speaking Arabic non-stop, and at a certain point, being tired takes its toll on my language production/comprehension skills.  Nevertheless, people were very patient with me, and Ahmed would very often re-tell the jokes in more plain Arabic (many Arabic jokes are told quickly, and both joker and audience enjoy assonance and rhythm that affects word-choice, which means the joke uses unusual vocabulary that I don't know).

    I was told by every member of the family separately that any time I wished to come back, the door was open.  They made a point of saying that I could come visit with or without Ahmed, which seemed to be their way of saying "we like you because of who you are, not because you are our son/brother's friend."  The invitations were utterly sincere, and the gesture was incredibly kind.  Ahmed and I will definitely be going back to take breaks from the Cairo bustle over the coming year, God Willing (Insha'Allah).

Ahmed's Mom and Sister-in-Law
baking at the outdoor clay oven.

Postscript: While writing this blog post, Ahmed called me on his way from Qranshu to Cairo.  He asked  me to meet him on his way to work.  I was naturally a bit concerned that maybe we were about to be advised about some etiquette that we had failed to follow or that something terrible had happened.  Instead, he handed me the bugspray can that we had left there.  I thought it was perhaps a bit strange that he insisted on meeting up to give me a can of bugspray, but I thought that maybe he had just hoped to grab a coffee and chat before work.  Then he extricated a HUGE bag of his mother's bread from his bag.  Not only is "Mother's Bread" proverbial in Arabic for the care and love of the mother's home, but the country bread that we had in Qranshu was ten times better than what we get in the state-run bakeries in Cairo.  It was truly a beautiful gift.