Goodbye Egypt

When I said goodbye to Cairo it was early summer. The city’s outdoor produce markets were burgeoning with the deeply purple plums and prickly pear cactus fruits that appear at the start of the hot season, the nights were still cool enough for rambling conversations over shisha pipes in an outdoor café, and the flame trees on my quiet residential street in the Mohandiseen neighborhood had recently erupted in bursts of crimson flowers.

Nearly three months have passed since I left Egypt. As the Gulf Air jet soared swiftly eastward on that July day—toward Mecca, toward the heart of Arabia, two hours further from home on the dial of a clock—I watched Egypt disappear below me, a coffee-colored wilderness of sand and mountains baked in the glow of the setting sun. At that point I’d lived in the Middle East for more than fifteen months, all told, and I was proud of the knowledge I’d acquired of the customs and traditions of this region. I was proud of the Arabic I spoke and the ease with which I had learned to argue with taxi drivers, haggle over prices with vendors, and walk the many invisible tightropes of being a foreign white woman in a conservative Muslim society. But as I turned my imagination toward what lay ahead, all of this and more—Cairo’s several thousand crumbling minarets, its frenetic traffic, its dusty alleyways perpetually abuzz with life—began to recede, already a thing of the past.

Now I live in the United Arab Emirates, that tiny, hypermodern, petrodollar sheikhdom where 80 percent of residents are foreign-born and the other 20 percent, only one generation removed from tent-dwelling Bedouins, race their Mercedes SUVs down the six-lane highways at 115 mph and act as if the worth of a human being can be measured by the size of his or her wallet. Life is cushy here, and I would be lying if I said it would be easy for me to trade in the little luxuries of life available to me in Abu Dhabi—a spacious, well-furnished apartment, a car to drive, real American drip coffee in the morning, Western clothing stores, the freedom to go where I please unmolested by stares and catcalls—to return to Cairo.

There are moments when I catch myself yearning for Egypt, and the way that every morning there I rose to greet the world with shoulders braced for a challenge, and every night I went to sleep pumped up by what I had accomplished. Here I have neither of those feelings, and without them my joie de vivre has dwindled somewhat, and with it, my motivation to maintain this blog. I can hardly expect my readers to be interested in my life when I can sometimes barely muster the will to be interested in it myself.

But perhaps I’ll try anyway, and that will be the real challenge.