Misr! – Boom.Boom.Boom – Misr!

Only the most absent minded would notice that Cairo has become a bit football loopy over the last couple of weeks as it hosts the Africa Cup of Nations. Kids are playing on the streets, the standard fizzy drinks are being endorsed by African football stars and there’s even an African Cup song. So we decided to go along to a game as it would be rude not to imbibe some of the culture of your host city for the next few weeks!

Egypt 3 – Ivory Coast 1. That’s how the match ended. As a qualifying game, it was largely inconsequential – Coite d’Ivoire were assured of their place in the knock out stages and the host nation just had to avoid losing to make sure their destiny was in their own hands and not rely on the results of Libya v Morocco. The Ivory Coast team were bigger and physically stronger than the Egyptians, but the home team showed more heart, enthusiasm and courage in front of their inspiring fans.

The crowd atmosphere was something quite different than any sporting event I’ve been to in the UK. The absence of alcohol meant that the raucous enthusiasm never verged on the menacing and frankly it felt relatively safe and good natured. Of course you did have to go through about ten lines of security in this most security-obsessed country. We turned up with about 45 mins to go before kick off and were lucky to find 9 seats altogether near the edge of the pitch. I realised later that at that angle, about 10% of the pitch couldn’t be seen because of the advertising hoardings on our side! This was frustrating as Mido, Egypt’s best player, was dribbling down our flank for the first half-hour before he was substituted due to injury.

I was worried that I would have to explain the offside rule in Arabic to the bunch of football novices that came along, but it didn’t get much worse than; ‘Isn’t it mean that they boo the opposition team? And how do they know in which direction to head the ball’ before the yummy home made chocolate cake was passed around (Mrs C is a fantastic cake baker). The football chanting was no more imaginative than Misr! Boom-Boom-Boom- Misr! A crowd fluffer bizarrely managed to get a whole section of the second-class stadium to shout Oooooo! Aaaaaaaaa! And then what was suspiciously like the Old Macdonald Tune – E-I-E-I-O - in chorus. I was so enraptured with all this that I admit missing Ivory Coast’s goal towards the end of the first half but the crowd itself was something of a spectacle with red, white and black cladding nearly every single one of the 70,000 capacity stadium. They kept up the noise and encouragement for nearly all the game.

After a quiet start to the second half, Ivory Coast’s goalkeeper was substituted and Egypt went on to score a second and third, just in time to warm us all up by cheering along. We had agreed to leave a little early before the end of the match so that we could get a cab home, but mutiny in the ranks put pay to that and we got home really late. As expected the streets were jammed with fans celebrating with flags, horns, whistles and drums. Anyway with no cabs, we were forced to walk for ages and then got into a minibus whose driver insisted in blasting his horn all the way (inducing a headache, homework aversion and class cancellation the next morning). If you didn’t know there was a football match on you might think Egypt had just won a war against Israel! You can imagine the scenes if they do win this competition - the whole nation will go mental. For one short night, we were all Egyptians and the final word should be MISR!

PS Thanks should go to Ustadh Muhammad without whom things would have been a little more difficult.

PPS For a real match report click here.

Tagged

Wow – my counters reached 1000! – thank you Mrs C Senior for logging on five times a day – my most loyal fan. I’ve been told that I should really write a bit more frequently but in all honesty, I haven’t had the time with two teachers equalling at least six hours of lesson time (sometimes more) and then at least three hours of homework. And herein lies the rumours of my entry into Geekdom. I wish I could say I can see the fruits of these hours spent but its early days yet. I’ve given myself a couple of days off but that’s just landed me double homework with an exam on Saturday!

Now its been brought to my attention that I’ve been ‘tagged’ by a certain Peanut, the Sleepy Jughead aka sister-in-law No. 2. What this means is that I’m supposed to complete in a silly blogfiller and tag some one else to do the same. After procrastinating about whether I should bother, I though why not and so here we go and coninue this idiocy.

10 years ago: I was at University. Beard starting to grow then. Interesting times on and off ‘campus’. Oh yes – there was a thing called the internet that was starting to take off, and the cool guys had Motorola bricks.

5 years ago: The world before September 2001, stock markets were flying high, internet share trading was the new fad and even I nearly go sucked in. Was working at Andersen which was still a reputable company then (pre Enron scandal). The world really has changed since then.

Middle School: I presume this means the years before GCSE? Why does anyone care. So long ago I can hardly remember suffice it to say that I hated playing rugby and can’t stand it now.

5 bands and artists: Can’t say I listen to much these days. My old tastes were quite eclectic from rap (old-school stuff – not this curent crop of pornographic gangster wannabes. The originals had social conscience, principles, intellect as well as being commercially astute), to Seattle grunge, to jazz (Jazz FM was always on during exams) and commercial classical.

5 things I'd do with £100, 000, 000:I think I would keep some, spend some and set up a tax effective charitable trust for various good causes of my choice. I definitely would not work again – but since noone’s going to give me £100m this is a mute point (for anyone from the office who happens to read this!)

5 places I would run away to:If the island in Swiss Family Robinson exists that would be quite cool. But since I’m allowed to cross the road now and don’t have to enter into the recesses of my imagination, perhaps the Galápagos Islands (spelling?). I’ve heared that’s quite cool. Somewhere with a temparate climate (definitely not cold), where they speak proper Arabic and don’t try charge you double the price for everything – oh! I’m going back to my imagination.

5 movies I like:
Shawshank Redemption (watch it to the end – I know it’s a long film), Malcolm X (book is better though),
Star Wars (good v evil – and the jedis are just intergalactic sufis with Yoda as the grand sheikh – warning: don’t base your Aqida on this film though, you’ll go astray!),
Bowling for Columbine (a bit unfair to Americans – makes them all look dumb except for the really insane ones) and,
Swiss Family Robinson (a childhood thing you understand – I know there’s no way you can have all those animals on a small island for real).

5 people I'd like to meet: Other than many obvious people from the Prophets, scholars, writers, thinkers and leaders, I’ve restricted this to the twentieth century world.

Malcolm X - martyrd in his prime – would have changed America and the world even more than he did.
Ghandi, Nehru and Jinnah – just to listen in to what they really thought would happen with partition.
The guy who assasinated the Serb in Sarajevo and started World War 1 – I think I would try to explain Chaos Theory and the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Oppenheimer (et al) – What did you think would happen? You’re smart guys.
Bill Gates – I’d lend him some money/take shares to start up a company

5 biggest joys of my life:
Good food, warm rooms, intelligent friends, family and watching toddlers learning to walk, stumble and fall over (it always makes me smile, so long as they don’t hurt themselves of course – I’m not cruel!).

Glad that’s all over – I ‘tag’ Insane Bovine – aka sister-in-law No. 3.

In the next couple of days we’re off to the Cairo International Bookfair and an African World Cup match against my better judgement. Will write about that later.

Settling in

Well it’s been 10 days since we arrived in Cairo and Mrs C and I are beginning to settle into a routine of sorts. We were fortunate to see Eid within a couple of days of landing. Daughter of a Duck and Mrs C wrote about this so I won’t elaborate further other than to say that the streets of Nasr City really were awash with blood. The experience of Eid in a country where everyone celebrates and takes a national holiday was quite special – no need to try and book a day off weeks in advance!

The other thing about Eid is that everything shuts down for a week which gave us some time to acclimatise to our new home and surroundings before starting classes. As we had few cooking utensils, this also meant getting to know a lot of the major fast food places intimately. Given that they are so cheap (I mean really cheap by London standards) and they deliver to your door we soon became acquainted with the following outlets; Dominos Pizza, Chillies, KFC, McDonalds, Pullman , Smileys amongst others. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of strangers during the Eid holidays and being invited around to people’s houses I’m sure would have frequented a lot more. Being seriously in danger of bloating under such temptation, I’ve joined the local gym and we’ve promised ourselves to cook at home more. Good intentions and all that.

My classes at the language centre started three days ago. You have to sit a placement test so the teachers can judge your abilities. I was placed on Level 0! – the lowest possible!! (Mrs C was placed at level 5 and did a celebratory jig!). I was annoyed as the teacher only marked the first two pages and placed me on the basis that I didn’t know the words for ‘arrow’ and ‘date tree’ in Arabic (a slight exaggeration perhaps). Anyway I was more reassured when I heard that Imam Sohaib was also in Level 0 when he started and he’s been studying for years. He also reminded us of the need to have humility in our studies. I got moved up a couple of levels in the first class and am more comfortable with where I am. I should finish the first book in a month or so but my oral communication needs a lot of work – so I’m concentrating on that at the institute. For grammar I take private lessons and will pack a lot into three months. But what I’ve learnt so far is that three months won’t be nearly enough for what I want but still invaluable.

My day starts with grammar classes at 6.30am for about four hours! Ustadh Ahmed as well as being a grammarian and a specialist ophthalmologist is the sort of person who only seems to need 3 hours of sleep a day. As well as teaching me, he teaches others Arabic and medical courses. This is for 6 days a week with Friday as a holiday (i.e. for revision and consolidation). The ‘oral’ classes are for two-and-a-half hours a day and seem to whizz by. I’m trying to pick up at least 25 words a day although Ustadh Ahmed gave 80 on the first day. On top of that I have homework which takes a few hours a day. So you can see that there’s not much left in the day.

You would think that living in an Arabic speaking country that this will become second nature but the local dialect is so significantly different from the standard Arabic we’re learning that the institute teaches separate classes in the local Aamiyah dialect. It’s quite difficult to make yourself understood even if you have the standard vocab. For example the other day I went looking for a chicken to cook and asked ‘yuurid adajaj’ instead of ‘iyyaz al faragh’. It’s completely different if technically correct. In the end I cheated after pushing a wheelchair-bound Good Samaritan around for about half-an-hour (another story) and went to the local supermarket and picked up the aforementioned poultry from the local Shoprite (Egypt’s equivalent to Sainsburys). I have to learn a bit more before I chance it at the barbers – I need a trim soon and am scared something might get lost in translation (and not just all my hair). More soon. Oh and it’s still extremely cold in Cairo.

Istanbul

As I write this now we have been in Cairo for five days now and have celebrated Eid yesterday.

The universal truth about both Istanbul and Cairo at this time of year is that it is very cold and full of stray cats – two things which I am allergic to. True, not as cold as in London but the homes and apartments in these countries don’t have any central heating systems, insulated lofts or sealed glazing so the nights feel particularly cold. For those that know me, you know that is not what I hoped for but thankfully the worst of the cold seems to be over and we’ve got our bawab (porter cum guard cum apartment caretaker and odd job man) to get some more heaters.

One good thing about the time of year was that there is a distinct lack of tourists around the main Sultanahmet tourist area of Istanbul. I have been fortunate to see many examples of Islamic architecture but I don’t think I have seen anything as ornate and beautiful as the Sultan Ahmet or Blue mosque. The domes, minarets, mosaic tiling, carpets, calligraphy and stained glass windows were first rate. And it’s not just that mosque, the Ottamans left hundreds if not thousands of these types of mosques. As soon as you head towards one, another comes into your eye line. Quite fantastic. And to bring them into the modern age, most of these mosques have been updated with under floor heating!

The famous Topkapi palace, the residence of the Ottoman Caliphs was also a reminder of the splendour and also decline of the Ottoman Empire. Its focus as the centre of the Islamic Empire over many centuries was evidenced by the many artefacts on display including many keys to the Ka’ba (the House of Allah in Mecca) here and in the Ibrahim Pasha House which now houses Turkey’s Islamic Art and Artefacts collections. I didn’t go to the harem section of the Topkapi palace but this had by far the longest tourist queue and reinforces the orientalist preoccupation with the exotic eastern ‘other’.

Other than Turkish delights, Turkey is also famous for its Turkish baths. Now this is normally something I would not necessarily indulge in mainly because of worries about ensuring haya or modesty. Muslim men are supposed to cover the area between the knees and navel at all times (don’t get me started on school dressing rooms). So I took my trusted lungi along (a sort of sarong from the sub-continent as modelled by fishermen and rickshaw drivers). The whole thing was quite traumatising. As soon as you enter, you are ushered to changing rooms then the sauna. There was a line of menacing looking moustachioed Svengalis that you had to pass. As it was the slow season there were very few clients and loads of them waiting ready to pounce on their next victim.

The hamam in itself, like all things Ottaman, was a beautiful marble clad steam room where I was made to sweat for about twenty minutes before Tahir, my stout and very strong masseuse stepped in. After showing me how dirty I was and scrubbing me till my skin was raw, he proceeded to ‘massage’ by back, neck, arms and stomach. I swear I thought I was going to pass out at one stage. When it was over, I pointed to my right shoulder which had been giving me some problems and he promptly went back to work kneading, pulling, stretching and scrunching and in general inducing more pain than I had ever experienced before. I think the tactic was to cause more physical distress so that the original problem pales into insignificance. If you ever wondered where the CIA, KGB and Saddam Hussein recruited the men for their torture chambers, Turkish baths may not be a bad place to start. At the end of it all and after stepping back into the real world I did feel strangely invigorated and refreshed.

Apart from that we fitted quite a bit in to our short stay including a trip to the Fatih district, a round trip around the Bosphorous straights (with breathtaking sunset views of Istanbul) and grand bazaar trip where Mrs C bought two fake leather handbags.

PS. I was going to post some pictures but it takes for ever on dial-up.

450 Chickens, 6 goats, 2 cows and a partridge in a pear tree

That’s what it took for the ‘wedding’ function banquet in the home town of Moulvi Bazar (not the partridge of course). All except the two legged animals were slaughtered by my dad. Having seen this all before this was nothing new for me but Teacher C, Little Miss C and Mad Cow (my sister in law) had never seen how their kebabs got to the dinner table wanted a front row seat – and that’s what they got. Cows and goats were brought in, subdued and quickly slaughtered in the traditional Islamic manner, jugular vein slit whilst saying ‘Bismillah Allah Akbar’ and it was then all over very quickly. The three voyeurs were sat yards away and recorded it all on camcorders for those interested in a certain type of snuff movie.

I had previously wondered how it was possible that so much halal meat was available in the UK without using mechanical slaughter methods used in most abattoirs, but the speed with which the chickens were dispatched reassured me that it was possible for livestock to be slaughtered quickly and remain halal. Not that it helps win arguments with vegetarians though.

The function itself went well which was essentially just the serving up of the aforementioned livestock. It seemed like the whole town was invited and of course I did not recognise most people including those who came up to have photos taken next to us. The guest of honour was my wife’s grandfather a prominent personality in Bangladesh’s political life and it seems that most if not all came along to see him. It was all slightly bemusing and press photographers came along to take pictures for the newspapers as well as armed police to provide protection.

One of my personal highlights of any trip to Bangladesh is a stay at my Nana’s (maternal grandfather) home. I say home but apart from the house which is pretty much just a large tin shed with some modern amenities, the grounds on which it is sited is quite impressive. There are three lakes (two large and one small) used as fisheries, acres and acres of fruit trees of almost all indigenous varieties planted by my Nana himself and plenty of paddy fields.

Being a city dweller, the remoteness and sedate pace of rural life was a refreshing change to the traffic jams, blaring horns and general hullabaloo of town/city life. Cows are still used to tread on the paddy to separate rice grain from the stalk. A sign of modernity added to the age old techniques was the use of large fans to help separate the chaff from the grain. Previously you had to rely on several hours of back breaking work of chucking the grain/chaff mix high into the air and let gravity and natural breeze do the work. I wonder if in a few years time whether the cows will still be used even though they have been around for thousands of years. Unfortunately few people actually stay here now, most having moved to the city for the benefit of the next generation’s education.

The story of how my Nana and his brother’s came to settle down there is interesting in itself. They are originally from what is now India in the Assam province. After independence from British rule, the colony was split into two, Pakistan (East and West) and India. This led to one of the largest forced migrations of Muslims from India and Hindus from East and West Pakistan with associated looting, rioting and mayhem (that’s the PG version). The land that my Nana ended up living in was one of those abandoned by a rich Hindu family and taken over in a ‘reciprocal’ arrangement for those Muslims made land-less in India like my grandparents. The thumbnail sketch over looks some of the legal and physical obstacles that had to be overcome to hold on to it though – land disputes cases take up something like 90% of civil law cases in Bangladesh.

We’re now on our last day in Istanbul. I’ve fallen behind in my blogs so am slightly out of sync. I’ll write about this when we get to Cairo.

PS. If you want to see some pictures of Bangladesh go to www.bouquetofdreams.blogspot.com

Bangladesh

We’re now back from Bangladesh. As you might have guessed from my lack of previous blog, I managed to get my revalidated flight the next day and obtain a visa in Dhaka – without any hint of baksheesh or bribe to oil the wheels (Bangladesh regularly features in the league of most corrupt nations). In fact the whole thing was so straight forward, you wonder why I had to go through all that stress. I was thinking about writing a stroppy letter but six of us got upgraded to Business Class on the way back so I may just let it drop and put it down to experience. Normally I don't agree with nepotism, but if your wife's maternal aunt's husband's first cousin happens to work for Qatar airlines at Dhaka International Airport and upgrades us, who am I to complain!

So first, apologies for not blogging once throughout my whole time in Bangladesh! There was a distinct shortage of internet cafes in the secondary provincial towns we were staying at as well as lack of time in our itinerary. Suffice it to say, it was very busy, with on some days visiting five to six houses a day (eating at each of these). We never slept in one place for more than a couple of days and must have clocked thousands of miles on plane, automobiles and rickshaws. At least no one got (seriously) ill, the ‘wedding’ functions went relatively well and every one was pleased to see us and made us feel most welcome.

Bangladesh can be a diverse country and your experience of it depends on how much cash you have. To keep my numeric friends happy, £1 = 114 Bangladeshi Taka at time of writing. A haircut (with beard trimming for moi) costs 50 taka, a loaf of bread 20 taka, the latest DVD about 80 taka and Harry Potter book 150 taka. So you can see being loaded with sterling means you can live very comfortably if that’s what you want.

In fact there is a word for those who work/live in the UK and own property and land in Bangladesh – ‘Londoni’. We saw some of the houses that Londonis were raising out of paddy fields and my were they lavish! Some of them looked like they were transported out of scenes from Gone With the Wind and would not look out of place in the Deep South. But the tragedy is that most will probably remain empty for most of the year as their families settle in the west and these status symbols will decay. My father told me of one such Londoni who built a small palace and only lived in it for three months before passing away – the house is now split in to three and rented out.

To satisfy the extremely wealthy, massive shopping centres have been built in the capital city. The whole of Bangladesh seems to be undergoing a construction boom (with land scarce, tower blocks are sprouting up all over the place). Boshundara City, the largest and plushest of these shopping centres, in my opinion rivals any in the UK. We spent many hours roaming through the DVD and sari shops. The DVD collection has been boosted quite nicely now.

One of the most conspicuous symbols of the secular elite life style is the Dhaka Club. I had originally thought that this was just a high-class restaurant and was shocked at the out of place decadence. The Dhaka Club was founded in British colonial times and every thing associated with the club is a throw back to those times, which includes rules such as no children and strict dress code. The members see themselves as superior to the masses and in some ways act as the new colonials with their mega wealth – probably through ill-gotten gains. Nowadays it just has a reputation for boozing, gambling and as a ‘gentleman’s’ club for the new elite. I won’t be going back – the food was not even that good.

Right now I’m getting ready for Egypt so I’ll write more about the functions and rural (read real) life later.