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Published: February 22nd 2007
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Paul’s managed to score us a ride for the three-hour drive to Alexandria. He’d met some young guys snorkeling the Blue Hole in Dahab, and back in Cairo, after a luckless morning of staticky phone calls and mixed messages and one perilously stupid cab ride across town, we meet Ezzeldin amid the manic traffic of early-afternoon in Midan Ramses. He’s grinning broadly as he leads us across the square, his local celebrity instantly cemented by the company of two cheerful, smiling Americans. The sun shines auspiciously on his spiffy loafers and designer jeans and expensive sunglasses. If not Alexandria, it suggests, why not the world? He piles our things into the backseat of his hatchback, where they manage to topple into my lap as soon as we’ve pulled away from the curb.
You start to appreciate the smallness of the world when you’re whizzing through traffic at 120km/h, donkeys clopping along outside while the late Tupac Shakur commends a young girl for her adept performance of fellatio. It is, all things considered, an appropriate glimpse of what the next few days should have in store. For all its stature in the ancient world, modern Alexandria - “Alex” to
the locals - is less a beacon of light than a mirror reflecting the aspirations and material longings of the West. Outside the congested, crumbling center, it’s a town of slick shopping malls and upscale hotels and the sorts of kitschy theme restaurants that recall the luaus your cousin Benny used to throw in his backyard in Poughkeepsie. It’s not hard to imagine what the pharaohs would think of this little stretch of suburbia-on-the-sea, its swank new library bedecked with lights that make it look like a UFO’s double-parked alongside the corniche.
All things considered, Ezz and his friends are a fitting group of guides. Reared on a diet of pop culture that most of their American peers would find remarkably familiar, the guys don’t bat an eye over any of Alex’s Western excess. We have lunch at a café-restaurant called Carlos’, where Paul tries the cordon blue and I have a chicken fajita. A stylish bunch of twenty-somethings sits at the table beside us, the girls in tight, fashionable jeans, the guys in loose T-shirts with bold logos. One of the girls has long bleached-blonde hair and pouting lips, as if she’d just gotten back from a casting
call for the next season of
The O.C. Ezz’s friends want to talk about Al Pacino movies and hear the gossip about certain pop stars, leaning conspiratorially over the table as Paul describes to them Spring Break in Cancun.
It’s in these lurid tales of wet T-shirt contests and backseat groping, though, that the gulf between us becomes apparent. For much of their young lives, Ezz and the others have been bombarded by stories of the sexual Gomorrah simmering across the Atlantic. But even in their social circle - the sons of doctors and professors, raised with a veneration for the market values of the West - most of Ezz’s friends will be virgins on their wedding nights. They all share first- or second-hand accounts of the country’s sexual Inquisition: friends arrested for hooking up in parked cars, girls assaulted for showing off too much skin. The more we talk about sex and relationships, the more Paul begins to regret his wild tales of Thai strippers and Spring Break pool parties - the sort of public licentiousness that would be treated here with the feathery touch of an Idi Amin.
But the guys can’t tear their eyes from
the gruesome pile-up of Egyptian adolescence. They want to know if growing up in America is like it seems in the movies. While we struggle to assure them that it’s not, there’s a grudging acknowledgment that it’s a lot closer than it would be compared to your average prom night in Port Saïd. American girls might not be like they appear on the Big Screen - where they all but spread themselves out like a nice
tahena with little provocation - but most have no qualms about flashing a little wrist now and then. It’s hard for the guys to square their lives with the lives of their Western counterparts. Talking about
American Pie - a movie that, as I’ve already learned, has cast a long, lustful shadow across the globe - Ezz eloquently sums up: “In Egypt, that movie was like a drama.”
It’s not surprising that most of their post-college plans are staked on visas to North America or Europe. Ezz hopes to finish his pharmaceutical degree and pursue lab work in Canada; Edward - a tall, boisterous kid whose family runs a tight-knit cabal of area businesses - is already making plans to return to
Switzerland. He’d spent a week there in January, showing off snapshots of the Alps and the tidy A-framed chalets while pulling from his water pipe. In his wallet he still carries a handful of Swiss francs, the bright, crisp notes suggesting an optimism unmatched by their soiled Egyptian rivals.
We offer them heaps of well-wishes after our last meal. They’ve given us two full days and nights from their lives, but they’re eager to brush off our gratitude. “We drink coffee and we smoke,” Ezz says. “It’s the same thing every day.” Paul gives them some pictures of his place in Colorado - the backyard piled high with snow, the Rockies flexing their muscular shoulders in the distance. I give Ezz a bootleg CD I picked up in Morocco. Emails are swapped, promises to keep in touch.
In the morning Paul’s laid up in bed again. Suspicions abound that he picked up a parasite along the way. He tracks down Ezz, who calls us back with a quick prognosis from his uncle, a local doctor. It’s a credit to the Egyptian medical establishment that Paul can get a check-up over the phone, then pick up antibiotics with
hardly a prescription or referral to his credit. The pharmacist forks over some pills without a word, and we try not to dwell on the fact that one of the drugs cost Paul all of E£4: about US 70 cents, or the price of a pack of Chiclets.
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