The French Expats

Is it possible to become so desperate for (clean) underwear that one is forced to wear a bikini bottom instead? Yes, yes it is.

Yesterday, we had a celebration for the six April birthdays among the small group of teachers living on campus. The food was amazing- Middle Eastern rice pilaf type thing, saucy chicken legs, eggplant in yogurt sauce, tabouleh, a big pot of chile, and 4 different kinds of desserts- including an amazing banana cake with chocolate frosting. Oh man...and then we danced till late in big circles, Kurdish and Lebanese style, which are very similar. The Pakistanis wore lavish, bright-colored saris. Again, I felt underdressed in my long brown skirt and giraffe shirt. But at least I could dance in my non-lavish clothes! I thought I was going to go to bed after that, but no! 

Even later, I found myself at a casual house party in Braiyaty, a neighborhood somewhere in the city near Bakery and More. Ushered in by the neighborhood security guard, we walked into the house, and suddenly, I was hearing that language again, which has gone latent in my mind, during my current endeavors to learn the much less useful Kurdish. The party was being hosted by a French ICRC (Red Cross Committee) worker, and most of the guests were French. Besides the ICRC employees, I met a Doctors Without Borders administrative worker with gorgeous doll-like curly hair, and a 7-foot-tall lawyer who worked with the Tacoma lawyer I ran into at the Moose Lodge. I could have sworn he was standing on stilts when he looked down at me from the ceiling and said hello. And also two journalists- one who had discovered the Afghan caves inhabited by that one dude whom we all forgot about in all the hullabaloo over Saddam. What was his name? Oh right- Osama Bin Laden...son of Laden. I asked how he found the caves.

“It was actually really easy,” said the gaunt-faced (yet somehow still handsome) journalist, “I just asked the guy standing there, 'Where are the caves?', and he pointed 'They're over there.'”

And that was it. Thus was born the most defining piece of his career in freelance journalism, written anonymously. 

The host tried all night to get us to play a drinking game involving shaking two dice, but no one could understand it. It is not in the nature of drinking games to be complicated. They should be binary in nature- drink if you get a certain outcome, don't drink if you don't get that outcome. I sat next to a girl who was stoned out of her mind. She lit cigarette after cigarette until the entire box was empty, and then she reached for the chocolates. I watched amused as she tried to focus her eyes on the people addressing her. As the night wore on, I became so intoxicated with sleep that I laid my head down on my stoned, chain-smoking companion's leg, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up next to her in a big warm bed. I'm pretty sure nothing happened. 

We meandered out of the room and into the kitchen, and were greeted by a lovely, tall, thin, blonde, bright-eyed woman who immediately offered us coffee and toast with butter (good ole French hospitality, even with the lack of decent sliced bread around here) and told us about how she takes her daughter with her on all her ICRC missions (except for this one of course), and how she lived in Cairo for three years when she was in her twenties. Day 1, she loved it- the chaos, the crowds, the noise, the animals. By day 3, she hated it, and could not imagine living in such a horrible place for more than a few days. By the end of three years, though, the fondest memories of her life had taken place in that insane city. She says Cairo is an amazing place if you can find the “underground” culture made up of middle-to-upper class folk. She'd stumbled upon amazing places in Cairo that one could never find anywhere else in the world.

We thanked her for the coffee and left. Soon the two of us were walking out of the concrete-walled neighborhood as the rooster crowed from somewhere in the distance. Oh wait, never mind, there it was just a few feet away, chillin' in the middle of the road.