cultural detox

I think Cairo was a hard assignment for my family. I’m not sure how my dad felt about returning to the town he’d grown up in, but I know it was hard for my mom, being there without me. Wives, you know, aren’t really supposed to work on overseas assignments, but my school and my formation had always been important to her, and she’d done a marvelous, energetic job at both, and now she was there without me, since I was in college. So it’s weird when I mention it on our laundry list of overseas assignments, since I didn’t really live there.
But I did visit, four times in all. This was the fourth. Beth came with me, during the Spring Break of our sophomore year. I had never bonded with Cairo the way I’d bonded with the other countries we’d lived in. It was loud, god it was so loud, and it just never seemed to end. Not the noise, not the dust, not the sprawling poverty. I could see, objectively, its splendor and chaotic energy and the deep veins of its history but mostly, I was bored and lonely when I visited.
But I’m glad my last visit was with a newcomer to Africa, someone whose eyes were wide at every turn because it was all unfamiliar to her. Cairo through Beth’s eyes was at its best – captivating and exotic. My mom lined up stellar day after stellar day of fun and history and a little dash of decadence. It’s from whence I get my gracious hostess genes. We had a ball.
And my mom, in her ever-aware sense of hostessing, realized that the week we were visiting coincided with Eid el-Kbir, a period a few months after Ramadan that’s usually celebrated with sacrificial animals and donating food to the poor. It’s also marked, at least in Egypt, with dipping one’s hands in blood and marking walls, cars, homes. Hey, we were visitors – we never judged – and of course, this being our third Muslim country, my family was more than used to cultural differences. Only, Mom was a little worried about how Beth would react to all the, you know, animals. So she booked our last three days at the newly-minted Hilton resort, on the mouth of the Red Sea. Some cultural detox, if you will – in my family, nothing says home like the Hilton.
Of course, Beth was fine. Beth is open-minded, fearless, and the few bloody hand-prints or carcasses we did see weren’t anything to go crazy over. Still, that little gesture of my mom’s didn’t go unappreciated. For two days, we watched dolphins share waterspace with honking big oil tankers, ate home-brought chicken pie on the beach, and cavorted on the random trampoline. I remember it as the first place I read Harry Potter (in a matter of hours), a quiet, nearly empty resort that was basically all ours.
And the jumping photos sort of became a theme.