Mummies, Egypt, and Halloween

I woke with the sun, the warm rays flooding my room through my semi-transparent curtains. It was early and I dreaded the fact that I would have to reach a full state of consciousness in the next half hour in order to make my appointment for my language exchange with my Arabic professor. I opened my window, sliding the old warped glass of the frame to let in a cool breeze. The Nile below flowed its usual chocolate-blue. Everything was in its right place. But as I looked across the horizon expecting to see the gray blanket of car exhaust and pollution that typically obscures the view of mosques across the river I instead saw a cloud of dust, a layer of burnt orange in the distance that gave way to the bluest sky I had seen since Lebanon. This cloud of smog and sand had enveloped the city for the past months, filtering the sunlight, trapping evaporated moisture which had made October nights uncomfortably sticky. This was a particular problem when it came time to hang our clothes out from our 16th story balcony, as they never seemed to completely dry. Yet there was something new and inviting about this view of the sky, portent of good that was to come.

Ramadan came and went as did Eid. It was cooler, though, than those July afternoons I remember walking the city, dripping with exhaustion and sweat. The meeting with my Arabic professor went smoothly, correcting the subtleties of his diction, accompanied by Sayed's litany of questions on the minutiae of English grammar for which I had to rack my brain to remember rules of English I had not contemplated since learning the language, if ever, in order to answer.

When I returned downstairs from his office my day brightened considerably when the package from my mother had finally arrived after its long journey across the Atlantic and the northern coast of Africa with a 3 and a half week layover in the bowels of the Egyptian customs building.

I walked hurriedly across the outdoor corridor of the University's main campus between the netted athletic courts that I passed on my way to class everyday. The first few weeks at AUC I had felt strangely voyeuristic sitting with my Egyptian classmates watching the various sports being played on the courts but in the months I had been here I had grown accustomed to blatantly people-watching as well as to the fact that these athletic areas surrounded a central area of one of the University's main academic hubs. There was no time to contemplate such things at the moment, however, for I had received my long awaited package from my mother.

I sat in the cafeteria type area, stabbing haphazardly at the numerous layers of fibrous tape which wrapped the box with my ball point pen when one of the custodial workers noticed my apparent frustration and offered his keys to assist in the opening of my Pandoral parcel. And as I opened its cardboard flaps I sat in awe of its contents that I had expected only to be various medicines and a stick of deodorant (both precious commodities for those foreigners living in Egypt). But again my mother had defied my expectations, filling the remaining space of the box with kitsch Halloween trinkets: plastic fangs, jack-o-lantern confetti and spider rings.

And then, deluge.

The cool breeze outside blew the black and orange confetti across the room in a wonderful fury. This was the first time I had been completely cognizant of how I registered the change of the seasons; my previous recollections of this were only cues received from the Halloween decorations in the grocery stores lining aisles in time for early September. The fact that I had previously known seasons through their consumer culture tailored decorations begotten of the nearest holiday was at once a reality. But here in Egypt, there are no such grocery stores in which plastic masks and fake blood pills line the shelves with bags of assorted candy, nor is there such a devilishly consumerist holiday on the last day of October to provide the impetus for such merchandise. Though I had only known the nearness of Fall through the approach of Halloween in the states, my mother's package, filled with enough decoration to make Martha Stewart blush, had jarred me to realize what I had been noticing all day: it was Autumn in Egypt.

And Lewis Black would be proud; I don't miss candy corn one bit...