Friday, February 16, 2007

V.D. in Cairo


Who knew that Valentine's Day was such a big deal in Cairo? Not me. I never would've thunk it.

For weeks leading up to the big day, there were signs and gifts everywhere. Like in the States, before Halloween.

It reached a kind of frenzy on the 13th, with stuffed bears spilling out onto the sidewalks and giant hearts advertised on windows.

On the actual 14th of February, I saw something new--women with headscarves on the metro had red fringes on their scarves, or red sticking out from under their wraps. Were they going on dates?

I saw a half-dozen Egyptian couples wandering around Zamalek, some hand in hand, which is something I have not seen any other time. Maybe Valentine's Day is a kind of free pass to be lovey-dovey in public.

5 comments:

Marie Javins said...

The closest I got to hearing a sweet nothing was when a crass young man said something utterly obscene to me as I walked along the Nile near the Egyptian Museum. Guess there are some English-language words then entire world knows.

Anonymous said...

Well, it's better than what they do in India: .

A random question while I'm here: do you deliberately have the RSS feed turned off for the blog? Because I love catching up on your adventures, but I live and die by my aggregator. This is one of the few sites that I still check directly every day.

Marie Javins said...

I do prefer to see how many people are reading and where they read from and all that, but honest, I have the thing turned on. I just upgraded my template so maybe it will improve the situation. It is nice though to see that people visit. I can't get stats on feeds. Or maybe I can and don't know how yet.

Amanda Castleman said...

No Hurry in Africa reads fine through my aggregator (Google Reader).

And site meter still tracks: I experimented with my blog.

My irritation is the RSS feed insists on "short" even though I tell it "full".

Buggy Blogger...

Anonymous said...

The template update must have done it; I didn't see a link before and my reBlog installation couldn't auto-discover anything.

I'll be sure to stop by to check on the comments, I just like to know that there's an update. i'm a bit absent minded and occasionally forget to chec sites for months....