Oh. Michael.
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
42
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Abu Simbel,
Egypt
Sunday, March 19, 2006
The drive is 280 kilometres due South. Tourists in buses have been terrorist attacks objectives at times. The Egyptian government has to be seen doing something about this, so tourists may only drive to Abu Simbel in convoys. As we waited for the convoy to assemble I tried to doze. Outside stood soldiers here and there, each armed with a submachine gun.
From the middle of the bus, one of the passengers in the middle of the bus asked the driver a question in Arabic. It was four o'clock in the morning, and I sensed a collective groan from the rest of the passengers who were all trying to sleep. The owner of this voice was too perky for four in the morning; she had no sense of decorum to be squawking so early in the day.
The sound was really something unusual - I haven't described the voices I have heard out here to any extent, but this voice is particularly worth a mention (in the way they show the most unusual performers on American Idol). The closest to anything among the North American dialects would be either a 1980s Californian film heroine or modern Ottawa inflected accent; but more staccato and higher pitched than anything one would consider typical from these regions. Perversely feminine comes to mind - all the more suitable because I do think it is perverse for anyone to be perky or conversational at four am.
I was crushed to hear the conversation go on and on. It wasn't a case of this woman trying to keep the driver awake. She seemed pretty bored and she had a lot more to say than did the driver. In between their phrases I kept praying that the conversation would stop. After about five minutes it appeared to.
A few minutes later, the woman came up to me and asked me if I would change seats with her. I told her that she ought to go back to her seat and keep it down. She insisted that I should do as I told because she was a woman. I told her that I didn't care what she was. I was the second to last person who got on this bus, and to my mind, it made sense to me that I should start following some stranger's orders particularly when the other seat was considerably too small for my frame to endure over a 3 hour drive.
A few minutes later the woman was squawking at the driver again. But there was no respite this time. After fifteen minutes I was thinking that perhaps I should have let her move to my seat for quietness' sake, but then she came up to the front of the bus and sat on the space between the driver's seat and mine (the design of this bus had the engine block there) and she continued her one sided conversation with the driver as loudly as she had been speaking before. Eventually he stopped responding to her entirely. She sat jilted for a few minutes and then decided to talk to me.
"Which country are you from" she asked me. I told her my nationality. She asked about my home city and I told her what it was. She asked how long it took me fly get to Egypt and I told her my best guess. She told me that she was Egyptian and from a city between Cairo and Alexandria in the Nile delta. She marked it in my guidebook with my pen in big block letters. She introduced herself and asked me my name.
At this point in our conversation I didn't want to talk to her at all. I told her that my name was Michael. It just sort of came to me. In very formal English she said "Nice to meet you. Michael." with a slightly longer than usual pause between "you" and "Michael." She looked at me and couldn't come up with anything to say in this language. She thought about it and said "fifty-fifty English. Michael." I usually like interaction with other people but it was still quite dark out and I leaned back to sleep a moment. But she had thought of something to tell me.
She told me that she was married to a police officer back in her home city. She showed me a wire ring. I wondered how it was that a married woman wearing a hijab (which she adjusted a bunch of times when trying to tell me what it was her husband did) went about travelling all by herself out here. She asked me if I was married but I had no ring and that answer was pretty straightforward. Then she told me how old she was and asked how old I was. "I am twenty and three. Michael." It could have been quite cute if it hadn't been so damn early in the morning.
At five in the morning, she decided to teach me Arabic. "I will teach you Arabic. Michael."
All of her sentences were still punctuated with Michael.
She took the fingers of my left hand and moved herself closer to me, and began to teach me Arabic numerals. "Wahid. Michael." I managed to say "Waa." She said "Wahid. Michael." I said Waaid." She corrected me until I could get it right. I was a particularly slow learner as she went through the first six hundred numbers just in case she could get discouraged. But the woman had patience.
Part of the way through the lesson she seemed to realise that I wasn't addressing her by her name. I hadn't quite picked it up and I fathomed a few guesses from deep left field. She wasn't particularly impressed and she hit me on the shoulder as punishment.
She smiled at me though and then had me repeat her name. "Niveen. Michael." I attempted it until I got it right. By this time the dawn was coming across the sky and with the light shining in my eyes, I was less tired and I gave up wanting to sleep. After we exhausted numbers, she got me to take out my guidebook again and she had me flip to the back where there were Arabic phrases.
Two hundred and eighty kilometers later we arrived in Abu Simbel and by all rights I should have been perfectly fluent in Arabic. As it was I was starting to believe that my name actually was Michael. At the ticket office I lined up with all of the White and Asian tourists and she walked up to the window for Masri (Egyptian) visitors.
The signs at that window were only written in Arabic, and they said that the price was 1/10th of what the price at the ticket window for "tourists" (in English) was. But the staff were adamant that I wasn't actually Egyptian. Saying "ana masri," meaning "I'm Egyptian," didn't cut it for them.
Niveen began to reveal herself as something of a drama queen. She wanted to walk with me to the tombs at half the pace that the average senior tourist walked. I instinctively walked a lot more quickly than she, for the first time being out of a queue. All of the common language between us was depleted and she resorted to crying out "Michael, Michael" to slow me down.
Inside the tombs of Abu Simbel I started to wonder what exactly Niveen was doing down here. It took her less than two minutes to glance at the tomb art before she told me "I'm bored. Michael." Why does someone take a three hour drive to poke around somewhere for two minutes and then leave? Niveen went to talk with an Egyptian guard after I told her that I was going to take my time to see something I had travelled so far to see.
Niveen joined me as I left the Sun temple and the guard gave me a friendly salute as she left him and took my arm to walk the seventy five meters to the other temple. She wanted to walk slowly, but not so slowly that I could turn around and take photos. I did, of course, and she was really annoyed.
Inside the second temple she wasted no time looking around and rather than even going in all the way, she struck up a conversation with this guard at the door. I took my time to see it, and twenty minutes later, when I came out, she was so involved in conversing with the guard that I didn't bother disturbing her. I went to a small shaded area by Lake Nasser to eat a flaky pastry I had bought last night. Fifteen minutes into it Niveen found me and told me that she wasn't pleased with my behaviour.
I asked her by what right was she not pleased and she sniffed haughtily. About the same moment she noticed a late-aged Teutonic woman. This senior realised that she had been spotted and seemed to react exactly like that Loony Toons cat responds every time Pépé le Peu finds her. Sophie stayed at the same hotel as Niveen, but she flew down to Abu Simbel instead of taking the bus.
"Oh my God," Sophie told me later. Niveen seemed happy to see Sophie but the feeling couldn't have been less mutual. After a few minutes of failed conversation, Niveen grew impatient with the both of us and stamped away. Sophie said that Niveen had been at her hotel for four days and, lacking the precise English vocabulary to explain it to me, mimed a claw grasping at a mouse. I understood her to mean that Niveen was clingy. Sophie had chosen to fly to Abu Simbel (and back) to get some alone time.
The walk back to the bus went along side the shore of Lake Nasser, and as I walked back Niveen found me and walked along for a few meters. She slowed down and made a scene again, saying "Michael. Michael. Slow down. Michael." I asked her what could possibly be bothering her now. "Michael. I'm tired. Michael." "Okay, Niveen," I told her, "I'll see you in the bus." I had to visit the boys' room. Back at the bus there was another scene and Niveen didn't talk to me again until a few hours later when she got off the bus and said "goodbye. Michael."
After Niveen got out, the daughter in the American family turned to me from her seat in the bus and asked me why Niveen kept calling me Michael, because I had told the American girl my real name. I said "well, I don't know why I told her that my name was Michael. I thought it would be amusing, I guess." No. It wasn't that. I didn't trust her. She was the first Arab woman who had spoken to me on my trip. It seemed suspicious.
* (1/8th of a cent)
