When most people think of Egypt, the first thing that comes to mind is an image of those giant triangles in the desert. Some people might think of Obelisks, those giant penises, most of which now reside in Rome, because the Caesars couldn’t get enough of other people’s phalluses. Maybe a book or movie brings to mind some ideas of the vast, slow moving Nile River that afforded such an arid land an abundance of crops, and the labor necessary to build big triangles and giant penises. Naturally, the average 21st century person would think of the chaos and strife of the recent revolutions. Farmers armed with planks of wood and chains plowing into an unarmed crowd on camel or horse. While all of those things are interesting, and I saw the triangles, obelisks, and temples, and I attended one of the protests in Tahrir square…for a little while, I’m going to tell you about one indelible image of Egypt that will stay with me for a long time. This is the story of a gay male belly dancer, a fat woman singing Sinatra, and two dozen Pakistanis at an all you can eat buffet. This was our dinner cruise.
We were in Cairo again. After a blistering tour around the city itself, five days on a river boat, hordes of shimmering temples of granite and limestone, five domestic flights, and about 3,600 hours of droning by awful tour guides we made our way back to where our trip began. We left from the Sheraton with our trusty driver Osama II. The first Osama was the company stooge who was there to facilitate our whims at bloated prices and take a cut for the company. Osama II was a cool, little, middle aged man who was constantly blasting Egyptian music through the speakers, and whose general positive attitude about life made some of our most tiring days much more bearable.
Osama II took our battle van over to the pier where the boat was docked, and after a few minutes of standing in the cold (amazingly the riverside was damn cold that night) and taking pictures. Osama I came to give us tickets, or paid our tab, or something, and then we were on the boat.
It all seemed relatively harmless at first. We sat down with a good view of the area in front of the speakers, microphones and sound equipment. We all assumed halfway through the meal a belly dancer would come on for a half hour, do some belly dancin’ and then we’d go back to dessert while staring blankly out the windows at Cairo from the center of the Nile river. We saw the dining room slowly fill up, noticeable was the entire corner of the room taken up by an extended Pakistani family, dressed in Salwar Khamis’ and Shawls; an old man sitting with a young guy with a bottle of whiskey in front of them; an oddly paired gay couple (Little Asian dude and skinny, tattooed Aussie) and a couple a very goofy looking Japanese guys directly in front of us.
We sat down as the boat unmoored and started to float silently down the river. Egyptian staff began to bring out the buffet trays. We ordered drinks. Mom ordered a white wine, and after tasting it found it to be even more horrible than the long line of incredibly awful Egyptian wines we’d been privy to in the last week. So she tried to order a vodka tonic.
Mom: This is no good, do you have another white wine?
Server: We have red wine.
Mom: No, can I get a white wine, different from this one?
Server: We have white wine and red wine.
(At this point a short family discussion was necessary, we agreed they very likely did not have a different kind of white wine and new booze would have to be obtained.)
Mom: How about a vodka tonic?
Server: Vodka Pepsi?
Mom: No, vodka tonic or like vodka and soda.
Server: Yes we have Pepsi, Miranda, and Seven (the UP in 7UP is silent in Egypt)
Mom: No, I don’t want Pepsi, I want soda water and vodka.
(At this point very perplexed, the server was aided by a manager of some kind who swooped in to repeat the whole procedure)
A few minutes later someone came with a glass with ice and vodka straight. I told my mother not to worry, that this was in fact progress, and in 10 or 15 minutes we would build up to an entire cocktail. The server came over smiling, his boss in tow, and my mother explained that in addition to the glass of vodka she would like a mixer known as tonic. The server and boss smiled and nodded, and came back with a 7UP. That 7UP was then returned and finally someone brought out a Schweppes tonic water, in a little yellow can that might have been in the back corner of the stockroom since the Pyramids were constructed.
After everyone’s orders were shored up we toasted to a successful family trip in Egypt, afterward, we were regaling my sister’s high school friend with pictures from the last week. She happened to live in Cairo. Then all of a sudden: “Feelings. Nothing more than feelings. Trying to forget my feelings of…”
A tall, Egyptian guy in a black suit with slicked backed hair was crooning. And he was singing the cheesiest song in the long history of cheesy songs. The entire table exchanged glances. I had to ask my dad if an Egyptian man was really singing “feelings” to us for confirmation. I couldn’t look at the singer without bawling. By the time he reached the crescendo, “feeling, whooooooaaaa feelings, whoooooooaaaaa feelings,” the dam burst. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. We all broke into hysterical laughter. I hope we didn’t hurt his feelings, to the guy’s credit, he did a pretty good job with the song. The playlist got a little better after that…but not much.
Our conversation about the disappointing reaction of New Yorkers to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death (on my birthday no less) was interrupted by a husky voice belting out “My Way,” the Sinatra classic. I was almost horrified to turn around and see a rather large woman singing it. If the boat were a Seinfeld episode, which I think it nearly was, she would be “man voice.” When she finished, one of the young, Egyptian waiters came over to us and said, “The food’s ready now, but you see the family over there from Pakistan, you might want to go over there quickly before they attack,” he made a gesture of an animal jumping on its pray as he said it. My sister seemed a bit horrified at the blatant racism, but I thought it was funny. Neither of us would have predicted its prescience though.
We walked over to the table and the old man in front of Rachel grabbed the first spoon…and kept it. He went down the row of buffet trays with the same spoon, giving himself portions and then moving on, while Rachel at the same time was reaching around his back, taking the spoon for the next tray, using it, and leaving it there. This process was repeated through about 12 different trays of food, and finally when the man finished he went back to the beginning of the buffet and placed the spoon back where he found it. (I should note that this was the man with the bottle of whiskey, whose wrinkled face would be nose deep in belly dancer cleavage an hour later)
I was first in line on my side, so I got back to the table without a problem with my food, but decided to go back for soup. When I turned around the scene was very different. The Pakistanis, as foretold, descended. The waiters were rushing past me to take my mother and father’s plates, which they held above their heads like refugees fording some great river with their dearest possessions. A sea of short people flowed all around them, knocking into them, and making it generally difficult to get back to the table in one piece. Rachel was nearly knocked over turning a corner near some fish. The buffet was a melee.
Everyone made it to their seats as I went into the throng to get soup. I walked over to the bread table where people had decided the only way to choose the right roll was to grab it, start a conversation with somebody next to them about it, then throw it back and pick a new one more or less arbitrarily. I didn’t take any bread. When I got to the soup it seemed the only way to discern the nature of the mysterious broth was to stick their faces as close as possible to it, smell it, then dip a spoon into it to taste it. I went ahead and got some soup anyway.
We ate. The crooners crooned. Then they departed and we really began wondering about our dinner theatre. As the plates were being cleared and the mic stands moved aside, two men enter the area…and begin to dance to an Arabic song. One of these men cannot dance because he is a little too fat, and the other one is too gay to do anything but dance. He is fabulous with a capital everything. One prances, nimble as any queen of Julliard, and the other tries to imitate, a few steps behind. The whole ordeal is ferociously reminiscent of the Saturday Night Live sketch where Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley are trying out to be Chippendale’s dancers. We hope there will actually be a belly dancer on the belly dancer cruise.
As they depart we get another warning from one of the waiters. Dessert’s up. This time I hesitated, as always, the last one to finish dinner. The wave came, and when I looked at the desert melee I decided to wait. When it crested I went over to the ice cream, where I saw one of our Pakistani friends, a few scoops short of a banana split. She had a bowl and a spoon in her mouth, then the spoon in the tub of ice cream, then back in her mouth, then back in the tub, then depositing it into her bowl. She was a rather flaccid and disgusting looking woman which made it even worse. I see my dad come over to the ice cream…and it’s decision time. I try to think of any particular moment from my childhood which made me angry at this man, something he’d done that I needed to take revenge for, but nothing came. So as he dove in for the ice cream I punched him in the kidney.
Dad: What the…?
Me: Shhh, just watch.
And like one of the horsemen of the buffet apocalypse she arrived, and again double and triple dipped in the ice cream. I made a motion to the serving spoon and her spoon and tried to make it clear that this was not ok. When she understood she dropped her tainted spoon back in the ice cream and leapt back as if attacked. I almost felt sorry for her until she found solace in the cake and jello, which she liberally shredded with her bare hands before depositing some smushed and soggy remnants of them into her bowl.
We relayed our story to the rest of the gathering, and the wait staff, who laughingly brought some fresh dessert out from the kitchen. While enjoying said desserts our dancing friends appear again, they’ve changed into some adorable sailor outfits, and continue the same routine to a different song. One elegant and the other goofy, and both hysterically out of place. When they finish they stay next to the dance floor as the main event finally arrives, our belly dancer has come.
After everything that had already happened I had no expectations, but she didn’t meet any of them. Our belly dancer had a kind of Monica Lewinsky face, the chubby Monica, not the fat one. She had a cute face…with cankles. She wasn’t particularly graceful and it was less than satisfying to wonder which part of her was actually moving, because everything seemed to shake simultaneously. The Muslim men on the boat were enthralled. Immediately after she began her, let’s call it; “performance,” all the Pakistani men surged to the adjoining tables, taking pictures and videos, their mouths hanging open. The drunken old spoon-thief looked like the cartoon wolf with his eyes popping out of his sockets. The Japanese guys in front of us had each had a beer, and the Asian flush was upon them. They stared blankly.
Our table is laughing. I wondered how in the hell a city of 25 million people couldn’t find a better looking girl for this kind of thing.
After her mediocre dance she went around the room to pose for pictures at each table while a photographer snapped the shots. They were demanding some outrageous price for the shots. When they were satisfied everyone was covered, the belly dancer and her dancing friends exited stage left.
But our graceful man dancer wasn’t quite finished with us yet. He came back dressed in black. He had a kind of thin silk scarf which he used in a kind of interpretive dance to music played from the speakers. It was entirely bizarre and fit in well with the rest of the boat’s insanity. It was received about as well as that Chinese girl’s swan dance in Donnie Darko, with looks of unbelief and abject silence at its conclusion.
The most entertaining performer came in next, what in Turkey would historically be called a whirling dervish. I have no idea what they call it in Egypt. It’s a guy with a big skirt, who spins around a lot. I mean a lot. He just kept spinning and spinning for what seemed like a very, very long time. He had these hollow wooden things that looked like drumheads that he’d hold between one outstretched hand and his head, and he’d spin, and adjust them into a different shape, and make them multiply into more drumhead things and then when he was finished with them he’d throw them at a dude waiting nearby.
Then one spinny skirt became two spinny skirts, one on his waist and the other above his head. Rather impressively, with one end of the upper skirt in his mouth he folded the whole thing, while still spinning. He did it with crisp movements, like soldiers folding the flag above the coffin of a dead comrade. Afterwards he stopped spinning. He walked around the room with the folded skirt, and he placed it right in Rachel’s arms. He then grabbed a large bottle of water and rocked it up and down on the bundle, I suppose like feeding a baby. The whole enterprise happened with such quickness that none of us even took a picture of it, and then he was gone repeating the baby feeding thing with the drunk old guy, who looked annoyed that his fat belly dancer had left the stage.
Instead of leaving after this weird god damned behavior he just went back to spinning again. He took off his last skirt and then starting twirling it around his head, like an old Italian making pizza. He continued this for a few minutes and then walked around the crowd doing it. The best part of this section of his act was naturally putting my mother in a headlock while spinning the skirt over her head, we rushed to take pictures, and then he squeezed harder, so we took more pictures. Priceless.
And still he wasn’t done. He then grabbed my sister, dragged her onto the dance floor, put the skirt on her, and made her spin in it. After that he came back to our table, grabbed Rachel, and made her do the same thing. Apparently spinning in a big skirt was much harder then it looked.
Now naturally we hadn’t had nearly enough belly dancing yet, so our fabulous friend came back. He was decked out with all the jingly jangly hall marks of a belly dancer, just in pants and a shirt, and a lovely little black sailor hat. He then belly danced his heart out, to the consternation of all aboard. Halfway through the song he paused dramatically and his hat lit up with about two dozen little lights. It was precious. When he’d finished prancing around cankles came back in a Wonder Woman belly dancer getup and they had a BELLY OFF! Battle of the Bulge!
Unfortunately, the guy was just a much better belly dancer than the girl was, and she knew it. He danced circles around her. After this had gone on a few minutes too long, the spoon thief got up to dance with the lady dancer. The bottle of whiskey was nearly drained. It was then in the middle of this dance that he very nearly face-planted, but landed right in the cleavage of the poor woman. The Japanese guys were also coaxed into dancing, and, by god, it was the most awesome Asian flailing and discombobulated drunken schizophrenic twisting I’ve ever seen. It was like the grand finale of a 4th of July fireworks show.
I’m glad it ended then because I don’t know how much more dinner cruise I could have handled after that. We departed, happy to have another unexpected Egyptian tourist experience under our belts, and crashed for our last night in Cairo. Egypt, we will sort of miss ye’
