Thursday March 28th, 2024
Download SceneNow app
Copied

7 More Egyptian Mysteries

Someone please explain...

Staff Writer

7 More Egyptian Mysteries

1. We are all familiar with those men who call girls and either '3akis' over the phone or just spend a full five minutes breathing heavily down the speaker. While we understand that we are a sexually repressed society, we still don’t quite get how these phone calls are meant to satisfy one's sexual appetite. Like, what exactly do they think is going to happen? The girl on the other end will be overjoyed to have finally received this call she's been waiting for her entire life, reciprocate, and it will rapidly turn into a steamy bout of phone sex? That never happens. What is even more confusing is that usually the girl doesn’t even say anything past 'Hello?' and to deter the heavy breather/whisperer of sweet, sweet nothings, often just puts the phone on hold, to drain his credit. But these guys are persistent, and will continue to call systematically for months on end. What's in it for you? What pleasure can they possibly derive from this one sided phone convo where the only thing they can hear is the repetitive 'beep beep' when a phone is put on hold? Does that turn you on? We don’t get it.

2. We utterly fail to comprehend why Egyptians consciously choose not to move aside when there's an ambulance desperately trying to maneuver its way through our streets. Do we have so little regard for life in contrast to reaching our destination approximately 34 seconds earlier than if we did the decent human thing and slowed the fuck down for the ambulance? We know that it's your gut instinct to rapidly fill any gaps in traffic and to never, ever, under any circumstances surrender your spot in the street by allowing someone to pass your car, but like, there's someone dying in that ambulance. Could we not put our offensive strategic line of driving on hold for one minute and let them pass? We know that after years of battling traffic, tactical strategies for moving forward have been ingrained in our systems, but it's an ambulance, the level of urgency for the person inside is definitely higher than your level of urgency to reach your house and get in your PJs. WHY DON’T WE MOVE ASIDE?

3. Why are Egyptians such severely nocturnal creatures? We don’t even acknowledge exiting our homes for any kind of outing before 10pm, even on a weekday. In countries abroad, they, as normal humans, who get tired if they continually run on five hours of sleep a night, if they want to go out for drinks, head there after work. At 7 or maybe 8. Why do we insist on waiting until 10pm until it is deemed acceptable for us to exit our homes? Why do we need to go home first sit around and do nothing, and THEN head out and subsequently never get enough sleep? Why do we start clubbing at 1am? They say New York is the city that doesn’t sleep but the people who say that are idiots who've clearly never been to Egypt; there are always cars in the street. New York has no humans anywhere past the hour of 11 on a weekday. Perhaps the more pertinent question here is, why has the world overlooked our true non-sleeping ways and given acknowledgement to New York? We feel a little jilted to be honest.

4. Why does a significant portion of the Egyptian male driving population stick their elbow out of the window? Like, is it a particularly comfortable position for your arm? Does it provide you with just the right amount of lumbar support? It actually seems counter to your driving comfort to have to stick your left arm as far as to reach the window. There's usually a rest shelf type of thing a few inches before it…

5. Why do we seem to have this strange obsession with Turkish soap operas? For months on end, Mohanad was the only name on every Egyptian female's lips, from teenagers to grandmothers. Literally. It was conversation that dominated both the dinner table and the shisha place alike. How have these shitty dubbed melodramatic soaps managed to surpass both Arabic TV shows and English ones in terms of a bona fide obsession? Surely one of the two should satisfy our televised needs, no? Apparently not. Apparently only dubbed Turkish TV shows can garner a nation-wide love. We still don’t know why.

6. We know traffic's a bitch. We know walking around Cairo is never a hugely pleasant experience. But why does our population abandon a perfectly good pavement and voluntarily choose to walk on the side of the street? In all fairness, it's not a 'perfectly' good pavement, it’s a veritable obstacle course, but the street is not exactly a better alternative, what with you know, cars in it and all, their mirrors constantly bashing against your arm, and cyclists veering and swerving around you. Why don’t we just use the pavement as God and city planners intended? It's there for a reason. For that specific reason, in fact.

7. Perhaps the biggest mystery our nation ever faced. Meen el ragel el wara Omar Suleiman