Movies and Weddings

I said it would be a while...

I recently attended two events which stuck in my mind as both very Egyptian and very opposite the experience you'd have in the states: a wedding, and a showing of Spiderman 3.

I'd expected the wedding to be, well, different. In Indonesia, families invite about 500 people to the wedding, there's no ceremony, and guests show up, take a picture with the bride and groom, eat food (standing up - there are no tables), then leave. I guess I was expecting something like that.

The wedding I attended, in Alexandria, was scheduled to start at 9pm. Since it's Egypt, I figured that actually meant a little later, but I wasn't sure of exact timing so I went around 9:45. Big mistake. No one actually starting showing up until 10:30/11, and the bride and groom themselves came in at 11:30. Once the wedding party arrived, they videotaped their entrance to the hotel (which was shown on big screens in the reception hall, where we were) - the bride and the groom walked into the hotel, put their bags through security (no joke), waited around for the elevator, and eventually made it up to the reception hall with musicians playing the drums very loudly.

And that was the organized portion of the evening: the rest was just chaos. No ceremony (that's done several weeks before with immediate family only), but lots of dancing, singing, being lifted on chairs... and we didn't eat until 2! It was full of energy, but if it were my wedding I'd want some order. My favorite part was cutting the cake: by far the most ceremonial portion of the evening, a member of the catering staff cut the cake for the couple into very precise slices, then cut small, bite-size pieces and put each piece on a fork and handed to one of the couple to feed to the other (thus eliminating the best part of the wedding, throwing cake in your spouse's face).

Spiderman was another experience entirely. I had been forewarned that movies start 30 minutes late, so I was prepared for that. I wasn't prepared for what happened when the movie started. Over half of the audience was under the age of 5; Spiderman isn't particularly designed for the under-5 crowd, but it's especially difficult when reading subtitles is necessary for comprehension. Because they had no idea of any of the dialogue, this portion of the audience spent the whole movie using the theater as a playground: climbing over seats, playing tag, screaming, etc.

But this was nothing compared to the adults. The girl next to me read (in Arabic) all the subtitles to her boyfriend. Behind me, a man brought a boom box and was playing Arabic music. A woman in the back was talking on her cell phone for most of the time. Best of all, however, was the intermission. I'm used to theaters with intermissions, but I'd expected an intermission to come at a reasonable stopping point in the movie. Not so in Egypt: at the exact halfway point of the movie (mid-action scene, Spiderman was mid-word), the movie stopped, the lights went out, and everyone immediately leaves the theater. This process was repeated towards the end of the movie. After the last action scene, the lights went up and everyone filed out of the theater - even though there was still 10 minutes left.

So the moral of the story is: it's a good thing that Spiderman 3 was such a bad movie... if it had been good, I would have been very mad!

Aside from those two anecdotes, I don't have much to report. Rush visited Egypt for a week and we visited Luxor and Cairo, including a belated trip to Islamic Cairo and the Egyptian Museum. I will have pictures up from that visit shortly, insha'allah. The rest of June was spent working - organizing information and writing the report, followed by attending conferences and final briefings. I'm now in the airport waiting for my flight home - so this is my final post. It's been fun, and as always I'm happy to answer any questions :)