Egypt

I had one of those dreams about school. Students were arguing about their grades, why they failed. It was a dream because I was asleep, head bobbing against the window, and a stream of drool easing its way slowly out of the corner of my mouth, although this exact dream was reality only two days before.

I awoke then, eyes snapping open to find myself in less reality then I had been in seconds ago. Next to me, along the side of the road, a man in a galabiyya sat on top of a donkey, a pile of hay as tall as his sitting body rested between him and the animal, but he rode it as commonly as I would a bicycle. He was smoking a cigarette.

Heat drifted through the window though it was late December. An ox, next to a mud brick house, was turning a water wheel, bringing water up from the aqueduct to flood the field alongside the house. Alongside the road. Where men, some in uniform, some in galabiyyas, some in jeans, stood with small automatic weapons at street corners and watched us pass. Tourists treated like presidents as we are whisked along in convoy, protected from traffic, from dust, and reality save for the view, to temples older then the mind can really comprehend.

Egypt.

After the convoy there are metal detectors, temples, hotels, where the white man can beep and the local guards turn their heads, where they themselves must clear through, searched. Metal detectors next to ram headed sphinx that lined the ancient road where only some could pass three thousand years ago.

And they treat you like a queen, because you’re pale like the snow back at home, so they offer you fifty camels only to find out they’re underbidding. Next they will give you your weight in diamonds if you’ll be their wife. But there are more wives at home. So you go to the streets where the vendors offer you mint tea and you look at their wares and they hope you will buy, or take them back to Slovakia, either one will do, or you can just look. It’s free to look. What’s your name? Where you from? Promise you’ll come back. They always want a promise. Not maybe.

But maybe I will come back, though I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow, besides telling some students why they are failing, then perhaps taking a nap. And dreaming. Of Egypt.