2007
Jul 
31

Moving to Egypt

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I helped two very good friends pack up and move to Cairo this weekend with their two dogs. My partner and I ended up agreeing to take care of their cat for the next several years that they will be gone, the Chairman Meow—also known now as the Chairman Now!—so named because his meow sounds like he is saying the name of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

While I am not taking dogs or other people, helping my friends get rid of their stuff, figure out what to do with the cat, get stuff from one place to another, get papers dropped off and phones canceled reminded me that I have a scant five weeks left before I move to Alexandria for the year. It reminded me that I am nowhere near ready to leave. I have about a million things that I need to do before I go. Even when thinking about completing all of the things that I need to complete before leaving makes me lie awake at night. And yet, I find myself waking up in the middle of the night so excited and thrilled in anticipation of the move.

I can’t wait to be back in Alexandria. Not because it is better there, not because it is an easy or comfortable place to live, but because I love the feeling of freedom that I get when I am living in a place other than my home, totally out of my element. Don’t get me wrong: I can find my way around, I feel very comfortable there. I don’t have too many culture shock issues, but Alexandria is not my home, and it probably never will be—at least not full time.

I find this feeling to be pretty ineffable, but others do not. My dear friend Wanda gave me a wonderful passage from Pico Iyer which fully and perfectly sums up the expatriate experience:

Every trip we take deposits us at the same forking of the paths: it can be a shortcut to alienation—removed from our home and distanced from our immediate surroundings, we can afford to be contemptuous of both; or it can be a voyage into renewal, as, leaving our selves and pasts at home and traveling light, we recover our innocence abroad. Abroad, we are at Titanias, so bedazzled by strangeness that we comically mistake asses for beauties; but away from home, we can also be Mirandas, so new to the world that our blind faith can become a kind of higher sight…. If every journey makes us wiser about the world, it also returns us to a sort of childhood. In alien parts, we speak more simply, in our own or some other language, move more freely, unencumbered by the histories that we carry around at home, and look more excitedly, with eyes of wonder. And if every trip worth taking is both a tragedy and a comedy, rich with melodrama and farce, it is also, at its heart a love story. The romance with the foreign must certainly be leavened with a spirit of keen and unillusioned realism; but it must also be observed with a measure of faith.1

There is no reason to go further, but I will. When I am in a totally foreign environment, I feel not as though I am no longer myself, but as though I am only then fully myself. I am not required to put on the persona which I wear in my everyday life, but am free to be completely candid all the time. My needs are simpler, and therefore much simpler to fulfill. Every day is a challenge, or an adventure, and I learn quickly to take a great deal of comfort in the simple things that make me happy.

When else can we live in such a state.

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1 p. 23, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East. New York:
Vintage Departures, 1988.