Fil Mishmish
Well, courses are under way and going well.
I am still settling in and becoming accustomed to my Eastern bloc apartment. Currently we are waiting, and have been waiting, for a DSL connection to be started. This is very frustrating. It is amazing that you can get a DSL here in the first place, so for this, I am thankful. What frustrates me is that the company continues to give me unrealistic estimates about when the connection will be active. I wouldn’t mind if they told me that it will be ready in three or four weeks, a month, January. At least then I would be surprised when it actually happened. Currently, in order to please customers, they just tell you whatever sounds good at the time and then give you spurious assurances that it will be done then.
I am not attempting to make a generalization about Egyptians, and I won’t do so. I have certainly met Egyptians of all stripes and if I have to make a generalization, it would be that you will rarely meet a kinder or friendlier person that Egyptian. That said, this sort of thing happens a lot here. It seems that many people here, upon meeting foreigners, will go out of their way to please them. This is really polite and it is nice that people want to help you, but often there is nothing that can be done to help. Or, in some cases, those people attempting to help are also met at every turn by frustrating bureaucracy.
Egyptians even have an idiom for that. When you are expecting something on a time-line, or expecting something that should not otherwise be a problem, then you can say, “Fil mishmish.”
“Fil mishmish” means literally “in apricots” and is part of a larger phrase: “Bokra fil mishmish.” The general idea is that tomorrow things will be better or that things will work out—”bokra” means “tomorrow.” This sounds like a relatively optimistic thing to say, at first glance. However, in reality, this idiom means something more like “when pigs fly.” So if you are in a situation where you cannot get results no matter how hard you try or how many people you talk to, you say “Fil mishmish.” Alternatively, if someone tells you something that they will do for you but there is no way that it will ever happen, you say “Fil mishmish.”
Enjoy today’s Arabic lesson. Use it wisely. I’ll post again when my internet is up and running, fil mishmish.
1
Hey why don’t you email a brother back?
2
Keep the blogs coming . . . I enjoy reading what you are up to.
Diane Rehm says ‘hi’ by the way.