The parents are here! Yay! They got in three nights ago, and got over their jetlag the next day at the Egyptian Museum (somewhere I haven’t seen, a place filled with all the Egyptian artifacts the British didn’t “borrow”), and now we’re in Sharm el-Sheik. I think they’re adjusting pretty well to Egypt, albeit the version of Egypt you get at the Marriot.

My mom got to see the useless bureaucracy of Cairo and understood it immediately. While of course my father wasn’t allowed to come up and see my room, I didn’t think it would be a problem to take my mother. But no. Hassle is the national pastime of Egypt. We were stopped at the bottom of the stairs by the hijabi warden who was very sure that it was impossible for her to go upstairs. She called over the head of security, who said that it was forbidden, asked us how long we would be upstairs, and limited her stay to 10 minutes only. Why? No one is allowed. It is forbidden. Which is a bunch of bull, of course, because (female) guests go up all the time; it’s just a show they put on for the parents. But Mom nailed it: “They have to justify their existence.”

Welcome to Cairo.

My dad got to see how women are treated here, and how I’m treated by the guards in my own dorm. As we were leaving the building and getting their passports back from security, one of the guards said, at a normal volume in Arabic, the Egyptian equivalent of “She’s hot” while staring directly at me. I snapped back, in Arabic: “I speak Arabic, thanks.” The next day I spoke to one of the dorm’s managers about it, who offered to help me file an official complaint or “speak to him about it.” Knowing that a complaint would be more trouble than it’s worth, I declined, but told him I just wanted to let him know. As I was rushing out the door to meet my parents yesterday, the manager pulled me aside and brought the guard up to me. “I don’t speak English,” he said, now apparently shy and unable to make eye contact with me. “I sorry.”

This, of course, wasn’t as bad as the story I had heard the night before, when we went over to the home of a USAID diplomat who had worked on a case with my father a few years back. His young daughter and a friend had been flashed by a man while they were walking home; the police had forced her to sit down in front of him to identify him as a suspect. This, of course, wasn’t as bad as his other story: a Canadian teacher who had been raped by a police officer forced to go down to the police station before she could go to the hospital, and then interrogated as to what she did to provoke the assault by a judge. But, I digress.

I’m on vacation now, a vacation from my vacation, a post-vacation vacation. I’m in the beautiful resort town of Sharm el-Sheik, described last night by our driver as a “piece of Europe in Egypt.” I’m writing this on our pool-side patio overlooking the ocean. I had an egg-white omelet after running a few miles in the morning. Life’s pretty hard.

On to the promised spring-break update.

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