We were riding in a taxi yesterday going to the big bazaar.<\/p>\n
Everyone here asks “where you from”.<\/p>\n
If it is just someone on the street, you can be sure he is trying to start a conversation so he can drag you into his store.<\/p>\n
We got dragged into a perfume shop this way. Live and learn.<\/p>\n
Children on the street will say “Welcome to Egypt. Where you from”. It is unclear if they have something to sell or are just practicing their English.<\/p>\n
2 hijab-ed women, one wearing a niqab (a veil that covers the entire face but leaves the eyes visible) were walking down the street and as they passed us, one of them said “Welcome to Egypt” and kept walking. Slightly odd.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the taxi driver asked “Where you from” and I replied “America”<\/p>\n
His response was<\/p>\n
“Americans beautiful! Very good people… Bush, no good!”<\/p>\n
I agreed and we laughed.<\/p>\n
I wonder how the conversation would have gone if I tried to disagree with him, and had a command of the language to do so…<\/p>\n
Update: Had the same thing happen the other day at the meat counter. Nice man asked us where we were from, we replied Amreeki (america in Egyptian Arabic).<\/p>\n
He said “Americans very nice. Bush no good”<\/p>\n
Seems to be a common sentiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We were riding in a taxi yesterday going to the big bazaar. Everyone here asks “where you from”. If it is just someone on the street, you can be sure he is trying to start a conversation so he can drag you into his store. We got dragged into a perfume shop this way. Live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}