[I know I am probably never gonna hear the end of this…]<\/p>\n
This is a culture that respects age. An older woman is shown a great deal of respect. An older man, even more so.<\/p>\n
When a group of people are together and deal with someone else outside the group, say a waiter or salesperson, you can see the waiter\/salesperson scan the group. He\/she will then address the senior looking man in the group.<\/p>\n
Even if the senior person in the group attempts to defer to someone else, the natural tendency is to continue to deal with the senior male.<\/p>\n
If it is a group of just women, the senior woman will become the de facto spokesperson. There is also some interplay of class involved. Dressing nicely here gets you a lot more respect. It would be interesting to observe a group of people made up of a poorly dressed older gentleman and a well dressed younger man to see who got the nod as spokesperson.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
So, we went to the White Desert over Thanksgiving. There were 4 of us. Kaddee, E, R and myself.<\/p>\n
Kaddee still looks like her high school yearbook photo in age.<\/p>\n
E is a woman of about 25 years. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
R is a man that looks about 18. I think he is around 29, but he looks very young.<\/p>\n
So the 4 of us climb in a bus and head to Bahariya.<\/p>\n
We arrive and are met by Ahmed El Shymy, our bedouin guide. He scans the 4 of us. You can see his eyes go from person to person.<\/p>\n
He then turns to talk to me. Throughout our weekend with him and his guides, I was constantly consulted to make sure i was happy. No decisions were made without my consent. I would turn to the group for consensus but the final say was clearly mine.<\/p>\n
I got “dibs” on shotgun in the vehicle. I got served tea or food first. It was odd. It was amusing. It also became somewhat tiring.<\/p>\n
So after the first night, the bedouins start referring to me as “baba”, which is, literally “papa”. It was said with a great deal of good humor and meant as a sign of respect.<\/p>\n
They also sat around the campfire on the second night and made up songs about baba jack who was freezing cold and huddled under blankets trying to make up for a lack of sleep the night before.<\/p>\n
Funny bedouin bastards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[I know I am probably never gonna hear the end of this…] This is a culture that respects age. An older woman is shown a great deal of respect. An older man, even more so. When a group of people are together and deal with someone else outside the group, say a waiter or salesperson, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-differences","category-out-and-about"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","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=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}