s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Traysi — a word about Traysi: she’s a dancer, and she owns the funky ethnic shop “Indeja” in Cuba Street where Chris and I found the belly dance class and Hossam Ramzy workshop flyers, and she has the lifestyle I want, which is to say, she flies to funky exotic places and buys funky things to sell in her shop. (sigh) This also means she has tons of kewl stuff, jewelry, funky clothes, etc. Oh, and fabulous spiky pink/purple/orange hair.

Anyway, Traysi, a thousand blessings upon her, has loaned (given, actually) me her old vacuum cleaner, to use until I finish my anal retentive comparison shopping and buy one of my own.

Back up. Okay, cat litter.

Warning: Oversharing is Imminent.

Most Kiwis seem to use regular sort of absorbant stuff made from recycled newpapers or something. The kind you change. However, you *can* get the clumping kind of cat litter here, and I’ve been trying out the different brands, looking for, as the Kiwis would put it, the best value for money.

As near as I can tell, the clumping efficiency of cat litter is in direct proportion to its fineness. You got big chunky grains, you got not so great clumping. You got what is effectively dust, you got neat little balls of solidified cat wee, all ready to be scooped and discarded (twice a day, because the two cat boxes are in rooms I live in, for pity’s sake (because, you know, small apartment)).

However, there is another feature of cat litter — one I’d never been particularly bothered about before — that is *also* in a direct proportion to how fine it is (and therefore to how well it clumps), and that is its trackability. Yes. You got nice clumping litter, you got it scattered everywhere the cats go. (Ah. I see you’ve been on the counter while I was gone, you wretched things… AGH. Cat litter on the COUNTER! Ew, ew, ew, get the cleaner…)

So for the last few weeks, I’ve been spending 10 minutes every morning and evening on my knees, brushing up cat litter from as much of the apartment’s carpet as I can muster the energy to do, with a HAND BROOM. Ugh. “This is a labor of love,” I tell myself. “This is temporary,” I tell myself. “This is driving me BATSHIT,” I finally admit, half-crazed.

But Traysi, may her hair never fade, has given me a vacuum. It’s held together with tape, it smells kinda funny, and it does bugger all to get up the shed fur the cats have been determinedly putting down in a near-solid sheet (I’d swear this carpet was blue when I moved in…). But it picks up the tracked litter, by gum, and that is *such* a relief I just can’t express it.

Hallelujah.

– for Snog Week Countdown, see previous post.

So. Dancing, freezing, dancing. The relationships between several of the most common Egyptian drum rhythms. (note: Rhythm is a musical sound characterized by regularly occuring accented beats. It is not “The space between the notes”, as several of the dred locked hippy guys indicated. Nor is it anything so esoteric as “The heartbeat of the music”, which sent Hossam onto a five-minute anti-sap tirade. Hee.) The composition of the Egyptian orchestra, and the sorts of dancing one ought to be doing to each instrument. What dancing *is* to begin with (it is a visualisation of the music — you should let the audience hear with their eyes. Now imagine if Winamp came with a Belly Dancer, instead of “Down the Drain”…). Bad puns. Bad sandwiches from the canteen at lunch.

Hossam Ramzy very much loves music, loves the tabla, loves his culture, his country, and his countrymen (and women). When he spoke about the fellahin moving to Cairo from the country, describing the sprawling haphazard suburbs, I remembered vividly the half-completed concrete blocks, with the goats outside and the rebar sticking out of the empty upper storeys. When he talked about the fellahy rhythm, I flashed back to nights around a fire on the banks of the Nile, listening to the felluca sailors play tabla with the farmers. Very, very cool.

Saturday night (after racing home to change and shower) was a big group dinner at Tug Boat on the Bay, a — you guessed it — old tugboat moored at Oriental Parade and turned into a restaurant. It’s a good idea in concept — you get a great view of the harbor at night; it’s a neat venue. Unfortunately the food was not really up to scratch for what we paid for it (apparently, it has that reputation). The only reason the dinner was held there, really, was that it was the only place Glen could find willing to close for a private function on a Saturday night. Still, it was fun. I got to chat with several of the dancers I hadn’t really had the opportunity to before.

After dinner, we all trooped downstairs to the bar, where there was drumming and (sort of) dancing. Unfortunately, the drumming was mostly monopolized by the hippy guys on djembe, and just like at Pennsic, the African drummers all devolved into Boom-badda-Boom-badda-Boom, which is really boring to dance to. So there wasn’t much dancing except for three set pieces that a few of the dancers that didn’t perform at the show did there to recorded music. Most folks seemed to have a good time, though.

Sunday evening (after again racing home to change and shower) was the “Stars of Egypt” video lecture. Hossam Ramzy, at considerable personal expense, accquired the rights to pull clips of dancers from the very earliest Egyptian movies (Cairo is its own Bollywood). Basically, no one knows what “authentic, historic” Egyptian dance is (and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you three-legged camels). Anyone you’re learning from today learned from someone who learned from someone who learned from someone who (etc., etc.) very likely learned from the women who starred in these films, or women like them. And *these* women knew what there was to know at the time about “authentic” dance. So this is it. This is the earliest documentation we’ve got, and a lot of it probably would have been lost for good if someone like Hossam hadn’t made the effort to collect and save it. I have to say I ate it up with a spoon. It was especially cool getting all the behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Hossam — how this dancer got her start, how that one ran a famous nightclub, who that guy playing the accordion was, who was having an affair with whom. Great stuff.

So that was Saturday and Sunday. Must eat something now.

— 4.5 days to Snog Week ! Eeeeeee !!!