Just like Gibraltar

My apologies for the sparcity of writing of late. I have been busy here, and the truth is my quotidian activities, while quite fun, are probably not all that exciting for outside readers.

So we headed this weekend to Seville and Cordoba, beautiful towns here in Andalucia, Spain. We left Saturday morning, and within a few hours had arrived in Seville and entered the Cathedral.

Now I was one tired man on Saturday morning, and, being quite familiar with Seville's Cathedral (a beautiful piece of architecture that was once a mosque), I decided to relax while the students walked about. I sat down in the lovely Orange Tree Patio (Muslim) and tried to stay out of the sun.

Within a few moments, a short and spring-stepped man approached "my" bench. He pulled a baseball cap off of his bald head, sat down, and lit a cigarette. One of us commented on the heat. We both commented that we were tired.

With little warning, our conversation left the path of normality and veered sharply, turning onto the superhighway of strangeness.

"How do you like your women," he asked me, "skinny or fat?"

I responded slowly, indicating that I was not sure that I had a definable opinion on the matter.

"In Egypt," he said, "we have nice, beautiful fat women. Women that you can hold on to, women like those over there." He pointed at a group of large women passing by that might have been Egyptian. He called something out to them in a foreign tongue and they smiled back at him.

"American women," he continued, "are all so small...you touch them here (he touched his side, below the ribs) and you are already here (he touched his other side, in the same place)"

The man continued along these lines for a few more minutes, and we were soon joined by his friend, who seemed to have similar tastes for women. I stuck hard to my ambiguous answers, not really sure that I wanted to be a part of this conversation, but unable to stop laughing at his commentary.

"Let me teach you something," he told me, and began reciting what sounded like a poem, or perhaps a song. He indicated that I should write down what he was saying, so I pulled out some paper and a pen and began to transcribe.

It went something like this:

Kul al dunya bahar
urras erri sahar
went udi, went udi?
Aoud alarass eraq
ughanni

"What does that mean?" I asked him. He began to translate. His translation and explanation went something like this:

All of the world was water
And I was hard like a rock
(He interrupted himself--"the penis, you know, like a rock, like Gibraltar--and I nodded in understanding)
Where shall I sit, Where shall I sit? (asks a woman)
On the rock, where I will bounce and sing!
(He again interrupted himself--"she sit on you, you get it?"--I again nodded in understanding)

Now, needless to say, when this man reached the end of this explanation, I was somewhat perplexed. While my travels have accustomed me to strange conversations, I am certainly not used to learning lurid limericks with Egyptian men in holy sites.

As we continued to talk, and I continued to repeat time and again the Arabic words, learning pronunciation with my new friend´s help, we were joined by more members of his tour group. One woman approached us, a petite woman of around sixty years old, and the man grew excited. "This is my wife," he told me (I balked at her lack of fatty tissue), "repeat for her what I have taught you."

I looked around, confused and a bit worried. "Was he serious?" I wondered. Did he really want me speaking like this to his life partner? I did as I was told, and the woman began to laugh, losing control with every chuckle.

"Do you know what it means?" she asked me.

I gave her my explanation of the translation, adding that I knew that it was an Egyptian text.

"Has he told you that he is Egyptian?" she asked me. "He is crazy. We are Israeli. He is crazy and likes to tell people that we are Egyptian."

More people arrived. I was made to repeat again the odd lesson.

More laughter. More confusion. I had (and still have) no idea where these people were from, Egypt or Israel. Everyone shook my hand and listened as I read. Some people in the group tried to give me advice, telling me "never say that to an Egyptian--they will cut off your head," others telling me that there was no better way to seduce an Egyptian woman.

After a bit more time with my now large group of older foreign friends, I was forced to leave. I explained that I needed to return to my group and continue with our tour of Seville. We said our goodbyes and I left.

Over the next day, I told the story of our meeting many times, amazed to have had such a great, strange time in the Cathedral, amazed at how a place that had become so familiar to me could become once again new.

The next day, already in Cordoba, I heard someone call my name as I stepped down from our private bus.

"CHRISTOPHER!" sounded the voice. I turned in the general direction of the yell, and saw, once again, the wife of my strange Egyptian-Israeli teacher of dirty rhymes. She gave me a huge hug, yelling "You are the best! You are number one! My husband has gone to make pee-pee!"

The students looked at me oddly, the people around looked at me oddly. I reached into the pocket of my short trousers and pulled out a now wrinkled postcard. I turned it over and read from the back, in a now confident accent, "Kul al dunya bahar..."

When I had finished, I hugged the woman again, waved goodbye to the crowd, and continued on my way, wading through the traffic amidst sounds of car horns, Egyptian (Israeli?) laughter and the puzzled mutterings of my students.

On a final note: I return to the USA on August second or third, and within a few days will be leaving for a cross-country trip with my good friend Jason "Sturd" Weinstein. Along the route, I will be posting regularly, and if all goes well, Sturd and I will be working on a regular PodCast as well. I hope that all are well, and thank you for reading.