Party til Sohour

I finally really went out last night after three weeks here. The occasion is Lindsey's (a housemate) impending move to Kuwait to do her research. The day started with a horribly difficult midterm exam in Arabic, in which the reading section was about carrier pigeons. Luckily I knew the word "carrier pigeon" because of random events last week.

After iftar Mindy, Michele, and I met Lindsey at the botanical gardens next to the citadel (we could only smell the river a bit) and had chocolamou, a delicious ice cream/mousse hybrid. Then it was onto a cafe, where Jihan (an Algerian friend of Lucy, a SOAS student. Jihan's been staying in the house for two weeks, having moved to Syria to get the hell out of her parent's house - she works in a salon here) was singing. Hung out with the SOAS girls and some sketchy/nice guys who work in the souq (just like Egypt!). She sang only one song, but got the crowd going with her hips as well. Good voice.

A strawberry shisha (it's so hard to remember to call it argileh here)later we made our way in a big group to Domino, a restaurant by day/club by night. We got there a little before 1, demanded that the DJ change the Eurotechnoshit that was playing (though Lilia, German, was loving it), and got our requested mix of Arabic, Latin, and hiphop. One guy, who was actually quite good at dancing, kept wanting to dance with me but he also came up to my chin, which made dancing a bit awkward. Ramy, the guy who got us all in Domino for free, was seen in the middle of the dance floor making out with and dry humping a huge foreign girl. Some drunk foreign man kept staggering around the dance floor, while the Syrian girls (heavy eye makeup and belly shirts) worked to show up the foreigners. Tariq tried to spin me at one point but instead I accidently smacked his nose with my arm. There was a little blood, very little.

Before 4:00, having sweat my hair wet and beaten the shit out of a nice boy, the four of us who stayed to the end made out way back to the house. On the way back we ran into Abu Tabla, the old man who during Ramadan walks into the all the alleys beating a drum to wake people up for sohour. He went into our alley at the same time as us, so we had to hurry. Luckily we could use Lucy's key to the side door and sneak in. We changed into our pajamas, then went down to sohour with the family, who thought we had just woken up.