First meeting with Egypt
Summer 2018, August. My friend and I are sitting on her summer terrace, on a Belgrade street in Vračar. She begins to tell me about her summer from a few weeks ago, which she spent with her mother in Hurghada, Egypt. She says: "I'm going back there in September, it was beautiful there for me, she continues, the climate, the Red Sea, that feeling when you swim in the sea which is warm all year round, the hotel, the experience on the street, the excursions... I have already chosen my dates and accommodation through the agency." And so I sit, half in a good mood, after a hard day spent in the office, I slightly avert my eyes at that last sentence, as she has already chosen the dates in September, and I interrupt her with the sentence "I want to go too". It was ideal for me, I had an agency and a friend who had already been to that place between the desert and the sea, the past and the future, the collision of centuries-old civilizations and cultures where I would be able to take advantage of the moment of weak signal and turn off all the phones.
I tell my parents and my boss at different times that I'm going to Egypt, their unique, almost the same reaction "Are you normal! You're going there alone with another woman. Well, there they steal people and organs, there the women are wrapped, there the women go to white slaves!". To my depressed face and even slower reaction, I tiredly explain to them that I am not going to some village on the border with Syria, that my hotel is called Elysess Dream Beach after the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, not the ISIS hotel in Syria and that there is no mobile phone signal.
Although I am someone who has been traveling around the world since the age of 15 (mainly playing water polo, with the occasional school excursion), then at 30 I didn't know what to expect, nor did I want to expect, it was only important to me that the pilot took off. The employees on the plane and my friend tried to occupy my thoughts and my fear that lasts for 10 seconds of eternity, but without success, because my heart was beating fast. After the big turn of the plane to land at the airport, which of course was on my side, so I could have fallen on that window on my right and the whole of Hurghada was under my armpit, I felt something unusual and mystical for the first time. Not only the color of the sea, but also that moment in the middle of the desert where there are residential buildings, like those from the Yugoslavian era, endless long asphalted streets and on the other side hotels with large swimming pools, collisions of tourism and regular life, made me forget for a few seconds the fear of landing the plane and remain in my thoughts "where did i come, as if I had already been here in a previous life" ." As soon as I landed on the runway, the warm air hit me, opened my eyes and nostrils, as if I had breathed new strength, I turned my gaze to the window and looked at the soldiers standing with rifles and working hard on their tasks, I smiled and thought of all the prejudices that i have been told about Egypt by those who have been once or never on this side of the world to the African continent.
An Orient that I have not seen in Istanbul, Arab culture and a tropical climate that I have not yet experienced. On the way to the hotel I was fascinated, I didn't know where to look at the strangest combination of sand, stone and buildings, cars dirty from dust and people dressed in a mixture of East and West, a voice told me welcome to the land of Gods, Pharaohs and pyramids, Aleksandr Makednoski, Nefertiti, Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, the land of bedouins, camels and cats.
After a few days spent sleeping on the beach, swimming in the crystal clear Red Sea, being looked at by both women and men, I get the impression that I belong here, that for the first time in my life I am not getting questions and looks about my extra kilos left over from the famous water polo players days, that I am healthy even though my skin is whiter than usual and that I have sun kisses on my face called freckles.
In that burst of thinking, Mahmud approaches and says: "You bring happiness, your face brings luck, you have freckles, but you have sad eyes." Nobody beofre has told me that until then.
I came to a country where people look into each other's eyes and talk, where a woman's curves and her sexiness come to the fore with the movements of the covered body, I am beginning to see that the value system between men and women has not yet been lost, that natural beauty is still valued , that illnesses are treated with plants and food, that poverty is terrible, that people are barefoot on the street, but they are smiling. That everything is somehow easier and without pressure.
Events changed every hour. There were so many moments that cannot be put on one paper, from me screaming the first time I sat on a camel (where it was all recorded on camera),
when the panic of tourists took my attention during the first scuba diving in the sea, where I also questioned myself whether I wanted to scuba dive for the first time (I am a great swimmer, a lover of water in every form, not only according to the zodiac sign of Pisces, aqua woman),
courtships of Egyptian pharaohs, whose names always changed in the same order, Ahmed, Mahmud, Muhammad, until the one that surprised me the most, when my friend came up to me and said after a whole week spent on the hotel beach: "Well, you didn't see whose picture is in the lobby of the bar on the beach", I didn't want to believe it, but yes, the one who was strictly told, i.e. threatened, that I wouldn't exist for 15 days of my vacation, he was on the wall, one of my directors at the time. Of all the hotels in Hurghada that exist (several thousand), he had to be in my hotel and on the wall in the cafe on the beach, telling me - You can run, but you can not hide. To make the trauma worse (with a smile), this has already happened to me in Shanghai, Croatia on the island Vis... But, I will only follow up on the moment when I was coming to that same beach the next day, avoiding to raise my head because of the picture I can see on the wall and I turn straight to the table near the gentleman who reminded me of my father by the age, tall, big, gold chain around his neck, a typical tourist from Egypt. I look up at the TV when it's one of my former directors again, I turn to the gentleman with a smile and he asks me if it's my first time in Egypt. Our conversation lasted quite a long time, it was interrupted mostly by people who worked at the hotel in high positions, I had no idea then that it was one of the owners of the hotel. To my delight, I asked him the next day who is in charge of decorating the cafe on the beach, all of them tennis players, he says I'm a big fan of tennis and the Serbian athlete, he says: "He's very popular here, you know we watch him even at night when he plays" , I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Once i came back to office , the boss was like : "Oh if you only knew it to bring with you the signed posters", " yes of course i must bring my work to my vacation" i tought.
The impression of that summer, the people I met and the realization of a new world in which I can see myself, influenced me to somehow devote myself only to Egypt, after that summer in 2018, I came several times before and after the corona. The beautiful moments I spent with the Copts for Orthodox Christmas and New Year, scuba diving, implementing with the local population, getting to know the language and customs of various parts of Egypt, led to the fact that I want to get to know that country more. A land that calls me with a special music, full of mystique, the same kind that Sufis play in a circle. There is something in that land of the God Thoth that calls me quietly with oriental notes that leave a mark in my soul that I return again and again to places that will help me to know myself in the original form and put my ideas into practice.
It is in this spirit that I begin this new life chapter, the door of which was opened for me by Anđelija Marinković at the age of 33, and for the first time in my life I have no plan. I let things take their course, but sometimes I turn to the sentence of my late mother who told me: "Jesus Christ was 33 when he performed miracles that are still talked about 2,000 years later, what you do now in your life stays with you until the end." .
"The more we go into the heart of the desert, the more it seem like a dream"
by MJ
Desert near Hurghada, September 2018.
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