“Hey, American! American! Walk like an Egyptian, eh? Eh? You see?? YEAHHH!!!” - middle-aged Egyptian man in Cairo and yes, he was actually doing the Bangles’ “walk like an Egyptian” dance. And yes, he was pretty good at it.
“Hey, America! Howdy howdy! Yankee doodle doo!” - an entirely different middle-aged Egyptian man. No dancing this time.
And the last, my favorite exchange of all…
I was waiting for a flight in the Cairo airport, dusty from weeks of traveling, when I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting nearby surrounded by her kids. She was wearing a conservative burka from head to toe, revealing nothing but her eyes, but those eyes betrayed the crazed look of a woman sick to death of talking to small children. So, I started talking to her. She told me she’d been raised in Egypt but had married an American and moved to Virginia, and was now on her way back taking her kids to visit her family back home. We made small talk about families and tradition when she turned and whispered in a low, conspiratorial tone…
“Are you a Christian?”
I replied that no, I was not. She straightened up, balanced the toddler on her knee and said, “Why do Christians smell so bad?”
I was startled, to say the least, and was actually struck dumb for a second. I had no answer. She continued.
“It is just, whenever I am in a public and I start to smell something that is stinking I think to myself - A-HA! I am betting there is a Christian in this room. And my nose points - there! There they are! Stinking! What is it about the Christians? Is it the food they eat? Are they not washing themselves?”
I almost died trying to hold in my laughter, but finally confessed I had no idea why Christians smelled so bad.
Post Script:
Several months later I found myself back in California. I’d gotten an office job, a clerk in a cubicle, and I was listening to the receptionist talk about her jerk husband. I tried to be a sympathetic ear and say all the things women say in those conversations. “You don’t need him.” “You deserve better.” Stuff like that. At one point she went to her desk, got out a small black book, and turned to me and asked…
“Are you a Christian?”
I couldn’t tell her why I started laughing.
