laura.fo

Last night I went to meet my friend Wael, who was studying Islamic Architecture at AUC when I was there so many years ago. We met my first week or two in Cairo and I remember him as one of the nicest, most polite people I knew. (Other people said this about him, too.) I remember finding out he was a musician and getting all excited and telling him that if he liked music he should come see this band I knew and I gave him a flyer and he very kindly told me that he would be there. Because he was their guitarist.

With anyone else that would have been an embarrassing moment, but with him, somehow, it wasn't.

At the time he was playing classical guitar in hotels and restaurants, solo, and I'd figured out since then (thank you, Facebook) that he was one of the few musicians I knew back then who had stayed in Egypt and was now doing music full-time.

Even so, I was pleasantly surprised to see how successful he's become. He gave me directions to the venue where he'd be playing and I assumed it would be some kind of restaurant, because that's how I remembered him and I'm still under the impression that time has stood still here in my absence. But I guess what happens when you have skill and talent and stay in one place for 15 years working on your art, you start selling out concert halls. I got there a little late and had to claw my way up to the balcony because there was no place to sit in front.

Here's a shameful secret: I don't love Spanish music. But he and his band, Flamenca, combined classical Spanish music with classical Oriental music in a way that was riveting even to someone like me, who doesn't know that much about Andalusia. Besides him, on guitar, they had two tabla players, a violinist, a bassist, a keyboardist, a kowla player, and an Arabic vocalist. It was really great, and I realized too late that I'd forgotten my video camera.

Afterwards he and the band went to a coffeeshop downtown, which apparently is a regular ritual while they wait to get paid. When he said "coffeeshop" I think I was picturing something between a diner and Starbucks, but it was a real street ahwa, the kind women usually don't go to, out on the sidewalk with sheesha, coffee, and tea. I asked if it was really okay for me to be there and he said yes, yes, this is an artists' cafe. I looked closer and realized all the posters taped to the walls were for concerts and art gallery shows. The guy at the table next to me was writing poetry or song lyrics, something in verse. And yet someone like me, walking around like a tourist, would never have noticed it was anything but a regular working-class cafe if he hadn't pointed it out. It was packed with men in their shirtsleeves, one-right-next-to-the-other, smoking sheesha at midnight. And it was LOUD, in that very pleasant way I associate with Mediterranean countries in the summertime. Men yelling to each other, yelling to the tea boy, the tea boy yelling to the waiters, the waiters yelling to the customers.

We stayed for a couple hours and I smoked so much sheesha that I came home feeling like my body had become one big hookah pipe. Which isn't as pleasant as it sounds like it probably should be. And then (shocker) slept right through my class this morning.

But what a fun night. And how nice to pick up where you left off over a decade ago.