The fundamentals of the game are the same wherever you go, but the Egyptian game has some striking peculiarities. You might say the difference derives from the contrast of America's free market to the well regulated markets of Egypt.
In the next couple posts, I am going to explore this idea. I didn't post enough stuff to keep people interested in December, so I'm going be like the media and take a sensationalist bias to start up the new year.
What's the relationship between guys and girls in Egypt?
There is no such thing as "just friends" in Egypt. If a guy and girl hang out by themselves, they must be dating. But since dating doesn't exist, the only reasonable conclusion that you can make is that they are on track to get married.
Guys and girls don't hang out in groups together. There are exceptions to this rule, but this is true 90% of the time. Guys hang with guys and girls hang with girls. Geographically speaking, college kids are doomed. The guys dorms are a couple kilometers away from the girls dorms. But, that's not too important because you would never be able to sneak past the armed guards who stand in front of the only entrance to the fort-like dorms. I'm not talking about sneaking into the dorm after lights out (there's no lights out, but I say that in a figurative way), I'm saying you can't go in the opposite sex's dorm at any time of the day. Furthermore, the girls have a 9:30 curfew everyday of the week, so there's no possibility for social life during the night.
Why guys and girls still don't try to circumvent these external obstacles? I don't know. You can put it up to the culture, it's just considered completely weird for guys and girls to hang out. Last Thanksgiving, for instance, all the students in the Middlebury abroad program along with our Egyptian hall mates ate dinner in the apartment of our professor's apartment. The Egyptian guys hung out with everyone, and each of them made small talk and treated the girls kindly. On the other hand, the Egyptian girls hung out in a separate room, and they didn't talk with us at all with the exception of one girl who made small talk with a couple guys. I asked one of the guys what his opinion is on hanging out with girls after going out on night, and he told me that he finds it really weird because he just doesn't know what to say to a girl.
