Books!

Did I just say that I had read 13 books this summer? Make that 14.

The other day Wahied and I went to the Egyptian equivalent of Wal-Mart. This is not some cheesy analogy for a souq where people are selling live chickens, don't speak English, and haggle, this is a REAL big box store at its finest. It's actually a french chain called Carrefour, and Wahied and I go there frequently (at least once a week) to pick up bits 'n bobs and to get most of our groceries.

Our last trip was primarily to locate strips to put on the doors of our car in an effort to minimize further damage caused by people aggressively opening their doors into ours. We were unsuccessful in finding this particular item but the trip was not a loss. As Wahied was explaining what we needed to a salesman I wandered off to the next aisle, which obviously was books (I mean, duh, guys). They had a fairly impressive selection of books, including Harry Potter 5, 6, and 7 and what I'm sure were romance novels, all in Arabic. Their English selection, which fit easily onto one shelf consisted of no more than a half dozen different books including "Cooking Made Easy" (more of a pamphlet), The Koran, "Men are from Mars and Women are From Venus" and......"Freakonomics".

Freakonomics? By Steve Levitt? The one that made people realise that I wasn't studying to be an accountant? The one written by a professor I would later have? The one everyone and their mother had read and felt the need to discuss at every dinner party I'd been to since?

I bought it and just finished re-reading it this morning.

3 or 4 years and my U of C education in Economics (the Public Policy didn't hurt either) really changed the effect that this book had on me. It was so much, well, less unusual than I remember it being, which is probably because my U of C education taught me that unusual thinking isn't so unusual and is usually the best kind of thinking to be doing.
It reminded of many of the things I learned at the U of C. For example, the page 2 mention of the name "James Alan Fox" conjured up images of a rabid, out-of-his mind lunatic, which, though I'm sure Levitt didn't expressly teach us, has stuck in my mind since his class. Any mention of 'costs' as defined by an economist had me thinking about all of the problem sets and exams I ever took in any of James Leitzel's classes. And the very word 'regression' conjured up loooooong nights on the A-level with Stata during Econometrics.

Wahied asked me about what I was reading this morning, so I told him about Levitt's main points in the book, including Roe v. Wade as a factor in the reduction of crime in the 90's. This didn't seem to shock him, but I could see he was thinking. "But we don't have crime in Egypt, and abortion is illegal here." So I tried to explain that there were lots of other factors at play, and that the abortion argument holds in the US because of things that are fundamentally different between the US and Egypt. (For example, due to the fact that it is illegal for unmarried women to get pregnant, and that families here prize lots and lots of children, fewer born babies are unwanted in the same sense. Also, crime here is low for a variety of reasons including severity and ubiquity of punishment). Wahied again turned this over in his head and finally said: "Is this how they teach you to think at that University you went to? I mean, you can't order from a menu but you can have a serious conversation about Sumo wrestlers and teachers cheating on standardized tests?"

And I thought about it, and all of my friends from the U of C, regardless of what they studied--Nelc, Science, languages, etc...and the answer is pretty much yes.

Bringing this post back around to Egypt and me living here ... other than the fact that I found a book that I totally wasn't expecting to find here (I've just started reading a Dave Sedaris book I found at the AUC bookstore) things here continue to be boringly unusual or very unusual depending on what you think I usually am.

Tonight I'm going to go have dinner with a bunch of girls my age (and Wahied) who all speak varying degrees of English and are very very nice at one girl's apartment in Nasr City while, simultaneously, I'm supposed to be picking up an Orthodox Priest with a broken leg from the train station and feeding him dinner because he's staying with us tonight. I suppose details will follow tomorrow.