Friday, Friday…

So after writing that completely overwrought blog post, I put my notebook away and went exploring.  The Plaza St. Catherine (which is where we were staying and is, as far as I know, the only hotel in the area, aside from the rooms the monks keep at the monastery for visitors) is not really hotelish – there’s a main building with a dining room and the front desk and whatever else, and then the rooms are in outlying buildings sort of scattered around in a half circle, with a little tourist-y bazaar near the main building, rather than just having one big building.

Most of the people on the trip were meeting at 1.30 (yeah, that’d be AM) to go climb Mt. Sinai and see the sunset at the top.  I had planned to do the same, but at one of the rest stops, my friend Tim pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to go to a service at sunrise at the monastery.  See, there’s a girl in the program, Irini, who’s from Greece.  Her dad’s best friend does a lot of restoration work at the monastery’s library, so he (the friend) has brought Irini’s dad there a few times, and as a result, her dad knows a few of the monks.  When her dad learned that she’d be visiting, he made arrangements to have a monk come and drive Irini to the monastery for Divine Liturgy in the morning.  Irini is friends with Tim, and knew that Tim is in the process of converting to Orthodoxy, so she invited him.  And Tim is friends with me, and he knew that I was Orthodox, so he invited me.  Back to the present (read, 10-ish on Thursday night), I needed to arrange a wake-up call, so that I would be waiting in the lobby at 5.15 am the next morning.  So, to the front desk I went, to tell them NOT to call at one (which is when everyone else was getting called) and to instead call at 4.45.

Once I took care of that, I was ready to head back to my room and hit the sack, but I heard some music coming from one of the shops (which of course were mostly closed by that point).  So I looked over and there were a bunch of kids from the Zamalek dorms, sitting around, drinking mango juice and smoking shisha and talking.  Of course, I had to go over and say hi, and of course, I wound up meeting six or seven new people, sitting down, and turning down offers of shisha and juice.

I stayed for…oh, maybe half an hour.  It was the birthday of Andreas (one of the people in my regular Arabic class) and he had just been forced to dance because it was his birthday…with the belly-dancing scarf, of course…so I got to see video of that, which was HYSTERICAL.  And then one of the other kids, Tony, revealed that he was a percussionist, and he mentioned that he’d been desperate to try one of the local drums (dumbek), so we got the shopkeepers (who were lounging around, listening to music, dancing, and talking) to find one, and he tried keeping time with the music.  He wasn’t too bad, either – I think he’s going to try to buy one at a souq here in town.  I guess we’ll see?

So I did that for a while.  Eventually, though, I remembered that I had to be up at quarter to five, which meant that it would be stupid to emulate the others and stay up all night (they only had a few hours until they needed to meet to climb, so they could get away with it).  I made arrangements to borrow a scarf from my friend Helen, went to my room, got into PJs, took the scarf when Helen dropped it by, and went to sleep.

4.45 came far too soon, of course.  But come it did, so I rolled out of bed, examined my fancy new mosquito bites, and dressed quickly.  Mom taught me when I was younger that I should never go to church with my shoulders uncovered, and going to Greek churches with relatives taught me that I should never go to church in pants.  Five years of being a Sunday School teacher/assistant-y person taught me to ignore the latter, and years of going to fairly liberal churches help me to ignore the former, but since a Greek Orthodox monastery is about as conservative and Greek as you can get, I figured a skirt and covered shoulders would be advisable.  (I did, however, have to wear flip-flops, since this was last-minute and I hadn’t packed nice shoes.  Sorry, Mom.)  I had a skirt, but I didn’t have any nice, non-shoulder-baring shirts – hence the borrowed scarf, which got draped around my upper body, until all you could see of my shirt was the hem.  It was actually kind of flattering, though inconvenient for carrying things (and I could certainly never direct the choir at home while wearing it).  One quick packing job later, I was ready to go.

I got to the lobby before the others, but it didn’t take long for them to join me.  We left our bags at the front desk with EXTRAORDINARILY strict instructions for the poor people there – namely, that they be loaded onto the ALI buses at all costs, no matter what!!  We then checked out, said thanks, and hopped outdoors to wait…and wait.

A little after five-thirty, a large silver SUV came rolling up, and the monk behind the wheel greeted Irini in Greek.  (I was immediately thankful that she was there and that I hadn’t tried to make similar arrangements on my own.  In case you don’t know me, my Greek is TERRIBLE.  And by “terrible,” I pretty much mean “nonexistant.”)  We hopped in, and I immediately understood the need for the SUV – the roads in the area are pretty awful.  It was a short ride, though, and next thing I knew, we were leaping gracefully out of the SUV and following the monk through various short but extremely imposing doors into the monastery, and then through a few passages, down a path, and into the church!

It was, all in all, a small, lovely, Greek church.  Irini and I lit our candles (the nice thing about this being Egypt:  I can afford to give relatively large amounts of money to the church AND that means I can actually light the right number of candles), kissed the icons, and walked in.  Tim found a place to stand toward the left, and we stood on the right, by a wall between two of the choir stalls.  We were there fairly early – the reader was just finishing Matins (which is the smaller service right before the Divine Liturgy), but all the choir stalls were already full of people who definitely weren’t monks – I learned later that St. Catherine’s is a fairly popular destination for religious tour groups – there was a group from Greece and a group sponsored by various Greek churches in Canada.  St. Catherine’s only lets Orthodox people attend services, though (they have to, it’s a small church), and there aren’t that many non-Orthodox people out there who are willing to get up before dawn for a three-hour service in a language they don’t know anyway.  (Unless perhaps they really love Byzantine chant – but even so.)

And…it was Divine Liturgy.  St. Catherine’s does have its own bishop (who I believe is also the abbot of the monastery), so it was a hierarchical liturgy, and because it’s a monastery, they do EVERYTHING, in Byzantine chant, so it was a three-hour service.  I didn’t eat beforehand (because you don’t eat before Divine Liturgy if you’re going to take communion) and I don’t think I’d had enough water the night before, because I got lightheaded about a third of the way in and spent most of the rest of the service sitting.  It was disappointing, but at least I was in a corner and therefore unnoticeable – and I wasn’t the only one, either.  And eventually, of course (after a long sermon which would have been very enlightening – if only it or the Gospel had been in a language I understand), we got to Communion, and it ended soon after.  My favorite part:  the bishop at communion questioning whether I was baptized (after I gave my name in Greek, no less) because I look so positively un-Greek.  It always happens.  Excellent.

We then (after another wait) got to see the relics of St. Catherine.  It’s one of those things that tends to kind of weird out not-Orthodox people, but I was very excited about it, as were we all.  And then we went out and had akhwah and chatted.

It was a beautiful service, and I’m very happy to have been a part of it.  The church is lovely – ancient icons, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, with tiny, high windows that slowly let the sun in as it rose.  And it was so nice to just be able to enjoy the service – I didn’t have to conduct, didn’t even sing (since they had three different chanters and it was all in Greek anyway).  I had to focus on the words and the form and the music to keep my place in the service, so my mind didn’t wander, and even hearing the Greek as opposed to the English was restful.  I don’t usually get to go to church here in Cairo, simply because I have class on Sunday mornings and I don’t know how to get to the church alone (so going to Friday services means talking Dad into coming with me), so I’m still not used to that feeling – and I only have a month of it left!  I’ll have to enjoy it while I can, the luxury of actually experiencing church.

Anyway.

We drank coffee and waited for the monk, who was theoretically supposed to return.  He didn’t, though, so after a while we wandered into the bookstore, made a few small purchases, and then wandered back outside.  There, we met a Russian man whose name left my head moments after it entered it…  He was tall, rather weather-beaten, well-traveled and conversant in several languages, perhaps in his late forties, with blonde, slightly unkempt hair and a nice smile.  Tim got into a conversation with him and we wound up sitting in the shade and talking together for about an hour – or rather, they talked, I contributed occasionally, and Irini mostly smiled and nodded.  (English is not her first language, and this was fairly philosophical, so I’m not sure whether she enjoyed it or not…)  Basically, Tim and Weathered-Russian-Guy were debating the role of the Church in one’s spiritual life, whether that kind of community is necessary, why it might be dysfunctional sometimes, whether (because of that) the Church should be unified, and how, and whether individuals absolutely have an obligation to be a part of the Church, and why…  I tended to agree with the Russian guy.  It was very odd:  even though he was baptized Protestant and claims no formal religious affiliation today, his views tended to line up with mine (a born-and-bred Orthodox girl, easily half his age).  Tim, on the other hand, was raised Lutheran and has spent a lot of time in Evangelical organizations – I’m not sure if he was ever in an Evangelical church or not – and his views showed it.  It was, to be sure, a very interesting conversation.

But, of course, it had to end eventually.  The two buses of ALI folks rolled up and our comrades poured out, sore and tired from the climb.  We said goodbye to our buddy and joined them – to see the church (we which had already seen – seen more of than them, in fact, since we got to go out through a smaller chapel and since the sides and front were roped off to keep people away from the small side chapels and the altar) and the descendant of the famous Burning Bush (which we had walked under without knowing what it was).  Then, an unexpected surprise – after a lot of waiting around, we got to see the famous library!  The priest told us about it (Irini, God bless her, translated for us), and it was very interesting – it’s one of the most important collections in the world, with lots of documents in many languages and a huge amount of ongoing research surrounding it.

And then, we hopped on the buses and went to Sharm.  Once there, we ate quickly, waited an eternity to get our rooms and room keys, and then out we went – to the beach (briefly) and the pools (for a while), to dinner (delicious), and then, for me at least, to homework and bed.

All in all, a lovely Friday.