Smell the Breezes

"Walk among the orange groves and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into the trees.The winds will blow their own freshness into you...while cares will drop off like the bumper of an ancient Fiat made in Egypt."

Several weeks ago was the Egyptian national holiday, Shem el Naseem (literally translated as "smell the breezes"). It's a holiday dated back to the pharonic times so it has no religous connections at all. It is just simply a day where everyone in Egypt takes the day off, finds any piece of green grass they can plop their bottoms down on (even if it is surrounded by a busy highway), and have a picnic. This year my parents were invited to join some friends in the Nile Delta for a picnic in their village. It was the most random (my parents can be very vague sometimes) and fun trip i've had in a while.
We met at Abouna Marcos' house and he, and his sons, drove us out to a farm about half an hour away from their village which sat on the banks of a canal surrounded by the lushes green fields of the delta. There we joined the Abouna's entire family for a day of food, long walks, and games. I quickly made friends with two girls named Miriam and Ingy and a guy named Mina, who knew practially no english. I was suprised at how much arabic i've picked up over the years and spoke fluently with them and even got some laughter from a joke i told them in arabic!


Mina and Ingy (college kids) treated Miriam and I (highschoolers) like little sisters and made us help them pick lettuce and get all the kids involved in a game of hide and seek tag. They gave the two of us advice about school and taught us some Egyptian songs. I really didn't feel like the oddball forigner with them.



Then it came time to eat. We sat on mats on the floor and the women brought us raw fish, garlic, and very very old cheese (traditional foods eaten on Shem el Naseem). Then we took a long walk through the endless orchards of green orange trees and stopped to climb some of them and eat fruit off them. We also tried to ride a vicious donkey but that didn't go very well.