At 4:30 Thursday morning I awoke to the sound of drums and songs drifting over the rooftops outside the open door of my bedroom veranda. I have not yet asked any locals what was happening, but I must assume that people were celebrating the beginning of the first day of fasting, which begins at sunrise each day. It is customary in many Muslim countries for people to wake up early in the morning to eat and drink before sunrise then go back to sleep for a few hours so that they can make it through the rest of the hot day before breaking fast in the evening.

My day consisted of two primary objectives. First, I needed to attend class from 9 to 12 in Mohandiseen like I do every Monday through Thursday morning. This time some things were slightly different from past days. The streets, usually packed with taxis, busses, cars and people, were mostly quiet. My taxi made the trip in only a few minutes even as we crossed one of the busiest bridges in Cairo. When I arrived in class I also noticed that my instructor was a bit more tired than usual, at one point even resting her head on her desk as we worked on an exercise. She was likely up late the night before enjoying food and drinks with her family and friends and that combined with not drinking anything since she woke up was probably starting to take its toll. Fasting is very straining on the body its effects manifests can manifest themselves in many aspects of daily life. They affect how everyone, both Muslims and non-Muslims, schedule their daily routines and shift the expectations that everyone has about those around them.

My second objective was to purchase a Ramadan gift for our landlady. It is considered good etiquette to give special gifts to people like your landlord or doorman during Ramadan and I needed to keep up appearances and make sure our landlady was taken care of. We decided to get sweets from Mandarine Koueider, a famous sweet shop in Zamalek. When I arrived at the shop at 12:15pm I found utter chaos. The shop was packed full of people jostling to get their orders filled so that they could enjoy the evening with family and friends on the first Iftar (breaking fast). Since this was the first day of Ramadan, there was a certain sense of urgency in the air. After all, who wants to return to return to their house without the holiday sweets? Unfortunately for me there were a few facts on the ground that put me at a disadvantage: unlike the locals, I was fairly unfamiliar with how the shop operated, that is, how to order, where to pay and how to communicate what I wanted; everyone was speaking in Arabic, which added to my sense of confusion since I wasn't able to pick up on the social cues necessary to figure out how to successfully get my order taken; and being an outsider meant that I wasn't comfortable yelling at the staff to get their attention, which appeared to be the only real way of accomplishing anything. Even if I was well versed in the ways of persuasion that Egyptians use with other Egyptians to obtain services, those strategies don’t necessarily translate well to me. No matter what my command of Arabic or social customs may be I am still a foreigner, and an American at that, and treating an Egyptian, regardless of his status, as another Egyptian may not return the same results.

Facing down these obstacles I stepped into the foray confident in obtaining my objective. After first arriving I tried to make my order but I left after 15 minutes. My thought was that this was a lost cause and that I would try again another day. However, on the way home the feeling of failure overtook me and I decided that I would return after collecting myself and unloading the messenger bag I was carrying. After a few minutes in my apartment I mentally prepared myself to go back to the shop and claim victory. When I arrived I found myself in the same position as I was before, but this time I was determined. I made my way to the front, where I was in eye shot of the employees putting together trays of sweets. The smell of bachlava and other arabic sweets were going right up my nose and everywhere I looked I saw pound after pound of delicious deserts loaded on trays and headed out the door. I also smelled the sweat of the other 100 or so men trying to make their purchases and heard the irritated voices from the forgotten patrons who seemed to be waiting for ever in the same place with no service. I made my best attempts to get the attention of the servers by yelling out what I wanted, "kilo wahid bass" (one kilo only), asking them nicely "min fadlack" (please) and I poking them when they finished an order hoping mine would be next. Unfortunately, everyone else was still more persuasive, they yelled louder, they poked harder and they had yet one other advantage, they wrote down their order on a piece of paper, which I, ignorant of this strategy, did not have. After nearly 30 minutes of standing in the same place, with the same outcome and not even a look from the server I gave up and left.

Demoralized I returned to my flat empty handed. If not giving a gift on the first day of Ramadan was a social mistake, than I was guilty of it. I would delay the gift until another day and hoped that my reputation would remain intact. The next day I would return to the shop in the morning and make my purchase with no problems. A few hours later I knocked on my landlady's door, gave her the sweets, wished her Ramadan Mubarak and exchanged a smile. One advantage of being a foreigner is that you are sometimes forgiven for not getting things 100% right.