Now for something completely different: the weekend of engagement parties. The memories come to mind vividly and makes me smile. Before this fateful weekend I had not been to any engagement parties or weddings here in Egypt, but had heard numerous things about them, good and bad, from various people – enough to make me hope dearly for at least one invitation to such an affair during the course of my stay here. I had been invited to one earlier in the year, but couldn’t go because it was on the same night as one of my English courses. And then, one weekend, out of the blue, I suddenly had invitations to five different engagement parties. One was for a person I actually knew, another for a brother of a friend, and the others for friends of friends, so I decided on the first two – the ones most closely related to people I actually know.
Egyptian engagement parties are almost as big an affair as the actual wedding. It isn’t really socially acceptable in Egypt (and especially in Beni Suef) to spend time alone with a romantic interest until you are officially engaged, and they make a big deal of it.
The first party I went to took place on a Saturday morning, which was awfully strange as most of them are in the evening. We met at a big villa on the edge of Beni Suef where the young lady to be engaged paraded down a spiral staircase in her flowing dress, met Mina, the fellow I know who invited me and who was getting engaged, and all the guests piled into their cars and a couple of busses and drove out of Beni Suef and started down one of the desert highways. This was all a surprise to me as I thought the party was going to be at the villa we had been told to meet at. Now I was being whisked away to who knows where and I had to be back in town that afternoon to meet some other friends.
We ended up at something like a cottage in the desert after turning off the highway onto a small unpaved road which had huge temporary wooden archways draped with coloured fabric constructed over it, ushering the guests into the party. The cottage was surround with massive rugs to cover the sand, tables and chairs, speakers, decorations, two camera crews and many, many people. Mina and his fiancé came up the road after all the guests arrived, standing together in a nicely decorated cart being pulled by a tractor The winding road was lined with guests, men were firing off their automatic guns into the air and confetti was flying. It was quite the procession.
After some mingling the entourage priests arrived. There had been an unrelated meeting for all the Beni Suef priests earlier that morning at the retreat center where I live, and it looked like they had all been invited to the party as a clump of black robes and domed hats made their way through the crowd to the dais where Mina and his fiancé sat. I have never seen so many priests in one place – maybe thirty of them.
By the time I had to leave I was regretting the decision to have made additional plans that very same afternoon, as the party was so fascinating, but it was too late to change that and I got a ride back to Beni Suef with another friend who had a car and also had to leave early.
That night engagement party number two took place in an apartment with a smaller crowd and no guns, but it had it’s own flair. I arrived very early, apparently, as the only other people present at the time were the immediate family and an aunt and uncle. It was awkward as two speakers dominated the room with pounding Arabic pop music and talking was nearly impossible with these people I barely knew. Yet as the evening wore on more relatives arrived, and later still a number of guys around my own age (friends of the fellow getting engaged) started showing up. With the arrival of one or two more outgoing people, the dancing began.
Let me set the scene a little bit better. We were in the main room of a small apartment where two corners were occupied by rather large speakers. Chairs lined the walls around the outside of the room, supporting the older relatives, with a small open space in the center. In this small space the children started the dancing, followed by the young men. In mixed settings like this the women don’t usually dance, just the guys. And the dancing is so different from what I’m used to. I like to dance, and normally grab the opportunity to do it, but even I felt a bit uncomfortable as all these guys pulled out their Egyptian moves. It’s like male belly dancing, with lots of fluid movements, swinging hips, and delicate movements with their arms and hands. Simply weird by Canadian standards. But it was unavoidable to get involved as I was physically yanked into the circle and could either fight my way out of the room or try my best to pull some moves a few feet away from grandma and all the aunts and uncles sitting, smiling and clapping to the beat.
Despite the initial awkwardness it turned out to be a fantastic and freeing night of dancing, laughing, and more dancing. There were some videos taken, and I’m trying to get my hands on them…
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