Egyptian Scribbles: On wishing I had stocked up at duty free...

Wednesday 24 October 2007

On wishing I had stocked up at duty free...

In its infinite wisdom, the Egyptian government has banned the sale of all foreign alcohol. I don’t think you can get though life in this city without an occasional stiff drink, so I have been driven to try out Egypt’s finest… Tonight I am sipping on Omar Khayyam’s “Vin Rose.” Usually, I don’t go for a rose. But I thought some additional sweetness would mask the ethanol overtones. Omar Khayyam was an Egyptian poet and there is a small extract of his work on the back: “Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky/ I heard a voice within the Tavern cry/ ‘Awake my little ones, and fill the Cup,/ Before Life’s Liquour in its Cup be dry’.” (random capitalization verbatim).
Khayyam allegedly was a big drinker, and would continually be pulled before authorities who condemned him for his immoral ways. But he argued that wine was a necessary joy in life… and I wholeheartedly agree.
This wine is, so the bottle says, celebrating 125 years of production. That would be 125 years of headache-inducing hangovers. I haven’t even tried the Egyptian vodka that I bought this evening. My roommate said it might make me blind… But as long as it helps me sleep through the morning prayers, I’m a happy woman! The beer is also not that bad. I've stocked my fridge with Sakara at the moment ...
But next time I pass through duty free… I’m going to load up on Scottish whiskey, British gin and any vodka that won’t make me blind…

1 comment:

Forsoothsayer said...: yes, a fundamental rule of living in cairo is to stock up at the duty free.

like i mentioned before, theres a distinct hierarchy of egyptian wines, and khayyam is at the bottom. HE WAS Persian by the way, and many people attribute his verse to religious symbolism, or even love.
ID vodka is drinkable...but on no account try the other spirits. it's generally best (and your foreign ilk usually agree) to stick to stella.; 25 October 2007 at 13:55

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."