American Girl (or Easy Westerner with Loose Morals)

After chatting with my roommate’s boyfriend about how difficult I’m finding learning Arabic, she told me to, “Lay off.” It was a weird confrontation about how horrified she was that I would try to take the love of her life. It caught me off-guard—I’d never found him remotely attractive or thought about him in that way. It’s one of the things that really irks me about Egyptian culture. Egyptian girls here may wear a headscarf, but they also wear LOADS of makeup, high-heals and skinny jeans, and flirt like the most seasoned airhead Valley girl from LA. What you see less of is serious and casual conversation, which I think is why when I talk to a guy for more than a minute I'm accused of being an over-sexed foreigner. There’s something terribly intimate I guess in actually connecting conversationally.