I am sitting on a black leather couch, in a sparsely furnished large apartment, while Adel makes call after call from his old-fashioned black rotary-dial telephone, trying to find me a taxi.
At least that’s what he says he is trying to do. Given that the conversations are all in Arabic, for all I know he could be negotiating my sale into white slavery. How could I have been so stupid? I don’t even have my passport with me or very much money. What if Adel is a date rapist? What if he doesn’t even know what date rape is, just assumes that if a woman comes to your apartment she is consenting to sex? And who knows if he’ll even use a condom? I could leave Egypt not just with my virginity disposed of, but pregnant and HIV-positive. If I leave Egypt at all!
Just a few hours ago, I was thinking maybe I would want to have sex tonight. Adel, who is tall, dark, and muscular, with a chiseled nose and piercing brown eyes, is the most handsome man ever to ask me out. Yes, sex on a first date is slutty — all the more so losing your virginity on a first date — but once I leave Egypt I may never have another opportunity like this again. Having sex has been one of my goals for this semester abroad, although the plan was to be deflowered by an Israeli, not an Egyptian. However, I’m pretty sure things are over with Yair, the Israeli video store clerk I have sort of been seeing but who hasn’t called me since our last encounter, when we almost but not quite had sex, leaving me in an awkward limbo between virgin and non-virgin.
Adel is the youngest and hottest of the men (and they are all men) who work for Hebton Tours, the operator of the week-long Egypt tour package sold by an Israeli company called Masada. All this spring break week my friends and travel companions Heather, Elena, and I have been lusting after him as we hang out with the Hebton employees — we refer to them as “the company guys” — in the evenings in the company offices on the second floor of the Cairo Sheraton. (We’re staying at a cheaper hotel that is a short cab ride away.) Ostensibly these nightly social gatherings are a way for us to learn more about the real Egypt, but mostly it’s just because they invited us and we like to feel like we are not the typical semester-abroad tourists.
Each night we sit...
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