I was invited to go with friends to the Sinai this week. We stayed with Bedouin in the desert, drank tea, rode camels, and drank more tea. It was not a tourist experience. The friends who invited me are German anthropologists who've been living on and off with this tribe for years. It was not exactly a comfortable experience. My Arabic is terrible, and I don't speak German. So I spent a lot of time sitting quietly, and drank a lot of tea. A lot. Plus, half our group got violently ill. Which was made more difficult by the fact that there were no toilets or toilet paper. But, despite all this, when we returned home, we realized we had collected all these vivid and funny stories and sat around the table shaking with laughter over them. Like the camel that managed to run after a female camel from another caravan despite the fact that his legs were tied together. Or one of the young boys in the Bedouin tribe who was given a mattress for Eid (the rest of the tribe sleeps on the ground) and showed it off joyfully to anyone who came to visit. And it was revolutionary to live a deep and simple life even just for a few days.
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