The other week I was out drinking with the one sister of my (half Sudanese) (half British) friend, and suddenly out of almost nowhere she took the conversation in a new direction and started saying what she really thought about different groups of Arabs.
"It's true what they say about Egyptians," she was like. "How do you translate it? 'They'd take the eyeliner right off your eyes.'"
She then said that Egyptians had a very brazen hucksterism, and once in Cairo, even, she saw this guy just set up on the sidewalk and demand that tourists pay a fee to pass, and many did.
She said Syrians were awful too.
When she was studying there and her (British) mom visited, she said that everyone would just blatantly check her out.
"Oh, that must have been kind of nice," I was like. "You know, kind of a 'still got it!' kinda moment."
"No, actually," she was like. "You know how people say that you can undress someone with your eyes? That's what they were doing, young soldiers we'd pass by, older men sitting at a restaurant with their wives but just staring over, absolutely everyone."
She said that men in the street would esp. hit on her b/c she looked North African and so assumed that she was a prostitute; in particular, she remembers this car of twenty-somethings pulling up next to her, and one just sticking out his tongue and rolling up its edges to her again and again while he leered at her.
She also said that her and her roommate were the subjects of government surveillance, with clicks on the phone and people hanging outside their apartment for no reason and often following them into the city to see where they went.
"But we could leave that," she was like. "And they couldn't."
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