Desert Storm?

One of the perks of living in a desert is sand. There's a lot of it. Usually, it stays on the ground. And in your hair and clothes but to a fairly reasonable degree. Occasionally the wind decides to do some rearranging, but it's not too bad.

Until the khamseen.

Khamseen means "fifty" in Arabic. And it denotes the fifty days during the spring season during which sandstorms occur.

They started this week.

Wednesday, the haze was thicker than usual when we drove across the bridge to campus. After my class got out at 1100, I walked out of the Social Sciences building and was crossing the quad at Greek Campus when it started to rain while the sun was shining. I grinned to myself. Shaytan's beating his wife, I guess. And then I got bonked on the head by hail. Reasonably big hail, too. It only hailed for two or three minutes, but the Egyptian students went crazy. You'd think hail had never happened. (I found out later that it hasn't hailed in Egypt since the mid-1990s...)

Once I got onto the street and start walking towards Main Campus, I could see what this sandstorm thing meant a little more personally. The air during a sandstorm is brownish-yellowish-red. The sky is grey, but looks dirty and a little red, too. It's not like it's cloudy outside. When it's cloudy there's still light. Here, there's an unnatural sort of diffused, weak light that makes its way down. When the wind starts blowing (and not gentle breezes, either. Some real wind.) it's less fun. Wearing contact lenses during a sandstorm is bad.

What a sandstorm is NOT: those desert scenes from movies where the wall of sand comes out of nowhere and is blowing in everybody's faces and they can't keep their eyes open, wrap Bedouin-style scarves around their faces, and have to huddle in caves for hours on end (...and if it's The Far Pavilions, make sweet love). Maybe those happen way out in the desert.

Today, I woke up and walked to the store around 1030 to get some bread. It was absolutely peaceful out. Very quiet (it's a weekend morning and NOBODY in their right Egyptian mind would be up until about 1300), with a few birds and almost no car horns. I could smell flowers, actually, as I walked down the street. It looked cloudy but I didn't look too hard.

While I was in the gym, something changed out there. Upon exiting the gym the air smelled like dirty smoke, felt thick and too hot. Looking up at the sky, it was that brownish cloudy and things were obscured. I got back to my room and looked out the window, and found it hard to see to the normal distance. Buildings looked hazed over, but it was actually blowing sand.

It's calm now, but everything still has that strange color. The sand and dust in the air are really noticeable.

That's a sandstorm.