Well, way to not intimidate the guy right away! With plastered smiles on our faces we walked towards them, and as we were walking, my dad grabbed my mom, got up and walked away! What?!
I don’t know what he was doing, they were just walking around the garden! Was he trying to intimidate him even more? I had no idea, I just brushed it off and introduced him to those who WERE sitting in their places.
Everyone suddenly forgot that he didn’t speak English (except for my brother Sayed, my savior) and they kept greeting him in Arabic especially my grandma (she’s so funny) saying:
“ya 7abeeby ahlan beek nawartena! Akhbarak eh, w akhbar baba w mama?”
“Ezayak ya Yassine! Etfadal ya habeeby”
“Eh ya man whatsup” (my younger brother Sayf)
All he kept repeating were the three words he knew: “el7amdulilah”, “Tamam” and “Ana kwayes.” You can imagine how hard it was for me to contain my laughter.
My parents finally decided to join us, and with the loudest, deepest voice my dad could conjure, he greeted Yassine, shaking his hand SO hard, I could literally feel Yassine’s pain.
My mom and grandma kept aww-ing at the flowers and chocolate (score) and of course we opened them right away and munched away.
And the conversation began, mainly my dad asking about Yassine’s work and education, and that took up 70 percent of the conversation basically; And my mom chiming in with lighter topics to take the load and pressure off the guy!
Note that 85% of the questions/conversation were in Arabic, my grandparents and ESPECIALLY my dad insisted on speaking in Arabic even though they saw me, Sayed and mom trying to translate everything to him after each question.
I’ll never forget this, my mom was talking about something related to kids these days and marriage, and my dad was holding a seb7a (my dad collects them, he has over 200 seb7a’s.)
Yassine was sitting next to him and all of a sudden my dad goes WHACK with the seb7a on Yassine’s thigh saying “NO kids for the two of you for a long time, of course, understand?!”
Yassine gracefully laughed it off, and the conversation continued.
After a while, my dad suddenly got up and told Yassine to come with him up on the tower.
Don’t be taken aback, I’ll explain. My dad has a very creative, engineering mind. Among the other crazy things we have in our house, we have a tower. It’s erected up on the side of our garden (see picture above) with an Egyptian flag and steel crown.
The way you get up this thing is with a rope ladder (really safe, not) and you can see the view from the corniche. My dad is really proud of it; I have yet to see the point in it.
ANYWAY, I got up with him and exclaimed that it’s a bad idea, but he wouldn’t have it. And of course Yassine wanted to impress him in any way he can so he acted all tough and went.
I grabbed my dad and said “don’t you dare try and push him from up there!” I was dead serious.
My dad was showing off and climbed the ladder really quickly; meanwhile my poor baby never dealt with a 1920’s rope ladder before and struggled.
Talal our driver wasn’t helping either, he was supposedly holding the ladder from the bottom to keep it from swinging, but instead he was shaking it trying to joke around. I marched toward him and smacked him on the back of his head.
They were up there for a while, like over 30 minutes, meanwhile down on planet Earth my mom and brothers weren’t helping, teasing me about what dad might do and what he’s probably saying. Ugh.
They were finally done and headed down. My dad had a huge smile on his face, he was actually glowing and his tense mood disappeared. Yassine was also at ease and looked more relaxed. What is this, magic?
My dad was like “Let’s go eat Yassine must be starving!” Okay what the hell happened? Yassine just smiled at me and wouldn’t tell me what they said.
I didn’t even care at that point as long as they were both happy, I was happy! We went to my mom’s famous lunch table filled with pigeon, all kinds of meat, all kinds of chicken, fatta, rice, molokheya… your typical Egyptian food, but way over exaggerated.
Of course Yassine was taken aback, and tried to eat as much as he could to keep my mom happy, but I could tell he wasn’t a fan. He has a pretty sensitive French tummy.
We chilled altogether in the living room after, drinking tea, talking and laughing and I felt so good seeing how Yassine fit into my family so effortlessly like that.
Even my dad felt so confident that he excused himself to take his afternoon nap (he can’t live without those) and we continued.
After a while Yassine and I had to go meet some friends and Sayed walked out with us to go out as well.
As we were getting into the car Sayed yelled: “Yassine! Careful, I have eyes everywhere.” Now I knew this was coming since Sayed was so well behaved throughout the whole afternoon.
I love my brothers to death, and we tend to get protective and jealous over each other, like any other Arab siblings, so I was actually happy he did that somehow. It showed we still had that bond intact.
But it got a little stalkerish when I looked back every 5 minutes until halfway to our destination and Sayed was right behind us in the car… But still, I understood where he was coming from.
Well, I can’t say the rest of this holiday went as smoothly as that. I got food poisoning that kept me restless for the next five days, and I barely conjured up the strength to go to the new years party that I’d planned to go with Yassine and my friends for the longest time (thanks a lot Buddha Bar.)
But the most important thing was that the stress was off, my parents loved Yassine, and he came over everyday for the rest of the holiday, chilling by himself with my grandparents and mom in their houses, as I was dying in my bedroom.
So what’s next for us? The parents meeting the parents. Oh, and constant badgering to speed up the engagement and wedding. The pressure is on.
WE SAID THIS: Check out the first part of Yassine meeting Lenah’s parents here.
