Too smart for my own good.

If you´re an Oriental Dancer living and working in Cairo you will find your intellectual life as the focus of deep enquiry and surprise. No one expects you to be intelligent, educated, well travelled or cosmopolitan.
There is this recurrent gasp of surprise at my brains:
-I could never imagine you´re THAT intelligent!

Oh, really? What would you expect then? That I would be illiterate and spend my evenings picking at my nose?
Dancer´s image is STILL on the darkest side of this brilliantly absurd coin of egyptian/arab mentality. The fact that you´re a dancer AND you have a working brain is a SHOCK for most people you´ll meet. When they inquire about my educational background, how many languages I speak and write and how much I know of so many different subjects (from Art to Politics, from History to Biology) they simply go MAD. Their brains cannot, JUST CANNOT, accept that a DANCER can be more than an empty body seductively used for men´s enjoyment.

Note on the devilish side of me: ´Starting to enjoy the SHOCKED expressions of the ones who get to know me better and find out that the prejudice they attached to me does not FIT at all.