The walkabout is ending. The last stop is my wife’s home village. Every auntie and cousin is demanding a visit from the weird Egyptian who married an even weirder foreigner.

I love visiting Sohag. The people here have turned hospitality into a full-contact sport.

The first time I came, a crowd gathered around me, someone grabbed my arm, someone else pulled on the other. Just when I thought a sack would be thrown over my head I realized they weren’t fighting me, they were fighting over me. Who would host me for coffee. Who would smoke hookah with me. Who would feed me lunch.

And oh, the lunches, brothers and sisters. The lunches are mythical.

Yesterday I arrived to find a table overflowing with roasted pigeons, chicken, duck, sausage, okra, potatoes, rice, beans, fresh-baked bread, and mulukhiyah.

Forget the mulukhiyah. It’s like sipping swamp water and pretending to like it. But everything else? Absolutely glorious.

The only downside is the creeping knowledge that the next cousin down the road is already preparing a similar feast. And the next. And the next. Until eventually my stomach will explode like the world’s most gluttonous piñata, showering my in-laws in bread crumbs and viscera.

Yet still… I will grin and keep shoveling it down. Because refusing food here is the only true insult.