I’m back home in Austin. I flew home on Friday, a long day that involved a lot of nodding off in odd places. I had to leave for the airport at 1 am, so there wasn’t any actual sleep (I tried to nap a little in my hotel room, but I kept jerking awake out of fear that I’d oversleep).
As usual, the Cairo Airport luggage cart mafia got the last word: As I was standing in line to go through security (in many international gateways, you have to go through X-ray with your luggage before you get to check-in), I was asked which airline I was flying.
“Turkish,” I said.
“This line is for Olympic,” he said. (For the record: this is BS. The ticket lobby is wide open once you go through security — there is no “this line is for this airline, and that line is for that airline.”) I knew where this was going, but before I could stop him, he’d grabbed my luggage and started walking at an extremely fast pace across the terminal to the next checkpoint over.
“You give me money now,” he said.” He wound up with 1 Egyptian pound and 1 US dollar — the last cash I had on me.
I may have mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again: I hate Cairo Airport. It’s a pit of snakes.
Fortunately, there were better moments on this trip.
One evening, I suggested to a friend who hadn’t seen much of the city besides the campus where he was studying and the apartment where he lived that we visit the old city in the evening. The snakes who run the Khan al-Khalili bazaar tend to be a little less venomous toward the end of the day. Shortly out of the cab, I wandered over to the newly restored area between the Wikala and Madrassa of Sultan al-Ghori, which I hadn’t seen since the restoration was complete. While looking at the new roof over the area, a man wandered over to us and struck up a conversation. His English wasn’t the best, so the conversation took place primarily in Arabic.
It turned out that he was working on the restoration project, and after a few moments, he offered to show us around. I’m normally leery of offers like this as they tend to end with a bill being produced, but he seemed pretty genuine and kept insisting that he wasn’t doing it for baksheesh.
For the next two hours, we wandered the back streets south of al-Azhar mosque. Granted, he showed us a lot of craft workshops that made things neither of us were interested in buying, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
The only point where money entered into the conversation was when we went down to Bab Zuwayla, the southern gate to old Cairo that dates from 970 AD. The mosque of Shaykh Moizz li-din Allah adjoins the bab, and for a little bribing, you can get the caretaker to let you up on the roof.
As we were up on top of the mosque, with its view of the old city and the cliffs of Muqattam that border Cairo to the east, the muezzins began making the call to prayer (the azan). From our vantage point, you could hear muzzein after muezzin chanting from the city’s four thousand mosques, the sounds echoing off of each other and weaving into a great chant that is, to me, one of the most quintessential sounds of Egypt: prayer, street activity, and traffic. How Cairo.
As we descended, he asked us to make a donation to the mosque, which we were happy to do. After that, it was back to the main street where he’d met us, with a handshake and a good bye. I gave him a little Austin lapel pin that I had left over from the trip to Turkey, and with that we were on our way.
The next day, I returned to the old city on my own to wander all over creation and shoot some photos. I came on my own deliberately, as I know my interest in architecture and little alleyways is not shared by many … OK, most … of my friends. I’ve learned that it’s better to just come on my own.
There was a slightly ugly incident near Bab al-Nasir, one of the two northern gates of the city. As I was passing a small food stall, the guy working the fry station practically threw a piece of ta’amiyya (Egyptian felafel — it’s made with fava beans instead of chick peas) at me. The next thing I knew, I was being bodily pulled into the restaurant, made to sit at a table, and plates of food that I didn’t want were placed in front of me. I just wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable, as I imagined that this exchange was going to end with an outrageous bill being presented. I wasn’t wrong.
The conversation started off nicely enough, with the usual, “Where are you from? What’s your name?” questions, and a bit of bizarre cross cultural communication took place when it was revealed that I apparently have the same first name as The Undertaker from WCW(?). There was a moment of admiration of the bandana that I carry as a sweat rag. This is nothing new, and I’ve learned to carry spares. These were given out - I had enough for all the guys in the stand, but then things got ugly.
“I’ve got a kid,” said one of the guys. “What do you have for him?”
“Um … ” I looked in my camera bag. To my shock, he actually reached in and pulled something out, and I smacked his hand, and snarled at him. The phrase Leh keddah literally means “What’s this?” but said the right way it connotes “WTF, dude?” I eventually parted with a hotel pen that I’d picked up somewhere in my travels, and then decided it was time to make my exit. I was presented with a bill for 30 pounds ($6 – which is probably a 500% inflation over what a local would have paid) and then everyone started asking for a tip. Fortunately, by this time, I was far enough outside the restaurant that they couldn’t block my way, so I pretended I couldn’t understand and walked away.
I was irritated by this experience, and kept trying to calm myself down by reminding myself that I hadn’t spent that much, when a woman wearing a niqab (the face veil with a slit for the eyes) came up to me, motioning with her hands. She was a beggar.
The guys at the restaurant had taken all of my small bills, and I just didn’t have anything. I did, however, have a bag of leftover ta’amiya and french fries. “I don’t have any money,” I said. “Would you like food?”
She looked at me, puzzled. “You speak Arabic?” (This was an odd comment, considering that I’d spoken to her in Arabic, but I’m used to it. There’s something about looking the way I do and speaking Arabic that just causes brains to short circuit all over Egypt).
“Yeah.”
This was followed by the usual questions about where I was from, etc., and I gave her the food and headed off. At which point she asked me if I wanted to take her photo — a bit of a startling question from a woman in a face veil!
I headed down through the Khan al-Khalili as quickly as possible and crossed the bridge to the relative safety of the other side. My plan was to walk down through Bab Zuwayla and then down through the Khan of the tentmakers and through the neighborhood beyond.
This is an area that’s not frequented by foreigners, but if my presence caused any consternation, it didn’t show. A couple of boys asked me to take their photo.
I’m ashamed that I don’t remember their names.
The only incident happened further down the street. I stopped to snap a photo of a mosque, and the guy working at a street cart selling pots and pans, asked me, “What are you taking a photo of? I don’t want any photos of me!”
“I took a photo of the mosque,” I said.
“The mosque?” he asked. I showed him on the LCD panel on my camera, and suddenly the scowl was replaced with a big smile and a thumbs up.
And that was it. So much for the seething anti-Americanism on the Arab street.
Even that night, when my friend and I came back to see the Sufis and visit the newly lit up monuments north of the Khan al-Khalili, it was a mixture of ignorance and cheerful questions. And the monuments do look incredible at night.
And so. When I got to Cairo, I remembered thinking, “How am I going to fill up this time?” By the time it was over, it seemed like it went so quickly.
Which is not to say that I wasn’t ready to come home. Probably the ugliest moment on the entire trip occurred the morning before I left, in the form of an e-mail from work. Someone on the organizing committee of a conference I’m working on sent a message that was so ugly that it actually brought tears to my eyes. By the time I saw the message, several others had weighed in, and there was a message from my boss asking me not to respond to it because, “I’ve already told her in no uncertain terms that this message is completely unacceptable.” Even so, it put me in an absolutely foul mood, and my brain has been wandering back to it ever since (12 hour flights are great for stewing). It was a nasty reminder of things waiting for me when I go back to work tomorrow.
And so. I have vague memories of the plane taking off from Cairo at 3:30 am on Friday, and equally vague memories of the plane landing in Istanbul. I found a bench to sleep for part of the 6 hour layover in Istanbul and conked out again for a good chunk of the flight from Istanbul to Chicago. (The two bottles of wine served with lunch might have helped).
And now, I’m home where it’s hotter than it was in Egypt! But I’m happy to be back with Ray and Mocha and not spending a lot of money all the time — Egypt has gotten significantly more expensive over the past couple of years. The economic recession has not been kind there.
All the same … well, I’m not planning my next trip back yet, but it’s always in the back of my mind. That’s just kind of the way I am.
