Category Archives: Three minute read

Jul 08 2011
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Anecdotes, Three minute read

Have you seen a tall building in Cairo?

Walking in Cairo

I do not carry a purse, so whenever I go somewhere (i.e. a cafe),  with the plan to sit for a while, I immediately empty  my pockets and place the contents on the table to make sure nothing falls out and is lost forever. This system of keeping things in sight and mind had not backfired until yesterday, when I went somewhere new, a rooftop bar in Zamalek, and met a friend of a friend of a friend and enjoyed the company and the view. An hour later while reclining at home, my roommate got a phone call from me, and by from me I mean from my phone which was now in the possession of the friend 3 times removed since I had kept it out of mind though in sight. In other words, I left it on the table.

Obviously I was bummed that I would have to hunt down the phone, but I considered myself lucky since this friend worked close to where I live so I wouldn’t have to trek over to her neck of the woods in Maadi, an hour away by cab. She emailed me the name of the building, the street on which it was located, and the floor that she was on. It was a tall building–over 15 floors—and in an area I thought I was familiar with so I figured it would be easy to find. Once I got into the cab, however, it turned out that “Companies Building” on Shooting Club street (a long street) just ahead of the Department of Agriculture (in which direction?) before the end of the street (which end/how long before the end?) was not, in fact, a real address.

To make matters worse, prior to boarding the taxi I thought it would be a good idea to break my 20 pound note by spending most of it on hazelnuts. Thus, I wasted 15 of my only 24 pounds on hazelnuts so I only had 9 pounds on me when entering the taxi and was nervous the entire time that I would have disembark far from my destination due to lack of funds. As I sweated in the taxi cab and the driver asked me about my marital status, I stared like a hawk at the meter until it proved necessary to call my friend from his cellphone to get better directions. In her noble attempts at clarification, she told me that there was a gate, a big green sign that said “Companies Building” and that the building was brown-ish. Most of the right side of the street was gated and shaded by big trees which might cover up and/or camouflage a green sign, and everything in Cairo is brown-ish from the daily bastings of dust and pollution.

Cut to me getting out of the cab right as the meter turns to 9 pounds in front of a building the driver insists is correct, since it is tall and has a big green sign that says “Arab Development Bank,” which is not as close as it could be to “Companies Building.” I know he’s not necessarily tracking with what I’m looking for, but I get out anyways since I figure I could just walk until I find it.

Cut to me 30 minutes later, the saliva in my throat turned to pollution-mud, my face a mask of sweat, grease, and dust, and my heart heavy with despair as I trek back along the other side of a busy street under the merciless sun looking for “Companies Building.” Philosophical thoughts fill my brain: What if I don’t find the building and have to walk home without my cellphone? What if I die of heat/pollution stroke on the spot? What if my teeth start falling out because of stress?

I finally spot a sign that says, not “Companies Building” but something about USAID, the organization my friend works for, and enter into a gated compound down a dusty road/parking lost. I have found the promised land. The building is just as non-descript as was described but to me it looked like heaven. I climb a short flight of stairs, greet the men at the front desk and then head to the fifteenth floor. There is a man inside the elevator that pushes the buttons for me and asks what extent I am doing well…”good? very good? very very very good?” I answer “so-so.” and when I return the question he says he’s at 100%. Show off.

Two minutes later I’m sitting in the office of my friend with her colleagues shooting the breeze and drinking Nescafe in air conditioning. My soul is healed. Finally, after being in transit to this place for an hour and a half, I am able to leave in possession of my cell phone and renewed hope for society.

After exiting the building, I try to find a cab to take home. To my surprise, no cab driver wants to take me….I put two and two together and realize home must be closer than I thought. It was a mere twenty minute walk away. Things may take longer to get done here in Cairo, but they take especially long when you have no idea what you’re doing.

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Jul 02 2011
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Anecdotes, Three minute read

Christians in Cairo

This is where the pop music was playing

History can be interesting sometimes. I experienced that phenomenon today when I went on another tour with AUC to Coptic Cairo where we learned a little bit about Coptic history and art—we also saw a synagogue—not too many Jews left nowadays however, and most of the ones that are left reside in Alexandria, but the synagogue we saw was pretty sick.

Like last time, we rode in ultimate style to the old part of the city in our luxury bus, where we were then forced to get out and walk around, to our great disdain. Luckily, most of the time we were inside so I didn’t have to worry about wearing sunscreen. Unfortunately, I had remembered to bring sunscreen but forgotten my camera. On the bright side, no one else had a camera so I’ll forget the entire experience except for what I remember to put in this post.

Highlights from the trip:

1. Seeing two oldest churches in Egypt, going back to the 2nd and 3rd century A.D. (I think…that could be inaccurate). Maybe earlier. Old South Church in Boston has nothing on these guys.

2. Seeing where Mary, Jesus, and Joseph hung out while they were avoiding being killed in Nazareth (one of the rumored places)

3. Smelling frankincense when walking into the churches and imagining the people that have been smelling the frankincense for centuries.

4. The pop music playing in the courtyard of one of the churches.

Tidbits from the tour:

1. The tradition of monasticism was apparently started in Egypt, and so there’s a ton of Coptic art from monasteries that were built and then abandoned whenever the water resources ran out. I now desire to go hang out at a monastery and add my own modernist twist to Coptic art.

2. A story: in the time of the Fatimids, the ruler used to like to have discussions between the leaders of each religious community. At one such discussion, the ruler got into an argument with the Coptic pope and demanded a miracle from him in order to assuage his anger since Christianity was supposedly a religion of miracles. The specific miracle he demanded (I didn’t know you could be so picky) was that the pope move the Moqqatam hills in 3 days. So the pope asked all the Copts to pray and fast for three days and on the third day the Virgin appeared to the pope and said that he needed to walk outside the church and he would find a one eyed man who would perform the miracle. He exited the church indeed found a one eyed man. They took a taxi to Moqattam together and the one eyed man performed the miracle and the hills were lifted off the ground so that you could see the sky through the bottom of the hills. We know this actually happened because there is an authentic tile representation of the miracle, a medium widely known to be quite accurate.

3. St. Mark was the founder of Egyptian Christianity

4. Copts were known for their weaving skills.

5. In the 19th century, a tourist (read: British colonialist) was poking around in the synagogue and accidently stumbled upon a huge treasure trove of Jewish texts. When I’m chilling at the monastery I’m going to do a lot of digging in hopes of finding something equally impressive.

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Jun 20 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Three minute read

Fevered Bewitchment

Sometime around 9 o’clock last night, a sorcerer cast a spell on me separating me from my spirit animal and causing intense ramifications in my physical body. Without the gentle but clumsy aura of the giant anteater mellowing out the harsh edges of my own “amethyst” being, I was consumed by what felt like the hottest fever I have ever had.

I was out with some friends doing the same old thing in a place I had never been before, the Hussein area of Cairo, close to Al-Azhar University, that same old thing being smoking sheesha. The Hussein area reminded me a lot of Morocco in that it was the typical winding narrow alleys filled with vendors selling all kinds of things that instantly become dust collectors. We were heading for Feshawi’s, an apparently well known place that makes it into all the Lonely Planet guidebooks. After asking about 8 people where it was, we wound our way there and I suddenly found myself in a crowded café filled with patrons, soft gold light diffused by intense clouds of smoke, and people passing through selling everything from necklaces, to henna, to music, to tissues, to hookas, etc. Someone was playing the oud in the background and people were clapping along with the music.

We sat for a while, and at some point in the night a man who seemed normal but was actually a sorcerer came by and showed us an electronic candle that lit up if you blew on it or tapped it. None of us were interested, so he left. But after he did so, I began to feel hot; I thought it might have just been the cramped quarters and the fact I was almost sitting on the stranger in the booth next to me as well as inhaling death, but when I started to get chills as well I knew that something was not quite right. We left a little while later as my health continued to deteriorate, a combination of the sheesha, the separation from my spirit animal, and having only eaten bread and chocolate all day.

Things really took a turn for the worse once we made it into the metro station. We boarded the packed, sauna-like metro car, and began an eternal wait for it to take off. Though I didn’t want to alarm my friends on account of the sickness ravaging my body, it seemed likely I was about to faint, so I was forced to say something. “I do not feel in a good way” I heard myself sputter in Arabic as my hearing began to go faint and my surroundings lost the appearance of reality. The gibberish I spouted obviously concerned them and they ushered me out of the metro car and I sat on a bench for a second in order to try gain a further grasp on consciousness. A few minutes later, the car was about to go, so we quickly boarded once again and as we sped along underground, I leaned against the door and stared at a spot on the ground trying with all my might not to pass out. One possible benefit of my near incapacitation is that I was only vaguely aware of the usual metro staring.

Finally, we arrived at the Dokki metro station and I thanked the sweet Lord that I wasn’t going to end up in a hospital that night. My condition had stabilized by that time and I was able to walk and even make light of the whole situation a little bit as they accompanied me to my building. As I headed upstairs, I wondered what in the world had happened. On the way to my apartment I also had the pleasure of seeing a dog with a dead cat in its mouth.

I took what I thought was ibuprofen and tried to sleep. I lay there for about an hour, a fever consuming my body and strange thoughts pervading my mind, thoughts about wizards and last prayers. Finally I decided I needed to take more painkillers since my headache was threatening to cause blood to spurt out my ears. At this point, I came to the unfortunate realization that I hadn’t taken ibuprofen at all…I had taken anti-diarrheal medication. Alas, the red fog in my mind prohibited me from realized the small blue pills were not at all what ibuprofen looks like. AHHH. I then took real medicine and slept fitfully and sweatily. I woke up at about 6 and vomited up 5 cups of water, just like clockwork after drinking them. Needless to say, I didn’t go to school at all today. Instead, I lay around the house like a harem-dweller and watched the Naked Gun 3, which was hilarious, and an Australian cooking show. Being sick is great for watching television, definitely a benefit. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow; I look forward to lots of pity. We shall see. If I don’t feel better, there will be more movie watching.

Moral of the story: keep your gem guards on you at all time lest a wayward spell penetrate your aural defenses.

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Jun 11 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Three minute read

Old. Hot. Big.

Of course I’m talking about the dusty hollowed out water buffalo carcass I saw today. Just kidding, I saw a live water buffalo. They are such beautiful and noble animals, and delicious as well I’ve heard. I wonder if there is any ancient Egyptian mythology detailing their extensive history helping the human race. Topic for a later blog….

No but seriously, I went to the pyramids today on an excursion organized through the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo. When you travel with AUC, you travel in style. I didn’t pay a dime for the trip, and we had a yacht on wheels to carry us out the pyramids and ferry us around them, an art history professor telling us about the history of the pyramids, and all admission fees to the boat museum, the temple, and the pyramids themselves paid for. The only thing lacking was some kind of on-board food and drink service, which would have come in handy right about noon when every drop of moisture I brought with me had been evaporated by the merciless sun.

The pyramids are not far from Cairo. In fact, they are almost directly within it and are slowly being surrounded by it. Millions of people are able to make out the pyramids through the smog from their windows in the many high rise apartment buildings in the city. It was so strange to be winding our way through Cairo streets and then all of the sudden to see a pyramid pop into sight right out my middle school history textbook.

They were everything I thought they would be (see the words above), but there’s something to be said for visiting a place that is 4500 years old. I love imaging all the people that walked where I was walking over the past millenia and remembering how they had such ordinary lives just like my own, except for the semi-frequent mummy attacks that must result from living so close to the pyramids.

We didn’t go into any of the big pyramids, but we did go into equally small and smelly spaces. One of them was the burial chamber for a notable, and on the walls were all these dumb pictures and I was just like “Come on, they couldn’t even speak English? Why do we bother even learning about this civilization.” But I guess the craftsmanship was incredible. Everything was done with stone tools (that’s what our “guide” said) and it was incredible to see how well preserved and elegant it was. That chamber had the distinct odor of feet, which resulted from a stinkier group having gone in before us and the lack of ventilation. I can only imagine what the bigger pyramids smell like after a long day of tourist stink filling up the stagnant air.

The other small smelly place we went down into was the queen’s pyramid, for which we had to crouch as we descended down a very steep and narrow shaft and then turned the corner around another very steep shaft into a chamber where about 20 of us  looked around at each other and at the stone walls and then decided it was time to leave. I almost had a moment of panic when I began to think about what would happen if we got stuck down there and slowly suffocated to death. We’d have had to kill people in order to save air. I was also worried about mummy wrath and plagues.

No description of the pyramids is complete without a describing the tourism workers that accompany the experience. Tourism is the number one income for Egypt as a country, and after the revolution there was a huge decline in the number of tourists, threatening the livelihoods of millions of people. Despite the fact it’s hard to see kids selling bookmarks all day when they should be in school, and men whose only source of income are the dumb camel rides that tourists seem to love, it doesn’t make it any less annoying to have people offering you “gifts” and “Egyptian prices.” That said, it wasn’t too bad. You just say no thanks a bunch and walk on, sister. Don’t take anything, don’t let them do anything for you and you should be fine. If you really want a singing stuffed camel, though, be my guest. Haggle away and don’t look back.

Note: look at pictures on Flikr. There are more than just ones of the Nile I promise.

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