laura.fo

Short documentary about Cairo's new suburbs and satellite cities

At a time when countries like the U.S. are re-thinking the environmental cost of suburban living, Egypt is just beginning to build green spaces outside its largest city — and in the desert, the environmental toll is potentially even higher than in the U.S. and Europe. But urban areas in the U.S. and Europe don't face the level of overcrowding Cairo does, either. So it's a conflict.

Laila at Raising Yousuf and Noor writes about the Alternative Tourism Group, an agency committed to social justice tourism in Palestine:

The group is a Palestinian NGO that specializes in Fair Trade and "justice tourism", focusing in tours and pilgrimages that include critical examinations of the history, culture, and politics of the Holy Land. In so doing, they try to support the local community through the creation of economic opportunities and positive cultural exchange between guest and host, the protection of the environment, and political/historical education.

I've never been to Palestine, and the politics of tourism are part of the reason why. In college in Cairo I had a Palestinian friend whose girlfriend was American. I remember her going to Jerusalem for a week or two during one of the school breaks. My friend could not go with her. In fact he'd never been there, and probably still hasn't. He couldn't go to visit his grandfather's grave, while she, with her American passport, could come and go without incident. Even my Egyptian friends, who were less likely to be blocked outright at checkpoints, said the surveillance they'd be under wasn't worth whatever they'd get out of the trip. It just didn't occur to them to see Palestine as a tourist destination.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. I have several American friends who've gone to the West Bank, and somewhat fewer to Gaza, on social justice trips. They usually went by invitation of Palestinian activist groups or individual Palestinian friends. They stayed in Palestinian homes, came back with notebooks packed full of information, and used the experience to educate Americans about the occupation. In some cases they'd set up exchanges with Palestinian schools and NGOs and had helped fund those organizations. These are all good things, things I support. But the politics of going in the first place rarely came up for debate, and that does bother me.

On the other hand, I say this as someone who has been to Germany many times, and never thought twice about it until two friends told me their mothers would not step foot in the country that had killed one's parents and tortured the other's father. It was a matter of principle.

But Germany is different, one could argue; it's taken active steps to come to grip with its past. Israel: not so much. It hasn't even come to grips with its present. Yet I also remember one friend criticizing a musician with progressive politics for touring in Israel. "There are some places you just don't play," he said. "Yes," another friend said, "but if you're going to make that argument, the first place you'd boycott would be the U.S." Touche.

So, I'm conflicted.

Last week's Newsweek had a good feature section on higher education and how it's changing internationally. I especially appreciated Ballad of the Old Cafés, about how Gulf states, through much higher education spending, are usurping the old, cosmopolitan learning centers of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad:

The Gulf states have been happy to take advantage of this collapse. But a rearguard of academics contends that the new schools there are academic Disneylands that can't eclipse the old centers. "Intellectuals and academics don't want to live in a mall," says Osama El-Ghazali Harb, the Egyptian former head of the Arab Association of Political Scientists. "Science is more than labs. It's the people, it's the environment."

Egypt has even started fighting back, by trying to recruit U.S. universities to open campuses on its soil, too. But it's had relatively little success. "Do you really expect us to open a campus in a country that could be run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a few years?" said one high-ranking NYU official involved in the school's search for a Middle East campus.

Closer to home, I agree with almost every word of this critique of American secondary education ("almost," because I think early college isn't the answer; high schools themselves should be reformed):

To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.

The school K. attended for 5th and 6th grade had, as part of its original charter, a model for teaching that was closer to being a professor. Teachers taught fewer classes, had more prep time, were given sabbaticals, and received bonuses for research and artistic contributions in their field. Over time they moved away from this, which was part of the reason I wasn't as excited about it by the time she finished her second year there. But I still think it's a great model for secondary education.

I spent the last three days snorkeling on the Gulf of Aqaba. I feel guilty writing about a 'relaxing trip to the seaside' while a hurricane is hitting New Orleans, but we're leaving tomorrow and I want to get as many of these up as possible before we go.

Dahab means "gold," and is on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula. (This means I've finally been to Asia.) It's one of the lesser-developed resort towns in Egypt, popular with Egyptian bohemians and German scuba divers. Americans do go there but not as often as they go to Luxor and Sharm El-Sheikh. (My theory is because it's not hyped heavily enough in Lonely Planet.)

Germans, however, will skip Cairo entirely and spend two weeks in Dahab. When we left after three days people kept asking what was wrong, were we not happy, had something happened back in Cairo, why weren't we staying longer? I think it's the only time in my life so far that I was surrounded by English, Arabic, and German — the only languages I can muddle through in — to the exclusion of any others.

Getting here involves an eight-hour overnight bus ride, which in Egypt really means ten. Unfortunately K. wasn't feeling well, but she handled the trip beautifully. There was one baby on the way there and two babies on the way back. I know this because each one of them cried one time each. Meaning, a singular cry: "ahhhh." One time.

Why are children in most of the world, even infants, so much better behaved than American kids? I think it's because their parents aren't all pinched and tense. But who knows. Maybe it's something in the water.

The sea itself was incredible. I can't do underwater photography, but it looked like this.

I wrote about Dahab a couple years ago, just after it was bombed. I said then that one of the reasons I always had positive associations with it (although at the time I'd never been there) was because it catered to offbeat weirdo Egyptians as well as offbeat weirdo travelers from other countries. I like that kind of cultural blending; it doesn't seem as manufactured as most.

The hotel we stayed at, recommended to me by someone in my Arabic class, is run by an Egyptian man and his German wife, and known for its diving center. I now REALLY want to get my PADI certification. I love snorkeling, and in some ways think it's better than diving anyway because you're at the surface of the water where it's warmer and the colors are brighter, but outside of power kiting (which I'd also like to do) diving is the closest thing there is to flying — the only way to move in three dimensions without being inside machinery. And even with power kiting and other wind sports, you're dependent on the wind, which is fickle. Until someone buys me a personal jet pack, I want to learn to scuba dive.

I'm not particularly keen on the attire, though.

This was the view from our room (that's a playground there, between our terrace and the water):

Same scene, but taken from the terrace:

There's no beach, in the sandy sense — the water comes right up to that rock wall. Every now and then kids on horses would walk by on the sidewalk, and once, a camel on its own, with no saddle and no rider. Just moseying down the sidewalk.

The room had (what I think of as) Moroccan-style beds. I love the way these look. If it had been colder, I probably would have also loved sleeping on them. As it was the heat was oppressive, and being walled in on three sides was not helpful. If I ever build a house, though, I want to include these.

One of the ways I sold K on this trip was by telling her she could dress however she wanted, even though it was Egypt. Compared to what little most of the women had on, her outfit here is practically an abaya.

The beachfront is lined with cafes like this one: cushions, low tables, and thatched roofs, which end right at the water. In my previous post people who'd been to Dahab complained about Bob Marley on auto-repeat, but they seemed to have opened that up a little. It was a combination of mellow Arabic music (not pop), '70s stuff like Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens, and electronica.

The cafes stretch around the beach front. You can see a little of the mountains here. Most of the hotels offered Bedouin safaris up there, but at 140 degrees or whatever it was, we passed.

On the plus side, because most people know better than to come here in August, the beach was practically empty.

The "city" center ("city" in "quotes" because the town is so small) has a little bazaar area, which it almost tries to take seriously, but is mainly a sideshow to the sea, the diving, the sheesha smoking, and the drinking.

There's also token effort to keep the sidewalk pedestrian-friendly.

But no one really pays attention.

I saw this lamp and immediately thought of Connor. One of the things we've talked about is how, in the 'West', you learn to take it for granted that street lights won't randomly collapse on your head (and how this assumption is often incorrect in neglected neighborhoods like ours, and has eroded for everybody under Bush). In other parts of the world you can't necessarily count on the garbage being picked up, water coming out of the taps, the bridge you're driving on not falling into the river, the elevator you're riding on not stopping for nine hours while you suffocate slowly, the sidewalk beneath your feet not giving way and dumping you into a sewer, or anyone bothering to scrape your carcass off the roadway if you're run over by a public bus. Government is conspicuous in its absence.

"Street lamps" is our shortcut way of referring to the everyday safety that people take for granted when they bemoan too much government. So when I saw this, I had to laugh. It was our metaphor made literal.

Last Wednesday we went to Coptic Cairo. I had never been there before and thought it was fascinating.

On the way there we went past Cairo's aqueduct, built in the Middle Ages. We had a guide that day, and as we drove by he told us all about the lively textile district below. Inelegantly, I asked him if it wasn't also Cairo's slaughterhouse district. He seemed a bit embarrassed about this and said that technically that was true but the slaughterhouses were slowly being moved outside the city. A moment later we drove by a dead horse lying by the side of the road. He cleared his throat and said, "Of course, this hasn't happened completely yet."

Since he didn't seem interested in talking about that anymore and instead went on with telling my dad about Salah el-Din and the Mameluks, I took it upon myself to tell K. — who was sitting in the backseat with me — that this area was also famous as a place to buy drugs. Her father and I, I said, had a friend in college who was very wealthy and told people his family had made their money in the Gulf, but really he'd grown up in the slaughterhouse district and had his entire education financed by his uncle, a heroin dealer. He seemed like such a well-mannered boy that you would never guess he'd grown up in such a tough district, but one time he failed a course at AUC and in retaliation blew up his professor's car.

This isn't relevant to Coptic Cairo. I just think of that story whenever I drive through this area and needed to tell someone. K. seemed more interested in that than in Salah el-Din.

The area itself is a gated community. Like, there was an actual gate, with soldiers, that we had to pass through first. Directly inside there were a few gift shops and kiosks, and (once again!) I marveled at how much Eastern Christianity has in common with Islam, since at first glance I mistook these for glass Ramadan lamps.

We began by stopping at the remnants of the fortress of Babylon, a Roman fort that was built in this area before the city became Fustat, before Fustat became Cairo. This thing is old as hell.

From there we went to The Hanging Church, The Church of Saint Barbara, The Ben Ezra Synagogue, and The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, where legend has it Jesus, Mary, and Joseph found shelter during their escape to Egypt. There is a crypt underneath it that runs all the way to the Nile. We saw the stairs going down to it, but couldn't go inside because they were clearing it of water. (Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures inside any of these places.)

As interesting as all this was (and it was), what I found most fascinating was the architecture around these churches. I'd assumed "Coptic Cairo" was just a district like any other, one that kind of bleeds into other areas. So I was surprised that you have to walk down INTO it, and that it's walled off from the neighborhoods around it. Next to all these historical buildings — like "Islamic Cairo" — you have regular apartments, with people hanging out their laundry and watching television. But the place feels like it's a thousand years old.

I've never been to Jerusalem, but it's what I imagine Jerusalem to look like.

Walking through Coptic Cairo I heard what I thought was someone reciting the Qur'an. That's not unusual here, but we were in the Christian part of the city. It was the Bible! I know it should be obvious that Christianity has been influenced by Islam — even if Christianity came first, it's still an overwhelmingly Muslim country — but even so, it took me by surprise to hear the Bible recited in this very ….Islamic way.

I taped about 45 seconds of it before I got dragged away. Listen.

This video is excellent. At almost 24 minutes I know it can't compete with memes and lolcats, which makes me reluctant to even post it, but — related to what I was saying yesterday about Facebook activists, and how America is viewed as neutral to the point of cold in the foreign press — I think it gives a good picture of why American rhetoric about "democracy" rings so hollow in a country like Egypt. We in the U.S. hear "America supports democracy abroad!!ELEVENTY!" so much that it's become a cliche, so much that we assume the government must be just killing themselves doling out of democracy instruction booklets around the world. We complain that their reality doesn't match their rhetoric, but that criticism concedes half the argument — it assumes the rhetoric, at least, is there.

It's not. In Egypt all the American rhetoric about democracy comes with so many caveats and explanations of what's meant by the word "democracy" — explanations Egyptians hear and Americans don't — that no one sees it as 'America failing to live up to its promise' or anything so forgiving. The issue here isn't rhetoric without teeth: it's that no one has been promised democracy in the first place. They've specifically been told that the U.S. will not be promoting democracy if it threatens to come at the expense of stability. Meanwhile American foreign aid dollars are the only thing holding up Mubarak's regime.

The last time I was here hardly anyone had satellite. Obviously, that's changed. I've never had satellite before so I naively believed everyone when they said you could get "everything" on satellite.

This isn't true.

WHAT I WAS EXPECTING: People would be watching all the crap TV we export, including our crap news, including FOX. If someone spoke enough English, and cared enough, they could, in theory, watch all this crap American TV and come to the conclusion that the American people are either bombastic and stupid or decent and well-intentioned but either way they are separate from their government. Which is criminally insane.

WHAT I'VE FOUND INSTEAD: It's the other way around. The government looks smart, the people invisible (at best) or (at worst) in need of guidance from our overlords.

I was thrilled to get CNN International, since it's so much better than the regular CNN and in Boston we only get it for one hour a day. The problem is… it's too good. When Jesse Helms died there were no sappy and embarrassing obituaries, nor any glee from other corners. It was just reported. Here's who he is, he's dead now, moving on to unrest in Pakistan or child soldiers in West Africa. And the John Edwards affair? Only made the scroll on the bottom of the news. If I didn't have internet I would have missed it entirely. (I'm assuming they made more of it at home.) There's none of the joking about politicians, nothing about Bush's gaffes and failed policies. He does stuff and it's reported. Objectively and without context. Like he's a real politician, the kind other countries have.

I never thought I'd miss the underbelly of American media, but after being here for almost two months, watching only CNN and BBC and Al-Jazeera English, I've started seeing the U.S. in a different light. On television, our government looks scary-competent. It looks cold. And the American people — when they are featured at all, which is rare — look like cold and calculating minions of it. We look much more intentional than we really are. "Yes," we are saying to the world (unsmiling), "George Bush is our president. We like him, because he is powerful. We are more powerful than you."

One can, and I probably would, argue that this is closer to The Truth than the Jay Leno/Jon Stewart version of America, where George is a fuck-up who lies and bumbles, but not really Darth Vader, and the American people just kind of got stuck with him ha ha oh well.

Yet this cold version also misses the level and intensity of American opposition. I've gotten frustrated with German friends in the past who are critical of the U.S. government, particularly this administration, but obstinately refuse to acknowledge that I am too, probably way more than they are. But now I can kind of see it, because people who speak for me are not in power, and in this kind of news format, where it's Australia (60 seconds) –> France (30 seconds) –> South Africa (60 seconds) –> U.S. (30 seconds) –> Russia (60 seconds)….. there's no room at all for people like me. So why WOULD they think I exist? They watch the news, right, they're informed? And they don't see me. So my opposition looks like a defensive posture I'm adopting only because I'm under fire, in the moment, rather than the thing that drives me every day of my life.

It's making me re-think some of my reactions to Egyptian, and more broadly Middle Eastern, reactions to American policy. If you imagine an America with NO Left — not an ineffectual, underfunded, oppressed, or just generally embarrassing Left, the kind we complain about to each other, but literally NO Left, no anti-racist movement, no religions outside of God-told-me-to Crusader Christianity, no voices at all other than those of 5 or 6 politicians who are photographed disembarking from airplanes — I can see why it probably seems hopeless that anyone could ever deal with us. And maybe it really is! That's not my point. My point is that at home I feel American opposition and diversity. Here, I don't see it.

I meant to post this earlier — two articles about how young people in Egypt have been using Facebook as an organizing vehicle (interesting!), and how the government has responded (imprisonment!).

Virtual politics

A tool to mobilise?

"Foreign embassies follow up on these blogs and groups and report back to their countries," said Yassin. But most, if not all, of the bloggers' posts distort and misrepresent reality. "They send the wrong information about Egypt to the world," he claimed. Councilor Murad Hassan went further, insisting they deliberately manipulated facts, circulated fabricated pictures, and magnified individual incidents to mislead public opinion. "In addition, the kind of language they use to express their opinions is unsuitable and strange to our society," Hassan told Al-Ahram Weekly.

I said, before I even came here, that I was amazed how popular Facebook is in Egypt. Now that I'm here I've seen firsthand how common it is — even with people as old as me — to end conversations with "Are you on Facebook?" rather than "What's your phone number?" or "What's your e-mail?" I've started doing it myself.

I'm still not sure why it's so big. (One woman told me it was because "we're Arabs – we'll chat for hours with anybody about nothing." Ha.) But I think a real reason is that people are so mobile, especially with going back and forth to the Gulf. And Europe and elsewhere abroad, but especially to the Gulf, which is something members of all classes do. (Europe etc. is more of an upper-class thing.) On Facebook your information stays stable, even if your address and phone number change two or three times a year. And the 'groups' feature lends itself to organizing in a way that's less risky than it would be in Real Life.

This has been going on for several months now. It'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

ETA: rfmcdpei adds more links on this.

Youssef Chahine died a few weeks ago. I used to live in his building. At the time I'd never heard of him, but after hearing so many wow, you live in Youssef Chahine's building?'s I started paying attention.

His movies aren't as hard to find as a lot of other Arab films are, but they're not easily accessible, either. The Alexandria series is on Netflix. I watched it, and I think I can say I liked it, but because it's meant to be a biography that mirrors Egypt's modern history you have to know a lot of modern Egyptian history to understand it as anything but a biography. I understood just enough of that to understand how much I must be missing. (I'm guessing it'd be like trying to watch a highbrow Wayne's World if you're not American. You'd think the story was the point, not the 9560949032845 inside references.) I'm hoping some of his other stuff eventually becomes available in the U.S. Or maybe it is and I'm not looking hard enough.

Here's a guide to his work, going back to 1950, just before the revolution.

And a biography.

When my daughter said she didn't want to go with us to Old Cairo on Saturday, because she preferred to sleep, I was fine with that because I was more than happy to go again with her some other day. I love that part of the city.

But on the day we were doing the pyramids? I dragged her out of bed at 8 a.m., because I'm only doing that once.

*I would like it noted that my daughter is not actually taller than me. She must be, um, standing on something. Because I'm the mother. Therefore I am tall. She's a child. Yeah.

The pyramids area is bright, windy, HOT, and full of tourists. Plus there isn't much to DO there, except say "yep, that sure is a pyramid." But of course you can't come to Egypt without seeing them. Oddly enough they really don't look like they do on a postcard, as one might suspect they do. The scale is so overwhelming that by the time you back up far enough to get them all in a single frame you can see why K would describe them as "just a bunch of triangles."

What's more interesting, to me, is the scene on the ground around them, and Egyptians' love-apathy relationship with them.

Okay, this is the great pyramid. It's great. That giant hole over my dad's head, that thing that looks like a vagina, is its official entrance. I went in there 15 years ago and this is what you see: a long claustrophobic tunnel, and then an empty room. There, I've saved you money should you ever decide to come here yourself, since it costs extra to go inside.

There is another hole, called the Arab entrance (the jokes just write themselves, don't they?) that the Arabs* hollowed out at random when they invaded Egypt in 641 A.D. I don't know what they were expecting to find in there, a hotel or what, but I kind of like that story because it speaks to two things, both still relevant today: 1) human curiosity, and 2) the "jesus, what the hell?!" reaction they must have had — after romping about conquering Mesopotamia with relatively little resistance — upon getting to Egypt and suddenly coming face-to-face with this giant… THING.

Not that it stopped them. Egypt was conquered and the Muslims carried on their merry way all the way to Spain. Still, you have to think this gave them pause.

* "Arabs" in this context means Muslim invaders from what is now the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Most Egyptians are Arabs now because of the events I am describing at this very moment. At the time, however, they were African, Greek, Roman, or some blend of same.**
** Although most Egyptians will describe themselves as Arabs if they are speaking in terms of ethnicity and demographics, colloquially they still use the word "Arabs" in its 641 A.D. sense, to mean Saudis and other citizens of the Arab Gulf region. While it's not exactly a derogatory term, it's almost always used as an expression of annoyance. The other day, for example, my friend Wael complained that a particular cafe had been ruined since "it became full of Arabs." This usage is typical. It means prices have been driven up at (in Egyptians' opinion) the expense of art and culture.***
*** Remind me to write about this in the context of bride prices.

This is the Sphinx. Its nose decayed hundreds of years ago but there's still an ongoing legend that it was shot off by Napoleon. I've heard this story blamed on tourists, but to me it sounds much too clever for tourists to have invented. If I had to guess I'd say it's a joke-slash-conspiracy theory Egyptians made up in 1798 when Napoleon first invaded and have been repeating ever since.

Napoleon wasn't the first to invade Egypt, but he was the first non-Muslim to do so since Islam came into existence in the first place. He stayed for three years and then got bored and went home. (How French.) At that point the British moved in and with their typical British tenacity dug in their heels and oppressed the population for 150 years, until Nasser and his Free Officers got fed up and overthrew them in 1952. This made them heroes not just in Egypt but throughout the Third World. Pretty soon the British were being thrown out of everywhere.

And the Sphinx's nose was still missing.

His bigger problem these days is that he's decaying from the inside, a result of being located so close to Cairo's world-renowned pollution problem. People say he has cancer.

All of the pyramids used to be covered with polished limestone, making them smooth and shiny and more triangular and probably fun to slide down. You can still see some of it there on the tip of the Pyramid of Khafre, above, behind the Sphinx. Most of it, though, eroded over the last few thousand years, making them easier to climb, which you can do if you come after midnight and bribe the guards. You shouldn't do that, though. Not only is it damaging to the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, it is illegal and you could get caught and while you, Rich Western Tourist, will probably be forgiven for your fun-loving foreign ways, the guide you bribe will probably be fired and sent back to his village in Aswan.

That said, I do have a Turkish friend who did this, drunk, with his girlfriend, who was wearing high heels. (What?? I know.) They said when you get to the top it's much smoother than it looks at the bottom, so you have to have a guide who will tell you which route to take. They also said it's much taller than it looks, so don't look at the ground. Apparently his girlfriend cried all the way down. She thought they were going to die.

I like it when people I know do things like this so I can tell their stories without having to actually do the thing they're talking about myself.

* Someone in Romania told me that when I hold my bag like this I look like I'm waiting in a railway station. That's not true, is it?

(By the way, at the pyramids, all dogs are beige.

)

The thing that's hardest to convey in photography is where the pyramids are situated in relation to Cairo and in relation to the desert. Right up against both, that's where. If you look in one direction you see a city of 20 million people. If you turn around 180 degrees, you see… the Sahara.* Cairo is expanding in every direction, but so far it's yet to expand around the pyramids. What's that Eddie Izzard joke, about how Americans are so impressed with castles, but the British just see them as a pain in the ass to drive around? "Aw, no, another bloody castle"? I'm waiting for the pyramids to become like this, because Cairo really is that close.

* "Sahara", by the way, is Arabic for "desert." So if you say "the Sahara desert," you are technically being redundant. You can just imagine how this came to be, can't you? Some English guy got to North Africa and raised a sweeping hand across the landscape and asked "what do you call this?" and his Arab guide said "the desert, you fool."

Most of your energy at the site itself is used not gasping in awe at the history before you, but rather in avoiding people who are trying to sell you something.

People (including me) complain about this, but as with the Khan, it's likely nothing new. You can't tell me that when Napoleon came here in the 18th century there weren't kiosks lined up selling trinkets and overpriced water. It was probably even true when the Arabs came here in 641.

What I do think is interesting about this, though, is that Pharaonic art and history violate about 6,432 tenets of Islamic law, starting with the depiction of the human form and ending, super hugely, with their polytheism.

And does anyone care? No. They're perfectly happy to sell you King Tut's head on a chain.

I'm being flippant about this, but it's actually kind of a big deal, especially after Afghanistan made news a few years ago blowing up their Buddhist statues. Egyptians, for the most part, not only coexist with their heretic past, they get really really into it. The American University in Cairo teaches Coptic and hieroglyphics as foreign languages. They have an Egyptology program separate from any other department. The chemistry department offers a minor in carbon dating.

Tourism is one of the biggest industries in Egypt, which means the field of Egyptology employs a lot of people. Tourism is also Egypt's foremost source of foreign currency, which is what it uses to pay back its foreign debt, which it's dependent on for development, which Mubarak needs to stay in power.

This brings me to one of Egypt's strangest phenomena: THE TOURISM POLICE. If you're a foreigner in Egypt you'll be told to report anyone harassing you to the tourism police. At first I thought that was a joke, but it's not. They are a branch of the government whose _only job_ is to protect white privilege. I've been stopped before, when walking with Egyptian friends, and asked if they are "official" guides, meaning licensed by the government. No, I'd say, they're just friends. They'd be asked to show their identification. I'd be asked if they were bothering me.

The whole thing is humiliating, and part of the reason I don't have a lot of sympathy for white people who say they know what it's like to be a minority because they were a minority in a foreign country that one time. I have more privilege here than I do at home, and it's not only a class thing.

But I do think the term "tourism police" is funny. It's like the fashion police or the grammar police, only real.

Besides buying items, you can also buy your photograph on a camel or a donkey. The two animals seem to serve similar purposes here, but they have entirely different connotations. In Arabic you can be as strong as a camel, but you're pretty much always dumb as a donkey. X used to have a game he'd play to get K. to go to sleep called "Who's the Donkey?" The donkey was whoever talked first. I've used it at work once or twice.

My dad, having grown up on a farm in 1842 or whenever it was, was probably more amused than most by donkey lore.

He kept asking people about agricultural practices here, and I kept having to tell people he came from fellaheen. I told him that means "farmers." It really means "peasants." There was never a good time to explain to him that in Egypt people who've gotten OUT of the village don't go back. They don't move onto their family acreage and live there happily with their dogs and consider it quiet and peaceful and nostalgic the way he does. I've been asked before if we had running water in my "village" in America.

So when my father kept asking city people why they plant dates next to bamboo or whatever (I wasn't really listening), and they didn't know, it was actually a sign of them being educated, despite his wish that everyone keep such information at their fingertips. At which point I would tell them he was a fellah and they would go "ahh" and nod knowingly.

After the great pyramids we went to the step pyramid area at Saqqara. This is less famous but reportedly more interesting. I wouldn't know, because I find all pre-Islamic Egyptian history equally uninteresting. (I warned you this was going to be a lackluster and half-hearted guide.)

My main association with the Saqqara pyramid is the road to it, which is this little two-lane highway next to a canal, very beautiful, where X and I used to make out when we were teenagers. It's one of the only places in Cairo that has few people and dim lighting. We referred to it as "our" road and, to this day, even though we've been married and divorced and remarried and our daughter is only five years younger than we were back then, it still bothers me when other people drive on it or refer to it as though it is public space that just anyone can use.

Once we got to it it took everything I had not to bounce up and down and tell my father and my poor daughter exactly why I remembered it so well.

Is this too much information? Anyway. This is Saqqara. It's a pyramid that looks like steps. That's probably why they call it the step pyramid. Or maybe there's a more esoteric reason. I used to think hamburgers were burgers made of ham (isn't it obvious?) until my German tutor explained they were sandwiches invented in Hamburg. So don't trust me with stuff like this.

To get to them you have to go through some pillar thingies. They probably have a history, too.

What gets me is that they are STILL excavating this area! Like at what seems like a really rudimentary level! They've had five or six thousand years, you know? You'd think they would have worked this stuff out by now.

So far they've uncovered an Escher painting.

We also went to Memphis, the capital of this region in Pharaonic times. Cairo didn't exist until the tenth century, which makes it a regular whipper-snapper by Egyptian standards.

Memphis has, um, trees and statues.

Some of the statues are big. Like this one of Ramses. In the United States, he is a condom. Which makes no sense whatsoever, because the guy had over a hundred kids.

Other statues are small. Like this Tolkien-ish one, which is apparently the god of happiness. I like it that the god of happiness is short and fat, like the Venus of Willendorf, or Norm on Cheers.

As you may have noticed, I'm not really up on my ancient Egyptian history. But this area does have one of my favorite sites ever, in any country: PYRAMID FAIL. On the left is the step pyramid. On the right is a pile of rocks they couldn't make work, so they gave up and started over.

There are actually many of these dotting the desert, but I like this one because it sits so obviously, and sadly, next to the Saqqara pyramid. It's like there's someone yelling why can't you be more like your brother?

Anyway, I love this loser pyramid because it reminds me that effort inevitably includes failure, and that this reality is thousands of years old.

I think when I get home I'm going to print this out and hang it over my computer. I find it strangely optimistic. After all, the Egyptians did get a lot of things right. Just not all the time.

So that's how we spent last Monday. We got home late in the afternoon hot and tired with sand in our hair. Like I said, I'm not doing this again.

But it is something it's nice to see once, in person.

Not necessarily more than that. But once is worth it.

Even if it is just a bunch of triangles.

Al-Azhar is the oldest still-functioning university in the world. It was built in 971 A.D. and has existed in one form or another for the last thousand years. On Saturday my dad and I visited its mosque.

My dad waited for me in the courtyard while I went into the women's area. The invited him in with me but he declined, which I thought was cool. When I came back outside a few guys had gathered around him and were reciting the Qur'an. Not to him, exactly, but within earshot (see above), which I thought was interesting because it's an older style of instruction and I'm glad he got to see that. I don't know how the university operates now, but historically Islamic universities didn't have "classes" in the sense that we think of them now. Back then the senior clerics would lean against the walls in the courtyard and give lectures, while the younger students milled about and listened to the ones they chose to hear. They progressed individually, on no fixed timetable, by proving their mastery of the religion to senior sheikhs. (Kind of like unschooling.)

Inside the women's area a few women were praying, and several more were sleeping. I've always liked that about mosques, that sleeping is allowed and common. You have to feel either very safe or very desperate to sleep in public. Mosques accommodate both.

This is the main prayer hall. We got there just in time to watch midday prayer (no pictures of that, though).

Part of the original madrassa:

A cat naps next to freshly baked bread off to the side of the madrassa:

The outer courtyard:

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After Al-Azhar we went to the Al-Ghouri complex, built in 1503 in what used to be Cairo's charcoal market. It's set apart from the street a bit, behind a gate, to the point where I had to walk around the building and back again asking "bab? bab?" until I found the door.

Even after visiting it, I can't tell you exactly what it IS. A mausoleum, a school, a palace, a mosque, a cistern, a theater — and further down the street, a hotel — but I think what makes it notable isn't its architecture (although that's impressive) or the functions it served (although they were too) but that it's an early example of a _public_ building. It wasn't just built for the glory of a sultan, or even the glory of God, but for the people, ordinary Cairenes, to use.

Which is not to say Al-Ghouri himself was a great guy. By all accounts he seems like a bit of a dick. But he was a dick who apparently believed in giving people gardens.

View of the main courtyard from below and from above. This was a Sufi hostel. There is a stage because they still hold performances here, and during Ramadan people will sleep here:

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On the left is the main hall, if you can call it that, of the mausoleum. Al-Ghouri himself isn't buried here, but his wife and children and concubine are. They died of the plague.

On the right is a fountain. After you're dead, it's said, there is little that can help you; your life as you've lived it is the only thing that matters on Judgment Day. One of the exceptions to this is if you've built a public good that will continue to serve people after you're gone. A fountain is the traditional example. Here you can see where the water was poured; passersby could come and drink from it without having to enter the building itself. There was one of these on each of three walls.

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They've turned one room into a theater and apparently still hold concerts here, too, every weekend:

The domed ceiling over the theater:

Below the mausoleum was a cistern I wanted to see. The guide was open to that, but he seemed kind of embarrassed and warned me that, um, the steps were small. Oh, that's no problem! I reassured him. Until I saw them. They weren't so much "stairs" as a choppy ramp. They were tiny and sloped sharply downwards. I tried 5 or 6 times but ultimately chickened out.

My dad was braver, though:

I took this one from the balcony of the old kuttab, a school traditionally attached to a mosque where poor children were taught to read and write from the Qur'an. Mosques and other religious institutions were the main vehicle of education right up until the late Ottoman period in the early 20th century — which is probably also why people (Westerners) misuse the word "madrasa," which on its own has no religious connotations; the word just means "school":

Here, by the way, is a 19th century painting of the same scene.

Street life below:

(Later I bought two tops down there, from a 14-year-old girl named Aisha. I was ten pounds short of her final asking price and was unsure whether to try to haggle harder or just give them back when she said, very shyly, "I like your bracelets." I took them off and we made a trade. Barter seemed appropriate to the setting.)

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The mashrabeya (latticework) over the windows allowed women to see out without letting others see in. Windows aren't made like that anymore, of course, but they're still a common sight in this area.

Finally we went to the roof, where there was a beautiful view of Islamic Cairo's skyline:

I love this part of the city so, so much.

People sometimes write off Khan el-Khalili, Egypt's grand bazaar, as a tourist trap, and it's easy to see why. All the vendors know some English (and some French, and Russian, and Italian, and German….) and they all but assault you trying to get you to come into their shops. Usually it's something as simple as "want silver?" or "best perfume!", but sometimes their pitches are more creative ("This is the best place to spend all your money!" "If you have any money left, I will take it for you, no broblem!"). A good portion of what's sold is kitschy souvenirs, and the prices for things like tea and soda can be double or triple what they are in normal parts of the city.

But to leave it at that misses the history, I think. The Khan goes back to the 1300s, and has been Egypt's major souq for hundreds of years. (It may have been indirectly responsible for the discovery of the Americas, since it was the site of Egypt's spice market, which Europe sought to bypass by finding a new route to India.) So as aggressive as the vendors are, I can't imagine they're much different than the vendors of the 1500s or the 1700s, who would have likewise been catering to international travelers. International trade is hardly a post-globalization development.

It's also just a popular shopping spot, for Cairenes, especially its western edge, Al-Muski Street, which is still the best place in Cairo to get bargain prices on linens, dishes, underwear, and other less romantic household items. There are also several still-functioning mosques in this district, as well as residences. So while the concentration of tourists is high, it's not an experience that's been manufactured for their benefit.

I was surprised, when I went to the bazaar in Istanbul, that it was all indoors and felt like a mall. The Khan is less a defined "space" than a city "district." Some of the streets are covered by a combination of plants, bamboo trellises, and balconies that they feel indoors-y, but most of the streets are open. How anyone could live here with all the noise I have no idea, but you can see there are apartments on the upper levels.

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The famous Fishawy's coffeeshop, reportedly open 24/7, uninterrupted, for the last 200 years:

The front of Al-Husayn Mosque, Egypt's holiest mosque (so much so that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter it):

The minaret of the Shaykh Mutahhar Mosque. See the loudspeaker? Most mosques now automate the call to prayer, rather than using a muezzin:

Randomly:

My dad finds a friend:

These two look much better big, so you should click on them!

Coming soon when I have time: Al-Azhar and the Al-Ghouri complex.

I found Midaq Alley.

I had a map, but even so I walked down the main street twice without seeing the tiny side street I needed to turn into to get there. After asking around and being told, more than once, that I'd just passed it, one guy actually got up and led me into it.

We walked a few feet down that street and then he pointed down this alley and said, "Midaq Alley."

There was a boarded up cafe to the right, which they called the "Naguib Mahfouz cafe." This is confusing, though, because there's a cafe in a different part of Cairo called "The Naguib Mafouz Cafe" (as in: that's its official name) and another one, in a still different part of Cairo, that is referred to informally as "the Naguib Mahfouz cafe" because he used to go there every morning to write.

This isn't either one of those; I assume it's called that because it's one he described in his novels. That building on the left is also boarded up.

Back out on the side street, there was a man loading stuff into his shop. When he saw me with my camera he insisted I take his picture. "Egyptians!" he shouted. "Strong!" Everyone in the street cheered.

M