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.

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 Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete.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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

..

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:

..

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 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.

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(Although I've gotta say: I do find it amusing that the same Westerners who are critical of the headscarf on principle, who see it as a sign of oppression, come here and are suddenly reaching for any damn thing to put on their head to keep out the wind and the sand.)

(I'd say the same thing to Muslims not-from-Arabia who insist the hijab has always and only been about modesty; i.e. those who claim it's a complete coincidence that what's become known as "Islamic" headgear emerged in a desert climate.)

We got some soda at an underground cafe I like and the waiter served my dad orange juice with a straw. My dad thought it strange that men would be given a straw, which led to a discussion about whether this is a cultural thing or just my dad's own hang-up. K mentioned her (American) guy friend who came over and rifled through our kitchen drawers to FIND a straw — does this disprove my dad's thesis, or does it mean K's friend is actually a woman? She submitted that my dad really can't comment on the gendering of straws because the only thing he usually orders is beer.

We moved on to an outdoor restaurant on the northern tip of Zamalek where the Nile meets up with itself again around the island. The food was good but not fabulous. What I do love here though are NORMAL portions. Nobody is trying to overflow every plate to the point where putting your fork in your food means half of it topples onto the table, and you don't get salad, soup, and six appetizers automatically included with your order. It's so much easier for me to eat like a regular person if I don't feel defeated just looking at the plate, knowing I'm going to end up wasting at least half of it. At home that makes me lose my appetite. It makes me feel like eating is a job.

My dad tried to order a beer there but it was a minor Muslim holiday and they weren't serving alcohol. So he ordered a 'mocktail' instead and they brought him the girliest drink ever in cosmic retribution for his earlier comments about the feminization of beverages.

It had not one but TWO straws. There's an Edward Said analysis in here somewhere.

K and I have joked about having the equivalent of gaydar when it comes to Arabs/Muslims/Egyptians at home. Here, she said, she's actively having to quiet that part of her brain: "I keep thinking hey, that guy's speaking Arabic! and then oh … wait. Or hey I bet that person is Muslim! and then oh … yeah."

Afterwards we walked home along the Nile side of the island and stopped to take a short boat trip on the river. When I was here before it was easy to find a real felucca with no motor, just a sailboat big enough for the captain (who had an oar) and maybe 4 or 5 people. They would take you far enough down the Nile that you'd be outside Cairo and the only thing you'd see would be the silhouettes of palm trees and villages by moonlight. I got irritated enough at not being able to find those that I called X in America and asked him where to go, but he said although he could find one dock he knows if he were here, he had no idea what it was called or how to explain how to get there. In Zamalek and Downtown and in Garden City all the tour boats seem to be motorized and gaudy and loud, which is great if you are 50 people and you want room enough to dance, but sort of overkill for the three of us. BUT, we did it anyway, because it was their first night in Egypt and it seemed the thing to do.

As we were walking home there were lots of people out in the streets, including two boys galloping a horse up and down the sidewalk. It was nice. My dad says it reminds him of Italy when he and my mom lived there in the '60s.

These were taken in central Cairo, standing on the Zamalek side looking towards Imbaba. The mosque you see is in KitKat Square, named for a famous nightclub that stood there in the 1940s. I believe people still call the mosque itself the KitKat mosque, after the club, which I find funny. Behind and beyond KitKat is one of the poorest parts of Cairo, known in the '90s for Islamist activity, though I think that's died down some since then.

The houseboats lined up here are either Cairo's bohemian art district or Cairo's den of vice and sin, depending on who you ask. Naguib Mahfouz made them famous in his novels, particularly Adrift On the Nile, the story of a handful of men (and the occasional woman), members of the former aristocracy passed by after the Revolution, who spent their evenings on the houseboats in a hashish-induced daze. Today they're mostly rented to foreigners, who are either unaware or unconcerned with their reputation, and whose investment in their living arrangements is tenuous enough that they're willing to risk the chance that their home might sink into the river — which has been known to happen now and then. This is unsurprising, considering the boats' dilapidated state. What is surprising is that it doesn't occur more often.

Rumor has it that they were also inhabited by two spies working for the Germans in WWII, men hired by a Hungarian pilot and geographer named Lazlo Almasy who would later serve as inspiration for Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient.

The real Almasy, described by the British as "ugly but cultural and intelligent," might have escaped being tried for war crimes had the spies he hired not attracted attention by spending all their foreign currency "on drink and brothels" in the houseboats: they were, according to one of their interrogators, "too intoxicated with the possession of so much money and too intent upon enjoying the flesh-pots of Egypt in the form of women and wine."

This part of the river is used mostly for tourism and recreation, which can look quite poetic:

And occasionally for advertising, which is less poetic:

And fishing:

Though personally I'd be nervous about eating anything that managed to stay alive in this polluted section of the river — it seems like the result would be something out of science fiction.

I'd rather be this woman, catching a nap in the shade:

I read in a guidebook once that taking a drink from the Nile was, historically, considered an assurance that you would one day return to Egypt. "Today," the book warned, "it's considered a good way of catching bilharzia."

With anyone else that would have been an embarrassing moment, but with him, somehow, it wasn't.

At the time he was playing classical guitar in hotels and restaurants, solo, and I'd figured out since then (thank you, Facebook) that he was one of the few musicians I knew back then who had stayed in Egypt and was now doing music full-time.

Even so, I was pleasantly surprised to see how successful he's become. He gave me directions to the venue where he'd be playing and I assumed it would be some kind of restaurant, because that's how I remembered him and I'm still under the impression that time has stood still here in my absence. But I guess what happens when you have skill and talent and stay in one place for 15 years working on your art, you start selling out concert halls. I got there a little late and had to claw my way up to the balcony because there was no place to sit in front.

Here's a shameful secret: I don't love Spanish music. But he and his band, Flamenca, combined classical Spanish music with classical Oriental music in a way that was riveting even to someone like me, who doesn't know that much about Andalusia. Besides him, on guitar, they had two tabla players, a violinist, a bassist, a keyboardist, a kowla player, and an Arabic vocalist. It was really great, and I realized too late that I'd forgotten my video camera.

Afterwards he and the band went to a coffeeshop downtown, which apparently is a regular ritual while they wait to get paid. When he said "coffeeshop" I think I was picturing something between a diner and Starbucks, but it was a real street ahwa, the kind women usually don't go to, out on the sidewalk with sheesha, coffee, and tea. I asked if it was really okay for me to be there and he said yes, yes, this is an artists' cafe. I looked closer and realized all the posters taped to the walls were for concerts and art gallery shows. The guy at the table next to me was writing poetry or song lyrics, something in verse. And yet someone like me, walking around like a tourist, would never have noticed it was anything but a regular working-class cafe if he hadn't pointed it out. It was packed with men in their shirtsleeves, one-right-next-to-the-other, smoking sheesha at midnight. And it was LOUD, in that very pleasant way I associate with Mediterranean countries in the summertime. Men yelling to each other, yelling to the tea boy, the tea boy yelling to the waiters, the waiters yelling to the customers.

We stayed for a couple hours and I smoked so much sheesha that I came home feeling like my body had become one big hookah pipe. Which isn't as pleasant as it sounds like it probably should be. And then (shocker) slept right through my class this morning.

But what a fun night. And how nice to pick up where you left off over a decade ago.

Today I followed two guys pushing an empty wagon. I have no idea what they're saying. Usually when someone is, for example, riding a donkey cart full of mangoes they will shout "maaaaaaan-goes! maaaaaaan-goes!" …. but since these guys weren't peddling anything in particular, I don't know. I do know that folks will sometimes go through the street asking for donations of used clothing and other objects, which would explain the empty wagon, but I really can't say. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

What I think is interesting is the stylized nature of these public calls, almost like chanting. There are actually two men here, going back and forth, though in the recording they sound like the same person.

Listen.

The most beautiful time I heard something like this was during Ramadan in 1992, in Imbaba. A woman was walking through the alleys, begging, with her young son, who couldn't have been more than four. The boy would call out a sentence or two from the Qur'an and she would respond to each line, almost as a lament, with "God is generous." I can still hear it, and it still leaves a lump in my throat.

I took this from the backseat of the car while we were driving to K's grandfather's grave in The City of the Dead. Those of you who follow my life in minute detail will remember that the last time I was in Egypt was 14 days after his absolutely unexpected death of a heart attack. We rushed to Cairo in a state of shock and stayed for several months. K was a year-and-a-half at the time.

The contrast between then and now has been quite stark. In my mind I left Egypt in one condition — a state of mourning — and so that's how I expected to find it. I know that's irrational since it's been over ten years now, but there are still small moments when I'm taken aback at how they've moved on. Before going to his grave we dropped off a friend of X's second sister and she joked, "Are you sure you don't want to come along and meet my father?" And we all laughed. Which was weird.

Since the grave itself is hard to find (they all look alike, and the back roads aren't marked) they navigate by asking around for the tomb of Abd el-Halim Hafez, a famous Egyptian singer, which is across the 'street' from their family's tomb. This is what we're doing in the video — driving around, asking strangers how to get to this famous dead guy's grave. It was actually kind of funny, like we were desperately searching for Jim Morrison's grave so we could pray for a random citizen buried next to him.

The City of the Dead itself is a sprawling necropolis on the outskirts of Cairo, and thoroughly un-Islamic. Above-ground tombs are a carryover from Pharaonic times (kind of like pyramids for the proletariat). Despite its (English) name, it's increasingly seen a lot of life as housing shortages have forced families to seek residence in the tombs. Typically a family will squat in a neglected tomb, or take over one of a wealthier family, who will pay them to look after it in their absence and to pray for those who are buried below. Sometimes the caretakers' families will be buried in the same tomb, leading to a sort of patron-client relationship that extends into infinity.

Once we managed to find the place, the woman here materialized out of I-don't-know-where, found the person who had the key, let us in, and sent for a boy to come and splash some water on the very throughly dead potted plants inside, which I think was intended as a gesture of respect for the space.

We said al-Fatiha and one of his sisters read from the Qur'an. (Sometimes the caretakers will do that, too.)

What amazes me every time I come here is how desolate it is. Cairo just doesn't do desolate. It's way too crowded.

But even with people living here the roads are usually empty and everything is quiet. Not a gentle-relaxed quiet, but an abandoned-after-the-apocalypse quiet. It's a bit eerie, and not just because it's a cemetery.

One funny thing: since the tombs weren't intended as housing, they don't have electricity. The tombs of the wealthy and famous, though, will sometimes have it because they're decorated with colored lights. Families living near those tombs might steal some of that electricity to power their own, smaller tombs, so they can have lights and a television.

I didn't take pictures or video inside their father's grave, but afterwards we went to Abd el-Halim Hafez's, which, while not exactly touristy, is "public" enough that I could. The caretaker opened it up for us.

The actual bodies are underground. The men are buried on the right and the women on the left. Or maybe it's the other way around? I can't remember. The space in the middle is an open courtyard.

The caretaker showed us how they pull up the floor to take the bodies down, then bolt it shut again. I'm kind of morbidly curious to know what it looks like down there, since they don't use caskets.

Outside again:

National Geographic did a short piece on the City of the Dead. Their video is better than mine.

Also BBC: "Tomb with a view"

Today the bowab came upstairs with a top of mine that had fallen off the clothesline on my balcony. I thanked him profusely, he was very nice, and then said he wanted money. I thought that was strange, because people don't usually ASK to be tipped for small favors like that, but whatever so I gave him a few pounds.

He took it and I started to shut the door and then he called me back. No, he said, it's the first of the month and he wanted his monthly fee. "Adil has it," I told him. (Adil is his brother, the regular doorkeeper; this guy is filling in for a few weeks while Adil is in Aswan.) No, he repeats, this is the first of the month. I need to pay again. "Adil I pay two month," I tell him. No, that was only one month's fee. I pretend not to understand. He knows I'm lying and goes to get the landlord, who lives upstairs.

Seriously? I don't care. We're arguing over $10, which I'm more than happy to pay to a guy who really needs it, who is going to be the first person I scream for if I encounter an intruder (or, more likely, a gecko), and the guy who can potentially make my life really difficult if he decides he doesn't like me.* But when I first got this place I was told by others that the bowab fee I was being quoted was outrageous, more than twice what they normally charge, and that my landlords were probably trying to scam me by making me pay their fee, too. I was told I absolutely under no circumstances should pay this sum again in August, because if I do the landlords will think I'm a gullible foreigner and charge me more for furniture they'll claim I damaged when I move out, or make me overpay the electricity bill.

They have a point. Yesterday the garbage guy came and asked me for the trash fee, which he claimed was twenty pounds. But then my neighbor across the hall opened his door and he told him it was five pounds. "Eh?!" I said. "He five pounds, me twenty?" Okay, he said, he'd charge me five, too. Since I mentioned it. And because that IS the going fee I wanted to shriek, but I let it go, because I wasn't as mad as I was stunned that I'd actually successfully bargained for something.

So I feel the need to do this with the bowab and the landlord, too, at least for the sake of appearances. I'm not worried about losing ten dollars, or honestly even being overcharged for the electricity bill, which is pretty cheap here, too, but I AM worried about being one of those horrible Americans who just goes around dripping cash everywhere without arguing, not realizing that that can be just as offensive as failing to tip at all. When every interaction is loaded with the expectation of future favors being granted or rescinded, a dollar is never just a dollar. You overpay this guy now, it means he owes you later. Do that too much and you're building up a mountain of obligations the other person can never hope to reciprocate, thereby solidifying your dominance over him. Some people thrive on that dynamic, and do it on purpose, making sure they're never the one who owes, only the one who's owed. There's a fine line there between "noble and generous" and "asshole." Since I never know where that line is, these situations always stress me out.

Another example: a few days ago I got a Coke from the kiosk. I took it out of the cooler, paid for it, drank it, and returned the bottle. I've done this hundreds of times and never thought twice about it. This time, the friend I was with discreetly told me what I've been doing is mildly offensive. I should drink it first, then return the bottle, and then pay for it, and that I should hand over the money in a low-key way. I had been treating this as An Official Financial Transaction, you-give-me-soda = I-give-you-cash, but culturally I should have been pretending that they were happy to host me and that the money I give them is just sort of a tip or an expression of appreciation; an afterthought. To be so obvious about paying for something made me seem rude and unappreciative of their hospitality. That would never in a million years have occurred to me if someone hadn't pointed it out. I can see it now, but before it would have seemed like "here, I'm just helping myself to your stuff, and I'll pay you on my own terms, servant."

I met a guy the other day originally from Guatemala but now living in L.A. who finally got his citizenship and was celebrating his right to leave the country by traveling around the world. He wanted to know how much a cab from the airport was. I told him twenty pounds. He said okay, I got screwed. I said yeah but I don't think it's malevolent? It's like there's a sliding scale operating all over the country; you're charged by what it's assumed you can afford. Tourism is a major industry and we're how a lot of people earn their living. He agreed with this.

But that only works if you're here for a couple weeks, if it's understood you don't know A from B, and if there's no expectation of an ongoing relationship. What confuses me more is the shopkeeper around the corner who saw me admiring some skirts in his window the other night. He invited me to have tea with him and his nephews. Do I politely refuse, not wanting to put him out? Or do I politely accept, not wanting to turn down his hospitality? Am I _expected_ to buy something afterwards, or does he merely hope I will?

We start to chat and it turns out he's really nice, a lovely older man who speaks English with a slight British accent. I tell him my father's coming in two weeks and he wants to take us to see whirling dervishes and the mosque near the Khan, even invites us to his house in Alexandria. If I take him up on this, which I'd actually like to do, how do I go about paying him? To say how much do you charge? would be unthinkable; we're having tea; we're pretending we're friends. On the other hand I would rather pay him directly than to waste half an afternoon being pressured to buy something from his friend of a friend who will slyly give him a kickback from my purchase while he carries on with the charade that he's doing this out of pure generosity. It feels cheap and cynical to worry about that, but stupid and naive not to.

So how to address it? When X's sister paid the driver she hired for the day she made me get out of the car before she did so because the conversation was so awkward she didn't want to embarrass him any more than was strictly necessary, or maybe she was worried I'd say something stupid. Neither of them wanted to admit our pleasant day driving around town had, at root, been a matter of us hiring him, that our whole facade of a relationship was in fact marked by hierarchy.

Americans don't care. They'll say right out loud HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST? like they can buy their way into anyone's good graces. What's troubling is that in a third world economy like this one, they often can. But that doesn't mean anyone's in love with that dynamic.

In the end I paid the bowab. Of course. And now I'm all worried anyway that I argued with him in the first place. Do I look miserly? Ungrateful? I'm especially embarrassed that I gave him a few pounds for bringing my top upstairs. I honestly thought that's what he wanted, but now I know I look like I was shitting on his good deed by giving him this tiny amount of money for it, which said both "I'm paying off my obligation to you" and "that obligation is worth almost nothing to me, or I would have given you more."

I could, no lie, spend my entire summer torturing myself over things like this.

* This article's tone is offensive. The information is basically true, though. Kitty was deported once because her bowab fed someone in power information about the number of men she was entertaining in her apartment.

And the view was amazing:

This is the restaurant. If you look at pictures of Cairo proper, you can see why building something like this is such a feat: green spaces are so rare, and the city is already appropriating the desert to make room for housing. I remember I used to find it strange that the Cairo Zoo was such a popular picnic destination for families — people would be stretched out for the day on tiny little patches of space between the sidewalk and the zebra cages — but it makes sense if you consider it’s one of the few places with trees and grass. This is like that only way more so.

And the FOOD. Oh my GOD. Connor, you would have died. I am more indifferent to food than anyone I know — I’ve had this journal for seven years and have made, what, three posts about food? four, tops? — so believe me when I say that if *I* think it was incredible, it was incredible.

This was just the meat. Each of those tins contained a different dish: lamb, goat, beef, fish, chicken made five different ways, kofta, stuff I don’t even know the name of…

There was another room full of salads and vegetables, and a third full of pastries and desserts. On Fridays it was all-you-can-eat buffet. I felt like I was in one of those Middle Eastern medieval folktales where the humble servant comes to ask a request of the decadent sultan but has to interrupt him in the middle of his feast. (I, of course, playing the part of the decadent sultan.)

Actually I’m lying. THIS was the meat:

Seriously, it was a stupid amount of food. And then afterwards they bring you tea.

Later we went outside for a while.

At some point Laila decided to co-opt my scarf:

That’s X’s mom beside us. She was very mod in her younger years. It’s an ongoing joke that no one knows how old she is or what her real hair color is.

Laila and Omar go for a climb on the faux-latticework:

A waiter interrupts, offering to lift them over:

Omar goes for it, but Laila books for the stairs. When the waiter gives Omar a big kiss on the forehead her suspicions are confirmed, and she scolds her brother for being too trusting. (She explained to me that her baba told her that only mamas and babas are supposed to kiss you.)

As it got later the park started filling up. It was almost entirely Egyptians, not tourists, which surprised me. X’s sister pointed out that there were so many young (presumably unmarried) couples, much more so than you would have seen a few years ago.

Almost all of the women are wearing hijab now, a huge difference from when I was here in the past. Accordingly it’s become less meaningful as a religious symbol, and people are always complaining that it’s become just another fashion statement, something some women wear with tight jeans, sleeveless tops, or a lot of make-up.

On that note, here’s a funny tidbit: I went into the bathroom while I was at this restaurant and noticed a woman’s long black evening gloves abandoned by the side of the sink. I assumed they belonged to a niqabi woman, but the girl who came out of the stall was young, maybe seventeen, wearing jeans and a heavy metal T-shirt. I wanted to ask her if she thought we should take them to the reception (was there a reception?) or if there was some other way of dealing with lost items, but that was too many Arabic words for me so I just smiled instead and decided the woman, whoever she was, would eventually remember and come back for them. But then this heavy metal girl pulled a niqab out of her bag! And started putting it on! Ah! The gloves were hers! I like to think I’m immune from succumbing to hijab stereotyping, but I really hadn’t expected this girl, who looked less conservative than my own American teenage daughter does, to be the one so concerned with modesty she wouldn’t show her hands in public. That’ll learn me.

My instructor said it was the strongest and longest she'd felt since 1992. The earthquake of 1992 is to Cairo as Katrina is to New Orleans in a lot of ways — it was a moment when the government committed epic fail. Hundreds of people were killed while the administration basically stood around and said, "Gee, that's unfortunate." The Muslim Brotherhood stepped in, providing tents and food and water for people in poor neighborhoods, and the moment became a kind of catalyst or rallying point for the Islamist movement for the next five years or so, the closest Egypt's come to having a revolution since Mubarak's been in power.

Last night I went to the restaurant/pub around the corner and spent a couple hours talking to two journalists, both in their twenties, working for the foreign press. One of them said he wakes up every day and wonders how this city works at all.

The movie was Hassan and Markus, with Omar Sharif and Adel Imam. Omar Sharif played a Muslim cleric who denounced Islamism, had his house firebomed, and was put into some kind of witness protection program where he was given a Christian identity. Adel Imam played a Christian who denounced pro-Christian violence, had his car blown up, and was put into the same program, posing as a Muslim. They unwittingly move into apartments across the hall from each other and their families become friends, each thinking they are "secretly" the same religion as the other. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Best line: After a building is blown up in a terrorist attack, some government PR guy trying to do damage control has a meeting with the press and says, "We are happy to report 75 were killed, all of them Egyptians! Not a single foreigner was harmed in this event!" The audience was rolling.

I really liked it and thought it was funny, but it was definitely a "message" film, with the Muslim (but really Christian) saving the lives of the wife and daughter of the Christian (but really Muslim) at the end, after their house is set on fire, and ending with both families bravely walking arm-in-arm through a riot scene between Muslims and Christians who are all screaming "Allahu akbar!" and "We will die for the cross!" and beating each other with sticks.

Not that I'm intolerant of "message" films. I was raised on afterschool specials, after all. But this one had a too-tight equation of the Muslim and Christian experience in Egypt, which I think is apples and oranges in a lot of ways. Coptic Christians are facing persecution for their religion, i.e. as minorities. Muslims' complaints against the government are broader, and more political than religious, though they take an Islamist form and use Islamist rhetoric. To go from one scene of the Muslim trying to muddle through a Christian prayer to another of the Christian trying to muddle through a Muslim prayer, and so on over and over, ignores the different social and economic position of both groups, in Egypt and internationally, reducing everything to a matter of faith and fanaticism, full stop. Maybe there was more I was missing because my Arabic is so bad and it wasn't subtitled, but I don't think so.

Although, as I said, I did like it. Especially because I like Adel Imam.

Lila Abu-Lughod has some good articles on the way Egypt, through its government-controlled media (which includes the censorship of film), has controlled the portrayal of Islam and Islamists. She's worth looking up if you have access to a university library.

Housing in Egypt isn't, typically, something you rent, or take out a mortgage on. You either have an apartment or you don't. If you don't, you live with your parents or your in-laws. If you do, you either bought it outright, or you are living in someone else's apartment but with rent control your payments are negligible. X's family, for example, pays 15 pounds a month (about $3), which was the going rate for a three-bedroom under Sadat. Legally they can't be kicked out for three generations.

These laws might be changing, I'm told, but in the meantime they are the reason many apartments sit empty, or are only rented to foreigners. As an American, I have no legal right to stay in a rented apartment for generations, and my landlord can charge whatever s/he likes. I had a landlord once who flipped. out. when she realized I was married to an Egyptian; she'd rented to me alone and was convinced, once she learned of his existence, that we were going to park there until our grandchildren grew up. She would show up every day and make our lives miserable until we finally moved out.

This situation results in a couple things. One is that it's not the norm to pay thirty or forty percent of your income in housing every month, the way Americans do. This sounds good, but it makes people very sensitive to food prices, since salaries are low and that's where most of a lower-class family's income goes. In the U.S. if you lose your job or otherwise have financial problems you can often downscale your housing, and it will make a real difference in what you have left to take home. Here, that's not really an option. (I realize I'm glossing over what "downscaling" might involve for American families who were never living in a mansion in the first place, but you see what I mean by this.)

The other issue is that there is a housing shortage, in spite of so many apartments sitting empty. Because no one rents temporarily, and because affordable permanent housing is hard to find, and because most couples expect to have their own apartment when they get married, and because dating is mostly taboo, you end up with a lot of young, idle men still living with their parents into their 30′s, unable to get married or even have a serious long-term romantic relationship, working at jobs far below their skillset and unable to save any money. This is a huge social problem with no good solution. Changing the rent control laws would throw thousands, maybe millions, of people out of their homes. But the current situation is unsustainable, too, since Egypt's population is young.

I had one day to find an apartment and was really stressed out about this, since it's always been a headache at home. Here, though, I found there were tons of available flats, that is, tons available to me, a foreigner (see above). Some of the prices, though, were insane. There were landlords asking over ten thousand dollars a month. I didn't understand how this was even possible (it's Cairo, right, not Manhattan), but I was told that it was summer, and families from the Arab Gulf come here on vacation and drive up all the prices.

My sister-in-law, however, had unbelievable stamina. She spent ten hours with me, in near-hundred-degree heat, going from flat to flat and haggling in Arabic with all the simsars. Most of the places, including the one I ended up with, were bigger than what I needed, but in Egypt it's not common to live alone, so finding a studio or one-bedroom is rare. I also knew I didn't want a share, which I could have gotten through my school, because K will be coming next month. I also wanted to live in an expat area, again because K will be coming, and not try to be creative and live in someplace like Imbaba again (which would be impossible anyway, as a foreign woman without a husband). We looked at several that were very old and not kept up well, which I was willing to take if necessary, but when we saw this one the contrast was so great that I knew I wanted it. At first I couldn't afford it, but after aforementioned haggling I could. I think they were willing to go lower because it's only a two-month lease. It is extremely clean — certainly cleaner than my apartment in Boston — and most of the furniture is new. The landlords are a young couple who live upstairs. School is a five-minute commute by taxi.

I'm very happy with this. And very relieved. I had warned K. beforehand of a mile-long list of things she'd have to be prepared to put up with, like having minimal hot water and having to do our laundry in the sink, which isn't so bad but can seem worse when you're fourteen and it wasn't your idea to come here anyway. But things have been fine, better than I could have hoped for or expected.

Last Friday I met K’s cousins, Omar (3) and Laila (5), the children of X’s sister. They’re growing up in Colorado, but come to Egypt in the summers to keep up their Arabic. K’s never met them, and unfortunately will miss them this year, too, because they’re going back to the U.S. at the end of the month and she’s not coming to Cairo until mid-August. They are adorable children. Energetic, amusing, and astonishingly well-behaved, even at times when they’d have every excuse not to be.

These pictures were taken in X’s mom’s apartment in Heliopolis.

This is Omar’s bubby. You can’t tell from the photo, but it barks. Incessantly. It’s supposed to walk, too, but that bit broke. This doesn’t stop Omar from putting it on a leash and shouting ta’ala! (come on!) at it. May Allah reward him for his efforts.

Can I take a moment and gush about my new camera? I’m still learning landscapes, but for close-up portraits I love it. This was taken one-handed while she was sitting on my lap and I was holding the cards in my other hand, auto-focus, auto-flash, no editing afterwards. It might be the best picture I’ve ever taken.

Playing with (and occasionally abusing) their auntie, X’s youngest sister:

Their parents debated about where to raise them. They were born in the U.S., but their mother (X’s sister) originally wanted them to grow up here in Egypt. They transferred back to Cairo, but Omar kept getting sick, so they transferred to the U.S. again. After a few years they started to talk, and she realized they were playing together in English. So, their baba stayed in the U.S. this summer, and she took the children back to Egypt for a few months so they will keep speaking Arabic.

It's hard, she said, in the U.S., because the only language schools are on weekends, and no one takes them seriously. "I always compare their education to mine," she said. She and X and their sisters went to French language schools in Egypt and Kuwait, became fluent in Arabic at home and on the street, and picked up English because everyone does. There are a few schools in the States that provide that kind of education, but they're mostly for diplomats' kids, they're rare, they're private, and they're expensive. Coming back to Egypt for extended trips is kind of a pain, but she doesn't want them to grow up monolingual.

She also, as she put it, “wanted them to get used to seeing the zebel boy” while they were still young. Cairo’s zebeleen are the city trash collectors. All Christians — in part because it’s nasty work and they are the oppressed minority here; in part because the work relies on pigs to sift through trash — they collect garbage from every apartment in the city and take it back to the Moqattam, a hill on the edge of Cairo, where they pick through it for valuables. Cairo has tried to replace them with a more modern sanitation system, but that would be expensive, would rob many many people of their livelihood, would take money out of Egypt and put it into foreign companies, and in the end wouldn’t be as efficient. (The zebeleen fought hard against a proposed recycling program a few years ago, because once people start separating their cans from their bottles they might realize that whoops! that’s where my wedding ring went!)

Obviously this is really dirty work, and the people who do it are, too. X told me that when he was a child he was told not to touch the railings in his apartment building because the zebel boy had touched them. When his sister says she wants her children to see this, she’s talking about a whole range of things: the poverty on the streets, the waiting in line for every little thing, the heat and traffic and noise and cars held together by scraps of wire and all the other evidence of grime and human suffering that is hidden from view in American suburbs. We were both worried that K., at fourteen, is already old enough that she’ll be annoyed at these things, hate Egypt, and won’t want to come back.

But there are trade-offs. I told her I enjoyed being here when K. was little because Egypt was so friendly to children, and she said oh really? because her experience was just the opposite. We compared stories and decided maybe the key factor was being a foreigner. In Egypt I was the American mother and everyone wanted me to have a good experience here, welcome to Egypt! your daughter is beautiful! but she’s just seen as another Egyptian mom. In the U.S., however, the reverse is true, for both of us.

Also, in the U.S., she’s able to control everything her children are exposed to. This is funny to me, because so many U.S. Muslims, including native-born American Muslims, complain that the U.S. is a den of sin and vice and it is hard to bring up good Muslim children in Gomorrah. For her, however, the U.S. is a country where you can put parental controls on the television (“not like Egypt, where they can look at anything”), the food in all the restaurants is clean, and you can enroll them in clubs and classes where everything is well-organized and you know the people they’ll be seeing there. And the only Arabic they hear is the Arabic their parents decide to use. Yesterday she told Laila not to do something and Laila came back with why she was going to do it anyway and then flipped her hand up, in a classic Egyptian hand gesture, and said “fi eh?” Literally it means “is what?” but its meaning is a sarcastic “what’s the issue?” or “do you have a problem with that?” I burst out laughing and Laila ran off and her mother said, “See, this is the kind of thing she hears here.” The other day, she said, her son called someone the son of a dog.

It’s interesting to hear this perspective because I come from the opposite place. One of the things I first loved about Egypt, and one of the reasons I initially wanted to raise my children here, was that it wasn’t sanitized like the U.S. is. Children are out at all hours, in every public space, exposed to everything that adults see. I thought that was healthy, and a nice alternative to what I saw as the hypocrisy of so many American parents, who live one kind of life in front of their children and another one once the kids are asleep or at the babysitter’s. But I can also see the appeal of having precision control over the way you parent, especially if you’ve grown up without that.

An Egyptian scratched Aladdin's lamp and a genie emerged, offering him a wish.

"I wish for a bridge to the United States," the Egyptian said.

"Hmm," the genie said. "That's much too difficult. Can you wish for something else?"

"Okay," the Egyptian said. "Then I wish for Hosni Mubarak to be out of power."

"Hmm," the genie said. "Would you like the bridge to be one lane, or two?"

======

2.

Mubarak is sitting with [presidential chief of staff] Zakaria Azmi and asks him, "Who is a better leader, me or Gamal Abdl-Nasser?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Nasser feared the Russians."

"Good," Mubarak says. "Then who is a better leader, me or Anwar Sadat?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Sadat feared the Americans."

"Good," Mubarak says. "Then who is a better leader, me or Omar ibn al-Khattab?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Omar feared God."

The flight out of Amsterdam was delayed, so I spent a couple hours talking to Kareem, a tour guide from Luxor who was returning from a business trip to Norway. This is always a little weird. Egyptian men, no surprise, are more willing to talk to a female foreigner than are Egyptian women; whenever this happens I have to decide whether to chat with them (slutty) or rebuff them (ugly American). There’s no graceful third option, so it depends on how social I’m feeling, and how aggressive they are. Kareem, however, seemed safe enough, and turned out to be quite funny, too.

He asked me where I was from and I said America. He said he has American friends in Riverside, California, and that he likes American people very much. I said yes, but we have a very bad government. He said yes, that’s true, but it’s the same in Egypt: good people saddled with Hosni Mubarak for president. “For thirty years! He is like king.” We talked about Mubarak’s sons: Gamal, who’s being groomed to take over if Hosni ever finally dies, and the other one, the younger one who single-handedly controls Egypt’s entire beef industry.

He told me he was Muslim. “But not one of those beard guys,” he clarified. “I am Muslim modern,” pronouncing it mo-DAYRN, which made it sound European and therefore modern x 2. He complained that with the Islamists it’s always “haram, haram, haram,” but then they blow up a bus full of schoolchildren and you tell me what’s haram, drinking a little wine or killing babies? I had to agree.

Also haram: the way Bush and Mubarak are good friends, “basically same man,” and that both work their people so hard they don’t have time to care about politics, much less protest. He complained about rising prices in Egypt. He said his friend from Riverside, California, visited him in Luxor and said the news in the Middle East was completely different from the American news. Actually I’d seen something on CNN the day before I left, about major news outlets cutting or closing their news bureaus in Iraq because they were too expensive to maintain. And I’d thought expensive for Americans, yes, because they need protection and translators and drivers and Jordanian hotels. But Arab journalists don’t require all that, so they’ve continued to report on a war Americans halfway believe is routine or winding down.

“Bush does everything for candy,” he said.

For candy? Um. Was that a metaphor for something — maybe Bush’s simple, childlike demeanor? I tried to parse this and come up with an appropriate response, but he saw I was confused.

“Candy Rice,” he explained.

“Oh!”

I hadn’t thought about how Condaleeza Rice must be perceived here. An older, never-married female with such a prominent position in the government, obtained via her personal friendship with Bush? That’s fodder for rumors enough in the U.S., but here it must seem incredibly strange.

Then he changed the subject; started talking about the weather. He said it was 38 degrees in Cairo today.

“What is that in Fahrenheit?”

“Hell.”

But he doesn’t care, because he lives in Luxor and has a boat that he rents to tourists and every day he can swim in the Nile and keep cool.

“You don’t worry about bilharzia?”

“This is Cairo broblem.”

I love how Egyptians not-from-Cairo talk about it the way Americans not-from-New York talk about New York. The crime! The traffic! The weather! The overcrowding! The corruption! Why would anyone live there!

We went back to our gate and found they were just beginning to board. All rows, all classes, the strollers and the wheelchairs simultaneously with the business travelers, in one big good-natured mob. It was like a bit of Egypt in Amsterdam, and exacerbated after we landed in Cairo, where it took two hours of waiting in line at customs before finally making it out of the gate at 5:30 in the morning, 3½ hours after I told X’s sister I would be arriving.

I think she must have been standing there for most of the night, watching for me, which made me feel terrible, but in true Egyptian fashion she described this as no problem whatsoever, why if there was a finer way to spend an evening she didn’t know it, thank you to ME for giving her an excuse to do so, and so on with the niceness-on-steroids. This, I think, is 90% of what makes otherwise crazy-making aspects of Egypt tolerable: that sense of we’re all in it together, plus a dose of it’s kind of humorous, if you think about it. I felt it in line at customs, too, where I ended up in conversations with eight different strangers, something that would never happen at home.

It was nice to be picked up by someone I knew, rather than the school taxi, but by her in particular. Of X’s three sisters she’s the one I’ve talked to the least since he and I divorced, but really the one I know the best. She was living with him, and his aunties, in Egypt when he and I first met. (The other two were younger, and still in Kuwait with their parents.) So we’ve known each other since we were eighteen and nineteen, before either of us were married or had kids or finished college.

She dropped me at the wrong/different hotel and said to call her in the morning to go flat-hunting but I totally slept too long and the next day was Friday so everything was closed so I kind of screwed myself there and ended up paying for an extra day at the hotel, but everything worked out in the end and I’m now happily installed in an apartment in Zamalek.

Yesterday I went into the kitchen and smelled something rotten and instantly panicked, thinking I’d left out some food to spoil when I was trying to be so careful about that kind of thing. After a minute I realized I’d left the window open; what I was smelling was Cairo. People make fun of me for liking that (it’s kind of like dried urine + motor oil, baked in a long slow dry heat) but they say smell is the strongest of the five senses and this one takes me back to being nineteen. Not that that was an easy year, but it was an intense one, the year, among other things, that the idea of K. first started to take shape.

Me, in Arabic: I have combuter. I have DSL. Thing from wall to combuter not long. I want long. Have you?
Bored employee, in perfect British English: Oh, you mean an extension cord?

I need to write a Serious Post about underemployment here, and why it's one of the Biggest Social Problems in this country.

But now I'm home and watching Good Morning Vietnam because it's one of two things on in English besides the news. Lord I despise this movie. Oh Mister America you so funny I would love you occupation of my country if only all Americans like you, ha ha Mister Funny Man.

Also? If I signed up for a language course and my instructor threw out the textbook and decided instead to teach me phrases such as "slip me some skin, bro!" I would consider myself justified in bombing the cafe where he takes his morning coffee.

I think I'm going to switch back to the Arabic cooking show. I don't even watch cooking shows at home (except Top Chef) but I'm supposed to be learning food words this week. New vocabulary included "hibiscus tea," "zucchini with bechamel sauce," and "beef and eggplant casserole." Terms I'm sure I'll use every day.

Speaking of food, here is a shop:

And here is some meat:

It was sunset and you could hear the call to prayer all over the city.

This is a view of the old wall, built in 1087. Most of it’s gone, but you can see remnants of it here, in the lower part of the frame.

Cairo is the third-most crowded city the world, after Calcutta and Gaza City. I tried to take pictures capturing the scale of it, but without a wide-angle lens it’s impossible. Imagine putting six or seven of these photos next to each other side-by-side and you’ll get an idea.

This neighborhood is one of the oldest, though not one of the worst. Even here, though, you can see the near-total lack of vegetation. The unrelenting monotony of the brown and gray wears on you after a while.

But the sunset is always pretty. Everything blends together under the same light, and you know it’s about to become cooler. Al-hamdulillah.

I am as prepared as I can possibly be, which is new for me. I remember going once with a guitar case full of dirty laundry and my handbag. Even the hippie backpackers schlepping in from Bangkok had their act together more than I did. This trip, however, has been planned for a year, which, combined with my age, and Connor's ability to imagine 47 worst case scenarios and 52 possible workarounds for each, has left me feeling like I have a bit of a buffer between myself and total catastrophe.

It's still Egypt, though. The land where nothing ever works. FOR EXAMPLE: The school where I'll be taking my Arabic class offered to arrange transportation from the airport, to book a hotel for my first few days, and to help me find an apartment. That was nice of them. By Friday, though, I still hadn't heard from them, despite e-mailing them multiple times. I called X for other reasons and in the course of the conversation mentioned I wasn't sure if I had a a place to stay yet, so he called the hotel on the spot and asked. Naturally, they'd never heard of me. They told him to "call back tomorrow and see if there are any updates," which X explained is Egyptian for "I am trying to get rid of you, O Person With A Request." In other words, I had no reservation.

He called his sisters in Cairo and they arranged for a driver to pick me up at the airport and take me to their place in Heliopolis for the first night. Since one of his sisters and her kids are visiting for the summer there are already 5 people in their 2-bedroom apartment. They told me that this didn't matter, that of course I wouldn't be an imposition, which in Egypt either means "of course you won't be an imposition" or "actually you will be an imposition, but we can never say that out loud." I can repeat and rephrase this question 60,000 times and the answer will never change, so I went ahead and agreed to do that. It was only for a night, and it would be nice to see people I know and trust first thing, and to stay in a place that is familiar to me after so many years away.

So I e-mailed the school telling them I DON'T need a ride from the airport, and asking if it was possible for them to help me find an apartment BEFORE July 6, when classes start. I said my daughter was coming later so I don't want shared accommodation, so I don't need to wait for other students to arrive before I start looking. This morning I finally get an e-mail reply, telling me that yes, they will help me find shared accommodation after the 6th, that they will pick me up at the airport, and confirming my reservation at the wrong hotel for the wrong dates. "We are looking forward to meeting you. Enjoy your trip to Egypt!"

I swear, it's like gaslighting.

Just as I was working up my righteous anger, however, one of X's sisters e-mailed me saying she'd called the school. She gave me all of the same information, only with a different spin. They hadn't booked the wrong hotel, they'd booked a different one. She was going to meet me at the airport "just in case" the school forgot. The school would help me find an apartment, but she would help me look, too, in case the school was busy, or too slow. And so on. "We are looking forward to seeing you. Enjoy your trip to Egypt!"

See how that makes it a different story?

This is what worries me: that all my careful preparation is counterproductive. My first trip to Egypt I didn't know anyone, only spoke five words of Arabic, didn't have a cell phone, and had less than a thousand dollars to get me through six months. But that lack of preparation was more than compensated for by a willingness to wing it. When I was 19 life was something that just sort of happened TO me, and my job was to not die or offend anybody as I was getting through it. The foreigners I knew in Egypt who liked it were the ones who had no pre-conceived ideas about how things were supposed to go. The ones who hated it were the list-makers who brought hand sanitizer and didn't drink the water. By my last trip I was becoming one of the latter, and I could feel the shift. I was finishing up my master's and had less patience for plans and agendas always, inevitably falling apart. Spending three days trying to get my visa stamped wasn't charming anymore. Neither was waiting at home watching black-and-white television while X "ran out" to mail a letter… only he'd run into someone he knew… so he'd have to have coffee at the ahwa with them ("what? do you want me to be rude?")… and then the post office would be closed for lunch… so he'd have to drive across Cairo to another branch… and pretty soon it was 8 hours later and my day was gone. I distinctly remember looking down at the desert from the airplane as we flew back home and thinking good, having not a trace of nostalgia, because I was so over the red tape, the endless waiting for everything, the heat, and being told "maalesh" — it doesn't matter — whenever I complained. I was becoming one of those Americans I hated my first time around and I just wanted to be back in a country where that bitchy I-said-I-wanted-it-like-THIS attitude wasn't unusual or a liability.

Anyway. This is my challenge. All the time, but especially in Egypt. To be all Christian-Protestant-work-ethic when I'm preparing for something, but Buddhist once it happens. We'll see how it goes.