It’s a Small World

Stuff we encountered while out and about in Egypt that was memorable

If I had to describe Egyptian cities with one word I would say “hectic”. Cairo in particular is a wild swirl of street vendors, classy shops, horses, smog, shisha bars, beggars, mini busses, ancient taxies, pastries, all overlaid with the smell of sewer and smog, and the constant cacophony of horns. Add the Islam holiday Ramadan to the mix, and you have festive lights strung between dusty buildings and trees, kids setting off hundreds of fireworks, and every evening at 5:50 the streets are filled with tables and chairs and food as people break their fast for the day. Hundreds and thousands of people, eating food out in the street. Not such great food either, but it’s free. All morning the restaurants have been cooking and compiling large plates of food for anyone who needs it. At 5:00 they set up the tables, and the chairs get steadily filled with the impoverished and those who are traveling and can’t reach home. Food is set out, and now all that must be done is wait for the evening prayer call. When the last haunting notes die away, the whole city starts eating. It’s almost surreal. No matter where you are, you stop what you’re doing and eat. We have waited for our drivers, for shop keepers, for Airport Check In counters to reopen, and at security for people to eat. Once when we were still on the road, our driver stopped at an intersection to receive juice, dates and a plate of food from a few random passersby so he could be poised and ready when the call came.

Beggars

Those pesky things that make you both furious and break your heart. You want to be able to just say no, because obviously you can’t give to 100 people in one evening, but it makes you feel like the biggest, most entitled jerk to shake your head and shoo them off when you know good and well you have the means to help. It made me feel slightly better, knowing they were all getting a massive meal every evening. Heath had one funny encounter, a woman and her kids asked him for food as he went by. Incidentally she was sitting at a feast table, with three different meals in front of her. He looked at the meals, she looked at the meals, and actually had the grace to feel a little foolish. I guess it becomes a habit.

We did a lot of eating on street corners, as Ramadan had shut down quite a few dining rooms. This of course made us an easy target for the kid beggars, and we were continually harassed. Sometimes we gave them some food, sometimes we didn’t. Occasionally, a restaurant owner would chase them off, but all in all, it was rather bothersome, if sometimes sorta funny. They were pretty cute, and we had some good times visiting with them, even as they doggedly asked each and every one of us for something.

Animals

Absolutely everywhere you look there is a dog or a cat, and probably both. Never have I ever seen so many roving animals in a city. Or the country, or I guess anywhere at all. Adorable puppies, dogs with clumpy tails, cats who looked sleek and well fed and one that had a badly mangled tail that someone nicknamed “Meat Stick”. Unfortunately Meat Stick was a very sociable, rubby sort of cat. They slept anywhere and everywhere, and the multitudes walked around them. A cat climbed up Mt Sinai with us, mostly, I think, cause she liked my chips. Our favorite Kazaz restaurant had a cat or two that hung out under the grills, and occasionally they’d get some chunks of meat tossed down. One persistently tried to leap into the bun bin that was resting on the sidewalk, but wasn’t able as long as I was around.

Traffic

Basically just put the traffic from your local shopping town in a blender and switch it on high. Voila! Egypt. I guess in one way the traffic is very “woke”. You drive whatever speed you want, slow or fast, no matter, you drive in whichever lane you want, or if you prefer, use two. You don’t slow much for pedestrians, instead they are expected to weave their way between +- 4 lanes of flowing traffic and pop out unscathed on the opposite side of the street. I call this the traffic dance, and must admit I really enjoyed it! There’s a bit of an art involved, knowing just when to proceed or wait as the vehicles fly past within a foot or so of your very vulnerable self. They toot to let you know they see you, or perhaps because they want someone else to know something. Whatever the case, tooting is a must, and I suppose if your horn malfunctioned you might as well just give up and die. Definitely it’s every bit as important as your brakes.

Grime

But maybe the most impressive to me was the dust and grime that coats the city, and the thick smog in the air. I had a great desire to attack the whole city with a pressure washer and see all the hidden beauty come to life. You could see that under the filth there were majestic old buildings from Cairo’s glory days. Buildings with color and delicate scrollwork, now mouldering under a layer of grime. But if one can’t save the beggars, how much less the buildings?