Egypt
Dateline: Cairo
Jack (August 2000)
I caught a red eye special on Olympic Airlines to Cairo following the end of the SIGIR conference in Athens on Thursday night. Cairo was incredible and intense and most of all exhilarating. It is truly one of the world's great cities, in terms of historical artifacts, cultural manifestations, and diversity, but clearly not in terms of material wealth, modernity, and development in the Western sense. 16 million people, in one vibrant mass of humanity. It surpasses Shanghai in so far as these people have more freedom and less controls imposed on them, and it definitely shows, unbelievably crazy driving habits---nay, excesses---to name but one example. It turns out that I visited in the hottest season where temps routinely exceed 40 deg C (110 deg F). Locals tried to console me by saying that down in Luxor near the Aswan dam, it regularly tops 50 deg C (122 deg F). As a result, there is more activity in the streets at 11:00 at night than there is at 11:00 in the morning. Shops are still open and many families go out window shopping once the late evening cool settles down upon the town. Curiously enough, most international flights are scheduled to arrive around 2:00 a.m. That's when mine did. I figure there are four reasons they do this: first, there are no masses of Egyptians rushing to catch domestic or local flights at this time, second, there is much less traffic on the road into town, third, the town and the 1,000 minarets that adorn her mosques have a fairy tale appearance to them when lit up this time of the night, and, of course, fourth, temps are more moderate. Some of the highlights for me included spending an entire day out in and around the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara (the latter described as the world's greatest archeological site), taking a sailboat out on the Nile at sunset along with Ashok, a fellow visiting from Lucknow, India whom I ran into at a street side stand selling charcoal-grilled corn (on the cob), and spending an afternoon in the bazaars of old Cairo, sipping mint tea, examining the spices, metal utensils, and mother-of-pearl jewelry boxes and picture frames found there (to name just a few), not to mention visiting a couple of famous several-hundred-year-old mosques, and climbing their minarets high above the streets below for a breath-taking view of the city. It is clearly a magical city, one which is astoundingly safe, even at 2:00 a.m., which was often when I found myself returning to the Cosmopolitan from dinner! I have never had more people sincerely welcoming me to their country and city as I had in Cairo. One pair of fellows went out of their way to tell me that I had some notes visible in my shirt pocket, which I might wish to conceal.
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Cairo Skyline from Minaret |
Child Labor -- Carpets for Sale ... |
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Back Street Cafe -- Hibiscus, anyone? |
Market Place Cafe -- with more than caffe. |
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Hawkers' Gate |
British-Indian Couple before Pyramids |
I will leave you with a picture painted by the individual entrepreneurial spirit of Cairo, as well as the sadness of a city that sometimes shows little compassion for her lower strata. One night when I was walking back to my hotel and thinking about dinner, around 11:00 p.m., thousands of people were out on the street, Qasr El-Nil, walking from shop to shop and generally enjoying the moderating temperatures. Others had set up unlicensed 'stations' on the sidewalk in front of the shops in order to sell sun glasses, flowers, watches, basically anything imaginable. At one point a police vehicle could be seen at the end of the block and police officers were trying to apprehend those without licenses selling on the street in this manner. One could see hawker after hawker picking up his wares upon a piece of plywood or in a roll-up mat, then disappearing into the nearest alleyway. It was when I got down to the end of the street when I saw her: an elderly Moslem women, covered head to toe in a full length chador, on her knees crying as if she had just lost her only child. Beside her were two trays of eggs, with a yellow liquid flowing from them down the sidewalk and into the street. Almost all of them had been smashed just minutes before by police batons. Here was this woman, up in her years, trying to support her family by some "petite-commerce" and in only a matter of a few seconds lost perhaps a week or more's worth of income, thanks to the destruction wreaked upon her by these uncaring officials. She looked as though she were dying of grief. A few of the passers by offered her a small bill or two, but the mental anguish on the portion of her face that remained uncovered was nothing short of heart-wrenching. Such is life in what is the world's most ancient, most bustling of cities, cradle to modern civilizations.