A Little Bit about Egypt

Even though my trip to Egypt was over two weeks ago, the experience is still very clear in my mind, as though it happened yesterday. Cairo leaves such an impression, I doubt I will ever forget the brief trip.

To be sure, having Emily escort me around Cairo was an invaluable advantage. In addition to being a handy-dandy translating machine, Em also explained to me the ins and outs of Egyptian social, economic, political, and modern historical life. She provided an explanation to every baffling social structure, from the nonchalant mysogyny to the patterns of urban sprawl to the complex societal role of the Zabaleen. For anyone wondering what Em has possibly been doing in Cairo for the past THREE YEARS, I am happy to report that she is not only surviving but thriving, putting into practice her education in Int'l Human Rights Law and Arabic, and injecting her characteristic Em-sense of humor into a very serious country. I couldn't have asked for a better guide/friend/protector during this trip!

Obligatory compliments out of the way (I need to make sure I get invited to Tanzania, after all), I'll give a whirlwind retelling of the week. Alot of it was spent just hanging out with Em, Jason, and the ex-pat community. I arrived in Cairo on Saturday night, after weathering Istanbul all day. Em and Jason greeted me as only they would: by hiding behind a column and whispering my name loudly, causing me to swivel my head around uselessly in desperate confusion, until they decided to give me a break and reveal themselves. After two months without family in Turkey, I was overjoyed to see some familiar faces.

My week-long lesson in Egyptian disorganization began in the parking lot. It took us a long time to find Mohammad, their taxi driver, and the airport parking lot felt like a feeding ground for other taxi drivers, who circled us relentlessly; one followed Emily for about 50 feet before Jason finally warded him off. The lack of respect for women, and the refusal to accept the word 'no' (or, as Em says, Helas (sp.?), which means "That's enough!") struck me as appallingly rude.

So far my narrative of Egypt, even in the first twenty minutes after landing, has described Egypt as disorganized, disrespectful, and disagreeable. Like all cultural descriptors (especially from foreigners), it would be overly simplistic of me (and downright wrong) to let the reader think of Egypt only in this way (especially since my experience was so brief and from such a limited perspective). But I can say one thing with relative authority: foreigners are treated only as sources of potentially easy money, regardless of their length of stay in Egypt, their sex, their knowledge of Arabic, their business, or their nationality. If you look like a foreigner, you're treated like a foreigner. This is true of all the touristy places of the world, certainly, but not to the aggressive extent that I saw in Egypt. The taxi drivers were my first taste of this militant cajoling.

"Disorganized" refers to the sprawling layout of Cairo and the city's apparent lack of any city planning, standards, or infrastructure (again, reader be warned, my knowledge of Cairo is opinionated and surface level). This too is obvious from the get-go: Egypt is, after all a desert, so on the drive from the airport into the city, it was astonishing to see fountains and other water-features lining the road--I would later reflect on these unnecessary displays of irrigation as I trudged through the mud streets of Garbage City and witnessed the underdeveloped poverty of a slumtown where drinking water is as noticeably absent as electricity, schools, and sanitation.

Still, from the onset of the trip, I had a tried to keep an open mind. I didn't want my Western evaluation of standards ruin my trip or force an overly judgmental summation of an complex place (the mildly literate reader can discern what became of this attitude though). I knew there were several development problems facing Cairo, so I listened to my sister explain every facet of Cairean society. As we wound through the desert (on a road with a unique characteristic for Egypt: separately-marked lanes), Em and Jason, spurred by my surprise at the taxi drivers' insistent attitudes, detailed the extent of the disrespect they experience on a daily basis. Prompted by the water features, they discussed the unregulated sprawl of Cairo.

As I settled into bed that night, I prepared myself for an educating week in a country so, so different from the United States; one that revealed itself to be the opposite Middle Eastern extreme of Turkey's careful, plodding (plotting) development. After a long 24 hour journey, I let the warm desert air and the thought of ancient sites coax me, easily, to sleep.