Egypt - Day 4

I made it! Four flights, one across the Atlantic, and I made it with my luggage and sanity intact, for which I was very grateful. The trip itself wasn’t that eventful. I spent most of the time getting to know the other Middle East travelers I was sitting with. I can report that airline food on European flights is actually pretty nice.

We arrived in Cairo in the middle of the day. The first thing I noticed was a large sign next to the passport line politely warning us that drug-dealing in Egypt carries the death penalty. Good to know. The MESP director and the MESP interns met us at the airport with a big tourist bus, which took us through Cairo to the neighborhood where we are living, Agouza.

It seems that everyone in Cairo lives in huge apartment buildings. On the street, it’s hard to see a long ways in any direction. (The pollution – worse than Beijing – doesn’t help. We’re supposed to use nasal spray once a day to fight off the irritants.) From the porch of our seventh-story apartment, it’s just ten-plus-story buildings as far as the eye can see, plus the occasional minaret.

On the way to our apartment from the airport, Dr. Holt pointed at the apartment buildings through the windows, and said we were going through the nicer parts of the city. It didn’t look very nice to me. A lot of the siding was faded or falling off, and everyone was hanging their clothes out to dry on their tiny porches. Then we started passing the apartment buildings with caved-in roofs and no windows. According to Dr. Holt, about 40% of Cairo lives on two dollars a day or less.

The students are spread among three apartment buildings. I live in a really big flat with eight other guys. We have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a porch overlooking the October 6 bridge, a superlong bridge built by Anwar Sadat to commemorate Egypt’s Totally Glorious Victory over Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The apartment’s not particularly nice, of course (the mattresses are hard as rocks, for one thing), but we are college students, and there is air conditioning. (It’s very, very hot here – and not dry heat, either. Agouza is right by the Nile, so the air is always humid.) Also, we can pick up unprotected wireless networks from our porch – hence me posting here.

Dr. Holt and his wife live on the 13th floor of the same building. Six other guys live in another apartment building, and the sixteen girls are split between two other apartments in another building. We eat, have devotions and class in the MESP villa, a multi-story building close to the center of Agouza. Our devotions are on the roof of the building, where there’s an actual breeze, and we sit on cushions under a shelter and talk and sing hymns. It’s a great way to start the day.

Agouza is a great place to walk around. There are tons of shops and kiosks on the street level, and there are always people out walking around. A lot of them are excited to see Westerners, especially the kids. They use their five of six words of English to talk to us, and we use our five or six words of Arabic, which they love.

Traffic here is insane. If there are any rules to it at all, I can’t explain them to you. Stoplights? Traffic lines? Mere Western frivolties. People just go, and park, wherever they need to go. And pedestrians, including us, cross wherever people will slow down for them, including across the eight-lane highway between us and the Nile. The game Frogger has come alive for me here. Yesterday we were walking down a one-way street, and a driver who wasn’t looking drove over Julie Andree’s foot! She was only bruised, thankfully, but Dr. Holt took the opportunity to lecture us (some more) about safety.

Thursday, we went to a market to buy hijabs (head coverings) for the girls, for our mosque visit Friday. I don’t have my cellphone here, so I bought a “FOSSIILL” watch for thirty-five Egyptian pounds (seven U.S. dollars.) The market was really busy and kind of fun. There were meat vendors with whole skinned cows hanging in the air, flies buzzing all around, ready to be bought. I wasn’t that interested.

Food – dates are delicious, as are pitas and Egyptian juice. The Egyptian brand of Oreos, “Borios,” are pretty tasty also.

Last night, all the guys went wandering around the neighborhood. We tried to go down to the Nile, but there’s a gate blocking the riverwalk. Some of the guys went for a ten-pound boat ride, but I wasn’t that trusting. The rest of us found a café, where I had fresh strawberry juice, and we talked for a while.

Yesterday, we went to a mosque. The girls were separated from us and put in a pretty small, non-ventilated room with all the other women. Us men went into the main part of the mosque. Part of the mosque is inside a building, where the imam preaches. The bigger part is a huge green canopy put up over an ordinary street, where cars drive through the other six days a week. We sat on the sidewalk at the very edge of the canopy, and Muslim men starting filing in and praying. One surprise I got was when some men carried not one – not two – but three coffins into the mosque. Apparently it’s pretty common to bring people who died during the week to the mosque for prayers.

The sermon was on loudspeaker in the canopy. We couldn’t see the imam, and he spoke in Arabic, but he was very fiery. Sitting there was pretty much like getting yelled at in Arabic for half an hour. After the sermon, the men invited us to pray with them – so we did. All the men lined up in straight lines, and started bowing and praying. We mostly followed their actions. It was pretty exciting, I must say.

Speaking of mosques, the call to prayer issues throughout the city five times a day, the first time at 5:30 AM. Yeah. Grand.

Last night was probably the best night so far. For 100 pounds, the entire group went on a falukah (boat) ride on the Nile! It was beautiful. The river is surrounded by tall buildings and hotels. Not really what I pictured when I thought of the Nile, but hey, it’s the Nile!

Afterwards, we went to a huge market that Dr. Holt told us used to be the Wall Street of the Arab world. Now there’s just a bunch of cafes and tourist shops. They let us smoke hookah, or shisha, for the first and only time on the program, so we could “get the cultural experience.” I was the only one at my table who had done in before, so it was pretty fun to see everyone else experience it. The tourist shops had a lot of cool things, but we decided not to buy anything until we got our bartering skills down.

That’s pretty much it for now. Take care everybody!