cairo - pt 1

we spent the week leading up to our entry into egypt half-dreading it. when planning a trip like this, most everything about it is abstract: "wouldn't it be cool to go to egypt? see the pyramids? cool, yeah, let's add egypt to the list ..." and that's that. it's just theory and excitement.

until it's a week away - then "EGYPT" looms large in the mind as a land of unknowns. how much will we stand out? how much will we get hassled? will it be fun? will there be sand in the streets and poverty everywhere you look? will it turn out to be mostly opposite and actually *too* touristy? how much does the muslim thing come into play? are the books true about all this "the left hand is dirty, don't even hand money to someone with it" business? and oh yeah, they don't really like americans ... how many times will we have to lie and say we're canadian?

"hmm ..." you start thinking. "why did we want to go to egypt again?"

because there are pyramids and weirdness and it's Africa! Africa!

as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, Africa was the weird, left-in-the-tribal-past, very distant, AIDS/starvation/flies-around-the-mouth, child-soldier-scary continent. of course, egypt isn't and never has been *that* africa - or rather, the place where "that" africa was/is - but it's still, you know, &@#$!*^%-in' Africa.

And that spooked us a little. Just a little. But boarded our El-Al ("the most secure airline in the world") flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo and arrived in Africa two hours later.


the taxi ride in was crazy (see picture at end of previous post). lane markings are meaningless there. it's all, as my dad would have said, "flow driving" - you dance your car through traffic in a complex, fluid series of maneuvers that combines the grace and agility of a ballerina with the confidence and sense of purpose of a swift-currented river.

and my favorite part? at night, everyone drives with their headlights off. yes - off. they flash them once in a while, but otherwise, it's a low-light affair. and it's probably best that way, because if you could really see how close you were coming to running over small, barefooted street children and colliding with wayward cattle roaming the road at midnight, you'd very likely try to jump out of the moving car.

still, we survived and made it to our (super weird) hotel. the picture above is us in the elevator - which you board in a rundown office building's lobby, arriving 12 floors later at this odd little top-floor hotel run by a spanish/egyptian guy, his crazy french wife and their? only her? french daughter, who is married to a mexican guy. they have a child together, and another on the way, but she would rather - as she loudly explained to us with her son playing a few feet away - watch a dog run around than spend time with a child, hers included.

it was, how you say? interesting.





yep, no toilet paper in the toilet.


gotta dispose of it the red receptacle on the left - which we charmingly nicknamed the "poop basket."

so, our first night in egypt we took a midnight walk around the backstreets of downtown cairo. this was one of the first things we saw - the giant chunks of freshly slaughtered animals hanging from hooks out front of the midnight butcher. we soon discovered that pretty much every butcher in cairo is a midnight butcher. the shopping hours in this town very much agreed with us. need sneakers at 2 am? cairo can help. fresh vegetables from a cart? cairo has that cart times 100. computer parts at 4 am? literally right below our hotel.


we were in cairo during the week leading up to the muslim holiday Eid. these guys were dancing in an alley - with machetes. it was, you know, the ol' midnight machete dance. like square dancing. with all men. and lots of large machetes. at midnight.

nothing weird here. nope. totally normal.


another midnight butcher.


and cattle for sale on the street. this 2 am cattle stand was maybe a half-mile from downtown cairo.





we were rather mystified.


lots of scooters here - small hondas and indian-made vespa clones. I love the license plate placement. nothing like putting a sharp-edged piece of flexible sheet-metal right next to your front tire. (and yes, that's the government mandated plate location). oh egypt.


the 2 am fresh vegetable market, of course.


here's ann walking, there's a sheep peeing. cairo, how we miss you.





this ghetto chair still life was outside our hotel's entryway. it felt like home. with muslims. and cattle.


ann was a little unsure of cairo after our first night ...


this was the view from breakfast at our hotel.


half-french/half-egyptian breakfast





we took a daytrip to the pyramids - three sets of them.


ann in the desert.


my boots in the sand.





more on all this soon.
-k