Egypt – Cairo

2009 March —–

I’ve been back from Egypt for over a week now and am amazed at how I could live without wrist watch, cell phone (any phone), daily access to computer, radio, TV for nearly a month – all the so-called conveniences – and was quite relaxed and happy and now to have access to all these lovely conveniences, I am stressed.  There was literally 4″ of mail to tend to when I got home, some bills, some cheques and an amazing amount of forms and documents to be filled out.  I never realized before just how much of that stuff crosses my desk.  I guess because in always comes in daily, but to have it all in one whack really made me see how much bureaucracy bull shit there is.  One can get caught in the quagmire of forms, documents, departments, and “that’s not my department” to the point where all progress comes to a standstill – or in some cases goes in reverse.    Just my point of view….

Anyway, the last e-mail was from Dahab.  From there we flew to Cairo.  There are 20 million ‘registered’ citizens in Cairo.  ‘Registered’ being the key word.  Many people don’t bother to register their children.  Or people coming in from other areas don’t bother to register.  I think they all converge in the Old Islamic Market, throw up some sort of shop / stall / cart and just ‘live’ there.  I was trying to find out just how big this market is, but just the fact that we walked for nearly 5 hours and only covered a small bit of it should put it in perspective.  It dates back to the 1400’s and has taken on a life of its own.  Of course it is a tourist haven, but once you get back off the nicer stone streets and onto the dirt ones that are only about 2 meters wide, you get into the true market where the locals do business.  It is all divided into sections of jewelery (gold jewelery / cheap jewelery), trinkets (statues / boxes / key chains), clothing (men / women / underwear / bags / belts / children / shirts / dresses), spices, food (baked / meat / grocer), manufacturing.  Each slash mark indicated yet another section of the market.  The clothes were all in one area but the types of clothes were divided into areas yet again.  The Manufacturing area was amazing.  They do things so rudimentary.  There was one shop (bear in mind when I say shop I am referring to an area of about 10 by 12 feet, more or less) where they were making key chains.  One fellow put a piece of metal down, 3 or 4 other fellows spun a huge wheel causing the press to go down and squash the metal into the shape, another fellow took it out and another fellow filed it smooth.  Talk about a make work project!   Yet they were so proud of their job.  They posed for pictures, proudly displaying their wares.  Another shop was smelting aluminum in the corner over an open propane flame and then pouring it into sand casts to make what appeared to be radiators. 

   
We were getting quite accustomed to the market tactics of accosting potential customers.  And as we were not interested in purchasing anything anyway, we found we could say no and keep walking without them getting on our nerves as they had in the other towns.  I think a lot of it had to do with our attitude, at this point.  We realized that this is how they do business, nothing personal, just playing the odds of snagging a buyer if they keep up a steady barrage of “Come into my shop.  We have all colors.  No Hassel.  Good prices.  Best quality.”  When we got off the tourist roads, the hassling became considerably less.  We stopped at a coffee shop for tea in an area that was absolutely non tourist. When I say coffee shop, I mean we sat on some chairs on the side of the street and some guy brought us tea on a tiny table barely big enough to hold 4 cups.  Most shops also offer shisha (water pipe). We tried it at one shop. They have fruit flavours and it actually tastes quite nice and smells wonderful.  We got a really good price on the tea and had a lovely little sit down to watch the locals going about their day.  They did not seem too interested in us, in fact they would nod and smile at us with a look of almost respect that we ventured off the beaten tourist path.  It was in this area that Len was offered a sample falafel and the guy was not upset in the least that we didn’t buy any – this would not have been the case in the tourist area. 

The mode of transporting wares from shop to shop varies.  There are the little 3 wheel trucks, pull-type wheel barrow, donkey cart, motor cycle, on your back, or on your head; depending on the size and weight of the items.  They scurry here and there all the time and at times one has to duck into a shop or squash up against a wall to let them past.  When it is a person trying to get past you they make a ssss -ssss sound, almost snake like, to let you know they want to get by.  Interesting.

Because it is hot during the day, the activity really gets going around 6 pm.  The number of people crowded together, doing business, bartering, shopping, selling, and socializing is something right out of an old movie.  The scene in Indiana Jones where he loses Marion in the market (when he shoots the guy doing all the fancy moves with the sword) is mild compared to what it really is.  Bear in mind, it gets busier at night, and there are very few street lights.  The only real light comes from the shops.  The streets are no more than paths, there is merchandise pouring out of the shops onto the street.  Items are hanging on lines strung between the shops and over the streets. There are hundreds; no, thousands of people moving this way and that.  You are almost never NOT bumping into someone.  It is semi-dark, everything is cast in shadows.  Even the shops have only a few bare light bulbs.  The smell of spices, cooking, animals, dust, people, petrol fumes all mingle.  That was when I really came to love it.  It had a life all its own.  It was chaotic yet at the same time it all made sense.  When I stopped trying to impose what I thought was “the right way” into it, and just flowed with it, it became quite a nice experience.  I could have stayed there for days.

On the morning of the Market day we went to Giza and saw the great Sphinx and Pyramids.  We had waited 40 years to see them, from the time we studied ancient Egypt in grade 6.  Here we were, we made it!  The pyramids are bigger than I had even imagined – and I had imagined HUGE.  They are huger than huge.  The Sphinx was about what I had imagined, though; but more detailed than I thought.  I’m not sure why I was amazed to see it had a tail…..

The one thing that I overheard so many people say is “How did they build them?” (The pyramids) The stone blocks are so massive, I can’t even describe it.  Sure I had read all about it, seen documentaries, etc.  One would think I would have at least some concept of how big they are, but until I saw it, compared it to things beside it, stood beside it, touched it – nope, never had a clue…..  Apparently at one time they were covered in a limestone type rock which made them shine.  But over the centuries it was stripped away for use in other buildings.  Only the very top of one pyramid still has this shiny covering.  As the sun was moving into the afternoon, we could see just how shiny the top was.  It shone like snow on a mountain top.   We could only use our imaginations to see what grand splendour they must have been in their day. 

We went inside the Great Pyramid to King Khufu’s burial chamber.  We ascended aprox. 76 steps, in a tunnel of about 1 meter by 1.5 meters which opened up to a very large gallery (3 meters wide, 49 meters long and 11 meters high) with a corbel design.  Up another 120 steps and into the burial chamber.   Solid Granite, from Aswan (an hour and half plane ride – doubt they had FedEx back then – the freight costs would have killed them) the chamber is about 10 meters long, 6 meters high and wide.  The stones are about 1.5 meters across and I could not put my thumb nail in between them!  They were not as smooth as polished granite we might see in modern buildings, but they were smoother than a lot of slate floors I’ve seen in people’s houses today.  How did they do it????  But no hieroglyphics.  Not a one.  In Luxor, at the Valley of Kings, and in all the Temples, there was not one square inch of space that did not have hieroglyphs or drawings/paintings of some kind.

We also went to the Cairo Museum, because that is where they house King Tut’s stuff.  I can understand why they whisked it away to a museum so fast once it was discovered.  This stuff is all solid gold!  Again, I read about it, saw documentaries, etc.  But to see that head dress – all 22 kg of solid gold (choke, sputter) – with the intricate stones placed so daintily as to portray feathers.  Wow.  Everyone has seen pictures of it and is familiar with it, but there were other pieces of jewellery that are so tiny and intricate that I never knew existed and are even more mind-blowingly detailed.  Alas, we had to surrender our cameras prior to entering the museum so there are no sneak photos to be glimpsed.  The security was actually quite rigid at the museum, because some people in front of us thought they could sneak their camera through but the metal detector caught them.  Again, even with looking at pictures on line, they really don’t capture what they look like in person.  It’s kind of like a Hummingbird nest – yeah, you know it’s got to be tiny, but until you actually see one, you have no idea.

The traffic in Cairo is mayhem.  There is no other way to describe it.  The lines on the road are purely decoration, as are the lights.  Crossing the street is a life altering experience, as it is nearly a life ending experience.  Watch for a break in the cars closest to your part of the sidewalk, dash out, all the while looking for the next coming car, which may or may not be closest to your part of the street, put your hand out (as if that is going to stop them, but somehow causes them to dodge you – no they don’t slow down) keep moving, watching, putting your hand out, don’t go straight across, zigzag, maybe pause, but only momentarily – do NOT stop moving!  At first we got assistance from the traffic police – kind of like a glorified crossing guard.  But the traffic only stops when he is actually looking, if he turns his head for even a second, the cars make a run for it.  Too bad for you if you weren’t finished crossing.  Then we started staying real close to one of the locals, they seemed to do it almost with ease. By the middle of the second day, we were going it alone; every man for himself – we’ll meet up on the other side, sometimes 30 feet farther along the sidewalk and 30 seconds apart, but in one piece.  Granted that was the main arteries of Cairo, the side streets were actually quiet enough that you could walk on the street rather than the sidewalks, whether it was displays of merchandise, coffee drinkers, construction, or just poor sidewalks, the streets were easier to walk on.  I don’t think the motorists realize there are other streets, as they all seem to cluster on the main ones.

One thing we realized was that although we had waited 40 years to come to Egypt and see the pyramids, at the end of the day it was the people and the culture that stuck with us and had the biggest impact.  The pyramids were just the catalyst to get us here.  Once here we discovered a rich, albeit very different, life.  In many ways these people are richer than we are.   As I said at the beginning, since I’ve come back to the modern conveniences I have been more stressed.  They may not have the “stuff” that we have but they have time to drink coffee with their neighbours. They may seem to do things backwards, but they take pride in their work, they take pride in offering a service – even if it seems like hassling to us.  When’s the last time you had to shoo a clerk away in a Canadian store?? When’s the last time you could find a clerk in a Canadian Store??  They take the time to greet a stranger, to smile.  We seem to be so caught up in our hamster wheel life, running endlessly for some elusive prize, more stuff, more debt; that we don’t even have time for ourselves, our family, our friends, let alone a stranger.

Since we’ve been back, we get a lot of questions and comments about the Muslims and the Arabs.  Initially, until we figured out how they do things by way of haggling over prices, we overpaid for some stuff.  It was a Muslim who told us how to bargain with the shop owners.  It was a non-Muslim who overcharged us and then argued and defended himself when we challenged him on it.  It seemed, more often than not, it was the men with the dark spot on their forehead who helped us.  They get the dark spot from praying 5 times a day and touching the ground with their forehead until it actually gets a permanent bruise look, some even get a bump, like a callous.  And we think we are doing good by going to church once a week!!  We found that the media portrayal of Muslims is nothing more than a manipulation to keep people afraid of a way of life that they know nothing about, so it is easy to put an evil spin on it, thereby controlling the masses through fear of the unknown.  We met a fellow who has a friend living in the USA for the past 30 years.  Since 9-11 the friend said he no longer feels safe in his own community because of the media slander.   What kind of information are we blindly taking as truth without our own investigation or common sense?

Overall, it was a wonderful trip.  The sites were awesome, but the people were more awesome.  The Culture is so different from ours and in many ways richer.  I would love to go back, I would love to stay longer, but I doubt I could ever settle there.  The dry desert air and constant sand and dirt would get to me after a while, I suspect.   One is never more than a few minutes away from the Sahara…The wind blows and it is sand.  The buildings are grey, the streets are dusty, the plants are dirty, the merchandise in the shops has a film of dust, and the hotel had a layer of dust.  It cannot be avoided. You breathe it all day.  And yet these people live their simple lives and smile.