Cairo

Cairo is not a beautiful city. The smog is low-lying and thick; pointing our camera toward where the pyramids stood in the distance, the lens could only just capture them behind the haze of pollution. The traffic is completely chaotic, with no stop signs or lights, no lane markings, and apparently no right-of-way or any other sort of rules. Cars honk constantly, and drivers often lean out the window to yell at each other. Stenches of exhaust or garbage predominate in many places. And yet, the wide and shimmering Nile in the middle of downtown is majestic and calming despite what is going on around it; the white suits of the police and flowing robes of the relgious men and women give off a sense of pride and history; and the highest-in-the-world population density means that there are always faces to contemplate and stories to imagine. It does not fit the image I had in mind, developed from who-knows-what combination of movies and books etc. But after almost a week hear, I am starting to see that it has something of its own, less pleasant certainly but also much more alive than a fairy-tale name.

We arrived at the end of the first day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month during which people fast from sunrise to sunset, not letting anything (food, water, cigarrettes) pass their lips. At sunset the ezan (call to prayer) signals the iftar, or break fast. At this time, the streets are full of people eating; restaurants have the food out so people can dig in as soon as the call begins, and free food is served in various parts of the city; for a few minutes, time stops, as taxi-drivers, policemen, store owners, and everyone else digs in. Ramadan makes some things quite a big more difficult from a tourist perspective: museums and shops keep irregular hours, cafes and restaurants outside of tourist or expatriate areas are not open, people testy from hunger can create frustrating interactions, and sensitivity to the fasting people means we shouldn't eat or drink outside unless surrounded by other tourists. But it's also an interesting time to be here, to see how completely the religion is integrated into daily life, as well as to experience the post-sundown energy on the streets.

We have been very lucky to be housed by a friend-of-a-friend, a Danish PhD student in interreligious dialogue who has been living in Cairo for two years and has given us countless useful tips and insights into the city, as well as provided awesome hospitality. (Coming home to an apartment after a day of touristing feels really good compared to coming home to a hostel, especially an apartment stocked with excellent American movies....) We've also gotten to meet up with two other friends of this same friend (Lachlyn, whom Erik knew from high school, spent two years in Cairo), which has definitely been a boon for our experience here.

As for the sights, the Giza pyramids were a bit of a let-down. They're so familiar without visiting Egypt-- the name and the image of them-- that I had a high expectation for what it would feel like to actually see them in person, and it was different from just a picture, with their incomprehensible size, but there was also a lot to detract from the experience. Pushy vendors touting camel rides and cheap souvenirs were everywhere, some tourists were wearing shockingly inappropriate clothes (pink hotpants and a mid-riff shirt in an exceedingly conservative country? a see-through white mini-skirt for walking around in the dirt?), and the city has oozed out to the very edge of the historic area, with a KFC and Pizza Hut visible from the sphinx-- in all, not quite the desert romance I had in mind. But after Giza we went to some farther out pyramids, at Zaqqara, which are actually the oldest in Egypt, and that was quite cool. One, that we could see in the distance, was built by an architect who didn't calculate his angles correctly (let that be a lesson to you, kids) and ended up needing to make drastic corrections in the middle of the pyramid, leading to what is known now as the Bent Pyramid. The architect was punished by the angry king, who wanted a new pyramid built, but during the construction of the replacement the king died, and was put into the original anyway. There were also a couple tombs covered in hieroglyphics, which were truly beautiful. The concerns of the writing were aesthetic as much as they were communicative; lines could be written left to right, right to left, or up to down, depending on the needs of the overall design (the direction of the animals' heads indicates which way the line goes). The hieroglyphics were supposed to not only pay homage to the buried person, but also, like the tomb as a whole, provide everything needed for the afterlife. So, for example, one entire wall was covered with carvings of servants carrying various kinds of foods, and another of servants bearing drinks. While the hundreds of figures in each of these positions resembled each other, they were also individually wrought, with different supplies carried by each one. They were really astounding to look at. We've also visited the ridiculous and awesome Egyptian Museum. Like Cairo's streets, it's an exercise in chaos, with thousands upon thousands of ancient objects placed here and there, largely unlabelled, with some purported order but a general sense of disorder. But some of the exhibits were really awesome (with great thanks to Lonely Planet for pointing them out and saving us the exhaustion of figuring it out ourselves!). The ubiquitous treasures of King Tut's tomb, ironically available to us today because King Tut was so unimportant in his time that no one else had tried too hard to rob the tomb earlier, were especially impressive. His solid gold death mask, with lapis lazuli liner around his onyx eyes, was moving to behold, while the stature granted him by the several gilded cases of consecutive size that had covered his three coffins (one of those in solid gold) is quite something to think about. We also enjoyed the room of animal mummies: pet cats and dogs and baby babboons, and a holy 15 foot crocodile and 3 foot lake perch that were revered as manifestations of certain gods. We skipped the human mummies, though, because the additional 20 dollar entrance fee to see them was too much for us to stomach.

We've also been to a couple sights off the tourist track that gave us incredible peepholes into how many people here live. One was the back roads of the City of the Dead, an area of old tombs, some of them very grand and some not, where squatters have been living for many years, raising families in the shadow-- according to our driver-- of ghosts. They can get electricity in the tombs, by some quirk of urban wiring, but not water, which they have to bring in from elsewhere. These are the poorest people in the city. But from our perspective driving through, City of the Dead seemed lovely compared to the other neighborhood he drove us through. This was Garbage City, a place whose name is viscerally evidenced in every breath or sight one has there. There is no municipal garbage collection in Cairo; rather, people organize to get contracts to collect trash from various parts of the city, which they bring back to where they live, sort, and sell to companies. The stench in the air seemed unbreathable to me, although the people who live there, and in the other, competing, Garbage Cities, breathe it all the time. Looking one way, I saw two men sitting on bags of trash next to an open bag containing cow detritus and swarming with flies; looking another way, there was a young girl walking barefoot in the trash-strewn alley eating a lollipop. The government has tried to move people from the garbage city, but they don't want to; there is a good living to be earned in collecting and sorting what others throw away. The most desired contracts to get, according to Henrik, are for the wealthier neighborhoods, because in the poor neighborhoods people use everything themselves. He says that the residents of Garbage City are not considered poor; they have food every day. To me it fell into a category that has been growing larger and larger as we've been traveling: things we can see, but cannot begin to understand.