Look but don't touch.

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With Paul back in the States and a procession of long, lonely days ahead, I’ve settled into Cairo to get my life back on track. We’d kept a frantic pace these past few weeks - late to bed, early to rise, rushing through 4,000 years of human history and as many pounds of hummus - and now I have a to-do list as long and unsightly as the Nile. There are too many friends I’ve been neglecting, too many bills past due, and too much planning left for a trip that’s meant to take me toward the heart of the Middle East in just a couple of weeks. It’s no small task for a kid like me, who’s as much a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy as any, to sort through visas and make anxious phone calls to embassies. In the morning, leveled by a crippling inertia that’s no doubt a response to the past three weeks, I stare at the ceiling with my legs propped up on the covers, the wind rustling the curtains beside me, the horns of Cairo calling out to each other with cautionary toots and bleats.

For three weeks, since arriving with my guidebook hopefully dog-eared for the months ahead, I’ve been putting off a visit to the Syrian Embassy. Bureaucracy in even its low-level forms has a way of sucking the life from me; a trip to the post office, or a call to a credit card company, can afflict me with the sorts of dizziness and heart palpitations that suggest the rampant misuse of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. I can picture - in agonizing detail - how a visit to the Syrian Embassy would unfold. The long hallways with their checkered tiles scrubbed to a blinding polish. The slats of light cutting in through the blinds. The ceiling fan slowly whirring. The bureaucrat with his trim moustache and neatly combed hair fussing with a stack of papers, cradling the phone to his chin, straightening his necktie. “I am sorry, sir, but your documents are not in order.” His speech is fastidious and even. He pushes more papers across the desk. “The embassy requires Form 1022-B to be filled out in triplicate and witnessed by an embassy official. Signatories must receive sponsorship from their host countries three to six months in advance. Sponsorship forms must be signed in triplicate and witnessed by an embassy official. Requests for an interview can be made by filing out Form 37C in triplicate.

“Your tears cannot help you now.”

A quick, demoralizing phone call, though, spares me all the trouble. While I’d anticipated problems at the embassy - a missing piece of paperwork, ambiguous references to my father’s kibbutz - I didn’t expect to be rejected outright over the phone. But the official I speak to is adamant, his voice nervously trilling as he gets worked up: no American can secure a Syrian visa in Egypt if he’s here solely for travel. Without a student or work visa to point to, I’d be as warmly received at the embassy as Ariel Sharon and the cast of Fiddler on the Roof. I run through different options I’d researched beforehand, but he offers a grim prognosis. My odds in Amman aren’t bound to be any better: the Jordanian policy is no more flexible than Egypt’s. My best bet is to try an end-around via Lebanon, though my chances at the border there are, he suggests, about 50-50.

It’s a bleak picture he paints, one that - I imagine - is exacerbated by certain unresolved tensions between him and an overly affectionate mother in Aleppo. But I’m hardly put off by the prospects of visiting Lebanon first. Stirred by images of bare-bellied pop stars and political intrigues, I’ve been drawn more and more to the country in recent weeks. I’d written to a few CouchSurfers in Beirut not long ago, trying to sort out the ever-turbulent situation there. You get an interesting take on stability when you talk to people who were born and raised during a civil war. Politics, security, the prospects of more bloodshed: life in Lebanon seems to be as fickle as the weather, with no one quite sure on any given day what the next will bring. It is - upon closer inspection - perhaps not the most sensible place to book your next holiday. But I’m not quite sure you can make sense of the Middle East unless you’ve made sense of Lebanon - or at the very least, put yourself in a position to ogle the country’s famous beauties in their natural habitat.

It’s with somewhat less dubious motives that I meet with Eliana, who’s visiting Cairo on business for the weekend. We’d been exchanging emails about life and Lebanon for close to a month, and she’s assured me - with a sort of resolve that’s characteristically Lebanese - that her people continue to drink and dance and make trashy pop songs with the spirit for which their country’s known. We meet at City Stars, an extravagant shopping mall in the Nasr City suburb of Cairo. For a Beirut native, this temple of commerce, fashion and immodest spending is a logical home away from home. She meets me in front of Alfredo - a Western-style coffee shop - wearing tight jeans and a low-cut blouse, an outfit that, even here, provokes more than a few disapproving glances.

None of which, FYI, come from a certain writer.

For the next two hours, in an illuminating role reversal, I get to feel this country’s sexual chokehold first-hand. I suspect there’s a misunderstanding at root here, that Eliana’s been mistaken for an Egyptian, and I’ve appeared to commit the unpardonable offense of cozying up to a local. Security guards make a point of tsk-tsking as we bump shoulders and exchange affectionate taps on the elbow. One wags a finger as we stop to lean against a railing overlooking the food court - an assertion of authority on par with a chaperone’s clucking at a junior high school dance. The more our friendship takes up the strains of casual intimacy - squeezing a knee, patting a thigh - the more alarmed everyone seems to be getting. As Eliana straddles a bench outside the MontBlanc store, a stern, mustachioed guard leans in to reproach her - until she quickly tells him off, in English, Arabic, and a little bit of French.

With a lucrative job offer being floated to her from a partner in Cairo, Eliana’s clearly torn between two worlds. In Beirut she has all the trappings of a modern, Western life, where the hair is long, the skirts are short, and everyone is happily dancing on the tables till sunrise. But in Cairo, with young women modestly tucked beneath the hijab, with pious old men sporting scars on their foreheads from long hours on the prayer mat, she’d leave much of those freewheeling ways behind. Some Egyptians might enjoy a certain double-standard - especially with a good education and lumps of cash on their side - but they’re still swimming against the current in Egypt today. You can eat an elegant meal and dance till dawn in Zamalek, but the soaring sunrise chants of “Allahu akbar” are a forceful reminder that the Godless have a good way to go in shaping this country’s course.

It’s an interesting contradiction in a place like City Stars, where the material yearnings reach the sort of fever pitch an American can’t help but find touchingly familiar. On the way home, barreling along the highway back to downtown, the way is lit by the bright, colorful billboards of cars and conveniences that lord over this gray, somber city. German automobiles, Japanese washer/dryers, watches that dazzle with the heights of Swiss engineering: a global community of consumption brought into the lives of Cairo’s stunted millions. If Western man hasn’t perfected the formula for happiness, you wouldn’t guess it from these cheery, red-cheeked families marveling at the wondrous blessing of a certain snack cake or dish detergent. You might not want whatever it is they’re peddling, but you can’t help but wonder what secrets might be loosened by the simple power to buy. Underneath the sputtering Peugeot taxis and derelict buses whiz by, the passengers crammed shoulder to shoulder, their hopeful faces pressed against the windows.

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