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Published: February 13th 2009
Somebody told me over the summer that the population of Egypt is so concentrated around the Nile that it’s like taking 1/3 of the US population and stuffing them into New Jersey. I sort of shrugged it off at the time, but now that I’m in Cairo, I can completely see the truth of that statement. Cairo. Is. Packed.
For the first week or so, I'm staying in a hostel until I can find an apartment, which I'm (naively?) hoping won't be too difficult. The hostel that I’m staying in is in the heart of downtown, on a road called Shari'a Talaat Harb, and at any given hour of the day or night the street is teeming with people and cars. I arrived here at night, when things are the most crowded, and it was just swarming… It was even more disconcerting because I had a million eyeballs staring at me with my lighter, loose hair and my enormous bags which could fit a dead horse.
Not quite ready to wing everything by myself, I practically had to drag the taxi driver out of the cab by his shirt collar to help me bring my bags in, putting him at risk of disembowelment by other drivers for leaving his car stopped in the middle of the road. It didn’t make much of a difference though, since they just swerved around him. Lines on the street serve more as decoration than anything else, as drivers are totally oblivious to them. Honking the horn is apparently as natural as breathing (and is done just about as frequently) and as far as I can tell, is done for no apparent reason. Maybe to warn pedestrians just in case they were thinking of pulling a fast one and crossing the street. The best comparison I can make of crossing Cairo streets is to a real-life game of Frogger, but on crack…when you win, you’ve survived the crossing and begin to seriously second-guess the way you lead your life. When you lose, you get crushed to smithereens.
My first night here was about as “Hello I’m a foreigner and I have no idea what I’m doing!” as it gets, which I can now (thank God) laugh about. My plane landed an hour late, and after scampering around the airport for an hour, desperately trying to find the AUC taxi I’d arranged for which mysteriously didn’t show up (figures) and trying to fend off men’s stares, offers to drive me to my hotel, marry me, or as far as I could tell from their incomprehensible colloquial, drink my blood, I wound up borrowing a supposed airport employee’s cell phone to call my hostel and tell them I was still alive and to pretty please not give away my room. Then I gave in to one of the taxi vultures and let him drive me to my hostel for the extortionate price of 100 LE (Egyptian pounds). But he got me there in one piece (which was a feat unto itself. After watching people weave in between moving traffic like swarming ants, I asked him in my broken classical Arabic what roughly translates as: “If you oh so please, do there exist in the city of Cairo much many of the dangerous problems involving the humans and the cars with the many of blood and ::smashes hands together and makes explosion noises:: ?” to which he just laughed. So probably yes.)
Once I got into my hostel, I discovered that they had in fact given my room away for the night, but that their partner hostel upstairs would take me in. I was showed into a small room with a bed that smelled like Unwashed Man, a Victorian-style armoire that looked hilariously out of pace, and about 45 square centimeters of walking space. There was also a bathroom (in which the lights didn’t work), long strips of paint hanging down from the ceiling that I could have used for kindling, enough mildew on the walls to take down an entire village, and a balcony whose door was held shut by a rolled-up magazine. The next morning I woke up thinking “Wow, someone’s door is banging really loudly in the wind…hey, why is it so bright in here? I though I shut the curt—“ at which point I opened my eyes and saw that my balcony door had blown open in the middle of the night, was banging in the wind, and had let in both bright sunlight and a scrawny, diseased-looking stray cat. It was poking around my luggage and making those horrible, hairball-esque cat noises. After staring at it incredulously for a second, I heaved a pillow at it and started hissing at it until it swaggered out of there. Yet another reason to hate cats.
For as much as I felt like Tom Hanks in "Big" (in that scene when he gets that dank Bronx apartment once he becomes an adult) I was feeling pretty darn good about things since that first night. This was mostly made possible by the kind hostel-owners who drank coffee with me and taught me some Arabic colloquial my first night when I felt funky and disconnected, but also by the fact that things went more or less according to plan. And even when they didn't, things turned out fine. It was strangely liberating to realize that there tends to be a way to do pretty much anything even if your preparations cave and you have nothing but blonde hair, time to kill, and a random mix of small American and Canadian bills in your wallet to get your way.
Since the first night, I’ve been getting a feel for the city, the food, and the generally chaotic swing of things. Cairo is like one huge, living organism where everything builds up on top of itself like sedimentary rock, with the Nile at the bottom and the Pharaonic ruins, the dried-up grandeur of Cairo’s golden days, and grime and progress of industry stacked on top and meshed together. You can see each part, but they’re just obscured a little bit by pollution, car horns, hookah smoke, donkeys, and kids running around with doors covered in pita bread balanced on their heads. I guess that a city with thousands of years of history is pretty used to taking change in its stride, folding it into its city-story, and finding a way to evolve along with things but still keep its distinctive color. For as comically maddening and exhilarating as the first few days are, I've made things much easier for myself by having an utterly open mind about everything. I came in a blank slate, prepared to expect that nothing would be as I was used to, and it's paid off pretty well so far.
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JAB
non-member comment
This is absolutely hilarious. I had no idea you were so funny, haha. "Lines on the street serve more as decoration than anything else, as drivers are totally oblivious to them. Honking the horn is apparently as natural as breathing (and is done just about as frequently) and as far as I can tell, is done for no apparent reason. Maybe to warn pedestrians just in case they were thinking of pulling a fast one and crossing the street. The best comparison I can make of crossing Cairo streets is to a real-life game of Frogger, but on crack when you win, you’ve survived the crossing and begin to seriously second-guess the way you lead your life. When you lose, you get crushed to smithereens." Amman is the same way! And my first night was rather as crazy as yours. Minus the cat. That is priceless.