To my great astonishment, my missus has already blogged today, so I won’t retread the ground that she has already covered.
I’m grateful to her for covering for me, actually, because I’m still feeling pretty ropey. I felt fine yesterday evening, but have suffered something of a relapse today. The diarrhoea has gone, but I’ve been fighting off a headache and fatigue all day. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were due to, or at least exacerbated by, the fumes that I’ve been breathing in all day. As Sarah mentioned, Cairo has more than 20 million inhabitants. That’s more people in a single city than in the whole country back home. And we live pretty densely in the Netherlands. Well, wait until you see Cairo!
The downside of that is the emissions from the vehicles here. The pollution is incredible; we’re talking Bangkok levels, as least as far as my uncalibrated nose is concerned. If you could get high on diesel fumes, this would be a junkie’s paradise.
Whatever the reason(s), I was definitely not operating at full strength today, as we made our way along streets with pavements that were almost certainly not created with the comfort of buggy pushers in mind, to Cairo’s Islamic district.
My impressions of Cairo are best summed up by our guidebook. I really couldn’t say it better myself, so I’ll just quote from the book:
The crowds on a Cairo footpath make Manhattan look like a ghost town. Your life will flash before you eyes each time you venture across a street. And your snot will turn black from the smog.
Sounds bad, right?
But there’s more:
But it’s a small price to pay. This city has an energy, palpable even at three in the morning, like no other. It’s the product of its 20 million inhabitants waging a battle against the desert and winning (mostly), of 20 million people simultaneously crushing the city’s infrastructure under their collective weight and lifting the city’s spirit up with their uncommon graciousness and humour.
That about sums it up, really. The city has a vibrancy all its own. Egyptians who travel to Europe must think our cities are populated by zombies. They must seem as if they are run as hospitals. Here, anything goes. And although the city feels as if t’s on the brink of chaos, its people are very friendly, indeed.
We walked to dinner through torrential rain, leaping over the potholes that had now turned into wells of muddy, oily water.
When we got to our destination, we found it had been worth braving the rain. Dinner was a delicious meal of شاورم (shawarma), bread and salad. Egyptian food gets the thumbs-up from me, although I couldn’t really tell you what differentiates it from Iranian, Lebanese, Emirati and Omani cuisine, which all seem very similar to me.
Egypt feels very Middle Eastern to me, and it’s hard to remember that it’s actually in Africa. The culture betrays its location, though, which is as close to the Middle East as you can get, whilst still being in Africa.
Cairo in torrential rain.
As we walked back from dinner, the heavens really opened. Thunderbolts rockets across the city and flashes of lightning turned night into day for just an instant.
One street that we had crossed on the way to dinner was now almost completely under water. We stopped for a moment, while I took a picture of it with my phone’s camera.
We’re told that Cairo gets about one day a year of weather like this, so I suppose we should feel privileged. On the other hand, the staff of our hotel inform us that the weather will remain like this for the rest of the week, which makes us feel that our luck is more of the bad variety than the good.
Whatever the weather, we won’t be able to swap it for better, so we’ll just have to make the best of it, rain or shine.