Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

It’s the twelfth day of the third month of the Islamic lunar calendar, which means it must be the prophet Mohammed’s birthday! Peace be with him.

For this year only, the Islamic calendar coincides with the Gregorian calendar to place Mohammed’s birthday on the same day as my own. And yet, whilst I could scarcely have failed to notice the hordes clamouring to celebrate the anniversary of their prophet’s manifestation on Earth this afternoon, I knew about my own birthday thanks only to a bunch of canned happy birthday messages from various discussion forums I’m a member of. How sweet of you to remember,

Apparently, I’m 43. Fuck that! How am I celebrating it? you ask. I’m not; I’m 43, for fuck’s sake. What’s on Earth is good about that?

Today, we moseyed over to the Egyptian Museum and blitzed the place before the children could complain too much. We saw the main stuff we wanted to see, such as the royal mummies and the Tutankhamun exhibition. Beyond that, we took in as much as we could, but then the inevitable wail of “Can we go now?” began to rise and we our time at the museum was done.

Outside, we agreed a fare and hopped in a taxi to خان الخليل (Khan el-Khalili), the souk in Islamic Cairo that we failed to locate yesterday. Prior to entering, we dove into Gad for delicious falafel, شيش طاوو (shish taouk) and strawberry juice.

With lunch out of the way, we had a look around جامع الأزه (the Al-Azhar Mosque) before entering the Khan el-Khalili souk. It was fun, but after the souks of Istanbul, Muscat and Dubai, we feel pretty spoilt. Before leaving, we popped into Qahwet el Fishawy to revitalise ourselves with mango juice.

Leaving was a little tricky, as a massive Islamic procession was arriving on Midan Hussein square. Women were ululating (how do they do that?), sweets were being strewn, the TV cameras were rolling and the men were marching with banners. This was clearly a huge event.

An Egyptian man informed me that my wife was showing too much flesh and, sure enough, Sarah’s shirt had ridden up where her sling was tied to reveal a sliver of her waist: definitely not the done thing in this most conservative of neighbourhoods. She quickly covered herself up.

We eventually burrowed a route through the crowds to the main road, where we found a taxi and headed back to our hotel.

I’m too tired to write any more and still struggling with sickness, which is causing headaches and fatigue. I feel as if I’ve done a day’s walking before I’ve even left the hotel. And then comes a day of walking.

Still, the temperature here is very reasonable. It can’t have been much more than 21°C today and the rain stayed away. Here’s hoping we’ll all shake the sickness by the morning. Tomorrow promises to be a very full day.

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.

Sarah here. Just blogging to shock my hubby.

We’re staying in a nice hotel which is on the fifth floor of an old nondescript building downtown. You would never suspect that a nice hotel existed upstairs when you arrived. You enter the dark and dirty building lobby and go up via a truly ancient elevator, which is basically just an iron cage on a cord, but when you get upstairs, it’s lovely.

We spent the day today wandering aimlessly around Cairo, which is pretty enormous. Our cab driver last night told us that there are 25 million inhabitants. I thought it was 20, but you get the idea. It was raining this morning and we weren’t aware before we left our room because our windows face out onto a narrow courtyard such that you don’t really look out the window carefully. It wasn’t raining that hard, though, so we didn’t alter our clothing choices once we realized it. But Cairo seems to be permanently coated in a fine layer of black silt, such that the rain turned the whole place into a mud pit. Eloïse splattered a huge amount of mud onto the backs of her bare legs and the skirt of her dress. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get it out. Even Ian was embarrassed while walking around. He said that people were laughing at her. That’s the kind of thing that I would usually think and he would tell me that I’m ridiculous. As the person wearing a baby in a wrap all day, I’m pretty convinced that they were actually laughing about Lukie. Clearly a baby in a sling is an unusual sight.

Having spent the entire day walking in a very crowded city, I can still say that we didn’t see a single stroller of any sort all day. As with the people of Oman, Egyptians seems to prefer carrying their children. Last night when we were out seeking our dinner (late, it must have been 10:15 or something), I saw lots of women carrying their very small babies just as we had in Oman: wrapped up in a lot of furry blankets like little burritos with virtually no baby sticking out. It was interesting last night that children of all ages were out. That was also reminiscent of our UAE/Oman trip.

We had a tasty lunch at some random place on the street that had smelled nice as we walked by earlier in the day. They also gave us crackers made of fried pita bread as we walked by and they were yummy. So we headed back and enjoyed a large lunch. This seems to be one of those countries where they just dump stuff on your table and you’re not sure whether it’s what you ordered or whether it’s some freebie that comes with every meal or if it’s something that they’re giving you and will charge you for if you don’t refuse it. We refused nothing and ended up with way too much food. But still, when we were all finished and asked how much we owed, the guy said “50?” in a way that made it clear that he was just making up a number that seemed suitably high for the tourists. We didn’t complain since that is under 7 Euros for the whole large meal and drinks.

We had another similar experience earlier when we stopped for juice. Ian asked how much for a fresh orange juice and the guy said 3 (it’s 7.50 to the Euro). That seemed fair enough, although we realized that it was probably high, and we ordered two. Then two 11-year old boys came in and were practising their English on us. They had a nice fruit cocktail-looking thing and Ian asked how much it costed. The boy said 1 and in the midst of our confusion about what he was saying (first he tried to describe what was in it) the proprietor suddenly shooed him out and it was clear that he realized that the one finger being held up in the air was going to clue us in to the extent that we had been overcharged. Oh well, we got 50 cents of enjoyment out of our juice so we don’t mind.

Time to get these kiddies out the door for some dinner so we don’t have a repeat of last night’s late night. I’m sure Ian will blog more later.

Well, we’ve made it as far as Cairo, which isn’t saying much, of course, but we are at least here in one piece. Finally, we set foot in Africa (you can’t really count the Canary Islands last year, can you?)

To say that this place is a hive of activity wouldn’t be doing it justice. Outside the hotel, somewhere in the centre of Cairo, it’s like Picadilly Circus, even after ten in the evening. Every street is in gridlock; the traffic is mayhem. The pavements, too, are awash with people going about their business, all of the shops are open, eateries are run off their feet with customers placing orders… The place is bustling beyond belief.

It also has that nondescript exotic aroma to it, which reminds me of Muscat, Dubai, Bangkok, Istanbul and other such cities, where the senses are bombarded at every turn by a veritable barrage of impressions, especially the olfactory.

I can’t spend long on this entry, because it’s late and we haven’t actually seen much at all yet. You can tell already, though, that this is going to be good.

Those passports Eloïse and I picked up the other day weren’t just for the sake of having current documentation, of course.

Sarah has been busy planning our latest trip. We leave tomorrow afternoon for three weeks in Egypt.

This journey will see us spend a number of nights camping in the desert, another few nights on a boat as it makes its way down the Nile, and, of course, a few more nights in more traditional hotel accommodation.

There’s a great deal to see and only three weeks in which to see it in. There’s no way we can hope to see all of a country as big as Egypt in that time, so we’ve been forced to make a few hard choices. Nevertheless, we’re going to see plenty and it’s going to be very exciting; and warm, which is nothing to be taken for granted, I can tell you. We’ve had the mother of all winters here this year and it hasn’t ended yet.

The timing of the trip is good, coming right at the end of a period of sickness for the whole family. I came down with the bug after the rest of the family, so I’ve been struggling these last couple of days and keeping my fingers crossed that I’d be fit for Wednesday’s flight. When I awoke this morning, I could have shat through the eye of a needle without touching the sides, as my grandmother used to say. The prospect of facing the post-meal queue for the toilet on the aeroplane tomorrow was enough to fill me with anticipatory murderous rage.

Happily, though, the gastric storm seems to have blown over and the severely pebbledashed toilets have been scraped clean. Even better, the hospital has given me the all-clear for travel after inspecting the incisions made during last month’s operation. Everything has healed amazingly well and the prosthesis they inserted is doing its job.

My weight is also at a post-April 2009 low again. I’ve repaired the damage done by Xmas in the US and ironed out the blip incurred by not being able to exercise in the post-operative recovery period, but progress has been slow and somewhat frustrating. Nonetheless, I’ll be entering Egypt tipping the scales at a very pleasing 77 kg and hoping, not altogether realistically, to maintain that while we’re there. We’ll see how effectively I can limit the damage.

It’s going to be three weeks of manifold impressions in a society that we’re unlikely to mistake for the home country. Internet access will be sporadic (and obviously non-existent while we’re traversing the desert), but I’ll blog if the opportunity arises.