Defeated by a White Night

[Warning: It’s a longie, but I think a goodie]

[Warning 2: For reasons which I cannot completely explain, the narrative is given in a sort of casual, self-aware oral style sprinkled with ironic academishness.]

This is a story about fitting in.  When you try, and when you don’t.  When you can, and when you can’t? And it is also a story about how you never know what you might find in Cairo.

The story begins and ends on a micro bus.  This is a good frame for a story about fitting in because, frankly, there are not a lot of Americans, or foreigners in general, who frequent the micro bus system in Cairo.  It was Thursday afternoon and I was leaving AUC. I hopped on a micro to Sayyida Aisha which is a square alongside Cairo’s majestic Citadel. (From Future University it is at most 3.5LE to Sayyida Aisha and takes 30-40 minutes.  From Sayyida Aisha you can catch a micro to almost anywhere in the city.)  From there I caught a second micro, for 0.50LE, to Imam i-Shafayee where my good friend Chris lives.

This is a worthy point of digression.  Imam i-Shafayee is the district of Cairo that you get to by leaving the path that you would normally take to some other district that is already off the beaten path. (The structuring of that sentence was partly meant to emphasize that Imam i-Shafayee is a thing of its own, while at the same time indicating that it is representative of a much larger phenomena in the urbanization of Cairo [see graveyard reference below], or even that all such districts around Cairo are in some surreal fashion actually connected into one space).  Chris has to travel to a neighboring district to use an ATM, and when I visit him I bring loaves of bread because loaves of bread are too western of a product to find in his area.  All the territory around his neighborhood is mausoleums, and although Chris resides in an actual apartment, it would not be a far stretch to say that he lives in a graveyard.  The oddest thing is that this does not please him.  While the rest of the young American community in Cairo, myself included, champions the goal of “discovering the real Egypt” and ends up living in Maadi, Zamalek or at best around Down Town, Chris would love to be living in Maadi and ends up in obscure allies in a city of the dead.

I hadn’t been able to reach Chris in over two days.  This was despite actually trying to call him, which for me is a last resort and tells you just how desperate I was getting.  With this in mind and factoring in Cairo heat, I tried, as I walked the block and half to his house, to calculate just how decomposed his body would be by the time I figured out how to break into his apartment.  As it turns out, Chris had not chocked to death alone in his apartment but had merely tried to fix his iphone and instead managed to completely reset the thing and block it from use in Egypt.

[At this point the story switches to a kinda present tense thing indicating that what has come before is sort of background but now we are getting to the real meat.]

So, I explain how glad I am to see him alive, and he says, let’s get supplies for tuna melts, which seemed like a reasonable line of logic to me.  As we are heading past the butcher I hear a small group of guys arguing, actually it is one guy arguing with four others guys.  This is not such a queer sight in Cairo, what is odd is that they keep pointing and nodding towards me.  As we walk past I pick up the word Masri (Egyptian) being thrown around.  Well, we go pick up our butter, the most important ingredient in tuna melts, and as we are walking back past the butcher the one guy asks me in Arabic, “Are you Egyptian?”  Now, I have not shaved or cut my hair in a while, and I am not exactly the tall, blond type, thus I do not look as American as I could.  So, I decide to have a little fun with them, so in my second most annoyed tone of voice I respond in Arabic, “Of course! Look at me! I’m Egyptian! I’m Egyptian.”  And the four guys take another look at me and then break out into a little we-told-you-so dance, and in my head I’m doing the little dance with them.  This is a pretty big moment for me.

Well, Chris and I go home and we make our succulent melts, and I do something I have been meaning to do all month.  I cut my hair.  At least, I try to cut my hair, which at this point is almost to my shoulders.  I get about a ninth of the way through and the buzzer runs out of juice.  Now, obviously I can’t leave it like this, so we plug it into the charger and watch a little TV.  Half an hour later I try again and now I get two ninths of the way through and it looks even worse than before.  I had been planning on only stopping by Chris’ for a short visit.  Instead it turns into a four and half hour ordeal—trim-a-little, talk-a-little, trim-a-little, talk-a-little—like the Music Man meets Sweeny Todd (but with less swindling and less gore).  By the time the buzzer dies a ninth time, my patience has died with it, and almost all my hair is gone.  But, I still have this huge beard.  Buzzed head.  Big Beard.  For anyone who has traveled in Egypt no doubt this sounds familiar.

I ask Chris if I can borrow the buzzer, and decide I will charge it over night and shave in the morning.

I head out into the street and it is about midnight now.  Of course, Cairo being the true “city that never sleeps” there are people everywhere, and suddenly I realize, no one is even giving me a second glance.  Usually the moment an American steps foot in the neighborhood passersby start pointing them in the direction of Chris’ apartment and shop owners start asking if he or she can pay off Chris’ tab.  But, I am blending right in.

I hop on a micro back to Sayyida Aisha, and a man asks me what the price is.  (It’s 0.50LE). I am riding pretty high.  I transfer to another micro to Sayyida Zeinub (0.50LE).  We barrel off down the road.  This driver is one of the good ones, a real zealot, an improvisational driving genius.  Nothing’s off limits.  He squeals around a midan, swerves past a maroon Kia and almost hits a donkey cart.  He’s enjoying himself but the two middle-aged, black-clad women in front of me, who have already taken the precaution of sandwiching their two small children in the middle of the seat for protection, scold him to slow down.  So, just as we are passing the Mosque of Ibn Tulun on the left, the driver lays off the gas a bit.  And that’s when it happens.  Out of the dark, squawking, squealing, honking night, mane tossing in the breeze, comes a white horse galloping in and out of traffic, and it overtakes us.  I crane my head because it is so close I can hardly see it.  On the back of the horse, in stark contrast to its majesty, is this small Egyptian guy in dusty jeans, an over sized navy dress shirt and bad sneakers.  The horse, nay the stallion, elegantly dodges a merging taxi and disappears off into the night.  My jaw drops and I cast my gaze around in the universal sign for, “Holy Bleeping bleep! Did anyone else just see that bleep?!”

Every Egyptian around me is calmly staring ahead.  The girl beside me lazily meets my eyes and then looks back at the road as if to stay, “Meh, giant white stallion you say, wake me if it sprouts wings.”

And that’s when I realize, I have failed the final test.

Home from AUC for Four Pounds Fifty

I have been meaning to right a eulogy to the Irish dance class which I have been teaching for the past semester and a half and which ended just before spring break, but the words have been evading me.  So, instead I am going to post something a bit more practical and less energy intensive.

Some of you may remember the fight for an affordable bus system (among other issues) that a number of students, including myself, had with AUC during the first year at the New Cairo campus.  Long story short, this effort failed.  Currently an AUC bus pass for one semester costs 1,740LE ($316). And the school is raising the price next school year.  You can also get tickets good for 1 ride for 20LE.  (A taxi into the city costs about 50LE so if you have even two other friends heading the same direction as you it is cheaper to get your own ride.)  As a result of the exorbitant bus fees a number of students started forging bus pass stickers this semester.

For those of you without your own means of transport, a forged pass, people to carpool with or who just want to leave school whenever they please, the following is a relatively quick and easy way to get from AUC to down town Cairo (or anywhere serviced by the metro) for 4.5 LE.

Requisites: Beginner’s Egyptian Arabic, intermediate sense of adventure, high tolerance for cramped spaces.

Step one: Getting to Future University

Head towards the gate near the Art department (this is the closest gate to Future University, which is the horrific campus across the highway from AUC which resembles the unfortunate love child between an airport and the Coliseum).  Sidle up to someone heading the same direction and ask them if they are leaving school.  If they are, politely ask if they can drop you off at Future University (most people pass Future University on their way from AUC).  In the event that they are not actually leaving school or unwilling to give you a lift, it is only a five minute walk.

Step two: Getting to the Moneeb Transfer Point

In front of Future University there is a micro bus pick up point.  Tell the driver of a micro that you need something to Moneeb (“Lazim haaga ala Moneeb”).  If they are not going in that direction they will usually point you to a micro that is or tell you that something is coming.  Occasionally, you will find a micro from Future University straight to Moneeb (if so skip to “step four”).  This will usually cost 3.5LE (sometimes 3LE).  More often the driver will tell you to hop in and that he will drop you off at a transfer point with buses to Moneeb.  This short lift should only cost 1LE.

Step tree: Getting a Bus to Moneeb

After a ride of about 10 minutes you will reach a little, informal microbus stop/station off to the side of the road like a rest stop.  There are usually 2 or 3 other micros parked here.  There will almost always be a driver calling for people going to Moneeb (it might sound like “Moniya”).  If no one is calling, ask someone at the stop and they might tell you that there will be a bus shortly or point you to the right one.  The bus to Moneeb should cost 2.5LE.

Step Four: Getting to the El Zahraa Metro Station

Get on the bus to Moneeb.  Try to sit near the door.  You do not actually want to go to Moneeb.  Your goal is to get to the El Zahraa metro station.  So, tell the driver (or the people sitting in front of you) when you get on, or during the first five minutes of the trip, that you would like to be dropped off by the El Zahra metro (“Mumkin urayib el Zahraa” or “Mumkin urayib el metru”.  This is fairly common request. It is about 15 minutes to the metro once you are on the bus to Moneeb.  You will be driving along a raised highway and just after you go around a sweeping corner to the left and start heading down hill you will see an off ramp ahead and the metro tracks running under the highway.  You may need to remind the driver to let you out at the off ramp, but usually they remember.

Step Five Getting Down Town (or elsewhere):

Walk down the off ramp to the metro and catch it to wherever you are heading (1LE).  Down town is about 10 minutes away (Marg direction).  Maadi is about 5 minutes away (Helwan direction).

Note: don’t expect it to go smoothly your first time, and be ready to improvise.  It may seem complicated at first but it becomes second nature within a week.

I can usually make it to Down Town in the same time as the AUC bus, sometimes slightly faster. Between taking microbuses, carpooling, hitchhiking and occasionally slipping on the AUC bus, transportation to and from university for February cost me 38.5LE, for March 24.5LE, and for the first half of April 15.5LE.  At this rate I will spend about 120LE for transportation to and from school this semester that is a savings of (1740-120=) 1,620LE or $294.50.  Last semester I got a round trip ticket on Air Arabia from Cairo, Egypt to Mumbai, India for $280.

If you want any other transportation tips feel free to email me (coleagar@gmail.com).

I Sold Two Pictures at 1,500LE ($275) Each

Eighth Floor Falaki, pen, 60x80cm, 2008

Nubar Apartment Roof, charcoal, 80x60cm, 2008

DRAWRING

“Excuse me. Excuse me. Yeah sorry to interrupt. Is your name by any chance Cody?”

The man looked to be around mid-fifties. He was balding and mustached, and had a round quality to him. He spoke without commas, quickly and confidently. His skin was slightly dark like his mismatching brown suit. He looked like a professor, and I knew I recognized him, even knew him, but could not think from where.

“My name is Cole, is that close enough for your purposes?”

“Cole! Cole! Yes Cole.” He was friendly, but with eyes and energy just piercing enough to appear slightly aggressive. The friend with whom I had been making small talk pulled back slightly but looked on intrigued. “And did you used to be in LSA?”

“I was in the Law Students Association all right. All the way back, basically in the beginning.”

“Yeah yeah Cole?” He seemed to be pondering my name, trying it on for size. “And did you do this drawring.” He stabbed a hard second ‘r’ into the word every time he said it. “Just a second.” He fumbled in his pocket and then pulled out a phone. I expected him to show me a picture of the LSA logo, which I had designed, and say that LSA needed me to send them a soft copy again because they had lost the old one. He held the phone up for me to see, shielding the screen against the glaring dessert sun.

At first I could not see anything. Then I made out a dark, pixilated image of a fleet of Cairene buildings stretching up towards the citadel. It was a charcoal picture I had drawn nearly three year earlier, and I could not imagine where he would have seen it.

As if responding to my thoughts, he continued, “I saw this drawring in the gallery here on campus,” he indicated down the main spine of AUC towards our art department. “I saw it and I said ‘isn’t that that Cody kid.’ Well I’ve been looking for you for a year and I carry a picture of your drawring around with me just in case I ever found you. I just have to ask you,” and here he paused, or at least in my mind time stood still for a moment. “Do you ever sell your work?”

I told him that I sold one piece back in grade school.

“Well you don’t have to decide right now. You look at that drawring for a week or two and then let me know what you want.” He told me his name was Tony. We had been together in LSA and now he was teaching Rhetoric at AUC and night classes in legal writing. We exchanged numbers and I said I would give him a call. And then, he walked away.

Wasting Away

“You have to eat some food from this world or else you’ll disappear. Don’t worry it won’t turn you into a pig. Chew it and swallow.”
-Haku, Spirited Away

It’s always nice to have people notice us and comment on changes in our appearance. A coworker asks if we have been working out. A classmate says she likes our new haircut. These comments of recognition confirm our friendships, boost our self confidence and reassure us that we exist.

But sometimes these exchanges are less flattering. For example, in the middle of an art critique session when the teacher stops class to say, “What is wrong with you? You look terrible, I mean really terrible. I think you are not eating, yes? You need to be eating, I mean you look really awful, like unhealthy awful. Doesn’t Cole look unhealthy?”

This sort of comment could probably be dismissed. Art teachers are eccentric. This one has often commented about his erratic sleep schedule. He has bags under his eyes, and his skin, despite his being Arab, is pasty. You don’t have to trust health advice given by people with pasty skin, do you? Unfortunately, you do have to trust sweet, veiled engineering TAs. If anyone is grounded and has your best interests at heart it is an architectural engineering TA. They are like God’s messengers on Earth.
So, when TA Mina seeks you out in your architecture studio and says, “Do you need anything? Is there any way I can help? You are looking really thin. I think you have lost a lot of weight. Do you find time to eat? I know you are very busy but you really have to eat. If there is anything I can do just let me know.” you know that this is not a fluke comment. Neither is it a confirmation of friendship or an ego booster. At least you still exist—that feels good—but for how much longer.

Oh… there is a knocking at the door. That must be dinner. I should go.

A Pandemic We Can Get Behind

I first heard the news from Sam. I will always remember where I was—sitting on the couches in the library reading Cracking the LSAT by The Princeton Review—when the news came. The swine flu pandemic had touched the American University in Cairo.

Over the past year the Egyptian government has done everything in its power to ward off the specter of swine flu. Much of Egypt’s pig population—owned chiefly be Egypt’s poor Coptic citizens like the zabbaleen garbage collectors—were rounded up by the government and massacred. A friend of mine recounted how he was driving through one of the poorer districts on the outskirts of Cairo, and he got stuck behind a slow moving microbus. A long line of cars had built up and people were honk and yelling their requests for the obnoxious obstruction to be removed. The microbus bumped and groaned through the dirt road and suddenly the side door popped open and slid wide. Plump little pink pigs tumbled forth into the road. My friend said that people freaked. I pictured Mercedes and BMW crashing into each other in an attempt to avoid the pig avalanche. It turns out the opposite was true. The Mercedes and the BMWs revved their engines and tried to run down the pigs. It was like the drivers feared that, unless killed, the pigs, like zombies, would attack, smashing through windshields, ripping out throats and gorging themselves on human flesh, spreading the plague. By night fall millions of mutant humans and pigs would roam the streets of Cairo competing for the few remaining food sources.

In addition to seeming incredibly overblown, many people feel the swine flu scare in Egypt is highly politico-religious. In a part of the world where the pig is seen as unclean, taboo, forbidden, and is only owned by the Christian minority, it understandable that as a Coptic citizen one would feel directly targeted by the government’s pig eradication measures.

These are the things I hear about—pigs tumbling from microbuses, outraged Christians—but it has never affected me personally till now. When I say that the swine flu pandemic has touched AUC I don’t mean that students are dying in the hallways or that the dorms have been quarantined. From what I hear there have in fact been 7 cases of swine flu at AUC, but none of the students were seriously affected. No, I am not even referring to a physical pandemic. Rather I mean the pandemic of pandemonium.

Yesterday, by order of the Egyptian government, the American University in Cairo was shut down until October 4th. Our two day Eid break, has just turned into two weeks. It is highly inconvenient, teachers and students alike are frustrated, the semester will be seriously set back, and I know I will feel wretched when the zombie invasion begins, but sitting at my computer, on a Thursday afternoon, having slept in till 1:30PM, with the LSAT exam in a week and a half, I can sincerely state, this is one pandemic I can get behind!

TAKE A NUMBER

The office is packed when I walk in. It might be any office, Egypt Air, LinkDSL, but that is unimportant. What matters is that the well swept floor and flat screen TV mounted on a central pillar do little to disguise the underlying shabbiness of the establishment. What matters is heat which drips down men’s spines, discolors a plaid or paisley arm pit, or pools in a crotch. What matters is the hunger nestled in each belly, just below the religious guilt and social pressure. What matters is that the office is packed when I walk in.

A man indicates towards a black dispenser, a bureaucratic toilet paper roll used to wipe away fecal inefficiency and foul individuality. I take a number. I am 0664. A chime calls my attention to a license-plate-sized digital display mounted on the wall behind the counter. The display says 0550.

I stare at the display. A minute goes by, and then five. A few people enter. A few people leave. A chime. 0551. One man leaves. I do some quick calculations in my head, and follow him out. As an afterthought I grab another toilet paper number as I walk through the door. I am 0664, and I am 0667. My heart swells a little at this act of rebellion. I feel more dynamic and alive, and with that I go to run errands. I come back after the shadows have shrunken and shriveled in the ascending sun and then begun to grow again. The display says 0621. I head back out for a walk to pounder why others did not simply do the same. When I return again the display says 0658, and I go inside to wait.

Twenty minutes go by, and then the chime summons me to the polished, plywood, Promised Land. I approach the counter and show the gate keeper my number, 0664, and he nods his approval. Pleasantries are exchanged. Explanations are exchanged, and finally funds are exchanged. As I head out the door I look around.

A dusty, potbellied man on my left picks his nose. He does not hide it, neither does he flaunt it or dare those around him to meet his gaze saying, “Yeah, I’m picking my nose in public. Want to fight about it?!” It is a simple act. He picks his nose. In another dimension he might have coughed or tied his shoe.

Next to the dusty, potbellied man sits a dusty old man. The dusty old man does not pick his nose. He does not cough or tie his shoe or do anything accept stare at the ground and wonder what he is doing, an old man, in this crowded office with a distant number in his pocket. He was not there when I first arrived. He was not there when I came back from running errands. It is a very distant number.

I reach into my right, front jeans pocket, down below my tattered wallet, pull out a crumpled piece of toilet paper and hand it to him. Instinctively, he reaches up and takes it. For a moment he looks confused, not quite sure what his body has done in his mind’s absence. Then, he looks annoyed, perhaps wondering why some rude American kid has just handed an old man his pocket detritus. I smile at the old man. I am myself again, and he is 0667. In this office in, this moment it is a name with more sway than any held by old aristocracy. I walk out into the street. Behind me a chime. 0666.

Cole Verses the Netherworld: A Week Without Sleep.

And now that week was gone,
That week without sleep,
That week of one night rest and working the next.
For eight days.

We walked the streets,
Sam and I,
A celebration of semi-somnambulation.
There were things we were doing,
The silent sounds of the concert behind us,
A friend’s concert where no one had recognized me,
The expat woman grabbing me
And using me as a human shield against the guard’s
Tennis balls,
The groceries in my hand,
A hazelnut pudding for me,
A peach Freeze for Sam,
But it was the walking that mattered.

The walking and the questions,
The odd queries punctuating our conversation,
“Do you think a ‘Hello Pineapple’ backpack would sell?”
“Why ‘Hello Pineapple’?”
“Because I saw a pineapple.”

When we got home we made pasta.
We had gone shopping
Because there was nothing to eat,
We had not bought pasta,
But when we got home we made pasta,
I guess that’s how these things work.

Minority Report was on TV.
It was on TV because Sam put it there
Using the USB drive
That he stuck in the Play Station controller port.
A real discovery that.
It seemed an appropriate movie.
It seemed long.

And then it turned violent,
The sleep that consumed me,
And when I tried to awake it perused me,
Reaching out of slumber and grabbing at my face,
Grabbing at my clothes, my nose,
Reaching round and pulling me down,
And then I was back in the apartment.
But not the apartment that was,
The apartment that should have been.
It was large and every door hid another room,
A room with three beds
Or a balcony of nothingness
That extended eight stories down
To the ground two stories below.
The front was modern,
White sterile walls,
IKEA kitchen ,
Sleep Comfort beds.
But as you moved to the rooms in the rear
They transformed into antique
Four posters,
Dark wood,
And slanted attic ceilings.

And LuLu was their,
With her strange men.
They kept coming and coming,
And I knew them all,
And that made them stranger.

And I could jump,
Oh God could I jump.
I could leap and bound and spring and vault,
Hop and hurdle, soar and summersault.
No furniture could match me.
No railing was too high.

And this reality was mine,
And I would have it!
Once I awoke,
And I was pressing the pillow
So hard into my eyes I could feel
My contacts scraping my corneas.

I peered in the mirror in the morning,
A couple of pin-prick scabs on my forehead
Flared red and inflamed from the friction,
Faint bruising ran round one eye
And down the center of the same cheek.

Over an hour has passed,
And I’m still not sure I’m free.

Becoming a Brothel

It is hard to tell the exact point where one switches from a life of decency to a life of transgression. One day you are asked to carry a letter for a nice man in a tux. Then it is a brown paper bag that you are asked not to open, and one day you open your eyes and find yourself staring at the bloody crumpled face of a man you never met with a tire iron in your hand and sweat beading in your eyebrows. Or maybe you start out storing and lending like anyone else. A few deals go bad, the economy dips a little, and you can’t face the investors. You keep recording real estate which is tanking at its original price till one day nothing is left in the vaults and your clients are shit-out-of-luck. Do you escape to the Caymans or wait for the government to bail you out? Where did it all begin? Can you find a point and say, this is when we knew things had changed?

For us the point probably came when a strange Egyptian man asked Reem the time of day… and then tried to kiss her. She was sitting on the landing smoking a cigarette, a normal enough activity, and when the man paused in front of her she assumed he was trying to find the flat of a friend. The strange man asked for the time, and asked for a cigarette, and then asked for her name. Reem didn’t want to be rude, and then his lips descended.

We might have considered the attempted landing kiss a localized incident had it not happened once before. On Monday a man followed Gillian up to our apartment. She assumed he lived upstairs until he stopped in front of our door. Again, he asked for the time of day. This seems to be the code. When she said she didn’t have a watch the man asked for a glass of water and started walking into our apartment. Gillian screamed at the man and slammed the door.

But how did we gain this reputation? What has given these strange Egyptian men the impression that sin and sensuality lay beyond our wooden door?

Two of the members of our flat-family are girls, Gillian and Kaya. Neither of them is particularly promiscuous, but they do have friends that are male, and they definitely do not try to be Egypt. Gillian’s boyfriend is a marine, and he has spent the night occasionally. Kaya, despite covering up with scarves and shawls, for some reason, has been mistaken for a prostitute a few times. Once when she and I were coming home from a party some officers stopped our taxi just as we were coming to the bridge that crosses the train tracks into our part of Maadi. They harassed us for a few minutes and made rude insinuations about a young white man with a darker skinned woman going home together late at night. They demanded to see our identification but as soon as they discovered that Kaya is an American they sent us on our way. We also have a part time roommate who lives in Paris but stays with us for four or five days a month. Lauren is the sister-in-law of one of my professors, and as an artist who is recording a CD in Egypt we do not question why she comes and goes at 4:00am. Occasionally when I take a break from homework to go to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning I will hear a male Egyptian voice coming from her room, but I assume she is practicing Arabic. And Reem, who stays with us when she can, does spend some time on the landing smoking, but after all, we host a yoga studio so she certainly cannot smoke in the house.

And that is probably the key point, the yoga studio. It never struck me as odd until strange men started showing up and harassing my friends. However, I suppose standing on the street in Egypt and seeing groups of mainly western woman coming and going from a certain dwelling, often with a couple guys accompanying them might look a little suspicious. Doing homework on the inside, as a youth from a liberal community in Wisconsin, the reason for these mysterious goings-on seemed very clear; yoga classes attract a largely female crowd and haven’t yet caught on with most Egyptians who generally have more important things to be worrying about then the form of their downward dog. But now I can see the other side.

It is hard to tell where to go from here. While it is nice that the community is finally getting to know us, being known as the town brothel is not quite what I had hoped for. The worst part is that now I am starting to see our apartment as a brothel. The attempted landing kiss just took place this morning and already the image has crept into the back of my mind and nestled in amongst the half-forgotten errands and movies I mean to watch sometime. I look at the beer bottles on the dining room table and think brothel. Dim light seeps out from under a bedroom door and I imagine I hear the whining of over-burdened bedsprings. I pass the living room on the way to the kitchen and my mind paints half-naked woman draped over the furniture their eyelids drooping languidly with the boredom of a long day. One smokes a cigarette, another picks bits of food from her teeth, while a third strokes her leg pondering if it is time to shave, and all of them wait. They wait for a strange man to barge into the apartment and ask for the time of day.

A Guest’s Week in Cairo

I flew from London to Egypt on a nonstop service, landing late on a February evening. As the plane sighed and began to descend, the southern coast of the Mediterranean came into view, illuminated by setting sun, glowing in the center of my porthole. A golden cloud of sand was suspended out over the wine-dark sea, which, I imagined, had originated thousands of miles to the south, having tormented the 80-odd million citizens of Egypt before enveloping the super-tanker that was resting in the sea below us. We followed the western edge of the anciently fertile delta of Alexandria, circled Cairo a few times and finally landed; I haggled a taxi, who I paid in the small bills of three different currencies, and then there I was, in Cole’s dining room.

Egypt is kind of an upside down country. The Nile flows from the southern border, where it sneaks in the back door (dropping its famously fertile silt in a giant fake lake called Nah-sir, I mean Nasser, which, the US failed to the fund in the ’50′s because we felt threatened by youthful Gamal); meanders up dawn the length of the country and dribbles out at the top, into the Mediterranean. The alluvial fan is at the top not the bottom — this leaves me confused regularly.

Furthermore, adding to my feeling of inversion, Egyptians and their drivers fail to follow the traffic laws — the only non-divine laws which are patently and unquestionably just. The term circus becomes more abundantly rich; cars wear their collection of dings proudly. When a flow of cars seeks to split and merge with other stream, a hundred blood pressures rise as vans full of bodies vie for a little space between hulking brown truck and hulking Hummer H2.

I suppose the readers of this blog deserve a sort of independent review of the American University of Cairo. I can’t review the school itself — I’ve only been a student for a few days, attending what my handlers describe as only the best classes, professed by only the finest professors — all corn-fed Americans. There is, however, the new campus — a shimmering feat of architecture and fundraising, (USAID paid for $100 million of it). I suppose I am qualified to talk about that, at least.

Besides for its circumstances, the campus is unexceptional — built with a certain cleverness on one hand (lots of shade), and a certain lack of for sight on the other (location; dozens of fountains?!?), characterized by the liberal use of ceramic tile which will cause many future Americans feel as if they have truly arrived in the Arab world, and feel compelled to give generously. The influence of artistic/propaganda movements like Constructivism and Suprematism upon the architects is also on full display when one walks between the three or four story buildings — one feels a little uncomfortable being alone, like maybe one did something wrong even when one didn’t.

The new AUC campus, its location, conception and execution have drawn sharp criticism from the students who I have met, Egyptian and otherwise. Each critic had his or her own way of pointing out the usefulness of the new campus as a symbol of all that is backwards about the administration of the school; a desert temple to their folly. I suppose I would say the same things if I were a student here — there’s nothing like seeing wasteful people doing wasteful things to stir up resentment towards them — but the campus could be much worse (its location, maybe not.)

Expatriated Americans abound, as do Europeans and Canadians. Upon several occasions I have forgotten that I was 6200 miles from home, I was so surrounded by familiar clichés, political views and prejudices. As I have discovered, Cairo is somewhat famous for its concentration of expatriates. One night, I even took in three Americans sing a cover of Wagon Wheel as their cultured audience sipped alcohol under tacky Christmas lights. Cole and I, feeling a little too at home I think, wandered outside and watched a 12-year-old Egyptian tennis prodigy return serve after serve from her hired coach as her father looked on and we talked with ourselves about being from the midwest. (Sidenote: I noticed yesterday that if you draw the shortest line over the surface of the globe from Viroqua to Cairo you can, your line passes directly over London provided you use a thick-ish marker.)

My first week in Egypt ended with a visit to the pyramids, west of Cairo, with Dina, Cole and Dina’s family’s driver. I was struck by their hugeness, although according to my companions I was too awe-filled. As one approaches on the freeway, the pyramids possess only a two-dimensional gigantism — like when the disk of the harvest moon appears on the horizon; you know, you just know, it’s not going to look that big after it wheels into the sky, it’s probably just an optical illusion — big by way of being surrounded by little things. The pyramids appear the same way, smooshed into the sky by yellow-brown pollution and sand, foregrounded by Giza and a endless warren of half-finished brick buildings. But when you finally get there, and their edges pop out to form volume and suggest mass, they only seem bigger — not elegant, not holy as the Parthenon felt, just very permanent and determined against the sky.

Whatever elegance is lost on account of the pyramids can be found in the Great Sphinx, and her tremendously expressive tail. About the size of a large midwestern barn, the sphinx is, in its own right, a moving work of the human spirit. The lighting, however, is permanently, ‘a little too much’. I got a headache looking at it for too long.

After having all of these thoughts and seeing all of these things, Cole and I were deposited back at his apartment, sunburnt pink and a bit jaded, Dina notified us that we were invited to go with her and her family to ‘their place’ on The Red Sea coast, an invitation fraught with intrigue, history and political wrangling. Tune in next time!

- SJH