khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-14 14:06:00 |
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Egypt: May 8-9, 2007
Okay, now for more Egypt. Going back in time to May 2007...
DAY ZERO (Photos)
Jake and I got on the plane, and flew for 14+ hours of waking and troubled sleep, from San Francisco to New York to Egypt. I changed my money to Egyptian pounds in the New York airport, and was disappointed to find that I could have gotten a much better exchange rate if I’d waited ‘till Cairo. My first act upon entering the country, and every day afterward, was to slather myself with tons and tons of suntan lotion (Jake’s lotion, since I had forgotten my own). I probably needn’t have bothered; the skies above Cairo that first day were smoggy and gray and dour, hanging with a humidity I hadn’t expected to encounter in Egypt, and as our taxi drove into the city proper I looked out of the windows onto miles of rundown apartment buildings and old cemeteries and, in the distance, barren hills.
We finally arrived at the Garden City House Hotel in downtown Cairo -- an impressive old building with huge rooms, a vast echoing stairwell, and a rundown feel. Our faint apprehension at our so-so room (there were no towels in the bathroom) was brightened up when we went out on the balcony and saw a beautiful view of greenery, the river Nile, and countless minarets. We went out to explore the city. Cairo is a pedestrian’s city; streetlights were few, but cars constantly slowed down for passers-by and we basically walked wherever we liked. On the other hand, compared to the only other non-English-speaking country I had been in -- Japan -- there were almost no English street signs, and there among the narrow, tree-lined, radial streets, we soon found ourselves repeatedly lost.
It was at this point that I made my first major social faux pas. Every tourist book I had read had continually hammered a point about the importance of “baksheesh,” tipping. You were supposed to tip people for giving directions! Opening doors for you! Talking to you in the street! So there I was, with my wallet full of Egyptian pounds, certain that if I had ANY social contact with ANYBODY I would be obliged to pay them. The first few times that I asked someone for directions and then immediately thrust money on them, however, they responded with bewilderment or laughter. Once or twice they accepted it, but mostly they refused. Gradually I realized that I was merely being a moronic tourist waving money around. The truth, as I later discovered, is that “baksheesh” is not something that just everyone constantly gives to everyone else, but mostly, something that people expect in designated tourist areas or for designated service jobs. When you go near the Pyramids, or Luxor, or major tourist places like that, *then* there are swarms of self-proclaimed guides and helpers who make a living by (unhelpfully) pointing out the locations of monuments and so on, and then asking for money. It’s also a good idea to give it to luggage-handlers and all the same people you might tip in America. But there in Cairo, on that first day, Jake and I were pretty much just wandering obliviously around in a city where everyone else was trying to go about their normal lives, and if they gave us directions, they were just being friendly. (We did encounter one or two scam artists on that first day, but not many... just some people with an assortment of tattered American business cards, trying to make friends with us by claiming that they knew such-and-such person in the states, look, here’s his card, and would you like to stop at a souvenir shop?) After blundering around like this for awhile, Jake and I eventually stopped in a cafe where I was so fidgety and nervous that I accidentally spilled hot sweet tea all over the floor.
Embarrassed, I soon staggered out of the cafe and we made our way to a park where I bought some mint juice from a street vendor. The mint juice was so good I regained some of my equilibrium, and realized I didn’t need to try to tip people all the time. I joined Jake in wandering far to the northeast of the city... out in avenues where butchers hung filetted goats and lambs in the open air, through alleys filled with lamp shops and furniture shops, past clothing shops with the windows completely filled with dresses and shirts, with not an inch of wasted space. I was struck, as I had been in Tokyo, by the massive space waste of American cities, with their enormous suburbs, their vast streets wasting the land.
We wandered until the sun grew low in the sky, and then I started to get tired. I hadn’t really slept on the plane and it was probably about 6 am back in the U.S., on almost the exact opposite side of the world. We made our way back to the hotel room where I crashed out on the bed shortly after sunset without having dinner. The air was heavy in the room, but I slept like the dead.
DAY 1: COPTIC CAIRO (Photos)
Jake and I woke just before dawn. Our sleep schedules were off; furthermore, in the wee hours of the morning as at other times of the day, there was the sound of the mosques’ loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. We showered and prepared to make an early start of it by going to Coptic Cairo, one of the locations not on the GAP Adventures tour, which we would join later in the day. In the dim early morning light we got on the train and went south to Mar Girgis, Saint George’s station, in the heart of Cairo’s old Christian community.
Christianity spread rapidly in Ancient Egypt, and Coptic (“Egyptian”) Christianity is one of the oldest forms of the religion. After centuries of Islamic assimilation, only about 10% of Egyptians are still Christian, most of them not in Cairo but in the south, near the Sudan and historically Christian Ethiopia. But at one point Egypt was the center of a massive Christian church, which broke off from both Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox due to the usual nitpicky ideological differences, not long before Islam came into the picture. (In fact, the Islamic invaders were welcomed as liberators to a certain extent, since the common Egyptians were sick of being oppressed by their Byzantine overlords.) The Copts of Cairo, however, boast one of the oldest churches in the region, as well as a recently upgraded museum and bookstore, from which I bought postcards, but not the English-language leaflets of philosophy and religious instruction by Pope Shenouda III.
It was still early morning when we arrived, and the museum wasn’t open yet. We wandered through the alleys between the old Coptic buildings, built on the ruins of a Roman fortress, which reminded me in the vaguest way of the back of the Episcopal church I’d attended as a child. Most of the faithful had not yet arrived for prayer, but the churches still seemed bigger than necessary for the number of attendants. Some sort of morning services had already begun, and the sound of chanting and praying echoed through the alleyways. A cleaning-woman indicated to Jake and I that it would be okay if we went inside one of the churches, so we went into a chapel -- an ancient wood and stone building -- and saw perhaps a half-dozen people seated among the pews, while altar boys performed the service along with a man in a massive ornate white robe and mitre. Hanging near the altar was a huge tapestry of Jesus, surrounded by glowing green Christmas lights. I had the thought that Coptic Christianity was like Catholicism with twice the imagination and 1/10th the budget. We dropped some money in the donations box and continued wandering around the grounds, eventually finding our way into the great Coptic cemetery in the back. The tombs were built like houses, shadowed with trees, with painted statues of Jesus and Mary everywhere as if as an intentional “nyah!” to Islamic iconoclasm. By now the museum had opened, so we went inside and looked at the strange Coptic art, that final fusion of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman influences. The Coptic language had died hundreds of years ago except as a liturgical language which still provides clues as to the sound of ancient Egyptian, but there were old Bibles written in Coptic, with semi-hieroglyphic characters, vulture-headed and eagle-headed creatures looming over the vaguely Gothic letters like an illuminated manuscript. There were paintings of Saint George and the dragon, obscure animal-headed saints from fables, paintings of Jesus from monastic caves, and other fascinating relics. Children played in the courtyard as we wandered through the museum’s upper stories.
The sun had now broken free of the clouds, and we left and had some hot tea at a pleasant sidewalk cafe, making do with English and Jake’s smidgens of Arabic. I was already appreciating Egypt’s cafe culture, sort of the replacement for bar culture back home. Alcohol, after all, was forbidden on religious grounds -- if there was any surreptitious drinking I didn’t see it, except on the last night of our trip -- so perhaps as a substitute, people hung out for hours in the shade of the cafes, in shirts and pants or djellabas, drinking Coke and hot dark tea full of sediment and sugar. It was almost entirely a male culture, with only men in these cafes, but more on that later. Sometimes a little TV would be playing in the corner, sometimes people would be smoking from water pipes. Sometimes you could get karkady, a usually sweet red drink made out of hibiscus. Egypt had excellent non-alcoholic drinks -- tons of strange fruit drinks and sweet, tasty things. We passed by a bakery, where we bought some bread and pastries, which were delicious. At almost every meal we were served excellent, fresh pita bread or flatbread, which made American-bought pitas taste like the nasty, bitter dish-sponges they are.
In other ways, though, Egyptian food was a little bland. In upscale restaurants there was lots of rice and salad and meat dishes served in little clay pots, but the casseroles weren’t particularly spicy or flavorful. The standard “Mediterranean” dishes like kebab and falafel were everywhere, and were very good. Koshari is by far the best food I had in Egypt -- a fast-food mixture of rice, lentils, dried chickpeas, and macaroni. Pour tomato sauce, garlic and spices on it, and you have something like spicy pasta crossed with breakfast cereal. Fuul, brown beans which are also a common food, varied from a gross paste to very tasty -- it all depends on the seasoning, I guess. It must be remembered that we were on a fairly “cheap” tour and, later on, we spent quite a few nights being served simple communal food on feluccas and in tents. These dishes were actually very tasty at the end of a long day, even if it was just stew, or alphabet soup poured over rice. And whenever we stopped to rest, we drank tea, and Coke, and bottled water.
After lunch the sky got gray again, and we went back to the Garden City House Hotel and checked out, gathering our luggage. On the way out, the seedy-looking doorman followed us out the front door and informed us that indignantly that the towels from the room were missing. Jake and I both simultaneously and with the innocent confidence of truth told him that there weren’t any towels in the room when we got there, and the doorman raised his hands in a dismissive “If you say so” gesture and, not speaking another word, turned and left. This put both Jake and I in a good mood for the rest of the day.
THE CITADEL (Photos)
We decided to go to the Citadel, an enormous fortress built by Saladin on a cliff above Cairo, back in the 12th century. (I vaguely regretted that we didn’t have time to go to the Agricultural Museum, where the Lonely Planet guide promised “giant plastic fruits and glass cases full of stuffed birds”.) After a brief and satisfying haggle over the taxi fare -- we didn’t mind walking if we had to, and we were starting to get the vaguest lay of the land now -- we arrived. When we got there it actually rained for a few minutes, the wind dashing drops in our faces -- you can see the rain puddles in the photos. The Citadel was a massive fort, incorporating a mosque and several small museums. As usual I immediately evaluated the building’s zombie-proof-ness and gave it a high rating. The towering ceilings were impressive, but even more so was the view of the city to the west. Across the brown sea of minarets and apartments, we could see the Nile and the distant hill of sand upon which the Pyramids of Giza stood.
We took a taxi back to the main part of the city -- haggling again, but paying a little extra on the way down since we were now stranded in an out-of-the-way place and it was a long walk -- and made our way to the Happy City Hotel where, for the first time, we met the other 15 or so members of our tour. Khaled, our shaved-headed and youngish-looking 40-year-old guide, was there as well, making us sign our medical waivers, and on the rooftop restaurant we all clinked glasses and talked as the sun set.
After dinner I went to our new room at the Happy City Hotel, which although it lacked the character of the Garden City House was much nicer and cleaner, and I plugged my power converter into the wall socket, in order to recharge my batteries for my camera. Twenty seconds later there was a fizzling sound and a small burst of smoke and the light on my battery charger went dead forever. Rushing up to inspect the damage, I realized that I had gotten the “Egypt” power converter mixed up with another, almost identical power converter for a different country. The correct converter still worked, but the battery charger was dead, so for the rest of the trip I had to go on a constant quest for AA batteries, buying them for all kinds of prices from the modest to the outrageous. I was annoyed, but mostly relieved that the entire room hadn’t shorted out. And again, we slept. (Separately.)
More rambling on Saturday!
Okay, now for more Egypt. Going back in time to May 2007...
DAY ZERO (Photos)
Jake and I got on the plane, and flew for 14+ hours of waking and troubled sleep, from San Francisco to New York to Egypt. I changed my money to Egyptian pounds in the New York airport, and was disappointed to find that I could have gotten a much better exchange rate if I’d waited ‘till Cairo. My first act upon entering the country, and every day afterward, was to slather myself with tons and tons of suntan lotion (Jake’s lotion, since I had forgotten my own). I probably needn’t have bothered; the skies above Cairo that first day were smoggy and gray and dour, hanging with a humidity I hadn’t expected to encounter in Egypt, and as our taxi drove into the city proper I looked out of the windows onto miles of rundown apartment buildings and old cemeteries and, in the distance, barren hills.
We finally arrived at the Garden City House Hotel in downtown Cairo -- an impressive old building with huge rooms, a vast echoing stairwell, and a rundown feel. Our faint apprehension at our so-so room (there were no towels in the bathroom) was brightened up when we went out on the balcony and saw a beautiful view of greenery, the river Nile, and countless minarets. We went out to explore the city. Cairo is a pedestrian’s city; streetlights were few, but cars constantly slowed down for passers-by and we basically walked wherever we liked. On the other hand, compared to the only other non-English-speaking country I had been in -- Japan -- there were almost no English street signs, and there among the narrow, tree-lined, radial streets, we soon found ourselves repeatedly lost.
It was at this point that I made my first major social faux pas. Every tourist book I had read had continually hammered a point about the importance of “baksheesh,” tipping. You were supposed to tip people for giving directions! Opening doors for you! Talking to you in the street! So there I was, with my wallet full of Egyptian pounds, certain that if I had ANY social contact with ANYBODY I would be obliged to pay them. The first few times that I asked someone for directions and then immediately thrust money on them, however, they responded with bewilderment or laughter. Once or twice they accepted it, but mostly they refused. Gradually I realized that I was merely being a moronic tourist waving money around. The truth, as I later discovered, is that “baksheesh” is not something that just everyone constantly gives to everyone else, but mostly, something that people expect in designated tourist areas or for designated service jobs. When you go near the Pyramids, or Luxor, or major tourist places like that, *then* there are swarms of self-proclaimed guides and helpers who make a living by (unhelpfully) pointing out the locations of monuments and so on, and then asking for money. It’s also a good idea to give it to luggage-handlers and all the same people you might tip in America. But there in Cairo, on that first day, Jake and I were pretty much just wandering obliviously around in a city where everyone else was trying to go about their normal lives, and if they gave us directions, they were just being friendly. (We did encounter one or two scam artists on that first day, but not many... just some people with an assortment of tattered American business cards, trying to make friends with us by claiming that they knew such-and-such person in the states, look, here’s his card, and would you like to stop at a souvenir shop?) After blundering around like this for awhile, Jake and I eventually stopped in a cafe where I was so fidgety and nervous that I accidentally spilled hot sweet tea all over the floor.
Embarrassed, I soon staggered out of the cafe and we made our way to a park where I bought some mint juice from a street vendor. The mint juice was so good I regained some of my equilibrium, and realized I didn’t need to try to tip people all the time. I joined Jake in wandering far to the northeast of the city... out in avenues where butchers hung filetted goats and lambs in the open air, through alleys filled with lamp shops and furniture shops, past clothing shops with the windows completely filled with dresses and shirts, with not an inch of wasted space. I was struck, as I had been in Tokyo, by the massive space waste of American cities, with their enormous suburbs, their vast streets wasting the land.
We wandered until the sun grew low in the sky, and then I started to get tired. I hadn’t really slept on the plane and it was probably about 6 am back in the U.S., on almost the exact opposite side of the world. We made our way back to the hotel room where I crashed out on the bed shortly after sunset without having dinner. The air was heavy in the room, but I slept like the dead.
DAY 1: COPTIC CAIRO (Photos)
Jake and I woke just before dawn. Our sleep schedules were off; furthermore, in the wee hours of the morning as at other times of the day, there was the sound of the mosques’ loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. We showered and prepared to make an early start of it by going to Coptic Cairo, one of the locations not on the GAP Adventures tour, which we would join later in the day. In the dim early morning light we got on the train and went south to Mar Girgis, Saint George’s station, in the heart of Cairo’s old Christian community.
Christianity spread rapidly in Ancient Egypt, and Coptic (“Egyptian”) Christianity is one of the oldest forms of the religion. After centuries of Islamic assimilation, only about 10% of Egyptians are still Christian, most of them not in Cairo but in the south, near the Sudan and historically Christian Ethiopia. But at one point Egypt was the center of a massive Christian church, which broke off from both Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox due to the usual nitpicky ideological differences, not long before Islam came into the picture. (In fact, the Islamic invaders were welcomed as liberators to a certain extent, since the common Egyptians were sick of being oppressed by their Byzantine overlords.) The Copts of Cairo, however, boast one of the oldest churches in the region, as well as a recently upgraded museum and bookstore, from which I bought postcards, but not the English-language leaflets of philosophy and religious instruction by Pope Shenouda III.
It was still early morning when we arrived, and the museum wasn’t open yet. We wandered through the alleys between the old Coptic buildings, built on the ruins of a Roman fortress, which reminded me in the vaguest way of the back of the Episcopal church I’d attended as a child. Most of the faithful had not yet arrived for prayer, but the churches still seemed bigger than necessary for the number of attendants. Some sort of morning services had already begun, and the sound of chanting and praying echoed through the alleyways. A cleaning-woman indicated to Jake and I that it would be okay if we went inside one of the churches, so we went into a chapel -- an ancient wood and stone building -- and saw perhaps a half-dozen people seated among the pews, while altar boys performed the service along with a man in a massive ornate white robe and mitre. Hanging near the altar was a huge tapestry of Jesus, surrounded by glowing green Christmas lights. I had the thought that Coptic Christianity was like Catholicism with twice the imagination and 1/10th the budget. We dropped some money in the donations box and continued wandering around the grounds, eventually finding our way into the great Coptic cemetery in the back. The tombs were built like houses, shadowed with trees, with painted statues of Jesus and Mary everywhere as if as an intentional “nyah!” to Islamic iconoclasm. By now the museum had opened, so we went inside and looked at the strange Coptic art, that final fusion of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman influences. The Coptic language had died hundreds of years ago except as a liturgical language which still provides clues as to the sound of ancient Egyptian, but there were old Bibles written in Coptic, with semi-hieroglyphic characters, vulture-headed and eagle-headed creatures looming over the vaguely Gothic letters like an illuminated manuscript. There were paintings of Saint George and the dragon, obscure animal-headed saints from fables, paintings of Jesus from monastic caves, and other fascinating relics. Children played in the courtyard as we wandered through the museum’s upper stories.
The sun had now broken free of the clouds, and we left and had some hot tea at a pleasant sidewalk cafe, making do with English and Jake’s smidgens of Arabic. I was already appreciating Egypt’s cafe culture, sort of the replacement for bar culture back home. Alcohol, after all, was forbidden on religious grounds -- if there was any surreptitious drinking I didn’t see it, except on the last night of our trip -- so perhaps as a substitute, people hung out for hours in the shade of the cafes, in shirts and pants or djellabas, drinking Coke and hot dark tea full of sediment and sugar. It was almost entirely a male culture, with only men in these cafes, but more on that later. Sometimes a little TV would be playing in the corner, sometimes people would be smoking from water pipes. Sometimes you could get karkady, a usually sweet red drink made out of hibiscus. Egypt had excellent non-alcoholic drinks -- tons of strange fruit drinks and sweet, tasty things. We passed by a bakery, where we bought some bread and pastries, which were delicious. At almost every meal we were served excellent, fresh pita bread or flatbread, which made American-bought pitas taste like the nasty, bitter dish-sponges they are.
In other ways, though, Egyptian food was a little bland. In upscale restaurants there was lots of rice and salad and meat dishes served in little clay pots, but the casseroles weren’t particularly spicy or flavorful. The standard “Mediterranean” dishes like kebab and falafel were everywhere, and were very good. Koshari is by far the best food I had in Egypt -- a fast-food mixture of rice, lentils, dried chickpeas, and macaroni. Pour tomato sauce, garlic and spices on it, and you have something like spicy pasta crossed with breakfast cereal. Fuul, brown beans which are also a common food, varied from a gross paste to very tasty -- it all depends on the seasoning, I guess. It must be remembered that we were on a fairly “cheap” tour and, later on, we spent quite a few nights being served simple communal food on feluccas and in tents. These dishes were actually very tasty at the end of a long day, even if it was just stew, or alphabet soup poured over rice. And whenever we stopped to rest, we drank tea, and Coke, and bottled water.
After lunch the sky got gray again, and we went back to the Garden City House Hotel and checked out, gathering our luggage. On the way out, the seedy-looking doorman followed us out the front door and informed us that indignantly that the towels from the room were missing. Jake and I both simultaneously and with the innocent confidence of truth told him that there weren’t any towels in the room when we got there, and the doorman raised his hands in a dismissive “If you say so” gesture and, not speaking another word, turned and left. This put both Jake and I in a good mood for the rest of the day.
THE CITADEL (Photos)
We decided to go to the Citadel, an enormous fortress built by Saladin on a cliff above Cairo, back in the 12th century. (I vaguely regretted that we didn’t have time to go to the Agricultural Museum, where the Lonely Planet guide promised “giant plastic fruits and glass cases full of stuffed birds”.) After a brief and satisfying haggle over the taxi fare -- we didn’t mind walking if we had to, and we were starting to get the vaguest lay of the land now -- we arrived. When we got there it actually rained for a few minutes, the wind dashing drops in our faces -- you can see the rain puddles in the photos. The Citadel was a massive fort, incorporating a mosque and several small museums. As usual I immediately evaluated the building’s zombie-proof-ness and gave it a high rating. The towering ceilings were impressive, but even more so was the view of the city to the west. Across the brown sea of minarets and apartments, we could see the Nile and the distant hill of sand upon which the Pyramids of Giza stood.
We took a taxi back to the main part of the city -- haggling again, but paying a little extra on the way down since we were now stranded in an out-of-the-way place and it was a long walk -- and made our way to the Happy City Hotel where, for the first time, we met the other 15 or so members of our tour. Khaled, our shaved-headed and youngish-looking 40-year-old guide, was there as well, making us sign our medical waivers, and on the rooftop restaurant we all clinked glasses and talked as the sun set.
After dinner I went to our new room at the Happy City Hotel, which although it lacked the character of the Garden City House was much nicer and cleaner, and I plugged my power converter into the wall socket, in order to recharge my batteries for my camera. Twenty seconds later there was a fizzling sound and a small burst of smoke and the light on my battery charger went dead forever. Rushing up to inspect the damage, I realized that I had gotten the “Egypt” power converter mixed up with another, almost identical power converter for a different country. The correct converter still worked, but the battery charger was dead, so for the rest of the trip I had to go on a constant quest for AA batteries, buying them for all kinds of prices from the modest to the outrageous. I was annoyed, but mostly relieved that the entire room hadn’t shorted out. And again, we slept. (Separately.)
More rambling on Saturday!
