Retrospective

I'll go ahead and begin at the beginning.

CAIRO

Emily and I arrived in Cairo on the 21st, and took a cab to our friend Ahmed's apartment in Ma'ady. He is a photographer in Cairo with a really cool apartment, featuring a swing, and a panoramic view of the whole city, and the pyramids.







You can't see the pyramids in that picture, but it's just the smog, we'll see the difference later on.

Our goal for the trip was to not really have goals, or plans that were set and definite. In fact, we visited the Pyramids on our first day just to get it out of the way so that it wouldn't be nagging in our minds for the rest of the trip. It was amazing, I should point out, but I'll get back to that later. I posted a passage about modern tourists a couple posts ago, and it described the kind of visit that I wanted to avoid as much as possible:

"since you are on your holiday, since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water used [...], must never cross your mind."

Take notes.

I saw a lot of tourists, but rarely spoke with any of them. In Cairo, they were confined to their travel buses, packed to the brim with wide eyes and bermuda shorts, looking out the windows with wonder, excitement, and fear. It's so weird that a person would travel to a place, and then move around it in a bubble, avoiding as much contact and interaction with that place as possible. It's not a nature documentary.

Our first night in Cairo, Ahmed took us to a tea and shisha cafe. Egyptians like their cigarettes flowing, and their tea sweet. Man, they had really good tea.



Then the next morning was the pyramids. the way this works is, you get a ride to Giza, which costs about 30 pounds (5 dollars), then deal with one of the many people approaching you and throwing prices and camels at you. Don't be afraid to just walk away from a deal. If you think they're ripping you off, it's typically because everybody gets ripped off. He quoted us about 90 dollars (American) at first. We eventually got him down to about 25 for a horse, a camel, a tour around the Sahara, the pyramids, and some other things we did. The whole procedure is organized in its disorder. There are no fixed prices for anything, no admission fees, and no rental fees. Its just a straight deal made between you, and the guy who owns the camels. Tours work out different arrangements, but if you want to see the pyramids on your own terms, I think it is much more beneficial.















Despite the amazing cultural and human relevance of the pyramids, or perhaps because of it, there is a creeping feeling of "culture for sale." The way that the sellers and guides work in Giza is calculative and completely reliant on the tourists who come through to see them. Most visitors buy the white shawl and headband, recalling Lawrence of Arabia, and buy the souvenirs in the museums and do all of these little things that take away from the magnitude of the pyramids and make them kitsch. It's a way of diminishing and reducing a great human achievement to the level of happy meal gift, making its importance a matter of capital, instead of a matter of appreciation. Again, creeping feeling...

Day three, we visited the mosque of Mohammad Ali and the Citadel.











Muslims pray five times a day, and so five times a day (sunrise, lunch, afternoon, dinner, and evening) mosques will blast prayers through loudspeakers on their roofs. Mosques like this one are older and don't have the loudspeakers, which serve as the third crucial aspect of every mosque. They all have a staircase, from which a prayer leader will lead prayers on fridays (and I think are meant to symbolize the stairs to paradise); they also have a small cubby where they stand and give prayers every day except friday; and they have a platform (substituted by megaphones in modern mosques) where an individual would stand, listening to the prayer leader, and shout out the prayers to the crouds gathering outside.



We spent a long time talking with Ahmed, who studied architecture for five years, about how mosques, with their huge size and ornate detail, make a person feel inspired and submissive at the same time: inspired by the beauty of the mosque, and intimidated by the absolute magnitude of it.

Here is the view of Cairo from the Citadel/mosque of Mohammed Ali:





And some locals:



After that, we spent a long time trying to figure out how to get to Sharm el Shiekh, a city on the coast of the Red Sea, about 5 or 6 hours to the East. I ended up staying awake all night, watching the sunset and sunrise.





In the morning, since it rained the day before, the sky was clearer than normal, and the view was better.







SHARM EL SHIEKH

Sharm was a very strange place for me. Highlighted by the fact that I had just started reading Marcel Proust's multivolume "In Search of Lost Time," we arrived, staying in a hotel to see what it would be like to experience Egypt from the perspective that the vast majority of visitors did. I like to sum up my experiences in the passage I read the morning after we arrived in Sharm el Shiekh:

Or suppose that he dozes off in some even more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place.

Sharm el Shiekh was like the void between falling asleep and waking. Suddenly I was out of Egypt, and I was in a strange, ritzy recreation. Visitors would walk around in bermuda shorts, white socks and sandals, and often preferred the flaky red sunburnt skin to a shirt. They spent their time swimming, dancing, drinking, and ordering around the Egyptian staff.





It had a constructed, idealized version of Egypt laid out for people who wanted to escape the trials of their own life, and misplace their own culture into the "forum" of another. Most of the visitors were Polish or Belgian, and every day Belgian and Polish food was served in the dining rooms. I'm not sure if it was the food, or the Belgians/Pollacks, but something made me incredibly sick in Sharm, and I was out of commission for a day and a half.

We did make a trip to the Red Sea our first day there.









We smoked shisha and snorkeled. Emily had an underwater camera, but I don't have the pictures yet.





My goal for visiting Sharm was Sinai. Emily is a scuba diver, and so obviously the Red Sea was what appealed most to her. But the prospect of climbing Mount Sinai was the ultimate drawing in factor for me.

The problem with the way that we wanted to experience Egypt was that everything had the sensation of being planned at the absolute last minute. Unfortunately, the security around Mount Sinai and Saint Catherine's Monastery at the base of the mountain is incredibly intense. Anyone visiting has to send a manifest to the police telling where all of the visitors are from, and they can check passports at will, possibly arresting people not listed. Our hotel had a group of Polish citizens heading to Mount Sinai the day that we wanted to go, and the manifest had already been sent. So obviously we were unable to visit Sinai that day. We did, however, go on a quad ride through the Sinai desert. Admittedly, we broke our own rules a lot in Sharm, and environmental degradation was not one of our goals, but desperate times...



















ISLAMIC CAIRO

It was a relief to get back to Cairo, and even with that much pollution it was a breath of fresh air. For our last day, we walked to the Sultan Hassan Mosque, and then to a much smaller mosque, and walked up a minaret that looked over the city.













Afterwords, we walked to Islamic Cairo. Now, I swear, Islamic Cairo is a lot like walking back in time. We met two American travelers at Ahmed's later that night, who said when they walked through Islamic Cairo, they moved without thinking, and just let the streets take them where they would. That's what happens, so I'll just post my pictures here and you can see where they take you.

































































Those are pretty much all of my pictures, so I guess that's the end of my magic blog post of wonder and delight. Cheers (Oh, I forgot to mention, beer is socially taboo in most of Egypt and hard to find...don't go to Egypt to party).