Cairo - First Impressions

Yesterday was my first full day in Cairo. After the late night, Mike and I slept in until around 12:45 and only reluctantly got up after that. The plan, as I understood it, was to meet Angela and Jessi at 1 and go out into the city. There was no sign of them when we got down, so we sat and waited. We ended up talking to another student by the name of George. I mistook him for a Middle Easterner at first because of his skin tone and hair style, but I eventually found out that he was from Spokane, and a student at the University of Washington. He’s been here since last summer through a direct matriculation program, so he really knows the ropes. Being an incredibly cool guy, he offered to show us around Cairo. Angela came downstairs up after a bit and we headed out.

First stop was a small Arab restaurant the name of which escapes me. George got us some taamiyya (similar to falafel, this is lettuce, tomato, and something like fried chickpeas tucked into half a piece of pita bread), for which we paid 50 piasters. That works out to roughly 10 cents in USD, and I've found my true love. We walked across the bridge over the Nile that connects Zamalek (the island the dorms are on) to the rest of Cairo, and then spent the afternoon touring the city. George was incredibly helpful, and he had answers to almost any question we asked about how to do things or where to find things in the city. I learned an incredible amount, and it’s a struggle to keep it all from leaking out of my head.

There are a couple of things to mention about Cairo so far. First, crossing streets is something of an experience. There are very few (functioning) stop lights, traffic signs, crosswalks, etc. If you need to cross a street, you just cross, regardless of oncoming traffic. This applies to everything from crowded one-way back alleys to huge four lane highways, which Egyptian motorists drive on as if they had six or seven lanes. All in all, crossing streets is a lot like playing Frogger, or at least that’s the best comparison I’ve heard so far. Honking horns are a near constant occurrence, but the honking generally doesn’t seem to be out of anger. In fact, I’m told that the Egyptian driving system works perfectly, and there are very few accidents. More on that in a bit.

After exploring the city for a few hours, we walked back to the island and went to a café near the dorms. We ended up staying for around two hours just talking and eating. It was very different from an American restaurant. Everything was slower and people sat around for a long time smoking or shooting the breeze. I started getting restless after we finished eating – my ingrained sense of American propriety kept telling me it was time to leave. But the culture here is much more relaxed and people aren’t in a hurry, so I’m going to have to adjust to that.

George got a call while we were at the café from an Arab friend of his by the name of Mohammad. When George told him where he was and what he was doing, Mohammad, who is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, wanted to take us out around town, despite having never met us. He came by the dorm with another friend in his mid-size Chevy, so Mike, Angela, George, and I crammed into the back and we headed off. Cruising through town, I started to appreciate the beauty of the Egyptian driving system. Because there are no real rules of the road, everyone is used to the insanity and is excellent at gauging distance and speed. They do whatever they need to in order to get where they’re going, and that approach works in a country where everyone is used to it. If you put a solitary Egyptian driver into an American city, however, I have no doubt that he could single handedly wreck the entire highway system.

After a quick stop at a huge Western-style mall, we ended up at Mohammad’s apartment, an upscale affair in downtown Cairo. Mohammad is quite the character. I’m not sure that he would appreciate the label, but the best word I can find to describe him is metrosexual. Around 23 years old, he’s a big, loquacious, well-dressed guy with curly hair, a soft voice, and perfect English. Bizarrely, he’s a huge American movie/television buff, and has three hard drives and cases upon cases of dvds on which he stores a ridiculously, obscenely large number of tv and movie downloads. Seriously, he has everything, ever. Mohammad was extremely friendly, offering to take us up to his apartment at 1 AM (where he lives with his parents, as is Egyptian custom). After making us food and tea, he showed us his room. Conversation turned to movies for a while, as Mohammad is an aspiring film director (although he graduated from dental school). He’s particularly into American classics (Stanley Kubrick is perhaps his favorite director), and he had seen anything that any of us mentioned. Struggling to catch him off guard, I played my trump card and brought up Incubus, the Esperanto cult classic starring William Shatner. To my delight, Mohammad’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped – he’d never heard of it. I smiled. Like a challenger reaching the top of the final tower obstacle in Ninja Warrior, I too had finally achieved total victory.

After discussing movies for a while, we switched to a more traditional Middle Eastern activity: an intense game of Cranium. At two in the morning. In Cairo. This turned into a two or three hour affair and afterwards, somewhat against my will, we watched segments of a downloaded American Idol episode and some of Britain’s Got Talent. That finished, Mohammad drove us all back to the dorm at a quarter to five in the morning. I finally got to bed around six, just as the sun was rising. All in all, it was an extremely Western night, and couldn’t have been more different from the night before.