After I got back to Cairo from Siwa, I had a day of errands to run, mainly getting my Syrian visa squared away, before Olivier, my friend from France, showed up. I took the subway to Doqqi, a district across the Nile, and walked to the Syrian embassy and there found the same deal as last time: lots of people sullenly waiting around and the officials not actually doing much of anything except walking around very fast, wiping sweat off their faces, locking and unlocking doors, and generally looking like they couldn't possibly be bothered. I stood in the middle of the passageway between the two doors that people seemed to be going in and out of the most until someone decided to notice me.
"Yes? What do you want?"
"A visa for Syria."
"Where are you from?"
"America."
The man looked at me in incredulous surprise and confusion, like I'd just come in here to make a bad joke. "Why does American want to go to Syria?"
"As a tourist."
He blinked, then shrugged. "OK. 660 pounds, a picture, fill this form." He rushed off to make more sweat on his face so he could importantly wipe it off, and despite not having any references in Syria, I got it the next day with no problems.
Olivier showed up that night, and we took the subway out to Giza to meet up with Amina and her mother, the sister and niece of the guy Wa'el I'd met before. They had prepared a feast of broiled spicy chicken, Egyptian dolma which I thought nicer than Greek, a spicy potato and lamb dish, tomato salad, Molokhiya (a green soup that looks and tastes something like blendered spinach, seaweed, and snot, but is actually pretty tasty), and for dessert pomegranate with sugar, mangoes, mint tea, and baked sweet potatoes with a tough skin that we ate like candy. They treated us like family even though we'd only met briefly and less than a week before. We chatted for two hours nonstop and Amy (her American nickname) showed me her entire David Beckham scrapbook, and she gave Olivier a bracelet and me a necklace, "to remember." We left well-fed and loving Egypt.
The next day I had to get to the Syrian embassy between 11 and 1:00, and then to the post office to offload a couple of kilos I didn't fancy carrying around 'til December (mom, that'll be coming along in a couple of week). Olivier walked around Old and Islamic Cairo and then we met up and took a taxi to the Citadel from which we saw some amazing views of the old town dotted with minarets, and afterwards we walked north toward the markets. A guy intercepted us at one point and said, "Hello! Blue mosque is this way. Blue mosque, very nice. You want me to show you?" The hawkers and touts for some reason hadn't hit us very hard yet so we were not properly wary, but still wary enough. We said, "If you point us there we can find it. Is it very good?" "You want me to show you? No problem, I'm not a tout, I'm a high school teacher, I just show you. No problem, it's right this way."
We followed him in good faith, and he showed us right to the mosque, which wasn't blue at all. "Why is it the blue mosque?" we asked. He pointed to a small detail in the wall and said, "See? It's blue."
Much later I determined that what he showed us wasn't the Blue Mosque at all. I figured it out when I visited the real Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.
Soon the guy started putting on this tour guide persona that made us feel kind of edgy, and we didn't want to be rude, but we kind of had a bad feeling. But he led us through some fascinating old hot, dusty, bustling, filthy streets and to a little place selling a perfect milky rice pudding that cooled us off and filled us up at the same time. He bowed with his hand over his heard and said, "Egyptian hospitality. I pay." Now we knew we were sunk. No one who uttered the phrase "Egyptian hospitality" could really be showing it.
He led us to a minaret we could climb with a fantastic view and then started talking about his family and his wife being in the hospital. We expressed our sympathy and said thanks so much for the hospitality, it was really nice seeing everything and he was really nice to show it, and now we would stay up here for a while. He said, "We are finished?" We said, "Sure. Thanks." He turned to go and then turned back around and said with an apologetic smile, but with the confidence of the cat who has cornered the canary, "You will give me something for my hospitality? It's only for my wife, she is very sick." Of course we gave him a couple of bucks, because he had shown us and told us some cool stuff we wouldn't have found on our own, and he was a nice enough guy, but we still felt taken.
The view up there was incredible, though, and very sobering. Old Cairo looks like a war zone. Ceilings were crumbled in and/or covered with garbage that goats were scavenging in. Walls were missing and more looked like they might go any minute. Corrugated iron sheets served as roofs for some, fallen bricks were piled in courtyards, wires stuck up and out everywhere. It was hard to imagine families lived in that unsafe mess, and they were the ones lucky enough to have a shelter to call their own. Olivier, being a manager for building sites in Paris, was horrified. If an earthquake ever struck Cairo, casualties would be in the millions.
Almost as incredible and disturbing as the ghetto architecture was the smoggy haze, which was often impenetrable after only a few hundred meters. Breathing at street-level was something like smoking a tail-pipe. And the noise! I tried a few times in the center of town to pause and actively search for a single, full second in which there was not a car horn honking. I don't recall ever being successful.
"I think I hate Cairo," I said once on a particularly frustrating, noisy, smelly Cairo excursion on an inner-city street.
"What?"
"I think I hate Cairo!"
"I like Thailand. For me it is a nightmare."
I tried and failed to make any sense of this whatsoever. "You like Thailand?"
"What? I don't know, I've never been there."
"You just said you like Thailand!"
"No, I said I like SILENCE."The next day we were signed up for a taxi to take us to the Pyramids, Saqqara, and Memphis, and this was our first taste of Egyptian Tourist Hell. I generally don't like being around the most shamelessly touristy places, but going to Egypt without seeing the Pyramids and Karnak and the Valley of the Kings seemed unforgivable.
So we loaded up in the sweaty sun and motored out past the last apartment blocks to the Pyramids themselves, awesome beyond description and ringed by big-hatted Midwesterners and their cell phones and opinions. The Russian mafia tourists made a show of being disinterested, and the authentic Arab headgear every middle-aged man purchased came with a visible Made in China tag.
We waited in line a while and took a few pictures, and then after a steep, claustrophobic climb, a big group of us made it to the very heart of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, where an American woman exclaimed, "I wonder if my cell phone will work in here!" A crowd gathered and I stared hard at the wall, trying unsuccessfully to tune it out and enjoy a moment of awe.
We saw some other, less impressive but still very old piles of rocks, surrounded either by tourists or desperate baksheeshers who would extend every courtesy, point out every detail, and expect an exorbitant tip in return. We had to be careful to turn down any kindness before things got out of hand.
The next day we were back in Cairo to see the National Museum that had Tutankhamun and the mummies, and on the way there endured the same conversation we would endure constantly for the next several days:
"Hello, taxi?"
"No thanks, we're walking."
"Taxi? Yes?"
"No thanks."
"Taxi?"
"Thanks, but no."
"Where you going? I give you good price."
"We'll walk, thanks."
"Welcome to Egypt. Where you from?"
"America."
"Oh, very good. I give you very good price."
"Thanks, really, but no."
"Where you going? Just tell me."
Silence.
"Just tell me, where you going? I give you good price."
Silence.
"Where you go? Museum? Temple? Just tell me."
Silence.
"Five bounds, OK? OK, we go. Five bounds, no problem. You need taxi?"
By this time we're at least a block away.
"OK? Taxi?"
This wasn't so bad the first several dozen times it happened, but it quickly became a steady waterfall. Everywhere you go, everything you do that's even remotely touristic, and unfortunately most of the best sights in Egypt are, people look at you like a rather dumb sheep to be fleeced and fleeced. They grab you, stand in front of you, write your bill in Arabic numbers and then tell you a price three pounds higher. They invent service charges that didn't exist last time you ate there, they tell you felucca (Egyptian sail boat) rides on the Nile cost at least 20 pounds an hour and they have a really good deal of 40 pounds for three hours including sunset. And not only do we find out too late that you can easily get a felucca for 5 pounds an hour, but our felucca driver said sunset was definitely not included, the trip would actually be shorter than three hours, and then he asked for a tip.
Their methods are highly evolved. It's a nightmare of walking around feeling like a jerk if you're rude to people who might be nice and an idiot if you're kind and trusting to people who end up ripping you off with a big friendly smile on their face. I haven't had to walk around in this mindset of gut-twisting paranoia since middle school. I think I would be able to handle it better if I hadn't been put in that mindset already by a summer of dealing with unscrupulous Belarussians who also loved taking advantage of the trust and ignorance of a foreigner. And poor Olivier, this is supposed to be his vacation from a Parisian summer so unprecedentedly hot it killed about 15,000 people in their homes.
Anyway, the Museum didn't disappoint, but didn't blow us away either. In high school I had done a painstaking portrait of King Tut's death mask in pencil that had taken weeks of not paying attention in history class, so I had every detail of it memorized. Seeing that alone was worth it, yet the fact that it was mobbed by perky Japanese girls who never even looked at it but instead took pictures of themselves next to it ad nauseum took a little something away.
We took an overnight train to Aswan, where we saw the Valley of the Kings and Queens and some impressive tombs. Few more impressive than the ones I saw tourist-free in Siwa, but incredible in any case. We saw Abu Simbel in the south near the Sudan, an ancient temple or burial place, huge and imposing; we saw another temple, light and beautiful, on an island in a lake which some early Christians had desecrated by chipping off faces and hands from carvings because they represented graven images; we saw Karnak, one of the most impressive temples ever built, with some of the paint even still clinging to the undersides of ornately-carved stone beams impossibly high over head.
I hate to say it, but in the end, they were probably the least memorable parts of my whole travels. They were just buildings. We didn't get to meet anyone, because anyone who was friendly with us was probably trying to cheat us. That was the worst part, the sweaty distrust of everyone, the constant lies and scams, the bad faith everywhere. The destroyed economy that depended on scams perpetrated in the shadows of ancient monuments of a vast and rich and dead civilization. I remember feeling nervous and depressed more than anything else during the Aswan and Luxor days.
Some themes I noticed in the paintings and sculpture I saw at the tombs and temples (archeologists get your pens ready): A strange face that looked very much like alien pictures of today--kind of a flat face, strange nose, big ears, definitely not human. I think a guide told us it was some kind of representation of a spirit or devil, but I think it was just aliens.
Some of the paintings had people holding each other in affectionate embraces that seemed to echo a kind of human continuity of intimate and elevated feelings from all those thousands of years ago. Some showed people holding hands with gods, perhaps denoting their closeness to and intimacy with their spirituality. There was also a very curious spectacle of graffiti from ancient Greek times, graffiti from German and English explorers clearly dated in the 1830's, and right on up to people like 'Jason' who 'ruled' in 1999. Jackasses chipping their names into rocks someone else put there for the same reason; a misguided attempt at immortality.
Some quotes from Henry Thoreau ran through my head more than once while viewing these marvels: "As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby." And: "Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?"
Tomorrow we fly to Sharm El-Sheikh and then we'll take a bus to Dahab, by all accounts one of the most relaxing places on the planet, a tie-dyed scuba diver's dream, and the vacation finally begins. Our cultural duty is done and now we can leisurely ponder what it all means over strawberry milkshakes on the beach.
Love,
Pam