A long walk home - Cairo, 5.08.2009

This'll be a longish post, and the first on the hyper-touchy Asus keyboard, so bear with me. History has shown that when I chat with Anna, lots of letters get inadvertently struck twice in succession, so if there are a lot of typos that I don't catch, well...bear with me.

I arrived in Cairo yesterday around 10 a.m.-ish, and spent most of the day getting myself situated. I took a cab ride to the hotel in Zamalek (an island in the middle of the Nile where a lot of embassies are situated) from the airport, paying ~120 L.E. (more or less 25 bucks) for the 45 min. ride. I apparently overpaid by about 30-40 L.E. (about 6-8 bucks), but for my first cab ride I just didn't feel like haggling.

Once I got myself squared away at the hotel, I decided to go for a walk in search of the Fatted SIM Card. I ultimately snagged one, although not at the "supermarket" the desk guys had tried to point me to. I think I just would have felt odd walking into what was essentially a closet-sized room full to overflowing with fruits and vegetables and trying to explain my need to people who a) would not expect me to speaking any Arabic in the first place, and b) would not be primed to understand my "news anchor-style" formal Arabic, which is substantively different from the colloquial these folks would be speaking. Also, there would be about a zillion different things I could be asking about. At least by walking into a Mobinil store, it's fairly clear that I'm looking for phone stuff, and the context is sufficiently narrow that I could make my Arabic go a little further.

Fast forward to today, since nothing much else happened last night. I overslept my alarm clock (because I failed to set it), and so didn't have time to avail myself of the hotel's complimentary breakfast on the terrace. So now we were at 22 hours in Cairo without eating a meal. Hrmm...not ideal. Thankfully, I managed to snag a cabbie almost the moment I stepped onto the main drag, and we sped the 30 mins. from Zamalek to Maadi, where my friend D. lives with her husband H. and her son Little D. They've got a beautiful apartment on the 8th floor, and since they're on the Corniche El-Nil, they get an amazing breeze and a great view. There was very little smog today, so we were able to count 12 pyramids from their balcony. Wow.

We attended the service at the Maadi Community Church -- yes, they meet on Fridays, since Friday in majority-Muslim countries is pretty much equivalent to Sunday in the States -- followed by a short ride to H.'s photo studio. The Big Thing in Egypt is apparently getting large portraits (on the order of 3' x 2') made into...HOLOGRAMS! SO cool...so there was a photo of these two sisters, and depending on which side of dead-center you stood on, you would see a photo of just the one little girl, or just the other. Really neat...although nothing compared to the graduation ceremony photo for the Cairo American College. There was a shot of ~100 kids chucking their mortarboards into the air--a couple hundred yards in front of a pyramid!! Oh, MAN! I gotta say, Spring-Ford, Alma, and NC State had NUTHIN' on that.

Anyway, after lunch at Mickey D's -- I know, I know, ugly American, etc. etc....but it's Little D's favorite restaurant, and he desperately wanted to share it with me. I redeemed it by getting a MacArabia, which is basically a spiced chicken patty wrapped in a pita, with yogurt sauce, tomatoes, and lettuce -- and a short while hanging out with the Ds at their place, I decided I was going to go for a walk and see if I could track down my future workplace.

I managed to find it, about 2 miles away from the Ds' building. There was actually someone there today, working on his off-day...so he was quite surprised to have anyone knocking on the door, much less some American kid he had no idea was going to be coming this summer. So Ah and I hung out and chatted for about an hour before I got going on my way back to the hotel.

Here's where I REALLY should have rethought my plans for the afternoon. The expats, upon hearing that I was planning to walk from Maadi to Zamalek, had said "Oh, no, that's MUCH too far!" Perhaps I should've listened to them, right there at mile zero. OR, I could have listened to Ah, who said exactly the same thing at mile 1.73, and mentioned that it would cost me 1 L.E. (about 20 cents) to hop the subway to within another mile or so of my hotel. OR I could've listened to the nice Cairene policeman who said "What?! No, that's too far. Get a taxi!" when I asked himn for directions. At mile 6.85. Once I got that far into it, though, I was NOT gonna give up. EVERYONE had told me this was a bad idea, and it was sure beginning to look like it, but dammit, I was NOT going to quit at this point! So I kept going, periodically pulling my iPod out of my pocket to check the distance I had covered. I watched 8 miles pass...9 miles...10 miles (at which point another dude I asked for directions tried to snooker me into paying for the privilege of receiving a "gift" of a traditional Egyptian scene painted on REAL PAPYRUS!!! for the low, low, price of 20 dollars)...ugh. Finally I made it onto my island -- which I had not realized until today is the 2nd-northernmost of the 4 islands hanging out around this section of the Nile, which meant that on two previous occasions I had THOUGHT I had reached my island, but really hadn't -- and walked on past the soundcheck for some kind of big concert happening at the Gezira Sporting Club. When I finally set foot in my hotel lobby, the iPod said 12.65 miles and more than 1800 calories expended (which is significantly more than I have consumed as of the end of day 2 in Egypt -- something tells me this is not sustainable), and my body was SCREAMING.

A long shower/laundry session helped a little. Apparently, there is no such thing as a laundromat in Cairo - if you don't wash things yourself at home, you take them to professional cleaners who charge about a buck an item. Well, I'm cheap, and I've got soap in the shower. So 30 mins. of glorious showering later, I had handwashed two sets of undergarments, a pair of jeans (those'll NEVER dry, I'm sure) and a pair of shirts. If I wear outer garments twice or three times before washing them - which shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't make a habit of walking 13 miles wearing them - I don't think this system will get too onerous. We'll see. Maybe I'll break down a few weeks into this.

Anyway, it's now 8:30 local time, and I still need to write some work-related e-mails and get some school stuff squared away, so I'm going to sign off.

(Ms. DeYoung, your update is coming. Since I anticipate tomorrow is going to be a slow day -- not only will my body be needing a break, it's also the second day of the Egyptian weekend, so not much will be going on -- I promise to spend part of the day writing it, and will hope to have it posted by mid-day your time.)