Joel's Experience.

Up coming we will have guest contributer, Joel Parker, who will give some insight into his experience on his first day in Egypt.

November 5, 2006 Joel Parker

From Tel Aviv to Cairo: by Bus, Foot, and Taxi to the Four Seasons Hotel on Giza Street.

Entry number one: Life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without some problems. I am a non-guest at the Four Seasons on the Nile right now Friday, at 8:30 am. The fun started yesterday, the tenth of August, about noon in Tel Aviv, after a relatively smooth trip to get my ticket and Egyptian visa.

I was a bit late to get on the bus because my friend who is studying at the American University of Cairo showed up to stay with me two hours before I was supposed to leave to go to Cairo. Never mind, we had a laugh and he will watch my bird for the weekend.

I decided to take a taxi to where the tour bus was so I wouldn’t be sweaty for the first part of the thirteen hour bus ride ahead. It was comfortable, and an Arab Christian lady shared some of her cucumbers and pears from Jerusalem (she was reading the New Testament in Arabic and English), while I chatted with Ori, a High School Teacher from California. He was on his way to Malawi, next to Rwanda. He uses all of his vacation time to travel all over Asia, Europe and South America, so this was his Africa trip. We had a great chat about politics, music, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his views on medical marijuana in California.

We made it to the border, and I got through fine, although our bus coordinator wanted to use my passport to buy him three bottles of whiskey right before he let three extra people on our van to Cairo on the Egyptian side of the border.

We bounced and rocked through the Sinai to Cairo listening to Arabic pop music and at times holding lively conversation in Arabic, at least everyone but Ori and me. I enjoyed it, but probably would not have been so into it if I knew the challenges I was going to face in a few hours.

Arriving at the Sheraton in Cairo with blood-shot eyes and with no Egyptian pounds was only a half-relief. Because I had withdrawn too many shekels yesterday my ATM card had some sort of freeze on it. So all I had was three hundred Israeli Shekels (about 75 dollars) and I needed to get to the Four Seasons on the Nile, where I thought Jeff and David would be arriving in a few short hours.

The bank at the Sheraton didn’t accept my shekels, so I set off to find a phone card and call my bank. None of the little shops were open except for one which didn’t take credit cards. So I came back with the idea that maybe the photo shop in the hotel would take my credit card and I could buy something and return it to get the cash back. But my immediate concern was to get to the hotel, and Abd al-Rahim at the photo shop just gave me ten Egyptian pounds (two dollars) to take a taxi.

In a way it was a good thing that I went to the wrong Four Seasons hotel, because I went to the new one, which is bigger and has more people and they were not so suspicious of my outlandish claims. They arranged for a courier to take my shekels to a bank somewhere in Cairo that would exchange them for a 30 pound (six dollar) cut. I agreed and they let me sit in the Tea Lounge where I first started writing about all the craziness.

Entry number two: Of course, when I got my three hundred Egyptian pounds (sixty dollars) my brain was not working too well as I had been living off of almonds and chocolate and had had no sleep. So I took a taxi back to the Sheraton and paid Mr. Abd al-Rahim at the photo shop back for the ten pounds and bought a disposable camera. I got back in the taxi and he returned me to the four seasons where we left from, which I kept insisting was the wrong one, but he didn’t understand. We finally made it to the correct Four Seasons on Giza Street and he tried to take a hundred pounds (20 dollars) for a ride that should not have been more than 25 pounds (five dollars). Welcome to Egypt.

Other than getting ripped off, I did have a fun time riding in the cab with no seatbelt and my window open as we nudged our way through the three or four lanes of traffic and around people on the side of the road. I have concluded that the most important safety feature of an Egyptian car is its horn. Brakes are entirely optional in a manual transmission car with in a city with few traffic lights, only roundabouts. You just put your head down and hope everyone sees or hears you, especially the people walking into the street.

I convinced the staff at the ghayer (other) Four Seasons to keep my bag and I discovered that Jeff and David would be in at around 9pm, and it was currently 9am. So twelve hours in the big Egyptian-African-Islamic-Third World-Capital City…

Entry number three: I walked to the Nile then began to go south. It was looking a little deserted and I was not sure why. Eventually though, I saw an inviting coffee shop with sheesha (Arabic fruity tobacco in a Turkish water pipe) and a TV. So I had two great Arabic coffees, you know the kind with the mud at the bottom that can make your stomach burn for hours but tastes like fine bitter chocolate on the way down. The music television was very entertaining and had “We Love Lebanon” scrolling across the screen every so often. I saw some news of the war against Lebanon and heard something about the American-inspired Israeli attacks on the Arabs and decided to be Canadian from here on out. The guys at the shop were great, and tried to speak to me in simplified Arabic, which didn’t work because I only knew how to read my phrasebook and didn’t know how to understand them. I’ve been learning fusa, the formal written Arabic for translation, so I don’t speak very much street Arabic, which is virtually a different language.

Then, energized, I began to walk away from the river into the heart of Cairo. This is where I saw some amazing sights, and smelled some exotic smells, and heard, well, a blend of shouting, singing, and horns that is etched into my mind as “Cairo.” I don’t really want to describe the people, because I can’t first of all, and because you should come here and find out for yourself. The people were beautiful, as all people are in a way, but the conditions were tough. I’ll describe the conditions:

It was about ninety five degrees Fahrenheit I would guess, and sunny with a slight haze in the air. I had sunglasses on so I was seen as a tourist immediately, but they were absolutely essential for me, as it there was a mind numbing glare from a mixture of the pollution and the African sun. The trash on the ground was mostly just papery goods, although I tried not to dwell on it too much. The cats and I suppose some of the dogs get most of the little scraps that might be there, so sometimes I saw a dry chicken bone or two. But the amount of trash varied from a few dirty napkins to a whole pile of rubbish that one could either climb over or walk into the street to avoid. I chose the latter, risking my life, numerous times.

I had lunch somehow after going through the market with potent smells that ranged from sweet, to savory, to that pervasive raw meat smell. The sights were pungent too, with whole carcasses of chickens, cows, and sheep, as well as various severed body parts dangling sometimes in the middle of the walkway. It was dizzying at times trying to comprehend 360 degrees of action happening all around me. Not understanding, or choosing not to concentrate on the conversations, arguments, and chatter around me may have helped make it both more surreal, and less insane at the same time.

Around this time, I realized why so many of the shops had been closed earlier: it was Friday, and I found myself in downtown Cairo for the noon prayers. That was a realization of how Islam is intertwined with the everyday life of the vast majority of people’s lives. I accidentally walked into a gated park of a woman’s college that I was not supposed to be in, but the security guard had left his post to go pray. He ran in while I was admiring the courtyard and garden and told me to leave, but was not too angry when I indicated that I didn’t know what was going on. This would not have happened in Israel. There are security guards everywhere including in the local grocery stores and even some small cafes, and they would get fired for leaving their post for a moment. I saw large crowds of men praying in nearly every side street, and heard the impassioned voices of Imams preaching most likely about the glories of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad and the dangers of western materialism and debauchery. It was amazing to see the young and old, educated and not, rich and poor, stop everything for an hour or so to be built up in their beliefs. Because of the fact that virtually every male was in a mosque or praying in the street, one got the impression that everyone was part of this religion for better or worse and there was no apology about it.

Then I walked a lot more and made my way to another sheesha/coffee house. By then it was almost five in the afternoon, so it was the normal time to be in a cafe. I met the second English speaker outside of the hotel there—Mr. Nabir. (The first was a Coptic Christian from visiting from Alexandria who wanted to introduce me to his daughter who was about 16). He came and smoked some sheesha next to me, and after I told him I was Canadian he asked about the immigration process, and how easy it was. In between the employees yelling, (really yelling at each other, and not at the required volume to transfer information), as well as typical road sounds like twenty-some odd guys banging on percussion instruments in a ten seat bus, he asked me what I think about the current Israeli acts of aggression and about what we can do to end the lack of Arab unity to solve this problem. Then a boy came and asked for some water from my cup which I didn’t refuse. I was a bit confused at first, but his mother was buying bread at the shop next door and smiling at my good etiquette—he and his brother were wearing soccer uniforms, so I guess you could call her the Egyptian soccer mom.

After this amazing experience of Egyptian culture and the thoughts of Mr. Nabir, I set off to walk some more. I went back to the Nile and walked over it as the sun was going down. On my way back across the bridge I realized I was hungry again, and there were two teenagers selling some kind of stuffed sweet bread, so I bought some at top dollar. One of them, Austin asked me where I was from and we had a short but sweet conversation. It turns out he was a Christian from Southern Sudan, and that is how he knew English I suppose. I didn’t really know how to respond to that information—pity, sadness, or some kind of solidarity. It was kind mixed into a surprised “wow…uh…that is such a hard situation…uh…I whish you all the best, man.” I think he understood that more or less, and I went on after shaking his hand and saying “Take it easy man.” He reminded the most of an American of any person that I encountered, possibly because he both spoke English, and because he didn’t seem to be as hardened by the city as some of the other people I met.

With only a couple of hours left until I was expecting to see Jeff and David, I went looking for some place to round off my raging apatite I had developed from about seven hours of walking in the Egyptian sun. I didn’t find any place that looked appealing until I passed a Pizza Hut. I wanted more Egyptian food, but I settled on a clean, overpriced, and thankfully air conditioned place. That was great, and I got to practice my Arabic as I ordered and paid in Arabic, for the most part.

Entry number four: The last leg of the journey was back at the Giza Four Seasons Hotel at 8:30 pm, where I asked if there were any messages from Jeff, and was told to wait in the tea room. I took out a book that I had started in Pizza Hut, Talmudic Lectures in French, by Emanuel Levinas. It was amazing, and I managed to finish a sixty-five page section about the importance of our outward actions towards others in tandem with our inward relationship with God. It was referring to sins that are done against God directly which will be forgiven of the truly repentant, versus the wrongs that we do to others which require reconciliation with the other person before God can forgive us. The physical context was nearly as refreshing as the spiritual one. I was so absorbed in the book, and seeing that the Four Seasons tea room was practically an isolation chamber compared to the streets of Cairo, that nearly two hours went by before I thought to go find out if Jeff and David had arrived. They had indeed arrived, and didn’t see me in the tea room, so I received the message to find them upstairs at the pool and lounge bar. The next thing I know I was standing on a patio bar open area with the Nile on the horizon and Cairo far below and greeting Jeff in his Speedo with David in the pool…