Saturday began with a trip to the Egyptian Museum. I was particularly excited because they have probably the best collection of Egyptian artifacts in the world, and I never quite grew out of my mummy phase. Before we saw the museum, however, we had to get there, and this is as good a time as any to describe the utter insanity that is Egyptian driving. I had been under the impression that Budapest’s traffic was bad, but a few days in Cairo quickly dispelled me of that notion. Somewhere along the line it seems that Cairo’s city planners decided that lanes really aren’t essential for the safe operation of motor vehicles. They were wrong. Rather than driving in lines, citizens of Cairo (Cairoers? Cairoites?) seem to move in perpetual traffic jams, weaving in between each other in a bewildering fashion. Traffic lights do exist, but they seem to be universally ignored except at the largest intersections, and even then a police officer usually is around to make sure that tourists get to cross the street every once and a while. Egyptian locals, on the other hand, seem to walk into traffic with reckless abandon, and more than one avoided an accident only by leaping out of the way at the last minute.

In any case, we took our lives into our hands and made our way the few blocks to the museum, tailing locals whenever we had to cross a major thoroughfare. Once we reached the museum, we had to pass through an elaborate security system before being allowed to enter. In order to get onto the museum grounds we had to show our passports at a security checkpoint and then go through an airport style metal detector while a troop of police with exceedingly large guns stood in formation nearby. After buying tickets we had to go through another security checkpoint before entering the museum proper. I am glad to see that the Egyptian government values its history, but the constant presence of so much security was a sobering reminder of the realities in the Middle East.

My experience with the Egyptian museum strikes me as a good metaphor for my experience with Cairo as a whole. It was massive, chaotic, frustrating, completely foreign, and filled with unbelievable treasures. Any one of hundreds of artifacts on display would have been the crown jewel in most museums’ Egyptian collection, but in Cairo they were strewn about with almost no contextual information. A few of the more famous pieces (like Tutankhamen’s mask) were described in Arabic, French, and English, but most of the other artifacts, if they were identified at all, were labeled as “wooden implement” or something equally vague. Don’t get me wrong, the museum was amazing, it was just sad to see so many treasures left unorganized and unexplained. Maybe someday they will find the money and the space to give their massive collection its due.

Once again we ate and napped for a couple of hours before heading out for the evening. Bart had heard about a Sufi dancing performance that was supposed to be worth checking out, so the nine of us squeezed into two cabs and set forth. The thing about being in a taxi with a driver who doesn’t speak much English is that you have absolutely no control over the speed or direction of the vehicle. Despite nearly colliding with several vehicles and a few pedestrians, once I got over my survival instinct it was actually great way to see Cairo. Once again we went from the modern downtown past a dizzying array of slums, mosques, clogged market streets, and ancient monuments before reaching the “Citadel,” where the performance was to take place. The citadel is an old fortress that now houses several museums and perhaps a mosque. All of that was closed by the time we got there, so I don’t know anything else about it. We ended up having to wait over an hour before the performance actually started, but in the end it was well worth it.

It’s a bit difficult to describe the music in any detail because the instruments were all unfamiliar to me, but it was very exiting and percussive. After about thirty minutes of music, a dancer came out and began to spin. He was wearing several skirts made of a very thick material that he was able to twirl expertly in a variety of increasingly intricate patterns around his body and head. I am not quite sure the precise religious significance of such a dance, but I believe that by spinning around the dancer enters a trancelike state and has some sort of religious experience or communication with God. In any case, the physical endurance of the dancer was amazing. He must have been spinning non-stop for 45 minutes, and he was able to stop and walk away without falling over or missing a beat. I expected that to be the end of the performance, but there was another section of music and then three dancers came out and performed simultaneously. I have no idea how authentic the performance was, but it was a wonderful spectacle nevertheless.

Another exciting cab ride through nighttime Cairo and a stop back at the café we discovered on Friday concluded my evening. Some of the others went out to a club with some locals, but I was sick and tired and looking forward to my bed.

In an attempt to try and better understand and capture my experiences in Egypt, I’ve decided to write up my experiences at length. This may or may not turn out to be interesting or helpful, but if nothing else it will provide a record of my activities to look back on. What follows is “day 1.” Hopefully days 2 and 3 will follow in the near future, but I do not know when.

The one problem with “weekend trips” is that they invariably involve traveling at some ridiculous hour of the night. Our flight to Cairo left at 11:40 pm, putting us into Egypt at like 3:00 in the morning. To add to the confusion, we unknowingly arrived on the night that daylight savings time ends in Egypt, so nobody knew exactly what time it was. It turns out that Egypt is usually one hour ahead of Hungary, but for a few months they are on the same time since Hungary hasn’t “fallen back” yet. I suppose it was indicative of what was to come that as soon as we passed through customs we were approached by official looking people trying to offer us hostels and taxis. They really try to hook tourists early. At least two of the people in our group were told, independently, that they had “Egyptian looking faces,” for instance. Since I don’t think that blond hair is a traditional Egyptian trait, I think they were going for gullible instead. Luckily our hostel was awesome, and not only did they put up with a bunch of exhausted, adrenaline-fueled Americans, they were there to meet us at the airport at three in the morning. That’s service for eight dollars a night!

The hostel also provided a free shuttle to the Pyramids. We had originally been planning to go on Saturday, but during the trip to the hostel the driver convinced us that Friday would be less crowded. It was 4:00 am, so we just smiled and nodded and agreed to meet five hours later to embark for Giza.

Even trying to recount the trip as it happened, it’s really hard to describe how overwhelming Cairo was. It’s so huge, so chaotic, and so radically different from anything else I have ever seen. I guess I had naively assumed that since Egypt is so touristy, Cairo would be just like any big European city, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The racial and religious makeup made us very visibly outsiders, and the relative poverty of most Egyptians was occasionally striking. Giza is on the outskirts of Cairo, so we a saw a lot of the city on the drive. The high rises and luxury hotels of the downtown gave way to rows of crumbling apartment buildings broken by the occasional mosque. Towards Giza we even shared the road with a few donkey carts that looked like they hadn’t changed much in the last few millennia. I’m trying not to draw any grand conclusions from a three-day trip, but visiting Cairo was a powerful experience and I’m still trying to sort out my reaction to it.

I know it was the most predictable part of the trip, but seeing the Pyramids was still pretty much the coolest thing in the world. The hostel set us up with a tour guide that took us out on camels. We were undoubtedly supposed to haggle more than we did, so I’m sure we were ripped off, but I think everybody was having too much fun to notice. Our first stop was the Sphinx, which was a lot smaller than pictures had led me to believe. They have it set up so that you enter through the temple at the base of the statue and then go up a hill next to the Sphinx. The whole area was swarming with peddlers trying to sell us things. They technically weren’t allowed inside the walled off area near the monument (where we had to pay admission), but that didn’t deter them from conducting transactions under the fence around the complex. Every so often we would also little kids crawl under the fence to sell trinkets, only to be chased off by police officers. Almost all of the goods on offer were touristy junk (plastic pyramids, fake statues, etc.), but I did cave in and buy some ridiculously overpriced water to help fend off the desert heat.

After the Sphinx, we headed up to the Pyramids. They have one pyramid open to tourists at a time, and on Friday it was the Pyramid of Khafre, the second of the three great Pyramids. It’s cool to have been in a pyramid, but there’s really not that much inside. You have to walk bent-double down this tiny tunnel, which eventually opens up into a rather empty chamber. There was an empty stone sarcophagus, but everything else had been looted or carried off to a museum long ago. There was some graffiti (or a message of some sort) dated 1813, which was kind of cool to see. The Pyramids were still unbelievably ancient decades before the civil war. Anyhow, we next rode up a nearby hill for a photo op and then headed back towards town.

The afternoon and evening consisted of eating, napping, and wandering around downtown. A few people in our group had some friends studying abroad in Cario, so we met up with them for a while and just generally hung out.

The most interesting experience of the night came when a few of us were walking around some of the shops near the hostel. We were approached by a couple of Egyptian guys who started talking with us in English. That would not be a particularly notable occurrence, except that they did not appear to be trying to sell us anything or to heckle the women in our group. Instead they talked about the need to improve Egyptian/American relations and invited to go a cafe for a while. The whole thing seemed pretty sketchy to me, especially when the aforementioned cafe ended up being down an alley, but things ended up turning out all right. The cafe was an outdoor affair patronized almost entirely by locals. We sipped mango juice and tea while our “host” told us an elaborate story about how he had lived in Japan for several years and traveled throughout Europe and to the United States. It was probably mostly made up, but I can’t complain too much since we told him that we were Hungarian!

Anyway, it ended up being a fun evening, and the mango juice was pretty delicious. I felt a bit awkward because I never knew whom to trust. We met a lot of very nice people in Egypt, but we could have very easily been taken advantage of. Cairo is the only place I’ve been where it was immediately obvious that I was a foreign tourist, and I was pretty much completely reliant on the goodwill of others. It definitely makes me appreciate Budapest – I may not know the language, but I can pass for Hungarian if I just keep my mouth shut.

To be continued…

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Originally uploaded by bsowell.

back from Egypt. Cairo is the largest and most chaotic city I have ever been in, and this trip was certainly one of the most unique experiences I have ever had. At the moment I’m still trying to frantically finish catch up on homework and get over a cold, but there is a lot I want to share. Give me a few days.