As we wandered through the narrow dirt paths of the village, between the low walls of the bright and colorful mud-brick homes, running into adorable wobbly-legged sheep grazing from trash pile to trash pile, I couldn't help thinking “This was Africa.” I mean, duh, Egypt was officially on the African continent, but Cairo is more Middle Eastern than African. Here on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt, the people were dark like Africans, their clothes were bright, colorful and cheery, the women were bold and not the least bit reserved even if they wore the traditional Muslim garb. During our exploration of this more “African” region of Egypt, we happened upon a preschool, and a minute later, found ourselves in the schoolyard, dancing with a bunch of 3- and 4-year olds to rhythmic music playing from a cheap boombox. They'd seen us peeking in and immediately invited us in. The boombox was switched on and the little 3-4 year-olds started doing their morning dance. It reminded me a lot of how I always started out the school day with “head and shoulders, knees and toes” or “itsy-bitsy spider” with my own KG's. The kids here were so much tamer, I thought, thinking of my particularly rambunctious boys back in Kurdistan. Also, they were allowed to lay around if they pleased, or to dance in circles hand-in-hand if this they pleased, and there was no concern about maintaining order in a classroom. The children were not shy, and did not hesitate to take our hand and bring us into their dance circles, and some of them were fairly good dancers.
We took all this in stride and came, danced, paid and left as if nothing unusual had happened, moving on to whatever was to be our next adventure on this strange island. We wandered around and happened upon little Mohammed and his family of women- a mother and a bunch of aunts and sisters I think, or maybe just aunts. There, we had tea, played with the little toddler, saw some wedding photos, paid and left. At the end of our wandering through the small island, we stood at the top of a hill overlooking the water near where the ferry was to arrive and took photos of the village and the palm trees; of the woman in a black burkha carrying a pot on her head as she gracefully made her way down the dirt hill, barefoot and brown, old, yet back as straight as an arrow (or else how would she carry all those things on her head?); of the feluccas along the Nile framed like a painting by the whitewashed bricks of a window frame. Soon, we hopped into the ferry, boys and girls on separate sides, and headed back to the East bank of Aswan, which was so vastly different from this Nubian village, though only a short ferry ride away.
Hot dog
A sheep studies its shadow
A cat roams the low rooftops of the mudbrick homes.
The cat was an animagus!
Picturesque felucca, visible through a glass-less window
The train trip back to Cairo from Aswan was much more pleasant because giant flies did not buzz around our faces all night. It would have been equally as miserable because the AC was cranked way up, though it was the dead of winter and freezing at night (yes, Cairo gets cold!), and I might have ended up like the Little Match Girl if David hadn't saved the night by pulling out his extra coats, bulky and snug and inviting in that meat-freezer of a train. Brrrrrr! I kept my legs crossed all lady-like almost the entire time in order to keep as much of my body heat trapped as possible, and refused to eat or drink anything for the next 12 hours in an attempt to avoid using the train bathrooms (- Success!). I can withstand many discomforts while traveling, but for some reason, I have an intense aversion to dirty bathrooms. Surprisingly, I got a decent amount of sleep on that long train ride, and this time without the company of a gaggle of giggly Egyptian girls playing violent hitting games, or a hobbit-haired French child who liked to repeat phrases like “ba-NA-na cake” and “un grand camion!” over and over again. (That was during the three- or five-hour trip from Luxor to Aswan. Not that I minded their company.)
Back in Cairo, a local who spoke in English idioms took us to a kosri joint, which just turned out to be that macaroni-and-tomato sauce dish we had had just outside the train station to Luxor. Somehow we ended up paying for our unofficial guide's meal, too. Then he took us to an outdoor teahouse, where we sat around in the nippy morning downing hot, sweet tea and talking to our tour guide. He was of Bedouin descent, married with 5 children, and intensely studying the English language. He really loved idioms. He seemed to think idioms brought a conversation from a level 1 to a level 10 in terms of interest and intellect. We talked about the shoe-at-Bush incident, as we seemed to do with all the locals we ran into. After paying for the tea, we were thinking about heading back, but then the guy insisted we pop into a perfume shop. A perfume shop, as it turns out, is more of a theatre than a shop. The four of us and the tour guide took seats set up around the periphery of the small shop, underneath shelves of unlabeled glass bottles full of heady liquids. After taking the trouble to go out and buy us more tea (I had more tea during my 2-week winter vacation than I had during my entire lifetime, no joke!), the owner of the shop (who, coincidentally, was also of Bedouin descent) then put on a show which was really “the longest sale ever”, as David put it, at the end of which Alice and I felt obliged to buy something. I bought a tiny bottle of all-natural, alcohol-free rose petal perfume, and I think Alice got the lotus scent, made popular by Cleopatra according to our salesman. Our local guide made some randy comment about using the perfume to make an upside-down Pyramid on a woman, which turns men into Arabian horses. I don't think it was an idiom. Anyway, we left the perfume shop, said goodbye to our guide, and returned to our hotel Arabesque.
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I had to leave the rest of the traveling group early, after our visit to the huge and well-manicured Al-Azhar Park, because my plane was to take off in the early evening. I said goodbye to the group before they headed to the Northern Cemetery, a bit disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go with them. After all, it seemed I was developing a habit of visiting cemeteries wherever I went- from the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings where King Tut had been discovered, to the humbler one in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. It would have made sense to top off the trip to Egypt with a visit to the space where the living lived among the dead. Anyway, I said goodbye and caught a cab, assuming that with the hotel business card in hand, it would be cake finding it even if I really had no idea where it was in the mammoth city of Cairo. What an assumption. We drove around for an eternity, asking for directions from cops, other taxi drivers, and other locals, but no one knew where it was. Then, when we finally figured out where we had to go, we got stuck in the one of Cairo's infamous gridlock traffic jams, moving at a snail's pace, if we were moving at all. Crawling in traffic, I burst out laughing as a man on a donkey suddenly cut in front of us, its big white donkey booty bobbing up and down, utterly undaunted by the sea of cars surrounding it. And then at one point, all the cars stopped for a sheep crossing, the shepherd herding his woolly charges through the cars with his stick as if this was all normal, which of course it is, in Cairo.
What a city, so colorful and animated...chaotic, its dirty streets swimming with cars, donkeys, sheep and shepherds; men riding bikes with dining table-sized boards on their head, piled high with bread; shapely women using their head as a third arm to carry their groceries, wobbling not even once and swinging from the waist down with grace; men in dresses; destitute citizens demanding baksheesh left and right for every little favor, for every step taken, for every turn of a screw, and every fallen leaf. The cab driver was amused that I was amused. To him, it was all normal, but he knew that it was all foreign to me, a great circus act, with all the balance but no order. I had known it was going to be this way from the moment the plane landed: as soon as the wheels touched the ground, the entire plane seemed to rise as every single passenger stood up in unison (the last orderly act I witnessed until I got out of Egypt) and made a mad rush for their luggage in the storage areas above, some even making a mad dash toward the front of their plane, trying to get as close as possible to the front exit before the aisle got crowded, as if they'd been waiting with their bags ready and eyeing the exit door like an eagle eyeing its prey or a runner eyeing the finish line from his starting place, ready to bolt forward like a bullet as soon as he heard the pistol shot. This was Egypt: chaotic, dirty, and poor, abandoning all pretense and leaving every man for himself to survive any way he knew how, even if it meant making a living out of pestering people, day in day out for a felucca ride, as little Mohammed's father did while the little boy hung around the colorful mud-brick house on Elephantine Island, unbothered by the flies all over his face, charming tourist-visitors into coming in and having Nubian tea, and earning a bit of baksheesh of his own.
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