On Christmas morning 2008, I woke up in a hotel room with three Jews. The night before, while everyone else was asleep, I had gone for a walk around the neighborhood and happened to buy a box of Middle Eastern desserts like baklava and stuff from a sweets shop around the corner. We dug into these before heading downstairs for the usual hotel breakfast, which just barely passed the “edible” mark, despite all appearances. After the first morning, I pretty much just had tea or nescafe. I think this was the day we visited the Citadel of Saladin (12th century Sultan of Egypt and Syria and legendary military commander, who was actually of Kurdish origin!), where we entered several mosques, including the famous Mohammed Ali mosque, and climbed some old crumbling stone-brick structure with towers and steeply spiraling staircases and a beautiful view of Cairo's cityscape of pencil gray buildings that matched the grayness of the winter sky that day, and were hung all over with colorful laundry. I selfishly hoped that the dwellers of this city would never adopt automatic dryers; without the laundry hung over all the balconies, the Cairo cityscape would be dull indeed.
Keeper of Shoes
Modern Cairo through an ancient window
Dave and Alice make their escape
Max surveys his kingdom
Sitting precariously on a ledge
I want to climb a tree in every nation.
Denile is a river in Egypt
Another night, we visited the Cairo tower which was supposed to afford a most amazing view of the city, especially during sunset. We got there after dark, so decided not to go up that night. But I did get a picture of that black vulture-like emblem that adorns the front of the tower as well as the flag of Egypt.
Later, I discovered that this fierce-looking bird was not a vulture, but an eagle- the Eagle of Saladin, the symbol of Arab nationalism, also later adopted by Saddam's Baathist party* and the Nazis. Saladin is turning out to be a vastly interesting historical figure, and I'm now wishing I'd read more about him before going to Egypt, so I could have looked for the eagle carving on the western wall of the Citadel, if it even exists anymore. Anyway, we came back to the tower during our last night in Cairo before heading down to Luxor, but the sunset escaped us once again because the line for the elevator was so long. Nevertheless, the view from the top was pretty nice- like seeing Paris from the Eiffel Tower, except here we could see a huge soccer field, a tiny soccer field, and a swimming pool among other things, and the Nile of course. I dunno why it's the sports arenas I remember. It was freezing so we took a seat at the cafe, which wasn't terribly fancy, but had a small tray of little red stones on the table as decoration that Alice seemed to like. Alice and I had a nice long chat about books. Back at the hotel, as we sat around on the lobby couches, waiting to go to the train station, we played a game called “2 f***u's and a surprise”. Alice won the surprise- one of the little red stones from the Cairo tower cafe.
While waiting just outside the train station, we shared a bowl of macaroni-and-tomato sauce at a hole-in-the-wall macaroni-and-tomato sauce joint whose floor was covered with wood chips. I went exploring and passed many shisha-and-shai cafes full of men with smoke blowing out of their mouth and nostrils, and steam rising from their teacups. And interestingly, I discovered a large shisha-and-shai house where the men sat around smoking, drinking tea, and playing some hard-core chess. Before heading back to the train station, I picked up some sweet Egyptian bread, a bag of honey-roasted chestnuts, and a marriage proposal (I said no). We took a 12-hour train down to Luxor that night, accompanied by all these Egyptian men in dresses (I can't help thinking of them as dresses, even though they're just the traditional Egyptian garb for men) and turbans, a man who made a strange droning sound the entire time, a man who looked as old as the Pyramids who was unable to walk by himself and yet insisted on taking a walk through the narrow aisle every half-hour, taking about half the time it took to build the Pyramids to walk a single train-length. And flies. Welcome to 2nd class trains in Egypt, folks! It felt like the Septa in Philly- dirty, with the token crazy guy(s). The door right in front of me kept swinging open and shut all night because of the men selling tea and bread, and because of that ancient man who enjoyed taking walks. It was a restless night for me. It was a miserable night for one of my traveling companions. (Cipro anyone?) At one point, I woke up from my half-sleep, looked out the window, and saw a beautiful countryside view, of lush, green and golden fields and palm trees, the sky a pale yellow and white. At another point, I woke up, looked out the same window, and saw an amazing deep-pink and red sunrise. Surreal images between sleep, seen through a smudged window of a train chugging through Egypt.
*Months later, I bought a rusty Ba'athist eagle insignia for $5 at an antique shop in Erbil. To this day, I don't know what to do with it.
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