Thoughts on Egypt

We spent a lot of time looking into where Egypt has been on my trip.  I’m curious as to where it is going.  It’s tough to say.

As I told Double D on the last day, in many ways, Egypt reminds me of post-Soviet countries.  Lots of things are kind of just falling apart.  Our showers didn’t quite work in 3 different hotels.  Many places are just sort of run down.  A lot of the buildings built in the Nasser era and later were taken straight from the Stalin textbook: big blocks of rundown apartments.

What is striking is how BIG Egypt is in terms of population.  Cairo is nearly 20 million people.  The county as a whole is nearly 80 million.  That’s the size of Germany!  Cairo is bigger than London, and Egypt has more people than the UK.  Yet you rarely hear about it.  That’s curious to me.

Of course, people are packed in tight in Cairo.  The Nile is basically the source of any and all water for the entire country year-round (it rains maybe 5 days a year, all in the fall).  People are packed in tight, and there’s not enough housing or space for them.  There also seems to be chronic underemployment.  The unemployment rate is a respectable 5-something percent (though rising), lower than the US rate.  But most salaries are tiny.  Many people work 2 jobs.  And a lot of people you see that are “employed” really don’t seem to be doing much.  Many jobs seem to involve just hanging out and chatting with your friends.  Now, I enjoy doing that, but it doesn’t help much to pay the rent.

Add to this the widespread corruption in the government of “president” Mubarak… who retains absolute control.  After over a quarter century in power, he has yet to name a successor.  That’s important, because the votes mean nothing.  And a free press?  Forget it.  There’s a reason why there are so many cops on the streets.  There are 5 different police forces, and they’re everywhere.  Add to that numerous army checkpoints in the countryside, armed convoys, and some active Islamists, and I worry a bit about the future of Egypt.

As a place to see the past though, wow!  Seriously, there is stuff I saw that is 3 or 4 thousand years old.  We’re talking serious BC-time here. 

And the food is awesome.  I have become obsessed about Shek-shou-ka, which we had on the boat in Egypt.  It’s this rather simple stew made with sauteed onions, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and eggs.  I don’t know what makes it amazing, but it was AWESOME.  I am going to cook it all the time when I get back.  And I’m gonna make some baba ganoush.  Because eggplant RULES.

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Incredible India

5 AM.  Welcome to India.

That’s the time I got in this morning.  Air India cancelled the daytime flight, and offered me a midnight departure from Dubai instead.  Thanks guys.

Mo, a friend from work, described the upcoming flight well.  “First, your plane WILL be delayed.  Second, you will get NO SLEEP.  Third, the food will be a DISASTER.”  We were only about 10 minutes late, so I’ll give them a bye on timing.  The “no sleep” thing, though, was totally true.  Jeesh.  It’s like they were trying to make sure I wouldn’t sleep.  What airline serves dinner at 3 AM?  Seriously?  I’m trying to sleep, dammit!  Didn’t you all get dinner before coming to the airport… you know, since the flight was at midnight?  So, there I was, sitting amongst 499 Indian immigrant workers on their way back from Dubai (I was the only non-Indian on the flight).  What Mo hadn’t told me was that apparently Air India flights offer FREE BEER.  Due to the late hour, however, I pass on it and go with juice.  They don’t have apple, nor orange, so it’s tomato juice time.  Yee-ha!

This is really just the setup for my arrival here in Delhi.  It was very surreal.  I breeze through customs (past the duty-free shop which had a really impressive single malt selection!), and out to the taxi rank.  I prepay the cops at a booth and get a voucher for a taxi.  I exit into the dark Delhi night, laden with fog, and am immediately rushed by a bunch of drivers.  One guy was very insistant that he would take me, but his taxi was in some dark corner away from everything else.  He might have just been at the back of the rank or something, but no thanks.  I’ll stick near the cops.  I jump into the next car, one of Tata Motors finest!  It looks to be from about 1957, though it’s probably from this decade.  We sputter and clank into the night.  My driver is quiet, but his driving is characteristically slightly insane, flying in between busses, trucks, autorickshaws, blazing through constructions sites, and pushing his little car for all it was worth.  His headlamps don’t really do much, and there are no street lights for much of the way into town.

But we make it.  I pile my stuff into the little lobby of the hotel on a dimly lit, misty street of a deserted market area.  Check in time is 2pm.  I’m a bit early.  The guys there are nice though.  They take me up to the next floor, where there’s a big wraparound couch in the lobby.  On one end is a white girl in complete colorful Indian garb, with metal beads and everything.  She’s wordlessly tapping away on a laptop.  She says nothing.  I crash out on the other end of the couch.  The sound of some sort of strange horror movie (lots of sounds of blowing wind, “haunting” guitar solos, no dialogue) is emanating from a TV in a room just off the lobby.  The girl types.  She occaisionally moves a fraction of an inch, causing all the metal on her body to tinkle.  I feel like I’m in an old episode of Are You Afraid Of the Dark?, and she will start speaking to me of some “ancient mystery” of genies in a bottle or some such crap.

Whatever.  It’s 6 AM.  I pass out. A bellhop wakes me at noon.  I check in, reading the paper while they do my documentation.  The Indian press has gone nuts about the 8 Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire.  That and the cricket matches with New Zealand.  Apparently, the child actors in the movie still live in the Mumbai slums.  Now that the Oscars have made them national heroes, the province of Maharashta is seeing if that can’t get them on the list for some public housing…

Anyway, I take a quick shower, and off into Delhi I go!

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Making The News

Landed in Dubai this afternoon.  Since Dave and I got up at 5am to go to the airport, there’s no real need to adjust for the 2 hour time change.  The Gulf and Egypt are both Arab, but veeerry different.  And Dubai is well…  kinda weird.

Fun facts about Dubai:

1. Population in 1964: 150,000

2. Population in 1990: 500,000

3. Population in 2009: over 1.5 million

4. over 75% of residents are male

5. only about 10% of the population is native “Emirati”.  About 5% is Western expats, 60% Indian or Pakistani, and there are tons of Chinese, Africans, Russians, Phillipinos, and other (non-Emirati) Arabs.  It’s kind of like the multi-cultural mix of a place like New York, London, or Toronto… only really different.

Oh, and it is so not Cairo.  Everybody speaks English.  There’s no dude in the bathroom hassling you for a tip.  People can make change when you pay for things.  It’s clean.  And everything is new.  I’m staying in the “old downtown”, called Deira.  By “old”, that means it was the downtown area from about 1960 to 1995.  After that, the center of the city sorta moved over to newer areas.  Before that, Dubai was just a village of 4 dudes sitting around a creek (in between gold smuggling runs).

I’ll fill in more once I’ve seen a shopping mall here.  Apparently, you really can’t talk about Dubai until you’ve been to the mall.  Tomorrow I’m going to check out the one with a ski slope in it!

As for the news, my friend Jared made this little photo of my buddy Timmy and I.  It is awesome.

Sailing the Grand Line to Adventure!

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Photos!

Ahhh, the joys of a fast(ish) internet connection!  I can finally post some photos.  On the right hand side of the screen, you’ll see a new “photos” section.  Click on the link for the relvant location.  In this issue, we’ve got some cool Egypt pics, including some awesome Tadhog and Double D action shots!

The full photostream link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/35629022@N04/

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The First Stomach… Incident

It’s not me, it’s Dave.  He’s just left about half his lunch in a restaurant toilet (the other half on the floor next to it).  We think it was a mix of dehydration and the suspect kofta he had for lunch.  We think it was made of old camel.  Fortunately, I remain fine… for now.  Mostly I am writing this so my friends can give him a hard time when he gets home.  In the meantime, I’m making sure he gets enough water and all that.

Also, right now this is kind of surreal.  I’m in a dusty internet cafe on Thursday, which is kind of like Friday night around here.  To my right is a headscarfed teenage girl, very shyly chatting online with someone named “Marc” via Yahoo instant messenger (it’s all in Arabic.  And no, I don’t normally read other people’s stuff, it’s just that the load times on this machine are ridiculous).   To my left is a 4 year old boy named Mahmoud who is ripping shit up playing GTA San Andreas.  It’s all rather funny.

Quick update.  Yesterday we floated down the Nile on a boat (that’s right, we were ON A BOAT) all day and night.  Aside from a bathroom break in which a chained-up bull got loose, that was very relaxing.  Today we saw the temples of Luxor, which are spectacular.

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Sheesh!! (I get by with a little help from my friends)

Apparently, all of Egypt runs on two “sheeshes”, baksheesh and sheesha.  Sheesha is simply a hookah, smoking fruit tobacco through a water pipe.  It seems that almost all the men around here spend the hours between 4pm and 8pm hanging out at cafes drinking tea (typically Lipton’s, who must be making a killing selling mountains of their less-than-stellar tea to 80 million Egyptians) and smoking sheesah.  Not for me, but I appreciate the relaxed pace of the aftenoon.

Baksheesh takes a little more getting used to for we Westerners.  It very loosely translates as “tipping”, but can often be construed much further, as almost bribery.  For pretty much anything you do here, (and I do mean anything) you are expected to give some cash to the person serving you.  The ins-and-outs of baksheesh are still rather confusing to me, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.  The big problem really is just having any change to give.  Nobody seems to have change around here.  The ATM gives you 50 and 100 Egyptian Pound notes, and your average tips are 1 or 2 pounds… but nobody wants to give you change, of course!

In the course of the past few days, several friends have come through in ways that you would totally expect.  When I was out in the sun the other day checking out the pyramids, Betsy’s sunscreen was totally awesome in making sure I didn’t turn red (though I missed a bit of forehead… not too much though).  Boris gave me a new piece of post-modern tragi-comedy by directing me to the KFC across from The Sphinx.  Amanda hooked me up with some totally awesome Arabic phrases to amuse people with.  Mariah tried to add some other awesome part to the trip that I totally didn’t have time to do, and totally couldn’t fit in unless travelling didn’t require any time (Which it does, so Mariah failed).  And as for Dave… well, Dave has been threatening to kill me.  Nonstop.  But that’s what Dave does all the time, anyway.  Plus ca change…

My final “sheesh!” is in the form of accelerated time.  A week ago right now, I was putting my stuff into the storge locker in Brooklyn.  It’s hard to believe it’s been only a week.  It feels like a couple months already.  I even rode a camel yesterday.  His name was Jamaica.  His handler likes Bob Marley (and, like just about everybody else around here, really likes Barack Obama).  Dave and I also got some totally sweet action shots at the pyramids.  Once we can find some decent upload speeds, we’ll try to post some.

Tomorrow we go sailing on the Nile, the world’s longest river.  Woohoo!

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First Day, First Stop: Cairo

Cairo is an interesting place! Quite the city.  On Wednesday, I finished up with the apartment, had a quick lunch with my guys in the ‘Burg, took it to JFK, and then, BAM!  I’m here!  As usual, I coudn’t really sleep on the plane, but otherwise, the flight went fine.  The only delay was when we were held on the tarmac after getting off the plane.  We saw a big, official plane land just after ours, looks like President Mubarak.

I make it to the hotel.  I was ripped off on the cab ride, but not too badly.  After I drop off my things, I just start walking around…  Cairo is a great city for walking.  I mean, you take your life in your own hands crossing the street, as there aren’t really any lights and “rules of the road” are only material for comedians, not actual rules anyone follows.  You just wander straight into the street, and everybody drives around you.  It’s more-or-less like anywhere else in the Mediterranean, but a lot more congested.  Oh, and there are cops EVERYWHERE.  Gazillions of them, on like every corner.  Well, actually, let me think… crazy traffic, everybody is trying to rip you off, and there are far too many goverment employees everywhere…  Sounds rather link New York, no?

The funny thing is the people are REALLY friendly here.  It’s a lot of fun.  You walk around for about 15 minutes, and somebody will try to chat with you.  About half of them really want to take you to their “office” to sell you some overpirced papyrus painting or something.  These guys are a bit much, but are kind of amusing in their own way.  They all “have been to America” and love it.  They “just want to give you their card”, and take some tea with you.  As a former salesman, I am impressed with their pitching, and admire their persistence… but also, guys.  Don’t waste your time on crap leads.  I ain’t buying anything, and I make it pretty obvious from the start.  They’re friendly though, and not a terrible bother.

Then I meet Hosam.  He thinks initially that I speak Spanish (NO idea why!), but we chat for a good half-hour wandering the streets.  He teaches English an does translation work, so we get to chat about both Egypt and English pedagogy.  Good stuff.  Later on, I meet Mustafa, who asked me the time, and then we started chatting.  He is career army (claims to be a commando…  I’m sure), and we wander about, chatting about the world and old Cairo, and telling a few jokes (this is very easy when you pass carts selling nothing but livers and other cow offal).  Very cool guy.  We eventually grab some dinner and a few beers.  Good times.  We had a long discussion about how to properly use the term “Insha’Allah”.  It’s a great term that I’ve always liked, and it apparently is applied to anything in the future ever since you could die at any moment.  Interesting stuff.

Today is Friday, so everything is very quiet.  In many Muslim countries, Friday is the weekend.  So, Thursday night, Cairo was bumping!  Streets were packed with shoppers and revelers.  I, having not slept on the plane, crashed at 10.  I also slept quite late, which is a bad idea for jetlag, but anyway…  Today, much of downtown is closed, and the streets are relatively quiet.  I grabbed some Koshary, and came here.  I think I’ll do a bit more wandering today.  The weather is the perfect temperature for it.  Tonight will apparently be the big grocery shopping night.  Tomorrow, Double D arrives.

Now for a bit of tea, methinks…

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Preparations Are Afoot…

Wow.  I thought that a week and a half would be plenty of time to get everything together, pack my stuff away, throw my bakcpack together, see people, party a bit, and maybe to just chill out a little.  Nope.  I got a notebook full of stuff to do, and I don’t seem to be able to cross stuff off nearly as quickly as I want to.  Oh well.

It didn’t help that Egypt Air basically thought that I hadn’t paid them for 3 months.  I double check my reservation Sunday… OH!  not there!  Long story short, their website is crappy (go to egyptair.com in Firefox, and see what happens… you know, with the second-most-used browser in the world), and crashed mid-order.  When I re-entered my order, it went to Cairo, not New York, but everybody for some reason thinks the order is in NYC, so I’ve spent this entire week calling and emailing around, and just being told to email someone else in a different time zone and wait a day. So today I just went to their office and asked very nicely that they give me a ticket.  I had to insist that I was not going to leave without a solution, but they were very nice, and we got this all resolved.  Yay!

Also got my Nepal visa today.  This took a whole 5 minutes, and was very pleasant.

About every other conversation this week has been with people who are rather bowled over by this whole plan.  I guess I’m doing something right 🙂

I’ve closed out accounts, changed addresses, adjusted things, procured items, blah blah blah.  Now (finally) to packing!

So, flight takes off Wednesday evening.  First stop, Egypt.

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