| Cairo,
Egypt
27.4-28.4
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alex |
| Cairo,
Egypt
27.4-28.4
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alex |
| Wow, this is the nicest restaurant I've seen so far, decked out in amazing Egyptian kitsch (plastic grapevine on pink walls, random farm objects, paintings of Egyptian life and to top it off a stuffed chicken bursting out of a flower pot). The fuul/tehina/ta'amiyya/etc are ridiculously priced by local standards, but you can still assemble a full meal for about $10, and the ta'amiyya was excellent! (I wish I could say same for the fuul, but the primary problem seems to be my taste buds -- there are only so many ways you can mash and warm up fava beans.) |
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Whoops, looks like the plan has changed: I'm not flying back
to Tel Aviv early Sunday morning as planned, but instead to Gaza
on Friday, ie. tomorrow. And yes, that's right, I'm going to
Arafat International, the brand-new airport (mostly) operated by
the Palestinian government authority. I had
better get at least a few funky-ass stamps out of this!
(And need I mention that while only Air Sinai discreetly flies to the Zionist entity, EgyptAir is proud to fly to Palestine?)
After lunch I took a taxi to the Citadel -- the driver replied to my most carefully enunciated "Midan Salah ad-Din" with "What? Salah ad-Din? Oh, you mean the Citadel, right?" in fluent English and zoomed off. It's big, it's impressive and it would have made a good first stop on a Cairo tour, as it's high up on a hill and you can see most of the city from there, including the Gaultier-style twin bra peaks of the Pyramids on the horizon. The $10 (student) entrance fee gets you into everything inside the walls, which is quite a lot: the Mosque of Mohammed Ali (the guy the boxer took his name from, that is), the rather standardly Egyptian al-Gawhara Palace, the somewhat underwhelming National Police Museum, and the wondrously bombastic Military National Museum.
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The Mosque of Mohammed Ali is, err, big. As in "real big". It's one of those cakes that are prettier from the outside than from the inside and the hordes of rampaging tourists in ungodly shorts don't help, but there are a few select spots inside and the size alone is impressive.
The Military National Museum has to be seen to be believed, I'm still kicking myself over not paying the one silly pound required for photography (I would of course have broken this rule, but they made me leave my bag at the entrance! Agrajag!). Egypt's "stunning victory" in the 1973 "war for peace" is regaled with room after room of displays made with the help of North Korean artists and boy, do they look like it! No, I don't mean that soldiers have slanted eyes, but the style of the revolutionary paintings is inimitable: bursting with socialist fervor and crackling with nuggets of heroic resistance, slathered in the milk of indomitable optimism and the leadership of Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung... err, make that Gamal Abd el-Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, who can be found in every painting and panorama, looking resolutely into the upper right-hand corner. (For some curious reason, 1948 and 1967 seem to be ignored entirely. How odd.) Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you're a deviant like me who gets his kicks from uberrevolutionary art ###link), Egypt has come a long way since the days the museum exhibits were constructed.
The National Police Museum, on the other hand, probably wouldn't have made much of an impression if I hadn't run into a medical student from al-Azhar University there. For reasons of privacy, I rarely name the people I meet on my travels if I go into more detail about them, but in this particular case I think I can safely make an exception -- so meet Mohammed, who came up to me and asked if he could practice his English. Well, sure!
(In case you didn't get the joke, according to Islamic tradition the first boy in each family should be named Mohammed. There are 65 million people in Egypt with an average of 4 children per family, which translates to approximately 17 million Mohammeds.)
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So. A clean-cut young man, dark hair, a neatly trimmed black moustache and beard, round face and metallic eyeglasses, he pretty much perfectly fitted the stereotype of what you'd expect an kindly young Egyptian doctor to look like. After the obligatory where-you-from-what-do-you-do stuff, we sighted a crowd of pretty young things from Italy, with quite a few pretty young things hanging out on display, and the conversation naturally moved over to those two traditional safe topics, sex and religion. (But politics we were both careful to steer clear of.) After asking about Finnish women, he gathered the courage to ask me whether people in Finland, and me, "practice bad manners" -- after a little additional prodding this turned out to mean premarital sex. (Yallah!) I'm still not quite sure he believed me when I said that yes, in Finland when boy meets girl it's entirely up to them what happens; this is not "bad manners" but in fact quite normal; there are restaurants and dance clubs for the express purpose of finding sex partners; and -- this seemed to be the hardest part -- the men don't even have to pay! Of course, he was a devout Muslim so such things were to him unthinkable, but the lure of the forbidden and the temptation to sin remain strong... Poor fellow, especially given that (at least with my limited understanding of how the women add up these things, I'm still baffled by how anybody can find hairy legs sexy) exotic Mohammed with his tuft of black chest hair sprouting out of his shirt would have no trouble at all scoring some female company in Finland. I promised to write to him, I'm still not quite sure whether it would be too evil to include a couple of printouts of some select shots from my picture galleries. (Or that picture of a certain female acquaintance fondly hugging a giant penis effigy which, alas, I have been forbidden to put on the Net under pain of death.) But Mohammed doesn't have Internet access, al-Ahzar's done things the traditional way since 970 A.D. (the oldest university in the world!) and they do seem to have a good thing going. |
After the Citadel, he joined me for a quick jaunt to the bazaars of the Khan, where I did a little last-minute shopping. It is simply amazing how much easier bargaining becomes when you have a dependable local with you to negotiate, I probably saved tens of pounds (and minutes) compared to what I would've have had to pay otherwise. (Being able to deal painlessly with Arabic-only-speaking shopkeepers also helped.) And, in true Arabic style, I almost had to force him into a cafe to accept a drink as a token of my gratitude. But soon it was time to go, and he told me that he would miss me with such force that, without that preceding conversation, I would've been downright suspicious about his motives...
So I took the subway for the last time and weaved my way through the hellos and welcomes for the last time. As usual, the poor old beggar wretch with no arms and only one leg was sitting on the pavement outside the house. I'm usually too cynical a bastard to give anybody anything for free, but the few pounds I had left would do a hell of a lot more good in his pocket here and now than in mine back in Finland, so I gave them to him and was rewarded with a beatific smile. (No, I didn't take a picture, and fuck you for asking.)
And I then stepped into my air-conditioned world of unimaginable luxury. Halas.
Cairo at dawn, a heavy wet fog blanketing the entire city. Vapors from a puddle of spilled petrol in the back of the are almost enough to make me retch, and the little Copt driving the car wheezes and coughs in the polluted air. In Heliopolis, the entire front half of a BMW has been shattered into fragments -- a white shape is still pinned against the steering wheel.
If I ever found a new religion, its first commandment will strictly prohibit getting up before 8 AM.
15 minutes to departure (my flight actually seems to be on time, al-Hamdu lillah) and so far there are all of six (6) people in the departure "lounge", if I can use such a word for a concrete hall filled with orange plastic chairs arranged in neat rows. Two kids are playing with a Chinese-made plastic toy thingamajig that bleeps out the melody of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", but with wack-ass scratches between each line:
Demented. I want one!
And, of course, a one-hour delay was announced almost immediately after I wrote that. Serves me right -- although I still wonder how a flight in the Middle East can be delayed for "bad weather".
[Ed. Easily. I later learned that Gaza International has purchased navigational gear that would allow landings at night and in poor weather conditions, but the Israelis think that night landings would be a security threat and have thus invented some pretext to hold the gear in customs limbo, 1.5 years so far and counting. As often happens, there was a bit of a mist in the morning, and this was enough to delay the flight.]
Yowza! I seem to have been designated an Able Passanger with Sufficient Strength and Dexterity to open the emergency door, which means I have the only economy-class seat in the plane with tons of leg room. This feels almost obscenely luxurious, but at least the seats are comfortably narrow and the armrests can't be lifted. The entire B737-500 seems to contain about 10 people...
Anyway, odds are I got this seat as a prize for wearing a rather tight clubbing shirt that both shows off my biceps and hugs my sexy man-titties, as the toilet guardian at the airport demonstrated with some skillful miming (earning him my last grubby pound note as baksheesh). The shirt would be too hot and clingy for actual tourism in Cairo, but looks like wearing it here paid off. (Besides, all my other shirts were downright filthy.)
The plane is floating above the fields of southern Gaza now, the scenery
and the impossibly puffy little clouds make me feel like I'm zooming around
a three-dimensional TV weather report...
