City Limits
This weekend's activities were mostly inspired by lack of sleep, rooftop sunrises, sing-alongs and long talks. All these things sound lovely as long as we leave out the details, so that's what we're going to do.
In actuality it was a tough and emotional weekend for me, but it had some worthwhile moments.
On friday afternoon I embarked on a metro adventure.
the rules are: get on the Metro and just go. We picked the blue line, and headed out of town. My friend told me to count the number of stops from Sadat (our stop) to Shubra (the end), I gave him the option 1 to 10; he picked 9.
Around stop number 7, a young Egyptian with limited English approached us and said "I think you are heading the wrong way."
How do you explain to someone you got on the metro just to go somewhere? That you have no idea what kind of neighborhood you're heading to and you don't really care?
We didn't bother. We just told him it was okay, and asked his name.
We got off and started wandering. In Cairo proper people are jaded, they see tourists all the time, and to them we are walking dollar signs. It's all about the profit. Out in Koliet El-Zaraa we were the only non-Egyptians there. Little kids ran up to us and asked us our names, where we were from, if we wanted to play. Everyone said hello and no one tried to sell us anything. At one point one man laughingly shouted "tourists" in Arabic after us as we climbed a unused rickety overpass leading no where.
Eventually we found a little concrete loading dock along the Nile. We sat down next to two boys fishing and watched a few older girls gut fish, while their male counterparts worked on a partially constructed boat.
The young fisherman offered to let my friend borrow his rod, and one of the girls came up to ask our names, and tried to force cigarettes on me. My favorite part is that was I wasn't smoking, and it's atypical for Egyptian women to smoke. I wonder where she got the cigarettes from; since it's unlikely they were hers.
About 5 yards away, 70-some people were loading themselves onto a river boat and a large sailboat. Women boarded the river boat, and the men climbed onto the sailboat. As the boats filled up and the dock emptied, the sailboat took notice of the two white kids sitting along the Nile. One guy started waving, which led to seven guys waving, which led to someone pulling out their taba (an Egyptian drum) and starting up a call-response song for all twenty of them. The boat was singing to us.
I watched the riverboat pull the sailboat across to the opposite shore of the Nile.
There were two teens swimming in the Nile, which you do not see downtown. The Nile is filthy. One of them started talking to us, you could tell he was making fun, everyone else was giggling. A lot of people tried joking with us. The intent was evident, but the punchline was lost on the two foreigners who spoke twenty words of Arabic between them.
Eventually the riverboat came back, still dragging what was now an empty sailboat, and I would've liked to ask where the men had gone, but with no language, there was little chance that we could've figured it out.
It wasn't until later on when I was recounting my day over dinner that I realized it was the first time I've been in Cairo and seen people engaged in an activity that wasn't selling me something. In the immediate Cairo, everyone is a vendor of everything. I had forgotten that boats are made somewhere. It served as a nice reminder.
In actuality it was a tough and emotional weekend for me, but it had some worthwhile moments.
On friday afternoon I embarked on a metro adventure.
the rules are: get on the Metro and just go. We picked the blue line, and headed out of town. My friend told me to count the number of stops from Sadat (our stop) to Shubra (the end), I gave him the option 1 to 10; he picked 9.
Around stop number 7, a young Egyptian with limited English approached us and said "I think you are heading the wrong way."
How do you explain to someone you got on the metro just to go somewhere? That you have no idea what kind of neighborhood you're heading to and you don't really care?
We didn't bother. We just told him it was okay, and asked his name.
We got off and started wandering. In Cairo proper people are jaded, they see tourists all the time, and to them we are walking dollar signs. It's all about the profit. Out in Koliet El-Zaraa we were the only non-Egyptians there. Little kids ran up to us and asked us our names, where we were from, if we wanted to play. Everyone said hello and no one tried to sell us anything. At one point one man laughingly shouted "tourists" in Arabic after us as we climbed a unused rickety overpass leading no where.
Eventually we found a little concrete loading dock along the Nile. We sat down next to two boys fishing and watched a few older girls gut fish, while their male counterparts worked on a partially constructed boat.
The young fisherman offered to let my friend borrow his rod, and one of the girls came up to ask our names, and tried to force cigarettes on me. My favorite part is that was I wasn't smoking, and it's atypical for Egyptian women to smoke. I wonder where she got the cigarettes from; since it's unlikely they were hers.
About 5 yards away, 70-some people were loading themselves onto a river boat and a large sailboat. Women boarded the river boat, and the men climbed onto the sailboat. As the boats filled up and the dock emptied, the sailboat took notice of the two white kids sitting along the Nile. One guy started waving, which led to seven guys waving, which led to someone pulling out their taba (an Egyptian drum) and starting up a call-response song for all twenty of them. The boat was singing to us.
I watched the riverboat pull the sailboat across to the opposite shore of the Nile.
There were two teens swimming in the Nile, which you do not see downtown. The Nile is filthy. One of them started talking to us, you could tell he was making fun, everyone else was giggling. A lot of people tried joking with us. The intent was evident, but the punchline was lost on the two foreigners who spoke twenty words of Arabic between them.
Eventually the riverboat came back, still dragging what was now an empty sailboat, and I would've liked to ask where the men had gone, but with no language, there was little chance that we could've figured it out.
It wasn't until later on when I was recounting my day over dinner that I realized it was the first time I've been in Cairo and seen people engaged in an activity that wasn't selling me something. In the immediate Cairo, everyone is a vendor of everything. I had forgotten that boats are made somewhere. It served as a nice reminder.
1 Comments:
I think the guy was correct when he told you that you might be on the wrong direction. I could have done so myself if I were him. In Cairo, there are places where people are used to seeing tourists everywhere. Yet in Shoubra, tourists rarely come. You can ask Dody about Shoubra by the way.
You gotta see the real Shoubra one day.
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