A little bit of jungle in all this concrete
I spent last night sitting in a room, giggling with people whose only link to each other was they had all met me at least once, and they showed up when I invited them out.
At 3:30 a.m. everyone dispersed from the host's house, and I found myself walking home on what is usually the most crowded square in the city. But, at this early in the morning it was deserted. There are few green things in Cairo, but this block has an amazing climbing tree. Whenever I travel outside the city, I am always surprised by how amazingly fertile the Nile is. Over time, you forget what vegetation looks like, just like you forget that there are constellations somewhere past the light pollution.
But at 3:30 a.m. in a city of 22 million people, there was nothing. It was just us, three police officers and this tree. My friend stops and laments, and just stares longingly at the tree. Eventually we start walking again and the police officers flag us down. We don't speak Arabic, they have guns. It always makes me a little uncomfortable. Eventually through some gesturing on their part of binoculars and some climbing pantomime from us, it's been worked out- we can climb the tree, if they can watch.
Within minutes I am in the branches of one of the few trees in my neighborhood, and it felt good.
There I was, 50 yards from the Egyptian museum on a sidewalk usually packed with more than a hundred people, gripping bark and breaking twigs as I scramble to get just a little higher, and all I could think was "only in Cairo."
At 3:30 a.m. everyone dispersed from the host's house, and I found myself walking home on what is usually the most crowded square in the city. But, at this early in the morning it was deserted. There are few green things in Cairo, but this block has an amazing climbing tree. Whenever I travel outside the city, I am always surprised by how amazingly fertile the Nile is. Over time, you forget what vegetation looks like, just like you forget that there are constellations somewhere past the light pollution.
But at 3:30 a.m. in a city of 22 million people, there was nothing. It was just us, three police officers and this tree. My friend stops and laments, and just stares longingly at the tree. Eventually we start walking again and the police officers flag us down. We don't speak Arabic, they have guns. It always makes me a little uncomfortable. Eventually through some gesturing on their part of binoculars and some climbing pantomime from us, it's been worked out- we can climb the tree, if they can watch.
Within minutes I am in the branches of one of the few trees in my neighborhood, and it felt good.
There I was, 50 yards from the Egyptian museum on a sidewalk usually packed with more than a hundred people, gripping bark and breaking twigs as I scramble to get just a little higher, and all I could think was "only in Cairo."
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