Along the sidewalk packed with all sorts of traders, pedestrians and parked cars, a motorcyclist goes speeding by. How is this possible when even pedestrians can barely make their way through the crowds? The motorcyclist doesn’t take his hand off the horn. Still, everyone is so accustomed to this sound that the motorcycle dude has to apply his finest driving skills.
And then right behind him a guy on a bicycle comes rolling by with a large wooden construction filled with freshly baked bread on his head. How can he keep hold of all that while pedaling at the same time?! And how can he find his way among the dozens of people walking, standing, sitting? The guy asks people to step aside.
“Ps-s-s, ps-s-s, ps-s-s,” he hisses softly. And people, oddly enough, make way for him.
Road theme, continued
Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are rare. How do you cross these streets, clogged twenty-four hours a day? You just have to throw yourself into the stream; at least the current’s not too fast. You won’t get knocked over although cars don’t really stop either, they’ll just continue to move on slowly waiting for you to make your way through and jump back out onto the sidewalk.
And even when there are traffic lights… In Russia I never walk on red and here I wait just as patiently for the green. When the little green man appears I walk with him even though the cars continue driving across the black-and-white pedestrian walkways. Fortunately, I’ve learned to get by even without the stoplights.
Metro
Because of constantly rising prices in the Moscow metro I’m anxious to find out about the price of metro tickets in Cairo. I breathe a sigh of relief and surprise when I see that it isn’t much: one pound (this means five rubles).
On the platform, here and there you can see placards with the image of a woman: there are special train-cars for women only. There are no men in these cars, well, if you don’t count the occasional brazen salesmen offering all sorts of trinkets for which women worldwide seem to have a weakness.
I rode in these cars several times. It seemed like the women would burst out laughing any moment.
Women can ride in the other cars too, especially if accompanied by a husband or male relative. I also noticed a couple of single women. Apparently they’re not too fond of the chicken-coop either.
The AFT House
In Cairo I didn’t stay in a hotel. In this unusual city I had a chance to stay as a local rather than a guest.
My friend Anton Krotov, a true traveler, writer and founder of the Society of Free Travelers, thought up a new way of exploring the world. Instead of just travelling in the sense of getting there and going through, you rent a house or an apartment in an interesting country for three or four months. You live in this interesting place and make short trips to the environs.
So in late December 2008, Anton rented an apartment in downtown Cairo and filled it with a whole crew of interesting people and travelers, myself included. The place was on the sixth floor of an ordinary building with Egyptians living in it, a hardware store on the ground floor and a mosque right around the corner. The call of the muezzin and the Friday sermons resounded through our apartment. It was just a pity we couldn’t understand a word.
Culture
On the first day Anton led me out onto the balcony of our apartment. The very center of the city — Tahrir Square (after the main street) — was indeed only steps away. The roofs of the tall buildings surrounding us were piled with trash.
“There you go, take a nice long look,” laughed Anton. “Only the tallest buildings are clean. All the other ones get dumped on from the windows of the surrounding buildings.”
Coming out of the building I often had to jump over piles of trash left by people taking out their trash to the dump. You either have to jump over it or walk around it.
Subway tickets are cheap but not always so easy to get.
One man pays while the next one is holding his money ready, and I’m third in line. When it’s my turn to buy a ticket, an Egyptian man nonchalantly shoves his money to the cashier right under my nose. Discouraged, I look back at him while another guy does the exact same thing. It’s just my perception of the situation that I was next in line: they don’t have this concept. Or at least I never picked up on any signs of its existence.
Cairo Museum
I always used to think that my favorite museum was the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Now I’m not so sure anymore.
In front of the famous Museum of Egyptian History there is a papyrus plant growing in a small shallow pool, its leaves spread out like the fingers of a hand. It’s one of the few papyrus plants left in Egypt. In his book Ra, Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian traveler and ethnographer, writes about how difficult it was to find Egyptian papyrus to build a papyrus boat.
“Miss! Ma’am! Mister!” Swarthy Arab sellers surround you as you exit the museum.
“Papyrus! Papyrus! Original papyrus!” They are hawking large “papyrus” posters with images of the pharaohs, pyramids, and symbolic maps of Egypt.
“Ten pound!” They fix you with an anxious gaze while you patiently make your way forward.
My friends and I wonder what they actually make these “original papyrus” from — probably just dried palm leaves.
I have the good luck of getting a guided tour of the museum. Otherwise I’d have a hard time getting oriented among the five thousand pieces on exhibit.
An hour, two, three, four… and my eyes are still wide-open, my lungs still giving out sighs of astonishment.
The Cairo Museum amazes with the wealth of its historical treasures, despite the fact that it is also the most burgled museum in the world.
I was there at the very end of my journey and nevertheless decided that I would have come to Egypt just to visit this museum.
Food
An apt observation: in cheap countries you spend a lot more money than in expensive ones. When everything is expensive you don’t buy anything. But when everything’s cheap you don’t hold back and buy everything on sale.
I’ve never tried fresh-squeezed orange juice in my life. Until now. Two pounds — ten rubles in Russia, or around 30 cents — and the shop-keeper picks one orange ball out of the pile, a second, a third, slices them in half and into the maw of his squeezer. A minute later, the juice comes pouring out in a cheerful, fidgety stream into the thick transparent glass.
And the fruit cocktails they make there!
I’ve already made short work of my cocktail but I still remain standing by the kiosk to watch the nimble hands of the cocktail-master at work. A white (probably milk-based) beverage pours into the bottom of the glass, then yellow (probably mango juice), then strawberry. The whole thing is crowned with a headdress of banana, apple and strawberry slices carefully arranged and lined up against the sides of the glass. But why does the vendor have a small plastic bag? Oh! He pours all of this beauty inside. It turns out this particular cocktail has been ordered to go by a woman wearing a dark-red burqa. So the decoration process was just to give her aesthetic pleasure?
Kosheri! A mysterious word, right? Amazingly, the ordinary hotel tourists who come to Egypt don’t know this word. So why am I bringing it up? The kosheri spot is another place I love to observe the vendor’s dexterous work, unable to keep from drooling.
I get my portion to go (this is cheaper, by the way): so the vendor produces a plastic box, puts in a pile of rice, different kinds of pasta, peas, deep-fried onion and all of it bathed in a thin tomato sauce, plus two other sauces in small plastic bags. I am holding a warm box giving off a tempting tasty aroma.