pigeons and pyramids

10:18 20 August, The Oriental Express

Picking up where I left off, I really enjoyed the museum and I lingered there until it closed (near close, with hardly any other people, was probably the most enjoyable time to explore) and then headed back to the apartment. There I received a call from Benden on a loaned cell phone, and after writing down travel directions on the Cairo Metro, I was soon making my way toward his place of employment. The Cairo Metro is the one shining beacon of hope for Egyptian public infrastructure. It is, comparatively, clean and efficient, and costs only 1E£ for a ticket. As I was only going one stop, the trickiest part was finding the correct train and boarding it, and having accomplished both I was soon speeding under the streets of Cairo.

Brenden works for an agency that assists refugees with resettlement. Lately, this has been primarily geared towards getting displaced Iraqis from Cairo, where they have temporary asylum, to the United States. Iraqis who have assisted Coalition Forces in the Iraq War are entitled to an expedited resettlement process, but the forms are often complicated enough to undermine their resettlement. That's where Brenden's agency comes in, writing appeals, drafting statements, and generally doing what they can to help. Having met up with him in the small office based in the St. Andew's Church compound, we were joined by another of his coworkers and all three of us headed out. Our destination, which we reached after a short, though manic 5E£ cab ride, was a roofdeck bar/Thai restaurant. Restaurants and bars in close proximity to each other often collude to allow patrons to order a wider variety of food and drink at a fixed price. We were later joined, first by Mohamed - an Iraqi refugee currently living in Cairo who works/is getting assistance from Brenden's agency, and later by more friends and coworkers. The roofdeck offered a great view out over the Nile, and while the beer (Stella) was just as bad as before, the Thai food was quite good.

How to Red/Green a classy Egyptian sound system: cut a hole in a cassette player, put in a computer's CD drive, plug the speakers into the headphone jack, and dance the night away (if the Egyptian women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.)

Brenden suggested that we walk back to give me a feel for what Cairo is like at 1:30 "down by the river", and so the two of us made our way across the bridge in the direction of the apartment. Unlike New York, Paris, or any other huge city I've ever been to, Cairo is surprisingly safe even very late at night. In these wee hours of the morning, families with small children were walking along the banks of the Nile, or enjoying a picnic in the grass. Merchants were peddling wares, while groups of young men - who in other cities would been seen as gangs - laughed and joked while spraying each other with shaving cream. The normality of an afternoon in the city was here on display passed midnight, and the experience was very surreal.

The next morning, I had planned to accomplish some housecleaning efforts. I had laundry that I probably should have done a week ago, I wanted to pick up enough bottled water to get me through Cairo, and I needed to get a train ticket for the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. Instead, I accomplished almost nothing. This wasn't entirely from not trying. After Brenden and I finsihed a breakfast of fresh strawberry juice and koshery - basically spaghetti, macaroni, lentils, and more carbohydrates mixed together with a sauce - he gave me instructions on how to get to the laundrymat. I so fantastically misinterpreted these directions that I spent the better part of two and a half hours wandering around Cairo (the laundrymat, it turns out, was right across the street). Having this hauled my dirty laundry all over town in my backpack (a quick word about backpacks: Egyptians don't wear them, so with the exception of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, there's few things that make you look more like a tourist) I abandoned my efforts and returned to the apartment. I made an effort to figure out train times and tables, as well as research Egypt in general, but I never quite made it to the train station. I was successful on the bottled water front, procuring not only enough water to last me through Cairo, but also "milk", bananas, and bread.

When Brenden came back from work, we headed into town to for dinner, and one of the more unforgettable experiences of my trip. From the beginning of my trip, I have been doing my best to sample the eccentricities of the local cuisine in the places I visit. In Iceland it was rotten shark, in Egypt it was pigeon. Cairo is the first major city I've ever been to where there aren't any pigeons, and it would seem that this is the case because the Egyptians eat them. If your stomach is already starting to turn, then I seriously suggest that you skip the rest of this paragraph, and the next paragraph, and meet up with me in my discussion of Islamic Cairo. For those brave enough to continue reading, allow me to stake the pigeon eating experience up a notch. Brenden and I sat down, and promptly had two pigeons placed in between us. It was easy to tell they were pigeons because aside from the feet, the beak, the eyes, and the feathers, everything was still intact sitting there boiled, grilled, and stuffed in front of me. The fact that the pigeons have been boiled is an important fact to keep in mind as I retell Brenden's explanation for eating pigeon. "There are two ways" he said, with a semi-fiendish glint in his eye, "of eating pigeon. There's the American way, which is to treat it much like a Cornish Game Hen, but this is bespoiled by the fact that there is very little meat on the pigeon. Then," he continued picking up his pigeon, "there's the Egyptian way, which is just to eat the pigeon whole." My expression of incredulity dropped to one of mild disgust.

Somehow I don't see KFP (Kentucky Fried Pigeon) taking off in the States.

Suggesting that he may just be kidding me, Brenden proceeded to prove both his point, and his mastery of Egyptian dining by biting the head off the pigeon, boiled skull and all, and suggesting that it tastes a lot like liver. Disgusted, but determined to have the local experience, and with Brenden video taping the experience, I took a deep breath and bit the head off the pigeon. The taste was not that bad, but the psychological difficulties involved in the proper mastication of pigeon head made it a culinary experience I cannot see myself repeating. I ate the rest of the pigeon in the American style, and we were soon off to Islamic Cairo.

Having made it to Islamic Cairo, for those of you just rejoining me, Brenden suggested a good place in the Bazaar to try sheshaw and tea, and we languished there taking in the sights. Soon we were making our way through the ancient and colorfully illuminated mosques that dotted this part of the city. "Shookran", literally meaning "thank you" but colloquially meaning "no thanks", and "la la la", a light way of saying "no", where phrases that acted as my sword and shield against the invasive approach of shopkeepers and touts. We tried some cane juice - simply sugar cane, ground and squeezed - which pretty much tastes like sugar water with a hint of grass, before catching a cab back to the apartment. An early bedtime was a welcome treat, and I was soon sound asleep.

The mosques of Islamic Cairo.

Until 3:30. At about that time I experienced the first of the hellish cramps that would become the precursor to an inevitable trip to the bathroom. Since then I've been inflicted with what I'm referring to, in tribute to Mexico's famous Montezuma's Revenge, "Tutankhamen's Revenge". Trying to not allow the minor inconvenience of being unable to eat keep me from accomplishing the housekeeping activities I had attempted yesterday, I headed out around noon. I dropped my laundry off at the laundry mat, surprised by the 80E£ cost of what amounted to a single load. I then allowed myself to be ripped off by a cab driver on my way to the train station, went through the hassle of buying a ticket, and fought traffic back to the apartment. I had been looking for post cards for some time, and when a shopkeeper claimed to have them, I decided to follow him into his store. The shopkeeper, who introduced himself as "Moses", did in fact have postcards, from (I'm just guessing here) the early 1980's. Some employed a combination of bad photography and bright colors while others just opted to slap some WordArt over a picture of the pyramids. But I was desperate. So I selected the 10 that I found least offensive to the senses, and they were quickly wrapped up for me. That's when the tea came out. Tea is a common offering of shopkeepers hoping to keep tourists lingering in their stores, as refusing it is culturally impolite. Moses proved himself a master shopkeeper, sitting me down and chatting me up about my family while I drank the tea. At this point I was feeling rather ill and desperate to finish the tea and leave. With my defenses down, Moses struck, and under the auspices of fatherly concern for my skin (which was soon to be exposed to the Aswan heat) he poured me a bottle of oil for which he then proceeded to charge me 120E£. It's difficult to explain how he managed to pass this off on me, but I left the shop knowing that I had been properly fleeced.

After picking up my immaculately folded laundry, I spent the rest of the day doing my best not to move. Reading and playing computer solitaire, I managed to kill the daylight hours before falling asleep early.

Looking out on the Nile during the day of pain.

The next day I wasn't feeling much better, but because it was my last in Cairo I was determined to see the one thing I had not yet been to: the Pyramids. In the morning, I said my goodbyes to Brenden, who wouldn't be back from work before I left for the train station. After thanking him for all his hospitality, I hailed a cab and headed for Giza.

There are two things that visitors to the Pyramids need to know. The first is that the site has been completely corrupted by touts for hundreds of years. There are even Roman accounts of visiting the Pyramids and being hassled to no end by the locals. Two-thousand years later, not much has changed; camel drivers follow you around shouting out prices for a ride regardless of expressed interest, and trinket sellers literally throw their products on you then demand payment. My visit was the only occasion I have found myself using the aggressive form of "no": "La'Ah!", and I witnessed many Western tourists loosing their tempers admits the onslaught of touts bearing down from all sides.

The second thing that visitors to the Pyramids need to know is that they absolutely take your breath away. If you can remove yourself from the touts long enough to gaze up a the grandeur of ancient Egypt on a massive scale, you can't help but be overwhelmed. The towering colossi of the three Pyramids, the enigmatic figure of the Sphinx, and the ruins surrounding the site are images so familiar to Western eyes through pictures and film. Yet to stand there in the shadow of 40 centuries of history, looking up at these massive blocks stacked one on top of each other, and marvel that these man-made mountains have given a skyline to the desert since the beginning of premodern time... that makes it all worth while.

Feeling rather Indian Jones-esque.

Looking down into a rather deep pit.

At the main gate, I defacto bribed one of the men at the ticket counter to sell me an early ticket to enter the Great Pyramid. These tickets usually only go on sale at 1:30, but since I got mine early I was basically the first person to begin the tricky ascent into the heart of the pyramid - a preeminence that can be appreciated when one considers their experience I'm about to describe with the addition of the long line of tourists that would later form. After walking down a long, dimly-lit hallway cut horizontally into the pyramid, I encountered a 1x1 meter shaft ascending at a 35 degree angle for as far as I could see. The shaft had been reinforced with wooden braces that served as steps, facilitating a hunched climb upwards. The shaft opened up to a large diagonally ascending room - "the King's Hall" - built 10 meters tall by stacking massive blocks of granite in such a way that the width of the hall narrowed as it approached the ceiling. Climbing up, I was amazed at the grout-free masonry, exact to the millimeter, that held the stones together. Finally at the top, I hunched down into the royal burial chamber, now completely stripped of its decoration. The only thing disrupting the powerfully simple pattern of smooth black granite is a damaged sarcophagus, originally housing the remains of the Pharaoh. Though unadorned, the chamber is still incredible for its construction and history, and the overall experience of climbing into the Great Pyramid was unforgettable.

The Sphinx, wicked cool.

It doesn't get much more Egyptian than that.

Soon after leaving the pyramid, I accidentally spent around half an hour wandering around a restricted archaeological site (I only saw the signs when I was leaving the area, though I suppose the exposed 15 meter-deep pits should have clued me on to fact that this wasn't a touristy area).

Me in the semi-restricted area... oops.

I left the site and the Pyramids, and made my way down into Giza, where I stopped at a Mobil On-the-Go station. This may seem weird/pathetic, but this little piece of America, with its air conditioning, friendly staff, and (gasp!) items with actual price labels was just what I needed. Leaving I hailed a cab back to the apartment, unhappily reentering the world of modern Egypt with a 40E£ cab ride. I packed up my things, and got in touch with my parents before hailing yet another cab - whose skills and patience made him worth the 10E£ extra I paid above the normal 20E£ rate - to the train station. There I met a British family, traveling through Egypt on their summer holiday. When our train finally arrived, I joined mom, dad, and their three daughters in the club car for light refreshments before heading off to bed. Tomorrow, I'll be sure to update with my experiences thus far in southern Egypt, but for right now I need a good night's sleep for second, and last, night in Aswan.