I Saw Cairo

Four Sensations

The choke of humidity and car exhaust and dust, the air acrid like scorched peanuts, amid the crush of freelance baggage hustlers and greedy cab drivers at Cairo airport in the middle of the night.

The bitter and comforting taste of Nescafé over a bleary brain.

The glaze on my eyeballs from the glow of the laptop screen.

A thin layer of sweat or grease most of the time.

The Gall

Strangers volunteering to order me around while I’m parallel-unparking. Turn your wheels that way. Come this way. A stranger! With serene authority. I can’t make my peace with it.

Anomalies that Fade

Black-and-white taxis with hard white luggage racks on top.

Women with only their faces showing because their hair is hidden from view by their headscarves.

Public display of drying laundry.

Boabs washing the tenants’ cars in the morning and hosing the streets to suppress the dust.

The boabs' families, dressed more peasant than the tenants of the neighborhood, hanging out on crippled chairs on the concrete apron in front of the apartment buildings.

Soldiers sitting in a daze on street corners providing security below the salmon-colored tapered high-rise apartment buildings in comfortable neighborhoods.

Buildings wearing exoskeletons of wooden scaffolding, held together with tied strips of cloth.

Poleless phone lines strung from building to building like tin-can phones.

No sidewalks, so everybody walks in the street.

White-top, blue-bottom vans blasting black exhaust.

Young palm trees in blue plastic barrels.

Bicycles with thick baskets welded to them to hold six boxes of water or towers of eggs in cartons or peasant flatbread.

Sad ladies, tot-à-teat, seated on the subway stairs extending kleenex packets for 50 piasters.  Stoic men hustling kleenex boxes (or steering wheel grip-covers, or neon-colored dust brushes) at traffic stops.

On the sidestreets Stray cats under every other parked car; cars wearing cloth covers against the dust at night.

Spectacles that Endure

Carts pulled by donkeys carrying heaps of junk. Taxis careening around them at high speed.

Scruffy guys riding down the street on the back of pickups, beating propane tanks with a metal rod – the metallic pinging sound lets people know they can run up and buy a propane tank if they need one.

The garbage truck: An open-top truck with wood-fence sides, like the kind you'd see carrying bales of hay. By the end of the run, it's piled so stupefyingly high with individual garbage bags and nothing to hold them down – except the worker riding on top of the whole pile, usually a kid, stomping down bags and shouting out prompts to the driver.

Weird trash in the street, like peapods, plastic bags full of decomposed unidentifiable foodstuff, a third of a pair of sunglasses, a discarded sheep’s leg.  Most of it eventually gets picked up by street sweepers (not machines but individuals wheeling their trashcans slowly down a long street over the course of a long work day. Some of it stays there forever.

Corner fruit stands.

Streets without streetlights, streetlights without electricity, electricity that surges and splutters sparks from the lightpole inches from a tree, every night for four hot months.

Thick white fluorescent tubes that illuminate concrete buildings at night.

The moon shining through a hut on top of one of the high-rises.

Integration of Mosque and State

In every government-funded project: space for a mosque.

Four marble-and-glass private prayer booths at the airport.

The office is closed for prayers.

Men should not enter this room for the moment because women are praying inside.

The TV stations show a tape of Muslim holy sites with audio of a Muslim religious singer.

Police officers step onto the grass and kneel on prayer rugs as cars roll by.