Egypt part 1. Cairo, Anyone?

Cairo, Anyone?

This experience has a dissonant thread running through it. And it begins before the beginning. It was one of those times when you open the drawer while packing the night before and the passport is not where it's supposed to be.

Here's the Shortened long story:

waiting for a passport, Italian style

   
Our plan of a leisurely train ride to Bologna for lunch before going on to the Milan airport morphed into an early trip to the US Embassy in Florence. There we split while I waited for a temporary passport and Alex went on with her train ticket. We teamed up again in crowded Bologna to find the train schedules to Milan all scrambled by a fatal derailment. I had spent a lot of time planning and purchasing our connections at Trenitalia.it. Now all that effort did nothing but prove my naivete in trusting that these things actually work. Pioneering new routes through uncharted territory (including the frantic Milan underground) we met our plane before takeoff only to find that AirItaly had gone bankrupt, adding more evidence to a developing theory of mine. They courteously placed us on some arabian aircraft and off to Cairo we flew. 

      All cities look dazzling approaching in the night air. I tried hard to identify stuff from my memory of the map, but it’s really only ever a bunch of lights. I think we arrived at quarter to 5 in the morning. Terrified, actually. Everything was in Arabic which I remembered must be read from right to left. But that didn’t help. We knew to look for the government guy selling visas and I had to ask him a couple of times before I believed him. Cash only. US Dollars. A hundred of them. Then passport control with my paper passport. Then out on the dark street crammed with hustlers in taxis. A particularly slick con artist had his own little podium where he was pimping cabs in elegant english. OK, OK. Off we go in a battered car across the parking lot where he had to stop to wash his hands and bow to mecca for a few minutes. Half an hour later we’re downtown in a pretty grotty slum just off a grand waterfront roundabout. He’s got the window down asking directions until we work around to the front of a corrugated steel and wrought iron gate where we got dumped on a broken sidewalk. 6AM. Dark. Not blending.
     The dark iron gate creaked open and a sort of Arabian Gandalf character beckoned us in. Then into an intimate phone booth of an elevator. Then some fiddling in the dark with a key and into a bright white room smelling of paint and fresh floor varnish. Not bad for the price. Everything looked new, including the cardboard furniture and plush velour bedspreads. I took off my fetid hiking boots, admiring the shiny varnish pine flooring, and checked the facilities. Bidet, good. Overhead hot water tank had to be switched on. The loo had a mysterious chrome nozzle thing down there and I tried the

view out back

 knob on the side sending an arc of water across to the floor in front of the sink. Got it. No loo paper. Mirror spanking clean, sink OK; but Damn! I stepped my socks into the puddle of water. Dabbing the bottom of my wet sock with the towel I left a distinct black stain. The bottom of my feet were black. I wiped a finger across the tile. Black. Across the varnished pine. Black. Across the carboard furniture. Black. Kitchen counter? Black. And so on around the apartment, out the door, down the lift, onto the street and throughout Cairo, actually. Everywhere. The place is hopelessly filmed in a diesel soot mixed with desert dust. Where it's been cleaned lately, it's hard to spot; but it's there. Where it hasn't been cleaned, which is everywhere outside, it covers everything in a thick, brown cake giving the city a monochrome miserableness. The Cat in the Hat's relentless spot. I had a look out the window just to make sure. And more than just dust, there's a lot of other stuff accumulating as well.
  It was early morning and an emergency check for

Cairo in the morning

complimentary coffee came up blank. Knives, forks, microwave, fridge all brand new. Fridge didn't work because the wall socket had no current, but that got fixed. But no coffee. Into our luggage and soon we had a cup of tea going. It's the first step to feeling at home. I forced through the paint-sealed balcony door for a bit of fresh air. Dawn in Cairo. Empty street. I could spy onto the roof of a next door building and there was a woman leaning over the parapet seeing what I was seeing. Me for the first time, her probably not at all. I'm sure she must have missed the jumble of junk littering the roof gutter, and the abandoned car, and the confusion of satellite dishes, and the spaghetti of wires. But she didn't miss the quiet. I did, because I had no idea what what coming. Our single pane balcony doors soon resonated with the traffic below once it started up for the day. And on into the following night and every night thereafter.      

      Isolde arrived late that night, coming from London on her own. We arranged a cab for her from the smiling taxi pimp at the airport. He sent us reassuring phone photos of their rendezvous and I walked out onto the street to meet her. I waited a long time, worrying just like a parent is supposed to. I stood there in my white shirt trying look easy to spot because the building entrance certainly wasn't. It was approaching 2 in the morning, fewer and fewer cars going by. But I spotted her near the intersection, next to some headlights. I walked up, relieved, reached into my pocket and gave the driver a tip. We hugged. "Who's that guy?" She said. Who. "The guy in the car?" I had tipped some innocent stranger probably a day's wage. She had been dropped off previously without me noticing. Laughing, hugging, reunited.


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post script

I wrote this in my travel notes after leaving Cairo- 

Next time, I would skip Cairo. The museum is being moved to the pyramids and the government is moving East to a new city of several million people. Cairo is expected to double its population and perhaps it is best left to the Egyptians. So far, Luxor is far nicer! There is an airport here and a car rental would get one to Giza much more quickly than the train.