Egypt part 2. The Street

The street

I'll try to get this to
play, but it's just
a lot of car noise wih
 pedestrians having
 close encounters

    Cairo is home. Second time in Africa for me, but first time in North Africa. I'm a little surprised at the state of the place. After doing some reading, I chose to stay downtown to get a feel for the older architecture and to enable walking to popular spots like the Egyptian Museum. Isolde came prepared to explore the souks in the poorer Islamic quarter and, of course, the pyramids are really why we are staying in Cairo. 

bakery

    As we set out onto the street it's glaringly obvious we are foreign tourists. Shirt, hair, shoes, skin, language, knapsack, the bewildered look, it's so obvious. Surprisingly, we are often greeted with a cheery "welcome to Egypt," or "where are you from?" The early anxieties slowly ease as we get lost and then find our way again. Flash around, "where are we?" Oh. It's right there.

Walking around are a lot of women in full black peering through mail slots. And guys in floor-length dressing gowns. The street signs just aren't there, not even in Arabic. What my google map says doesn't show up in my actual reality and street view doesn't exist so there's no double-checking with an image. We find we have located ourselves in the middle of the DIY tech neighborhood. The shops are really tiny, cluttered; and the windows jammed with boxes of modems, digicams, motherboards, laptops, microphones, headphones, cabling, battery boosters, and earbuds. And that's just the stuff I can identify. Then the next shop, a meter and a half away, is crammed with the same stuff. Sometimes it spills out onto the street like a fruit stall and you have to step over stuff. The pedestrian course is never clear. Or carefully paved. A dirt section here, then a boulder of hardened concrete, a person cooking something, ten meters of shiny tile covered in diesel filth, broken mud bricks, an abandoned car. A couple of old guys smoking a hookah and looking at you. I reminds me of walking in the mountains. You can't look up because you'll fall down. It took us a while to figure out how to cross the street. Just find somebody you think you can keep up with and position yourself just downstream and try and stay in their traffic shadow.
    OK, Isolde. Off we go to the street market. As we weave our way east, things get even shabbier. Shabby Shiek. Now we enter kitchen appliance land. Roads blocked by rickety delivery vehicles wobbling under towers of boxed washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, microwaves, all that stuff. The sidewalks become canyons of the stuff, most of it stays in the box to avoid street contamination. And it's the same as the DIY electronics land, every shop is selling the identical thing. And they are tiny shops packed together in whatever corner of street level space available. But this isn't the souks, oh no. We open onto a sort of intersection with a freeway soaring over it. The crowds thicken. There's a mingle of traffic and pedestrian that approaches perfect solution. Equal parts. One dissolved into the other, moving in a sort of slow Brownian Motion. Then, down the sidewalk and the stalls begin and it is the most chaotic arrangement of useless stuff you've ever seen. I suppose it's a shopper's delight, but I'm entering one of Dante's levels. The main drag becomes a covered corridor so tight I have to step into somebody's tent to let a wide, black bedsheet go by with somebody wrapped inside. Looking at me. Then a guy yells and shoves a wide hand cart spilling bread rolls through. Overhead dangle pillows and fabrics and naked mannequins. It's impossible to tell the tent, the display, the product or the proprietor apart. It's all part of an intentional confusion, I'm convinced. Pause with curiosity and you're dead. They pounce. First of all it must be established that they have a close friend or relative who lives just down the road from you in Italy. Or California. Then you're let into a special secret about something. Then comes the invitation to have a little tea. No, No! It's free, no pressure. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Then the soft, silken hands slowly close around your common sense and stifle it and you find yourself looking at the Treasure of Indiana Jones uncovered for the first time and it's mesmerizing. Alex fell into such a trap and after half an hour snapped to the reality of her shopping bag full of exotic spices. Price: $400. US dollars, but disguised as egyptian pounds with too many zeros. It's an experience. Luckily we had Isolde there with her cheat sheet of Arabian numerals and a clear understanding of human nature.