Our little adventure.

Cairo Cityscape.

Let me preface this by stating that I’ve now been in Cairo for 4 days. Boy does time fly when you’re trudging through dust and dying of heatstroke.

But I digress, its actually great here. Allow me to share with you some more insights.

First, by and far what we do most of our day is walk around and get stared at by just about everyone. We’re white, and we are carrying backpacks (because our hotel is sketch, and the safebox isn’t big enough for our stuff, so we hike it everywhere) and my roommate Andrew is running around in shorts (EVERYONE in Egypt wears pants, seriously). So its not hard to figure us out. Recently, we’ve created a nice little posse. Alison found herself a nice roommate in Marziya, a funny Kenyan who’s been living in Colorado for a few months. They found each other on facebook, and apparently it was roomy love at first site.

-- Side note --

Andrew just mentioned that I shouldn’t refer to him as “a dick of a shmuck” in the blog, so please take note that no where in this blog will I refer to Andrew as “a dick of a shmuck who runs around all day in shorts”.

-- End Side Note --

Back to Marziya. So they will be living together (much to our disappointment, we wanted them to live with us), probably in an apartment in Zamalik. But, since then we’ve been hanging around a lot together, and sometimes with their mutual friend George, who speaks perfect English and Arabic (he’s like a godsend). He happens of course to know lots of cool places all around cairo too. We make an interesting group because andrew and I stick out. Alison could probably pass as Middle Eastern Somewhere, but obviously dresses western, and Marziya wears hijab, and totally passes as Egyptian, but is the most western girl ever (she knows Swahili, but no Arabic, or very little). So we make for an odd group of kids. Marziya gets the most stares because she’s a woman, so thats one stare, but then she’s with us stupid Westeners (that gets a second glance back), and then they’ll hear her speaking English, and that gets her a third crazy look.

One of the nice things about Cairo is that even though everyone knows you’re a westerner, no know knows where you’re from! In Europe, anyone can pick out an American from a mile away. But people are always asking us -- “Where are you from? France? Spain? --- Oh, Amerika! Texas? Caleeforrnia?” So the anonymity of not having to deal with anti American harshness is somewhat comforting in a weird sort of way.

Obviously the big thing is Ramadan, I mean, it rocks the Middle Eastern World. Life changes 180 degrees the moment the first day of Ramadan starts. For example, we aren’t muslim, but we are still fasting, not so much by choice, but mostly because we don’t want to stand out, and there is no where to get food. I mean, restaurants don’t open until after sundown during this month. So Business hours are weird. Basically shops are open from 8 PM to god knows how early in the morning, and then at 8 AM everyone goes back to work! The hotel guy must be super tired. He sleeps when he can on a couch in the lounge, and boy, do they need it. Fasting (i find) is twice as hard in Cairo because the place is so dusty. In Wisconsin when you don’t drink anything for a day, your throat is a little dry, but in Cairo you’re basically eating a pound or two of dirt every day just by breathing, so by not drinking water, its gotta be crazy. We’ve been drinking about 3 lbs of water a day, and we figure we sweat out 2 or 3 of those pounds, and piss out the rest.

I’ve discovered why many places smell bad. Its not that there is more piss… Its just that everyone sweats out 80% of the water everyday because its so hot, so when you do piss its super concentrated. If I had to guess, I’d say the amount of liquids I’m peeing has decreased 70%-80%. You just sweat it all out.

So at the end of the day, you have this pleasant oder of dirt, grime, sweat, and cigarette smoke everywhere. I mean, we are just dirty and messy. If you don’t like to be dirty and sweaty all the time, Cairo is not the place for you. Just stay home. I don’t mind it. Its not like the city smells bad, I don’t want to say that because its not true, its just that when you sweat that much, it changes the way your body chemistry works. Try carrying around 20 lbs backpacks through 100 degree heat, with 70% humidity, for maybe 5-6 hours a day and try not to sweat a lot.

We walk a lot. I’m guessing we may have hiked 4-5 miles today alone. Of course apartment hunting is never easy, but there isn’t much to do in the city except for walk a lot, and then sit, and then eat when the sun goes down.

Back to my day. We started early. I actually got up in time for breakfast, which they said was free, but I’m betting they’ll charge our room anyways. Then we took the subway up to City Stars, which is like a huge military compound that is actually a mall, filled with rich people. I have some nice pictures of the Holiday Inn with re-enforced Glass so when the truck explodes in the lobby, the glass won’t become deadly glass arrows. Awesome.

They don’t mess around with safety here. Lots of machine guns… lots of machine guns everywhere. Andrew did make a good point though. There has been more terrorist attacks in the UK in the last few years that in Egypt. Touche.

This mall is like the second biggest mall in the Arab world (and they love their malls). The structure is this towering mammoth endless brick building with endless gucci stores. Weird.

So our plan was to go to AUC, and get our student papers, but apparently during ramadan the bus only runs until 11 AM so we have to get up early tomorrow to catch it (or something like that).

So we went to Maadi instead -- apartment shopping. I believe I’ll elaborate on Maadi in a different blog. Its a weird place man… It just doesn’t belong. If Maadi is Manhattan, Dokki is Brooklyn. Yo.

We then went downtown, wasted some time, looked at some pretty sad looking apartments for the ladies, and grabbed a ticket back home. So… More to come folks, more to come...