SANDStorm

As we approach the end of the month of September, and enter the lunar month of Ramadan, a few weather statistics concerning the Egyptian city of Cairo (according to weather.com):

Average high temperature over the past month: 90 degrees F
Highest temperature: 106 degrees F
Lowest temperature: 70 degrees F
Total precipitation: 0 inches (and two days of high, sparse clouds)

Compared to Washington D.C.:
Average high over last month: 81
Highest temperature: 85
Lowest temperature: 50
Total precipitation: 4.38 inches (with storms on the way!)

and Fairbanks, Alaska:
Average high over last month: 55
Highest temperature: 69
Lowest temperature: 29
Total precipitation: 0.16 inches

Here is an old post that was erased, and that we found in a dark corner of the internet:

While it may be true that we have not yet ridden donkeys past the pyramids or visited the Egyptian Antiquities Museum to see King Tut’s treasures, we have not just been sitting in our apartment twiddling our thumbs and wondering what to do. (Although we do make sure to get back home for “Inside Edition”. News of Mel Gibson’s drunken shenanigans is hard to come by on the streets here).

Cairo is a splendid city. Sure, it is polluted, oppresively hot (when will it get a little cooler?!? – Oh yeah, it’s Africa), full of drivers who have one hand on the horn at all times, and ridiculously dangerous to cross the street, it’s also amazingly full of fantastic opportunities for relaxing each night. We’ve spent the past week taking in the local nightlife, and everything we’ve done has turned out better than we’d expected.

Here’s just a quick run-down of what we’ve been up to in the past week:

1. Tonight we went to the Contemporary Image Collective to watch a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” under the stars (well, the stars are up there, but invisible to us due to the thick cloud of ubiquitous pollution). The screen was set up on the rooftop and about twenty of us sat on wooden chairs in a semicircle to watch the surprisingly humourous film about death. The roof was surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings, shielding us from the traffic noises below, but allowing a cool breeze in from the fourth side. Afterwards, we walked through the neon-soaked streets of downtown to the Odeon Palace Hotel and had coffee and ice cream on their rooftop while playing cribbage for three hours.

2. On Monday night we attended an art opening at The Townhouse Gallery (Caution: The Townhouse Gallery’s website is immensly frustrating). Artists on display included Qini Feng and his large calligraphic landscapes and Jason Khan’s sound installations.

3. On Sunday, I sat at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Nile with D and Ang, sipping fresh lemon juice for hours. We vowed to each write a short story by next Saturday which begins with the sentence, “Knowledge is nothing by itself.” I have started my story, however, at this time it hasn’t gone much further than the first sentence. Your help in conquering my writer’s block is probably against the rules of our game, but would be much appreciated.

4. On Saturday, we charted a ride on the Nile in a felucca. The two hours lounging in the boat, eating watermelon and egg salad sandwiches while watching the sun set and the neon lights fill the city went by remarkably quickly.

5. Last Friday, we sat in the grass all afternoon and evening at a music festival which highlighted the contemporary Egyptian alternative music scene in suburban Nasr City. Sounded rather similar to smooth jazz to me, but it seemed to appeal to the twenty-something audience. I chose to enjoy the cool evening and fresh air of the suburbs with my shoes kicked off.

6. Last Thursday, I went to Harry’s Pub at the Cairo Marriott for karaoke night and chose to serenade the crowd with a little “Bad Moon Rising.” My good friend Ang and I were also invited to the Gezira Club, a once-upon-a-time influential British social club, with an older gentleman who had had a little bit too much to drink and didn’t seem to care that I was married or that Ang was 25 years younger than him.

People have been telling me about Ramadan in Egypt for the past month and I’ve been waiting patiently but with great anticipation for the clerics to see the sliver of moon and declare the start of Ramadan. Well, it happened last weekend and Ramadan started in Egypt on Sunday.

Since I don’t know much about the traditions of Ramadan, I’ve been taking cues from people on the street and what has been told to me by fellow classmates and teachers. One such tradition is to care for those less fortunate than you. Many people give money to the mosque to pay for the dinners they provide to the public each night during the month of Ramadan. We were also told that it is polite to give money or food to those who work for you, such as your cleaning lady, your gardener, your driver, and your doorman. We only have a doorman, so we gave him and his family a bag of food bought at the local grocery store and pre-assembled especially for Ramadan. I also bought one for myself to see what was included:

The Ramadan bag contained tomato paste, pasta, rice, Lipton tea, cooking oil, some kind of oil in a jar (ghee?), sugar, and apricot paste (like a fruit roll-up but slightly less sickenly sweet). Click to read an article about Ramadan bags from the Daily Star Egypt.

The second night of Ramadan I decided to take advantage of the quiet streets during dusk and explore the outer reaches of my neighborhood. After the sun sets, the daily fast is broken with iftar, literally meaning “breakfast” in Arabic. At this time, the 94% of the population in Cairo is at home or at the mosque eating and replenishing their electrolytes.

This seems to even include bus drivers and taxi drivers. The few cars which passed me on the road where passenger cars stopping at the local bakery for sweets or hurrying on their way home. The streets were so empty that I walked across a major six-lane road, normally a reinactment of the game “Frogger,” in one smooth move without any hesitation at the dotted white lines, without sheer panic racing through me, and without doing the “I’m a total pro, this is no problem and doesn’t scare me in the least” walk-skip-run move while a truck barrelled down on me, as is usually the case.

Empty streets of Mohandiseen. Green neon lights to the left light up a mosque.

On my walk I saw groups of workers eating communal meals on the floors of office building lobbies or in the alleyways. I saw two gas station attendents standing in the road with trays in their hands, flagging down the lone taxis to give them dates. I saw hundreds of people sitting on the lawn in front of a mosque in Mohandiseen, eating the meal provided by the mosque. On side streets, I saw no one walking, no one driving, no one. The only life around me were the few cats rummaging through the garbage on the sides of the streets.

Lanterns have been set up in front of stores, in apartment building lobbies, and strung across streets.

This is the lantern which has been strung up between two buildings on our street.

On the first night of Ramadan we bought a tray full of sweet honey pasteries and shared them with a friend. Behind D and said friend, hanging from the ceiling is a brass lantern which I bought for Ramadan.

Here’s D demonstrating the elevator which, as you can see, opens up into our living room.

View from our living room window – overlooks Agouza and the 6th of October flyover.

Enjoying shisha at an outdoor coffeeshop in Zamalek along the Nile. That’s right, we are relaxed, watching the Nile, drinking fresh juice, and having a smoke. Life doesn’t get much easier.

Bus

Last week, we hailed a taxi and wizzed down to the Four Seasons hotel to hire a felucca ride, just in time to watch the sun go down and the neon light up the night. We lounged on the small wooden boat’s cushioned benches, watching the shoreline, and munching on egg salad, watermelon, and chocolate muffins. Sitting on the Nile, feeling the cool breeze, the chaos of the streets seemed so far away and any stress I feel from living so close to millions of people was washed away.

However next time, I’m definitely going to try and hire one of those other feluccas that are decked out with blinking Christmas lights and pump techno beats out over the water as they cruised along the Nile. Oh yay, paaaaaar-tay!

View of the shore from a felucca.

The Daily Star Egypt has proclaimed the “Nasrallah” date the most expensive date sold this year for Ramadan (yes, I’m talking about “date,” as in fruit from a date tree). Checking in at $4.20 a kilogram, the Nasrallah date has earned impressive popularity, although not as high as the Jacques Chirac or Yasser Arafat dates of prior years.

Prior to 2001, dates were named after movie stars, but after 9/11 vendors began naming types of dates with political nicknames, creating a popularity contest which doesn’t seem like much of a contest when the “Nasrallah” date is pitted against the “Olmert.”

So, what are the other popular dates this year? The presidents of Iran and Venezuela. Notice a theme here?

Check out the article here:
http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=3071

We logged onto our blog today in order to publish a saved draft posting about Ramadan, however we got a big surprise when all the postings from the past month and a half were missing, apparently the result of some server errors. Seems as though time really can be turned back!

Anyway, after our short grieving period (very, very unhappy), we are now in the process of rebuilding our past postings (lesson learned on our part to always save a text file version of each posting. doh!) by finding the archived pages online. It seems the comments you’ve all contributed cannot be recreated though, which is what really makes the blog fun for us to keep up.

We assure you that once we’ve got all our past postings reposted (and saved on our computer) we’ll get back to posting regularly about our crazy antics in Cairo. Ramadan is right around the corner, so we’ll have lots of keen observations to share with you, our reader.

WAMA saying goodbye and goodnight after an hour or so of pop odes to love.

Last Friday night I found myself clapping in sync with hundreds of upper middle class Egyptian twenty-somethings under a bridge along the Nile.

We were all at the Sawy Cultural Center to see WAMA, a four-person boy band from Egypt, sing their latest pop hits. The popularity of this band, as described to me by a friend who has lived in Cairo for a number of years, seemed to necessitate a stadium to accomodate all the fans. However the tickets were 25 L.E. a piece – a mere $5 to me – but nearly three to five times the cost of other concerts, thereby making this concert an impossibility for many to attend.

The Sawy Cultural Center was the perfect venue though. Located under the 26th of July bridge on the western edge of Zamalek, the stage has the feeling of secluded intimacy with the occasional rumble of trucks overhead and the constant rhythmic honking in the background (beeep–beeep–beep-beep-beep).

The crowd was mostly twenty-somethings in mixed groups – guys and girls seemed to be relaxed and were hanging out together, something I haven’t witnessed much of since arriving in Cairo. After weeks of walking past young men on the streets who watch my every move, it was refreshing to be pretty anonymous in the crowd. Women and men jumped up and down during the songs, raising their arms above their heads and clapping to the rhythm, challenging my assumptions as to acceptable concert behavior in conservative Cairo.

WAMA played their hits for over an hour (although I recognized the melody of their current big hit at least four times during the show). There were no encores – in fact, the crowd began their hurried dash to the exit as soon as WAMA turned to leave the stage.

Camera and video phones are all the rage with this crowd. I watched my behviour carefully, lest I become the latest victim of YouTube noteriety.

The guy in the middle is an audience member plucked out of the front row. Dreams do come true!

There are a number of experiences in Cairo which are on my list to do before we leave Egypt such as sleep in the Western desert, drink coffee from a local outdoor cafe, buy some vegetables from the market outside my apartment, and learn to ride the bus. One item which I’ve just crossed off the list: drink fresh fruit juice from a juice bar.

Juice bars are all over town – recognizable by the open-air store fronts, nets filled with plump, in-season fruit hanging over the entryway. These days, the nets are filled with oranges, mangoes, and pomogranates. Although I don’t know the word for “pomogranate,” I was able to point to the net filled with the beautiful, red orbs to make myself understood.

A grey-haired man with a faded and blurred image of a cross tattooed on his wrist, indicating that he is Coptic Christian, stood behind the shiny, steel counter. He pulled a glass container of dark, red juice out of the refrigerator and poured it into a tall, thick-handled beer glass. I paid another man who was sitting on a plastic chair near the entryway 2.5 L.E. for the juice and took a sip. It was sweet and tangy and it cooled me down quickly.

The man who poured the juice walked around the counter and out to a store down the street. His pants were tucked into yellow, plastic rain boots.

It didn’t take me long to finish the last drops and contemplate buying another glass. (At 45 cents a glass, why not?) I resisted this time though, laid my empty glass on the counter, and wrangled up the courage to try out my Arabic.

“Ma’ salaama,” I said.

“Ma’ salaama,” he responded. I walked out and joined the crowds on the sidewalk.

Juice bar: check
Arabic usage: check

Click here to check out somebody else’s photo of a juice bar in Cairo.

We spent two afternoons last week exploring Islamic Cairo (the name kind of implies that the rest of Cairo isn’t Islamic. That’s not true). Our first day was limited to the streets of the Khan al Kahlili bazaar, home to hundreds of stores where you can find gold jewelry next to plastic Pyramid piggybanks, intricately carved bronze lanterns, large bath towels printed with Cleopatra’s image, or a wide array of colorful plastic buckets.

I wasn’t sure we’d actually make it out of this street. There was no conscious movement of your legs; you were just carried along with the crowd.

The Khan al Kahlili bazaar at night took on a festival atmosphere, although that didn’t make me want the King Tut pen set any more than during the daylight hours.

The next day we wandered south of the Khan al Kahlili bazaar into a neighborhood in search of the Museum of Islamic Arts. We found the museum, but it was closed for renovation. However, when one door closes, another opens. As we stood outside the museum wondering what to do next, Mohammed walked up to us and suggested that the city around us was better than what we would have seen in the museum as “Islamic Cairo is a living museum!”

We followed Mohammed to a local mosque and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon with him, drinking Egyptian yellow tea, walking through the vegetable market to the marble market, into the shoe market, through the carpet market, and finally through a series of small alleys to the spice market where we got a lesson on the spices necessary for keeping a good Egyptian kitchen (and a happy husband!).

View of Mohammed’s neighborhood from the mosque’s minaret. The collapsed buildings in the foreground are due to the 1992 earthquake.

Mrs. T and our new exploring-Cairo buddy, Angela, on top of the minaret.

D and Mohammed taking Egyptian yellow tea at a local cafe. Soccer on the tv, man smoking shisha in the background (a tiered cage with chickens, ducks, and rabbits for sale is out of the picture, but thought I’d mention it for ambience).