Cairo - Day One

April 18th, 2008

You'll have to forgive me for waxing eloquent - I don't think anything but the most florid of hyperbole could give Egypt its due.

Our journey thus far has been measured in gifts and flowers.

Yesterday security at JFK was total bedlam. The man in front of me was off-balance - something was wrong with his legs and although he was young he walked with a cane. He sought to travel on an expired California driver's license and a bit of paper. He was corralled behind thin black tapes and passed from TSA agent to TSA agent - they ignored his name in favor of calling him "a secondary" and they tested his luggage for chemicals - tested him for metal.

A woman behind everyone else in our group (there are 6 of us traveling together) was cursing loudly and continuously - complaining that there ought to be separate lines for families and single travelers. She swore so much we hypothesized that she might have Tourettes, but that was probably a kindness we offered her - she was loud, obnoxious, in a hurry - in short I suspect she was a New Yorker. She kept swearing all the way through security and down the terminal towards her gate, towing an anonymous black rolling tote behind her.

We stopped to eat at a Samuel Adams in the terminal - thinking it would be wiser than eating dinner on the plane. Then we hustled to our gate. On the advice of a friend who had traveled on the airline we were traveling on, our tickets were first class and not business. Business Class means something very different in the USA than it does overseas, I guess. There was a tremendous gap of comfort between the two when we got on the plane, and we all had cause to be grateful for the upgraded seats during the ten hour flight to Cairo.

The first two hours on the plane were very, VERY turbulent. I told Sandy I thought we would die like sardines in that tin can. Things were falling in the kitchen area and the plane vibrated like it was a few moments from tearing itself apart. It was an odd mixture, at that, of new furnishings, (the bulkhead and overhead compartments looked brand new,) and old, (the leather reclining seats in first class were old - frayed), which did not inspire confidence in the soundness of the plane under the conditions it was experiencing. But there was a grace to the service that helped take my mind, anyway, off my impending doom - our first fifteen minutes in the air became a kind of anxious parade of presents from the flight crew. It began with what was expected: pillows, blankets, headphones - but continued on and on until we all started to giggle - slippers, a flight kit with earplugs and toiletries and eye masks for sleep, a hot, damp perfumed towel to wipe hands with, bottles of water, small cups of guava juice served on a silver tray, truffles, and finally a nosegay of carnations. We all sat with laps full of plastic-wrapped packages, hands occupied with juice and chocolate. I have my flowers still on the bedside table here in the hotel room.

Despite the turbulence, we most of us opted to forgo dinner in favor of sleep, and we were to varying degrees successful. No matter how elite your seats in a plane, sleeping on one is just this side of the 7th circle of hell. I woke up feeling like someone had taken a pillowcase full of doorknobs to me. But we were in Egypt! Through the windows of the plane I saw nothing but sand.

Our guide in Cairo is named Ahmed - our driver some variation of Meged - (I hope he'll forgive me for butchering his name) - They met us at the airport and helped usher us through customs. In the small bus they had brought for us Ahmed presented all of the girls with red roses as he welcomed us to Egypt. We drove through Heliopolis on our way to the West Bank of the Nile and our hotel, and while we did he told us alternately our itinerary, and of the sights that were passing rapidly through the windows. He spoke uncommonly fast, and I eventually stopped listening; instead I measured our progress by minarets. They seem impossible, beautiful...more like fragile sand castles than architecture. The streets we drove down were largely deserted. If you can, arrive in Cairo on a Friday or Saturday morning - this compasses the weekend and there are few people abroad in the city then. On all other days traffic here is a nightmare of honking, screaming, wild driving - safety is evidently optional, lanes don't really exist, and no one drives here that does not constantly sound their horn like some kind of eternal affirmation of their existence. They don't honk in reaction to anything in particular, they just honk to honk. The level of sound in the city is unbelievable. It's so pervasive that even up on the 18th floor of the hotel here, in our room, it is a physical presence. But on Friday mornings, apart from the call to prayer issuing from megaphones that hang from the impossible heights of the minarets, the city is quiet and the roads safer to navigate.

We are staying at the Four Seasons - our hotel looks over the Giza pyramids on the West side, and on the East, the Nile. Standing on our balcony I can look straight down into the exhibits of the Cairo zoo;

with the pyramids rising out of a khaki haze on the horizon,

and if I lean over the iron railing I can look East to the river, where a bridge spans it and large party boats move up and down in the currents.

I spent a while watching the zoo beneath the balcony; hippos, camels, zebras, ostrich, white peacocks, flamingos, some strange gazelle-like creatures...above the trees of the zoo white birds circle - they roost in the trees and from a distance they might be mistaken for an infestation of gypsy moths - ironic considering where the word gypsy likely came from.

In flight, the odd white birds are pure poetry. There are crows here, of a sort - grey-bodied and large as a raven. They perch on the rooftops and engage in the trade of corvids everywhere; theft and tomfoolery. I want to bring one home very badly.

Speaking of the rooftops here, those that don't conclude in minarets are instead covered in satellite dishes.

From my balcony I can count also 5 cell phone towers - reaching higher to heaven than even the most ambitious of minarets - but nothing comes as close as the pyramids to scraping the paint off the sky. Even in the distance they dwarf everything else - modern and man-made. They look, all in a moment, both heavy and ephemeral - a mirage seen through the haze of the city. Solid and at the same time as fragile in the distance as a dream. From the balcony I prick my finger on the apex of one but draw no blood.

A hawk, black and indistinct, circles above me, the only trait I can see and measure being the strong indented v of his tail. I lose him into the sun to the west - towards the pyramids. Then too I find a tiny black beetle on one of my toes, scarab-shaped, spreading his carapace to dry his wings. In one day I understand the wisdom inherent in the shapes of the old gods here - the amber eyes of many of the men could be the eyes of the sun, the eyes of the jackal, the eyes of a new-fledged hawk before age and experience turn them red.

And speaking of the men...they are a subtle menace. I'm no supermodel but their eyes follow me everywhere. I think I'm modestly dressed but the lack of burqa leaves me vulnerable and it is a vulnerability that is very, very obvious. Their stares are unfamiliar and almost threatening - but not angry, or offended - Sandy just thinks their foreign appearance turns their appreciation, in my eyes, into something sinister.

(Not, however, as sinister as ducks...)

Also - Turkish Delight! Hurrah!