Confessions of a Part Time Tourist

The trap was laid so subtly that I didn’t even realize it was a scam until the end, maybe even after it was over. I suppose this is the mark of a successful con artist, even one who operates on a minor scale; while the con is in process, the mark should not realize he was marked. The coin shouldn’t drop until the tout and the mark’s money are long gone.

I had become more or less used to dealing with aggressive sales pitches. There were the guys at Khan-al-Khalili who say, “Do you need slippers…rugs…silver?” “Buenos dias…Hello how are you?” “Come inside please. It’s free to look.” “I give you good price.” Every day taxi drivers slow down, honk, flash their lights at me, when they see me standing on the corner, trying to cross a street. Other drivers hang around by the metro station and shout “Taxi?” when I walk down the steps. There are the old women wearing black who sit on steps of the metro station, often with a baby in their arms, selling packets of tissues. The pyramids are infested with guys who are more than willing to take your picture, take you on a horseback ride, present with the once in a lifetime opportunity to have your picture taken on a camel in front of the Pyramids. They all have something to sell. They shout, “Hello. Where are you from? Welcome to Egypt.” I still have a twinge of regret about the guy at the pyramids whose pitch began “Hello sir. Do you feel lucky? You have a beautiful baby. He looks just like you.” I almost wish I had slowed down enough to find out what he was offering.

One must distinguish between scams and services. As Deborah likes to point out, if you want your picture taken on a camel in front of the pyramids, and it’s worth 20 pounds to you to get this picture, you have a convergence of buyer and seller Adam Smith would smile upon. If you exit the metro and want to take a taxi home, it’s great that so many drivers are willing to offer their services; even if you know you will pay the foreigners’ price. If I were walking home from the gym and the heat became more than I could handle, it’s nice to know a cab driver would gladly drive me three blocks. I tried to haggle with the men from whom I bought scarves, on principle, not because I thought the price was unreasonable. They both told me they gave me the same price they gave to Egyptians. “This is not Khan al Khalili. This is not tourist market.” I was not unhappy to pay 10LE—less than 2 dollars—for a scarf I liked. Scams are another matter. You lose money, time, or both and end up with nothing, or with something that has little value for you.

We had exited the Metro at Sadat station, which no local would call Sadat. They would call the station Tahrir, the name of the metropolis’s central crossroads, where the station is located. I was proud of my ability to decipher the name of the station in Arabic, a feat that sounds less impressive if I tell you that every station name is marked in English as well as in Arabic. Still, I was proud of my ability to point out to Sheri and Gary which individual letters spelled out Al Sadat, and with my observation that in the word Sadat every letter in Arabic matches up with an English letter. All the vowel sounds are spelled out with letters from the alphabet, not with invisible diacritical marks. Because I am not a Christian, I need not worry whether pride is a deadly sin that is punished with a fall. I can confess that we missed the signs of a minor scam because we lost nothing, neither money nor time.

Before we went through the turnstiles, I asked a tourist police-officer the direction to the Egyptian Museum. I knew from experience that the tourist police are not above accepting baksheesh for services rendered, but I knew they would not deliberately mis-direct me in the hopes of steering me to a cousin’s papyrus shop, a brother-in-law’s perfumery, or a family rug dealership. Deborah had told me to look for signs in the station directing us towards our destination. The police officer told us to turn left, then left. We followed his directions, found ourselves heading for an exit, but saw no helpful signage. We asked another officer who pointed us in the same direction. We found ourselves above ground facing a building that looked nothing like a museum. It appeared to be the notorious bureaucracy building, the Mugamma`. Buildings across the street to the left, that is to say, across six lanes of traffic and traffic barriers, appeared to be the old American University in Cairo campus. The map we carried and the map outside the station were equally unhelpful in helping us figure out how to exit the Metro within easy proximity of the museum. We scanned the horizon. About half a mile away we saw a grand red building with a dome and wide wings facing the street. It reminded me of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, in short, of grand museums built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

We went back underground and headed towards the red oasis. This exit did feature signs saying “Egyptian Museum.” Aboveground, the building had moved closer. We saw a grand gate and tour buses. We also saw an enormous construction site between us and the building. To get to the building, we had to navigate our way around the fenced-in hole in the ground. Should we proceed along the Tahrir Square side or the Nile Hotel (formerly the Nile Hilton) side. A man standing by the metro exit saw us dithering and helpfully pointed out the museum, told us to walk along the back of the hotel (the front faces the Nile), and told us not to bother paying a tour guide once we got to the museum. He also told us that he was taking no money for this advice, and was not offering to guide us himself. He was a doktor. Or something like that. When three people are standing on a sidewalk on a busy street next to a construction site looking around not everyone hears everything. He told us the museum was 5 LE cheaper after 2:00 pm. It was 1:00 pm at the time. He suggested that if we went in the other direction, towards the Nile, we might like to do some shopping. As it happened, we were fully inoculated against an attempt to get us to shop rather than go to the museum. We were arriving at the museum much later than we had hoped: we were scheduled to meet Deborah and Hannah in less than two hours. Only after we were on our way to the museum did I realize that we had witnessed a classic, even iconic Cairo scam, described almost word for word in Lonely Planet under “Scams and Hassles.”

Around the Egyptian Museum…a charming chap approaches foreigners and asks if they are looking for the museum entrance…. If the answer is yes he asserts that it’s prayer time/lunchtime/any-inventive-reason time and the museum is temporarily closed…Then he suggests that while they’re waiting, they may be interested in going to the nearby ‘Government Bazaar’… (115)

Needless to say, when we paid our admission there was no indication anywhere that the admission fee was reduced after 2:00 pm.

I doubt Sheri and Gary would have been any more likely to fall into the clutches of this salesman without me than with me. Gary lived in Italy for a six months; Sheri spent three years in Niger. Neither is an inexperienced traveler. Their presence gave me the opportunity to visit places where Deborah and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable bringing Hannah for a one reason or another. Deborah offered to spend parts of several days at home with Hannah while I toured around with Sheri and Gary. Sometimes we all met up later in the day, somewhere in Cairo. One day I left Sheri and Gary before dinner and went home to have dinner with Deborah and do bedtime with Hannah.

With Deborah doing childcare, I was the most experienced Cairo hand in the bunch. Even when we went to places I hadn’t been in Cairo—which was almost everywhere—I was de facto the expert. Traveling with newcomers to Egypt made me realize how much I had become acclimated to a place that felt overwhelming when I arrived. In Islamic Cairo, I was the one who suggested we veer off the well travelled path. We wandered on some unpaved streets where we saw lots of men smoking sheesha, not at a café, but on the unpaved streets in front of their houses. We saw someone heating and beating metal into bowls proving that at least some of the wares for sale in Khan Al Khalili are actually made in Egypt. These were streets that reminded Sheri of Niger.

I was the one who steered us successfully back to Palace Walk and who led the way when we plunged back into the Khan on a path different from the one we had travelled on before. I managed to lead the group into what appeared to be a blind alley. But Sheri decided the store at the end of the alley was a promising place to buy fabric, which gave Gary and me the opportunity to rest our feet and watch the touts steering other tourists into the shop where Sheri bought three scarves. The shopkeeper also told us how we could exit the alley without retracing our steps. It happened to go through two stores and down a flight of stairs but, miraculously, we ended up back on one of the alleys we recognized; our purses were no lighter and our collection of souvenirs had not grown. I was the one who paid off the tour guide who attached himself to us in Ibn Tulun. When we realized he had nothing to teach us and that he was hindering our ability to enjoy the mosque I made it clear we were happier walking on our own. I gave him 5 LE. He asked for 20. (We gave the guide at the Gayer-Anderson museum 10LE and he knew English and was knowledgeable about the site). I refused. Finding himself in a blind alley the “guide” left us alone.

My proudest moment was steering us to Fishawi’s Coffeehouse, perhaps the most celebrated ahwa in Cairo. Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize winning author, held court there (not at the café named after him.) The night before our trip to Islamic Cairo we had watched a video which had a scene set at Fishawi’s. Going to Fishawi’s is a ritual event, like going to Café du Monde in New Orleans, or the Sacher Hotel in Vienna. But it’s harder to find, even with a map. Sheri and Gary thought it a miracle that I got us there, after we had tried and failed to find it earlier in the day. Here is my secret: as we headed up the alley, back towards Husayn, I realized that what look like streets on the maps are tiny alleys, much closer together than one might realize. The café was on one side of these side alleys, a few blocks south of Husayn. So I started looking down each of these alleys as we passed. When I looked into one someone got in my face. I expected to be told about some carved wooden camels for sale at a reasonable price. In fact, the man asked, “Fishawi’s?” “Aiwa,” I said. “Second right, second café,” he said. That last bit of information was crucial, because you walk through one café to get to Fishawi’s. And you walk through Fishawi’s to keep shopping. It would be easy to miss.

I must confess that my career as tour guide was not all about covering myself in glory. As we walked down the grand alley of Mosques, Gary was the one who said, “I think this is Palace Walk.” He got this information from the tour book. But he also knew that I was most of the way through the first volume of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, a novel called Palace Walk.

Many of the mosques were closed by the time we found ourselves on Palace Walk which left Gary the architect a tad frustrated. We did make it into one impressively old mosque shortly before late afternoon prayers. Then we passed a arched doorway into what looked like a tunnel. A card by the doorway said, “Open for Visit.” We went inside and were asked for an entrance fee of 10LE. We had no idea what we were visiting but decided it was worth 10LE each to find out. The tour guide knew a handful of words in English. We learned the first when he took us down a narrow stairway into a cavelike space that reminded me of the setting for the Cask of Amontillado, so much so, that I did not want to be the first one down the stairs. Part way down we turned off the stone stairway onto a metal staircase. We had left the stone tunnel and, at the bottom of the metal stairs, found ourselves in a massive vaulted atrium, somewhere between two and three stories high, lit by windows at street level. The word the guide said was, “water.” We were underneath a building which held thousands of gallons of water in a cistern as big as a McMansion. Then he took us upstairs into two large rooms with trompe l’oeil ceilings and chandeliers ten feet across. He pointed to the chandelier in the first room and said, “From Italy.” I asked “Venezia?” “Yes,” he said. In the next room he said, “School.” “Taliba?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. He showed us the basins where the water was used, and the well where it was drawn up into the building. These three rooms were, we decided, worth 30 LE.

The next day Gary told me the building we visited is mentioned on the second page of Palace Walk. We sent the book home with them so I can’t quote word for word but when the novel begins, it is midnight. Amina waits for her husband to come home from his nightly carousing. She stands on her balcony looking at the buildings around her. Across the street is the cistern building. I’m glad someone was paying attention.

You Can Take Some of it with You

In the last eight years I’ve been in the presence of several works of art that have been endlessly reproduced on posters, postcards, plastic models, piggy-banks, chess pieces, refrigerator magnets, beach towels, god knows what all else: they’ve been kitschified, parodied, and horrendously overexposed…but they retain their capacity to inspire awe when you see them in person. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they are all sacred objects. The more recently composed were designed to inspire awe among believers. The oldest, however, were designed to never be seen again by a living human after they were laid in the ground. I had to travel to Athens to see the (bleached skeleton of) the Parthenon and to Vatican City to see Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel (no hardship in either case). Both are pretty firmly affixed to their home cities, which is probably a good thing because if they weren’t someone would have at least tried to steal them. (You do have to give the British credit for stealing as much of the Parthenon as they could carry).

Last week, when I saw some of the treasures found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, it was a journey into my own past as much as a journey into the deep history of Egypt. In 1976 or 1977, when the first blockbuster museum show made its grand tour of American museums, I went with my mother to the Art Institute of Chicago to see some of the treasures King Tut took with him. As you may recall, this show inspired the song Steve Martin wrote back when he was a wild and crazy guy, not the elder statesman of American comedy.

The centerpiece of the mid-1970’s traveling show was the funeral mask: a stunning piece of work by any standard (not just because it is wrought from 11 kilograms of gold). I have fond memories of a miniature golden coffin, about the right size for the interment of a GI Joe, in which a portion of Tut’s viscera were buried. The conventions of Pharoanic mummification required that certain organs be removed and stored separately from the rest of the body. Tutankhamen was entombed with four of these little coffins, miniature versions of the three coffins in which the main structure of the king’s body was laid. The coffin for Tut’s intestines traveled to Chicago in the mid-1970s and was reproduced on a poster advertising the show, a copy of which hung on my wall throughout my childhood. (This week, for the first time in years, I wondered whether that mounted poster made the journey to Cleveland and then to York with my father and step-mother. I suspect it did not.) The second mini coffin contained his stomach; the third his lungs; the fourth his liver. All four minis were placed inside a canopic chest made of calcite, a marble-like stone. The canopic chest is a squarish box, about half a meter wide and a little less than one meter high. Inside the box are cylindrical compartments into which the miniature coffins were placed upright like hefty, extremely expensive, extraordinarily decorated test tubes. Stoppers topped off with sculpted busts of the boy king kept the coffins safe inside the calcite deposit box.

As we viewed these objects in the Tutankhamun room of the Egyptian Museum, Gary and I wondered what happened to the heart. We didn’t think anyone ate it, given the importance the Ancient Egyptians placed on making sure Tut brought his whole body to the afterlife, along with furniture, transportation, and plenty of portable wealth. I also assumed that the heart played similar importance for the Egyptians as it did for later cultures, our own included. The catalogue I purchased at the Egyptian Museum’s gift shop solved this mystery: the heart was mummified separately, then, prior to burial, placed back inside Tutankhamun’s body and covered with a scarab. The heart was “the seat of emotional, intellectual, and physical life. When the deceased was brought before the court in the afterlife, his heart was weighed on the great scales of truth…. it was essential during the trial, then in the eternal life” (Masterpieces of Tutankhamun 3). The brain, on the other hand, was insignificant as far as the Egyptians were concerned. The embalmer used long metal hooks to pull it out through the nose. The fragments were not preserved.

The funeral mask stands in the middle of the King Tut room at the Egyptian Museum, inside a cubical glass case which allows viewers to see all four sides, just as it stood in the middle of the room in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles. One item that did not travel to the U.S. in the mid-1970s was the gold inner coffin into which Tut was laid after he was mummified and dressed in unimaginable quantities of gold jewelry—including molded finger casings for each finger—and the funeral mask was placed on his head. Weighing in at 110 kilograms, the coffin “is the largest object ever made from solid gold” (Masterpieces 1). I can think of many reasons why the Egyptian government did want this object to leave the country.

This intricately decorated and incredibly beautiful coffin was placed inside a larger version of the same coffin, made of wood but so heavily inlaid with gold and other precious metals and stones that it looked like gold. The middle coffin was then placed inside another wooden coffin (which is not in the Egyptian museum. To see it you have to travel to the tomb site itself.) This package of three coffins plus a mummified Pharaoh plus hundreds of pounds of gold and jewelry was placed inside a canopic box the size of a modest lakefront cottage, along with all of the other loot that managed to remain, undisturbed, inside the tomb for more than thirty-four centuries.
I was struck by the layers of redundancy built into Tut’s burial containers. Tut’s body wore a series of gold necklaces, along with earrings, rings, and the sceptrelike staffs he held crossed upon his chest. His necklaces were reproduced in his funeral mask, and again on the gold coffin, and again on the wooden coffin inlaid with gold. The staffs crossed over his chest were reproduced on both of the coffins in the museum. Gary and I were reminded of the Russian dolls in which one doll contains another which contains another which contains another. But these Tut dolls were all images of the same person: Tutankhamun, dressed for the afterlife.

The Royal Tombs of Tanis, unearthed in 1939—probably not far from the spot where Indiana Jones found the Ark of the Covenent—yielded the second most impressive collection of tomb loot in Egyptian history. The much less crowded room devoted to the Tanis loot is next door to the modern shrine of all things Tut. In Tanis archeologists found some of the burial impedimenta of Psusennes I, a Pharaoh who died about 1000 years after Tutankhamun. Viewing this collection it seemed that Tutankhamun must have died during a period of exceptional wealth for the Pharaohs. His treasures are outstanding, not just because they remained in his tomb until 1922, but because they were more impressive than those of at least some other dead kings. Psusennes I was buried in a silver coffin, with a silver inlaid middle coffin and silver miniatures for his viscera. Buried in such an impoverished state, one wonders why he even bothered dying.

Practical Tourism

Every guidebook tells you that a few scenes from The Spy Who Loved Me were filmed at the Gayer-Anderson Museum. When you visit the museum you are unlikely to be able to forget this nugget of local history because every visiting group—even if the group consists only of two American professors and their baby—gets a personal tour guide and every tour guide mentions the James Bond connection. I extrapolate this from our experience when we visited the museum.

The museum is not large—it’s two houses that some British guy named John Gayer-Anderson purchased, joined together by commissioning a bridge that connected the two upper floors, and decorated according to his own eccentric taste. One room is called the Persian Room. Another is called the Turkish room. The French room is decorated in the style of Louis XIV. The Queen Anne room is decorated like a library in an English country house; it contains the samples from Mr. Gayer-Anderson’s collection of books that are not too valuable to be left in the open air. The Egyptian Room is decorated with legally acquired antiquities as well as a plaster copy of Nefertiti’s head. I happen to know that the original bust of Nefertiti lives in Berlin (which pains the Egyptian government). You can also see it on the dust-jacket of my copy of Jansen’s History of Art. The many of the museum’s rooms are small: the hallways and staircases smaller. (The notable exceptions are the halls designed for parties to be enjoyed by men and spied on by women through the upstairs grates). We kept crossing paths with the two other groups touring the museum. I heard each of the other guides refer to The Spy Who Loved Me. One even sang a bit of the movie’s theme song (he was no Carly Simon).


After we saw the rooms where the magic happened I began working through The Spy Who Loved Me in my head trying to recall which scenes were set in this house. I don’t think I’ve seen more than bits and pieces of the film since the 1970s but I saw it several times in the theatre when it was released. I was a twelve-year old straight boy when it came out, the ideal age and gender position for seeing a James Bond film. Every boy born since 1950 can claim a Bond movie that came out when he was twelve or thirteen and which may therefore hold a special place in his heart. I am fortunate that the Bond movie from my pubescence was one of the better ones (certainly the best of Roger Moore regency). But this is the subject for another essay.

As I went through the film in my head I eliminated the opening sequence when Bond is chased on skis by some Russian agents with machine guns and has to respond with some kind of gun masquerading as a ski pole. The Egyptian scenes set at the Pyramids, on a Nile boat, or in the Valley of the Kings were also off the table. I ruled out anything set in Sardinia, anything set on a train, anything set at the villain’s middle-of-the ocean lair, anything set on a submarine or on a massive submarine-eating ship. And the final scene was out too. In case you’ve forgotten, in the final scene Bond and one of the Bach sisters get cozy in the villain’s escape pod, a floating orb that resembles, in shape if not in color or material, the red-and-white plastic fishing bobs my brothers and I used when we fished for flounder off the pier in Wellfleet Harbor in the 1970s. That left the scene when Bond and Agent XXX demonstrate that each has read the file on the other by ordering the opposing spy’s favorite cocktail. At some point in this sequence Bond has to kill someone and stick him in a phone booth with an “out of order” sign in his lap. I’m pretty sure that’s the part what was set in the Gayer-Anderson museum. Since Netflix doesn’t deliver to Cairo and we don’t have access to any “24 Hours of Bond” festivals on cable TV (we might if our TV worked) you will have to wait, dear reader, until I return home for confirmation.

The Gayer-Anderson museum was stage one on expedition day two Fridays ago. Our weekly schedule is defined primarily by Deborah’s work schedule. She meets with each of her three tutors once a week: on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Two of those trips take her downtown. She needs to schedule an hour on the Metro each way. The meetings themselves last for 2.5 hours. She usually does some other business while she’s downtown. She might go to a bookstore, or to the street where they sell videos. Sometimes she has business relating to our visas or our banking or her program. So each of these trips lasts at least 5 hours. One tutor lives in Maadi so, on Thursdays, Deborah takes a ten-minute cab ride to the tutor’s apartment. My Arabic classes meet for two hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I do childcare while she’s out; she does it while I’m out. Friday is usually a recovery day. Saturday is usually expedition day: the day when we pretend we are tourists, not residents. The week we went to the Gayer-Anderson Museum, Friday was expedition day and Saturday was recovery day.

The Gayer-Anderson museum had several features to recommend it as a tourist site for us. First feature: it is never very crowded, a concern when we are trying to protect Hannah and her developing immune system. I try to avoid general statements, especially those that sound like cultural stereotypes but I’ll step out onto this limb: Egyptians love children. Everywhere we go, people greet Hannah with big smiles. They coo at her, stroke her cheek. At the pyramids we were surrounded twice by groups of school-children who took her picture, touched her hands, made faces at her. One girl kissed her cheek twice. Everyone touches her hands and feet and Hannah puts her hands and feet into her mouth. So we avoid parts of Cairo that are very crowded, which includes most of Old Cairo, the most interesting part of the city (or so I’m told). Mr. Gayer-Anderson’s museum is in Islamic Cairo, but on a street so quiet that, after clearing security, our driver was able to park and hang out during the hour we spent in the museum and the adjoining mosque.

Second feature: the museum is small, and it opens into the 9th Century Ibn Tulun Mosque, “the city’s oldest intact functioning Islamic monument” (Lonely Planet 138). This meant we could hit two sites with only one transfer of Hannah out of her car seat and into a chest carrier. Third, we could see both sites in about an hour, thus limiting the time Hannah spent in the carrier, a calculation that takes into account her temperament, her need to be fed and have her diaper changed on a fairly regular basis, and the heat. (Strapping a baby onto your chest in desert weather is sort of like cozying up to a very charming, very chatty, extremely adorable carburetor). We chose to do our expedition that week on Friday rather than Saturday because the day was projected to be in the mid-to-high 80s, not the mid-to-high 90s. Finally, the museum and the mosque were a short distance (by car) from the Al Azhar park where we would be able to have a nice lunch and walk Hannah around in her stroller.



From the outside, the Ibn Tulun mosque looks like a fortress. It has massive walls with a gate in the middle. The minaret is an unusual shape, with steps that curve around the outside of the tower. We chose not to climb it. We weren’t allowed into the mosque or the museum until mid-day prayers concluded. Because we were in the garden on the other side of the museum I didn’t seen how many worshippers streamed out from what is traditionally the most crowded prayer session of the week. However, I am fairly confident that the Mosque was nowhere near capacity. I imagine the courtyard alone has room for over 2000 prayer rugs. If believers position themselves inside the colonnade—four piers deep—that surrounds the courtyard (I’m not sure what local custom dictates) the number of worshippers could well double. After we left I found myself wondering about the pile of sandals that Medieval believers would have confronted outside the walls when this mosque was the only venue within easy walking distance. How do you locate your sandals in a pile of 8000?

After changing Hannah’s very full diaper in the back of the car (this is getting easier) our next stop was Al Azhar park, a spectacular addition to Cairo’s almost non-existent collection of publicly accessible green space. It opened in 2005 which means it did not exist when Deborah last lived here or visited. Beautifully planned, designed and landscaped on top of what might, in the American West, be called a butte, the park is actually constructed, according to some reports, on centuries worth of piled up garbage. It is one of best public parks I have ever been to, probably the best to open in the last half century. It is hard to convey how shocking this fact is if you haven’t been to Cairo. In many parts of the city, walkways parallel the Nile. But to get to these walkways you often have to cross three lanes of fast moving traffic to get to the median strip, then three more to get to the Corniche. Try that with a stroller. Neighborhoods like Zamalek have some parks that are impressive in scale but they are private. Downtown Cairo has virtually no green space. The streets everywhere are given over to cars. There are very few places in the city where you could walk a baby stroller if you had one. Even Maadi, suburban expat heaven, where people actually have strollers, is not stroller heaven. Many streets have sidewalks and the roads are generally paved, but the curbs are a foot high and the sidewalks themselves are inevitably cracked and broken in spots and often have mopeds (or cars) parked on them. If you walk in the street with your stroller, your only option most of the time, you must watch for cars coming from both directions, even on one-way streets.

Al Azhar Park has views of the city and the Citadel from multiple viewspots. It has an enormous playground, the only facility like it Deborah has ever seen in Cairo. It has water fountains and decorative streams, a small lake, and fountains children (and adults) can play in. It has several cafes and restaurants including one that I can vouch is first rate. It has performance spaces. When we were there musical groups succeeded each other on the plaza by the entrance. It is stroller friendly and wheelchair friendly. It is also accessible only by car and there is an admission charge: LE5 per person plus LE5 for a car. Two adults plus a car cost LE 15, less than $3, a modest sum for us but enough to shut out most Egyptians, especially those who would have to pay cab fare both ways. The previous Saturday we had walked along the Nile in Zamalek and discovered a riverside park that cost LE2 per person. Most of the people who chose to pay the LE2 were young couples, presumably already engaged, who sat on park benches, and got to know each other. Apparently LE 4 was a reasonable price to pay to spend time with your future spouse, especially if you could walk to the park. Al Azhar park was overwhelmingly a place for upper-middle class and affluent families who owned cars.

We ate lunch at the Citadel View restaurant where we had the best Egyptian fare we’ve had in Egypt. Some of the other diners were tourists (the restaurant rates an “our pick” in Lonely Planet) but most were affluent Egyptian families. Almost all of the Egyptian women at the restaurant wore headscarves. (The one exception we noted was a table where some members of the extended family clearly lived, or had lived, abroad. Their conversation kept switching back and forth between Arabic, English, and French.) Most of the men wore dress trousers and pressed shirts. I saw one grandfather in a business suit. One family group included a boy under 12 who was sitting on the back of his chair playing his guitar. He was working on his rendition of the theme song to The Godfather. It was the second time since I’ve been in Egypt that I’ve heard a guitar player in a restaurant play that song. The first player was a professional who expected a tip. At some point after we ate I sat in the lobby for a long stretch while Deborah changed and fed Hannah in a lounge downstairs. I noticed a woman seated opposite me who said her prayers as she waited for the rest of her family. Deborah told me a large number of men had laid out their prayer rugs downstairs, in the area outside the women’s lounge.

On weekends—Friday and Saturday—a buffet is the only option for lunch or dinner at the Citadel View Restaurant. Deborah and I are grazing animals and we were happy with the opportunity to sample. When it comes to Middle Eastern food, we tend to favor the appetizers but the chicken schwarma was a favorite for both of us. Deborah was also partial to items the stuffed vegetables. The pigeon soup was spicy and meaty (it tasted nothing like chicken). We ate so much buffet food between 2:00 and 4:00 that, after we put Hannah to bed that night, we each had a banana and that covered us till morning.



The view from the Citadel View Restaurant was astonishing: in pictures the view of the Citadel in the background looks like a painted backdrop to be used in some Medieval costume drama starring Erroll Flynn. Closer to hand was a formal garden being well used by people of all ages and sexes. And when you are outside on a massive terrace under an umbrella surrounded by family groups, it doesn’t matter how loudly your baby cries.

After lunch, when we walked around the park, I was struck by how many women, perhaps 10%, were wearing Niqab, the black headscarf that covers a woman’s head, face, and neck completely, leaving only the eyes visible. This word is generally used to describe not just the scarf but the black gown worn with it. Before coming to Egypt I had associated this style of dress with more conservative Islamic regimes such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Deborah told me that when she first started coming to Egypt you rarely saw women in Niqab: the women you did see were likely visitors from the Gulf. Indeed, in the early 1990s wearing the headscarf at all was far from normal. That has changed: more than 75% of the Egyptian women I have seen in Cairo wear some sort of head-covering. In some settings, such as the local branch of French Supermarché Carrefour or at Al Azhar Park or on the Metro, it is more like 95%. Deborah rides further and more frequently on the metro than I do. Her regular ride takes her right through Coptic Cairo. Certain cars in the Cairo metro are reserved for women. Generally this is where Deborah rides. She has said that the only women in the car not wearing headscarves are Copts or foreigners.

This makes for some incongruous moments. The woman I saw praying in the restaurant lobby had a 9 or 10 year old daughter dressed in clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Disneyworld: cropped pink and white pants, sneakers, t-shirt, a pink visor. Among one group of fully scarved women picnicking on the lawn in the park I saw a young girl, about 6 or 7, dancing very nicely, moving her hips and upper body. It was odd to see her dressed like an American girl, imitating the dancing she’s seen adult women do in person or on TV, when the adult women would not have danced in that setting, or revealed as much of their bodies as she revealed of hers. I saw fully scarved women wearing long skirts chasing their children up grassy hills, and rolling down those same grassy hills.


When it was time to go home, we had seen the sun set over Cairo, we had seen the families playing in the fountains, we had taken many pictures of Hannah (as had a young girl who decided Hannah was photogenic and decided to take some photos of our daughter using her mother’s cell phone). Our driver was waiting by the gate. As we drove home on the ring road, the fastest moving highway in Cairo, we passed a pick-up truck with a passenger who was lounging on the bumper, holding onto the gate. The bed of the truck was full of animal carcasses. We passed a herd of sheep that always hangs out at the same spot near one of the overpasses. We saw people running across three or four lanes of highway traffic by this same overpass, as they always do. We also passed a crowd of people in the left lane, facing away from traffic. Our driver slowed down as traffic merged to the right. He clicked his tongue and shook his head. I asked him if it was an accident but I needn’t have. As we passed I caught a glimpse of a young man lying on the road. We went past quickly and it was getting dark so I probably imagined it but I thought he was wearing a police uniform. It didn’t look good.

Studying Arabic (with a baby in your lap)

Based on my extremely limited experience, I can say with some confidence that Arabic is a challenging language to learn. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask the Defense Language Institute, which provides language training for military personnel, department of defense employees, and other government types. The basic courses they offer in Romance languages—French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—last for 25 weeks. This means you need under six months of full-time intensive instruction. You could start the program on New Year’s Day and be interrogating suspects in Lisbon, Barcelona, Venice, or Paris before Bastille Day. German takes 34 weeks. If you started German on the same schedule your course would end in late August. A cluster of languages that require you to learn a new alphabet and/or have little linguistic relationship to English require a 47 week course. If you started a course in Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, Tagalog, Thai, Serbian, or Croatian on New Year’s Day you could go home for Thanksgiving with no homework. Four languages require a 63 week course: Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, and…wait for it…Arabic. So if you started with one of these languages on New Year’s Day you would be done in mid-March the following year.

Because of their common Semitic roots, Arabic is most accessible, perhaps, to people who have some grounding in Hebrew, which is another reminder of how tragic it is that the relationships between the countries where these languages are used is so dangerously fraught.

The Arabic alphabet, which I am struggling to learn, has letters that represent three different sounds that resemble the English “h” sound; three different “th” sounds; two different “s” sounds; two different “d” sounds; and two different “t” sounds. There is a guttural “ch” that is not unlike some sounds made in German, plus a guttural “gh” sound and another guttural consonant that I have so much trouble pronouncing that I can’t transliterate it. Some letters have as many as four different forms, depending on whether they appear in the initial, medial, final, or independent positions. This is all before we get into vocabulary or syntax.

Even the numbers are different. We call our numerals Arabic, thus giving the Arabic world rightful credit for inventing arithmetic. This terminology distinguishes Arabic numerals from Roman numerals, which actually represent letters (cent-, mill-, etc). In fact Arabic numerals look only enough like what we call Arabic numerals to be confusing. Nine and one are pretty much the same in both systems but the five looks like to me a zero, the four looks like a backwards three, and the zero looks like a typo. When you read them, you read the numbers left to right, as we do in the European world, but if the numbers represent words, as in 1935-1939 you would read the words right to left, as the Arabic language is written. So the numerical phrase above would look like this: 1939-1935 (but in Arabic numerals, of course).

Then there’s the whole business of spoken vs. written Arabic which I am too much of a novice to understand. Fus-ha—written Arabic—is highly formal. It is spoken only in official situations—such as political speeches and newscasts—which makes certain registers highly international. I once heard Munther, who directs the Arabic program at Cornell, refer to a colleague who tries to help his students understand the difference by putting on a necktie when he speaks Fus-ha and takes it off when he speaks dialect. Many Arabic programs in the U. S. and elsewhere focus their instruction on Fus-ha so students can learn to read Arabic texts and write in Arabic. But everyone says that if you got out of the airport in Egypt or Syria or Dubai and tried to tell a cab-driver where to go in Fus-ha he wouldn’t understand you. Or he would understand but laugh.

Everyone compares speaking Fus-ha to speaking Shakespeare. As a literary scholar who wants to qualify everything (I find it impossible to fill out surveys) I find this comparison frustrating. When you tell me speaking Fus-ha is like speaking Shakespeare, do you mean it is an Early Modern form of the language? Do you mean it uses the cultural equivalent of blank verse, i.e. unrhymed iambic pentameter (perhaps with the odd couplet thrown in to indicate the end of a scene)? Do upper class people speak Fus-ha in blank verse while commoners speak Fus-ha prose? Is Fus-ha rife with extended metaphor and (during the middle period) soliloquies?

It surprises me not at all that spoken Arabic should vary significantly from country to country, region to region. The English spoken in the United States differs significantly, and not just in pronunciation, from the English spoken in Jamaica, or Scotland, or South Africa, or India. And, of course, significant variation exists within regions of each of those countries.

When I’ve talked to the director of the institute where I am studying I’ve explained that I want to learn equal parts written Arabic (Fus-ha) and spoken Arabic (specifically the Egyptian dialect). I don’t expect I’ll ever learn Arabic well enough to use it as a research language. (Nor would I have much to gain by committing this kind of time to the endeavor). It’s more important that I don’t get into a taxi and say, “Gentle driver, I would be driven to Midan Al Gazayir, to the street called Al Gayazir, to the market where one may purchase equipment for mobile telephony.” The director has communicated my desires to my tutor, but it’s actually hard to tell what I am practicing when I practice my oral phrases. I can’t really ask my tutor whether we’re speaking Fus-ha because we are not allowed to speak English in class, his English isn’t great (as is clear when we use English out of desperation), and it’s a little challenging to ask sophisticated questions about linguistics when my vocabulary is limited to hello, goodbye, thank you, one, five, pen, book, rope, door, house, and desk.

I think the spoken phrases I am practicing are Fus-ha, but I can only confirm this by asking Deborah, and she has to rely on my less than perfect pronunciation to make a diagnosis. Even the pronunciation is confusing. I’ve heard variation between the pronunciation of letters that my tutor teaches me orally, and a book I’ve been using (at the recommendation of the program’s director), designed at and for the Middlebury language program. The book includes a DVD in which Egyptian speakers model pronunciation. Of course, it may be a while before any of this matters much. There may be little difference between how the Lebanese prime minister and an Egyptian fruit vendor would say, “The pen is on the desk.”

But studying Arabic with Hannah in my lap, as I have done, raises a whole different set of reflections for me, reflections on possibility. Although we had narrowed down to one our choice of girl names (ditto for boy names) at least a month before Hannah was born, we refused to commit to either choice until after she was born, and not just until we knew whether it was a boy or a girl. (Nor did we give the slightest hint to anyone what either name might be, although I think most people who bothered to think about it probably guessed the first letter). This was partly a matter of superstition. (I didn’t know I was superstitious until I was about to become a parent). Ashkenazi Jews have all kinds of superstitions about birth and names. Traditionally, you wouldn’t buy anything for the baby until after it is born. (Baby showers are out). You certainly wouldn’t announce a name to anyone. Indeed, you might not announce the name until the brit milah (for a boy) or the public announcement at the synagogue (for a girl). You also don’t name children after living relatives, apparently because the Angel of Death might mistake the younger one for the older when it came time to take someone away. (I am always surprised that the Angel of Death can get directions precise enough to know that there is someone named, say, Harry Rachmaninoff on his list, but can’t be sure whether the person in question is a sixty-six year old man with lung cancer living in Cleveland or his three year old grandson with the same name who lives in Seattle.)

Even leaving the superstitions aside, it seemed important that we meet Hannah before we named her. I made Deborah wait for 24 hours before we decided that her name was, indeed, Hannah. The card on her bassinet in the hospital remained blank for our entire stay. Even after that, it took me a long time to understand that this was indeed her name. There is something about naming that seems so final. Once she was named, all the other possible names she could have had were no longer available. (At least, until she reaches the point in her childhood or adolescence when she renames herself, as everyone seems to do, if only temporarily).

Studying language with Hannah in my lap reminds me of this sense of possibility. I’ve sat with her in my lap while my laptop is on the table and I go through a DVD practicing the Arabic alphabet sounds. The DVD also shows video of an Egyptian professor writing Arabic letters with a calligraphy pen. Hannah is pretty interested in the video. As entertainment, it will seem limited long before she starts on Sesame Street. But right now it’s got colors (mostly black and white) and images that move (not very fast. The professor does his calligraphy very deliberately). She hears the sounds as I do. Her throat and voice will eventually learn to speak primarily English. (I hope she learns other languages as well). But right now, Arabic sounds are no stranger to her than English sounds. The guttural sounds that require me to rewire my throat would be just as easy for her to learn as American words like “Long Island” “thoroughfare” “maple syrup” or “Chicago.” All languages are equally available to her now, in ways they have long since ceased to be for me.

Our First Seder in Egypt

Although this is the second time Deborah has lived in Egypt when Passover came around, before Wednesday night she had never attended a seder in Egypt. Since this is my first trip to Egypt this was my first chance to celebrate the holiday of departure in the land we departed. Whatever bragging rights Hannah may garner from being able to say, “the first wedding I ever attended was a Medieval themed French wedding outside Paris,” will pale in comparison to her perfectly legitimate right to say, “my first seder was in Egypt.”

Not many Jews born in the last 50 years can claim to have celebrated their first seder in Egypt. According to my in-house expert, the Jewish community in Egypt may have numbered as many as 80,000 people—mostly in Cairo and Alexandria—in the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period when huge communities of non-Egyptians called Egypt home. The Jewish community started to shrink after Israel was established in 1948. A mass exodus began in the early 1950s after Nassar came to power. The departure of the Jews from Egypt was just one feature of the Egyptian nationalist movement which defined Egyptians in ethnic terms and demanded the expulsion of many thousands of people. In the wake of the 1956 Suez crisis everyone with a French or British passport was expelled; this included many of Egypt’s Jews. (For more on nostalgic literary representations of Egypt before the departures, I recommend Deborah Starr’s Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, due to be published by Routledge any minute). By the late 1950s, the community was almost gone. Similar stories could be told about the centuries old Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, notably in Iraq and Morocco. In April 2009, the Jewish community in Cairo (excluding expatriates and embassy staff) might be counted in the low three digits; most are in their seventies or older.

By the time we celebrated last year’s seder, we expected to be in Egypt for this year’s seder. We thought our sojourn in Egypt might last as long as four months and that some family members would join us for Pesach here, or perhaps that we would all meet up in Israel. At the end of last year’s seder, when it was time to sing l’shanah ha’ba’ah b’yerushalayim (next year in Jerusalem), Deborah’s sister Becca and I both spontaneously sang l’shanah ha’ba’ah b’mitzrayim (next year in Egypt).

Our travel plans remained in flux, however, until February. The primary pre-condition underlying our plan to spend time in Cairo—that we could be reasonably sure that the trip would be safe for our four-month old daughter—contained many sub-conditions. One condition concerned immunizations. We consulted with several physicians to find out what immunizations a baby needed to travel to Cairo; whether these diverged in any way from the immunizations a baby would need to remain in Ithaca, New York (ten square miles surrounded by reality, as the bumper stickers put it); under what schedule these immunizations should occur; whether there was an accelerated schedule on which they could occur; whether any risks were associated with this accelerated schedule.

We learned that it was safe for a baby to receive certain immunizations on an accelerated schedule and we got clearance from the insurance company to cover immunizations given at sixteen weeks rather than waiting until Hannah’s official four month birthday. Hannah received four shots on Tuesday, March 17th, the day she turned sixteen weeks. We built in a buffer day to make sure she didn’t have any adverse reactions. We left the country on Thursday, March 19. We were in Paris at the wedding of one of Deborah’s French cousins over the weekend. By the time Hannah was officially four months old, on March 25, we were in Cairo.

Because we would have only two months in Egypt, travelling to Israel made no sense, especially since we would have to leave for Israel less than three weeks after we arrived in Egypt. We also knew that our family would not join us for whatever seder we could cobble together in Cairo.
I didn’t realize until we were in Cairo that Deborah had celebrated the seder with her parents every year of her life, even the years when she was living abroad. One year, when Deborah was living in Israel, her family joined her there. Another year she was living in Egypt and flew home to Massachusetts. While it felt important to acknowledge Hannah’s first pesach in some way, Deborah admitted it might be easier to just pretend the holiday wasn’t happening. We packed one copy of our most lightweight Hagaddah (sponsored by the Maxwell House Family of Coffees, of course) in case we had to make do with a makeshift celebration at home.

Passover in Egypt presents certain challenges. At home we keep a kosher kitchen; this was how Deborah has chosen to live her life and I agreed to at least try it out when we got married. (The experiment is coming up on its fourth anniversary). While the particulars of our house rules about kashrut are subject to some negotiation, Deborah is extremely strict about following the dietary laws associated with pesach. We clean the kitchen thoroughly and remove all food that is not kosher l’pesach (kosher for passover). In Cairo, these rules would have to be waived. We’ve found it sufficiently challenging enough to keep our Cairo refrigerator stocked. Trying to keep it stocked with food that is kosher l’pesach would be impossible.

We hadn’t been here long before we started asking around about seders. When we had dinner with Gabi, the head of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, we asked if he knew of any seders where we might be welcome. (He and his wife were heading home to Israel for the holiday). He told us about a seder sponsored by Cairo’s Jewish community, to be held at the 100 year old Sha’ar Hashamayim synagogue in the heart of downtown Cairo. At almost that same moment we received a text message from Samantha, a friend who is studying at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), telling us about the same seder. Deborah also received a notice about the event, via Facebook, from her friend Noor. It seemed like Sha’ar Hashamayim was the place to go. Gabi told us he would contact Carmen, the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, to see about reserving us a place. Sam told us she planned on going too, with some friends from CASA.

Transportation presented the next challenge, as it does whenever we want to take Hannah anywhere. Cairo has something like 80,000 black and white taxis. These are small cars (Fiat is a dominant brand, along with a number of other small car models not sold in the U. S.). They rarely have air-conditioning or seat belts. They tend to suffer from other ailments, major and minor. One guidebook speculates about the possible existence of a secondary market for window handles because the black-and-whites don’t seem to have any. A friend told us that all city cabs have one back door that doesn’t open. This was confirmed during a short ride when we loaded ourselves into the back seat and the right hand door wouldn’t shut. The driver pulled a screwdriver from a tool-slot on the dashboard and tried to fix the latch. When that didn’t work, he unscrewed the handle from the inside of the front door, screwed it into the back door, latched the back door, put the handle back on the front door, shut the back door, and locked it. When it was time to get out, we had no choice but to exit on the left side of the cab. Unloading a car-seat with a baby in it into a Cairo street is not my idea of safe. Black and white cabs also don’t have meters. You negotiate a fare, either when you get in, or after you get out. If you’re a non-Arabic speaking foreigner, this means you either feel like you’re being exploitative or you’re being taken.

The new yellow taxis seem a real improvement. They do require advance planning; you have to call ahead to request a pick-up. They often have air-conditioning and they are said to have seat-belts. They use a meter. But every time we’ve used a yellow cab, the driver has been late because he’s gotten lost looking for our house. There has sometimes been one working seat-belt somewhere in the back seat. (When there isn’t, we wedge Hannah’s car-seat between the front and back seats and sit on either side, holding tight). When we’ve asked for a pick-up at the back-end of our journey, there is always some drama: either the cab isn’t where we thought it was going to be, or it doesn’t show up at all. The driver always gets lost on the way home. (Cairo drivers don’t know Maadi, and vice versa. My proudest moment in Cairo so far may have been the time I discovered, after the cab was moving, that the driver didn’t know Maadi. It was after dark. I managed to get us home.) For this particular expedition, even if we felt confident that a yellow cab would pick us up on time and be waiting for us at the appointed departure time, we did not relish the idea of asking a random Egyptian cab driver to take us to a synagogue.

For most of our family trips, we’ve hired a private car and driver (which always makes me feel like laptop colonialist). The driver we’ve used most frequently knows how to find our house (although he always seems to take one wrong turn two minutes from home). His car is new and he keeps it clean. It has seat belts, front and back, and air conditioning. He speaks and understands enough English for me to communicate with him if Hannah and I are the only passengers. On a per miles basis it’s more expensive than a yellow cab. We pay LE 250 for a full day’s journey, which sounds like a lot but amounts to a little over $40. As a point of comparison, when we’ve taken a one-way cab ride from Maadi to Zamalek we’ve paid around LE 30, just over $5. We try to remind ourselves that, if we drove into Manhattan and parked our car for the day, we’d likely pay over $40 for tolls and parking, before we even got onto the subway or into a taxi.

Before we called Abd al-Nabi, the driver, I contacted the Israeli diplomat we met when we had dinner with Gabi and Mikhal. We knew he had a car because he drove us home from dinner. I asked whether he was going to the community seder and, if so, whether we could have a lift. He told us he was celebrating the holiday in Maadi with friends, but reiterated the importance of confirming our attendance with Carmen. Security would be an issue. No one would get in who wasn’t on the list.

The ride itself was a bonus for me. It was my first trip into downtown Cairo. On the way in, we drove through the heart of the Medieval city, then into modern Cairo. It was the first time I saw incontrovertible evidence that we really were in a city. Once in central Cairo, our driver had to ask for directions four times and took at least one wrong turn. Then we pulled up in front of the synagogue.

I think I have been to two community seders in my life. The first was in West Berlin in 1978. I don’t remember entering the building that night, but I remember coming to the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. A German police officer stood out front, carrying a sidearm and an automatic weapon. He was nice; we greeted him on every arrival.

Synagogue security in Cairo in 2009 is much tighter. The sidewalk in front of the synagogue has posts embedded in the cement to prevent cars from pulling up on the sidewalk—or into the alley—and exploding. Several soldiers with helmets and machine guns stood out front. We had to walk around the barriers and enter the secure area on the side away from the synagogue. After passing a security booth, our passports were examined and our names noted down by one man. Then another man checked our names off the list of expected attendees. Finally we were free to walk down the alley and enter the courtyard behind the synagogue.

The synagogue is a massive presence. I hope to see the inside of the sanctuary while we’re here. The courtyard behind it has a small, dry fountain in the middle. It was lined with rugs and hung with festive lights. Several members of the community came to greet us as we made our way through the courtyard and into the room where the seder would be held, a low ceilinged social room off the central courtyard. Long tables were set for about 100 people. At the suggestion of one of the organizers we sat in the back, by the door, where there was room for Hannah’s stroller and easy access to the courtyard if we needed to walk her around.

Some of the attendees were Arabic-speaking Egyptians who apparently spoke little or no English. Some spoke French (a woman touched Hannah’s foot and asked me if Hannah was fils ou garçon). But English was the event’s lingua franca. A table of women was dressed in conservative Muslim style. Deborah recognized a woman she had met twelve years before—an Egyptian Jewish woman who had married a Muslim. Her daughter wears the headscarf. An American family included a pre-teen boy who would be called up on to recite the four questions. There were a number of people who seemed to be affiliated with the American University in Cairo (AUC), CASA, or the other Arabic language program based at AUC. One attendee was a man Deborah knew as a fixture at Cairo expat events for many ears. (I had met him once before, when Deborah gave a talk in Philadelphia). She told me that, when she met him twelve years ago, he had been working on his dissertation for sixteen years. He was there with a man in his early twenties who I believe he introduced as his son. I didn’t think he was Jewish and Deborah confirmed that he isn’t. After dinner he took out his guitar and sat in the back of the room and sang a few numbers. He performed rather well, although I only saw one person join in the singing. I personally don’t think a guitar is out of place at a seder. When I was a graduate student and hosted seders for family and friends we always made time for labor songs, a few spirituals, and the odd Bob Marley number. But I think this was the first seder at which I’ve ever heard anyone sing Irish drinking songs.

At the head table Carmen introduced an Israeli man, here with his wife and almost grown son, who would be leading the seder. We referred to him as the rabbi but I think we later decided he wasn’t. It was often hard to tell what Carmen or anyone else at the head table said because there was no microphone. Moreover, at no point did people in the room stop talking. Carmen also introduced an ambassador. At first we thought she must be the Israeli ambassador. But when she read from the Haggadah, at the invitation of the man we’ll call the rabbi, her performance left no doubt she was American. Immediately after introducing the American Ambassador, Carmen introduced the seder’s youngest participant, Hannah. I was standing up, holding Hannah at the time so I got to absorb the warm glances of everyone who turned to look at her.

Because there was no microphone and all the guests talked all the time, this was the kind of ritual where, if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t know what was going on. Sitting next to us was a well-dressed Egyptian couple in their fifties or sixties. They made some attempts to follow along in the Haggadah, then closed the book. I tried to help them follow along on the English side of the page which seemed to help for a while. It turns out he is Carmen’s doctor and she invited him to the seder. During dinner he took Hannah for a while and flew her around above his head. When she spit up copiously on the pants of his well-cut pinstriped suit, he didn’t seem to mind in the least.

When I observed that Hannah had filled her diaper, Deborah said, “Do you want to show them how liberated American men are?” I took this as a challenge and picked up the diaper bag. The week before we had enjoyed a long afternoon visit with some Egyptian friends of Deborah’s. During the car ride home she told me she wasn’t sure whether anyone had noticed when I went into the bedroom to change Hannah’s diaper. She told me that, if anyone had noticed, it would have been worthy of comment. In Egypt, Deborah told me, diaper-changing is not men’s work. At the seder, I had no choice but to perform my liberation in public. The bathroom is a tiny affair off the courtyard: two toilet stalls and a urinal. The bathroom also holds a stove which I thought was used to make tea for the security guards. Deborah told me later that dinner was also heated up in this little white stove. The sink was outside. I saw no trash can anywhere. I pushed two chairs together in the courtyard, put down the pad, and had a changing station. I kneeled down, as I often do when working on a low surface. When I was done, the right knee of my trousers showed that I had been kneeling on a dusty courtyard. If I’d been thinking about my trousers (and my comfort) rather than about discretion, I would have set up the changing station on one of the rugs. I had to ask someone for a trash can but I didn’t really want to hand over the used diaper. He brought me a small waste-paper basket.

No wine was served during dinner. Wine of any kind is not easily procured in Cairo. In place of wine, we drank kosher grape juice. In place of the horseradish typically used as the maror (bitter herb) at American seders we ate a bitter leafy green vegetable. (Several of us accidentally ate the bitter herb when it was time to eat the green karpas, usually parsley or watercress back home, leaving us no choice but to eat karpas when it was time to eat maror). There was no haroset, a chopped-up melange of fruit, nuts, honey, and a little wine. When it was time to make a sandwich of maror, matzah, and something to represent the mortar the Israelites used to build Pithom and Ramses we used fig paste.

Dinner itself seemed to be largely a pot-luck affair. A long table against one wall was laid with a motley assortment of dishes: stuffed vegetables; some kind of sausage surrounded by french fries (good hot, not-so-good cold); eggplant in tomato sauce (very tasty); fruit salad; cookies (presumably made without leavening); crepes; macaroons. I saw no dairy products anywhere in the room, which suggested the organizers had warned all food contributers to observe the kosher stricture against mixing meat and milk. The Egyptian man who had been particularly assiduous about welcoming and seating guests carved the biggest turkey I have ever seen. It was easily twice Hannah’s size. The turkey had been stuffed with rice, a grain that is forbidden during Passover according to the rules established by the Ashkenazi rabbis of eastern and central Europe but permitted according to the rules established by the Sephardi and Mizrahi rabbis of Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East.

We had told Abd al- Nabi we would want to leave at 9. We figured this would give us time to enjoy the pre-meal rituals, eat dinner, and get Hannah home at a reasonable hour. It turns out we didn’t miss much. Samantha reported that the rabbi tried to get the post-meal rituals underway but, when he couldn’t get the congregation to stop talking, he gave up. Once it was clear the event was over, the guests were apparently shooed out fairly efficiently. This was probably a good move, not only for security reasons, but because I have never been to a Jewish event where people said goodbye quickly.

Hannah behaved as she usually did: strapped into her car seat she cried while we were stuck in traffic. Once we started moving, she fell asleep and slept the whole way home.

"Expat Heaven"

If you look for information about Maadi in the Lonely Planet Guide to Egypt, as I did a few weeks before we left Ithaca, you will find it’s literally not on the map for the same reasons that guidebooks to New York City don’t say much about Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago guidebooks mention Winnetka and Lake Forest only in passing; and the authors of Washington, D. C. guidebooks don’t devote many pages to the tourist attractions in Bethesda, Maryland. If you graze in Cairo, The Practical Guide, however, a guide not for Anglophone tourists but for Anglophone residents and potential residents, you’ll find Maadi at every turn. You’ll find information about Maadi bookstores; the local cycling club (I’m an avid cyclist but I value my life too highly to get on a bike in Cairo); Maadi real estate (to lease or buy); medical care in Maadi; Maadi gyms; and Maadi shopping. In the section about neighborhoods, the authors have this to say:

"Maadi is expat heaven, very suburban, very expensive, very American. Some people love it and never leave it; other would not be caught dead living there. Malls, ugly high-rises, and heavy traffic alternate with tree-lined streets and lovely villas. Excellent schools, good shopping, some decent restaurants, not much nightlife, very community and family oriented. Impossible street naming system involving the apparently random assignment of random numbers. The Metro into town is great. (99)"

The Cairo Maps supplement to the Practical Guide has an overview map of metropolitan Cairo on the opening pages. The overview map shows the page numbers of the detail maps that will follow. For the most part, they show a continuous grid of boxes, extending from the lower right (southwest) to the upper left (northeast), like a half-finished scrabble game filling in on a diagonal. The southwest corner is Giza, the area that borders the pyramids. The northeast is Heliopolis, home to the Egyptian President and many of his ministries. The most upscale shopping and housing in Cairo is in Heliopolis and Nasr City, the adjacent district. A few squares in the southeast corner, unconnected with the rest of the grid, as if placed there by a scrabble player who did not understand the rules, show you more or less where Maadi is.

If Deborah and I had come to Cairo for a two month stay before Hannah was born we would probably be living in Zamalek, “the in-town expat heaven” (99). Because we arrived with a four month old baby and a non-Arabic speaking daddy we are living in Maadi. The air is cleaner than in central Cairo (Cairo has some claim on the dubious honor of world’s most polluted city); the streets are leafier; the crowds are smaller; the streets are quieter; it’s easier to cross the street. This last may sound like a minor point but the absence of traffic lights in Cairo shocks a first-time visitor, even one who has been warned. To cross the street, you edge out, anticipate a gap between cars, and walk confidently across one lane, betting your life that oncoming traffic will slow down slightly. Drivers in other lanes expect you to pause between lanes as you wait for the next gap. So far I’ve tried it on a few of the quietest, most residential streets of Maadi, on a few less quiet streets, and in a few hair-raising roundabouts. I’ve seen old women, schoolchildren, families cross three or four lanes of fast moving traffic. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to do that, even alone. My natural caution about stepping in front of moving vehicles is significantly heightened when my baby is strapped to my chest.

Our apartment in expat heaven has more square feet than our house in Ithaca. It is one of six apartments in the building: each takes up an entire floor. We have four large bedrooms (one set up as a study, one more or less empty), a big eat-in kitchen, a spacious living room and dining room, a grand entryway, two full bathrooms, and closet space to die for. We have two balconies. We pay rent that would be exorbitant for most Cairenes (it’s not cheap for us) but is not necessarily high for the neighborhood, or for the diplomatic staff and international business people who seem to live around us.

Our apartment was still being remodeled the day before we arrived. The wall between the kitchen and dining room was taken down. I suspect there had been doors between the living room and dining room which were also removed. Marble counter-tops and backsplashes were installed throughout the kitchen. The entire place received a paint job that, when it comes to detail work, would qualify as slapdash if you had hired your teenage children and a few of their friends to do the work. The kitchen has no drawers, only cabinets, and, as part of the renovation, the cabinets had wood-grain contact paper pasted onto all the exterior surfaces. We have a new refrigerator and a far-from-new gas stove and washing machine. The landlord dropped off a television set about a week into our stay. If we actually want to watch something on the TV we’ll have to buy a satellite hook-up. For the time being, we poach wireless internet from our downstairs neighbors when they are not using it (the wireless service can only serve one computer at a time). The apartment has parquet floors which were varnished the day before we arrived. (This made for an aromatic first night. Fortunately, we had been warned by our downstairs neighbor). Most of the furniture alludes to the styles of French imperialism. The pieces are well worn, reasonably solid, presumably part of the furnishings that belonged to the landlord’s parents when they still lived in one of the upstairs apartments. A few pieces—the better bed and its bed-side tables, the dining room set—seem to be Scandinavian modern.

We chose the building in part because we could reserve the apartment before we even got here, thanks to the good offices of our friend Michelle who has been in Cairo since January and lives downstairs with her husband Tamir and their almost two year old son Tal. She learned an apartment in the building was coming available; put us in touch with the landlady (who administers the building with her brother); gave us negotiating tips; vouched for us to the owners; and kept us posted on the progress of the renovations. She also stocked the kitchen with bottled water, eggs, baby friendly laundry detergent, and bread. She lent us towels the night we arrived. The landlady supplied us with two new sets of sheets, two pillows, two bars of soap, dish detergent, and some basic kitchenware. She charged us for all of the stuff she bought at Carrefour but not for the plates and tea mugs she brought from her own apartment. We had to stock the rest of the kitchen (in minimalist fashion) during our first week. This was an adventure in itself. This is endemic to Cairo; all basic tasks are adventures.

With population estimated to be over 20 million Cairo ranks among the world’s largest cities. So far, I imagine that Cairo is sort of like Los Angeles if you doubled the population, removed the ocean, the mountains, the sidewalks, the freeways, the traffic lights, the zoning, the smog control initiatives, and the organized collection of trash. And narrowed all the streets. And reduced the scale of all the buildings and moved them much closer together. And most people drove with their headlights off most of the time, even at night. And if Los Angeles had a built environment that included layers of history dating back for 5000 years.

I can’t say I have much of a sense of Cairo as a whole city. I haven’t spent enough time anywhere but Maadi. Indeed, there is much of Maadi I haven’t seen. When I’ve left the neighborhood, it’s always been in a car with someone else driving (you would never catch me behind the wheel in this city). Normally I have a good sense of direction; if I’m paying attention I can usually retrace a route after I’ve been there once. But when I get into a car in Cairo I get lost very quickly.

Maadi, particularly our neighborhood, reminds me of some of the older, residential sections of Tel Aviv or Miami Beach. The buildings are similar in age and scale. I see a similar combination of luxury and seediness, although the luxury is less elegant and the seediness is more profound. When I walk on the quiet street called Road 21 from our building to the Community Services Association a few blocks away, I pass apartment buildings that are five or six stories high. Most have walls around them. Many have security booths: small wooden booths that resembles phone booths or ticket booths at college football stadiums. They have a guy sitting inside or, more often, in front, perhaps talking on his cell phone, possibly drinking tea, usually wearing a semi-automatic weapon. Some of buildings in the neighborhood (but not on Road 21) are official: the UN Drugs and Crime Office; the Embassies of Mexico and South Africa.

I usually pass someone who is washing a car (a car he drives, not one he owns) and someone who is watering something. I was particularly struck by this on the Thursday after we arrived, which was the day our building and much of the neighborhood had no water. I walked to the CSA, where they did have water, a blessing for anyone who wants to wash his hands or use the toilet. By the time I walked home at about 3:00 p.m. water had been restored and the hoses were being used in numbers. The cars on these streets are newer and shinier and bigger than most of the cars one sees in Cairo. Many are SUVs or Mercedes. If I’m walking after school I might see drivers ferrying schoolchildren

If I walk for a few blocks in the other direction I find myself in North Africa. As Tamir said when he walked us around the neighborhood, “you are now leaving the colony and entering Egypt.” After I cross a three lane street (terrifying) I come to a roundabout where a dumpster and an adjoining pile of trash provide lunch for a donkey harnessed to a watermelon cart and steady meals for the many cats who roam the streets. If I am bold enough to sidle around the dumpster I come to Tamir’s favorite pita bakery. (It is the also the favorite of Abdu, the building manager who took me there another time). The bakery is a shack, perhaps 12 feet wide and 6 feet deep, that opens onto the street. The bread is piled on a table and on racks, fresh from the oven. You pick out the ones you want and pay in very small bills. (Everyone in Cairo hoards small bills.) If you walk straight through the roundabout you can find shops where Tamir purchases bulk goods: rice, lentils, dried herbs. Further along is the vegetable souk, where Abdu took me. (Tamir offered to take Deborah and me to the souk during his tour of local food outlets but we declined because Hannah was strapped to my chest and we weren’t ready to take Hannah into the crowd).

Abdu and I entered the souk after passing through a narrow alleyway, several blocks long, paved with dirt. The market goes on for blocks. Women leaving the souk really do carry heavy loads on their heads. I saw Eels in bathtubs. Entire legs of lamb. Live chickens. Abdu stopped to buy me a drink at a kiosk. I had no idea what I was drinking. Abdu watched me sniff and take tentative sips while he quaffed his in a few gulps. The language barrier limits our communication but it was clear he was amused. I called Deborah on my mobile phone and asked her to ask Abdu what I was drinking. It was sugar cane juice. Abdu was shopping for dinner. He bought okra at one place. He looked at the chickens but decided on lamb. The butcher had the meat out on a circular wooden butcher block. He hacked off a few pieces and put them in a plastic bag. A man hanging around the butcher stand shook my hand and welcomed me to Egypt. At our last stop, Abdu bought a kilo of tomatoes and asked the seller to put them in the bag with the meat. Deborah told me it sounded like the ingredients for classic Egyptian cooking. On the way home, Abdu asked me in his limited English if we had souks in the United States. I tried to explain (without any Arabic) that some cities have farmers’ markets but they are usually small and they may only be open once a week and most people shop for food in big indoor stores like Carrefour. What seemed to really strike Abdu was the once a week part. When I told this story to Deborah she said, “ the real answer to the question is ‘no’.”