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.
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