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.