As I write this, I have just under thirty hours left in Egypt. One more full day. I’m really quite sad about the prospect of leaving.
The last two days have been really great. Yesterday was Lizz’s mom’s last day in Cairo, so I went with them and Matt in the afternoon to do a bit of silly tourist shopping and also bought a duffel bag for about five dollars because I need a bit more room in my bag coming home. We had koshari and walked around downtown and Zamalek, just wandering and, for me, getting some last looks at parts of the city that I likely won’t visit again before I leave.
In the evening, we and Max all met up at this fancy restaurant in Zamalek for a final dinner as a house (plus extras). The restaurant is, more or less, Cairo’s one upscale Egyptian restaurant – very popular, reasonably expensive for Cairo. We ordered a huge variety of foods, most of which were quite good. The menu even had koshari, and written in parentheses next to it was “eat like an Egyptian.” We saw koshari for five or six times what we would normally pay at a fancier koshari shop and Max and I just had to try it. Considering how much koshari I’ve eaten in this country, and from how many different places, I’m pretty sure that it would have been irresponsible not to have had it. And the verdict: definitely inferior to the best of normal koshari I’ve eaten, but not bad.
The highlight of dinner, much more than the food, was what turned into an amazingly hilarious conversation about super colliders. Undoubtedly this was one of those you had to be there things, but briefly what happened was that for some reason I started talking about the Large Hadron Collider that is about to come online in Switzerland. Max started asking a bunch of joking and absurd questions about it, and expressing general disbelief that you could get two particles to hit eachother after shooting them through miles long tubes. At some point, I asked Max how you would say Supercollider in Arabic, and of course he didn’t know – most likely there isn’t actually a word for it. Lizz, though, took a stab at translating it and came up with MuSaDam Kabeer which means, more or less, Big Crasher or Big Smacker, and it’s even funnier because Saddam Hussein’s name comes from the same root. So we ended up talking for most of the rest of the evening about the absurdities of the MuSaDam Kabeer and, more specifically, about Yemen (where Max is off to) building one. And about religion-based science. It was quite great.
Then, after dinner, we came back home and Lizz and her mom had to head to the airport – Lizz was off to Turkey and her mother to India – and I said bye to Lizz.
***
Today, Matt, who stayed with us last night, Max, and I just hung around most of the morning and early afternoon. We listened to music and chatted and Max cooked tuna macaroni and cheese for lunch all the while cleaning his clothes more or less by hand and bitching about Mansour.
Max wanted to possibly buy a few new pieces of clothing before heading to Yemen, so Matt and I went with him to this giant outdoor used clothing market a bit north of downtown. Most of the clothes are horribly out of date and ugly, but there were some decent retro looking men’s shirts and the like among them, which was what Max was looking for. This market is very much an Egyptian market, and so we three white guys were pretty anomalous walking through and of course attracted a fair amount of attention, and the sales guys would come up to us and try to talk to us in broken English. Max, I suppose tired of this after several years in Egypt, simply pretended like he didn’t understand when people spoke English to him. He would just look confused and say in Arabic that he didn’t understand, and when asked where we were from he would say Poland. No one spoke Polish.
We did our shopping, not actually buying anything but having a fun time browsing, and had some really wonderful coconut juice at this little juice shop near the market. We went in and asked for orange juice, but the guy behind the counter insisted we try some juice called subya that none of us had ever heard of. We tried it though, and it was great – incredibly refreshing – and between the three of us we had two big glasses and a bottle of coke. When we went to pay, they said two and a half pounds, and we all thought he meant per drink, but, in fact, he only wanted the equivalent of about forty cents for all three. And he wouldn’t even take a tip.
Walking back to find a cab, we passed a little shop selling motorcycles. Max’s dream, it seems, is to go to Sudan, and he has talked often of buying a cheap motorcycle and riding it to Khartoum, and when we passed the shop he decided to ask how much the bikes cost. He and I made bets on how much, I figured 15,000 pounds and he thought 12,000. Actual cost: 2800 pounds, about 600 dollars – we remain fairly disconnected from the true costs of things here. Six hundred dollars, though, is something that Max can afford even on his small salary, and he talked about buying a bike the rest of the day.
Matt left after we got back home and Max and I cleaned the apartment and listened to music. At some point, his friend Emily called him and asked if we wanted to do a felucca ride tonight because she was taking a visiting friend on one. I’d never been, and it was a nice night, so we decided to go and called Ben to come along. The felucca ride, sailing on the Nile at dusk on my last full night in Egypt, was really nice. It wasn’t too hot, and out on the water it was quiet and pretty. Really good.
The felucca dropped us off across the street from the Four Seasons, and after we disembarked we ended up in a conversation about how nice the bathroom at the hotel was, and then that turned into a suggestion by someone to go drink overpriced juice somewhere in the hotel. Our group, looking sweaty and dirty (me with dirty feet, sandals, and pants rolled to the knee) entered the city’s fanciest hotel and felt terribly out of place, but because we are Western no one bothers us. We thought maybe there was a rooftop bar, so we went to the top and just found rooms, but eventually found an outside area on the fifth floor. I really can’t describe to you just how much fancier this outside restaurant, pool, and sitting area was than anything else I’ve seen in Egypt. It was crazy – we were seated on couches with our own plasma TV outside overlooking the pool. Everyone else there appeared to be rich Saudis or Emiratis.
And so we sat for a couple hours, talking and ending the day in Egypt’s fanciest hotel sipping juice forty times more expensive and half as good as what we had had hours earlier in a grimy market across town.
Wonderful day, all in all. I wish I had more.
