Postcard from Eqypt: Cairo, November 3rd

It’s our first day of sightseeing, and the first stop is the Egyptian Museum.  It opened in 1901, and it feels as though not much has changed in how things are displayed since then.  Lots of wood and glass cabinets with typewritten cards identifying the objects, and priceless 3000 year-old sarcophagi just sitting on a platform somewhere.  It adds something appropriate, however, to the experience of the antiquities – something Indiana Jones-like.

1. 

Interior of the Egyptian Museum

The Tutankhamun artifacts are spectacular.  And seeing his funeral mask up close is like seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or the statue of David in Florence – it’s such an iconic image already burned into your psyche with all sorts of associations, that you feel a deep connection to it and a fascination with it.  I looked at it from every angle for a very long time.

Almost as compelling an attraction for our group, is the former National Democratic Party headquarters building – that of Hosni Mubarak’s party – just behind the museum, which was set on fire by protesters during the recent revolution.  Its burned-out hulk adds some sobering realism to the romance of the revolution.

National Democratic Party Headquarters, just off Tahrir Square

Our second stop is the 14th-century Citadel of Salah Al-Din with the 19th-century mosque added by Mameluke ruler, Muhammad Ali.  It’s a lovely Turkish-style building, but the real charmer is the lighting inside the prayer hall.

Interior of Muhammad Ali's Alabaster Mosque

We have lunch in the Khan El Khalini market, an oppressive gauntlet of cheap souvenir hawkers, but it’s nothing a cappuccino at the Shaik Shaban Café can’t assuage.

View from the Shaik Shaban Cafe

In the evening, we take in the sound and light show at the Pyramids of Giza, which we’ll visit tomorrow.  A mangy dog wanders in the sand in the foreground, and when the music swells at a momentous, triumphal moment in the story, he howls – almost on cue – like a cartoon cliché of a howling dog.  As were leaving, he prowls among us, and I congratulate him on his performance.  He looks up at me, as if to say, “Why, Thank You.”

Postcard from Egypt: Cairo, November 1st

I have a free day before the official start of the tour.

I go to the fitness center right after breakfast.  There is a young trainer who gets me going on the stationary bicycle.  I don’t think he speaks much English at all.  There’s a television mounted on the wall in front of me.  The trainer is watching a man in traditional garb address some kind of meeting in an official, government-looking sort of place.  The man speaks in Arabic, of course.

An older man, who might be the health club manager, comes in.  He greets me; then says something obviously chiding to the young trainer, who immediately changes the channel to a Polish station playing American music videos, obviously for my benefit.  They’re counting down the top ringtone downloads.    Having just finished reading an Egyptian novel in which the clash between Western values and traditional Islam was a big theme, it seems like almost everything in the videos is about sex or partying, or sex and partying, but mostly sex.  The young trainer watches the music videos as intently as he watched the earlier program.  I think to myself, “If this were someone’s primary exposure to the West, they’d have a very distorted view of how we actually live.”

I spend the day by the pool.  Aside from me, there’s just one European family of five and another Western couple.

Nile view from the Ramses Hilton pool

 

Pool Chairs at the Ramses Hilton

At dinner in the Terrace Café, the staff outnumbers the customers.  The young hostess chats me up a bit, assuring me that life is going on despite the Revolution.  “We are coming to work every day,” she tells me, “it’s safe here.”  She says she liked Mubarak; he seemed like a good man.  “We don’t know who will be President; I hope it’s someone from the Army.  The Army is good here; we like them.”

At the fancier Indian restaurant next door, there’s not a single customer.  The nicely dressed staff are standing around as though floating in a sea of starched white tablecloths, choppy with napkin whitecaps.

I watch Al Jazeera a bit in my room, listening to the Arabic sounds – the melodic vowels and raspy consonants.  Some images I see clear up a mystery from my layover in Jordan.  The men in white “sarongs” and “shawls” were wearing the ihram, the required clothing of someone making the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, which begins November 4th.  The ihram indicates equality of the pilgrim before God.

Then I realize the answer to another mystery that bugged me when I arrived in my room – a weird sticker with a blue symbol plastered on my nightstand.  Now I understand it’s indicating the direction of Mecca (spelled Makkah on the sticker) so you can face it when you pray.

Face this way