Last Days in Cairo: 3

On Wednesday I tried to visit the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art but it was closed during the time I tried to visit. I showed up around 2:30. The man at the door instructed me that the museum was only open from 8am to 2pm, and then again from 5pm to 9pm. So instead I made the half-hour walk back up the island to the HSBC Bank, across the street from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf that I started going to with Julia during the last couple of weeks to study. At the bank I cashed the traveler's checks that had been sitting in my pocket since I left the US four months earlier. I would need the money for my trip to the Khan the next day with Jim and for random airport necessities on my flight home on Saturday.

That night our professor friend from Cairo University took me out for fatir and sandwiches from Na'ba. We walked north along the western side of Zamalek, almost all the way to Sequoia, and took the ferry across the Nile over to Doqqi. We caught a cab to Na'ba, a fast food restaurant offereing Egyptian food. A police officer was kind enough to let the cabbie park on the side of the busy street while we picked up our sandwiches. Since I was American I carried a bit of influence and rules could be bent. Both the cabbie and the police officer excitedly mentioned Obama (one of the few English words they know), and the officer muttered something about Iraq under his breath. The cab then took us to a fatir restaurant where we got two vegetable fatirs before walking across the University Bridge to the Professor's Club on the other eastern bank of the Nile. The professor pointed out the Israeli Embassy. It occupied the top two floors of the first building north of the bridge on the western bank. Security around the building was tight.

At the nadi we discussed Egypt. He was interested in my reflections on my time in Cairo and what I liked, disliked, and if I would miss the city. I told him I would absolutely miss it, but I had a hard time articulating any other feelings. There were things that I loved and hated about Cairo, and I can say neither that I loved the place nor that I hated it. It was just Cairo and I liked it for what it was. He wanted something more concrete, so I told him that I enjoyed how exotically different things were here than in America, and that this made daily life a little more exciting. I also told him that I had a really hard time with how many Egyptian men treated females, especially the foreign ones. He said that this harassment came from the fact that the younger generations were too poor to afford to be able to get married, and that those who could afford it usually couldn't accumulate the necessary money until their late 20s or early 30s. For this reason the youth had developed the very untraditional habit of befriending members of the opposite sex, often going on walks along the Corniche al-Nil or standing on a bridge, staring at the water and talking, maybe even holding hands. While the nature of these boy-girl. He said that society didn't know how to handle the rapid changes in male-female realations. While these "relationships" are definitely new and will have a unpredictable affect on Egyptian society, I found this explanation problematic. For one, Egyptian society has not always been as traditional as it is today. Two, this might explain why some young men were confused as to how they should talk to women, but it didn't explain harassment by the older men, who harassed just as much as the young ones.

A more effective explanation was that our media gives Egyptians a very poor image of our women's morals. In almost all American TV shows or movies, the men and women are almost never faithful (if they were it would certainly make for a boring drama). It is from these TV shows and movies that most Egyptians learn about American women. In their interpretation, having a boyfriend means nothing in terms of fidelity, and even married women can easily be persuaded to cheat. I find this explanation more reasonable. I would not say that American media is representative of the average American woman, but I can see how if this is what you depend on to learn about real American people, you might draw some of these conclusions. But this reasoning still doesn't explain why Egyptian women experience the same harassement as the western ones. And in either case, the harassment is inexcusable no matter what the cause. It's funny how quickly some of these men violate the same feminine modesty that they so vocally champion.

Our talk also turned to the Egyptian government, the prospects of Egypt's future, and the recent slaughter of Egypt's 300,000 pigs in the effort to combat the recent international Swine Flu scare. Corruption kept the government from making any meaningful progress in improving the situation of the Egyptian People. Bureaucratic inefficiency and further corruption had been slowing things down at Cairo University. He even said that it would take a miracle for Egypt to in 50 years maintain the same standard of living as the present, nevermind improvement or progress.

All 300,000 pigs in Cairo, which many poor Coptic Christian depended on for food, had recently been slaughtered to prevent the spread of Swine Flu, even though some scientists doubt that the flu can be passed from pig to man, making this a grossly unnecessary and costly measure. Some saw the slaughter as an excuse to further harm Egypt's minority Christian population while proving to radical Muslim groups, of whom the government was ever scared, that the regime was not in opposition to Islam. The professor and I disagreed on the motivations for the slaughter, but he was fearful of purchasing anything with meat in it that day. He said that the meat would not be thrown away but sold, and since pork would not fetch a good price in the days of the Swine Flu scare, it would be made into sausages and marketed as a non-pork product. I was amused by the prospect of the Egyptian government slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pigs, due to the Swine Flue or Muslim radicals or both, only to sell this potentially Swine Flu infected pork meat to unsuspecting Muslims. I have no idea how true this scenario may have been but I find it amusing nonetheless.

We finished up at the nadi and walked back across the bridge. We took a minibus back to 26 July, and walked across to the Zamalek side and back to my dorm. The professor apologized that he did not get to see Mark again before he left and explained that he had been very busy the past couple of weeks with conferences in Karachi, London, and Aden. I told him not to worry; Mark had moved up his departure date by a week and we had forgotten to let him know, so he shouldn't blame himself for missing him. I agreed to see him again Friday night before I finally left.