Last Days in Cairo: 4

Thursday (May 28) of my last week in Cairo Jim and I made our last trip into Islamic Cairo. I had been looking through my trusty National Geographic Traveler guide to Egypt for facts for my posts on touring Islamic Cairo and came across some things that I had missed those first two times around which I felt merited a third and final trip. The first was the Museum of Islamic Art and the second the Gayer-Anderson Museum. The Gayer-Anderson Museum was connected to Ibn-Tulun, which made it even more disappointing to miss since I had just been to Ibn-Tulun the week before.

The Museum of Islamic Art

Jim and I took a cab to Opera Station on Zamalek and took the metro from there to Attba, then walked to the Museum of Islamic Art. This walk was exciting because it was through a part of the city that I really had not been in at all. Spencer and I had walk from Attba to the Khan a couple days before but that was in a completely different direction. It was one of my last days in Cairo and I was excited to again be finding my way around by map in a completely foreign place. We walked to Midan al-Attba and from there the museum was a straight shot down Sharia al-Qal'a. Not too much past an outdoor furniture market was Midan Bab al-Khalq and our museum. The building was a massive tan and brown striped stone structure. We walked up to the entrance on Qal'a Street and were turned away. The guys working the desk inside told us to walk around to the other entrance for the museum. Well the main entrance, facing the square (midan), was bordered up. We walked around the entire perimeter of the building as far was the fences would allow and could not find any alternative entrances. We went back to the first one, on Qal'a Street, and again asked how to get into the museum. It was only then that they told was that the museum was closed and wouldn't reopen for another three months. I'm not exactly sure why they couldn't have told us that the first time around.

I was disappointed about the museum being closed, but this did leave as more time for the rest of our day. Ibn-Tulun, where the Gayer-Anderson museum was located, had to be accessed from either Sharia Bur Said or Sharia Muhammed Ali, both of which met at Midan Bab al-Khalq. We chose Bur Said and walked a distance away from the traffic of the square before hailing a cab. He dropped us off at Ibn-Tulun and we made our way into the mosque. Just like last time, the guards at the entrance were at great pains to emphasize that Ibn-Tulun had no entrance fee and that no one was owed any baqshish. Once inside the outer wall of the mosque complex and in the area between the outer wall and the walls of the mosque proper we took a left. At the corner was the entrance to the Gayer-Anderson Museum, which did require an entrance fee and baqshish paid to the tour guide. The museum was a 16th century house owned by an eccentric British lawyer/doctor/officer in the late imperial period. The interior decorations were preserved, complete with secret passageways, intricate wood lattice work, separate men's and women's lounging areas, isolated courtyards and gardens, rooftop patios looking over the mosque walls, and indoor fountains. Each room had a different purpose and different theme. There was the miniature art gallery and a miniature museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Various rooms were Syrian, Turkish, and Chinese themed. There were also the standard sitting, reading, and drafting rooms of such aristocratic British homes, as well as a library. The authentic Islamic architecture and interior decorations made the museum well worth the trip and price.

The Gayer-Anderson Museum from the garden in the back

An interior room of the Gayer-Anderson

A fine example of Gayer-Anderson's eccentricity (that's him in picture if you didn't get the hint)

Jim needed to go to the Khan to pick up some more gifts for family members and I still had two taola boards to pick up from my guy at the woodworking shop. We decided to walk there from Ibn-Tulun and retraced much of the route the taxi had taken us on from the Islamic Art Museum. Again, I really appreciated the opportunity to walk through a part of Cairo so devoid of tourists and people looking to sell to tourists. It felt nice to be in a place where Cairenes went about their daily lives without the intense focus on the tourist economy. We walked northwest on Qadri street, with Ibn-Tulun's distinctive minaret at our backs, until we met up with Bur Said. Here we took a right and walked up to Midan Bab al-Khalq. On the corner of Bur Said and Sharia Ahmad Mahir we found a small, grimy koushary shop and grabbed a cheap lunch. From here we took a right on Ahmad Mahir until we reached Bab Zuwayla, the southern medieval gate of Islamic Cairo. It was refreshing to enter the Khan from such a strange direction. I had been to this part of the bazaar before and had even climbed the western tower of Bab Zuwayla, but I had always come from Midan Hussein and al-Azhar in the north. I had never entered the bazaar from its southern edges, actually entering through that massive stone gate through which so many medieval travelers and merchants must have entered the the old city as well.

I wished to come in this way because I wanted to purchase something from a man whose stall was located just inside the gate, opposite the white and pink striped mosque, and we otherwise had no other reason for being this far south of the main bazaar. It would have been a long side trip had we come in through the more centrally located Midan Hussein. What I wanted to purchase was a yard or so of that diversely multi-purposed and colorfully patterned cloth that was so ubiquitous throughout Cairo. Cloth of this type could be seen draped across the scaffolding of building under repair protecting the workers, decorating the tables of vendors in the bazaar, and even on the gates of Versailles Palace, the cafe right next to our dorm. After buying some fabric for myself and Spencer we walked north past Qasr al-Ghuri, through the tunnels of the pedestrian underpass, and into Khan al-Khalili proper. Merchant stalls run from Bab Zuwayla all the way north to Bab al-Futuh, but as far as I know only anything north of al-Azhar is considered an official part of Khan al-Khalili.

Approaching Bab Zuwayla on Sharia Ahmed Mahir

Thankfully my guy at the woodshop had my taola boards in. I had requested three wood-grain boards. Unlike the one I had purchased earlier, which was decorated with colored in-lays, the ones I had commissioned were decorated with different shades of wood stain. This is the type that had caught my eye before but had so upsettingly been sold to a high-bidding tourist the day before I promised I would come in to buy it. Finally I purchased the three boards: two for myself and one I for Spencer who had to take an exam that day. I also impulsively bought a framed ancient Egyptian scene painted on Papyrus, my one kitschy purchase of the trip. These were the last of many items our group purchased from the man in this shop. I know that Mark bought at least one taola board, a mother-of-pearl inlaid Quaran, a book stand, and possibly a mirror. Jim bought some mother-of-pearl inlaid jewelry boxes. We said our goodbyes to the man who had been a continuous part of our Egypt experience. Mark and I discovered his shop on my first trip to the Khan one day in February, less than a week after the bombing, and I had stopped in to say hello of trip to the Khan since then. On the way out he gave each of us a gift: a small box decorated in the same style as the taola boards I had just purchased. I was touched by the gift. This man, just like all the others in the Khan, was in the business of selling items, mostly to overpaying tourists. Very rarely did they just give anything away that wasn't included as an incentive in some sort of haggling deal, no matter how small the item. This gift was completely unexpected.

Down the main street of the Khan, the one that ran north to south between the two medieval gates, Jim found a lady selling ladle-shaped metal cups for making Turkish coffee. They were beautiful and graciously priced, but I was running out of room in my luggage and out of money. Jim crossed one more item off his list and we were then off to find him a galabiya. Here we walked west down a very long and very crowded street mostly selling clothing items, the same street where I had bought a Zamalek football jersey for my brother on my first trip to the Khan, and the same street where I first noticed the hissing/kissing sound Egyptians use instead of saying "watch out, get out of the way, wide load, beep-beep," etc. as some guy was trying to plow through the crowd with a cart laden with sacks of who knows what. Looking at my map now this must have been Sharia al-Muski, although the name is really irrelevant since we never needed it to navigate our way around and most Egyptians don't really use nor need street names to navigate either. There are just streets and landmarks. Names are useful only in conjunction with a map, and this is if you are lucky enough to find the street name posted anywhere; most Egyptians wouldn't know the name of the street they took every day to work unless it was one of the few major thorough-fares in the city. For some smaller streets I feel as if the name exists only on the map, as there are in realy life no signs indicating the street's name or people aware of such a name. Anyway, this portion of the Khan I always remembered for its crowds and proliferation of clothing products, and we soon found a vendor willing to Jim a decent galabiyya in the 40-60LE range.

We taxied back to Zamalek, careful as usual to walk a short distance away from the Khan before grabbing a cab. This decreased the likelihood of getting a cabbie with unreasonable price expectations. I usually paid 15LE for the ride from the Khan back to the dorm on Zamalek. I know this is a little high, but it is by no means exorbitant and it's almost always accepted without protest. You can pay 10LE if you are willing to haggle, but never did I leave the Khan in the mood to haggle. The Khan is compact, crowded, and at that time of year hot and sweaty. When it came time to leave I had always had my fill of haggling and felt physically drained. Any extra haggling effort to me just wasn't worth it, especially when that extra 5LE amounts to only $0.90US split between a couple of riders. Some of us fought for the cheaper rates on principle: "I'm not an ignorant foreigner. I'm not a tourist just passing through for the week. I can speak Arabic and I've been living here for months. I know the fair Egyptian price just as well as you do and I will not bet taken advantage of." I totally agree with the viewpoint in other circumstances, but again, fighting for $0.90 just wasn't a battle I was willing to fight. Besides, I was making almost 4 times more per month in my monthly stipend from ND than a government-employed Egyptian doctor. That extra $0.90 is worth a lot more to him than it is to me.

We found a cab parked along the curb and said Zamalek. He asked how much up front and we said 15LE. He shook his head and pulled forward a bit. Then another cab swooped in and took his place. We made the same offer and he gladly accepted without protest. This seemed to be a common practice around tourist areas. Some of the cabs sit and wait for the unwitting tourists willing to pay the high prices. This is obviously more profitable, but sometimes I wonder how many takers they actually get. Jim and I would run into this one more time before we left, outside the Egyptian National Museum on Friday, our last day in Cairo.

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.