One-way conversation.

Safwan - "I used to play football. Professional. I was really good."
Joshua - "Really? What made you stop?"
Safwan - (silence and a lengthy pause as he shakes his head) "There's no place for that here, I can't in my life. 24/7 in Cairo you have to concentrate just to stay alive."


A Richter scale works by quantifying how devastating a movement is, increasing by one hundred percent with each number behind the decimal point, and one thousand percent with each number before it, so that an earthquake measuring a 7.0 is ten times more violent than one that is 6.0, which in turn is also ten times more than a 5.0..... I'm not going to arbitrarily enumerate the difference in danger and trauma between Cairo and all my previous travels, but the very fact that I'm contemplating how things grow exponentially worse in such a short span should be an indication in itself.

This is my twentieth country. It is also the first in which I have not been mistaken at least once for a local by another local, who usually have stopped to ask me directions or about a train schedule. This ability to blend in has been pretty crucial since I've avoided being an obvious target for would-be hustlers in Barcelona or corrupt policemen in Russia. Entering the Middle East and then Asia, this is a luxury I am sacrificing. But I didn't realize the scale of this sacrifice until Friday.

My plane arrived at the Cairo airport at 2 a.m., and the driver my hostel was supposed to send for me with one of those cute little signs with my name failed to show. So as I gameplanned outside on just how the fuck to cheaply make it to an address in a city with virtually no public transportation in the dead of night, I was approached by scores of cab drivers trying to convince me to come with them. Except for one. That wasn't what he wanted.

"Why white?"
"......What?"
Far more aggressive this time around. "WHY you're white?""
"Why am I white??"
He nodded, his eyes seething further as he waited. I knew the answer he wanted to hear... I'd already been called "Obama" several times by the customs agent who stamped my visa.
"Because my family is white."

And I gave in to the reality of the situation, that standing around in anger and exasperation wasn't going to make my driver appear and I had to get out of here, so I booked a cab with two middlemen for 10 Euros. This price was settled upon and confirmed 3 times, and 30 seconds later it mysteriously jumped to 15 because of a phantom airport toll, and then finally back again to 10 when they were reluctantly forced to admit I'm not a complete moron and wouldn't pay that.

I didn't reach my hostel til 4 in the morning. That's a 2 hour ride from the airport, not because of distance or traffic, but because the driver didn't know where the address was. It's one of the main streets in downtown Cairo. Forty minutes earlier, he pulled over on a street in which thirty men were hanging outside talking animatedly. Thirty mouths that fell silent, thirty heads that turned to follow my face in the passenger window.

"Here."
"This isn't the right place," without hesitation.
"Yes. Here. Hotel."

It was the wrong street, street number, and name. It was also 8 km away from where I was actually staying, though I didn't know he was that far off at the time. The same stoic tenacity that had dropped the price back to 10 Euros made him restart the car. In all, he pulled over about fifteen times to ask for directions. Five of those times, he silently got out of the car, turning it off and taking the keys with him, never saying where he was going. There's a sickening feeling you get, like your stomach being pulled instantly and repeatedly backwards, when you realize that your well-being is being rented back to you. That the only reason you're still somewhat safe is because you didn't pay your driver in advance. That the price of this safety, your well-being, at times it amounts to as little as eight dollars. Safwan was my driver I hired for all day Friday; I had a guide take me around the Pyramids, and another on my overnight trip to the White Desert, and with them I felt this at least a dozen times in three days.

On Saturday afternoon I sat in Sam's living room. Sam is a middle-aged Egyptian man that runs a small tour company for the White Desert, five hours outside of Cairo. On this day, Sam was playing host only to myself and a Brazilian girl named Fernanda. And the "all-meals provided for" meant that his wife was making us lunch, which I actually preferred and appreciated over a restaurant or a kebab stand. Sam was nice to me until he asked where I was from, and from then on all questions were directed solely at Fernanda, all my asked questions went unanswered, and hung heavily, awkwardly in the air of the small room. He turned on the news and expressed his disgust with America before turning back to an Austin Powers movie. Before putting on his Tommy Hilfiger sandals. Before watching his son ride a Superman bicycle. A disgust far more convenient than it is consistent.

My tour guide for the pyramids repeated the same jokes for tourists as other guides along the route, as Sam would with his driver two days later. Verbatim. They must have been the same jokes used for a half century. I heard maybe three or four total facts about the pyramids, and then several times about how the Sphinx was his great-great-great-great grandfather. About how the camel's name was Mickey Mouse... Charlie Brown. I tried to get to know each driver, each guide, wanted their perspective on Egyptian history, or what else their society has been doing for the past three-thousand years, and got flat-out nowhere. I got cartoon answers to human questions. I don't think I'm remotely like the negative American stereotype, but they made no attempt to see me as anything other than that. It takes so much more effort to be close-minded, to ignore facts when they are in front of your eyes, and that was the only effort that they were willing to put forth.

I had a very beautiful four hours on Saturday night. I was camping in the middle of the picturesque White Desert, the sky filled with a continent of illumination, and I sat silently next to Fernanda and our driver/guide Ahmed after having had a bare bones traditional Egyptian meal and the three of us smoked shisha. I sat thinking about my life, and what the moment I was living at that second meant in the overall tapestry of it, the sky above me the perfect metaphor for my memories. A million pockets of light that create something phenomenal when you look at the whole. This is what I wanted to write about in discussing Egypt. But it would be a lie. This is not what defined my experience, but what salvaged it from uninterrupted disaster.

The freeway from Giza to Cairo. DJ Tiesto blaring on the stereo, Safwan weaved us through highway traffic at 180 km an hour in a car that wouldn't turn over twenty minutes earlier. It's not that cars in Egypt don't stay in their own lane, it's that they're never there to begin with. Cars will stack five-wide across a three lane freeway, until they hit the next batch in front which is in a totally different random alignment. A girl sat side-saddle on a motor-bike behind her helmeted father, her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead, her face visible as she wore no helmet, emotionless, like she was waiting in class for a lesson to begin. She doesn't hold on to the bike with her hands despite its frequent tilting and darting, doesn't cough despite the visibly ashen cloud of pollution that straddles Cairo, its roads in particular.

The honking isn't merely never-ending, it literally never lightens. On a six hour bus ride from the White Desert back to Cairo, our driver honked at not just every single car he passed up, but he would drive on the wrong side of the road, honking at any cars coming towards him who were in the correct lane. Over a span of six hours, this had to have been over 600 cars. The driver from the airport honked at parked cars. Not double-parked cars. Ordinary. Parked. Cars.

I found Egypt disturbing. And not because it is very unsafe for its residents, and incredibly unsafe for traveling Americans (though it absolutely is), but because of its common theme of disregard. Having been, I almost couldn't care less about the photos I took of the pyramids, since that's not the real Egypt. It's a coincidence, a luck of the draw of history. When you visit, you understand that those are not what defines the Egyptian culture because it is not what they embrace or even attempt to revere. They have an archeological museum with a ton of priceless artifacts from antiquity. In this museum, maybe one in thirty of these is labeled. Visitors have no clue what they're looking at, or why it is important. There are guards, but they sit idly by as children and visitors handle the objects, play with them, eroding them down, smoothing out the hieroglyphics and distorting them with the oil all human hands emit. When you get to the base of the pyramids themselves, you see heaps of people climbing all over them. The last remaining wonder of the ancient world, and 21st century sneakers chip off ends of giant bricks that were put in place thousands and thousands of years ago. It's a disregard for their own history in the museums, for their own safety and for their peers on the road, for common sense and for the basic order necessary to function as a society.

Egypt will be defined in my memory by what I was unable to photograph. It was too unsafe for me to walk around alone at all, let alone with an obviously expensive camera on clear display. So there are images I failed to capture, but also moments not applicable to film or memory cards. Without analysis, without narrative, without pretext, without embellishment, here is what I am bringing back.
Three men bathe a horse in the Nile a mile or so away from where this water is collected for the city's drinking water. A woman walks up and down the aisle of my bus trying to sell the passengers those individual packets of tissues... This is how she believes she will sustain a living. Safwan and I pass a bus with a plywood exterior. A carpet weaving school I walked through, and the boy of five who knew no English but after I took a picture of what he was working on rubbed his thumb together with the tips of his index and middle fingers: the universal sign for demanding money. I walk back on to the bus after a snack stop, and a woman in a full burka snatches her child away from the aisle so that she doesn't touch me (fear? disgust?). The hindquarters of camels scarred from whipping. As we wait for lunch to be served, Sam's son races in to the kitchen to shout something at his mother who is making the meal, and the boy and his parents all laugh at this.... Sam finds it so funny that he translates it for me and Fernanda... He says "Mom, you dog, hurry up with the food!!" And they all laugh more.

I realize in retrospect that I wanted the impossible from Egypt. In a world in which two societies are diametrically opposed, I wanted to achieve, in at least my few days of experience there, a sense of common ground, seeds for hope. Clearly I failed. But I am astounded at how complete my failure was. One last image, but one that I will comment briefly on. On the way back on the bus to Cairo from the White Desert, a couple in their late twenties (I think, she was in a full burka and veil, only her eyes were visible) sit with their two very young children (1 and maybe 2 1/2 at the most) in their laps. The boy is the older one, and when he smiles you see that his recently formed and still growing teeth are already brown with rot, the sides curved in some places from this decay, like the edges of a block of Swiss cheese. A black spot I mistake for a mole is right near his eye, and I stare for almost a minute and wonder if the family will ever have it removed surgically. And the spot moves, because it is a fly. It crawls closer to the boy's eye, and another lands on his lip and scurries in that creepy way that flies do, to the under side of the lip, the interior of the boy's mouth. This whole time, the father is looking at the boy, smiling with a fatherly pride. Yet he never once moves to swat away the flies, even though they are crawling on the boy's eyes and into his mouth. He clearly loves the boy, but at no point does the instinct to swat the flies away ever kick in. Can we be that different? Actions I thought intrinsic, ones so obvious as to be unconscious, even these don't seem to be mutual.

I don't think that my experience is unique, but I also know that it can't be the only one. I met two very nice people that worked at my hostel, ones I was able to speak with only briefly, and maybe my time would have been different if I got to speak more with them, or if I looked a bit less Western. I'm sure there are American backpackers (we're not counting the security of tour groups) that have been to Egypt and loved it, ones that did not experience the discrimination that I did. But it is part of this journey, and an experience that is important, if not pleasant. I now know firsthand what total shit it is to be treated this way, and especially for no true reason that an individual can control.

I included the conversation at the top between Safwan and myself because I thought it set a pretty accurate tone for Cairo and my experience, and also because it was the only real conversation I had in my three days there. The honesty of his answer was the one time I didn't feel like an American, the one time anyone was willing to let me be just human.



Egypt:
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