Courtesy, Dogs, and the Desire for Albinism

Gotta love foreign customs. Let’s talk about politeness.

MAJOR RULE: Greet everyone first; talk later. About a week ago, David was saying hello to a group of friends at the Grand Mall. A brief conversation spontaneously started as David greeted them one by one, there was a short exchange, and David moved on to the rest of the guys.

Next in line: “David, I am so angry with you (said with no inflection).”

David: “Why?”

Next in line: “Because you did not say hello to me.”

David: “But I’m saying hello to you right now. I just walked through the door.”

Next in line: “But you talked with Ahmed first.”

David: “ . . . ”

They take their greetings very seriously here, but it shows just how valuable good manners and civility are to this culture. As with all human acts, though, any good deed can be warped into something driven by selfishness or fear, but these are rare and extreme occurrences that only happen in old-fashioned, rural areas. A popular story is about some men who were held at gunpoint and taken hostage by their hosts so that they would have no choice but to eat dinner and spend the night at the hosts' house. The hosts would look incompetent and would be mocked by their neighbors otherwise, so the hosts really had no choice but to take drastic measures in order to keep their guests from shaming them. Again – a rare thing.

Other rules make much more sense than the greeting thing, such as “feet are dirty” and “so are dogs,” because feet are gross and and no matter how highly you regard your dog there’s just no way you’ll ever keep him from searching out and rolling in the most unholy refuse he can find.

Speaking of dogs, the dismissal of them as unclean has led to a hilarious misunderstanding of the domesticated dogs kept by European expatriates. Egyptians aren’t only afraid of all dogs, they fear for their lives when any dog, even one on a leash, gets too close. While it’s amusing, I don’t consider Egyptians to be misguided or even unwise for this – imagine if you were approached by a large, clearly predatory animal with which you have had no positive experiences and about which you have heard only bad things. Think you’d be friendly? I find it funny regardless of whether it makes sense, mostly because masculinity is so exaggerated here it’s kind of ridiculous to see a grown man try to evade a dog that’s less than half his weight.

Appearances are everything in urban Egypt. Walk down any street and you’ll see the destitute making calls with the latest, most high-tech cell phones. Being well-dressed and polite are common methods of achieving faux affluence. For example, David knows a guy who spends all his money on clothes and insisted on paying the bill for a party of seven even though pooling the money was an option and David’s the one in the group making an American salary. A much more interesting occurrence of this type happened in the Coptic district, where we were hanging out with someone we'll call Mr. A and a friend of his. His friend took a few photos, which somehow led to Mr. A pulling out a few glamor shots he kept in his wallet.

David: “These don’t look like you at all, Mr. A.” * hands photos to me*

Mr. A: “What do you mean?”

Jared: “You’re white in these photos, man.”

The Mr. A in the photographs had the complexion of a cave-dwelling fish. His skin had doubtless been edited by the photographer.

Mr. A: “I am white – it’s just that the sun is very hot in the summer, and sldkjfas;ldkfjasdfl...”

I was too deep in thought to hear the last part of Mr. A’s sentence. Blaming his complexion on the heat of the sun instead of the UV rays that are known to cause an increase in epidermal melanin seemed odd to me, then I realized I was an idiot and that the real issue was that he was trying to convince me, a semiprofessional geek of considerable paleness, that his skin was whiter than mine. It’s true that many Arabs can have pale skin, Syrians and Lebanese in particular, but Mr. A simply doesn’t have it. The guy’s dark brown, but he’s Egyptian, where dark skin is common. Why would he make up excuses?

He’s got two reasons to be ashamed of his color, both of them invalid and regrettable:

There's a European ideal: In every advertisement, film, music video, and television show, the featured men and women have white skin, and they appear to be selected based on how Caucasian they look. The noses, cheekbones, and skin tones of Egyptians in the media – and therefore the aesthetic standards aspired to by the population – are unmistakably European. 

The other is class distinction: Well-paid people are businessmen; they are successful and powerful people, and, more importantly, are also the ones who work indoors. It’s an old aesthetic concept: if you’re pale, you look rich because you clearly don’t spend your time outside doing manual labor.

I’m guessing Mr. A’s excuse was motivated by a combination of these. That was a very interesting and lamentable event.

In other news, Egypt has left its mark on about half of my clothes, in the forms of ripped-off buttons and stains from air pollution, dripping food, and contact with literally every surface I have touched since my arrival. I don’t think of myself as terribly vain, but seeing garments intended for a 15-month journey being systematically eliminated within mere weeks tests my patience.

I’d get into the Egyptian view of Israel but I don’t think this entry should be longer than it already is. I’m going to Dahab either tomorrow or the day after; expect something good in the next week.

Cheers,
-Jared

Egyptian Update

 I’ve been in Cairo almost two weeks now, and a report would probably do some good. We’ll start with first impressions.

The architecture and upkeep of Cairo changes drastically from area to area. In some districts, I’m guessing the ones with more foreign traffic, you see huge hotels, fancy cars, and alternating rows of palm trees and polished granite obelisks. In the others, where people actually live and work, it is quite different. 

Cairo is dirty-really, really dirty. The air is grey – not the sky, the air. There is so much particulate matter floating around that everything, indoors or outside, is coated with a layer of dust. There is much more litter here than in Graz, and there is probably more litter here than in any European city. Plastics, construction waste, and the occasional dead stray line the streets with no prospects of quick removal. Every hundred yards or so there is an overflowing dumpster with a huge pile of waste sitting next to it, even in the affluent neighborhoods.  

Speaking of garbage, David gave me a tour of “Garbage City,” an area of Cairo everyone should know about. Garbage City is a community of Coptic Christian Egyptians who take most of Cairo’s waste for their own personal use. Mountains (no exaggeration) of trash are stored and sorted: food is given to livestock and pets, reparable items are repaired, and glassware and plastics are sent to a recycling center for processing. Since all of this is done by hand, Garbage City is home to one of the most efficient recycling rates in the world. I make it sound almost pleasant – my apologies. It wasn’t. Well, it was but it wasn’t. Let me start over: to understand Garbage City you must know what it looks like. I have no photographs, so we’re kind of disadvantaged in that respect, but we’ll see if a written description can suffice: 

David and I stepped out of the cab, just off the highway but not quite inside the district they call Garbage City. From where we were standing I could make out unremarkable apartment buildings of the kind you see all over Cairo: old and brown, with rebar sticking out of the top since there’s no need for roofs in a land without rain.  The rest of the view was obscured by an overpass.

As we made our way beneath the overpass, I noticed large deposits of mud around the concrete supports. The whole underside of the overpass was wet, and the smell carried on the humidity clued me in to the fact that this mud couldn’t have been just dirt. Something, probably many things had decayed there until it was nothing more than sludge, collecting garbage and dust as it dissolved.

David: “Looks like they cleaned the streets today.”  

Lovely.

The view opened up, and we were greeted by a new smell. It was less wet and natural than the one beneath the overpass; it reminded me of taking out the garbage or driving past a factory.

David: “Man, the smell isn’t that bad today – sometimes when I come here, I can barely breathe.”

Lucky me.


 I was right about the buildings being standard Cairo apartments, but up close I saw that the similarities were limited to the exterior. There were no lights inside any of the buildings, and it was too dark to see their interiors. David and I walked and talked. We stopped at a kiosk and grabbed two bottles of Sprite. Two little kids asked for our names – that’s a really common greeting here in Egypt. Kids and teenagers see two “cool Americans” and try to be as nice as possible, and what’s the best  first step in getting to know someone? Name.

David: “Look to your right.”

Dear God.

By then the angle of the sun had changed, making it easier to see the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings. It was filled with trash. It wasn't an apartment complex at all, but rather a windowless shell of a building that housed a pile of garbage. This wasn’t something the average reader or even a well-travelled one could easily understand. If you haven’t been to the third world, I’m pretty sure you have no idea the ruin humanity is capable of surviving in.

Perhaps you think I’m overreacting just because I like to wax poetic or indulge in personal drama. Perhaps I can change your mind with an analogy.

Step 1: Think about what you throw away on a weekly basis. What’s in those garbage cans? Newspapers, cardboard boxes, empty wrappers, used napkins and paper towels, rotten food. Imagine saving all of it for a year – every last bit of waste. You don’t get to refrigerate it.

Step 2: Empty all of this waste into your garage, kitchen, or living room. 

Step 3: Live with it.

The two differences between this analogy and the circumstances endured by Garbage City’s residents are that the filth in which they live belongs to someone else, and that their livelihood is to sort a perpetual stream of refuse until they die.

Every building’s ground floor was packed to the ceiling with some kind of trash. The smell got worse. We moved on. I noticed that the streets were busy. We were passed by cars, carts, and hundreds of pedestrians, many of whom were hauling large bags of Greater Cairo’s excess. The road to the center of Garbage City was an uphill climb, in all senses of the phrase.

We finally met the guy David wanted to visit: Ashraf, an Egyptian in his mid-20s who is working with my brother to organize an English class for people in the district. Apparently he had invited us to have dinner with his family. I was completely out of the loop – he and David spoke very little English together.  

Outside the entrance to Ashraf’s family’s apartment building were four old men sitting on cardboard mats. They greeted David and Ashraf in the way any Egyptian would, but when they saw me they smiled at each other and told David that his brother was very beautiful. David said they were being sincere.

The ground floor of Ashraf’s building was just like all the others. Brick walls were missing large sections, dust coated every surface, and piles of unsorted trash took up every inch of space except the path to the dilapidated staircase. Inside the apartment it was surprisingly clean. It was clear that the women of the house do everything they can to make their family’s living space as unlike the outside as possible. At the dinner table we spoke a lot of English, not for my sake, but because Ashraf wanted to impress his father. When the family saw an American smoothly speaking Arabic and a pale giant with hair like the Prophet’s, I believe they were suitably impressed.

We were served an authentic Egyptian dinner, and it did not disappoint. We had chicken, fish, a tomato-onion-cucumber salad, fruit, and homemade pita with tahini.

Ashraf: “He doesn’t know how to do it.”

 I had a bit of a cultural conflict with Ashraf when I handled the fish differently than they do in Egypt. Apparently removing the spinal cord in its entirety, thus instantly removing the ribs, neural spines and the danger of choking, is something I did because I’m an ignorant American who has never experienced something as exotic and exclusively Egyptian as eating fish. That was the first cultural lesson of my time here in Cairo: if you don’t do it the native way, you’re doing it wrong.

After dinner we went to a massive church complex built into the side of a mountain. Like most of the Vatican’s efforts, it was aesthetically impressive but environmentally incongruous – this complex is a part of Garbage City. It’s in the same place. Its construction and upkeep, both considerable investments, are paid for by the Catholic Church, yet the buildings next door are falling apart and the people living within them receive too little to escape or at least modernize their accommodations and trash-sorting methods. Why spend so much money on a fancy church while the ones you want to save are living in filth?

The sun went down and we headed back to the overpass. The streets were even more alive than they were that afternoon. Neon signs pointed out shops, cafes, and kiosks. Strangely enough, I felt safe. At no point did I wonder if someone was about to antagonize me in any way. It may have been because of the unexpected vibrancy to the community. People were smiling.  How crazy is that?

And that’s the end of my Garbage City story. Let’s move on to sobia: the greatest drink of all time. It tastes like thin, heavily sweetened coconut milk, and I swear it could raise the dead, considering the boost it gives to those who are living. I will find out how to make it, and I will bring it back; this I pledge.  

Microbuses: like taxis, but so much better. They’re cramped, loud, fast, and fun because no foreigner ever thinks to hop on and take a ride - David and I are the exceptions to the rule. We get stares but no ridicule since the other passengers hear David’s Arabic.

Taxis! White taxis are a risk because they operate on a meter, and you could either get stuck in traffic or taken on the long way to your destination. Black taxis have negotiable rates, but things can get ridiculous fast. David got in a pretty heated argument with one very disagreeable driver who tried to wring one extra Egyptian Pound out of him. David got in a fight over one Pound. It was awesome.

As some of you know, I got pretty ill. David was sick as well, but now I’m better and David’s just got a terrible cough.

Anything else? Ah, the dogs. We’re housesitting for a friend of David’s, and we have to take care of their dogs while we’re here. For reasons I can’t understand, they behave exactly like my Austrian host brothers Christian and Phillip. The older one is quieter and more reserved, and the young golden retriever is too energetic for her own good. 

Egyptian service - how could I leave this one out? At every restaurant we've been to, it's been very clear that customer satisfaction is second only to the comfort and convenience of the server. Any food or groceries that you ask to be delivered, no matter how simple and small the order is, takes at least ninety minutes to get there, if it ever gets there at all.


And that's all I've got. Next weekend we're going to Siwa, a desert oasis on the Libyan border - be on the lookout for another super-special video entry.

Cheers, 

Jared