Choke

All text & photographs in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2008

"Min fadlak," (please) squawks the loudspeaker on the roof of the puny-looking ambulance, in between the woo-woo of an equally puny siren.

"Please get out of the way!"
"We have a very sick person inside."
Woo-woo-woo-woo

A few seconds later:
Woo-woo-woo
"Please! We have a very sick person in the ambulance."
Woo-woo-woo-woo

Nobody moves. They can't. Traffic has ground to a halt on the the Kasr El Nil bridge. We've been standing still for about twenty minutes now.

From my cab, I see the paramedic jump out of the ambulance and run to the cars ahead. I see his hands making wild, pleading gestures. I see him run back to the ambulance, and shut the door.

The decal on the door reads "A gift from the people of Japan."

He gets back on the the loudspeaker.

"Please move to the side..."
Woo-woo-woo-woo...

Nothing is predictable in this city of 20 million people - not the cab fare, not the price of a cup of coffee, not the direction in which a car will drive down a one way street. Everything is negotiable. You have to be 'on' at every instant. You have to be thinking. You have to be alive.

Except when you're stuck in traffic - Cairo's predictable, non-negotiable monster. It will choke you to death.

There are more than 2 million cars on Cairo's streets, very few traffic lights, and extremely bendable traffic rules. The city is like a heart in a state of constant cardiac arrest.

Woo-woo-woo...

Half an hour later, we're still in the same spot. The paramedic's loudspeaker pleas have become less frequent. He's stopped jumping out.

Forty minutes into the jam, I decide to walk to work, and get out of my cab.

As I cross the bridge over the Nile, I turn back to look at the hopelessly stuck ambulance.

The driver turns off the siren.

Bis-mil-lah no! This smoke has got to go!

A great day. Big Islam is finally weighing in on clean air.

Every year, from September to November, Cairo is plagued by something called the Black Cloud - a thick blanket of smoke that hangs over the city, and makes the sky, well a little more hazy than it normally is. The cause - farmers burning plant refuse on their rice farms to prepare the soil for next year's crop. The result - breathing in Cairo is no longer equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. You're now smoking 40.
So the beards and turbans at the so called House of Fatwa (I have dibs on that name for my band) - an outfit linked to Egypt's Chief Mufti - have issued a, well, fatwa: "The Koran forbids such acts that are considered a social nuisance."

Thank you, House of Fatwa. You've hit upon the one and only reason why Cairo's air is unbreathable - farmers burning hay for 2 months. The rest of the year, we're fine.

FAT-WHAA??
An aside: Ever get the sneaky suspicion that there are just too many fatwas flying around? You're not alone. Read more.

Za Bollywood & Za Beoble

I have no idea how fast my taxi was moving this morning. The speedometer was stuck at 120 km/h even when we were still. But, at times, we were flying.
The driver glanced at me in all of his 8 rear view mirrors as we hurtled across the Qasr El Nil bridge, towards downtown Cairo, and asked the inevitable question:

CABBIE: Anta min-ein? (Where are you from?)
ME: Min al hind. (from India)

I've stopped telling random people that I'm from Canada, because ultimately I'll have to tell them that I'm originally Indian. So why bother?

CABBIE: Ah! Hindi! Naas kwayyis. (Indians are good people)
ME: Shukran. (Thanks)
CABBIE: Mitabbitshan? (????)
ME: Effendim? (excuse me?)
CABBIE: Mitabbitshan! Mitabbitshan! (WTF??????)
ME: Aasif. Ana mish-fahim. (sorry, I don't understand)

At 120 km/h (or whatever the real speed was) the man let go of the steering wheel and started to punch the air.

CABBIE: Mitabbitshan! HA! HA! HAAAAA!
His arms were flailing by now.

CABBIE: Aflam hindi! (Indian films!)

Of course! He was talking about "Amitabh Bachchan", the small "g" god of bollywood cinema! I'd heard that Egyptians love Indian films. They've even hired bollywood actress Celina Jaitley to be "the face of Egypt." When Bachchan visited Egypt in the '90s, it was pandemonium. Kids skipped school, people skipped work. Everyone lined the streets to get a glimpse of him.

ME: Aiwa... Amitabh Bachchan! Ta'arif hu? (do you know who he is?)
CABBIE: Tab'an! Ragl halwa 'awi! (Of course! Great man!)

Our brief Bachchan love-in ended as I paid, got out of the cab, and walked in to my office. There was a notice on my desk about the university's Desert Development Center (they research desert agriculture, among other things). They had fresh honey for sale at their kiosk, and I thought I'd check it out.

ME: Izzayak? (how are you?)
HONEY MAN: Alhamdulillah. Ayyi Khidmah? (Thanks to god. What can I do for you?)
ME: Endak 'asl taaza? (do you have fresh honey?)
Honey Man looks up at me as he's packing my jar of honey.
HONEY MAN: Hadratak min ein? (where are you from, sir?)

Oh brother...

ME: Min al Hind...
HONEY MAN (smiles): Min al Hind? Mitabbitshan?

Over the Bridge Downtown

This picture is from Lonely Planet. I'll change it as soon as I get a better one myself.

Steve Franklin was a Knight Fellow at the university. I never met him - he left before I got here. But I find his business cards all over my office.
I've been reading his blog lately. The other day, I found something on it that I had to steal.
See, it gets dark here around 5 these days. As I cross the Qasr el Nil bridge over the Nile, on my way home, I witness a scene that you can write novels about (people here have).
Back in August, Steve quoted an article from the LA Times (by Jeffrey Fleischman) about this scene, on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

CAIRO — The lovers and the fishermen, the street kids and the cops, the veiled girls and the flower sellers, they all come at dusk to the bridge over the Nile, stealing kisses and tugging their lines, escaping the heat and hoping for magic, the boys whispering promises bigger than their pockets as moonlit boats glide beneath them.

Hotel lights glow along the corniche in the distance and somehow Cairo’s grit and poverty are gone; night makes everything pure. That’s when dreams and memories unfold on the bridge.

Ibrahim Adel, a waiter, tells his fiancee, yes, he will one day own a restaurant. Yehia Helmi, a barber, lifts his grandson to the railing and points to a sail flickering in the darkness. Samir Shawki skitters with his buddies through the traffic. And Ali Mohammed Hussein, a sturdy man with a bent nose, sells wilted roses in cellophane.

The Qasr el Nil Bridge carries tens of thousands of cars a day, but at night its wide sidewalks are shoulder to shoulder with Egyptians. There is no sweeter spot for a cheap date, a refuge from big families and crowded apartments. A brush of the hand, a smile, all the subtle rituals of Muslim romance play out in tiny dramas amid the call to prayer and the river breeze.

Ramzan & the Khan

All pictures in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2007.

Ramzan (ramadan to many of you) turns Cairo upside down.
You sleep when it's time to eat, eat when you're supposed to sleep, work when you normally go home, and go home during work hours.
Traffic takes a break too. Normally, by 6pm, all roads here become exhaust-filled parking lots.
But not tonight, when Ahson and I decide to check out ramzan in Khan-al-khalili (aka the Khan).
We drive through a dead city, to a dead market.
It's iftar: time to break the fast. So everybody's either eating, praying, or waiting for the post-iftar stampede.


Ahson and I make our way to the Al Fishawy cafe.
I've read that Naguib Mahfouz would come here to write.

As we smoke shisha, and sip mint tea, the post-iftar stampede begins.
Traffic, touts, temper tantrums.
A girl tries to sell Ahson keychains, while balancing a newborn.
A Somali dude named "Mark" shares his Chapelle's Show DVD.

Bargain Basement Sociology

All pictures in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2007.

A colleague at the university recently told me that you can tell the socio-economic status of a Cairene neighbourhood by looking at the roofs of buildings.
The more satellite dishes you see, the more affluent the residents.
Poorer neighbourhoods usually have one or two dishes per building.
These are pictures from my balcony.
Does this mean my neighbours are rich?

Boxes!

Our shipment arrived, about a month after I put it on a truck in TO.
It's all there, and it's all in one piece (except for a few mandatory bruises). Not bad.

Beep Beep Beep

Marie finally got her smoke detectors!

No idea what I'm talking about? Go here.

The Colonialist and the Cretan Woman

Mujib and I were done with the mosque fairly quickly.

I'm not one for grand mosques. They're all basically the same - big, once opulent, built more to glorify the builder, rather than who the builder prays to.

Houses, I can spend hours in. And the House of the Cretan Woman (now known as the Gayer Anderson Museum), next to the Ibn Tulun Mosque is a real gem.

Actually, it's two 17th century houses joined together. Used to belong to a couple of wealthy ladies, one of whom was from Crete.

When the brits were here, a major by the name of Gayer Anderson (an unfortunate first name in the schoolyard, I'm sure) took over the place, restored it, and filled it with quite a bit of stuff - kitsch, stolen artifacts, and lots of paintings of himself.

Everything in this place - from furniture, to cushions, to books - is over a hundred years old, and in really good shape.

I read somewhere that part of the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me was also shot here. Couldn't tell you what part, though.
Look it up.

All pictures in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2007.

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun

I spent my second day here with Mujib Khan (no relation) - the managing director of AIG Egypt (the insurance company). I was introduced to him in Toronto by my friend Atique Azad of Butler's Pantry. Mujib's moving to Dubai, and wants to do a quick tour of Cairo before flying off.










So we meet up at the uber posh Conrad Hotel in the downtown area, hop into a chauffeured SUV, with his lovely guide Dina (almost all the Muslim Egyptian women I've met here so far are Dinas or Monas or Hodas), and head out to the Ibn Tulun mosque in old Cairo. Dina tells us it's the oldest surviving mosque in Egypt - all the way from 879AD.

All pictures in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2007.

Where there's no smoke detector, there's no fire.

Drove out to the boonies with Marie and Craig last night to try out the "world's best hamburger". Took us a while. Our driver Mohyi, a sweet guy, was completely directionless... and perhaps a little intimidated, since Marie's his boss' boss.

The burgers at Lucille's were good. No question. Maybe even the best I've had in the last little while. But I know I've had better.

Next, it's on to Carrefour, a "hypermarket" further out in the boonies. Marie needs to buy smoke detectors for her new office so she could insure the place.

Trouble is, no one here knows what the hell a smoke detector is. And why should they? Everyone smokes like a fiend. Everywhere. Smoke detectors would be an absolute nuisance.

It's 10pm by the time we get to Carrefour, and the place is jumping. It reminds me of Mecca during hajj season.

Craig and Marie decide to soldier on, and after some time, we find a clerk who doesn't understand what we want. I point to a smoke detector on the ceiling. Marie makes beeping noises.

In my broken Arabic, ask if he has any. No. The only place we might get them is somewhere called Bavaria in downtown Cairo.

But there's a Radio Shack right outside, so we try them. And what we think is a smoke detector, turns out to be a spy camera. They do have a real one on display. We tell them we need four. About 20 minutes of frantic searching ensues. But it turns out to be the last smoke detector "in the whole company." For the record, here's a picture of the last smoke detector in Radio Shack's entire Egyptian inventory.

Our new digs

Talk about royal treatment. I was picked up at the airport, whisked thru customs, and driven to my new apartment building by about 4am on Friday morning... only to find the street pitch dark.

"Ya doctoor Yasir! Zere is no electric," said a voice. My eyes adjusted to a short, very dark dude - Mohamed from faculty housing. So we spent an hour outside on the street, me sweating, Mohamed telling me how he'd worked for the the university since he was fourteen.

Lights came on after about 1/2 an hour, and I was ushered into an elevator, and taken up to the 14th floor to our new home in Cairo.

"Zis is very unusual doctoor Yasir," said the other housing officer who gave me a tour of the place as I staggered around (no sleep for 24 hours - can't sleep on planes). "Zamalek is full of embassies. Special area. Lights go off only in poor areas. Very unusual."

Zamalek, my new neighbourhood, is on an island in the middle of the Nile. It's supposed to be the greenest part of the city, and quite posh.

In the past, it's been home to the city's aristocrats, princesses, businessmen, etc. There are stories about nazi sympathizers, as well as wealthy jews living around here.

More thoughts on the place as I discover it. Been walking around a fair bit (it's pretty small - smaller than Toronto's downtown core).

My street is quite interesting - the Cuban embassy used to be in my building, the Libyans are right beside us.

And pre-wwII, the Deutsches Archaelogisches Institut used to be about 5 doors down. It closed during the war. The villa was bought by a Jewish businessman, who later leased it to a former queen of Egypt.

Then, it was sold to the Canadian government, and turned into the ambassador's residence.

Don't have a cell phone or an internet connection at home yet. Things take time here.

Here's an article that helped me figure this place out. Here's another.

All pictures in this post copyright Yasir Khan 2007.