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Apr

The disgusting and the divine

If you were ever after a slice of streetlife in Downtown Cairo, taking a bench at Restaurant Zezo the Disgusting’s (est 1962) would give you ringside seats.

The restaurant is a string of benches and trestle tables set on the roadside opposite one of Cairo’s city gates, Bab el-Futah. Built in the 11th century, the gates lead into Gamilaya, the heart of Islamic Cairo, which is why Zezo’s little kitchen is topped with a perky imitation of the gates.

Zezo’s is most famous for its sandwiches – soft white bread rolls – filled with fried liver or spicy oriental sausage, and a super-sweet, hyper-activity-inducing roll filled with halva, cream and… honey (omg!!!) for around LE5 each. The floor is the city’s dirt and there’s a constant stream of taxis, donkey carts, garbage trucks and cheap Chinese motorbikes tearing past, spilling pollution onto the scene. Best eat at night, then.

Last time we visited the 24-hour Zezo’s, a bride sat, in full white regalia, at the next table, intermittently weeping and fainting till her groom back-handed her and manhandled her into the bridal car watched in a mix of amusement and horror by the rest of the cafe.

The perfect follow-up to a late-night dinner at Zezo’s is tea and a shisha pipe at Lord’s, inside the city walls. The cafe’s pets include a handful of stripy kittens, a scattering of small, colourful birds and a large duck, which I reckon is so cranky because it’s sleep deprived. Come too close, and it’ll take a bad-tempered swipe at your ankles.

“What time do you close?” we asked one of the busy cafe boys at Lords.

“There are no walls at Lords,” he replied, with a mystical look in his eye that could have either been the result of the late night, indulgence in sufism or a particularly strong hash…

Apr

Well noted

In between slogging around Cairo and assorted towns, I’ve occasionally been doing some non-travel work – here’s a new blog from fabulous Australian colour and trend forecaster Bree Leech, who put up with bad phone lines and weird time zones to pull together this feature for Home Beautiful magazine. The blog might go a bit wobbly next week cos… we’re off to the biggest, beautifulest Milan Design Fair!

Apr

Sniffing the Breeze

A lot of people have asked what happens in Egypt during Easter. Well, for a start, the Coptic Christian Easter kicks off a week later – so it all starts happening this weekend.

It’s a holiday for most of the country; like anywhere in the world, people are happy to take a public holiday for another religion’s feast days, so the Muslim population will enjoy a long weekend, as will the Christians.

I popped into a Catholic church last Sunday (Palm Sunday), walking in while Mass was just about to start. It was in English, and the congregation was a real mixed bag, with lots of Asian worshippers, elegant old French ladies with big gold earrings and black scarves tied over their coiffed hair, black, black Africans and a few stray whiteys. A Christian friend told me that on Easter Sunday, they will go to church for three hours (three hours!) then picnic with friends and family afterwards.

The weekend culminates in a holiday on Monday called ‘Sham el Nissem’, or ‘Sniffing the Breeze’, where everyone gets out and picnics. One website says that this feast, which is also regarded as the first day of spring, has been celebrated by Egyptians for over 4500 years, making it one of the world’s oldest.

Interesting name, the traditional thing to eat is salted anchovies, sardines and mackerel, so the breeze will be interesting indeed.

Apr

Life in Cairo, as the newspapers see it

Cairo has a number of rather slim English language papers, mostly condensed versions of their Arabic bretheren, including Al-Ahram, the Egyptian Gazette and the Daily News.
In a quick flick through the papers this weekend, here are a few of the key news items:· Up to 50,000 private medical clinics went on strike against doctors’ low salaries, which can be as little as LE470/month (about A$120) after graduation, rising to a hefty LE1000 (A$250)· A group of followers of the Bahai’i faith were attacked with stones and firebombs in their homes. There are between 500 and 2000 Bahai’is in Egypt, who recently won the right to hold government identity papers, which don’t list their religion (opponents say only Muslims and Christians should have the right to hold identity papers).· Taxis over 20 years of age have until 2011 to get off the roads, replaced with newer taxis that run on natural gas. There are more than 40,000 taixs on Cairo’s roads. Their models read like a who’s who of former Soviet and central European countries: Russian Ladas, Romanian Dacias, Italian Fiats, French Peugeots, Turkish Shahins and lastly, the home made Egyptian Nasrs. Taxi drivers are, to a man, horrified. · A man beat his daughter to death after she received a phone call from her boyfriend. · Around 27% of Egyptians have high blood pressure caused by eating junk food, smoking, obesity and lack of exercise. And, most importantly for a front page story:· Nefertiti had wrinkles.

Apr

The Oracle speaks

The wind rustled the dusty palm trees and tickled the waters of the salt lakes down below as I stood on a hilltop, surveying the Siwan oasis.

The hill has particular significance – it was the site of the Siwa Oracle, where Alexander the Great came in 331 BC to ask the question he would take to his grave, most likely seeking advice for annexing the rich lands of Egypt for his empire.

The only sound was the wind as the midday heat grew and my guide Ibrahim and I were silent as we overlooked the oasis. Then I heard it:

“You’ve got the longest lifeline, girl!”

The voice was pure Camp Australia and I turned to find a large group of Antipodeans (with a few Americans?) reading each other’s palms on the historical hilltop. Oracles…palm reading…

Well, I guess the site’s always been a place to find your destiny.

Apr

Veiled truths of Siwa women

Out here in the remote oasis of Siwa, the women of both dominant species – donkeys and humans – are kept under wraps and away from temptation. The women are heavily cloaked, walking fabric shops, while the female donkeys are kept in a village away from the town, the males brought there to mate with them.

Photographing women is out of the question, and even tiny girls on their way to school refused my requests. The boys were less reluctant, the men: media tramps.

So for once it paid off to be a female journalist (the downsides: bathrooms and leery men), and I was met two groups warm, funny girls who work in a co-op arrangement, performing the traditional embroidery for which the oasis is known, as well as weaving palm leaves and trunks into an array of household goods, such as pots and beautiful baskets.

I met a girl called Mabrooka today, which means congratulations. I thought I’d heard wrongly when she told me her name. I thought she was congratulating me for something. She and her friends paid out on me in Siwan, laughing as they worked.

Their work ends up in the US and they have a regular client in Italy, and they are paid well – more than many men earn working the traditional agricultural pursuits of date and olive farming. They are not city girls: their eyebrows are ungroomed, their skin is sun darkened and they don’t have the obsession of colour coordinating of the flashy Cairo city girls.

They are not pretty girls. Their features aren’t fine and there’s not even the addiction to large amounts of eye kohl. They’re all unmarried, only the unmarried ones are allowed such freedom to be out of the house.

When Siwi women marry, they won’t venture out of the house socially except for extreme cases – weddings, the birth of a child… and when they do leave the house, they are heavily cloaked in a blue and white embroidered piece of fabric over their clothes, that covers from head to toe, and black gauze fabric across their faces. You see them tearing past with children in a cart on the back of a donkey or motorbike, the wind whipping at their robes, nothing but black faces. (I took a pic of a dummy in the local museum to give you an idea – naughty hussy, she’s not covering her face!)
Of the working girls, one wore a niqab, but the others had just scarves thrown over their heads, hair covered with a sort of cummerbund.

They let me take a photograph of them, but only once they had covered their faces. I caught big eyes looking into the camera from behind a thin veil of fabric. The girl in the niqab could almost have been smug, but then I couldn’t read her face. She was the meekest of them all, compared with a couple who were positively ebullient. I was struggling with them with language, then toward the end, I remembered my book in the car, we started to hit it off, and then it was time to go… I was sad I had to leave just as it was all going off.

I did feel so bad learning that it takes up to six days to weave one basket. It really shows how much we devalue this work.

[PS In between, hundreds of economic refugees fleeing Africa for the riches of Europe were shipwrecked off the Libyan coastline. Here’s an interview for RTE Radio…

Apr

Oasis life: Siwa

What is it that makes people fall in love with Siwa? Is it the isolation? With an 11-hour bus journey, or eight hours by car, Siwa’s not exactly on the way to anywhere.

The oasis is 50km from the Egypt-Libyan border, set on the lip of the Great Sand Sea, which stretches the length of the country, where thousands of sand dunes shift shapes as the wind takes them. Siwans identify themselves as Siwi first, and Egyptian second. They speak their own, unwritten language that is shared with Berber tribes from across north Africa, including Morocco and Tunisia, and dress, think and act differently to that of their Egyptian counterparts.At night, Siwa town, population 10,000, is quiet as only a desert town can be quiet. The sand seems to suck the very sound from the air. In comparison, Cairo’s ever present grumbling, even when asleep, is like an old dog revisiting grand fights, growling and moaning while its eyes are closed. All I can here is the click of my keyboard, the crackling of the beeswax candles and what I think is the occasional night bird.

Instead of heavy trucks and souped-up cars, the main mode of transport is by careta, or donkey cart. However, like its brethren, the less remote Bahirayya oasis, Siwa’s young guys are far more interested in cheap Chinese motorbikes than donkey carts. The main town is built around old Shali fortress, a collection of mudbrick buildings huddled together for safety. For hundreds of years, Siwans defended their turf against ravaging invaders and greedy governments but, the story goes, a deluge of rain here in the desert in the 1920s washed away the structures which today cling to the ground like a dinosaur’s carcass, sliding gently back into the earth from which they came. The oasis has all the hallmarks of an Arabian fantasy; palm trees, cool sweetwater springs, pink flamingos and shallow salt water lakes, also a delicate shell pink from the salt that lies beneath the surface. Siwa doesn’t wake early, so the sleepy soundtrack is one of calls to prayer and the braying of a dismayed donkey as each morning the oasis awakens slowly to its contemplative life, far from a world of package tours, shouts and touts.

Apr

Match making

The locals say that Egypt lost the 2010 World Cup (that’s football/soccer, to the unawares) largely because its taxi system was so bad (the meter is but a decorative concept, seat belts optional and a pricing system based on the quality of your shoes). But if the FIFA authorities had seen the crush outside the stadium last week as legit ticket holders such as yours truly tried to get into the Egypt v Zambia qualifier for the World Cup, they would have had another reason.

The stadium, in the north of the city, holds 80,000 people in three classes. The third-class tickets to the match cost just 5 pounds (about A$1.70) and reportedly sold out in two hours, while our luxurious first class tickets (forget Gold Class cinema, it’s seats, people, you get seats!) cost LE50 or A$17-ish.

We rocked up late, only 1½ hours before the match, and once our patriotic Egypt flags had had their sticks removed by the guards, and our bodies searched for lighters (hello, this is Egypt?? People smoke professionally here), we were let at the gate. Except there was a crowd of say 300 people at the gate, all with legitimate tickets, all clamouring to get in. Apparently the stadium was full.

“This is so … Egypt,” muttered one of the group as we joined the mass which was attempting to strain itself through the gates. So it was shoulders to the wheel, the boys made a circle around us two girls, and we pushed, like everyone else, to the steel turnstile gates ahead of us, the only things between us and football utopia. A guy near us called out, “You have girls with you! Go up ahead! They’ll surely let you in!”

Someone dropped food on the ground and it was trampled into a brown sludge that stuck to our shoes. When we got to the top, we were all separated, and there was a fence between us and the gate, which we climbed, bodies shoving and groaning.

“Does it ever get like this in Australia?” asked Amr.

“Only during the Boxing Day sales,” I told him. But as I was lifted off my feet when the crowd surged once again, I thought that nobody in their right mind would be doing this for a pair of cheap knickers.

We finally got through, I was plucked free by a guard who saw my white face and hauled me out, shoving me through the gate. Once in, we found the third-class boys had taken over half of first class seats, mostly handsome, wide-mouthed young boys, cheeky little buggers who fought and crowed and shouted naughtily through the whole game.

The stadium was a sea of flags and the orchestra a series of hand-held and big drums that rolled like a war march, as the stadium chanted, “Misr! Misr! Misr!” (Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!).

The cameras picked up the president’s son (and unofficial president-elect) Gamal Mubarak, and Samira and I had strips of black, white and red, the Egyptian colours, painted across our faces. Egyptians also do Mexican waves, though I’m not sure what they’re called here. Everyone wore something red, the girls co-ordinating their higaabs (headscarves) in the national colours.

Zambia wasn’t given a hope in hell against Egypt, the current African champions, so when they tied 1-1, the devastation amongst the home crowd was palpable. The pleas to the umpire, the entreaties, the heads in hands… some just stood up in the crowd and held their arms open wide in supplication.

But Egypt just couldn’t get past Zambia’s clever, hard-working goalkeeper, and we filed out quietly, our flags drooping along with the hopes for an Egyptian victory. A few people threw empty bottles toward the by-now empty pitch, and despondency descended on the cold city that suddenly seemed a lot darker.

Mar

Getting hitched, Part II

For those of you who can’t get enough of weddings, the latest wedding I attended was that of Mokhtar and Samira. This time, I actually knew the couple getting married, as opposed to gatecrashing or being brought along as wedding arm candy.

The format for an Egyptian hotel wedding (as opposed to raucous street weddings) goes as such: couple sit on a raised platform while the guests are each photographed with them, then each guest drinks thick, sweet sherbaat, sort of like raspberry cordial without the water. Sugar-fuelled, the dancing begins. Firstly, as with western weddings, the newlyweds take to the dance floor. Samira wore a beautiful gown, the bodice heavily encrusted with sequins and the skirt trailing across the dance floor through a cloud of billowing smoke.

Then couples join them on the floor, and finally, everyone else get up to dance them into their new life, sometimes surrounding the couple , clapping, or taking turns to dance with either the bride or groom. The boys were feeling energetic, so they tossed Mokhtar in the air, for good measure while his sisters danced around Samira, kneeling like handmaidens to a princess.

There are many differences – most Egyptian weddings are dry occasions, dominated by a DJ who, despite being perhaps 25, is conveniently deaf to any requests to turn down the volume and the reverb, and there are no speeches. The paperwork has been done earlier, so there’s no officialdom, thought there was a point when the bride and groom changed each others’ rings from the right hand to the left.

The similarities include the big white dress and there’s also the big white cake. There’s also the faintly rugbyesque scrum for the bride’s bouquet (taken out neatly by a girl I thought was married) and a bevy of pretty little girls in baby versions of a wedding gown. They chose not to have a bellydancer (I was ok with that, see earlier posts of plumpy Russian strawberry blondes in pink body stockings).

Just before it was cut, I drifted over to take a look at the cake, to find the three-tiered affair rising UP THROUGH THE TABLE in a puff of smoke, like a genie emerging from the bottle.

Nobody else seemed to notice… Samira and Mokhtar glided over to cut the cake, feeding each other mouthfuls of the creamy affair that would later feature on the dessert buffet, and at midnight, disappeared to their penthouse room overlooking Cairo before travelling to the seaside resort town of Hurghada for a week-long honeymoon.

Mabrook (congratulations), Mokhtar and Samira.

Mar

Forgiveness, pleasure and grace: a lesson in Arabic

“The Arabic language is very rich,” said didactic Nael, one of my first friends in Egypt, and himself a French teacher. The more I learn about Arabic, the more I have to agree.

The great apartment block I live in is known as Borg el Samah, ‘tower of forgiveness…’Almost everyone’s name has a meaning – my old cleaning lady, Sabah, was named after the morning, I met a girl the other day whose name means ‘inspiration’, and a guy whose name translates as ‘pleasure’. I giggle naughtily every time I say it. He is charmed, but confused.

In a country where English language books routinely cost $50 for the shoddiest paperback, I found the massive, massive Ken Follett ‘Pillars of the Earth’ (the doorstopper about building England’s cathedrals) for a miserly 20LE ($6) on a grubby street corner the other day and today’s find was a $3 copy of ‘Midaq Alley’ by Nagiub Mahfouz, Egypt’s only Noble Peace Prize for Literature for his epic ‘Cairo Trilogy’. The dog-eared book has the names of two previous owners written on the inside cover, both girls, Nashwa (‘ecstasy’ or ‘elation’) and Hala (‘lunar halo glory’).

And this week’s lesson: khartoum (yes, like the Sudanese capital) actually means hose in Arabic. I know this cos my shower hose, khartoum el douche, broke and I had to replace it.

On my way to my Arabic lesson (don’t get too excited, people, my new teacher thinks I’m thick as two short planks) I was reading my notes on the metro and a woman sat down beside me and said, ‘Are you learning Arabic? You are very smart. I will test you. Can you write my name?” Her name, dammit, started with one of the Arabic letters that has no English translation, ‘gh’. For Ghada. I had to stick my tongue out to write it. However, she was very nice, as befits a person whose name means ‘charming; graceful woman’.

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