Travel | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Jul

The price of Paradise

This weekend, I went to Paradise. Entrance costs 50 Egyptian pounds ($12). But if you know a guy who knows a guy, you can do it for maybe 20 ($5)…

Summer in Cairo? Insa! (Forget it!) Come Thursday evening, the highways are packed with cars and minibuses taking Cairenes away from the city and to the nearest body of water – the Mediterranean. Much of Egypt pours up to Alexandria for at least one month, while the north coast, ie. everything west of Alex, is littered with beach resorts whose names range from the chic to the corny: my favourite was the humble, unassuming, ‘Nice’ resort. A fake Dolce & Gabbana t-shirt is this year’s must-have accessory, worn by the sharp-eyed, dark-skinned boys of Upper Egypt, out for whatever havoc they can create on their holidays.

The beaches are a bewildering mix of public and private, and the private beaches can range from a strip of sand cordoned off from the great unwashed with a few beach umbrellas and seats to the lavish – bean bag at the water’s edge, shisha pipe in the pools, chaise longue on the white sand beache.

Their names are as evocative as they are global – Paradise, Cuba Cabana, Tahiti, La Plage…
Paradise is the basic number, with lifeguards on duty as this stretch of beach is notoriously dicey, with a strong undercurrent and waves that have no qualms about dumping you on the beach, swimmers full of sand, in front of hundreds of amused Egyptians.

After you have found your spot, hired your umbrella and beach chairs and settled in, guys wander past selling everything from ice creams to cappuccinos, frecia (a sweet wafer peculiar to Alex) to blow-up beach toys. You want it, they’ll run for it. They’ll even take your money and bring your change a half hour later, remembering your spot amongst the crowds. Australia, take note.

In comparison, entrance to Tahiti, a beach resort further up the coast in the gated community of Marina, costs LE75 (about $17) entrance (absolutely no alcohol, they even looked in my bag) and the scene was coooool. Lots of bikinis, lots of long hair tossed about, belly jewellery, Gulf Arab families with Filipina nannies, young actresses spotted in the mix, funky music and the smell of pizza wafting through the air. We lazed along the beach on chaise longes and bean bags and swam and drank coffee then moved to the pool and the lounges to order pizza and watch the big orange sun slide down past the palm-lined horizon.

Another night, we nipped into an open-air beach club at Agamy Bay. Slap bang on the beach, its location is impeccable. Blue has a reservations-only upstairs section, which this night was into bottle service (ie a bottle of Jack Daniels or vodka on each table, resting in an ice bucket) while downstairs was more into the dance floor.

Surely to be Dutch means you must be a great DJ? (Think Tiesto, Armin van Buuren etc). Wrong. The Blues DJ was cashing in on his famous brothers, but himself was a dud, yelling heavily-accented inanities into the mic whenever he got excited, “Take it easy, guys!” when a rare fight threatened to break out on the dance floor to “There’s a girl dancing on the beach!” as well as the obligatory advertisement for tomorrow night’s foam party, every third song.

Jul

Arabic 102

My word for the day is sorsarrrr – which uses the letter ‘sohd’, not to be confused with the normal ‘s’ sound, or ‘seen’, as the letters are called. TECHNICAL: NO NEED TO READ! The sohd (to give it a phonetic value) is a sound made deep in the throat, one of the many letters not found in European alphabets; sohd, dohd, thor, zord, ghein and the ain are just some of the letters that twist the tongue to get the rolling, guttural sound going.

Actually, the Egyptian accent is much softer than that of the Gulf states, which has got the whole throat-gagging-spitting thing going on.

Sorsar, by the way, means cockroach, a word I have become annoyingly familiar with thanks to the gargantuan beasts who galloped down the hallway playing tag with each other, every night after lights out in my old (temporary) apartment (here’s a pic).

Happily, I don’t have to use the word so much in my new apartment (which I’ll tell you about later) but I think that’s cos I started off as the boss, walking in brandishing a big can of sorsar spray, complete with explanatory pictures on the can in case they can’t read, the spray as super-toxic as toxic as only second- and third-world chemicals can be. I think the sorsareen (what IS the plural for cockroach?) get the pictures…

Jul

Learning Arabic 101

A friend who lives in another non-English speaking country made a wise observation recently. “You can ask for a drink and say ‘no’ and ‘thank you’, and you think you’re a hero of the language. It’s when you go any further that you realise you’re a complete novice.”

It’s the classic case of the wise man knowing he’s a fool.

I have hit that stage. I can argue with taxi drivers, buy and order most food, read menus and signs, as well as haggle, but to explain to someone the concept that my male friend is just a friend who happens to be male, and I lose the plot and stand there like a tongue-tied idiot. It doesn’t help that there is no concept in Egypt of non-sexual male friends.

I have stopped doing last-minute Arabic homework on the train because everyone reads my writing and smiles the way you’d smile at a small child or drooling idiot, then runs through the standard gamut of questions – where are you from, what’s your name, how many children do you have, are you married or do you just have a Friend (see comment above re: male friend).

Some people, notably taxi drivers, are most patient when it comes to listening to my mangled Arabic. Hell, I’m in their taxi, they want to get me to where I’m going and take my money. So they’re very complimentary and charming.

But there’s also a certain amount of arrogance amongst Arabic speakers toward the rest of the world, from educated Arabs and the street smart alike.

“You will study Arabic for 10 years and still not be able to speak it,” said my boab (aka doorman) in Arabic, who then informed me that in a month, you can learn to speak English. I asked him (in English) why he hadn’t done so, but he didn’t understand me…

TBC after tomorrow’s Arabic lesson…

PS: this is not my boab, but a pretty good idea of what many of them look like.

Jul

Sweating it out on the sauna express

The temp in Cairo is ramping, up with 40 degrees and sunny blue skies the norm. It’s the time when the city fills up with gulf Arabs coming to the cooler climes for summer, escaping their countries’ 50+ degree heat.

Yesterday, I made the mistake of travelling on the metro in morning peak hour. It was the MOST intensely crowded train I’ve ever been in – breasts, waists, heads, handbags, children – all enmeshed to create a jigsaw of human flesh, with not even a puff of air between. And the fans overhead in the carriages were broken. Just lucky this was the women’s carriage. Otherwise, it would have been a frotteur’s paradise.

When I got to my destination, I washed the sweat of other women from my skin.

Sometimes, there’s a funny camaraderie on the metro. Those fortunate enough to get a seat will take a standing woman’s heavy handbag and put it on their laps or, which I saw yesterday, even take their children, covering them with kisses.

On the way home, two girls sitting in front of me stood up to leave, and another woman and I took their place. Except the other woman was the size of the two skinny girls, and we just squeezed in on the bench seat.

Finally, she was replaced by another woman holding an infant. She hauled up her robes and, the baby’s head hitting my arm, she fed the child, all the while squished up against me. Mind you, opposite was another woman with a child maybe a month old, much admired in the carriage, when another woman sat carelessly beside her and rested her large handbag on the baby’s head. She felt something under the bag and casually moved it off his tiny head. No prams in Cairo.

Jul

McArabia: would you like dogma with that?

Far be it from me to plug a multinational food chain, but … rules were made to be broken. Let me phrase it this way: if there was no other option to eat in Egypt except at a McDonalds, you could do far worse.

Stop gasping people – I’m talking about the McArabia. Hurrah, McDonalds has forgone its cultural imperialism for one moment and come up with a passable alternative.

The McArabia is tasty flat bread with beef or chicken kofta, fresh lettuce, tomato and tahina inside. We have tried both and thoroughly rate the beef out of the two. At around LE25 (about A$5), it’s not cheap but it’s damned tasty.

They haven’t gone so far as to serve it up with the Ko’ran or a glow-in-the-dark plastic mosque alarm clock (yes, they are out there), but instead the standard fries and a drink.

Jul

Kartell does Cairo

Last night, I went to the opening of the new Kartell store (www.kartell.it) Yes, Kartell, the Italian home of Phillipe Starck – he of the occasional tables made from plastic garden gnomes and transparent furniture – amongst others of the designer world’s elite. I confess I was super surprised by the annoucement – sure I know there’s enough cash in Cairo to buy Kartell, I just wasn’t sure it was so firmly within the Egyptian taste point. But hey, I’m wrong.

It was a bit of a blast back to Milan, with the red carpet up to the door, though a few differences – the glamorous building is still being finished so they were running on generator power (though you’d never know) and the cocktails were mocktails, as far as I could see. Beautiful Egypt was out in force, with lots of leggy young girls in fashions you’d never see on the metro, and plenty of interested young blokes serendipitously placed outside for a rare glimpse of nude legs.

Jun

Little black number

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how differently black is perceived in the West and here in the East.

In the west, fashion has been dominated by the LBD (little black dress) for decades. When we want to look chic, we wear black. When we can’t find anything else in our wardrobes, we throw on the standby black trousers, black shirt and black shoes. Super easy, unless you’ve washed your black clothes into shades of grey, you can’t mess up the colour coordination.

In the East, however, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. Black is ultra-conservative: think the all-encompassing chadors of Iran, the face-obscuring niqabs in Egypt, how in Oman men wear white while women wear black gellibayas (the long shapeless gown that falls to the ankles think LBD again, but in this case, Long Black Dress). Here, to wear black is to state that you’re conservative, respectable, religious, even. It’s the flamboyant, fashionable girls who are mixing gold and purple, splashing spring green with white, as opposed to flashing flesh.

In both instances though, wearing black is conformity – conformity to fashion or conformity to conservative mores. Repeat after me: we are all individuals.

Jun

Get some pork on your fork

This is an old rumour, but a deliciously naughty one worth repeating in the light of the swine flu fanaticism: word has it on the streets that the government has been selling pork meat for the stunningly low price of LE5 (just over a US dollar) a kilo.

Of course, the pork comes from the pigs who have been slaughtered in the fever of swine flu. A further rumour, which I’m SURE is not true, is that unscrupulous butchers are mixing the meat with that of beef and lamb to flesh out their supplies.

I don’t rate this one because surely no butcher would be so bad as to mix what’s considered unclean meat to Muslims, who comprise around 80 percent of the Egyptian population. But rumours, like the flu, have no boundaries.

But then, as a Christian friend said to me recently, “Muslims say they don’t eat pork, but once they’ve eaten my pork, they love it.”

Hotly contentious, I’ll leave it at that. I have no beef with pork, either way…

Jun

Egypt beats Italy in World Cup frenzy

You know Egyptians, like so many other countries, adore their football. I didn’t think it could get any more frantic, but with the World Cup looming in South Africa, the fanaticism has grown to an obsession. Especially after a close match with the champions of Brazil.

So imagine what Cairo was like the other night after they beat Italy. Yes, Italy! Even the Italians were disgusted with themselves, moreso when one of their players lost his pants to reveal a white backside, caught on a thousand cameras.

After the match, the city closed off one of the main cross-city tunnels as dancing revellers poured through it, and homemade fireworks lit the sky. Hundreds of cars lined up to drive through Korba, just near my house, so they could wave their flags and have their cars rocked by the swarms of boys celebrating with horns and drums, chanting, “Misr! Misr! Misr!” (Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!)

Egypt is next pitted against America tomorrow night, which they are ridiculously confident of winning, and is the qualifier for the World Cup. I say: show caution. They say: it’s America. Which is almost as bad as Australia.

Jun

Swine fever grips Egypt

Despite the fact that Egypt killed most of its pigs in a bizarre species-cleansing exercise that had pig owner (Christians) disraught, the country is not immune to swine fever.

There are 29 cases to date, with new cases developing daily, mostly in people returning from travel in Canada and the US.

So of course, we foreigners are a target for suspicion. So much so that I’ve a good mind to wander through the busiest mall with an Australian flag, sneezing conspiciously and sans tissue – pure naughtiness.

It’s the front page of Al-Ahram today, with a photo of members of the Opera House audience donning masks, girls in the metro with masks on, and one girl quoted as saying, “Egyptians should shop kissing when they meet with friends. The flu provides the perfect reason to change unhealthy habits.” Really. That’s just un-Egyptian.

Throwing rubbish in the street or pouring raw sewage into the ocean – slightly less healthy than kissing, don’t you think?

Personally, I’m loving the Australian response to swine flu (despite the fact we appear to be riddled with the pig cold). Australia has increased its national threat assessment level from “no worries, mate” to “she’ll be right, mate.” There is no thought of incurring the most extreme threat level of “sorry, mate, we’re canceling the barbie”.

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