Cairo: whirling.

One evening, I went with a group of CouchSurfers to Islamic Cairo to see Al Tannoura [facebook, YouTube], a group that does Sufi dancing three times a week. Tickets are free - the group is funded by the Ministry of Culture or something like that. The dancing is a spiritual thing for Sufis, and while you can tell that some of the dancers/musicians are just doing their job, some of them seem to actually get into it and be in some kind of spiritual state - but maybe they're just good actors! I'm not sure whether they're all actually Sufi or what. One of the musicians who seemed really into it brought to mind Southern Baptists, with their crying and falling on the floor and speaking in tongues.

A clip of the group [not from me or anyone I know - just found on YouTube].

The venue - the courtyard of a beautiful old building.

Everyone loved the awesome old dude with the castanets - lot of character. He had a duel with that drummer and did a few "talk to the castanet" moves.

Cairo: taxi!

First: I forgot to mention one of my favorite things about the crazy traffic here. In the midst of everything, all of the cars and honking, you can find donkeys. They're hooked up to carts, either chilling on the side of the road or trotting along with a few people on the cart. It's incredible that they don't freak out in this circus.

On to the taxis. I [and most of the students at the language school] take the taxis pretty much everywhere, since the microbuses are kind of overwhelming for non-natives and I don't have a clue where the closest metro station is - although it's very cheap [one Egyptian pound, which is about 17 cents], so maybe I'll take a look eventually. But the taxis are, of course, also not very expensive - for the places I usually go, I rarely pay more than five or ten pounds, and even a 30 or 40-minute ride to City Stars came out to about 40 pounds [$7].

There are two basic kinds of cabs here - black and white. The black ones are older and don't have meters, so most people either settle the price before they even get in or know how much it should be and just give the driver that amount and walk away before he can argue too much - but tourists are easily ripped off. A lot of the black cabs have flashing neon lights and stuffed animals all over. The other day we saw one that had a baby doll head - just the head - attached to its sign. The white cabs are newer and cleaner and have meters and are therefore more trustworthy. You still have to pay attention, though, because sometimes they "forget" to turn on the meters and then try to negotiate when you get to the destination.

Most of the cars on the road are carrying at least two more people than they were designed for [the other day, I saw a pickup bed just full of children], but the black cabs in particular can often be seen filled to the brim with one person in the passenger seat, four adults in the backseat, and a few children on various laps.

In New York City, drivers know the city pretty well, especially since the streets and avenues are mostly numbered and in a grid. In London, every cab has a GPS system. In Cairo...you tell the driver the neighborhood and the street, and once they get to the neighborhood they stick their head out the window and ask every person they pass where that street is.

Cairo: the Greeks and the Buddhists.

One of Yasmin's relatives here is part Greek, so he invited the two of us and Brigitte to dinner at the Greek Society of Cairo, which is located right on the Nile. It was a very cheery group, and since almost everyone was Christian [mostly Greeks raised in Egypt], they weren't afraid to let the alcohol flow. One of the guys was consuming quite a bit, and Brigitte's conversation with the man's friend went something like this:

"He was a lawyer."
"Oh, what is he now?"
"Drunk."

After dinner, we danced and shouted "Opa!" a lot.

The Nile and some of the big hotels from the Greek Society's anchored boat.

Yasmin and I then met with Will and some of his friends visiting from the US at the Buddha Bar in the Sofitel hotel - hotel bars are a popular place to go out, especially for foreigners, it seems, since there just aren't that many other places that serve alcohol. It was a very fancy [and expensive] place, with a view of the Nile, and I felt worlds away from the Cairo I had been living in.

Cairo: the nightlife.

I don't know whether you've heard this, but...Egypt is hot. There are enough people in this city that plenty of them are still out and about in the middle of the afternoon, but most try not to do too much around then. Instead, most stores, cafés, etc. are open very late. City Stars - the biggest mall in Egypt - is open until midnight, and the RadioShack down the street from me is even open until 1 a.m. Sidewalk sellers stay out to play their wares even later. The streets are as alive in the middle of the night here as they would be in the afternoon in most other places, with children scampering about and everything. After the sun goes down, the grass on the large street dividers fills up with entire families picnicking or just chilling.

Cairo: the bazaar.

One afternoon, Yasmin, Will, and I went to Khan El Khalili, the big bazaar here. As it turned out, Yasmin was right that the afternoon is the wrong time to go - all the sellers have far too much energy still and really try to get you to come into their shops. One guy really really really wanted to polish Will's shoes and followed us all the way to the café. While we were at the café, men were constantly coming by and trying to sell us cushions, Rolexes, and Oakleys [helpful hint: the last two were not real].

Walking through the bazaar was like running the gauntlet. [Side note: I just looked that phrase up on wikipedia to make sure it was "running" and not "walking" (see the effort I put forth for you guys?), and the entry included this sentence: "It is also called 'running the gauntlet' when one runs on top of a large row of porta-potties while bystanders proceed to throw trash at him or her." Ohhhhhhkay.] On either side, all the salesmen were standing outside their shops, smiling and saying set phrases to try to get us to come in:

"I don't know what you want, but I have it!"

"How are you tomorrow - I mean, today?" [Uh huh, sure, that was an unplanned trip-up, not a cute mistake designed to make tourists go "awwww" and catch their attention...]

"Oh, lucky man, two wives! How many camels for one?" We heard that one several times - it was cute the first four or so times, but then it felt a little overplayed...especially when Will started asking for 15 camels. Just 15?!? We were very offended.

Cairo: showin' some calf.

I don't wear a head scarf here [except when I go into mosques, of course] or anything, but I do cover up a bit more than I would otherwise in this weather. During the day, I usually wear pants and a tank top - and that gets me enough comments. Once my roommate [Yasmin] was wearing a very decent skirt that definitely went below the knee and everything - but that little bit of calf showing got her more comments than ever. At night, I make sure to cover my shoulders, even though it doesn't really get much cooler when the sun goes down.

I don't feel threatened in any way, even though I tend to show more than the average Egyptian woman [which is not saying much, because the average Egyptian woman doesn't show much at all]. Men on the street tend to say whatever they want to whoever is walking by, but that's all it is - talk. They never get aggressive in any way. And since I usually have no idea what they're saying, I've learned to ignore it and don't notice it as much anymore. It can also be cute - Yasmin said that the day she was wearing the skirt, an old man cried out, "What is this beauty!" Aw. Then again, a lot of men just make the kind of lip-pursing noise you make when you're calling a cat.

The tour guide for the pyramids is half Egyptian and half Turkish and was raised in Turkey. She doesn't wear a head scarf and says that she gets a fair number of comments from strangers about not covering up. I don't think I get those, since I'm clearly not from here, but even I now tend to look twice when I see a woman who looks Egyptian but isn't wearing a scarf - it's somewhat unusual.

My top three stranger-on-the-street interactions so far:

3] This was in Arabic, but Yasmin was there to translate for me - a guy driving by on a moped shouted out, "Hello, whitey!" Well, hello there! Just give me some time to soak up the sun here...

2] A guy asked Yasmin [who's actually half Egyptian but was raised in Norway] and me, also in Arabic, "Are you tourists or are you Egyptians?" If he couldn't figure it out just by looking at me, he doesn't deserve to know.

1] The microbuses here usually have someone hanging out of them shouting out the destination. I was walking in that space between the parked cars and the cars rushing by - and wearing a tank top - when I felt someone slap my upper arm. I looked up to see a boy of probably about twelve hanging out of a bus driving by and grinning at me. Drive-by upper arm slap? Okay...

===

Most women just have the head scarf, long sleeves, and pants or a long skirt, but I've also seen a lot of women wearing burqas/abayas/niqabs. Most of them even wear gloves - so really all you can see of them is their eyes. Apparently they usually start wearing burqas shortly before they get married, but a few days ago I saw a girl of nine or so wearing one.

===

An Egyptian I went to a mosque with told me, "You look nice in a hijab [head scarf]." I think that's Muslim flirting...?

It was strange to wear the hijab - I'm not used to having something surrounding my face, and it was hot. I suppose you get used to it if you wear it your whole life and, of course, have an actual spiritual reason to wear it, but...it's not really my thing.

And I just generally don't understand why women in the hottest countries in the world are usually the ones who "have" to cover up the most. Doesn't seem fair!

Cairo: ShamWow? Really?

After the pyramids and the Sphinx, our tour guide was kind enough to take us to a perfume shop and a papyrus shop where they tried to sell us stuff [yeeeees, that'll totally work on a group of mostly students and young people - we have tooons of money to spend on papyrus]. But the guy at the papyrus shop who explained to us how it's actually made was awesome - filled to the brim with energy. At one point he was showing us how papyrus doesn't fall apart in water, and when he was wringing it out, he pointed at me and said, "You're from America! What does this look like?!?" I didn't know what he was trying to get at, so he shouted, "ShamWow!"

Oh man. How did that cultural phenomenon make it to Egypt?!?

Cairo: some old triangles.

My group, complete with a tour guide with a zebra sun umbrella. Noooo, we're not tourists at all...

Close-up of the policeman on a camel.

Obligatory I-was-in-Egypt-and-saw-the-pyramids picture.

According to our tour guide, the Sphinx wasn't actually supposed to be a sphinx originally. The plan was to carve a statue of the pharaoh, with the human body and everything - but after they did the head, they realized there wasn't enough stone between the head and the ground to finish with a standing body. So...you know...reclining lion body. Would've been my first solution, too.

Cairo: some stores and a product.

How much do you think this store paid the Beatles to use their name to sell jeans?

Cutest name for a liquor store ever.

I'm pretty sure I already know what kind of vaccination you have to get to go on one of these trips.

Hodo Cross - Egyptian for "Hugo Boss."

Cairo: the traffic.

Traffic in Cairo is at once insane and a thing of beauty [and, as Mr. Fox would say, a clustercuss]. Traffic lanes a fluid concept and aren't even marked in most places - and where they are marked, no one pays much attention to them, anyway. There are almost no traffic signals or crosswalks - I've seen a few traffic lights downtown, but there are none in my area. The bigger roads, about five "lanes" in each direction, have a big divider between the two sides, so to make a left, you have to go past the street you want to go down, make a U-turn [they have a designated break in the divider for this every once in a while], and then turn right. The whole thing really is a kind of organized chaos - it's just incredible that it actually works without accidents every few minutes. You really have to see it to believe it.

Several articles I've read have compared crossing the street in Cairo to a game of Frogger - and it's true. Sometimes you can time it just right so you can walk across the whole road in one go, but often you get a couple lanes in and then have to stand around in the street waiting for another break in traffic to go the rest of the way. If you're feeling really confident that day, you can charge ahead and assume that the cars will stop or go around you - the former, however, rarely happens, and when it's the latter, it's only by about an inch.

Honking is kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing here. Everyone honks so much and for so many reasons that it doesn't even really mean anything anymore. Taxis honk at pedestrians to let them know they're available; all cars honk at other cars to say either "comin' through, get out of the way!" or "why didn't you get out of the way?!?"; and cars driven by men honk at women walking in the street to as a way of saying "what up, baby." Since most cars don't use any lights at nighttime, flashing the headlights is used for the same reasons then - although not instead of honking, but rather as a supplement.

And everyone usually does walk in the street. The sidewalks here are so full of ups and downs and holes and cafés and stores extending to the very edge that they're difficult to navigate [the curbs are really high, too...this city is not handicapped-accessible] - most people just walk on the side of the street, between the parked cars and the crazy cars rushing by a couple inches away.

Speaking of parking, a lot of people double park - but then they leave their cars in neutral so people who need to get in or out of spaces they're in front of can just push them out of the way.

One guy told me that a friend of his - who had been driving in Egypt for years - married a British woman, and when they moved to London, his friend had difficulties driving with rules.

Human rights you can believe in.

If you're looking for a human rights group that tells you exactly what they do and doesn't need a movie announcer to tell you about it, check out Reprieve [US, UK, and more].

"Reprieve is a group of international charities dedicated to assisting in the provision of effective legal representation and humanitarian assistance to impoverished people facing the death penalty at the hands of the state, to producing and publishing information about the use of the death penalty, and to raising awareness more generally concerning human rights."

Rita worked for them a while, and I got a chance to meet some of the people still working for them - good people! Thought I'd just spread the word a little.

The Church.

I had received a special request [not from Tom Cruise] to scope out the London Church of Scientology, and I managed to rope Rita into going with me. Unfortunately, we only had a little bit of time, but we were able to take at least a quick look.

The building was, of course, very nice, what with all the celebrity money they have at their disposal. The people at the front desk were young and clean-cut. We said we wanted a tour, and they asked us to have a seat. After a bit [a little too long, if you ask me, if they really wanted us to buy what they were selling], an older woman came to get us and led us up to the visitors' centre [see how I spelled that funny because we were in England?] on the next floor.

The visitors' centre consisted mostly of various stations around the room with videos playing in front of informational panels. The woman told us there was a special event that night, so the usual informational panels had been switched out and temporarily replaced with panels detailing the horror and wrongs of psychiatry. We didn't have time to really read them, but they certainly made psychiatry look frightening [of course, it's true that a lot of past methods have been terrible, but - most things in the past have been terrible...things progress, usually for the better, in most fields, as far as I can tell]. Apparently the tour consisted of the tour guide telling us to watch whichever videos we wanted, offering us some water, and then disappearing, only coming back as we were leaving to try to sell us books - again, way to convince us!

We ended up watching a few "chapters" each of the videos on dianetics [L. Ron Hubbard's alternative to psychiatry, pretty much], Scientology itself, and the church's work in human rights. None of them contained much actual information. For part of the dianetics video, you could choose different people from various countries who were talking about their experiences with dianetics. But everyone just said a variant of "I was so sad and depressed and unhappy with my life...but then I started dianetics, and now I can really live my life again!" Never any concrete information on, say, how exactly it helped them, what exactly they got out of it, etc. Just - "try it, you'll like it!"

The videos on Scientology didn't tell us much more. They had more people telling us, "It changed my life - but I'm not going to tell you how!" They told us about the churches themselves - that video mostly consisted of shots of visitors' centers that looked exactly the same as the one we were sitting in right then...so...thanks for the information? And the whole time I was waiting to hear about space aliens - but no, no mention. I guess they usually try to wait until you're actually in the thing balls-deep before they mention, "Oh yeah, also, we also worship space aliens," or whatever it is they actually believe. [Not that that's any weirder than any other religion, but at least other religions are confident enough in their crazy, out-there ideas that they don't mind telling you about them at the outset.]

The human rights display was the weirdest. Again, no concrete information, mostly just statements like "seriously, we really care about human rights" - Rita [a human rights lawyer, I might add] kept asking in desperation, "But what do they doooooo?!?" We chose a video about a Scientologist who had won some human rights award [well...from the Church of Scientology]. It was strange for a couple reasons:
1) It profiled a guy who went to Africa [don't remember exactly which country, sorry] to teach former child soldiers and others about human rights [using a curriculum designed by the Church and featuring Scientology human rights tenets], and the story basically went something like this: he went over there, was told not to even look the young men in the eyes because they were so dangerous, and started teaching those same young men about human rights - and then they broke down and wept with him and ran out, Scientology human rights pamphlets in heads, to tell their friends the Good Word. It's a beautiful story, sure, but...was it really that easy? Somehow I doubt it.
2) The whole thing was narrated by a guy who sounded like he should be doing movie trailers. He said things like "And then they compiled data from 619 interviews about the high rate of rape and abuse against women!" in the same voice that says things like "Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up buildings and takes down punks in the past and the future at the same time - coming to a theater near you on Christmas Day!" It was incredibly off-putting.

My overall impression was that besides being vague and self-serving, it was all very artificial and marketed. The videos and panels were filled with graphics that just screamed, "Some guy was sitting at his computer thinking, 'Hey, if I add a few more flames here, this'll look really cool!'"

Of course, a lot of people would argue that this is pretty much how all religions started [vague statements promising that it'll improve your life ("Oh, yeah, leprosy? We've totally got a guy who can take care of that for you."), etc.], minus the snazzy DVDs and computer graphics - and in fact, maybe in a few millennia, the Scientology graphics will seem ancient and filled with symbolism, for better or worse [I'm going to go with worse, since that's the route most religions tend to go] - but right now it really seems like a new company masquerading as a belief system to get more investors.

And in case you're worried, despite drinking their water [well, I did - Rita was afraid to], we made it out alive without promising the Church our life savings and starting on the track to become High Holy Priestesses [okay, okay, I don't think they actually have those - not that I would know from the "informational" videos, since those don't actually tell you anything].

Bits of London.

Don't smoke - dance! At Guanabara, a Brazilian bar in London.

We were there to see Casuarina, a "young and hip" samba band. See the below video for a taste - good stuff!

I went to Leicester Square to get a ticket for a show at the TKTS booth, and when I got there, the entire place was blockaded off and completely full of people. The actors from Sex and the City 2 were about to arrive for the premiere. I was completely annoyed that I could see the TKTS booth just a few steps away, but it was blocked off on that side so I could to go all the way around the square and come back from the other side. They had created a separate area just for those who wanted tickets from the booth, and you were supposed to just buy your ticket and then clear out again - but since it was a prime spot to see ohmygodfamouspeople, most of the people were just pretending to be in line for tickets. I was annoyed with all the people making my life more difficult than it should have been - but I'd still like to tell you that I saw "Carrie" and "Samantha's" backs and show this picture I took of one of the minor actors, because, you know, ohmygodfamouspeople. [But it certainly wasn't as cool as the time I just stumbled upon the queen's birthday parade by accident.]

The show I bought tickets for was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, thanks to Leah showing me the movie when I visited her in Marburg. It was lots of fun, just as you would expect from a bunch of Australian drag queens on a road trip.

Another brush with celebrity - Rita, who I was staying with, lives a couple houses away from a house that Sylvia Plath once lived in.

One day I got some good food from Aladin, a curry house in Brick Lane whose big claim to fame, upon whose coattails they are still riding, is that Prince Charles dropped by a couple decades ago and gave it his royal stamp of approval. After lunch, I just started wandering, and ended up in this little artsy-fartsy neighborhood with a record store that I didn't feel cool enough to be in. I also checked out an exhibition space for artists and others that got creative about ways to deal with social issues. The space was sponsored by Honda to promote some new car [mmmmmm, commercial backing of art and community initiatives]. If you want to contribute to social justice with your underwear, take a look at Pants to Poverty [15% discount if you use the promotional code HONDA, by the way - go ahead and let them pay for part of your socially just knickers!].

For some reason, the sky in the UK is one of my favorites. This is just an average day - I've seen some pretty incredible skies there. The clouds just look better than in most other countries.

After some more wandering, I happened upon this covered courtyard with a mini-golf course and pool tables. It almost felt as though people were playing pool outside.

If a bar actually feels the need to declare on its sign that it's a dive bar, it can't really be that much of a dive, can it?

The graffiti reads, "BLACK GIRLS wear wigs." I'm sure the statement is backed up by scientific research.

The sound of Welsh?

There was a TV channel in Wales that seemed to be news in Welsh for people learning the language - every once in a while they would translate a word like "constitution" at the bottom of the screen. I don't know whether Welsh is supposed to sound this way or the announcers learned it bilingually / as a second language and just transferred their British accents, but if you didn't actually listen to the words themselves, it really sounded like British English - the rising and falling and overall tone of it. It's similar to the song sung by Italians in "gibberish American English" [embedded below and worth watching for the video alone] - as long as you don't listen closely, it sounds like something you *should* understand.