|
| Sprezzatura Splayed
We've wandered Caironic streets for hours, mostly at night. I've become more adept at avoiding people and debris and puddles, more relaxed about traffic avoiding me by centimeters and not inches. To cross a street, I mercilessly identify a buffer body and try to match my footsteps to theirs, though my impractical footwear amuses akhi, and my clumsy tripping occasionally amuses a bystander. There is something adaptive about being a monoglut fool, even as I've broken one glass and burnt two fingers.
Last night we meandered near mosques, admiring the long tables set out for iftar (the nightly breaking of the fast during Ramadan). We were walking towards the usually bustling but presently eating Muhammad Ali St. when the call to prayer beaded its way across the city. A few kids were handing out dates to the occasional passerby, the sticky form of the fruit being the traditional first taste of iftar. We accepted a parcel of sweetness and watched as the boys hurled others through the open windows of moving cars. We refused, though, each of the half dozen offers to join a table, repeating shokran, thank you, with one hand or two over our hearts. Dinner instead at a posh restaurant of imposing door on the island of Zamalek was tasty and pricey enough, but I've developed a daily craving for kosheri, a national street dish of rice, noodles, pasta shells, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions, and tomato sauce. Paired with om aly--a warm mix of milk and wafer with coconut, raisins, and nuts--I am just a warm and comfortable organ.
Later, akhi threw a party on the roof, to prove that he has friends. American ex-pats, Egyptians, and four blissful Frenchmen smoked and listened to two guitars and a mandolin. I smiled and tripped, said shokran. | | |
| I Have Swummed With Fishes While vicious looking kittens at restaurants and bus stops continue to terrorize our travelers (or maybe just one of them), the sometimes brave companions boldly go. The Sinai peninsula is still littered with landmines, but air conditioned tourist buses showing Egyptian musicals at loud volume can safely make it through mysterious checkpoints to reach Dahab, on the Gulf of Aquaba. And who knew that Dahab has some of the best diving in the world? Well, divers. Mostly Russian. Akhi and I gave it our best impression, zipping into wetsuits and feeling more like superheroes than we had in days. I went down 11 meters and used 100 of my 200 units of oxygen on a 45 minute dive. If you're into stats. Non-stat wise, I'm even worse. Underwater, I could only express my delight by repeatedly making the "okay" sign to Ihmed, who was controlling all of the funny gauge-thingums attached to my tank. (The "thumbs up" sign was banned as an expression of approval; it meant "I'm panicked and get me out of this sea.") Eventually, I took to supplementing the "okay" sign with two "okays," and then by waving at the fish that particularly delighted me. Rather than read the next bit, it's probably best to just imagine me waving frantically with two hands. Angelic lion fish. Rainbow parrot fish. Feathery fish showing off the vibrancy of the colors of rocks. Terrifying cornetfish, all beak. Generic angel fish. Brain coral, blue coral, pink coral, coral like shrivelled yellow dill, green worm coral. A fish with plaid on its back. Rainbow fish, blue fish, tuna fish. I kept thinking of 'The Little Mermaid' and Gaudi and that Herzog documentary that includes shots of a gorgeous and desolate dive under Antarctica. That is how strange that 11 meters was, why I will only remember a flash if I'm lucky: Disney meets art nouveau meets German New Wave. So many eyes. I was mostly calm wonderment, listening to my Darth Vader breath, until I brushed against a cornetfish and realized that I could reach out and touch all of these creatures, or they could move to touch me (some of the coral included). I briefly wanted to make the thumbs up sign, but goggles are too good at acting like aquarium glass.
I snorkeled a little later in the day, sometimes racing away from the fish that were so blue you saw how much the Red Sea was not. It was hard not to float. To my excessive chagrin, I thought of Act 3, Scene 2, lines 810-815 in "A Comedy of Errors." So light!
| | |
| If They Had Been Cubes So Imposing?
I left the comfort of akhi's company to go forth and find the pyramids by day. I managed to wave down a cab and communicate my desired destination using the international hand sign for "pyramid." Akhi says that this is how you wave down microbuses sometimes: you flash the hand signal for the place you want to go, and if the bus is going there, it will stop. The driver charged me thirty pounds for the taxi ride, which was fair--but he set his fees only after he pulled into a side lane where a man with a donkey cart told me that "this car is not allowed to go any farther. It is ten kilometers by desert to the ticket station. Best use a cart." I looked out the back window and watched as any number of cars zoomed through the gate. "I'll walk," I said. "You'll walk?" "I'll walk." "You'll walk?" Etc. The taxi eventually backed out of the alley and drove the 400 meters or so to the ticket station.
Giza redefines "tourist trap," where the trap has something to do with the nakedness of a free market's cruelty. I was asked for baksheesh by random men, camel drivers, the tourist police, and one boy who told me to turn left to find the sphinx (seductive lips, ancient lovely). There seemed a strong note of desperation in the constant bargaining that left me unable to abandon politeness, that made me cling to it. And so again and again, I was drawn into conversation, and then invariably into bargaining my way to refusal. Somewhere in between, I was often asked where I'm from. Canada, I said. Canada Dry, is the almost liturgous response. I have no idea why. I did embark on the yearned for camel ride. Moses was a fine, tall creature, whose trot was silly enough not to be terrifying. His keeper lent me one of his hats and offered me 200 camels in return for my hand in marriage, which I thought was rather flattering until this evening our waiter affably offered 5000 camels for the same. Now I wonder if the first proposal was a sign of class difference, or a subtle dig. A different man grabbed my wrist and tried to drag me to another camel, where a group of Egyptian tourists where waiting with cameras. I avoided that camel, but the same friendly group surrounded me and asked for a picture.
Yesterday, I read a novel by Naguib Mahfouz called Khufu's Wisdom, in which, yes, the true prince was switched at birth and the beautiful peasant girl is really a princess. The Pharoah learns that even he cannot control Fate, and his son learns that the cruelty of power must be measured for the greater glory of all (like pyramid construction). I learned today that I am scared of most cats even.
| | |
| Lighting Out for the Territory
In the afternoons, before it's cool enough to move, I've been reading two travel writers of sorts, Amitov Ghosh and David Sedaris. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Sedaris delights in the international absurdity of human behavior, from Dutch Christmas traditions to Michigan gun laws. Working our way through two flavours of shisha, my brother (brother is satisfyingly spelled akh in Arabic) recalled that last fall he had been obsessed with Dutch Christmas traditions for several weeks before he stumbled on the relevant Sedaris chapter. Of course he had. In celebration, we listened to Sedaris sing the Oscar Meyer Weiner theme song in a Billie Holiday accent. Fireworks exploded above the city to mark the first day of Ramadan. Sublime.
Ghosh is more earnest. The Hungry Tide made me feel uncomfortable in its combination of harlequin romance ("it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one") and postcolonial tragedy (in a point against simile, the storm kills one of the still distinctly two bodies). In an Antique Land is less florid but retains a view of history that foregrounds beauty and violence such that there is little room for naming absurdity. Put another way, Ghosh subtly implies that calling someone absurd, or delighting in their absurdity--a definite sign of love for Sedaris--curtails wonder and engenders cruelty. Although, Ghosh has no problem pointing out the foibles of animals. In his descriptions of the region around Cairo, I was promised Egyptian ducks that are "almost suicidally self-absorbed." An odd, wondrous phrase, especially applied to ducks. Yet even after a faluka ride on the Nile, I have yet to see such a fowl. I do find myself musing on the ennui of the slender pigeons that occasionally flutter on and off the roof. Akhi promises that at the Friday market pigeons are passed around like mangoes.
A few nights ago, I traveled through the pyramided desert on horseback. Before starting off, we spent enough time waiting in an alley near some camels for me to fully feel the lack of safety protocal and legal waivers, as well as my disappointing tendency to find comfort in bureaucracy. When our guide finally joined us, he brought a new steed for me to try; I was asked to climb from one saddle to the other without dismounting. However alarmed and utterly lacking in equestrian experience, I succeeded in the maneuver and resolved to focus on all of the nineteenth century heroines who gamely went out "riding" before they caught their deaths of typhoid or love or whatever. If they could do it. There was a great whoosh of silence as we left the alley that bordered the City of the Dead and started into sand. The whoosh interrupted the steady stream of commentary from our guide, who was at special pains to let us know that our respective mounts were named Madonna and Michael Jackson. While Madonna mustered his tourist-weary strength and galloped down a dune in the dark, my brain dreamed paralysis and petticoats, blue sand and cone bras.
| | |
| My Cynicism is Suspect.
We went to a concert in Damascus in a demesene--fountain, (voluptuous) pomegranate tree, marble (infinitely varied symmetry), tortoises (elegant foot), etc. Ubiquitous oldness.
I learned to spell the names of two musical instruments. The oud is large and lute-like. Its sound is deep and esoteric. When the string was strummed, I was anxious that it wouldn't make a sound. The qanoun is a zither. Its sound is high and visceral. When the string was strummed, I wondered if my nerves did it. Played together, they're quite something. So are two tortoises, playing together. Quite something. My word-things lose their nerve at playtime. A sandcastle! I will build a sandcastle.
Last night, we went to a concert in Cairo in a cultural center. Zar is a "community healing ritual of drumming and dancing whose tradition is carried mainly by women...In the whole of Egypt only around 25 people continue to practice this knowledge and this tradition." Zar is probably some academic's dream paper. But it is also men wearing belts of goats hooves and shaking it. When and if zar is no longer practiced in Egypt, there might not be a person who thinks to make a belt out of goat hooves, much less master how to move so that the hooves make the sound and rhythm that they did last night. I bet the academic just wants everything beautiful to exist always. Or a job. The nerve.
My brother lives in fine bohemian style. Sisterly, I spent a few hours yesterday playing with a squeegee in order to clean off the quarter inch of old sand that covered the bathroom.
| | |
|
