Arriving in Cairo: Dazed and Duty Free



Flying from the US to Egypt is a long flight even if you live in a major east coast city. If you live in a slow little city in the heartland and fly to Cairo, you arrive at your destination possessed of two advantages over other first-time visitors: You know you are in a very distant place (you just spent 18 hours in a cramped position to prove this), and you are acutely conscious of the fact that everything takes longer than expected. These two bits of knowledge prepare you better for the cultural shock of Egypt, which includes, among other more physically salient differences, one of the world's most strikingly inefficient economies; I'm guessing there's no word for "hurry" in Arabic. Given these facts, you can sit back and relax; you may as well smell the flowers along the way, so to speak. (I must note that there were no flowers on any of my flights actually, unless the bad breath of my seatmate from Detroit to Amsterdam could by any stretch of your imagination be deemed floral. I am thinking here of a remarkable flower called for good reason a corpse flower.) Taking it easy will help you adjust to the weeks ahead of you in Egypt, a place where eventually you will be somewhat amazed to discover that they actually DO run on the same schematic of time that we do in the western world, the structure of minutes, hours, and days. So put your feet up, relax, have a good glass of wine.

Approaching Cairo by plane

Or not. The wine, that is. I'm spectacularly unskilled at sleeping in moving conveyances, which comes in handy on escalators and bicycles but which is lamentable for intercontinental plane flights. My daughter had suggested I take full advantage of the free wine still offered on these longer flights in order to get some sleep, my tolerance for alcohol being nearly as small as my ambulatory insomnia is large. Well, I am even worse at drinking wine in daylight than I am at sleeping in daylight, so it wasn't until I was on my last flight leg that I finally ordered some vino. It was then I realized I was going someplace truly different. The wine on the attendant's cart was in a box. That's weird enough, but on the side of the carton I read: "Almost 50 percent real wine!" Oh yeh. That's right. I was landing in an Islamic culture. The content didn't matter; I spilled most of my plastic cup anyway and resigned myself to staring out the window at the sere landscape that was beginning to materialize below now that the Mediterranean blue was receding behind our jet trails.

Islamic or not, the ebullient young couple waiting for me on the other side of the customs visa lines barely paused to buzz my cheeks before whisking me, my fresh visa, and barely expired plane ticket off to the duty-free shop to buy wine. Apparently, there's a reason there is no Egyptian section in your local wine shop. The shoppers plundered the shelves of French and Italian wines on my behalf. You know, I don't think I've ever bought liquor at an airport before; I've never had a rousing motivation to carry more glass bottles in my luggage than are absolutely necessary. Perhaps it's this way everywhere, that only a freshly arrived turista can buy alcohol in these shops. In any case, I had to be the one to purchase the liquor, which I was happy enough to do as long as I didn't have to carry them. In fact, that was the last I ever saw of those bottles of wine, except for one I took to my host's home later that night, another inadvertant "learning opportunity," since he turned out to be a Muslim and didn't really drink more than he felt was necessary for politeness.

Everything would prove to be another a learning opportunity. I think I was agog the entire time I was in Cairo but never more than that first night. It was extremely fortunate I wasn't driving and that the young man who drove me everywhere was so absorbed in my daughter he really didn't care how embarrassing her mother was, hanging out the back seat windows, clicking pictures of chickens and donkeys and dervishes, entire families loaded up on tiny motor scooters, women smoking cigarettes through the black veil that covered their lips. Their absorption in each other left me gloriously free to be absorbed by the city.

In the posts to follow, I hope to tell you some of what I saw and heard and felt. I hope by the time I'm exhausted, you'll feel a little bit like you went to Cairo with me. If you do, like me, you will surely want to return.



It's that Nile thing. Even though nobody in their right mind would drink from the Nile, it seems to hold true. You drink the Nile with your eyes now, but it draws you back just as powerfully as drinking was once promised to do.

Come visit Cairo with me.