Cairo!

A week went by very quickly! Cairo was fabulous. I certainly want to go back to the city at some point of time.

To be honest, I didn’t quite know what to expect going in. Of course, I had seen pictures of Cairo the city and even some YouTube videos, but that can only tell you so much. I tried to draw an image of Cairo in my head, and that turned out to be more difficult than I imagined. Still, I left New York with a hybrid image of what I thought Cairo would be like. What surprised me the most was that when I actually got there was that it wasn’t at all like how I had imagined.

Several thoughts crossed my mind in the week before I left and even on the 12 hour flight from JFK to Cairo. It’s Cairo, Egypt. Egypt! Pyramids, Pharaohs, mummies, mystical pagan worshippers… But wait. Egypt is also in Africa! And you know what that means – Elephants, safari, forests. No, actually, Egypt is very much covered by the Sahara desert. Ah, the desert – sand everywhere (including inside my shoes), scorching heat and camels! The Nile…river, water, oasis? And then I spoke to my father who reassured me that Egypt is more an extension of the Middle East and would resemble Dubai or Doha more than it would any African city. So I added skyscrapers, the Cornish and men in white robes to the melting pot in my head as well. By the time I landed in Cairo, I was expecting a city full of elephants and camels side by side, with the sun beating down while Brendon Frasier guarded the three great Pyramids of Giza, while I roamed the city in a fancy Mitsubishi SUV on American-style disciplined roads lined with palm and date trees.

When I finally got to Cairo, I took a taxi and left the airport complex. I was just about absorbing all the Arabic and the statue of Ramses when it hit me – wait a second…did I somehow end up in India? Now having spent almost a week there, in my opinion the best way to describe Cairo would be to take any large Indian city including the traffic indiscipline, the honking, the crowds and the pedestrians and merge it with Arabic signboards, some sand on the side of the streets and a lot of sunshine. That, my friends, is Cairo. Cairo, where the amount you pay to a taxi driver depends on…what he feels like. Cairo, where telling someone that you’re an Indian immediately draws a smile on their face and prompts a reference to Amitabh Bachchan. Cairo, where people seriously speak Arabic at a breakneck pace. Cairo, where there are absolutely no traffic lights or roundabouts (seriously, I saw one traffic light in Nasr City near Anwar Sadat’s memorial, and that too was blinking orange).

Fantastic.