Part III: Cairo as an Arabic Student: Mosques and Trains”

Posted by bookncurls on March 6, 2009 · 2 Comments

This was the trip to Cairo that led me to say I wouldn’t tell people I studied Arabic. It would be about 8 years before someone discovered my Arabic past which would consequently lead me back into the Arab world. But that is a story for a different post.

What did I love about Cairo the second time?

My happiest memory was with a guy I hung out with pretty much the whole program. We often bolted from our group and added a touch of Indiana Jones to the experience. We weren’t exactly aloud to ride camels into the sunset next to the pyramids but we did anyway. And despite the travel weariness, the sicknesses, and the whatever-else’s, sitting high on the camels was regal, above the chaos of the city and in touch with the ancient.

Mosque Oasis

The traffic, mud brick, raw meat hanging all could make your first impression of the city wrong. I learned this the day my Arabic professor took us on a tour of the mosques in the city. As we wound through markets, dusty streets, butcheries, he stopped in front of a gate, pushed it open, and there it was–a mosque, an oasis of simplicity, cleanliness, and trees. My little girl heart was enchanted and I wanted to stay just a few more minutes. No wonder Muslims like mosques.

Midnight Train from Luxor

If you are traveling from Luxor to Cairo you could take the midnight train. Our Arabic professor booked our passage with the locals in 2nd class. It all began inocent enough. The train slowed down for 2 min for us to literally throw our bags on the train and jump on as it took off again. But that should have been the excitement for the night until in the middle of a half conscious sleep a crowd of loud villagers got on the train with a man on their shoulders wailing. Having been sick many times already I dreaded the thought of why he wailed so loudly. As the mob passed me, the bottom of his foot touched my arm. I spent the night worried I would die in Egypt of a horrible disease. When we unloaded the train I asked what was wrong with the man. His back was broken. I felt terrible that I had been so worried about my self and spared not even a moment of compasion for him. It prompted me to write a poem entitled, “To Cairo”.

Why did I not want to return?

First, I kept getting sick. We traveled around for a month, washing our clothes in the shower with shampoo. One day I was so sick I couldn’t go get anything to eat that day. I remember trying to fall asleep shaking with hunger wishing I were home. My comrades were sick, too. But all of that may have been easily forgotten.

The trama happened when my Arabic professor asked me and a couple of the guys to go visit a man living in one of the Cairo slums. I dressed modestly and covered my hair. Traveling deeper into Cairo and with the sun setting I noticed less and less women and more and more men. We changed transportation several times and finally crossed train tracks into an area without paved streets where mud caked the ground and lights hung from ropes in the street.

As we entered the neighborhood, several hundred men swarmed around the two guys I was with parading them around like heroes. The men were so tightly packed around my two friends they didn’t notice me getting pushed to the outside of the mob. I started to panic. I tried to call them but they didn’t hear me. It got worse when a man selling vegetables started throwing them at me at full strength hitting me pretty hard. Men called me terrible names.

We did finally make it to the house of the man we were supposed to visit. But when he saw me, he gave the two guys I was with a thorough tongue lashing. He told them they should never bring a woman here at night and they were lucky nothing happened to me. (That scared me even more.) He refused to visit with them, immediately bought out an entire taxi-van so that we would be the only ones and took us directly home. I’ve never been so grateful for the Arab sense of protecting their women in my life and that he would put my safety above whatever else was going on.

I was super happy to get on the plane to go home after that and I didn’t really want to tell anyone I had learned Arabic or had any connections to the Middle East.

See previous posts in the series:

Cairo Part II: “Cairo for the first time with an Argentine Flair”

Cairo Part I: “Pre-Cairo, My Aunty”

Damascus

Middle Eastern Cities Poll