Feeling a little restless, I went for a walk tonight that turned into a seven hour prowl all around my new neighborhood in Dokki and Mohandiseen, across the Nile to Zamalek and then eventually to Downtown for some late night Koshary (in what seems like blasphemy to me, almost all of the Koshary places are closed during Ramadan--except for my favorite one!). I spent a good chunk of that time in my old neighborhood on the island of Zamalek revisiting some of my old haunts and just sort of observing the Cairenes as they go all out for their Ramadan night-time affairs.

As I walked around Zamalek, I remembered how big Cairo had seemed when I first arrived there almost exactly a year ago. I also remembered how confusing the island is (still) to navigate, and how lost I kept getting right in my own neighborhood in my first two months here.  For some reason, as I walked the island, I felt far less comfortable in the northern areas where I had spent most of my time when I lived there than in the southern areas where I only ever passed through.

As I discovered new shops and restaurants and cafes that I had never known existed--even in that neighborhood I thought I had so thoroughly explored--I was reminded of just how big this city really is to me still. I have walked so much of this sprawling megalopolis, and yet I have only hit half of it at best.  There's lots more to explore still.

 Case in point is the location of my new work's office (just some part-time writing for a company that is creating a project about Egypt), down in an area called Maadi.  Like Zamalek, Maadi is where many foreigners and wealthy, affluent Egyptians live and work, but it is newer than Zamalek (and therefore also farther away). Whenever I get off the metro down in Maadi, I feel completely disoriented.  Even as my cabs take almost the exact same routes to my office, I can't yet really make sense of the endless series of identical-looking, leafy, developed traffic circles.  I'm looking forward to getting to explore the new hood, now that I have a regular excuse for being down there.

Also of note about Maadi is the number of dudes you'll see wearing shorts there. Maadi is a pretty trendy place, and so it is indicative of a phenomenon I've been noticing all around the city: dudes wearing shorts. This may sound totally uninteresting to you, or it may you may read this to be some kind of slackening of social taboos, but all I really care about is that I can wear shorts and not get weird stares like I did last summer.  Cairo in the summer is as every bit as hot as you would expect it to be (I mean, I live on the edge of the Sahara, so it stands to reason). Being able to wear shorts is important. Who knows why this change has come about, but I'm not the only one whose noticed it.

Sudanese reggae band

In this case the reasons behind the change are pretty unimportant to me, but some people do think it's a reflection of a freer society post-revolution. Then again, I get the feeling that a lot of people, be they Egyptian or foreign, are perhaps trying to ignore some of the more worrying trends in Egyptian opening society by overemphasizing the encouraging ones.  No ones want the revolution to have been in vain.*

*Well...some people might argue that the Egyptian army would like for it to have been in vain, perhaps...

I did have a notable conversation with two doormen in my wanderings of Zamalek that sort of touched on that notion of Egypt's opening society. (N.B. Doormen in Egypt live in the entryways of flats, and are responsible for a number of tasks involving general upkeep of the apartment and parking in front of it.  They pretty much just hang out in the bottom of their respective apartments most of their days.)  They were both from a town near Aswan, in the far south of Egypt (natives of this region are Nubian, a relative of a Northern Sudanese ethnic group, and they also speak a totally different language from Arabic that has roots going as far back as Ancient Egyptian civilization. The two men were sitting out on the sidewalk in their pearly white galabeyas  (better image) enjoying the perfect temperature of the night air when I nearly stumbled right into one of them. In that awesome Egyptian way that still baffles me slightly, he shoved a cup of tea in my hand, as if that's exactly what I was trying for in the first place, and after the second it took me to realize I had absolutely no other plans, I accepted the tea and sat down with the two.

The Arabic they spoke was different from the Egyptian dialect I knew (it sounded a lot like the Sudanese dialect my friend in Damascus once described to me as "Arabic being spoken with rocks in their mouth"), so my understanding was not exactly at its best, but we all made a good effort to get our points across, and we managed to have a fairly interesting conversation.

The older man, Omar, was really intent on my understanding that Egyptians pretty much love everybody. The words he was using to describe this are part of some oft-heard tropes coming from Egyptians which I think reflect a kind of head-in-the-sand mentality though. He talked about how he likes Jews, Christians, Egyptians, Americans, Israelis, and whoever else, because we are all humans and part of a larger extended family. An admirable sentiment, with which I couldn't agree more, but no matter how wonderful I find Egyptians, I don't think that is really the general feeling here (or anywhere else, for that matter).

"Raise your head high, you're Egyptian"

Wanting to press the issue a little, I asked about the violent sectarian clashes that had been going on a few months ago (and sort of forever) between Muslims and Copts in Cairo and Alexandria. Their answer was one of the most overused words in the Arabic political vocabulary: fitna.  The word has no direct English translation, but itt comes from the root having to do with temptation and is something like chaos or tribulations stirred up between people.  It is also the name used for the first Islamic civil war for leadership of the Muslim community after Mohammad's death.  As you'd expect, it's a charged term.  (You can also read the informative, if grammatically mistake-ridden wikipedia page for a more detailed explanation of the word.)  Don't be fooled though: if it sounds like a very specific and evocative answer, it's not.  Fitna has been blamed for problems in Muslim countries for centuries, because it implies no one is really at fault, and absolves the government of actually having to do anything to solve the underlying problems while vilifying the incidents in strong language.

So then I asked who they thought should win the presidential elections.  All I got was that they don't like Baradei, because he doesn't know what it's really like to be Egyptian since he lived abroad for so much of his life.  That's pretty much old news, so I asked what they thought about the army, and of course they said it was pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread, that the army and the people are one hand (a common revolutionary chant), and that the Egyptian army is integral to Egyptian society, because they didn't interfere with the revolution.  They pointed to the armies in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, and now even in Britain have supported the regime with violence against the people.

(Of course, grouping Britain in a group of brutal Middle Eastern dictatorships is a stretch for a long list of reasons, but an article I read in Aljazeera today about how California mass transit police had the cell phone services of everyone in their stations blocked in order to--get this--inhibit protesters from organizing a demonstration against police brutality in one of the stations.  Now I don't think it's much of a stretch to make a comparison to how said brutal Middle Eastern dictatorships used the same tactic on larger scale in their attempts to disrupt protest movements.  Of course, those movements were actually aiming to topple their respective regimes, begging the question, why could California police act in kind toward a potential demonstration that had decidedly more peaceful motives?)

They weren't really giving me much to work with, so I let them change the topic (inevitably it turned to the usual "I want to go to America; how do I do that?"), and they offered me some dates and a date-milk juice thing that they insisted would make me strong and healthy.  Luckily, I like dates, and I also happened to be carrying a croissant I had bought from a nice bakery on the island, so I happily insisted they take that in return for their generosity and openness.

So what is the point of this blog post?  I don't know.  But I did find a private rooftop pool nearby-ish my place that only charges 40LE for the day, and that is probably going to be my new favorite Ramadan hangout spot, I think.

Cairo sunset from a downtown rooftop