First day in Cairo

From the sky, Cairo looks like a kid’s attempt at drawing an aerial landscape. The lines are too sharp between lush green and dusty desert, the pyramids are too close to the city, and the endless 10-story tan apartment buildings have the uniformity of monopoly pieces. Even the Nile matches a little too well with the textbook picture of a river delta.

Our first day was a bit disorienting because we couldn’t sleep on the plane so we were already up for 24 hours by the time we touched down. After the ordeals of getting our first sim cards and calling an Uber (which we later learned you can pay for in cash here), we stepped outside to a surprisingly comfortable 99 degrees.

There’s a scent I remember from when I was here 11 years ago. It’s musty and dusty and maybe a hint rotten, which doesn’t sound nice but it reminds me of Pakistan in a way that makes it almost sweet to my senses. I was delighted to catch some mild whiffs of it as we crossed the street to look for our ride. I told Jack the first few numbers of the license plate to look for, 493, and he marched right up to the correct car, peeked at the license plate and went “nope.” I came around and saw “٤٩٣” (493 in Arabic numerals) and realized he might have a little trouble getting around without me.

Once we were on our way I gathered my courage and told the Uber driver in my super rusty classical Arabic that I had studied the language a bit in school. He was thrilled and we proceeded to chit chat in broken English and Arabic the whole way home. He even took us on a free detour to drive by the Al Azhar mosque and Al Azhar university, where he works as an engineer. He asked us if people in the US also have to drive Ubers as a second job and he told us where the locals shop. He kept calling his daughter his “husband” so we got to teach him a new word. By the end of the ride we’d gotten his phone number along with an offer to give us a free tour of Al Azhar University if we ever wanted one.

Our hostel has an elevator, which is great. The elevator has no door, but I guess you can’t win ’em all. As it crawls up to our level you can see the brick and concrete cross-sections of each floor. The room is pretty clean with strong AC and functioning wifi so we are thrilled. We walked around a little after grabbing a bite to eat (mediocre shawarma and shish tawook sandwiches) and couldn’t believe how many people were out late on a Tuesday night.

We’ve tried to get ahead of the jet lag by pushing through to almost 10pm before passing out. Outside of a brief but loud call to prayer at 3am, I’m now well-rested and pumped to be here.