This City Works (an example)

As I continue my studies of the colloquial Egyptian dialect of Arabic, and as the nuances of this society become more evident, I am increasingly aware of just how well this city functions. From the outside it is a mess: polluted, overcrowded, plagued by unemployment and underemployment, and overwhelmingly unmanageable. But in order to house 18 million people Cairo has developed a complex social and cultural infrastructure capable of meeting any need.

We were told, before moving out of the military hotel, that we would have to pay 300 U.S. Dollars for a bus pass (conversion rate: $300 US = approximately 1,500 Falafel Sandwiches, the effective currency here). We were told that no taxi would be willing to drive to the new campus, and that there were certainly no public buses. And that by moving out of the hotels, and out of AUC-provided housing, we were forfeiting our 'free' means of transport (free is only relative, when you take into consideration the extent to which we were being ripped off, living in the hotels).

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in an AUC shuttle at the new campus with Andrew, one of my flatmates. An RA from the hotels climbed in, and told us that they would be moving out of the hotels into another set of hotels, by November, and that the AUC shuttle (which we have not paid for), would no longer provide service to Nasr City, and that it was about time we found an alternate means of transportation. It was the same RA who had informed me of the supposed lack of such alternate means. This was just the incentive I needed to give public buses a try.

So I left Andrew with my bag and started walking. It turns out there is a bus route named Gam'ia (the arabic word for University), that originates in 'Ashr, makes its way out to the AUC, does a lap around the campus, and returns to 'Ashr, which as far as I can tell is on the eastern edge of Nasr City (probably around Taha Husayn Street, on this map). From 'Ashr, there is a bus that runs down our street. As Andrew and I raced one another back to the Apartment, taunting each other by text message, I was sure this new route would take twice as long as the AUC shuttle, which is contracted to take the fastest route possible from the hotels to the campus. Naturally, I was taken aback when I saw Andrew in his conspicuous Viking's jersey turning the corner to our Apartment. I have since been informed that the route we are now taking is far more direct than that which the AUC shuttles take, and that were it not for the inevitable 10 to 15 minute wait in 'Ashr, the trip would take less than half an hour, making it the shortest commute of any student at AUC, in AUC or self-provided housing.

Before I finish, I'd like to take a minute to describe these buses, because there exists no means of transportation similar to them in the United States. From what I've gathered, they are not public. They are privately owned, unsubsidized microbuses that call themselves Big Taxis. They are the organic product of sprawling city with limited public transportation, and they were at first outlawed. The drivers were persistent, and so were the passengers. And today they are almost as common as small taxis. They run fixed routes, yelling the name of the route out of a window, but they are subject to change an intended route based on, as an Egyptian described it: "flow". In essence, they respond to demand. Capitalists might cite them as an example of the free-market's outstanding capacity to solve any problem. They are all white. Though the passengers will open the sliding door themselves, the driver often utilizes a basic understanding of the laws of physics to close them. He will get a little momentum going and, once the van is full, slam on the breaks, sending the door sliding shut at a speed that makes your fingers hurt just thinking about it. They cost between a pound and two pounds, which converts to one or two falafels. They drive fast, but they're professionals, and perhaps it's unjustified, but they feel safe. In short, I propose the white-microbus-system as a solution to a plethora of social and economic issues that plague our country: emissions and pollution, the rising cost of gas and unemployment, to name a few. 

Jordan

We left for Jordan at 10:15PM on September 29th from a bus station on the edge of Midan Ramsis, which is, in some sense, a microcosm of Cairo itself; it’s overcrowded and sprawling, and yet it’s a vital hub of transportation, commerce and culture. Since our trip to Jordan, we have experimented with the white Volkswagon micro-buses, omnipresent in this city, half of which seem to end up in Midan Ramsis.

Our bus out of Cairo reached Taba, the northeastern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, by four in the morning, and Nuweiba by six. We got off at Nuweiba, expecting to take the ferry directly across the Red Sea to Aqaba, a coastal city in Jordan.

We napped briefly, awakened intermittently by the sun and the flies, until around 8 o’clock, when we began to line up to buy tickets for the ferry. Naturally, given the ferry’s monopolistic status as the only route from Egypt to Jordan that circumvents Israel (and thus the only route available to Egyptians), we reached the front of the line to find that the price was twice what had been advertised, a whopping 95 US dollars. So, in the interest of heeding the U.S. State Department’s advise (‘It is especially important for travelers to be unpredictable by varying their times and routes and to maintain a low profile’) we hopped in a cab and headed to Taba. 

We crossed the border into Eilat, Israel after a robust interrogation (truly an exercise in twenty-first century racism) and took a cab to Israel’s border with Jordan. Leaving ‘the motherland’ proved to be a bit easier than entering, with the exception of the exit tax, which they slap on you as walk out the door. We then made our way to Aqaba, in search of falafel. We arrived in Aqaba 10 hours earlier and 50 dollars cheaper than our friends who opted to ferry across the Sea.

On our first night in Aqaba we met a Jordanian named Mahmoud who was eager to show us around. He walked us along the coast, from which the lights of Eilat are clearly visible. We met his friend, who commutes to and from Israel every day. As the night came to an end we talked about plans for the next day, and Mahmoud suggested we take a ride on a glass-bottomed boat. I thought that he said something about military tanks under the ocean, but I wrote it off as just another miscommunication, inherent to my conversations in Arabic. 

We fell asleep watching حروف والووف, the Arabic equivalent of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, in which each series of questions is punctuated by what we called ‘Dancing Sword Time’, a bizarre performance by the Saudi Regis Philbin. And we reveled in our ability to understand a question here and there.

On our second day in Aqaba we visited a disappointing ruin, swam, ate and took a glass-bottomed boat ride. Admittedly, I was quite smug when we passed over submerged tanks, as I am anytime I translate something that seems peculiar but proves to be true. 

We tried to find Mahmoud again, unsuccessfully, and we ended our night in a coffee shop, discussing Egyptian-Jordanian-Israeli relations with a newfound body of evidence from which to draw: the cultural experience of crossing a border.

On our second morning in Aqaba we hoped to take a 7AM bus to Petra. However, the morning bus waits to fill up before it leaves, and there aren’t too many people in Jordan awake before noon during the Eid il-Fatr holiday celebrations. So we reluctantly climbed into a taxi, for what proved to be a scenic and pleasant hour and a half to Petra. 

We checked into the “Sharah Mountains Hostel”, and made our way into the ‘Rose Red City’ by 9:30.

I’ll leave the description of Petra to my photos.

Awkward Turtle at the Petra Treasury

After a long day exploring the ancient city, we went out to dinner.

The family in charge of the baby on the table behind us proceeded to change the baby’s diaper on the table, in what was quite an unappetizing act of questionable hygiene. We napped and returned to the site for ‘Petra by Night’, a candle-lit walk and musical performance in front of the Treasury, Petra’s most recognizable building.

We got back to the hostel by curfew and slept for a couple of hours, waking up at four to watch the vice-presidential debates on al-Jazeera. From five-thirty on my dreams were haunted by Palin’s winks and ‘folksy’ rhetoric, and I rolled out of bed at 10 hardly feeling rested.

The rest of the day, Friday the 3rd, was a race against the less than punctual clock that is MBC2’s movie schedule. You see MBC2 is the premier American movie channel, or if not the premier, at least the only movie channel we got in our hotel room. And we knew that ‘School of Rock’, starring Jack Black, was scheduled to come on at 10:00 KSA. Now we’re not sure where ‘K’ is, but we have calculated that 10:00 KSA is approximately 9:13 Cairo time. So leaving Petra we knew we had a meager 12 hours and 13 minutes (Jordan is an hour ahead of Cairo) to get back to our hotel room, shower for the first time in 5 days, order an Egyptian pizza (a ‘fatir’), and turn on the television.

We taxied to the Aqaba border with Israel, taxied across Israel, found one of those aforementioned white minibuses on the Israeli-Egyptian border, and shared it with a couple of Palestinian students on their way back to Cairo after Eid break.

The Sinai Peninsula is beautiful driving country and the entire trip, from Petra to Cairo, was actually quite relaxing. We did indeed make it back in time for showers, pizza and ‘School of Rock’. And I found it amusing how quickly the fast-food places and coffee-shops around our abode in Cairo have become sources of creature comfort, and have filled the niche that Wawa does when I’m home, and Basil’s does when I’m at school. [On a side note, I by no means am implying that anything compares to Wawa in quality or convenience.]

We have since moved out of the hotel with one movie channel, into an apartment with more than I could ever imagine watching. We are still in the same neighborhood, Nasser City, but we’ve relocated to a busier part of town. We will certainly still make the trek to our old stomping grounds, over on Nasser street, because we’ve yet to find a coffee shop with as friendly an atmosphere as ‘Soft Drink V.I.P.’, and nobody beats the BabaGanoosh at الشرقاوى.