I'm Back. Did You Miss Me?

Saturday September 22, 2012

Mena House Oberoi Hotel

Giza, Egypt

There is almost nothing attractive about walking down a street which is covered in dust and dung and discarded plastic foil wrappers. And straw – there's always straw, or more likely hay, fallen from a horse's feed bucket. Cars pass at speed, driven with reckless skill, a man at the wheel, his family around him. Someone is using their mobile. Something is tied to the roof of the car, or to the back bumper, or maybe it's the bumper itself which is lashed to the rest of the vehicle with dusty bungee cords. They pass in a moment, and you barely register to them. If you're lucky, you are ignored. If not, young men weariing dress shirts and long trousers despite the heat will ask if you need a taxi. Or if you need to be taken somewhere, to see the sphinx,or to make a picture behind the pyramids, an act which sounds as if it should be forbidden by local zoning laws. There is nothing attractive about this at all.

But there is something compelling. And even if one is not attracted to something, once a connection is made, sometimes the dust and the bother passes or attraction, and there you have it.

5:50. The call to prayer sounds as dusk falls. First one mosque, then three more, overlapping, and vying with car horns for attention. The first time I was here in 2000, the streets were full of honking. Then in the decade that followed, it seemed to die down, at least by Egyptian standards. Today, in 2012, it seems to be back in full force. It remind me of birds, the way a road is full of horns, the way trees are sometimes full of birdsong. But not here. The only birds I have seen today are out on the grass right now – large black ones with gray coats, picking at something in the lawn. Last night, while out for a walk, I noticed a couple of bats tumbling through the air. You can tell they're not birds from the loose way the move through the air, as much falling as flight. It lends a touch of mystique to the place, as though it needs it needs any more of that.

My hotel room overlooks one of the hotel's outdoor pools. It looks nice, even if you're not the sort of person who likes swimming in pools. A long progression of toughs lined with deep blue tile feeds the main pool. On deck, yellow lounge chairs and umbrellas, and beyond them, date palms. After that, trees and a concrete wall, and past that, it's Pyramid Road and car horns. Rooms on the other side of the building have a view of the hotel courtyard and the pyramids. We are only a short walk from the entrance to the site, and yet they don't really dominate the horizon the way I imagined they would, no more so than a tall office building does in the heart of a city. 

The Pyramid of Khufu, seen from the Mena House hotel

I spoke to a taxi driver named Zackaria this afternoon. He was plying a very soft sell, and I have to say, I was half-tempted to get in his car and just say, “Let's go somewhere interesting.” But didn't. Instead I tried to find out how things have changed since the revolution last year. His answers were mixed. The recent protests at the American embassy was strictly about the recent appearance of an internet video which was supposed to insult the prophet Mohammed. Nothing else, no sign of lingering resentment against the west. I observed that things had changed in Giza since the first time I was here in 2000. There had been a lot of construction, he said, but still people don't have enough to do, and there is more litter in the streets. This, he said in a very gentle way, almost poetically. He wasn't complaining, he was just making an observation. I asked him about the new president, and whether he was a good person and was doing good things. He is a good man, he said, but the people around him are still the same as before and that's the problem. And the police are not happy. Apparently in the Mubarak years, they were paid to work, but not too hard. Now, that is gone, and the work is no easier. Either that, or I've got it backwards, and they want to work, but are paid off to cool their heels. Zackaria's English was fine, but sometimes not fine enough for discussing the nuances of graft and alluding to facts that any local would know.

Dusk has passed into bone fide night now. It always happens quickly in Egypt. Faster than back home, at any rate, where the cooling hours of dusk are long enough to warrant having a name. Here, there's barely time to give it a label.

Another couple of bats just tore by the balcony. Looking that the silhouette of their wings, maybe they're only swallows after all. So much for mystique.