Cairo, Egypt

The sand here is a fine powder that coats anything on the street and mixed with my sweat makes my hair coarse and my contacts dry. I breathe it in when I was walking around downtown, kicked up by the decades old taxi cars that run to and fro across this city searching for fares that might earn the sometimes educated drivers another few Egyptian pounds to feed their family. Women with lipstick, mascara and a burquas stand in the heat to drink mango juice and then leave to have the glasses they used to be used again by smartly dressed business men trying to alleviate the thirst caused by the draining heat. And while men align themselves to Mecca five times a day, the satellite dishes that crown the tops of the sand colored building point towards the heavens channel news, dramas and sports from the corners of the globe... Oh, and of course, porn.

Cairo is a sprawling city of about 25 million people. It might be technically in Africa, but it feels like the Middle East. People here are polite and go out of their way to show hospitality. Most women are somehow covered, displaying their modesty while giving them the freedom of invisibility. Men read the Koran on the Metro, but they do so with their eyes closed since they know the words by heart. There are always men on the street here; unemployment is something like 20 percent. Traffic police in white uniforms are positioned every few hundred yards slinging old Kalashnikovs without bullets under their arms, looking bored. At this level of underemployment productivity and efficiency suffers. Getting a gig is hard enough. People here are too smart work so hard that that one will work yourself out of job. Things here take a little time to get done.

Crossing the street here in Cairo is fun. I have wondered where on this trip my love of jaywalking, street food and shady bars would get me intro trouble. Cairo has plenty of all of those. Well, maybe not too much of the latter. My favorite social lubricant, ethanol, is strictly controlled here. Westerners can the get ripped in private all they like, but many Egyptians will avoid any situation involving alcohol. Like the shoe stores here selling Dessels, the liquor stores here carry fake booze such as Finelandia and Johnny Waller. If you come to Egypt make friends with an expat by using your freshly stamped passport to buy 3 liters of imported liquor.

My host here, an amazing painter I knew from Houston, has this brilliant flat in Maadi that you can see the Pyramids in Giza from on a clear day. Maadi is a pleasant tree-lined suburb that has the greatest concentration of Westerners in Cairo. They are seen in the softball park drinking beer with hotdogs on the weekends while the mosque in left field announces the call to prayer. This is a place drenched in tradition, custom and history and rightfully so since civilization as we know it started around these here parts. So how does the palpapble tension between the old and new, rich and poor, East and West find a resolution here? What I am begining to understand in my travels is that I just don't know. I guess the point is that it doesn't.