You Can't Make Mistakes.

I took a bunch of my friend Peter Waters‘ mates mosque-walking around Fatimid Cairo the other day. We walked from the north gate to the south gate of the old city—Bāb al-Futūḥ to Bāb Zuwayla and then into the Qasaba. We then continued on from there and wound up near Sayyida Zeinab Mosque, but only the first part of our walk is documented here.

These are some snaps that I took with my new camera. I’m trying to get the hang of geotagging and recording walking maps with the pictures in, so this is still a little disjointed. I marked all of the spots on the map that appear in the photos. You can zoom to see the route better if you like and click on the little blue markers for the names of individual places.

Bab to Bab

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The other day Jeff and I took a walk down al-Darb al-Aḥmar, one of the city’s most famous streets, and one that I had never walked before. I had gone to a talk about the street and the orientation and placement of its mosques and mausoleums given by Dr. Nasser Rabbat, Agha Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT, and wanted to take a closer look at some of the the monuments themselves. This was also the last part of the medieval city that I had not previously walked along the path from the northern gate to the Citadel.

View Larger Map

So, Jeff and I went. He took care of the photography and I took care of the pointing and saying words that probably meant a hill of beans to him, but it was kind of him to humor me. Along the way we meant a guy named Gamal and started talking to him. He worked at the reconstruction of the Mosque of Amir Aqṣunqur (1347, a.k.a. – Blue Mosque) and I told him what we were doing. He knew many of the faculty members in my department at the university and was thrilled about that so he grabbed us by the arms and took us inside the reconstruction projects and showed us around.

Aqṣunqur is in a terrible state of disrepair, but still stunning. It is called the “Blue Mosque” because it was restored and rebuilt in 1652 by Amir Ibrāhīm Aghā Mastaḥifẓān and the qibla wall was redecorated with blue Ismet tiles. these tiles show up all over Cairo during the Ottoman period and can be seen adorning doorways and windows, though not to the extent that they are present in Aqṣunqur. We didn’t take any pictures of the interior since we weren’t really supposed to be there anyway and sometimes folks here get touchy about things being photographed if they are in any sort of state of disrepair.

Next he took us into the mosque and mausoleum of Amir Khāyrbak (1502-1520). The interior is completely restored. It is stunning. You can see it pictured below. We went from there to the House of al-Razzāz (1494-1778) and wandered around the palace where a number of Mamluk sultans and Ottoman rulers spent their days. There is a passage that runs from there to the citadel. Scary and unstable looking.

After this we continued back up the street and climbed into the minaret at the mosque of Amir Altunbūgha al-Maridānī (1340) so that we could have a view of al-Darb al-Ahmar from above. What we saw is a little disconcerting. This is a part of the city that was hit hard by a 1992 earthquake. Many of the buildings which collapsed then are still in terrible disrepair if not completely demolished. In 18 years, very little has been done to rectify this. You can see some of this in the pictures below.

We then continued back down the street toward the Citadel and exited in front of Bab al-‘Azab and caught a cab to Bab al-Lūq. The last photo is from the front of a restaurant in Bab al-Lūq. I have seen the restaurant a million times but have never noticed the hilarious advertisement for brains.

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A Mosque on Every Corner.

While Nigel and Johnny were in from Taiwan, Megan and I decided to take them Mosque-walking from the Sayyida Zeinab Mosque to very near the Citadel in Islamic Cairo. We swiftly coined the term “Mosqueing” to refer to this activity. Check Webster’s in a few years, it will be there.

There are unfortunately no photos of Sayyida Zeinab in this collection. They wouldn’t let Megan in at all and the doorman was everything but friendly. I will try to go back soon and grab a few snaps of the outside at the very least.

The walk then proceeded down ‘Abd al-Magīd al-Libān St. and turned onto Ṣulayba St. near Ibn Tulūn Mosque. It was a fun afternoon and we got some decent snaps out of it. We ended up catching a cab—quite thirsty and exhausted—from in front of the Sultan Hassan Mosque to Falaki Square near Bab el-Louq. Those of you in the know know that this is also the location of everyone’s favorite dive/watering-hole Horreya. Cold Stella actually tastes good after a long hot walk through the dusty backstreets.

Enjoy the photos.

God’s Country.

A couple of friends and I decided that it would be a good idea to get out of Cairo and breathe some clean air, swim in the sea and relax at the beach. So, we got a car, loaded up the cooler and drove across Sinai to a little coastal town called Nuweiba and chilled on the beach for a few days.

Driving through Sinai definitely gives one a sense of why nomadic folks often went there to talk to their god. It makes one feel small and alone. I can’t imagine taking the same journey on foot or camel-back. I got to drive back as well, which was pretty superb. I am most certainly in love with driving through the desert.

It was an absolute blast. Here are some pictures of our adventure.

Nothing gets in or out.

I had to go to the American Embassy in Cairo this morning. My passport still has five years left before it expires, but all of my visa pages have been used up. This is not necessarily from traveling a lot—traveling between EU countries now requires no passport control—but from living long-term in a country that has very arbitrary and haphazard immigration and border control. My passport is chock full of Egyptian visas.

Here is how it works: you can get a temporary—tourist—visa to enter the country from your local Egyptian consulate or embassy. Or, you pay the visa fee and get the stamp when you enter the country at the airport. Either way, this takes one page of your passport. Upon landing, you get an arrival stamp (one-quarter of a page). If you leave and come back you get an exit stamp and another incoming stamp (half page). If you apply for a resident visa through a sponsor, such as the university, you will use up another page.

If you apply for a long-term tourist visa—which is what most people do whether they are working/attending university here or not—this takes yet another page. From the last calendar year, I have four tourist visas (4 pages), one multi-entry endorsement (1/2 page), two full-time student/resident visas (2 pages), and about six exit/entry stamps (1 1/2 pages). That is a total of nine out of the sixteen-odd visa pages in my passport gone. My most recent resident visa has expired and I have two weeks to get a tourist visa for the summer in order to fill the gap before the University will sponsor me for another visa. The Mogamma will not place another visa in my passport becasue I am out of pages.

It was time to have pages added to the ol’ passport. So, I checked the embassy hours online: 8am until 11am, every Sunday through Thursday except for holidays and the last Tuesday of every month.

Confused yet? Just hang on.

So, this morning, I dragged myself out of bed and staggered downstairs to catch a cab downtown. I arrived near the embassy and walked, looking for the entrance. The American Embassy in Cairo appears to be a tribute to the concrete fortress-style architecture of the American 1970s. Here is a picture, which I do not own the rights to, but gets the point across. I would have taken my own picture but likely this would have ended in my being arrested and beaten. What you will not see in that picture is the 5 meter high wall that surrounds the triangular tower in the middle of an triangular city block. I didn’t know which of the three streets the main entrance was on, so I just picked a side and started walking.

It was the wrong side.

There are three or four doors in the two-kilometer long embassy wall, labeled cryptically. I just kept walking and walking and finally asked one of the many Egyptian National Security guys standing outside the walls where the entrance was. He gave me directions. By this point I am already worried that I will not have enough time to get inside, wait in line and submit my paperwork. I am also a little put off by how—not—inviting the embassy building itself is.

A few weeks prior to this, I was invited by one of the committee members at the BCA to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy. It was a giant cocktail party for the Queen. Bagpipes, drinks, food, ice-cream, hundreds and hundreds of diplomats. It was pretty cool. The party was held in the garden at the embassy residence: a very lovely, very comfortable setting. Grand British architectural style, but quite modern. Apparently, before the construction of the Nile Corniche road, the garden had extended all the way to the river. Lovely. The American Embassy is the opposite of this. While the British seemed to say, “Come in. Have a drink,” the Americans seemed to be saying, “Please leave now, or we might beat you.”

I finally found the entrance and a man pointed me to the left door as he was pointing couples of people to the door on the right. I noticed an AUC professor who I often see in the library in the line ahead of me. Once inside the security chamber—for lack of a better term—I was relieved of my mobile phone and my identification. I had been warned about this by a friend who had told me to take a book, but nothing electronic. After reassembling my person, I was told that to get to the American Citizen Services section I would need to go right then right again, left, up the stairs outside, through the doors, right, then down the stairs inside and then left. There were no signs. I noticed the visa section for Egyptians trying to get entry visas on my left before the stairs and the doors and things. It was outside. At 10am the temperature was already 30C (86F). No better way to say “please come to our country” than “please sit in this horrifyingly hot place and wait forever for the privilege.”

Even once inside, the place screamed “Go away! You do not belong here!” The ceiling was 50 meters above and there were rows of identical windows. The room was triangular. I was standing below ground in the center of the triangular tower. I took a number from a machine, which was tiny, unlabeled and on a shelf practically at eye-level so that you would have to search the entire high-ceilinged chamber before finding it. Then I waited. There were 30 people ahead of me. This took the better part of the hour.

Once my number was called, the rest was relatively painless. I submitted my passport and application and was then instructed to take a blue form to the cashier, even though there is no charge for additional pages being added to a passport. I was told that I needed to get a “no-charge” receipt from the cashier. I rolled my eyes. The woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass did not blink and pointed in the direction of the cashier.

And that was it. I was told to come back the next morning and my passport would be ready. Relatively painless. I just wonder what goes on inside the embassy that requires that level of fortress-like security and obfuscation. We—Americans—really are crazed when it comes to security theater. We just can’t get enough. So, tomorrow morning I will get up and repeat the process before work, or just wait until Wednesday when I can go to the Mogamma as well—an experience which I will also write about, I’m sure.

I got an e-mail containing this link today:

On Being a Better Muslim

I will write more later, but this felt like I should report for family and friends Stateside.

A bomb went off in Khan al-Khalili a little over an hour ago. This is the big tourist souq in one of the older parts of the city.

What I last saw on al-Jazeera—there is no local news on the incident at this time—is that there is at least on French woman dead and a number of French and German tourists injured, along with a few Egyptians.

Here are some links to Reuters and AP coverage.

Two foreigners among four dead in Cairo blast: police (Reuters)

Blast in crowded Cairo tourist area wounds 18 (AP)

I’ll let you know anything more when I know it. But at present there is no need to worry. We’re doing just fine on the other side of the river from this. But we will keep our eyes open and avoid the touristy places for a while.

Sometimes things still surprise even me.

I was sitting on the balcony the other morning with Stacey having our tea, and suddenly she jumped up and screamed at the sound of a crash in the street. I stood up and looked on with her and saw that a mint green car had hit two guys on a scooter. They had jumped/fallen/been knocked clear of any injury, and were standing up, checking themselves to make sure that nothing was broken, rubbing bruised knees and elbows. The young woman in the car did not move but just raised her hands in exasperation and glared at them. They started shouting at her as another man stopped to help them extract the scooter from under her front bumper.

She got out of the car at this point, shouting at the two men that it was their fault and what did they think they were doing? They shouted back that she was crazy and needed to be careful what she was doing. The scooter’s seat had fallen completely off and there was a puddle of gas and oil leaking out of some newly disconnected hose or damaged casing. They pulled the scooter off to the side of the road as a police officer walked up from a nearby street-corner. She was already back in the car. Just as they had finished getting the scooter clear of the car, she tried to pull around them, honking her horn. The guy who had been driving the scooter shouted in anger and pounded the hood of her car with his fist shouting that she had to wait and take care of this.

Rather than doing that she honked her horn at him and when he and the other man refused to move she just drove forward a little as if to threaten. This had one of the guys incensed, and he raised his hands shouting at her. The police officer lit a cigarette and watched. By this time she was in the next “lane” over as she had been trying to squeeze over to get around them, refusing to take any responsibility for the accident at all. When the man further refused to budge, she just gunned the engine and hit him, sending him up onto her hood. He somehow managed to roll off to the side like a portly, middle-aged ninja and remained astonishingly uninjured as she sped away down the street at the full speed of her late-model luxury Citroen. The police officer threw his cigarette butt down with no regard for the puddle of gasoline in the street and sauntered away to his corner without a word.

The two guys managed to get most of the pieces of the scooter and limped it down the street while a bawwab on the street picked up a piece of the scooter which someone pointed out that they had missed. He looked down the street as if in an attempt to ascertain their distance so that he might run after them, then shrugged and chucked it over onto the sidewalk and shuffled back to his perch in the middle of the road.

We were both naïvely astonished, which quickly wore away. This is not the first time I have seen someone from the lower class here grossly mistreated by someone of the obviously privileged class, but it was such a perfect visual metaphor for the state of things here: a young girl in a new car runs over a man while an officer of the law looks on disinterested. The privileged exploit and abuse the disenfranchised while the state looks the other way. That is the reality of daily life here, and sometimes it seems like the winds of change are forecast a long way off.

Lord save us.

Egypt switched out of daylight savings time today. I didn’t know this until we were almost an hour early/late leaving for an appointment.

Oh, by the way, I’m back in Egypt now. Jeff and I arrived in Cairo this past weekend. Sorry about the lack of updates, but I’ve been jet-lagged to the point that I can’t seem to get out of bed before noon, if not 2 or 3. This does not make for very productive days. Regardless, I will write updates of this week’s adventures later.

Back to the daylight savings rules for Egypt.

Egypt goes to daylight savings time at 23:59:59 on the last Thursday in April when the clocks move forward to 01:00:00 on Friday morning, thus skipping an hour in the time-line. Egypt leaves daylight savings time on the last Thursday of September when the clock moves from 23:59:59 to 23:00:00 on the same day. Seems reasonable right?

This is, of course, unless the shift will occur during Ramadan. In years in which this is the case—2006, 2007, 2008—the time changes on the last Thursday before Ramadan. That was, of course, last night. So, I woke up this afternoon, thinking that I had gotten up terribly late, again. But this time I was rewarded with the new knowledge that I had managed to wake up a whole hour earlier than I thought I had.

You think you’re confused? Try being groggy in the afternoon in a hot apartment, blearily looking at your watch, mobile phone and laptop trying to figure out what time it is when none of them match. My watch had run down it’s wind from yesterday a bit, so it was off anyway—it winds itself when I walk, but I hadn’t done enough of that apparently. My mobile hadn’t shifted automatically, as it was supposed to. The laptop did, but offered no explanation.

I have never believed in Daylight Savings Time to begin with, and one day, when I have more power, I will require that my subjects adhere to whatever time is on my watch. Wait, that’s not very nice, is it? I just wish that humans had figured out that if they just shifted their daily patterns rather than shifting our whole time-system everything would run much better.

Indiana figured this out a while back. Part of the state doesn’t shift into DST in the summer. Why, you ask? Because if they shifted, then the chickens wouldn’t know what time to lay eggs, and the cows wouldn’t know what time to give milk.

Way to go Indiana. Good on you. Maybe the rest of the world will follow this shining example someday. We can only hope.

Here we come…

I just got word from the American University in Cairo that I was admitted to their graduate school today. So, it’s back to Cairo in a few months to do an MA in Arabic with a specialization in Islamic Studies.

Now I am just trying to revel in congratulating myself before beginning to panic about how much this is about to cost.

Then again, money isn’t everything. Not to mention the logistics of completely uprooting myself. This will be a little different than last time: I still had a sort-of home-base in the States last year. Now my home base will be my backpack.

Exploring the world, one taxi-ride at a time, I guess. Wish me luck.