You Can't Make Mistakes.

al-Khamasin! al-Khamasin!

As I mentioned yesterday, we had a sandstorm headed our way. I have been asking everyone I know who lives here what they are like and I finally got to see one for myself. This was of the mild variety, though.

The sky was a little hazy this morning, and then all of a sudden it started to turn yellow and then orange. I opened the the balcony doors to bring in the mint plants and was caught with a blast of hot (28°C) air which smelled like clay after it dries on your hands and you rub it off.

The sandstorms are called al-Khamasin, which means “the fifty.” The reason for this name—as it was explained to me recently—is that the sandstorms generally occur in the spring during a space of about 50 days, beginning in mid-March and extending into May.

I already noticed the yellow dust beginning to collect on the balcony railing, so I went back in and made sure that all of the windows and balcony doors were shut tight, just to be on the safe side. I don’t want sand clogging up the pores of my laptop after all.

It was relatively uneventful, for the most part, but really cool looking. The sky just got darker and more yellow as the day progressed and then in the evening it cleared up altogether.

This is not always the case, I have been told. al-Khamasin have been described to me variously as looking like: a giant wall of sand approaching the city or like a hurricane of sand in the streets. From my friend Simon, I received a description of a particularly violent storm which happened several years ago. He recalled that the winds were so high that debris was blowing around all over the place. One man on his street was killed when a satellite dish blew off of the roof of a nearby apartment block.

There are also often what people refer to as “Red Rains” after the storms. Apparently, if the temperature and dew-point are just right, it will begin raining just on the tail of the storm, but since the condensation nuclei for these rains are very orange sand, they leave behind red-streaked rivers of bloody-looking water all over the place. I can’t wait to see this.

It is odd experiencing meteorological conditions that are different from those you are accustomed to. I imagine that my experience of a sandstorm is not dissimilar from that of an Egyptian seeing snow for the first time—which still feels a bit magical to me the first time it happens each year.

Smalltalk backfires to my advantage.

I am really bad at smalltalk. I hate talking about things that I don’t care about or am not interested in, so I am not good at bringing them up.

Now, we all know that when you have nothing to say, you talk about the weather. Well, I was in a cab today for a rather long time on my way to Medinat Nasr, and I brought up the weather. Mostly, I brought it up because I wanted to know a few things and learn some words that I didn’t know so I asked the cabbie about the recent barrage of rain and storms in Cairo.

Apparently, I wasn’t very clear about what I was asking, or he misunderstood me—both of which are likely—because rather than telling me whether it was normal or not to receive this much rain in Cairo, he told me the average prices for a taxi from almost every point in the city and suburbs to almost any other point. It was all I could do not to get out my notebook and voice recorder. I could write a grid guide for this and make a million dollars. I might still anyway: I retained most of the information in my steel-trap brain.

Apparently, to get from Downtown to Medinat Nasr, 20 LE is normal. Back is about the same. To get from downtown to Zamalek and vice versa: 5 LE. Round trip?: 8-10 LE. Mohandessin to the airport: 40-55 LE depending on traffic. Airport to anywhere else?: 40-70 LE depending on how foreign you look. He actually said that to me, by the way.

Now, this information is particularly valuable because there are no standard prices for anything. The meters in the cabs are never turned on, though each cab has one. You can take cabs that are more like cabs in major cities in the United States, but they are more expensive, and often more comfortable. The only basis that you have for prices in cabs here is what you know and what people have told you.

I thought that maybe this guy might have been inflating the prices a bit for me, but we seemed to have pretty good rapport and his data tracked with what seemed to make everyone happy from my experience haggling over cab fair. So, I figure that he was actually being honest. At the end of the day, the prices are still ridiculously cheap when compared with prices in the United States. Many things are beginning to level out, but cab fare is still one of those things that is just cheaper here.

For instance, for a Chicago cab-ride equivalent to the one that I took today, I would have paid $70-80 US each way. Instead, I paid 50 LE, equivalent to about $9.00 US. I can’t argue with that.

Today was definitely a lesson in “If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, You Can’t Make Mistakes.” If I had stopped the guy and tried to turn the conversation back to the weather, I would never have learned this crucial and potentially valuable information. Instead, I benefited from the mindset of someone who is happy to let information wash over him in waves, just hoping to take in anything he can.

Try it. You might learn something by accident.

Climate Change? Maybe

It has rained for the past two days in Cairo. This is a little odd, as it very rarely rains in Cairo. In fact, it is one of the driest urban areas in the world. Last night we even had a thunderstorm. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Anyone else having odd weather where you are?