Cairo Day 1

Sensory overload right now. I'm exhausted and can't really process any of this at the moment, but here are a few first impressions before I forget:

-Flying into Egypt over the Nile delta, you wouldn't even know you're in a desert country. It's lush and verdant in every direction to the horizon. Every square inch is under cultivation. It occurred to me we were flying over some of the oldest farms on Earth.

-Cairo is huge. It seems from the air to be bigger than New York. The main impression is that the city is incredibly dense; much of the cityscape is either the kind of mudbrick, closely touching homes you imagine as the classic Middle Eastern look, or large tower blocks. Conversely, interspersed with the gigantic apartment complexes are plots of desert, some with future roads and cul-de-sacs already traced out in a distinctly unfamiliar form of suburban sprawl. The cityscape also stops with breathtaking speed, with towers on one side of a street and untouched desert on the other

-One thing I was struck by flying in was the fact that, for once, places that held large sway in my imagination were no less grandiose in real life. The Nile River really does cut through the city in wide, serpentine arcs teeming with boats. The Pyramids look impossibly huge. Thousands of years later, they still tower over the city. They may loom larger in the mind of Westerners, devoid of any other reference point in Cairo, but the sheer physical reality of them I assume is impressive regardless of your familiarity with the city.

-Weather is not as bad as I was warned about, at least today. It is in fact a dry heat, and so standing outside can be reasonably comfortable if you're dressed appropriately. Even then however, the other members of my group and I got fairly sweaty and harried-looking, while the Egyptians seemed to stay cool as cucumbers. Lighter clothes? Are they just more accustomed to it?

- Everything I was told about driving in Cairo seemed to be confirmed. The concept of "lanes", even when clearly marked, is a joke here. I heard a lot of honking, but apparently honks may be not warnings but rather are used as a code to symbolize statements such as "You may pass". I would be very, very uncomfortable having to drive myself around here.

-I realize this is probably complete Orientalist fantasy on my part, but the concrete tower blocks the lower classes live in seem less odious then comparable structures in the United States and Europe. There's something about the colorful paint applied and the laundry flapping in the breeze on each balcony that present a friendlier, more human face compared to the bleak modernism of housing projects in the Western world. It doesn't lessen the crushing weight of poverty (something dealt with quite deftly in "The Yacoubian Building", a bestselling Egyptian novel I read on the way over that apparently is "the" novel of the modern Egyptian experience.)