Egypt Day 22

A quick anecdote I think I'll want to include in my project:

This morning, as usual, my host brother and I were standing along Ramses, Cairo's main thoroughfare, carefully watching the endless stream of busses for one that would take us to the neighborhood our school is located in. Twice, busses going the right way approached, but both times I steadfastly refused to get on. People were literally hanging out the door. I would probably manage, at best, a toehold if we boarded.

Now, I do my absolute best to accept and adapt to the culture here at all times. However, hanging out of a bus, in swerving traffic, given my klutziness and lack of balance, is one of (perhaps the only) thing I've completely taken off the table in consideration for my safety. I don't begrudge other people's comfort with doing so. I'm merely aware that getting around in such a way would not be a safe thing for me, personally, to do. My brother, thankfully, understands this. After 15 minutes of waiting to no avail, I convinced him we had to catch a cab to avoid being late. Within a minute, we had hailed one, negotiated a fare of 20 LE ($4) and jumped in.

I almost immediately cursed my luck. The air in the cab was acrid with the smell of gasoline. I'm fairly certain there was a leaking fuel line somewhere inches below our feet. When I tried to take a breath, I gagged. Choosing the lesser of two evils, I stuck my head out the window and drew big gulps of the smoggy miasma that hovers over the major roads here. Even then, I still got a powerful whiff of gasoline. I turned to my host brother.

"Nehad, I'm really sorry about not getting on the bus. It's just something I can't do. And my parent's would kill me."

Nehad looked at me with a bemused smile. "You can't tell me you have never rode a bus like that."

It was my turn to smile. "Never. In the United States, people don't ride busses like that. It would be illegal. You have to keep your body inside the bus at all times."

My host brother gave me the same incredulous look he had given me the time I told him women wore bikinis to the beach everywhere in the US (as opposed to Egypt, where it is strictly forbidden save for a few western resorts). He shook his head and lapsed back into silence. Meanwhile, I remembered I was in a low-to-no-oxygen environment and stuck my head out the window again.

It was then I noticed the driver had lit up a cigarette and was smoking with abandon in the front seat of his fuel-drenched car.

I spent the next 15 minutes with my atheism temporarily suspended. This was not how I planned to die, kickass as a car explosion may be.

I stumbled out of the cab a block from the school, practically threw the fare at the driver, and quickly stepped away from the potential blast zone. It was quarter to 9 in the morning, already in the 90s, with the sun blasting my already sunburned shoulders and four hours of Arabic grammar lay ahead. I took a deep breath. It was good to be alive.