Egypt Day 26, 27, 28

Although I spent all of Thursday, my extra day off, at home bored, this turned out to be an exceptionally full weekend.

Friday, per the suggestion of my brother's friend, a few friends and I went to Al-Azhar park. the park, set among hills and surrounded on all sides by Islamic Cairo, is one of the more stunning green spaces I have ever been to. In the midst of the incredible racket, dust and claustrophobia of this city, one finds an oasis bedecked in green, with soft grass, pleasant shade and running water. We had lunch at an exceptionally lovely lakeside restaurant whose beautiful location was matched by its wonderful readaptation of Islamic architecture in the form of a modern building. The retaurants numerous fountains, which gurgled down narrow channels into pools, were very remeniscent of those in one of my favorite buildings of all time, the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain.

We then continued to meander in the park, eventually walking down a blocked off path to reach the base of an impressive wall, dating to the time of Saladin, that marked one side of the park. Walking along it, one can't help but marvel at the expert masonry, which doesn't look too much the worse for centuries of wear. It was when we finally found a stair leading up to the ramparts that a guard found us and tersely directed us back to the open paths. Oh well...it was definitely worth (minorly) disobeying the rules to get a glimpse of history.

We continued to spend several hours in the park, lying in the grass, hanging in a playground in which we were probably older than everyone else by 5 or 6 years (although, Egyptian children often look much younger than their actual age to Americans) and generally having a needed break. Around sunset we took a cab downtown and spent the rest of our time out sitting in cafes and walking around, which is, I'm told, basically what Egyptian teenagers do on trips downtown.

One useful skill we did practice over the course of Friday and Saturday was how to take taxis without an Egyptian. It's preferable to take one of the white or yellow cabs, with their working meters, but generally you wind up in a black cab, with their cruel, broken suggestions of metered fares. Here's how we handled this:
1.We negotiated the price our host families recommended before we got in.
2.Said fare would be tightly rolled up in one of our hands
3. Any discussion (especially regarding how we should handle getting out without being hassled for a higher fare) would be in Spanish, to avoid letting the cabdriver in on our plans. Practice never hurts either, given I'm in AP level next year.
4. When we arrived, we would all get out and close the doors before hading over aforementioned tightly rolled bills. By the time the driver has unrolled said bills, we would have gotten several yards away, out of hassling zone.

Today, Saturday, two friends and I set out for the citadel of Saladin, also home to the national military museum. The citadel is an enormous stone structure on a rocky outcrop surprisingly close to the downtown. Inside its walls are a surprising variety of structures dating from between the Medieval period and the 1800s. My personal favorite of the structures we visited was the enormous Mosque of Muhammed Ali, built in the mid-19th Century. Given its high position and silvery domes, it's the most visible mosque in the city, and is spectacular up close. Every detail is intricate, every proportion pleasing. Inside, we took our shoes off and walked across the searing hot stone of the courtyard to enter the sanctuary.

I'm not religious by any means, but I happen to enjoy being in places of worship. There seems to be a sense of serenity and centeredness that is univeersal to such places, regardless of the faith they serve. This building was no exception. Seated crosslegged on a worn carpet, staring up at the lamps, representing the 99 names of God, that hang from the cupola, the collective roar of hundreds of tourists faded away. I thought about the magnificence of the mosque and how incredible it was, the lengths people will go to to glorify their god. When I stepped, blinking, back into the sunshine, it was with a great sense of peace.

The other major destination in the citadel was the military museum. That sort of thing isn't usually of special interest to me, and in this case I was if anything repulsed by it. The museum, for starters, consisted mostly of models. Very little seemed to be an actual artifact. Many of the rooms were roped off and their lights darkened. What we did see on our visit was extreme glorification of the military, including a statue of a soldier entitled "The Best Soldiers in the World." With its chronologically muddled displays, the museum, like so much else here, attempted to draw a direct link between the great military powers of Egypt's past and those of its future.

Most striking of all was the large hall dedicated to the 1973 war. Walking through it was like taking a trip through some alternate history. In the version of events here, the war was a magnificent victory for Egypt over the enemy. Evidence comes in the form of celebratory paintings and a chunk of the tail of a shot down airplane emblazoned with the star of David. One would never ascertain from the displays that that enemy dealt several blows to Egypt and Syria and was able to prevent them from overruning their defenses. In this version, it is a straight line from the early arab victories to the peace treaty between the two nations. Wanting to be associated with the victory, looming over the hall, in the form of portraits and a stone bust given, the inscription read, by North Korea, is the current president. (You may notice I never mentioned the name of the country Egypt was fighting. Nor does the exhibit.)

We then spent yet another evening downtown. Incredibly, walking along the nile we ran into one of my host brother's best friends, who called out to me and invited us to wait with him for some other Egyptian friends of ours. Sure enough, they showed up: with half a dozen of our fellow American students in tow. We had a great time taking yet another boat trip on the Nil It was quite the lucky coincidence, running into a friend, miles from home, in Africa's largest city. What are the odds?