Egyptology

To help me get Egyptian prices, as opposed to over-inflated tourist prices, I've been lying. I say that my parents are living in Alexandria and I am studying English in Australia so I can become a writer. Yes, sadly, it is necessary to create elaborate stories about your nationality if you want cheap stuff.

I sat down and chatted with a very lovely Muslim guy named Muhammed today. He runs a shisha and galabeya shop in El Souk st in Aswan. He started off trying to sell me something, and then when he saw that I could speak Arabic he asked me to come sit and talk with him. I usually fob off such requests, but today I relented. He seemed nice.

The vast majority of Egyptians are amazingly warm, welcoming people. They will sit and chat with anyone, offer them tea or food, even welcome them into their houses. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them who are also very poor, and try and remedy their situation by trying to cash in on the (comparitively) rich, ignorant tourist. Thus warm and welcoming become aggressive and annoying. Sometimes even criminal.

Because I told him the story about me being a student of Egyptian heritage, Muhammed sat and chatted with me, and gave up on the selling. He asked me about Australia, and talked (wistfully?) about how socially free we were. In Egypt (and most Islamic countries) men and women are very closely watched by their family and other Egyptians. In other words, no sex before marriage. No hanging out with the opposite sex before marriage. No talking about sex before, during or after marriage. So Australia must seem like some kind of amazing free-lovin' sexual paradise (or reincarnation of Sodom, depending on who you ask). I had a very similar discussion with this cute soldier on the train from Cairo to Luxor. He believed that in the West, the lines that defined acceptable behaviour had been pushed too far. He also had this idea that gay people had gotten bored with women and decided to experiment. I patiently explained that gay people (like friends of friends of mine) were not like that at all, and that they were gay because there was something inside them from the very beginning that made them who they were. He seemed to understand, or at least think about it.

Cairomania

I sit on a balcony six storeys above a (relatively) quiet street in Heliopolis, an inner suburb of Cairo. Heliopolis, in Greek, means "City of the Sun", but this morning the sun is mercifully hiding behind a big wet blanket of cloud. For the past three days I've been beaten into a listless stupor by a dry, oppressive heat which has made it difficult to engage fully in this very strange yet very familiar experience called Egypt.

My father was born in the village of Manoufeya, Battanoun, and has four brothers and five sisters. Almost all of them live in Egypt. It's a bit of a change from Australia, where I only see my mother's parents and her brother, and one of my dad's sisters.

My grandmother, my father's mother, is more than 80 years old and lives in Tanta, a city halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. She's also very sick after falling twice in her apartment in Cairo about two months ago. She had a stroke, so she cannot talk, only make repeated dadada sounds, which makes it incredibly difficult for our family to understand what she needs. It's also just recently transpired that she broke her arm at some point. No one, not her doctors, nor her physiotherapist, knew about this broken arm, despite her agonised cries everytime her arm was moved, despite our family's pleas to have it looked at, despite the x-ray she had done. It was only after another doctor came in to have a look was it confirmed that her arm was indeed in need of setting. This sort of thing, happens all the time in Egypt. No one is held accountable.

I thought the traffic in China was bad, but at least everyone drove in a vaguely predictable fashion, and somehow the whole complex mess flowed beautifully. In Egypt, people indicate right when they want to go left, double park on main roads, stop to have a chat and block streets, drive on the wrong side of the road needlessly, blow their horns incessantly, and generally act as though pedestrians are merely inconvenient speed humps. And I won't start on the pedestrians...

Five times a day, starting at some ridiculous hour, broadcast across the city through countless powerful speakers, comes the Muslim call to prayer. It usually starts with the famous Allah hu'akbar which means "God is great" and proceeds to deep, resonant chanting which I can't understand. For me, it's kind of nice, as it gives the city a peaceful, mystical air which it desperately needs. However, for the 30% of the country, including my family, who are Coptic Orthodox Christians, this incessant droning takes a heavy toll on the soul. My sister calls Muslims mosquitos, because they go to mosques, are highly irritating, and there's an awful lot of them. She finds it incredibly insulting that they feel they can shout their religion so loudly and openly without regard for the non-Muslims. But I can't really go much deeper into the complexities of Muslim-Christian relationships in this country because a lot of what I know is fed to me by my family, who aren't exactly the most unbiased source of information. I met some lovely Muslim boys at the Egyptian Museum who are studying to be tour guides, one of whom gave me his number and asked me to call him if I needed anything at all while I was in Cairo. I wouldn't mind spending some quality time with him in the spirit of Islamic brotherhood, if you know what I mean.

Oh god, I'm going to burn in Hell.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is astounding, but unfortunately you can't take photos. Like Cairo itself, it's noisy, overcrowded and disorganised (there are still yet to be unpacked crates scattered amongst the exhibits), but the sheer quantity and significance of things on display blew my mind. They have the famous gold and lapis burial mask of King Tutankhamen, sitting quietly in a small room off to one side, and a collection devoted to my favourite pharaoh, the very unpopular King Akhenaten, who tried to get everyone to worship one god, the sun, instead of hundreds. They also have a mummy room, which I loved. Entry to the Museum cost me two Egyptian pounds, and the mummy room an extra ten pounds, which all together equates to roughly A$3. For foreign tourists, entry is 50 Pounds for the Museum, and another 90 for the mummy room.

The Egyptians, in general, look at foreign tourists as fat, juicy cash cows waiting to be milked, and the Egyptian Government openly encourages this view. It is actually legal for establishments, be they museums, internet cafes, hotels or market stalls, to charge tourists 10 to 50 times the price for ordinary citizens. This sort of thing did happen occasionally in China, admittedly, but here it is rampant and state-sanctioned. It is only because I look Egyptian and speak Arabic (albeit not very well) that I've escaped a royal scalping. It also means that I've not been harrassed by beggars and sellers while I've been here, but I'm not sure how aggressive or plentiful they are.

The first part of my Egyptian adventure is going to be heavily family-oriented. Sightseeing (and hopefully more photography) is for later, when hopefully I'll be able to wrench myself free of their concerned, over-protective grasp. I haven't even gone to the pyramids yet! My father and others are saying I shouldn't go to Luxor and Aswan, where the vast majority of temples and collossi are, because it's too hot. I say "bah!" and hope that I can organise a trip down there soon. History is calling me, and the Museum only makes me want to run to it more urgently.

It's my birthday today.