Travel journal: February 15-27, 2004

Sabah al-gir - Good morning.

   One evening in Cairo we were guests for dinner in the house of an Egyptian family. This was a prearranged  “meet the people” dinner, arranged by our tour operators, to “achieve a better understanding of the country”. The hosts receive reimbursement for their efforts. For some of them, this means extra income; for others, they are genuinely interested in meeting with Americans, to talk to them and to exchange views on Egypt and America as seen by them and by their guests. Our host owns a small factory making those small paper bags containing sugar you see in restaurants. They were obviously upper middle class. The Lebanese food they served was copious and excellent. They were very kind and hospitable.

left: Omar Osman and parents and remains of a copious dinner

    The de facto host at this “meet the people” dinner was the son, an affable young man of 24, who spoke very good English, and who rather decried the attitude most tourists have that Egypt is only worth visiting because of their ancient and glorious past. Egypt has much more to offer the casual visitor, he insisted. There is Sharm-El-Sheikh, the resort on the Red Sea with its stunning beaches; there are the sidewalk cafes where one can sit for hours watching traffic and life go by.

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    It was a good try. Although we have not been to Sharm-El-Sheikh, I don’t believe it is so much more attractive than many other beach resorts in the world. Then again, we are not beach people, so this comment does not carry much weight. And as for sitting in a café, as immortalized by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, it can be dusty and hot in Cairo. And not being able to converse in Arabic with the other guests in the café sounds like a rather big minus. 

    Also, it will be obvious to all and sundry that because you look, you act, and you waddle like a tourist, you must be a tourist. You are hence fair game for the myriad of vendors of souvenirs and custom jewelry thronging the area trying to make living in the cut-throat business of selling the same souvenirs, manufactured in great quantities in China or Bangladesh, to you. Little girls have honed their attractiveness to induce you to buy their chains; three for a dollar. Sly-looking ruffians try to make you believe the Rolex watches they sell are genuine and that you will be making the deal of your lifetime acquiring a one-of-a-kind timepiece from them.

right: Graceful columns flanking the Hypostyle in the Temple of Philae. This temple was rescued from the rising waters of the Nile and rebuilt on another island.

    And looking at these restored temples one not only marvels at what these ancient people have wrought with the primitive tools they had. But you also marvel at what modern science and technology have been able to achieve to make the past come to life again. Millions have been spent to save temples from the rising waters of the Nile; these are millions well spent if you see the glorious results to bring back to life the achievements of Ramses II and of the other Pharaohs of antiquity. If these temples are, rightfully, considered wonders of the Ancient World, I feel that these temples, saved and restored by modern science  and international cooperation, should be considered wonders of the modern world.

     It is sad to know that these are just small amounts in comparison to the billions spent in futile wars. The major rescue efforts to save Abu Simbel cost 40 million dollars; for that money we have an irreplaceable monument saved for posterity. I believe that forty million is also the cost of a single tank in the war in Iraq.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy

  Maybe she does not belong here, but she has been big news in the Egyptian and world press recently. She calls herself a secular liberal feminist Egyptian and she is active on the internet as a woman’s rights advocate. She has publicly challenged the social structure in Egypt where, in her own words, there is racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy. To show her independence she published a nude picture of herself. But in 2013, she had to flee to Sweden for asylum. Egypt is not that kind to their progressive women. Cleopatra was OK, I suppose.