Today I changed my location for the first time as my wonderful host family with whom I stayed for the first three weeks will go on vacation tomorrow. I haven’t yet found a place to spend the rest of August at, so I moved into the guest house of All Saints’ Cathedral, the Anglican Church I attend. It is really adorable, but also a bit beyond my budget for ten days, so I decided to come here for three days, enjoy Zamalek (located on an island in the Nile in the middle of Cairo, one of the major city highways runs across it on a flyover with another busy street - 26th of July - below it; one of the best parts of town) and find something else during that time, inshallah.
Injy – what would I do without her? – took me to the island quite early in the morning, streets nearly as empty as on Fridays. A nice and early start for what will not only be, but also feels like my second arrival day.
"Is it the church that doesn't really look like a church?" - "That's the one!"
As the guest house (actually it’s two large flats above each other in an appartment building right across from the church compound) has just been renovated and cleaning is still underway, so I sit in the dining room for some time, drink tea and thoroughly study a map of Cairo, happy to lay hands on one for once. I don’t know how accurate it is, however, it still shows two German embassies and one of the Soviet Union, although the register doesn’t. I chat with the charming land lady and some other guests and move into my light and friendly room shortly after noon. Even the air conditioning doesn’t give me the feeling I’ll soon develop another laryngitis. I get an invitation to join a bible study in the late afternoon, so I got to get moving in order to get some food and orientation. As I walk out of my breezy room and down the stairs I realize that today it is REALLY hot or at least more humid than before, while I learned to more or less ignore the heat over the past few weeks, this combination makes me struggle. Also, as I am not much of a driver myself, I find it difficult to recall the exact paths of the tour round Zamalek Injy gave me in the morning, so I just try to find one useful way I remember from the map and see what else will turn up along it.
View across 26th of July Street towards the church compound.
Mark the graffito.
The church and the guest house are located one street off 26th of July Street not far from the island's eastern shore. I cross 26th and enter the street right opposite, passing the pizzeria we often take lunch at after service on the one side and my favorite bookstore on the other. The plan is to walk to the riverside down west and get some food on the way back. My memory of this morning’s tour really is not very coherent, so I’m always happy to spot something I recognize.
Most of the time I’m just overwhelmed by the heat and the swirl of different buildings and sceneries that quite unpredictably to me pop up at every corner. Beneath the trees that at least give some protection from the sun and I feel a bit like moving through an aquarium, eerie.
The architecture is a mix of beautiful older villas and townhouses and multistory apartment houses of younger age. I recall my Arabic teacher telling us how both Zamalek and Mohandeseen used to be really nice neighborhoods with gardens, nice houses and no buildings higher than three floors in “the old days” that ended in the 70s when due to lack of housing most of the old architecture was destroyed and replaced. Every now and then I pass by an embassy in one of the remaining villas, some surprisingly big for a small country and all of them well guarded and polished while most other buildings wear layers of Cairo dust varying in thickness. Small galleries of jewelry, fashion or photo designers are interspersed with fancy cupcake bakeries, cafés of varying size, sushi and Italian restaurants and the typical Egyptian one room supermarket that sells packed food and drinks, some fruit, phone credit and a mix of other things you might need. Some buildings look more reserved, but display big signs of lawyers’ offices or the practice of a doctor with an American degree. Some large villas host more expensive schools and the presence of many expatriates in the area is made obvious by mostly bilingual shop signs and places like the “American Baby Club”. As everywhere in Cairo some walls are covered in revolution graffiti, though I don’t run across the really great ones I saw from the car in the morning. As streets get smaller the expensive stores get fewer, but every now and then one still shows up unexpectedly. Garages, more groceries and small Egyptian cafés dominate. Benches are piled up against walls, waiting to be used for open air Iftar meals in the evening. Some streets are decorated with lights, one mosque reminds me of a summery Christmas tree with colorful fairy lights spread to the surrounding trees and houses. One more thing that strikes me as an unusual sight: People – men and boys, that is – ride bicycles here! And what bikes, enough to make any German hippie student envious. Eventually I reach the Nile and walk along the promenade, separated from the actual shore by clubs and some fancy cafés with air-conditioned terraces! (Unintendedly I walk through the hot air coming out of the ac, but actually even hot wind is a relief today). The broad street next to me is not very busy except for occasional taxis whom I have to wave off and I start to think I somehow changed my direction and am walking somewhere else, but then the buildings grow bigger again and hotels appear and then, there she is, Umm Kulthoum and the hotel named after her and right next to it the 24/7 café I’m writing my first posts in.
Statue of Umm Kulthoum - THE Arab singer of the 20th century
I'll write some more about her later.
I recheck the surroundings of the location to fix this landmark on my internal map of Zamalek and take some other way back through the aquarium, now mainly looking for a supermarket, ideally one of those Injy recommended. The heat has really worn me down and the still unpredictable mix of Zamalek which I’m sure to enjoy later on gives me an intense feeling of foreignness. Hadn’t had that for a long time. Another peak of diversity I encounter is the flashy State Ministry for Antiquities, very white (how do they keep it this clean?), very modern, an impressive ancient Egyptian art work next to the front door.
Eventually I run into the Alfa Market, I enter tentatively, by now that mentally exhausted I’m not sure if I’ll manage to shop at a super market, though I know this is one I don’t even have to speak at, let alone Arabic. The miscellaneous Western European brands only intensify my confusion. The shop is very clean and tidy, not too big (actually it’s a bit of a maze, I have to circle two times till I understand where things are) and intensely decorated for Ramadan with nearly every surface covered with cloth of a different colorful traditional pattern and small fanuz-lamps all over the ceiling. There are hardly any Egyptian customers around. In the nuts and sweets corner I overhear a woman talking to her little son in American English, “Sweetie, do you want any of these? Oh, sorry, no, we don’t have a nut cracker at home yet, you see, choose one without shells, you can choose one of these!” Expat life mystifies me, especially when children travel along. The more I think about it the more I am convinced that I couldn’t do this. Raising my children outside my own society, more or less outside any society as diplomats are supposed not to integrate is something I would probably choose to avoid. Unlike living geographically outside my home society myself, the idea feels to me like uprooting my children, but that is probably due to the fact that I lived in the same house for the first twenty years of my life… I know there are other ways of forming a home, but I’ve discovered this concept to feel stranger to me than any foreign way I’ve seen in its own place. Probably I am not much of a nomad after all. Walking back to the guest house I feel comforted by the huge DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) sign at the main street.
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