WEEK IV: Inside Guest House, Too Hot Outside

The fourth week marks the beginning of my time between host families, the first stop being the guest house of All Saints’ Cathedral in Zamalek. Although it is a bit beyond students’ budget, I enjoy this unplanned stay very much, where else would I meet Americans helping to build a new community in South Sudan, a Californian professor emeritus of anthropology who originally is a refugee from Eritrea, by coincidence an anthropologist from Kenya whose father used to work with that very professor and many more people of very different courses of life all brought together in Cairo as the crossroads between Africa, the Middle East, the rest of the world. Sharing stories about our recent experiences, our different or similar views of Egypt and getting first hand information about things we always wanted to know (or did not know we might want to know) about each other’s native countries makes for animated conversations over meals or in the sitting room. One of the highlights for me was learning something about Eastern African thinking about psychiatry, medicine, how good and bad witchcraft runs in families and how these different systems are integrated today – or not.

This week is also the beginning of a heat spell, one just has to accept to come home soaked. Or look for an air conditioned taxi, but I prefer walking, now living 40 minutes by foot from the language school. By trying different ways every day I get to know more of Mohandeseen. This part of town at the western bank of the Nile is really much more diverse than I thought from the quite limited insight gained from walking the streets between the language school and Doqi, the next quarter, where my bus stops. Trying what looks like the shortest way to Zamalek on the map, I discover some beautiful little shops not at all far from the language school – but on the other side of one of the major streets in some small streets all protected from the blazing sun by trees I still do not know the names of. Some of them top their flat dark green crowns with thick tussocks apartment houses with the occasional modern café or some embassy in between to simpler houses and all of a sudden I feel like I entered a village. In the sandy streets I can hardly differentiate between workshops, extended kitchens and public space – if there is any, that is. People don’t exactly look very welcoming and I have the unpleasant feeling of uninvited and unintended having entered someone’s living room. So I take the fastest way possible between cars, chicken and bales of straw to get back to the roaring main street with its office buildings, large shops and hotels which is just around the corner. No shade here, however, but having chosen to walk instead of taking a taxi which would at least get me to my air-conditioned room much faster, I get used to ignore it. After crossing another huge street I reach the bridge across the western arm of the Nile and stop for a while to watch the rowers in their sleek racing boats, accompanied by a coach in a plump little motor boat. The backdrop, of course, is magnificent and maybe it is a bit cooler on the water, but I do not feel much like exercise right now. Turning my back to eight lanes of cars and motorcycles honking and speeding towards or our of Zamalek or the flyover, I enjoy the peace the glittering water and the trees along the corniche still have to offer, with another bridge, the broader river and more skyscrapers and streets in the distance being far enough not to add any noise from this side.

View south from the bridge, Zamalek to the left

On some days I still have some energy left to explore the part of Zamalek west of 26^th of July. There are not many shops here, mainly apartment houses, banks, and large embassies. Most of them occupy villas as in the other half of Zamalek, here they tend to be a bit bigger. Two more facts are remarkable about the Dutch embassy: One part of the massive, yet transparent steel fence is decorated with delftware and they have a plastic cow standing in the front garden… The guards don’t really look encouraging, so I don’t take a photo. Not far from there I also find the German embassy, not in a villa, very large (one of the largest German embassies in the world as I am told by someone in church who just started working there), but not exactly nice to look at although it does seem to have a nice garden behind the high fence. Across the street there is some kind of park, the skewed letters on the gate mention fish and a grotto, unfortunately it is closed. Some of the bollards at the street side of the German compound are decorated with revolution paintings – but here it’s the peaceful revolution that eventually caused the end of the GDR. They were obviously painted to mark the 20^th anniversary of the reunification only a few months before Egypt experienced its own people’s revolution – sadly not always peaceful.

On other days I just head home straight down 26^th of July, catching a glimpse on a small gathering of people waving flags of the free Libya outside the Libyan embassy down one of the side streets. World politics in the streets everywhere. The flags just appeared as a bestseller in the product range of the men selling flags on the green patches in the middle of main streets and roundabouts. Obviously made in a hurry, sometimes the white print of star and crescent is a bit smudged, but they outnumber Egypt, other Arab countries, Al Ahly (one of the most popular Cairo soccer clubs) and Bayern Munich all taken together.

After having passed soldiers on tanks in Tahrir square on my ride to school on a daily basis for nearly three weeks (and a machine gun some three meters away from my head did not exactly give me a nice feeling), it seems just natural in a way to stumble across some minor unrest every now and then.