Convalescing in Cairo - Another Day in Babylon - 28th Jan 2002
Coptic Quarter
Mad Cairo
The Woman in Blue
Hippy's state of health was taking a bit of time to mend and so we decided to spend another day in Cairo to complete our education about that fair city.
After fighting with Cairo traffic the day before we decided to try out the metro. It was a dream, clean efficient and cheap.
We dropped in on two last sections. Firstly, the Coptic quarter. This is your actual Babylon although there is no hanging garden to mark the fact. We are pleased to have added to our list of sites of ancient wonders of the world though. In fact, surely the Pyramids is another. Really racking them up, eh?
Coptic Cairo is rather nice. The old churches were much to Hippy and my tastes. Not being big churchgoers, I guess we look more at the architectural features than any spiritual matters. We were well pleased in the St Sergius church, where most of the decor was quite simple, but the fancy bits were very well done. The altar screen, particularly, was top. Much in the manner of Arabic mother of pearl inlay, this style clearly predates Islam and its quality, here was without equal. The patterns were so precisely made that they created further patterns in themselves - rather like a kind of 'magic eye' print. The Coptic museum contains several worthy works, although the building itself is more impressive with lovely screened balconies and nice airy space inside.
Generally this area of town has a lovely calm and relaxed feel about to. The traffic is not filling the streets and there isn't the constant background noise of car horns. But the good feeling was tainted by a tourist policeman at the peaceful Sergius church hassling us for a pen for his child. He seemed to be disbelieving that 2 white folk did not walk about armed with numerous pens to give away. Remarkably for the second day running, we had had more hassle from the tourist police than your everyday hawker. Yesterday one had tried to con us into buying a headscarf.
In need of a little familiarity, we treated ourselves to a trip to Pizza Hut. Very disappointed in the salad bar, how is a skin flint supposed to build a decent sized salad with no celery or slices of cucumber. There were no records broken here.
On we went to the 'mad' part of Cairo. This is the old Islamic section, which is the real life and soul of the city. In the souqs, here, you can find anything. Cheek by jowl, there are light machine shops and ladies underwear purveyors. Whole streets of sewing cotton outlets. (We had been scouring the city to find some red cotton for Hipp's backgammon venture for days).
The main source of madness is the traffic which takes on a new dimension of lunacy. Here, the chosen weapon of assault is the Vespa. Modus operandi: find a street as full of pedestrians as possible (a donkey cart is a bonus) and see how fast it is possible to go. We did in fact witness a small child being winged. He soon got up so who's bothered. There was no requirement for the driver to stop and account for himself.
Walking back through the crowded street a woman stood out from the crowd. She was tall, dignified and elegant, dressed in a royal blue headscarf and gown she glided through the people demonstrating the beauty of black Africa. It was not until I saw her compared to the Arab women about her, that I became aware of how the other women seemed to walk apologetically, trying to hide in the crowd rather being proud of who they are. If this is a taste of black African diginity, I think it will be a beautiful and refreshing change.
We had to laugh on the way back to the hotel when we finally got to see one of the taxis get its comeuppance. On a totally empty street, it was zipping along at a healthy 30mph-ish. All of a sudden, it squealed to a halt veering towards the pavement as it did so. The 'fare' hopped out of the cab in quite good spirits and just gazed in amusement at the front wheel that had come semi-detached and was dragging under the car.
A policeman arrived on the scene and seemed totally unconcerned until the passenger (clearly a tourist) started taking pictures of the event for his photo album. He almost seized the camera in a fit of cover-up mania. The lord knows why.
We packed back at the hotel determined to break free of Cairo at last. I was beginning to get embarrassed by the fact that we whinged about the likelihood of the Sudan visa taking 5 days and had now been here just that length of time. Got to go!