Cairo — NR

CAIRO

March, 2019

Egypt is a 3rd-World country. There is no way around that.

“It’s dirty”

The first words describing Cairo from anyone who was told it would be stop number two. In truth, it’s no more dirty than any other developing nation, it’s just that most ewsterners haven’t actually been to a country that is truly 3rd world. There is a deep irony in calling Cairo developing. 3 large structures marking the end of the city and the beginning of 3,000 miles of desert serve as a memorial to a time when Egypt was anything but developing.

The Nile Delta cuts an artery right through the desert, a pocket of deep, dense soil and natural forest of palm trees. You can see it from the entrance to the Red Pyramid. The contrast feels out of place surrounded by the extreme. The sand in the Sahara is light and soft. It slides through your fingers and leaves a shallow coat of dust on your hand. It’s easy for the wind to pick up, sand is the patina of Cairo.

This was the heart of civilization for centuries. Today, though, only hastily made stands offering ceramic King Tut sculptures, glass pyramids— the full menu of Cairo’s Chinese made tourist trinkets, all being sold to busses full of Chinese tourists. A couple weeks after we left was another bombing, little under a mile from where we were staying. A sad reminder of the climate that still hangs over Egypt, more pollution for a place that can’t seem to recover from 2014’s Arab Spring.

Yes, burning trash, a city void of traffic lights, and donkey’s still pulling carts in the streets. But this country holds a place in every person’s mind, built from childhood and continued by Hollywood. There is little truth to that world, compared to what you see after even just a commute from the Airport to a city hotel. The real Cairo doesn’t exist in our collective conscious, just the artifacts of our imagination. They couldn’t be further apart.

info

prev / next

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·