What a day! It started at 4.30am – we had already packed for Cairo and now had one hour to get ready before Bob came to pick us up for the airport. All done – at 5.30 Bob arrives and we make the 15 minute journey to the airport. We say our goodbyes to Bob who will be leaving Luxor later this day to start his new business venture in Hurghada. We wish him the very best.
We check in – everything is on time and we board a rather packed plane to Cairo. This is my fifth trip to Cairo and in the past have flown on rather spacious planes that usually had many empty seats. Our original flight had been cancelled and changed to an hour later (which was better) but it seems that the luxury of flying on half empty planes is over.
After a short wait in the lounge we board the plane. The safety instructionsare relayed in both Arabic and English and the plane takes off. As the plane increases in altitude we can see the landscape below change immediately from the green irrigated land to the soft undulating sandstone terrain. Dried up river beds snake along the valley floor and the repeating scene of the desert below feels hypnotic . We follow the River Nile north towards Cairo.
It’s a nice short flight to Cairo – 1 hour. We begin to feel a drop in altitude. As I look out of the window the terrain below begins to change again. Instead of the instant change from green irrigated land to desert, the view below goes immediately from desert to densely populated metropolis. Tower blocks poke out through a thick layer of smog. (always more visible in Cairo in the early morning when the temperature is a little lower). It’s only once in Cairo that you realize the source of all the smog – the traffic here is like nothing else on earth. I remember the first time I came to Cairo on an organized trip – our tour guide told us “We don’t have rush hour in Cairo – we have rush day”.
Abdul is waiting for us as arranged. It has been 3 and a bit years since we were in Cairo and the same since we saw Abdul. Peter and I were in Cairo to get married – that’s another story!
As we drove from the airport to downtown Cairo, Abdul asked us if we noticed anything different. Looking out of the car window at the broad tree-lined freeway everything seemed quite familiar. As we drive through affluent Heliopolis we pass Baron Empain’s Hindu style Palace - it’s unusual architecture still looks out of place – but also perfectly at home. http://curious-places.blogspot.com/2011/03/baron-empain-palace-cairo-egypt.html
I couldn’t think what Abdul was referring to.
“No pictures of Mubarak!” says Peter. That’s right, Mubarak’s face used to be on hoardings all along the airport road. I wonder what other changes we will notice during our trip.
I can feel how much cooler it is in Cairo than Luxor – by cooler I mean 27 degrees instead of the 40 in Luxor.
We drive through Ramsis, Tahrir, over the Kasr e Nile bridge where the Egyptian revolution first began. T shirts saying “Free Egypt” “I love Egypt” “25th January, Tahrir Square” line the roadside railings. All seems peaceful now.
We arrive at the Sheraton and check in. It will be 45 minutes before the room is ready so we decide to head straight out to our first appointment of the trip, to the Mamluk Glass Factory next to Qaitbay Mosque. We were to phone Kamal before we set off which we did. He wasn’t in the factory so we would pick him up on the way. Off we set with Abdul. The traffic in Cairo is notorious. There is an order to the road system but also what appears to be absolute chaos – cars cutting across each other within centimetres to spare. It can be quite a terrifying experience for first timers in Cairo. At first the constant beeping of horns can be interpreted as a ‘telling off’ – much like we’d use car horns at home. However, the horns are a subsystem – a language between drivers (and pedestrians) that interspersed with various hand gestures is completely understood here.
We pull off the freeway into a short dusty side street along Cairo’s Eastern Cemetery or City of the Dead. (The cemeteries are yet another story for another day). Peter phones Kamal and we meet him at the bottom of the street and then proceed onto the factory.
I think the word factory conjures up an up an image of a large industrial unit. The Mamluk Glass Factory is a small enterprise but none the less a very productive one. Kamal takes us in. The walls are lined with shelves full of various glass products – not an inch of space goes unused.
The factory is no longer than 10 metres and about 3 metres wide. At the bottom is a furnace and one of the glass blowers at work. However much I had been relishing the cooler temperatures of Cairo it all went to pot upon entering the factory – the heat from the furnace was incredible. The worker had just two electric fans to keep the temperature bearable! We watch with great interest at the skill deployed to produce a glass jar with a water spout with a twist of glass relief around its body. I‘m invited by the craftsman to have a go at blowing some glass. I’m handed the metal tube that has a blob of molten glass on the end. As I blow into the tube it is turned for me (it weighs a ton!) and a large glass balloon is produced. Certainly nothing usable so it is knocked off the end of the tube to be melted back and used again. By now my face felt like it had melted. Any benefit of the cooler Cairo climate and Abdul’s air conditioned car was now truly lost!
Kamal invites us to drink tea outside. Kamal tells us that this is the fifth generation of his family to have this factory. A picture of his father blowing glass hangs over the factory entrance. Kamal brings us a selection of books and magazines that have articles about the glass factory – one of only five in Cairo. As we drink tea and look through the books I read an article that says Kamal is an engineer. I point out this section of the article to him and he says he works as an engineer in the morning and comes to the factory in the afternoon. He says it needs his generation to maintain the family tradition or the business and the skills will be lost forever. All of his family work in the workshop – all also university educated. The females in the family sort the glass and decorate the finished pieces and the men are involved in all other aspects of the business. I ask Kamal where the glass comes from. He tells us it comes from the Zabaleen. Zabaleen translates directly as Garbage Collectors. They are a large Christian community living in the foothills of Maqattam in Cairo. They go out into the city collecting all manner of garbage which they bring back to their homes and sort by type, ready to sell to recycling companies. Peter and I visited the church of St Samaan on a previous trip to Cairo and drove through the area where the Zabaleen live. We can talk about this another time as this visit left quite an impact on us. You can find out more information about this fascinating community through Google and also a very good (award winning) docu/film called Garbage Dreams. http://www.garbagedreams.com/
A little later we are joined by Kamal’s father Hassan, a fine figure of a man with an imposing presence. We shake hands and Mr Hassan offers us further drinks. Someone goes to fetch coca cola.
Peter talks about the Garagos pottery and how the business has been affected by lack of tourism. Kamal tells us that since the uprising the government say that the glass factory isn’t in a suitable place for tourists to come. He says this isn’t the case. The area is safe and being one if Cairo’s oldest areas should be considered as a key tourist destination. The Qaitbey Mosque itself is 700 years old. They feel that the government don’t support local businesses such as this even though they are traditional trades in danger of being lost.
We have another look around at the products. There is such a good range here and we tell Kamal that we would initially be interested in purchasing some hand blown Christmas decorations. We don’t discuss price here. It’s not the time or place. We ask to purchase one of the glass hand painted Christmas decorations but Kamal will accept no money – we must take it as a gift. .
We say our goodbyes and Abdul takes us back to the hotel to finish checking in and to freshen up. We are given a room on the 17th floor of the Sheraton. We have amazing views over the city and the river Nile. The island (Gezira) sits in the middle of the Nile. Directly in front of us Cairo Tower located on Gezira seems like a stones throw away. I can’t venture very far out onto the balcony before vertigo begins to set in. But I can’t resist straining my body from the patio doors to look at the amazing view below and across Cairo. The noise of the beeping is relentless but fades down to background noise after a period of adjustment.
We freshen up and go out to Abdul who is still waiting for us. He is one of the taxi drivers for the Sheraton and business is bad so we know he will still be available for us. We drive over onto the island and head over to leafy Zamalek. This is home to some of the foreign embassy’s and also several private schools. Zamalek is like a little oasis compared to the rest of the city and the wealth of it’s residents is quite apparent. Tree lined streets and high walls provide privacy to large colonial style villas, a legacy of the French and British occupations. http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/zamalek.htm
We head off first to a great bookshop called Diwan. It’s a must visit shop when I’m in Cairo and have picked up a good selection of Naguib Mafhouz books and Yousef Chahine films. We also search for a couple of the books that Kamal showed us earlier as one of them although in Arabic had a feature on the Garagos pottery. We don’t find the books we want but staff suggest we try the Cairo University bookshop – which we do. We find at least one of the books on our list so go away happy. We then go in search of a gallery called Alef. I came across this gallery on the internet before we left home and it sells a fantastic selection of handcrafted items – clearly to the wealthy residents on Zamalek! I don’t have the address with me and after driving around for a while we decide to leave it for another day.
We invite Abdul to join us for ice cream at Groppi’s in downtown Cairo. After Peter and I go married three and a half years ago in Cairo we went to celebrate in Groppi’s before leaving for Alexandria for our honeymoon. Abdul was with us then. He had been an absolute star in driving us everywhere we needed to go to get permissions from one ministry, official stamps from another. Also driving us out to Heliopolis to get permissions from the office of theCoptic Catholic Patriarch. We hadn’t know at the time we needed this permission as we already had permissions from the priest in Garagos and the priest in Luxor – what a palaver that was! It delayed the marriage (ceremony is the wrong word) for a day but we got there in the end with the help of Abdul.
http://www.alshindagah.com/Shindagah78/eng/Groppi.htm
Here the three of us were - sitting in Groppi’s three and a half years later. We all asked the question – where does time go? We had ice cream and drank tea. Abdul phoned his wife and son Mohammed and put them on to speak to us. Again we agreed time goes by so quickly. Abdul invites to his house for dinner. It is my birthday today and we had planned to eat out in a nice restaurant downtown but it seemed rude to refuse. We accepted the invitation an after trying a few more bookshops we set off to Abduls home the other side of Imbaba in Warak.
Imbaba had seen violent clashes between Muslims and Christians in May this year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13325448 Imbaba and Warak are local neighbourhoods (as Peter describes it). He means areas where tourists don’t usually venture. I vaguely recollect this journey from last time we came to have dinner with Abdul and his family. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking photographs in this kind of area – it seems almost voyeuristic and I’m sure wouldn’t be well received by the local people.
We turn into some tight alleyways, go past small shops that sell items ranging from spare parts for cars to live poultry. We arrive at Abdul’s flat and are greeted by his wife. I remember her telling me that she is 'quite high up' in the Ministry of Agriculture. This is apparent upon entering the flat which is clearly the home of Cairo’s middle classes. Their sons Mohammed and Mahmoud aren’t at home – they are currently working but Mohammed phones and tells us he hopes to catch up with us before we leave Cairo. We are invited to the dining table where plates upon plates of food are brought to the table. A large plate of roasted duck, another of roasted chicken. A large tourine of soup, a bowl of rice, a plate of bread, a dish of sliced,roasted potatoes in a tomato sauce.
I struggle to eat in the heat. My appetite decreases when it’s hot and we’ve just been to Groppi’s for ice cream. I am given a bowl of soup, a duck leg and a chicken breast. Shortly after my plate is piled high with rice, potatoes and bread and yet more meat. I have to keep insisting that I can’t eat any more but we make a good attempt at it.
We retire to the living room and fresh mangoes are brought in with tea. Again discussions are had about the revolution and how the country is in a terrible state. (The conversation is in Arabic and Peter translates). Mahmoud has put in an application for a visa to America. The cost of living has increased and it’s no longer safe to walk the streets. It seems that it is everyone’s dream to leave Egypt and it’s current chaotic state. After a while we make a move. It’s 9.00pm and Abdul drives us back to the Sheraton. As we go through Imbaba we see a fight outside one of the coffee shops and we also clearly see a man wielding a knife. It’s a bit of a shock to see this first hand but this is now normal as there is no longer any significant police presence on the steets.
We arrive back at the hotel and ask Abdul to wait whilst Peter goes to fetch some small gifts we brought over for them – an England mug for the men and some Belgian chocolates for Mrs Abdul. Small gifts but with so many family to buy for we have to prioritise.
I stay in the hotel room whilst Peter takes the gifts out to Abdul and also pay him for his driving services for the day. When Peter comes back he has an odd look on his face. I ask him what is wrong and he tells me he is a bit taken aback. I ask him at what and he tells me his is shocked at the amount of money Abdul has charged for driving us for the day. We know what the going rate is. Peter has colleagues who arrange drivers for tourists through travel agencies and also friends who own tourists cars. A days hire for a car in Cairo is about 150le. We had had Abdul for around 12 hours so counted that as 2 days so expected him to charge around 300le. He had asked Peter for 600le. Peter had paid it but he felt that Abdul had taken advantage of us. We had used Abdul on 2 previous trips to Cairo and money had never been a problem. – his prices had always been fair. After a bit of deliberation we decided to use Abdul the following day but to see what his costs would be.
We sit inside the suite with the balcony door open. It’s 10.00pm and Cairo hasn’t even begun to come alive yet. The traffic is still incessant (and the beeping of the cars) and there is a hive of activity along the water front. Café’s are heaving and steams of people stand along the railings on the bridges that cross the Nile. Tourist boats sail up and down and the next shift of street sellers pedal their wares. I read in the in-flight magazine with Egyptair that Cairo is ranked number 3 in the world in the table of 24 hour cities! I’m exhausted!