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December

December 2nd, 2003
    This day I walked to Khan Khallili to look for Christmas presents. I ended up buying an inlaid Koran box for my sister. I then crossed the street and wandered South through many torturous alleys. Here I observed the phenomenon of a house entirely filled with trash. In several places, it appeared that an old house had been demolished or collapsed, leaving an empty space bounded by surrounding buildings, and a low wall along the street. The interior space was then filled entirely with mostly organic rubbish. In many instances, this house of trash had grown so tall as to threaten total inundation by catastrophic collapse. Sometimes these houses will retain their beautiful old carven doors, which are now bulging outward behind the weight of trash. The rubbish seemed to consist largely of black plastic bags, plastic water bottles, and the scraps of cucumbers and tomatos.

December 5th, 2003
    This day was a rather unusual one. When I awoke, it was raining at a decent rate, and this continued intermittently all day. I bought a small statue of the ancient god Bes for my mom, then packed it with other presents in a specially constructed cardboard box. Next I walked to Ramsis post office to mail it. If the vast bureaucracy of the Mugamma has been streamlined, the parings now rest here. In other words, Stalinist bureaucracy flourishes. After being sent all over the building and dispensing various amounts of small change, I at last sealed up the package and sent it by taiar, or airplane, at a crippling cost of LE 167, far more than the sad contents were worth. O well, what the hell. Sending it by boat would have cost LE 90, and who knows how long that would have taken.
    I then walked home. More intermittent rain. From my kitchen window I saw part of a rainbow. I made some past, and as I was eating it, I heard a huge tumultuous noise. I looked out the window into a furious storm with driving, dense rain and cyclonic winds. At the climax, a huge sattelite dish on the next building toppeled over with a mighty crash. I cheered. In less than a minute, the squall was over. I finished my pasta and walked over to the Cairo Opera house, where I saw…wait, before I tell you, I think its necessary to backtrack and describe Midan Ramsis today. On any normal day, Midan Ramsis is “a byword for bedlam,” according to Lonely Planet. A large number of highways empty out into a bus station crammed with pedestrians. I can honestly say that it is the place the most expressive of total hellish chaos that ever I’ve seen. Insane indiscriminate taxis roaring through black clouds of  bus exhaust, as desperate civilians in their thousands try to reach the large central train station. An inextricable nexus of blackened flyovers arch over the clogged, decaying pavement. Occasional huge piles of sand and paving blocks are colonized by squalid vendors of plastic rubbish. This is the scene on an average day. Innaharda, however, all these delightful attractions were augmented by flooding. The pedestrians, many obese and burdened with baggage or goiters, struggled across narrow isthmuses between enormous puddles, through which taxis sped, sending up sheets of oleaginous, trash-ridden slime. At one point I saw hundreds of people struggling for space along one narrow curb that skirted a small lake at least two decimeters deep. Other lakes were filled with the noxious slurry formed when the rain contacted the deep encrusted layers of accreted diesel exhaust, shoe scrapings, and desiccated tubercular snot. As the pedestrians attempted to waddle across the slippery pavement, many fell, hurled like deformed walruses into the seething toxic miasma, there to flail and wallow until some passing bus ended their struggles, and their foul, insipid lives.
    Yes, now that that’s been clarified, as I was saying, after my dinner, I walked to the cairo Opera house, where, after asking directions three times, I finally found my destination-the Oud contest. The Oud is one of my favorite instruments. Its sound is haunting, complex, and vaguely menacing. There were three adult contestants and three children, one of whom could almost match the technical brilliance of his elders, but whose playing had an honesty and emotional energy theirs lacked. One of the adults was like the Yngwe J. Malmsteen of the Oud, exhibiting incredible skills stripped of emotional meaning or depth, while this one kid was just brilliant. He looked about twelve. He would laugh after each song. Someone in the audience called him a “shwaya neymoose,” – a little mosquito. The concert was still going on, but I was overcome by an insurmountable desire to leave, to be outside and walking, so I left near the end. And that is the end of that strange day.

December 6th, 2003
    Examples of typical news stories in Egypt and the USA:
Egypt
Minister of Industrial Extrusions Meets with Albanian Envoy for Petrochemical Byproducts
Mubarak Calls For Increased Ties With Gambia
Five Palestinians dead, Two Children

USA
Woman Bites Off Ex-Husband’s Tongue
27 Die from Salmonella; Wendy’s Closed
Suicide bomber kills Five Israelis

December 9th, 2003
    Mubarak Wakes Up Calls, for Increased Contact Between Toothbrush, Toothpaste
Mubarak walks Into Wall, Calls For Increased Cooperation Between Mind, Body
Mubarak Calls For Increased Contact Between Trunceons, Protesters

    Cairo. President Hosni Mubarak remained fused to his chair today, as he met the sub-envoy for mineralogical aggluteriminations from the Comoros, the Chief of the Supreme Council for Enormous Rotting Piles of Garbage, the military attaché for the Panamanian embassy, the head of the Namibian space program, and other dignitaries too numerous to enumerate.



December 10th, 2003
    The day before yesterday, I visited the Egyptian museum for a third time. It was relatively uncrowded, and I enjoyed slowly and deliberately investigating the relics. I discovered many new things, such as strange carvings of astral emminations on sarcophagi, a huge black stone snake, coiled as the lid of a jar in the temple of Aesclepius, many fertility goddesses of Roman date, beautiful Isises, and a huge head of Akhenaton sitting on the floor misfiled in a Roman section of the museum. I crouched down and had a good look at him in solitude for a while. Quite astonishing and mysterious variations of the human figure. I also found polygonal and dodecahedral gaming dice inscribed with letters. Were these used for divination?
    Yesterday I saw an excellent film called Master and Commander about navel warfare in Napoleonic times. Walking home, I met up with a group in an Ahwa and talked with them for a while. We played a game where someone spoke a sentence and the next person translated it, and so on. We had Arabic, English, German, Russian and Japanese. A very erudite and hilarious entertainment. I went to bed late at three.
    Today I arranged an interview at the AUC on next Tuesday, and also purchased a copy of the first two volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Already this delights me. In other news, I think I’ve finally mastered the art of crossing the street without dying. You just have to sail out into traffic and stand in the slots between moving cars. Never run. Instead, wait for cars to pass. When crossing Midan Talat Harb, do not circumambulate, but go right straight across via the statue and its eminent plinth. Avoid stopping to gawk at passing Egyptian beauties. These have large dark eyes, long black hair, and are tall and well built, their sleek bodies expressive at once of power and luxuriousness.
    *I only care what others think of me to the extent that I am vain and weak. Why then should God care what men think of him? that he would punish or reward them accordingly, if he were omnipotent?*

December 11th, 2003
    O my God. O. My. God. I’ve just encountered the most astonishing marvel I’ve seen yet in Egypt. As soon as I saw it, I knew I must try to describe it here, and that I would fail. This particular adventure began with my sink, that troublesome cloaca miniama. Detecting from that dank orifice an ordure more suited to the luxuriancies of maritime decay, than to the vernal freshness of Arcadian springs, I deigned to dissect, then to inspect the mechanical interior of the attached pipage. After removing a rank clot of indistinguishable horrors, I determined that a nut was missing from the central bolt. I remembered having seen, in the environs of the Tawfikiya souq, several small stores selling hardware and minute ironongery, so I set off in that direction, bolt in hand, in search of a matching nut. Inquiring at several small shops, I was told that they delt only in bulk, and was directed onwards. Soon someone directed me into a narrow side alley, only 3 or 4 feet across, which I had not observed before, despite passing that way numerous times. Here is where I discovered this marvel. They alley led into a vast, indeed apparently endless labrynthine warren of narrow corridors, crammed with oily men, and lined with hundreds of minute shops, each only several feet wide, and totally packed from littered floor to high ceiling with millions of small metal and rubber parts. None of these corridors had an end for they all branched off into further inscrutable complexities, or lead to stairs revealing further levels above or below. Bootblacks and tea vendors jostled with frantic mechanics and lounging tea drinkers in the cluttered aisles. The endlessness pf the passageways, the minuteness of the ware being sold, the oi, the fluorescent lamps, the thousands of hurrying men, all contributed to overwhelm me with a sense of inextricable, minute infinitude. I thin k this was the labyrinth at Babylon in Egypt esteemed in ancient times as a wonder grater than the pyramids. At last, after many broken Arabic conversations, I found, in a shop crowded with boys in an upper level, the nut I sought. I was given it for free. As I exited this place, I reflected that it was totally invisible from the outside, and that I had walked entirely around it many times.

December13th, 2003
    At this point, some description of Egyptian elevators is called for. That they were not present in antiquity is suggested by their name asencir, which derives from the French. In general, Cairene elevators are ancient structures of glass, wood and brass, which make their way at slow or irregular speeds through the central shafts of all buildings. Most appear to date from the 1920’s. Many are staffed by a man whose wholly pointless employment is to push the required button and open the doors. In general, the safety mechanism has been disconnected, allowing the elevator to ascend or descend with its doors open, leaving a continual temptation to the suicidal, who contemplate a horrific guillotine. The elevator in my building apparently dates from the 1960’s. Its operations are highly erratic. Liable to be out of order, and to start functioning again at the slightest intervals, it is a source of mystery or annoyance to all inhabitants. The mechanism that releases the outer door is faulty, causing the passengers to be frequently trapped, unless they know to slide their hand into a certain crack and pull the release. Occasionally, a pair of repairmen can be seen ministering to it. Just now, I heard an amusing interaction with it. One aspiring passenger, probably obese and asthmatic, pushed the button on the 8th floor, hoping to summon the box that would convey them to the surface of the earth. Alas, the vast and intricate mechanisms of the elevator, oiled but covered in dust, failed to respond. The aspirant pushed the button again. And again. The impotent clicking of the useless button continued, and swelled into a cacophonous symphony, expressive of anger, but not of despair. This continued, nor did it abate, even after long periods of time had elapsed. Listening in my apartment, I muttered encouragements, and was not disappointed. The pushing of the button did not desist. Time passed. I was wholly at a loss to imagine what chain of reasoning could possibly have justified the hope, that after pushing the button so many myriads of times without any result, the continuance of this activity could be productive of any benefit, either to the individual, or to humanity. At length, and with the lapse of time, the clicking ceased, and the disappointed traveler hove their distended bulk down the staircase, where perhaps even now they wade through the cat-ridden garbage mounds of the 5th, or flail in the foetid darkness of the 3rd level. Yet there is also some possibility, or even probability that the participant in this psychological study of despair chose to return in defeat to the comfort of their apartment, there to await the revolutions of the wheel of elevator fortune.
    This incident reminds me of an experiment which several psychology majors described to me in school. The effectiveness of antidepressant drugs is tested by placing pregnant rats into a vat of deep water, out of which they cannot climb. For a while they swim, but at length they give up and die. The length of time they swim is carefully measured, and correlated the effectiveness of their antidepressant. From this we can conclude that my neighbors suffer from unreasonably high serotonin levels, and that psychologists are cruel bastards.

December 14th, 2003
    This day I went on a long walk looking for the Berlitz school here. Although I did not find it, I discovered a huge aqueduct with pointed arches. I then wormed my way back through obscure streets where foreigners apparently had never been seen. I observed very medieval surroundings, the only modern touches being the auto wheels on the donkey carts. I also saw a huge pile of cast off fawanees or Ramadan lanterns. A few days ago I found on the street these printed instructions for shoes:

Thank you for Purchasing our products. If you find any quality problems in our products. Please charge them where you make the purchase. The following are our suggestions about using and maintaining the shoes properly.
1. Please purchase shoes that fit your feet, otherwise the shoes will become out of shape easily and your feet may get hurt.
2. To avoid becoming aging out of shape, please don’t put them under sunshine directly.
3. Please keep the shoes away from anything that is sharp and chemicals.
4. Keep at least two pairs of shoes, so you can wear the shoes alternately.

An intense study of this document has cleared up several points concerning the proper operation of shoes, which have mystified me for years. Who would ever have thought to purchase shoes that fit? Perhaps this would explain the strange sensations emanating from the lumps of flesh at the ends of my legs, felt when I put on a small pair of patent leather bootees. Am I justified in extrapolating from this first precept other guiding principles for life? Purchase hats that fit your head, otherwise your head may get hurt. Ah, ok! But the fourth cardinal point remains mysterious to me. Are we only to wear one shoe at a time? Are we to wear shoes from separate pairs. Hopefully a series of experiments that I am now contemplating will clarify these obscure points.

December 17th, 2003
    Yesterday I walked along the corniche in the Northwards direction, and found the Berlitz school, where I turned in my CV. The school was located in a weird mall. Didn’t know they had these here, but this was definitely a mall. On the way back I joined a group of about 20 flagrantly idle persons watching the operations of a backhoe on a barge in the Nile, filling in the embankment with mud. Truly, watching the operations of construction equipment is one of the most innocent and satisfying entertainments known. I almost cheered each time the huge iron dinosaur scooped up a vast load of oozing black blubbery mud, and released it along the embankment. My fellow spectators ranged from ulcerated beggars to strolling dandies. Any embarrassment we may have felt at deriving entertainment from such a mundane source was tempered by the gleeful knowledge that we alone had leisure to do so.
    This day I went to the AUC to have an interview. It seemed to go fairly well, and I’ll have to go back and teach a demo lesson to the four assistant directors next week. Perhaps this will be the source of further delightful idiocy and bungling on my part.

December 22nd, 2003
    This day I walked up past Ramsis station to explore Shubra. This turns out to be a pretty boring part of town- a lot like Mohandissen or Dokki. Lots of concrete apartment blocks from the 1960’s, vegetable vendors, cars, stores selling plastic kitsch. After a while I tool the metro back home. I have observed that the Egyptians do not follow the custom, so prevalent in the West, of letting the passengers get off before trying to get on. Perhaps doing so would be considered a sign of contemptible weakness. Or perhaps in the furious contest around the doors, as the clawing hoards paw frantically at the pressing bodies, an opportunity to demonstrate personal valor is found.
    In this connection, I recall an amusing incident at a local store. Paying for something at an Egyptian store is not a skill I have mastered. Perhaps one contemplates, goods in hand, a sullen crowd of tea drinkers dispersed around the store. Where is the cash register? Is there a cash register? Who in this crowd is authorized to take my money. Who is a random visitor, or some middleman passing by? I frequently find myself saying mumkin ashtiri da? which means “um hey, can I buy this?” In this certain case, the location of the cash register was betrayed by a crowd of shoppers pressed around a pile of packaged sugar. Approaching this locality, I observed what appeared to my untrained eyes to be a line or queue, branching off in an unusual direction. Having some doubts, and remembering the Arabic for queue, I asked if this was the line. The question provoked considerable hilarity. It then occurred to me that, from my observations, the Egyptians would have no cause whatsoever to include a word of this signification in their vocabulary. Is there a word for iceberg in Tamil, or coconut in Inuit? I realized that this word “taboor” that I got from a dictionary, must have some wholly archaic or obscure meaning, or is perhaps is used only in sociological studies of the weird rites of Northern barbarians. I worked my way around to the other side and saw that the man behind the register was counting a huge stack of bills. The persons whom I had mistaken for a queue were only the subsidiary followers or attaches of another eminent personage who haggled with the teller. Perhaps these were a butcher and his sub-butchers arguing over the price of one of the huge bleeding carcasses, impaled and decapitated, which hung from the ceiling. Who knows. I paid and left.

December 31st, 2003
    On Monday I taught a demonstration lesson at the AUC. I didn’t notice any obvious blunders, except the lesson ended very early, as the students, two middle aged Egyptian teaching women, refused to do the exercises. Well, who know what wil happen with this. I only hope that they tell me one way or the other. I felt very good after teaching this lesson, for which I had spent so long preparing.
    Yesterday I decided to visit the pyramids again, as at the last visit I didn’t have very long to explore. I managed to take a minibus out there for LE1. Like last time, the first sight was most impressive. These frightening masses towering over the low hovels and rutted streets of Giza. I confirmed my initial impression that there was something distinctly terrifying about the pyramids. It scarcely seems credible that they were built by humans. The exposed slanted lintels over the aperture on the North side of the great pyramid look like the shut mouth of a crab, or of some pupating insect. The pyramids are just so out of scale with any human ambitions or percaptions. This time I really observed the decayed state of the great pyramid. I’d guess its missing about 5 or 6 of its outer layers. The middle pyramid is actually more impressive, as its outer casing is still partially intact near the top. In all the descriptions I’ve read of the pyramids, they were supposedly cased in white limestone, but it looks to me like a stone I would call red granite was used. Many angled blocks of this can be seen tumbled at the base of Chephren’s pyramid. The smallest pyramid, that of Menkaure was clearly cased in granite, not limestone. I walked around this pyramid and found the remains of a small railroad whose tracks jutted off a precipice. A rusted cart lay below. I walked down to the temple and causeway. The Nile must have once been much closer, as its now many miles away. Eventually I took a big bus home. Now I remember why its unwise to travel in cars in the afternoon in Cairo. Total gridlock. It took over an hour to get back over the Nile, and then the bus was just stuck in an endless sea of cars. I would have gotten out and walked, but I really wanted to see where the bus stopped downtown. After sitting there more, in a seat a good 6” too small for my femurs, I decided to walk, so I got off and swam in a sea of exhaust until I reached home. Its interesting to contemplate the cars here. Obviously a FAILED SYSTEM, something that just clearly does not work, but everyone keeps at it anyway.
    Today I decide to visit the Abdeen palace museum. Not quite up to the standards of the Agricultural museum, but interesting none the less. What this museum had was GUNS. Room after room filled with guns. It started with a brief few halls of swords and axes, then moved right to the main course of millions of guns. In keeping with the Egyptian tradition of maximal useless employment, this place had many security guards. From the way they stared fixedly at me, it was evident that I was the only visitor, probably for many days, if not weeks. With all this bovine staring and all the endless halls of guns, I started to suffer from a laughing fit. Just contemplating all the variations on this one basic idea, the stick for killing people, and seeing all the vain filigrees, engravings, doodads, and precious encrustations attempting to disguise or glorify the purpose of murder, combined with the exceedingly sullen staring of the guards, induced an obscure species of hilarity. But I stifled my laughter. There were actually a few interesting things. There were many pistol/sword combinations. Many very long old muskets covered in decorations. The hammer part was just a clamp that held a shard of flint. I learned that a carbine has a huge bore. There were revolving muskets. Then I found the weirdest thing, an object more indicative of totalpathology than anything else here. Actually, there were two, but I’ll describe the more elaborate. It was a full steel breastplate, as worn by a medieval knight, but with 19 gun barrels mounted onto it, pointing in all directions. Each gun was loaded individually, and they were fired in sections. Someone wearing this thing could walk into a crowded room, say a board meeting, or a classroom, or a cozy bar, and massacre everyone with the flick of a switch. Like the early 19th century equivalent of the uzi. There was another of these breastplates with the guns mounted in a line. Another notable gun I can only describe as a revolver revolver. There was a Belgian pistol from the congo days that looked particularly cruel. The exhibet rounded off with machine guns.
    Across the way were a few halls filled with medals. A stupid collection of pompous trash. The 3rd place agricultural award for 1932. Next was a display of all the official gifts to THE PRESIDENT Hosni Mubarak. This was also sort of interesting, if only from a humorous perspective. All these gilded baubles served their purpose for a day, and are now entombed here. Last were some random and hideous piles of ceramic plates and other fancy shit. Now, if only the museum pieces had a field day: Guns versus Plates. That I would see. As I left the museum, I glanced at a case of indiscriminate plastic rubbish, and a man, who although old and fat was still able to run, sprinted across the courtyard, asking if I wanted to buy a souvenir. Maybe I would have, but he scared me off. I came home at last.


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