One Month

My international student's handbook explained to me that "Cairo is not a place to go to 'get away.'" It's true, especially for me and my low level of street smarts and my inability to even remotely blend in. It's very easy here to get in survival mode, to walk straight ahead, one hand on my bag, not making eye contact. To an extent, I follow the rules I've been given; I sit in the back seat of cabs behind the passenger seat when I'm alone, I don't make eye contact with men on the street, I know that people who yell "Welcome to Egypt!" are not welcoming by any sense of the word, and I never, ever, trust that things are "the best price." 

It wears on me sometimes, the hisses and catcalls, the tourist harassment, the man who ran across the street to the museum with us through multiple lanes of traffic and told us about his daughter's wedding only to tell us that the museum was closed for prayers (it wasn't) and try to persuade us to step into his shop down the street (we didn't), the clear reminders, again and again, that this is not where I am from. The hardest part of it all, I think, is to walk down the street without the basic assumption that I can trust anyone.

But there are times when I get into survival mode, not smiling and not starting conversation, when I'm struck by moments of tenderness; not anything out of the common way, they stop me in my tracks when I'm focusing on just walking straight ahead. There is the man who said "Salaam aleikum" to us in the market the other day, amid all of the catcalls and sales pitches. There is my taxi driver the other day who spoke to me in Arabic that was too rapid for me to fully understand--though punctuated occasionally by "no problem!"--about the revolution. There was the couple sitting on a bench on the Nile last week, heads bent together, her feet not touching the ground, a few feet away from laughing groups of friends taking pictures of themselves as the wind  and the sound of the city blew around them. There was the father and his son at the market last week choosing cheerios, the girl asleep in her father's lap in a passing car. 

It's hearing the call to prayer when I'm wandering around lost; it's a cab driver who raises my window when we're going through Tahrir Square, it's a faltering conversation in Arabic that ultimately makes at least some sense to both of us, it's "salaam aleikum." It's remembering that I don't have to be afraid.