Early Entry - Saturday, August 23, 2008

Today I stepped off my study abroad experience with almost every possible malfunction. First, because ‘there was too much air traffic’ at JFK, my plane had to sit on the runway for about 2 hours, causing me to miss my connecting flight to Cairo. Because I missed the connector, I had to wait some 2-3 hours in various lines to get rebooking figured out – which meant figuring out what was happening with my baggage. Apparently the figuring out we worked out at the counter didn’t quite cut it, because when I finally arrived in Cairo some ten hours after intended, the bag wasn’t there. It took about another hour and a half of phone calls to figure out that yes, it was in the airport somewhere. Also, the customs people had a weird reaction to my being Arab-American. I wasn’t quite sure if it was anger or happiness or a strange mixture, but I was taken out of the line and sent to some serious-looking Egyptian officer type people before I was cleared. Phew. At least the visa itself wasn’t an issue like I thought it would be.

So eventually I get my bag and conveniently enough, some car service people throw themselves at me. I was fine with that because it meant I didn’t have to think. The only problem was that, though the car was quite lovely, it drove me to the wrong hotel – one that was booked, in fact – so I went wandering the streets of Cairo at night with large amounts of cumbersome luggage, searching for one. I accidentally wound up in some city water services office, but the guy in there actually had someone stand in for him and walked me around the entire neighborhood, looking (unsuccessfully) for an open room. After about an hour or so of this, he snagged a cab and asked it to find me a specific hotel.

This is when it got very creepy. It was fine at first, until we started having a legitimate conversation. He started asking me details about my sexual life and my thoughts on sexual culture in America. I thought he was a conservative Muslim trying to get my liberal American views out in the open, but I was apparently quite wrong. He was in fact telling me that he was a closet gay and had watched one hundred million gay sex tapes – because they’re sweet. This was weird enough, until it eerily dawned on me that I was sitting in a dark car with a strange man (he had pulled over to ask me a few specific questions) in a strange city and with my destiny completely at his disposal. And he was implying that maybe I wasn’t sexually active enough AND informing me that he finds men-men sex beautiful. So I casually changed the conversation and ‘realized how tired I was’ so he would find a hotel quick as hell.

It turned out alright – he actually seemed like a legitimately helpful man, and he gave me his contact info in case I ever needed anything again (*cough cough*). This was the second time a strange man went completely out of his way to help a lost foreign kid. He didn’t even charge me (he was a cab driver) for the ride. I just realized that the situation could have been really bad or really good, and I happened to get really lucky. I do not intend to rely on luck next time.

Already I miss very subtle things from home, and some less subtle ones. There is a smell (spices and garbage mixed together, I believe) that pervades the streets, reminding me of when I was in Lebanon. The heat, the scent of car engines and outside markets is all quite a rush of new sensations (or relived ones, anyway). I miss well-kept bathrooms though, and knowing where I’ll be sleeping when I wake up. That will be solved (provided I can get to Ramses station tomorrow) easily enough once I’m with the group. It’d be nice to see familiar faces after such a hellish day and a half. I need routine, and the past bit of time has most decidedly not been so. We’ll see how it works out later. At this point, I’m waiting to take advantage of internet so I can contact people in the US so they know I yet live – but all this after I take a very well deserved rest on these very, very soft mattresses.