!ابوقير

The pearl of Egypt, Abu Qir (pronounce [abu'ir] in Egyptian dialect –> map and history here). I went to this place because it was mentioned in the dear Lonely Planet that there was a great Greek restaurant (Zephyrion), and I thought that it could make a nice lunch stop before the drive to Port Said. It’s a very short drive from Alexandria, so I wasn’t hungry when I arrived and I hesitated whether to stop or not.

However, as soon as I arrived in the small streets of this tiny village I received such a warm welcome that I decided the place was worth to walk around until I was hungry because people were just so nice. As I pulled off to park someone else arrived and helped me orientate and park safely without even asking for money! Unbelievable. In Cairo there is ALWAYS someone charging you for parking, cops included, as it has become part of the informal economy.

As I was walking around I kept meeting people who waved at me, threw out some “welcome!” as people did in Syria. I talked to these two gentlemen:

After a while I finaly headed to this Zephyrion Greek restaurant, which revealed itself to be fantastic. They even served beer. There were a few Coptic families having lunch also, and after spotting some unveiled girls (in shorts!!!) around I made the assumption that there must be lots of Copts in the region. After all, Abu Qir was the name of a Copt martyr.

Overall, the stop was extremely pleasant. I was already looking at some of the abandoned beautiful buildings and wondering how much would that be. As much as Cairo can be dehumanizing, Abu Qir is full of humanity, simplicity, and friendliness. I’ll be back.

Click HERE for the slideshow with more pictures.

Cairo! I don’t really know where to start, for this place is just so… much! It’s enormous (26 millions inhabitants according to the last population sensus), and it’s far too ultra-über-overcrowded. It’s polluted. The traffic is just insane. It’s dirty also, as there is a garbage problem that is going on since the government decided to hire ineffective European companies (FCF, Urbaser and AMA) over the Zabbaleen, or garbage people (زبالين) that used to collect and recycle informally the trash in Cairo. Some call this immensity of a city dehumanizing also. But hey, it’s the Paris of the Nile!

It’s also the Mother of the World, capital of the Arab world. Walking through the streets, observing the architecture, the subway system, one cannot not imagine the past glory of this city.

It’s cosmopolitan also. Living downtown I felt like I was living in Manhattan, although I’ve never been to New York. But Cairo is so big that I feel like anyone can assimilate himself into this immense thing that Cairo is. Overall, I must say it was a fantastic experience. Tiring, exhausting sometimes, but I would definitely do it again, and I will probably be back before long. It is frustrating to live there without speaking arabic properly, for the people of Cairo are much better appreciated if known and talked to; else one tend to experience only rip-offs…

Because Cairo can also be extremely annoying and/or discouraging. First of all there is the omnipotent Islam and its double standards. People would yell at you for showing affection in public to someone of the opposite sex, but they would also be the first to grob a girl’s bottom or give the dirtiest look conceivable.

There is also the overreaching bureaucracy and it’s mighty empire of functionaries that the government is buying off buy employing people to do nothing - literally nothing. But as a result to do anything that has to do with a permit of something alike one requires a lot of patience. A tremendous amount of patience. And money.

Just under, on the left, is the portrait of my bowab (doorman) Abdul; and on the right is the Egyptian parliament, Orwell’s 1984 looking, behind the smog and the jammed traffic on Tahrir Square, downtown Cairo.

Well well, where to start? Like too often I have been quite inactive for some time on this blog, and I still haven’t written anything on Egypt. So I’ll start with a post on AUC, because this is why I came here, and what shaped my experience of Egypt during these four months.

When I signed up for the exchange back home in Montreal at the Concordia International office I was told that AUC was “the Harvard of the Middle East”. Well, let’s go straight to the point: it’s a joke!!! After a few month of fulminating against this AUC I finally got the irony of it all; and it is actually hilarious!

To start with, I heard that the people in charge were originally planning to have a ‘environmentally sustainable’ campus. This is maybe the funniest joke of them all. There are water fountains fountaining everywhere on campus, which is in the middle of the desert (it doesn’t require much brain power to realize that a water fountain in the sahara desert is not very natural…). There are also fields of flowers, and [very] green grass all over the place, and it’s all growing on sand dunes…

Complain #2: The campus is FAR! I spent two hours everyday commuting around Cairo in these Family Transport buses whose drivers are all enrolled in an intense competition at who’s-the-most-insane-when-it-comes-to-driving. This literally ruined my experience as I was sticked most of the time in traffic. And this leads me to another complain #2 bis: transport back and forth this joke of a University is expensive as hell! 300$ for the semester’s bus pass, when it should be free!

Complain #3: Classes are preposterously useless! I should specify that this complain goes mostly for the lower level classes (200 and 300 level). I took two seminars/grad-classes and they were pretty good. But the other ones… what a joke! When my teacher of Cultural Anthropology found out that some student were plagiarizing he just said that he was unhappy about that and that he would take some points off… One of the exam questions was “explain what is cultural relativism to a friend in a small paragraph”! Even in high school teachers had higher expectations from us!

Complain #4: students are ultra-spoiled kids who are completely disconnected from reality! They are all so rich that they think the American exchange students are cheap because they don’t eat at McDonalds everyday (which is almost 10x the price of a falafel). Of course not everyone is dum; I made some very good Egyptian friends. But the majority are just spending their life wondering about which Louis Vuitton bag to wear…

Complain #5: it’s impossible to work at the library because the AUC kids are swarming the place and it all looks like a playground or something like that. Sometimes it’s so loud that I can’t hear my own ipod music…

+++: But the good thing about this place is that I am done so I don’t ever have to go there again!!!

p.s: Maybe I should call this post “AUC hate mail”. I’ll try to calm down before my next post.