protests, police and an 82 year old president

In case you're wondering about the situation in Cairo, here's my take. It's interesting how many people I heard from abroad, I guess after Tunisia people are taking the threat of revolt in the Middle East more seriously than ever.

I seriously doubt much will come of it other than a bunch of protester casualties and the government giving in to the demands that are easiest to fulfill - nobody honestly expects a revolution. The police are well armed and very good at using violence control protesters. But, for that reason the vast majority of Egyptians don't protest, and the huge turnout says something about how tired people are of the economic and political circumstances, and how they're emboldened by Tunisia. Their requests aren't unreasonable, like a new minimum wage: the current one has been LE 35 (less than $7) since the mid-80s, and it's completely unlivable - a half gallon of milk, for example, costs $2. Of course most people make more than the minimum wage, but it were reset to reflect today's cost of living, the pitiful salaries would have to go up. People also want unemployment relief, the resignation of the interior minister, and an end to torture.

Almost all the offices in Cairo were closed Tuesday for Police Day so I stayed home and it was quiet in my neighborhood. While internet and phone cuts have been reported, I still had service. On Tuesday I went back to work, and they sent home all the women just after noon. I had been planning to sneak out around 1pm for the other office so I just went then. Around 6:15, rumors spread of a 7pm curfew, and my boss insisted on driving me and Maysaa (the only one of three other girls who had deemed it safe to come in) home. I later heard that there wasn't a curfew, or it hadn't been enforced. While obviously there's been an enormous amount of activity on the streets, it really feels like I would have never known that anything was going on if friends and coworkers hadn't been talking about it. I guess that's what comes from living and working on the other side of the river.

Here's my assessment of the political situation in Egypt: Mubarak is ancient, has been ruling the country for decades and he does virtually nothing - except cut deals with businessmen. He's been grooming his son Hosni (who doesn't have any political experience) to replace him, so there's no reason to expect anything to change. The elections are rigged and the country has been operating under emergency law for over a decade, which gives them the right to arrest anybody and imprison them without trial for as long as they like. The vast majority of people are poor, really poor. But there isn't anybody for the people to rally behind - people who do attempt to run against Mubarak tend to end up in prison. The most palatable option for president, Muhamed ElBaradei, has never publically announced an intention to run. The Muslim Brotherhood does a lot of behind the scenes community work - they give food and clothing to the poor, they build schools and mosques. They're actually the majority party in the assembly, but as they're banned they all run as independents. Analysts think that the Brotherhood is too fragmented internally to put up a solid political front, or even establish a leader.

One of the major factors holding Egypt back from revolution, in my opinion, is Islam. Most everyday Egyptians are deeply religious, and Islam has a pretty fatalistic outlook. People trust in God to provide and accept their circumstances as his will. I think that makes them loathe to take power struggles into their own hands. More secular people almost always come from the upper class, and as they have their hands in the government's pocket, they're pretty content with the status quo. As far as international relations are concern, Mubarak has the best relationship with Israel of any Arab nation, and the US provides Egypt with a huge amount of aid (the second-most of all countries) and has made it quite clear that they don't want power to change hands. Except if it's peaceful. And it's hard to see how can happen in a country where the elections are fixed.

Lindsey thinks that the government will have to do something to appease the protesters. My boss Nahed gently mocked the recommencement of demonstrations on Wednesday night, saying that people came home from work and realized that nothing had changed. She guesses that the government will make a big deal of firing a few ministers ("and what's the difference, none of them do anything anyway!") and once they've got a scapegoat everyone things will calm down.

So, there's reason to hope for small changes, but I wouldn't expect any Tunisia-style power shifts. And honestly, while life in a dictatorship is tough - especially for those who get on Mubarak's wrong side - there's not much reason to believe that a new government would yield a more democratic nation.

In case you want to learn more, here are a few good links:
The first day (Tuesday) - The Guardian has a lot of solid coverage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/25/egypt-protests-mubarak

Lindsey's blog, here's her account of Wednesday
http://lpinthefield.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/egypts-unrest-protests-continue-for-second-day/
A gawker page that's not great but has a video that was filmed across the street from my old apartment in Garden City
http://gawker.com/5743556/whats-going-on-in-egypt

Check back soon - Lindsey's trying to drag me to the protest tomorrow night!

goodbye cairo... hello, giza!

well, we've left the fair isle of zamalek for the uncharted wilds of dokki. after viewing a bunch of places with no success, i contacted a few brokers from craigslist and made some appointments. almost immediately, we fell in love with an enormous, nileside apartment owned by a fierce-looking soldier, wearing an army jacket over his civilian clothes. we ran around like kids exploring the apartment and admiring the view of the Nile from the bedrooms and the wall of windows in the living and dining rooms, the pyramids visible in the distance
the next few days were tense as we waited to see if alex's company and the owner could agree on the rent and the conditions before other potential renters got their act together. the broker alex used last year told him that dealing with abdel aziz, the guy in charge of negotiating for the company, was the worst experience of her career. while this time it wasn't without road bumps - like telling the owner and broker to meet at the apartment and then waiting for them at the office - but it all worked out and we moved in this past weekend. we had a blast on thursday night, admiring all the bizarre knickknacks and statues, fake flowers, and awful rugs... thankfully we have a lot of closets to hide them in. we explored all the cupboards and rearranged furniture for hours, and the next day went to the nearby botanical gardens and left with 27 plants. the neighborhood is nice: within walking distance of one one my offices and a quick cab ride from the other. there's a bowling alley and a pool hall across the street, and the corniche is covered with restaurants and cafes on boats. alex was worried that our friends would be too lazy to cross the river, but so far that hasn't been a problem and we've already hosted friends for dinner and shisha a few times. i will post pictures as soon as we get the internet - the wifi i've been stealing is too sensitive to upload anything right now. for the moment, just imagine us grinning.


Below is my neighborhood circa 1918!

interviews and insights

this morning menna, one of my writers (the only one, actually) and i went to cover a social media workshop at a hotel on the other side of the city. i wasn't particularly happy about losing the time at work, because we're hoping to send this issue (our first) to the press by thursday and i still had two other articles to finish. but menna, who is 21 and a pretty inexperienced journalist, pushed me to come with her, saying that this was a learning experience, i'm her teacher, and while she'd be miserable alone, together she'd be confident. so after meeting in the office we hailed a cab to the fairmont heliopolis, a fancy hotel not far from the airport.

i was glad i went. in addition to the event organizer and the speaker, we were able to do an interview with the organizer's parent company, a digital media agency, that i can use for my other story. i talked with the people who were comfortable being interviewed in english and she spoke with a few others. we also made several useful contacts in the digital field, who tried to convince us that the future of advertising is online. the speaker even claimed that tv will soon cease to exist. our photographer was late and menna, annoyed, called him several times. finally he showed up explaining that his wife had just given birth. i don't know what "just" means to him but we decided to let it slide and congratulated him profusely on the baby.

we were interviewing people during the breaks in the workshop and while we waited for the next break menna attended the workshop and i made an outline of the article and wrote the introduction. we also entertained ourselves by taking glamour shots in the bathroom. there was a table of bizarre but appetizing food for the attendees just across the room i was hanging around in, but i couldn't work up the nerve to check it out with all the staff hanging around. my hunger eventually got the better of me but as i stood up i realized they were already clearing it away. defeated, i resolved to stay until the next break so i could do the last interview, then hit up mcdonalds. my resolve paid off: when that lecture finished the organizer invited us to the hotel restaurant for lunch with the group. covering events is the way to go - i think the other attendees had paid $300 for the day!

it was also nice to get the chance to hang out with menna during the long cab ride. long by my standards - this girl spent four years taking a two hour bus ride (each way) to university. she's young, but really interesting and thoughtful. i'm always curious about their perspective on things in their lives that are so different from mine, but a lot of egyptian girls give really rote responses when talking about the veil or their family. menna said she started veiling when she was about 16, but spent a year thinking about it her first. her mother advised her to wait and think very seriously about if she was ready, because once you start wearing the veil, there's no going back - or at least not with a lot of explaining to do. it's not that people are disappointed about the veil, but it shows that you didn't think it through carefully or that your faith wasn't strong enough to see you through the decision. egyptians are always quick to defend women's choice in the matter, which kind of rings false to me because almost all of them do veil. i guess the choice is less 'if' and more 'when'. most egyptian muslims nowadays (as opposed to a couple of generations ago) follow the strain of islam that interprets the koran as saying that the veil is a requirement for women, unlike countries like lebanon, tunisia and turkey. menna stressed that it's about finding a balance between your outer and inner self: it's easy for women to come off as more pious by wearing the veil without actually being religious otherwise. there's also women who, while they think that women should veil, don't want to because it'd hurt their careers or is not what their friends are doing. menna also mentioned a friend of hers who desperately wants to veil, but her father is opposed to it. the friend says that she'll wait until she marries and then start veiling, because when she gets married, it'll be her - and her husband - who decide what is right.

i also asked menna if her parents were pushing her to get married yet. typically mothers start pestering their relatives and social circle about eligible men while their daughters are in college, and menna's mom is no exception. menna has already received a couple of offers that way, which her mother, grandmother and aunts pushed her to accept. apparently if she is too selective, she'll end up a forty year old spinster or a divorcee. her father, on the other hand, doesn't want her to get married so young, she says because she's the only daughter and he wants her to continue living with them for a few more years. she herself is still holding out for falling in love and then deciding to marry, instead of marrying and hoping for love to strike. she's pretty and her father drives a bmw, which should land her a lot of suitors, so hopefully she'll find a true love before she gives in to her mom's pressure.

oh, and in case anybody's wondering about my bowab's wives, i'm sorry (but not really) to report that i haven't seen the older one in over a week. i hope she's in bed, relaxing while her kids serve her cups of sugary tea. i saw the younger one a few days ago when i was on my way out to an interview. i was with our sales manager, and the wife grinned when she saw me and launched into an enthusiastic speech of which i understood very little. the manager, soha, turned to me and said mildly, "she likes you." well, i like her too.

living in cairo

when i first came to cairo, i thought everything was charming: the old cars, chaotic streets, talkative taxi drivers, women wearing burqas (full-face veils) with glasses perched on top... somewhere along the way, the things i found funny became typical, and things that never bothered me really began to. leaving the country became less of a respite and more of a reminder of what life was like in normal places. it became time to leave egypt. i went home for an extended vacation and to take care of stomach problems, then to france for a few months in order to be able to legitimatize my claim of speaking french and figure out what the next step was. and i did, kind of. france was beautiful, organized, and expensive, and i realized that i wouldn't be able to work there without either a civil union or a career. i sent my resume to companies back in new york and saw for myself how hard it is to score an interview, let alone a job, back in the city. i started to miss my cairo friends and how comfortable life was there on so little. alex's promised transfer grew further away and our long distance relationship grew harder to deal with. so i decided to move back to egypt and pick up my old life there, while getting more editing experience that i can hopefully use in the future.

when i first got back i floundered for a little while. i was intimidated. i thought i had said goodbye to cairo forever and it didn't feel good to be wrong. i was hesitant to pick up my old routines: haggling over taxi fares, joking around with shisha guys, speaking arabic. the magazine i had worked at before was in transition and slow to rehire me, meanwhile my old coworkers had mostly all quit and had horror stories to share. but i was reluctant to apply to other companies because i had already decided on going to live like a hermit in the leafy suburb the office was in. meanwhile, christmas was coming and the fact that i intended to be home for it this year, but wouldn't be, was sad. my friend smiley put together a list of his contacts at publishing companies, and i finally sat down and sent my resume to all of them. and almost immediately received an interesting offer. things started to be charming again. exchanging smiles with a cab driver when we drove past a baby in a cute hat, listening to another talk about how much he loves oprah. a guy at the gym showing me pictures of his infant daughter and lamenting the fact that she resembled him. i was walking around outside of my office this afternoon and i passed two men in the street, one wearing a sweater with embroidered cacti. the other asked me if he should punch his friend, and i suggested that the friend punch him. they giggled and gave me a thumbs up. two kids leaving school yelled welcome, welcome in egypt. of course, as i rounded the block, two other kids shouted fuck you, but it can't all be sunshine, shisha and boreo milkshakes. at least boreo milkshakes make up for a lot.

italioni

alex and i had vague plans to go out for dinner thursday night, as a reward for sticking to our vegetable-heavy diet plan during the week. i was craving cheese, grease and unlimited bread, so while i waited for him to get home to work i perused the internet for italian options nearby. we'd been to a lot of them, and i wasn't particularly interested in the 'hidden gems' we'd have to search for, so was happy to be reminded that a new place had opened in zamalek, owned by the same people who have a couple of high-quality french restaurants. because it was the weekend, alex called ahead for a reservation, but they claimed they were full. for the rest of the night. despite his pleading "but we are just two - and small, too, hein?"

tori had mentioned that the italian embassy had a restaurant on their grounds, but weirdly enough i couldn't find anything about it online. figuring that there was a chance of it being more authentically italian than the competition, we hopped in a cab and headed downtown. a guard outside the embassy opened the gates, and we wandered around inside the compound until we saw another. there, we signed our names (in the non-italian column, sadly) paid twenty pounds, and were let in through another gate. again, we milled around a dark, empty garden until we saw a door in the shadows. inside, it was bright and noisy, filled with cigarette smoke and, i was pleased to note, wine. we sat down at one of the few empty tables and asked the waiter for menus. he looked at us, confused. 'no menus,' he explained, brow furrowed, as if we were the weird ones. 'ok, so what do you have?' 'anything you want!' 'penne with cream sauce?' well, except that. surprisingly, the pasta was terrible. worse than i can make. worse than the greek club's 9 pound ($1.50) spaghetti. fortunately, by the time the pizza arrived, we had taken a good look at what the neighboring tables were eating and ordered a couple of other plates that were pretty great. the dessert was shitty, but there was wine. we'll be back.

the apartment search

We've been apartment hunting recently, which is both exciting and overwhelming. And, as was seen last night, can lead to severe differences of opinion. After work yesterday Alex and I met up with our broker, Sherine, at an address in Mohandisseen that seemed "very familiar" to Alex. It turned out to be the same building he lived in before moving to Zamalek. For a bit of background, there are a few neighborhoods in Cairo that are very foreigner-friendly and have western-style apartments and inflated rents. Zamalek, which is a tree-filled island, is one of them, my old hood Garden City is another, and Maadi, the suburb to the south where I used to teach, is the third. We've decided to broaden our search to the neighborhoods across the river from Zamalek, Mohandisseen and Dokki. Technically in Giza and not Cairo, they were built for the newly wealthy when the country opened up to foreign trade in the 60s and 70s. Like all of Cairo, they're noisy and crowded, but are still known for having classy restaurants and stores.

The apartment we looked at was seriously a relic of that happier time. It was enormous, with old, but elegant, western-style furniture (one of our requirements). A big tiled balcony overlooked a quiet park. It had three bedrooms, three bathrooms (not including the maid's bathroom at the end of narrow, scary little room), three living rooms... two refrigerators and a deep freezer. I was in love. I was also willing to overlook the constant sounds of traffic audible from the bedrooms' side of the apartment. Alex wasn't, and for once seemed immune to my pleading. He said he had suffered from the noise for the year that he lived on the floor above, and that his number one requirement in an apartment is quiet. I have to concede that if anyone would put up with a year of sleep deprivation without complaint, it'd be Alex. So we went back to Zamalek to look at two small, poorly-decorated apartments. I was hoping that their unsuitability would strengthen my case, but it didn't, really. Nor did my offers of white noise machines and earplugs.

Searching for apartments makes me remember when I had just moved to Cairo and was looking for a place with Tori and Ryan, nearly two years ago. We were staying at a seedy, bedbug-infested hostel deep in Downtown, with a very hazy idea of where and how to look. The traditional way to find an apartment in Cairo is to walk around the streets you're interested in and ask the bowabs if there are any free apartments in their building. They might decide to help you search, or refer to the neighborhood simsar, who knows what's available and how much rent the owners want. So we memorized the relevant phrases in our egyptian phrasebook and set out to get an apartment, the egyptian way. I think we went to Dokki, since it was on the metro and I knew a girl who lived there and liked it. We wandered around, bought roasted sweet potatoes from a street vendor, and talked to a couple bowabs who told us to come back the following day. Which we didn't.

The manager of our hostel was either sympathetic to our cause or sensed a business opportunity, and connected us to a simsar in Garden City. Sayeed had a dingy little office with a revolving door of strange men who'd come in to drink tea and smoke cigarettes with him. Sayeed was a bit of a scoundrel but he was quick to laugh, especially at others. He spoke enough english to get by and relied on his assistant Amr for the rest. Amr was about a year younger than us and a university student who never seemed to get any closer to graduating, probably because he was always doing Sayeed's bidding. He complained that he was a slave and that Sayeed didn't respect him. He didn't, either - I heard that their business relationship has recently come to an end, when Sayeed insulted Amr's mother and refused to take it back or apologize. Amr loves his mother, and once told me that he didn't want to marry because he preferred to live with her forever. I teased him about that most months when I went to drop off the rent and have a cup of tea, but he never wavered. Anyway, they set us up with an apartment that we loved, and that Tori still lives in. Amr occasionally sends me facebook messages griping about how I left without saying goodbye, and I assume Sayeed's found a new assistant. But this time around, we're going through a professional broker.