Cairo Malaise

CAIRO MALAISE

For months I thought: If I can just get one thing done today, a trip to the store, a workout at the gym, I will have accomplished something.

My friend John went further: “It takes one day to buy the groceries…and the next day to put them away,” he said.

It's not that it is so hard to get things done in Cairo. Its just that there is something about the pace, the heat, and the general feeling that nothing is really going anywhere that contributes to the malaise.

There is also something so pleasant about sitting in a sunny living room in Cairo, drinking coffee in the morning for an hour after you force yourself out of bed. And feeling the heat build as 10 a.m. moves toward 11.

And there is something so daunting about the streets, with the endless honking, the black and white metal shells without air conditioning that pass for taxis, the incessant blare of Arabic pop music or Quranic verse through tinny speakers, the fur lined---yes, in this climate!—-the fur lined dashboards and dangling prayer beads.

If there is nothing one has to do, why do it? Rent is cheap, food is cheap, taxis are cheap: we are all surviving without much effort.