Destination Anywhere!

Beyond Cairo

   

 So sorry to have not posted in a while but I feel that if I have nothing interesting to say, I don’t want to waste people’s time with my quotidian life, no matter how interesting I find walking my dog under palm trees and cooking koshary. I have also not posted because I have been busy with articles for the New York Times—two in the last month, which gave me a good excuse to remain silent on these pages, one on the Nile cruise, one on Istanbul, and as long as I am plugging my pieces, I wrote an earlier one on Cairo during Ramadan, that I realize I never posted here.

    The other reason I have been neglecting my blog is because we have had a lot of guests, and I have finally spent some time venturing beyond  Luxor and Aswan, two cities I have visited twice. Since our Nile cruise, two sets of friends have come through. Our good friends from Chicago, Julie and Kim, came to Cairo before their Nile cruise, as did my sister-in-law’s in-laws (if you can follow that connection), the Davisons.

     We went on a Felucca “Happy Hour” sail with Julie and Kim--a regular highlight here among expats, where everyone brings wine, beer, and nibbles and you sit in these huge wooden boats with deep cushions cruising the Nile for two hours for less than $20. We also took them to Dan’s supper club, "The Garden City Club," which is an event in itself. It is a private member’s club with a roof top terrace, and the clientele is all of Egypt’s elite—media moguls, business and government types. It feels very old world from the Nubian waiters in white jackets, to the bottles clients keep behind the bar for private consumption, to the piano player and art deco furnishings. The best feature of the club is the hostess, who has been there, it seems, forever. She wanders from table to table talking to members and, in our case, suggesting fabulous trips we should take outside of Cairo and telling me about the, "old times." The first time I went to GCC she said to me, “Inside here, you find the real Egypt..the old Egypt!” It was music to my ears as that is the Egypt I long to be able to visit and experience.

   

After Julie and Kim left,  the Davisons arrived for a Nile cruise, a very ambitious trip for older people, like my parents who came on our Nile cruise, and they should be commended for their stamina. Since Daniel’s parents have been gone, they have been like New York grandparents to our children, letting us spend summers with them in Long Island, always hosting a lobster dinner during our stay, and generally being very loving with both the kids and us.

    I am amazed by how many friends come through Cairo, as are my friends here, who think we know too many people, but having lived all over the world we have amassed a wide range of buddies, many of whom travel for business and pleasure and make us feel we are not so far away from  home.

    We have also been blessed to have had not one, but two, really close friends attend the American University of Cairo. Last semester, Carter Eltzroth, the son of Florence’s godmother, was here studying Arabic for a term from Wake Forest College. His dorm was four blocks from our house and he became a regular fixture at our dinner table, as did many of his adorable friends from AUC—including lots of cute Ivy League boys. Harriet and Florence hardly minded their presence, nor did Charles, as he still lives in a girl’s world here with two sisters.

    This semester, Leigh Nusbaum, the daughter of one of Daniel’s cousins is studying at AUC from Brandeis, so now we have the good fortune to meet lots of smart young women, who don’t mind the comforts of our home from time to time—internet and hot meals-- over their somewhat crumbling apartment not far away.

    The most amazing thing is that Harriet, who plans to study Arabic at college next year, has had access to so many American kids doing the same thing. I am amazed by how popular it is these days to study not just Arabic, but Chinese, and Hindi. These kids are very global and see a future we never imagined when we were in college.

    As for traveling—I just returned from my first trip to the Red Sea--I have included photos of the beach and posh pool. I went to Marsa Alam last week, an hour’s flight from Cairo, with a girlfriend in London, Margit, for a decadent four-day break from life. We stayed in a gorgeous resort for next to nothing, snorkeled in the coral reefs, read by the pool, and generally soaked up the sun. Daniel and I now hope to return at the Easter break with the kids, but to Dahab, where there is also culture (St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai), as well as colorful fish to follow.

    Florence has been desert camping again this month (part of the Duke of Edinburgh award that here must be called The International Award for imperialist reasons) and to Sharm el Sheik, both for school trips (beats my school trips any day). I am hoping she will post next week about those experiences, as I am in New York as of Wednesday for nearly a week speaking at a NYT travel conference on Saturday!  A bit nervous, dare I admit, that as a travel writer I am a nervous flyer. It never stops me, obviously, from going anywhere but a glass of wine or two normally helps me handle turbulence, particularly on a twelve-hour flight. Am flying Egypt Air (no booze), so may be a bit uptight on the flight. Am hoping lots of books and my IPOD will soothe me through my first "dry" flight.

    So that is it for now. Life continues to be fascinating here and the weather amazing, though a bit hot for February. Yesterday it was 90 degrees! Am concerned I will freeze to death in Manhattan later this week!

 Also must report Harriet’s epiphany. On two occasions in the last week, despite the garbage ridden streets, feral cats, and rusty cars blocking her path, she was struck by how comfortable she felt walking home from school one day and racing through traffic in a taxi another night. “Living here now feels really normal," she told me, which I must say, kind of freaked her out, but in a good way. I leave you with the amazing "swan," the towel man created on our bed at the Marsa Alam resort. Each day we had a different towel creation--Martha Stewart needs to visit Egypt.

   

 

My Own Private Book Club

 

 

    I almost decided not to blog this week (hence the delay in posting), as I did next to nothing while Daniel was away in Switzerland for nine days, except read from morning until night. But truthfully—it felt like an amazingly active week as I discovered this whole new genre of historical and contemporary fiction and non-fiction, I had little interest in before my move to the Middle East. I can only compare it to my sophomore year of college when I read “Exiles Return,” by Malcolm Cowley and then had to read everything ever written on the “Expatriate Generation.”  My future, perhaps, was portended right then and there.  

    This particular reading craze began when my friend, Mary (who was on our fabulous Nile cruise) emailed me this recent New Yorker article about contemporary Arab fiction. And in fact, many friends who just visited us are now making suggestions for books they have read, or heard of, about this city, country, region, and in turn are asking for recommendations.

Click here

    Having read The New Yorker article, I realized that I had read many of the novels mentioned, but then thought I might perhaps re-read some of them, like “The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany, as I now actually live here and can visit the various places he mentions in Cairo.

    As I perused other titles on my brand new bookshelves (we had them made by a lovely Egyptian carpenter and they are beautiful, if I do say so), I noticed just how many books on Egypt we have been given since we arrived here. Within moments, I started pulling them out and placing them on our dining room table. When I was through, the table was covered.

     I had all three volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s, “Alexandria Quartet,” about love in pre-war Alexandria, a city I just visited last month and found amazing. I could hardly wait to delve into this book and learn about the beach community there in its glory days.

    I found “The Cairo Trilogy,” by Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel prize-winning author, whose official biographer is a friend of ours here in Cairo. I discovered a new work called “Taxi,” in which Khaled Al Khamissi puts together fictional dialogues from Cairo cabbies, and not one, but two, copies of Ahdaf Soueif’s “A Map of Love.”

    But I also discovered we had tons of non-fiction—a new history just out called, “The Arabs,” by a Middle Eastern Scholar, Eugene Rogan; “A Border Passage,” by Leila Ahmed, about her life growing up in pre-Nasser Egypt; “Down the Nile” by Rosemary Mahoney, who took a seven-foot rowboat down the river to discover modern Egypt. I flipped through my worn copy of “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” by Lucette Lagnado, about her Jewish family’s exodus from Cairo in the 1960’s, before grabbing a book called, “Cairo in the War-1939-45” by Artemis Cooper, and then another, by a New Yorker writer, Mary Anne Weaver, on contemporary Egypt called, ‘A Portrait of Egypt.” There were so many, I moved them to my bedside table, including Edith Wharton's travel writings on Morocco.

 All these books primarily deal with 19^th and 20^th century Egypt—the period I am now obsessed with, as I realize that in order to understand the complexities of the Cairo I am residing in today, I have to understand how it evolved to this point historically.

    So anyone who would like to leave a suggestion as to other books I should read in my mini-book club of one, please do so in the comments section.

    I have already received one recommendation to read, “A Passage to Egypt,” by Lucie Duff Gordon, the letters of a British woman who moved to Egypt in the late 1800’s for health reasons. I also just read about “Out of Egypt,” by Andre Aciman, another story of a Jewish family’s flight from Egypt.     

    This dedicated reading, I pray, will inspire and enhance my own writing on Egypt and this blog. But for now, must get back to, “Death on the Nile."  It seemed criminal to not include Agatha Christie and her fabulous Egyptian mystery in my little club. And besides, on the cruise I realized I had never read it. So much to read, so little time!