In Which A Small Comment Is Blown Out Of Proportion To Illuminate A Larger Cultural Truth

As I mentioned before, by the time we finally made it to our Cairo hotel on that first day in Egypt we had been traveling for 24 hours door to door. Which is to say, we weren't exactly in the mood to listen to the tour organizer's welcoming briefing. But one thing he said during it stuck out for all of us: "Remember, you are in a third world country."

It was interesting because I don't think any of us ever thought of Egypt as part of the "third world." At the very least, the notion of first, second and third worlds seemed outdated, a cold war relic, and "third world" was a term that I thought was losing favor to the less-hierarchical and more neutral concept of "developed" and "developing" nations.

I think the tour organizer meant something along the lines of "don't expect a luxury experience, especially given how much you paid us." But after a couple of days in Egypt we started to wonder about the psychology behind his disclosure. Plus, it's much more interesting to speculate about the wider implications of seemingly innocuous statements based on limited empirical data, which itself is a time-honored tradition in travel.

Going back to the narrow focus in which the tour organizer said this, his warning was unnecessary — the accommodations were all fine, and the sphere in which tourists circulate throughout the country did not seem "third world" in the least. None of us expected Palm Springs.

That said, the overnight sitting train to Aswan was kind of gnarly, and the 12-plus hour journey was about as third world as I want to get for the foreseeable future. For me, using the busted toilet fulfilled a perverse sense of street cred (and of course elicited a healthy dose of revulsion):

The best conclusion to draw is that the tour organizer's third world comment was an indication of Egypt's massive tourist infrastructure — in other words, the warning is there because so many people travel to Egypt. Egypt is full of coach tours and cruise ships. "Holidaymakers" travel there. Your grandparents visit Egypt. It's the concept of sexuality in Victorian England — "repressive sexuality" presupposes sexuality, and you have to look at the discourse itself to discern the way things are. That would at least partially explain why no one in India felt the need to remind us that we were visiting a "third world" country — all that was completely clear from the cows meandering along the expressways and the encampments under the overpasses — no one had to disclose that India was "developing".

That said, the tour organizer's tone had, in my mind, a bit of resignation to it. (At least that's what I'm taking away from it, given that it's much more interesting to speculate about the wider implications of seemingly innocuous statements based on limited empirical data.)

This all happened a few weeks before the apparent revolution in Tunisia, and the reaction around North Africa made me think again about the third world statement. In particular, this:

From the crowded, run-down streets of Cairo to the oil-financed halls of power in Kuwait, Arab leaders appear increasingly rattled by the unfolding events in Tunisia and elsewhere in the Arab world, where men continued to set themselves on fire — two more in Egypt on Tuesday, and a third who was stopped.

Though the streets of Cairo, Algiers and other Arab cities around the region were calm, the acts of self-immolation served as a reminder that the core complaints of economic hardship and political repression that led to the Tunisian uprising resonated strongly across the Middle East.

Full disclosure — we never talked about Egypt's political life with any of the guides, nor did we ask — it never came up, and as I said before, the sense you get traveling through Egypt is that you are inhabiting an entirely separate sphere dominated by overpriced tea, metal detectors at tourist hotels, police convoys and military checkpoints. So the closest thing I can point to about all this is an offhand comment by a tour organizer about the level of cleanliness in a hotel room. But while we were there we kept thinking about what he said, and it wasn't until the news about Tunisia came out that I had a convenient narrative in which to place it.

See also the Big Map: Egypt/Jordan, December 27, 2010-January 11, 2011.

Compulsory Cake

Four of us traveled together in Egypt and Jordan — Jen, myself, Brother Michael and Compulsory. This is the story of how Compulsory got her name.

As background, Jen loves to dole out nicknames. A while back, some free association led Jen to call Compulsory "Cake" — in short, it involved basically chopping up and shortening Compulsory's given name. Cake takes it in stride, which is nice for us.

On our first day in Egypt we eventually made it to the El-Giza Train Station where we had to wait quite a while for an overnight train to Aswan. There is not much to do at the El-Giza Train Station but there is a cafe where you can sit for as long as you can put up with the surly waiters wanting you to keep ordering absurdly overpriced cups of tea. It was at this cafe that we experienced one of the classic Egyptian "scams."

It's not so much a scam as it is a particularly annoying petty way of getting fleeced for mostly insignificant amounts of money. It involves a slice of cake.

At first I saw the slice of cake with my tea and thought how nice it was that a cup of tea came with a little bit of cake:

So when it came time to pay the bill, we were a little surprised that the cost of our tea was 15 Egyptian Pounds. For comparison's sake, it should be noted that our 12-plus hour first class train ticket from Cairo to Aswan only cost 109 Egyptian Pounds. Our guidebook suggested that a typical price for tea was somewhere between 2 and 4 pounds. Even we — after being in Egypt only a day — knew that this was a little high.

To be fair, 15 Egyptian Pounds is $2.57. And I don't think anyone would scoff at paying that much for tea and cake at, say, Starbucks, but this was Egypt, where the minimum wage is 35 pounds a month — and besides, none of us even asked for cake.

Jen, having read about the practice in advance, knew not to order tea (guidebooks hip you to this particular scam, but I missed that part), but there wasn't much we could do if we wanted to sit at a table in the El-Giza Station cafe.

Tommy the tour guide appeared later and sat with us and shrugged his shoulders when he was asked about the cake. He said that the best thing to do is not touch it and tell the waiter take it back. So when some of our group ordered another cup, Tommy tried to make it clear to the waiter that the cake was unnecessary, which precipitated a bit of bargaining.

"It's compulsory cake," the waiter explained before eventually agreeing to knock off five pounds for not serving the cake along with the tea.

Ten pounds is still a lot for a cup of tea, but like I said, there wasn't much else to do at the El-Giza Train Station.

But the upside of all this was that Cake got a new nickname: Compulsory, which Tommy took to calling her after her given name proved a little too much of a tongue twister for him.

See also the Big Map: Egypt/Jordan, December 27, 2010-January 11, 2011.

Egyptian Ghost Stories

We were blithely floating on a felucca along the Upper Nile when we heard about the New Year's Eve bombing of the Coptic church in Alexandria. Some of our fellow tour participants had seen the news on Blackberry devices. The tour guide nodded and said that he was aware of the bombing.

When we returned home, Compulsory's dad asked us about the tensions in Egypt between the Coptic minority and Muslim majority. Truthfully, I hadn't seen any. But then again, why would I have? There are parallel worlds in Egypt: The world of tourism, which is an $11 billion per year industry that employs 12 percent of the Egyptian workforce and the world that everyone else lives in. If you're on a tour — especially if you're on a tour — you are shielded in a way that becomes striking after a while.

So here's some background that I had no idea about when we visited the Hanging Church in Coptic Cairo on the 29th of December:

Periodic violence between members of Egypt's Muslim majority and Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the country's 80 million people, have led to accusations that the government ignores, and even exacerbates, a dangerous sectarian divide. Officials often blame local conflicts for such violence, dismissing talk of sectarian tension.

Over the last year, those tensions were repeatedly marked by violence. Last January, Muslim gunmen opened fire on worshipers leaving a church in southern Egypt, killing seven people. In November, Christians angered that the authorities stopped construction on a church clashed with the police in Cairo, leaving one person dead.

Yikes! I mean, we knew about or even remembered some of the more spectacular acts of terrorism: the 1997 Luxor massacre and the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks in 2005 are two that stand out in my mind. But here's a Wikipedia page that I'm glad I didn't look at before we left. Terrorism in Egypt, when it's not directed against the Coptic minority, seems to be heavily weighted toward the tourism industry. Like I said, Yikes!

Later on, our tour guide recounted some of his greatest terrorism misses. One was at Khan el-Khalili in Cairo, where he was leading a family around in the hours shortly before the 2009 bombing of the market. He said that the family wanted to stay longer but he had a bad feeling, so he encouraged them to leave on time. That was one of the places we visited our first day in Egypt:

Another one of our tour guide's terrorism misses he said came when an overnight train was bombed. He said that he actually moved the suitcase bomb from the overhead storage above his group's seats to the front of the train — it wasn't luggage from his group and he couldn't figure out whose it was around him. He said that he still has trouble hearing in one of his ears. Oh, and the tour went on as planned — everyone agreed that it should go on.

Now I couldn't find a story about a train bombing, or at least one that would fit the timeline — there was one in 1994, which was a terrible year for terrorism in Egypt, but our guide is only about 31, so that wouldn't make sense — but perhaps there have been other attacks that weren't reported on as widely as others. That said, the way he recounted the incident had the air of a ghost story — he told it to us in a quiet moment I think on the felucca boat. He also told us this before we took the train back up to Cairo from Luxor, so we were kind of spooked by the luggage racks above us on the way back:

Tommy (he had an Egyptian name but this is what the tour organizers told us to call him) said that he carried these attacks around with him, and some of what he was describing sounded a little like post-traumatic stress disorder. At the very least the tour guides in Egypt must live always on edge — if it's not the breakneck pace the companies have them shooting around the country then its the constant specter of terrorism aimed at the tourism industry.

See also the Big Map: Egypt/Jordan, December 27, 2010-January 11, 2011.