One of the goals of the program I'm on here is cultural education, so we've been allotted three weekend trips for the summer. The first was Cairo, which as I mentioned was a highlight of the entire summer so far. Friday morning we hopped in a van with an Egyptologist and took off for Rosetta (aka Rasheed), and Port Said. Rosetta is the place where some lucky French soldier found the Rosetta Stone, which enabled the ancient hieroglyphics to be read. Unfortunately, our Egyptologist was sent packing just hours into the weekend due to a religious misunderstanding that is too sad to recount here, so I ended up wandering around hot dusty alleys looking at ancient buildings without any real idea of their significance, contemplating how much human energy has gone into (and will continue to go into) arguing about religion.
We rode in silence for two hours to Port Said, a town that seems to have but two purposes these days: hosting weddings, and providing the last stop in the Suez Canal before it dumps into the Med. From my hotel room, I could see a dozen enormous cargo ships lined up on the horizon either coming or going to the canal.
Perhaps the most notable element of the trip was the company we kept. From the time we left Alexandria until the time we returned safe and sound, we had armed escorts. I took a few photos of this to try to convey what was happening here, but imagine a little mini-van on a remote desert road, flanked by police motorcycles, police cars with sirens and lights going, and a light-duty troop carrier with a handful of bored cops. We traveled like this for several hundred miles in each direction. When we walked around shopping in the souk, we had two plain clothes guys with automatic weapons under their jackets just steps behind us. These were real cops, not the ubiquitous chain-smoking half-asleep guys in ill-fitting white tunics perched outside every building in the country.
As Egypt is broken up into jurisdictions, we had to switch escort groups every 100km or so. Like a cell phone call getting passed from one tower to the next, or a runner passing the baton, these escorts would converge on the road, honk a bunch of times at each other to signal the hand-off, and then we'd press on at top speed, forcing all other cars out of the way. Of course, these cars would then look at our mini-van, see Westerners in it and all the attention we were getting, and scowl at us. We all agreed that from a diplomatic standpoint, the escorts were counterproductive and a waste of resources, but apparently this is policy handed down from Mubarek himself that Americans, British, and Israelis on "official trips" must be escorted around Egypt like this.
I can't think of a time so far in Egypt where I felt in danger because of being American. On the other hand, I felt slightly in danger yesterday when I picked up a crab that I thought was quite dead, and it turned out to be quite alive, and angry, and immediately chopped into my finger. The fishmonger had to use both hands to pry the front claws loose. So I am applying Neosporin to my finger today, but I am not taking it personally.
