lost in transit

ondrej is in cairo

after spending most of my flight with a lady who was displaying obvious signs of transformed avian influenza, i arrived in a -4 degrees beijing. it got even colder over the course of the night, and when i went for a walk in the morning from my little gratis hotel near the airport, my skin burned and seared from the intensity of it. the sun rose over the airport as a red ball, the colour of blood and the image of the japanese flag, as i had never seen it.

my transfers in europe were a nightmare. the plane was late to paris. i had one hour to get out, go through immigration, collect my baggage, jump on a bus to a different terminal, re-check in, go through customs, find my gate and get on the plane. only with the help of a 15 minute delay and an italian diplomat, i made it onto the plane as the last passenger with my full backpack as carry-on luggage, my whole body shaking, wanting to vomit and explode with nervous diarrhoea. i had 20 minutes to do the same in prague, and i ran like the wind between terminals this time, and passed out promptly when i got onto this final leg.

i headed out this morning and thought i'd walk around a bit. after being shafted by a tout selling papyrus, i happened to meet a man who told me he was heading to coptic cairo (the oldest part of the city) to check out the restoration works. he told me he was involved in them. we settled in a cafe for breakfast, and sat for an hour chatting, smoking a sheesha pipe and drinking egyptian tea, all very typical cairene activities, and then took a roundabout journey through the city to check out the architecture.

as it turns out, this man, sherif, was not just involved - he was a famous architect and archaeologist invited by the government to head the restoration of coptic cairo and the oldest mosque in the city. he literally wrote the book on it, as i found when i entered the old church and saw a thick volume about the restoration with his name on it. i couldn't believe my luck.

he unlocked doors not open to the public, took me on a private tour, and as a bit of a gift and a perk (being the head of the whole thing), he slipped me two roman coins that had been discovered in an urn in the basement of the church (where jesus and his parents had apparently hidden when the romans were slaughtering first borns in israel). i put them in my pocket with the surreal knowledge that these 2000 year old metal scraps were easily the most precious things i would ever own.

we went to the mosque - a beautiful airy space where people come to eat, sleep, hang out etc, and afterwards sat in a cafe drinking coffee and playing backgammon for hours. i spent most of the day with him.

after leaving sherif, i wandered through a poor suburb of cairo just between downtown and coptic cairo. the people on the streets here were nasty. they look at you as if they could think of no greater pleasure than to cut your throat, and one man i passed actually put his finger under his chin and swept it across in a gesture of i'm going to cut your throat, all the while laughing savagely. another man spat on his hand and then shook mine while all his friends laughed. i found the whole experience unpleasant, and though all these things occured only in that one ugly suburb that i have no intention of returning to, i was quite shaken by it all and had to go back to my hotel room afterwards to stop freaking out and pull myself together.

i chilled out with my book in a little eatery in the evening and a sense of calm redescended over me that had been rudely stripped by the throat-cutters. i'm going to explore a bit more of cairo - pyramids and museum, but then i might head off. unlike most cities that i come to, i have taken an immediate dislike to egypt's capital. it's not my sort of place.