Egyptian Scribbles: Learning to play chicken on Cairo roads

Tuesday 9 October 2007

Learning to play chicken on Cairo roads

It's the end of my second full day in Cairo and I'm getting a little more confident at crossing the roads here. I've learned to pick out a strapping man who is also quick on his feet (this is a skill in itself), to position myself on his left-hand side, and to then run across the road when he does.... The traffic is just like this in India, but I'd forgotten how much you take your life into your own hands when you cross these types of roads. You literally have to confidently step out into speeding traffic and dodge around the various layers of oncoming vehicles. If you hesitate at all, then you are lost....

3 comments:

Unknown said...: What happened to the Hilton human rights lifestyle? Shouldn't you be looking out for your chauffeur? ;-); 9 October 2007 at 22:57
Rebecca said...: hee hee. This was the road I had to cross to GET to the Hilton!! Really. Hiltons are not what they used to be. Where are the moving walkways to transport you from downtown Cairo straight to room 1702? My chauffeur just wasn't up to the job.. I told you to come and drive me around, yelling Lil' Kim out of the window.... Paris Hilton herself would be proud of you for doing that.; 9 October 2007 at 23:38
Teale said...: Beware - you'll get overly confident with your street-crossing skills and then almost die. Constant vigilance! :); 13 October 2007 at 01:45

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."