An evening walk home in the rain...

I walked home from work tonight. It took an hour to go from Garden City, where my office is located, across a bridge spanning the Nile and up the length of Zamalek, the island where I live. The wind was rough, and as the call for prayers rose from one of the mosques I passed, the dust was whipped into my hair and eyes. The sky was glowing red from the pollution – it reminded me of sunsets I’ve seen over Los Angeles… And the pavements and roads were packed. People (but mainly men) were everywhere – hanging over the bridge staring into the Nile, swinging off the street lamps, rushing into the traffic-jammed streets. Whenever you are out in Cairo, it is impossible to forget that this is a city of 20 million people. You just can’t need or expect much personal space.
Such large quantities of people can be reassuring in some ways. Despite the constant harassment, I don’t actually believe I will be attacked. Maybe this is over-confidence – but I’ve already seen how, whenever any kind of altercation or accident occurs, people swarm around to sort things out, mediate, intervene. So I assume at the moment that people would also instinctively prevent any potential attack on me.
So I felt safe as I walked. But also a little melancholy. It’s hard settling into a new city when you have no routine and few friends. And even harder when you have to walk past horses that are barely alive, so thin that you can count their ribs—horses that are being used to pull carriages for mainly Egyptian families, and are whipped until they finally gallop along any stretch of open road. I hate even looking at the boys/ men who own these carriages, because it seems to encourage them to ‘show off’ by whipping their horses even more. It makes me so angry… And, of course, there are the hundreds of emaciated cats that lurk under every parked car and in the corridors of every building.
Thirty minutes into my walk, it started to rain, and the smell of horses, and dust, and car fumes was intensified. So I put in my ipod and walked home in the rain—in a surreal world of Bob Dylan and damp Egyptian smog. I think I will increasingly need this kind of musical escape… Cairo is a demanding city and unless I’m careful, it could drain every ounce of my energy. So I need to make sure that my ipod is always on hand so I can remember to ‘shake it like a Polaroid picture’ ;-) …