visions périphériques

It’s just after 3 a.m. in Cairo, and I’m sitting in my single room at the Garden City House Hotel. This room has air-conditioning and a private bath. For those luxuries, I had to pay an additional six or seven dollars a night, bringing my daily fee to a whopping 125.00 Egyptian Pounds, or about $23.00. Just outside my window, there’s a very busy traffic circle where several police officers, dressed in snappy white uniforms and black berets, are sitting together on the curb, smoking and joking as we used to say in the Army. The police are everywhere. They are young, and from what I can tell, they are friendly. My guess is that police duty is one way of performing one’s national service, but that’s just a guess. The cars are whizzing by outside. One of them just cruised by blaring what must be the Egyptian version of the Mexican Hat Dance from its horn. A few minutes ago, a taxi crept by with alternating red and green headlights. It’s a party in Garden City tonight, I don’t even need to go to the disco.
Beyond the traffic circle there’s a long, brightly lit bridge that ends in a place I can’t see, it’s blocked by palm trees. The bridge goes over the Nile River. The Nile River. Let me repeat that, the Nile River. It’s a stone’s throw away from my window, and from where I’m sitting on the bed, I can see the lights of the buildings on the far side reflected in the rippling water—which is funny, because I can make out those lights more clearly in the water than on the buildings themselves. I came prepared with the knowledge that Cairo is one of the top ten most polluted cities on Earth, but it’s weird to actually see and taste the pollution in such a clear way. It’s hanging in the air, I can almost touch it, I am touching it, it’s touching me anyway. It’s in my lungs, and that worries me. But what can I do? There’s a very tall minaret on the horizon, maybe a half-mile away. It’s brightly lit, but almost indistinguishable in the haze. Like anything, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
The Garden City House Hotel is nicer than I expected it would be. It’s old and decrepit—that much I expected—but it’s not dirty, and it even looks like the moulding around the doors and windows has been freshly painted. The sheets smell good, the towels smell good, the bathroom is clean. It reminds me of my first apartment on Monument Avenue in Richmond; no matter how hard I tried to clean that place, there was simply a limit to my powers, and that limit was imposed by the state of the building itself. Constructed in the 1920’s, it had seen one to many abusive tenants, gravity had taken its toll on the plaster walls and ceilings as well as the framing angles of the cabinets and doors, and all varieties of insects and critters had long since discovered how to pick the locks and colonize the guts of the building. But when it was clean, as clean as it could get, it was wonderful. It had character, and I always had the sense that it was a very human habitation. One often hears the expression “lived in” to describe a place with character. 3006 Monument Ave. #3 was nothing if not lived in, and Garden City House Hotel has that same appeal. It also has a vintage elevator that looks like it came directly from a run-down Paris tenement. Apparently there was an architectural epoch in Cairo during which the city planners tried very hard to frenchify. They bulldozed narrow alleyways and constructed wide, tree-lined boulevards; they built block-long apartment buildings with tall windows and ample balcony space. I saw some of those buildings on the way in from the airport. They’re in a bad state of disrepair now, but I’m sure they still have some charm hidden away somewhere. It’s my goal during this year to find it.

My flights were great, nothing whatsoever to complain about. British Airways flight attendants are superb—friendly, efficient, and professional. The seats were comfortable and I had and empty seat next to me on both legs. Also, like Air France, British Airways isn’t stingy with the booze. I try to get my hands on as much alcohol as I can when I fly overseas because it helps me sleep and I enjoy experimenting with the effects of alcohol at altitude. I could be way off, but I think the cabins are pressurized to about six thousand feet or so. That’s plenty high to make your brain float a little more easily. It’s also the reason why your potato chips are often about to explode out of the bag. Anyway, I got my hands on three mini bottles of Johnny Walker, which happens to be my scotch of choice—I can’t afford anything else in the States, I can’t actually afford Johnny Walker—and two mini bottles of Bordeaux with my meals.
When I woke up an hour before my flight landed in Cairo, I was sufficiently cotton-mouthed and hung over. Nothing that a little bit of coffee didn’t cure, which explains why I am still awake and writing at nearly four o’clock in the morning after two solid days of travel. Mom and I left Richmond for Pennsylvania, where we dropped off my dad’s car, at just before 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 26. I arrived at Dulles Airport after eight hours of driving at approximately 8 p.m. My flight for Heathrow left at 11 p.m., arrived around lunchtime in London, and then I had a six-hour layover. My flight from London to Cairo left at 5:45 p.m. and arrived a few minutes before 1 a.m. Cairo time. The Cairo authorities didn’t hassle us much, and I was in a cab with my bags only about twenty minutes after I got off of the plane. Some guys tried to hustle me a little bit for a cab, but I knew that I shouldn’t pay more than 80 Pounds (AUC instructions), so I felt confident that I wouldn’t get ripped off. I did not, however, feel confident that I would get to my hotel after I listened to four or five long, frustrated cell-phone conversations in Arabic between the cab driver and the dispatcher, punctuated often by the only phrase I understood: Hotel Garden City House.
But here I am. The driver stopped and asked some police, then stopped and asked some other cab drivers, then took a few very sharp and confusing turns down some dark and confusing streets, and then he asked one final guy on the side of the street, “Fondo Garden City House?” The guy pointed to the end of the block, and there was the sign, hiding beneath a grimy façade and surrounded by cabbies. I had arrived.
Tomorrow will be exciting. I’ve gotten in contact with a guy who just graduated from Middlebury, who could be classified only as a friend of a friend of a friend (I don’t even know the original friend that well to begin with). This guy—Theo—is here to work as a journalist and improve his Arabic. Fortuitous, no? I’m also supposed to meet up with the girlfriend of the second friend, the original friend of a friend, to get a key to that second friend’s apartment, where he said I could stay while I look for my own place. He’s also working as a journalist, this original friend of a friend. He works for Reuters, and he came to Cairo after working for various publications in Beirut and Dubai. He’s a UVA grad too, and that’s how he knows the original friend, the one I don’t know that well but who was nice enough to start this chain of acquaintances that has resulted in such wonderful fortuitousness.

I’m excited. Very excited.