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February 29, 2008

Cairo, The City of Liars and Thieves

Did you know that when you arrive in the airport in Cairo, Egypt, what greets you is a sign saying that people with drugs will be punished by hanging?

Having just spent four days in Cairo, I repeat something I will never tire of saying; those who don’t go to these places have no business talking about them. I had an idea that Egypt would be like a majority of the other third-world Islamic countries I’ve visited, but nothing had prepared me for seeing people living in such wretched squalor. Cairo is far dirtier than Mexico City and Calcutta combined; the city is basically one big trash can.

The place is like the lowest ring of Dante’s Inferno, without the great poetry. Never have I been in a city with such disgusting and ubiquitous environmental pollution. No matter what kind of human depravity you might have witnessed in the traffic circulation in any other city, Calcutta, Mexico City, wherever, you have not seen true automotive barbarity until you have been to this place. The roads are wide but nobody understands the concept of driving in a lane. What passes for a car looks like a banged up anchovy can on wobbly wheels, with black smoke belching out behind it. Picture endless numbers of such contraptions weaving in and around each other in a chaotically violent muddle. Picture open trucks of cattle pooping away in the middle of that mess. There is an appearance that nobody has informed the civil engineers of Cairo of the invention of the traffic light. With the madness of banged up anchovy can cars in this driving hell, there is a very small chance that any driver will stop for a man to cross the road. But there is as good a chance of them slowing down for a woman as for a dog. It is hardly surprising that there are about 6,000 auto related deaths here every year.

Of 20 million people in Cairo, it seems to be that ten million are driving cars and that the other ten are using the subway and train system. I have seen unpleasant subways, but this takes the cake and the cake was baked from shit. Riding it is a cruel experience, which I decided to try one day. To board, mobs attack the train, pushing each other in groups to get on, working with their elbows. The doors don’t close all the way but the trains start moving anyhow, with dozens of people falling off as they do. Arriving at a stop, the mobs inside can’t get out because the mobs outside won’t let them. People get off where they are able to get off, not where they would like to. By the time I got out of that subway, I felt like I had been through a boxing match with Mohammed Ali.

Because Four Seasons hotels are dependable, I often choose to stay in them, and did so in Cairo. The opulence of this Four Seasons property, if anything, outshines that of most of their others. Extravagant floral arrangements, deep plush lobby seats and sofas, sumptuous décor, all in shocking contrast to the incredible poverty and filth right outside the sparkly front doors. While there are some American and European tourists, the majority of the customers are from other Muslim countries in the Gulf.

Employees of the Cairo Four Seasons Hotel and its restaurants were so servile that it troubled me. On the premises, one sees processions of rich sheiks surrounded by their many wives, some of those wives in full burkhas, some with facial veils only, but always carrying Louis Vuitton bags. The style of catering to these super-rich sheiks and their entourages involves the hotel and restaurant employees demeaning themselves in a preposterous way. For example, you can not take a few sips of a wine or water glass without having the servers ask if you would like for them to replace the glass with a fresh one. Whenever a server has finished interacting with a table, he takes his leave of the people there as though they were the Queen of England and her court, taking two steps backwards, bowing, practically in a prayer position. I asked a waiter who was requesting this humiliatingly obsequious service, if it was the Saudis demanding it. He told me no, that it was Americans asking to be treated that way. I told him that he was lying, that we in America do not force waiters to behave this way.

I asked the manager about this tradition, she was an American with Egyptian background and looking into my eyes she tried to lie to me that Americans request this. I briefly explained to her that this is making people behave like slaves. Of course I didn’t get any comprehensible response; but I did get an extra huge bowl of fruit delivered to my room.

Egypt is a nation of liars, they lie everywhere, and can not be trusted even when asked what time it is. The only time they are speaking the truth is when they talk about their hate for Israel and Jews. In a taxi, I passed a museum. When asked, the driver told me it was a ceramics museum. But then I saw that it was a museum dedicated to the 1973 war against Israel. I asked him who won that war. (This was the famous Yom Kipper War, which began when Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel on the High Holy Day of Yom Kipper. Israel quickly won.) Nevertheless, the driver told me that Egypt had won that war. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to visit the museum to see how these ratfinks distort history. These Egyptians lie, lie, lie, every step of the way.

The whole time I was there, looking around for openly gay men, I didn’t see one. I of course know they exist in Cairo. But after all the recent arrests and terror against them, they have probably changed their meeting places. Tourist guide books tell you they do that as a survival technique. As in every Muslim city, there are men wandering around together hand in hand, or with a hand around another man’s arm or shoulder. This is described by Muslims as their “local tradition.” Everything in the Muslim world gets explained away by the left wing Muslim apologists as “local tradition,” the new term for shit such as the mutilation of people accused of theft, and genital mutilation of young women. But let me tell you that the “local tradition” does not stop at hand holding; they also jerk each other off, and/or suck each other and/or fuck. Because of the extreme segregation of the sexes, there is no way for the men to have sex with women before marriage. Do you really think they all wait? When they see foreign gays, they see two main opportunities; 1) to get money; 2) to get sucked off or fuck, and usually, they are aiming to have sex and get paid for it. The proposition comes in the rudest, nastiest ways. They have actually learned a few words of English, and can say “me fuck you” or “you suck me.” One of them is still moaning over his genitals from the kick I gave him between his legs right after his proposal for me to suck him off.

Don’t get me wrong. There are stunning things to see in Egypt, especially the monuments of the Pharaonic culture. But to see those monuments, you pay a very high price in terms of what you have to put up with going on around them. Hoards of thieves loiter in touristy places, especially around the pyramids. They loiter around their “merchandise” and have many ways of getting into your wallet. At every step they accost you, some with their trays of ugly faux-Pharaonic souvenirs which they try to pass off as authentic objets d’art from antiquity. A simple “no” never works. They dog your steps with their shit. Often, they approach you with their camels and their donkeys, offering you to be photographed with the livestock. They swear they are doing it to show “hospitality” and that they don’t want any money for it. Afterwards, they demand unreasonable amounts. Their demands become even more absurd towards the evening, and can go like this; they come yelling “You have to give me money, because you were photographed with my camel in the background.”

These duty merchants slow everything down tremendously; you can barely take a step around those pyramids because they are clogging all walkways up with their garbage. Fake gold, fake stones, statues of Pharaohs, and other ugly things which stupid tourists buy out of lack of taste. God forbid you should trip over one of those objects in trying to avoid them. They’re going to yell that you have to buy it immediately, quoting some crazy price, as of course the object is from the ancient Egyptian period. If you refuse, they will curse you, all your relatives and all of your offspring. I doubt that when the Pharaohs were building their tombs that they thought they would become the operating grounds of a ragged Islamic mafia. It’s not as if that Islamic mafia cares about the Pharoahs’ tombs, anyway. The pre-Islamic culture means nothing to them. They shit and piss right on the walls of the pyramids. They throw their trash and their bags all around, polluting the place without end. And I’m sure they would blow them up just like the Taliban blew up the Buddhist relics of the 4th century, except that they know that without the Pharaonic monuments, they’d never attract even one tourist.

It would seem they gave up their Islamic tradition of mutilating thieves because the thieves are trying to steal from you everywhere you go, including in the bazaar Khan el-Khalili, where they sell plastic tchotchkes and cheap stones with, as usual, the claim that the things are ancient artifacts. They are there with this crap every step of your way, around the museums, around restaurant entrances; everywhere. “Muslim hospitality” in turns out extends to forcing you into a broken down store-front, forcing a nasty tea into your mouth and then trying to sell you some piece of garbage for $100. Some fools pay that. Others get into haggling over the price, and when they get the piece of crap down to $5 bring it home and brag to their friends about the great deal they made for a plastic piece of junk.

Tonight, thank goodness, I am leaving this cesspool and returning to Tel Aviv, where I will breathe fresh air and be surrounded by civilized people.

Gay sex tourists, including those who like rough trade, can take my word for it that in Egypt, even at the age of 25 the young men have swollen bellies like pregnant women. They dress and smell like camels. You should definitely instead go to a place like Puerto Rico where the air is cleaner and they know how to treat tourists as though their experience in the country mattered. Besides, those Boricua papis with their big dark hairy dicks and bubble butts have what it takes, if you are looking for a real hombre.

Posted by Michael at February 29, 2008 02:49 PM

Comments

Posted by: nk at March 2, 2008 09:25 AM

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Posted by: Charilaos at March 21, 2008 08:04 AM