Halfway down the Danube

Cairene guest-blogging 2: Don't Eat at Rick's, the first part.

Wow, this retreat has been less like a spa, and more like a fighting withdrawal from the very concept of relaxation itself! (With added hot migraine action.) Anyway, I have a backlog of guest posts to fill, so here is Luke S., filling us in on Egypt's cuisine:

When I arrived in Cairo, I was treated to a long nosebleed from my host, the American University of Cairo, about how at many places it wasn't safe to eat. A few of them were the same as the US -- street vendors -- as there are no health codes in Egypt, but the storefront places are also a deadly threat.

So, in my first two weeks here, I wandered over to the 26th of July Street, the main drag on posh Zemalik Island, where I live. It's Fifth Avenue gone neon and Bladerunner, with lots of tacky shops offering just about everything. In the early, highly paranoid days of my arrival in Egypt, there were two places I went to get safe food: La Bodega and Maison Thomas.

The former looks like it was cast out of Europe in the 1930's, despite its name. With lots of dark mahogany, brass, and green leather, it's a brasserie and one of the nicest bars in Cairo-despite its lack of European, even Lebanese wines. It serves European food, for the most part -- pastas, steaks, filets, etc. anything one might think of as Egyptian food is called "Lebanese" or "Oriental" something that would give Edward Said a fit of epilepsy.

The waiters, dressed in swallow-tailed coats speak in unaccented French or English, and understand my recently acquired Egyptian Colloquial. The clientele is largely Western -- men in suits and ties, women in close-cut cocktail dresses -- speaking mostly English, but some scattered French, and dashes of German. It's a bubble, and a comforting one early on, with an excellent view of the Nile, too boot.

Now, one thing that the AUC and all guide books can agree on is the conservative dress of even modern Egyptian culture. For men, this means no shorts and few short sleeves. For Western women, leave your hotpants at home [dammit. CY] -- the natives increasingly favor the 'raincoat brigade' look that was first thought up in the seventies over all Al-Azhar. In our first days, we got lectures about eye contact, posture, and public displays of affection. It's a society that's a product of Nasser's Arab Socialist Revolution, to be sure -- the Chancellor of the AUC is a woman -- but it is also one of Muslim Modernization along the lines that Mohammed Abdu would have approved of; social conventions are very conservative.

One night, I got all trussed up to go to La Bodega for a nice dinner with my mom -- she copes with my arrival in the Middle East by tagging along for a week -- arrive, order, and eat. About thirty minutes into dinner, a very loud group of about a dozen kids shows up -- twenty-somethings, maybe -- who are dressed like they were cast for MTV's Spring Break in Cancun, but with even less clothing and more makeup on the girls. They sit at the table next to mine, chatting in high speed Arabic. they order not one, not two, but four bottles of Johnny Walker Black and two bottles of Pepsi.

The girls, made up in a way that would make Tammy Fae or Katherine Harris jealous, periodically adjust their blue contacts in the smoky-tinted mirror while ignoring their Treos, ringing to the tune of "My Humps." Everyone -- guys wearing lots of rings and gold chains, shirts open to their sternum -- takes a glass, pours in about three shots of whisky into a glass, and top it off with just a little bit of Pepsi. They each drink three of these in the span of forty-five minutes, laughing and chatting, and settling in for a break before they return to clubbing for the rest of the night, which ends here, as in Spain, in the early morning.

What I couldn't figure out, while watching all this, was who these people were. Unlike the Balkans, which produced the sponsorozhde in Serbia, as these girls aren't gun molls of victorious gangsters. Egypt doesn't have moneyed oligarchs like Russia or the Gilded Age United States. They lacked the requisite bodyguards to be the children of members of Egypt's Shura Council -- the Upper House of Parliament. But they were twenty-somethings with a lot of money for Egyptians, and a lot of free time, to go drinking and clubbing on a week night, especially in the pricey La Bodega, to be drinking imported -- and extremely expensive -- whisky in large amounts.

The wardrobe bears some on that of the Sponsor Girls that Doug described earlier, with very conspicuous consumption in every way possible, but entirely in imitation of the 'America' that MTV sends via satellite to the Middle East. But it also reflects the state of the Egyptian economy; education is universal at the college level, and though college graduates continue to have the promise of a job on graduation, they're increasingly being paid below the standard of living.

These people were loud, bawdy, and a general pain in the ass -- like college students anywhere -- but it's the only group of young Cairenes out of the town that I've seen. Ever. This, combined with the amusing articles in The Egyptian Gazette suggest that young Cairenes are having a public/private space problem, but these people are something else entirely. So, I promise to figure out who these sort of people are, and report back accordingly.

More to come from Luke shortly.