Cairo has it all. Poverty to your right, and designer bags to your left. Revolution at Tahrir Square, and expats drinking cappuccino in Zamalek. The world has many extremes, but in Cairo they're so obvious it feels a bit overwhelming at times.
My bus ride to school takes about one hour in the morning, an hour where we pass through areas with embassies, and then the dusty streets of Downtown. Looking out of the window we stare at the peripheral areas of Cairo - the City of the Dead - where both living and dead reside among the graves. Minutes later we face New Cairo, an immense building project of malls, offices and private houses with exteriors that has connotations closer to embassies than to a private residence. And then there is our university. Out there, in the desert, with fountains, enormous buildings and a gym the size of a shopping center.
It sounds absolutely amazing, not in the "pretty" sense of the word, but in the gaping and unbelievable way. The more I read about your Cairo the more I curse myself for not going... Now, for a politics student, it would almost make more sense to go! Do you see/feel the things we've all seen on the news? Or is this in some sense the media overreacting?
ReplyDeleteI feel like I'm going back and forth between feeling a whole lot, and then back to some sated state of cafés and comfort that could be located anywhere in the world. You know you're in a place where a lot of things are happening, but at times it feels really distant. (Which feels both comfortable and guilty at the same time.)
DeleteWe've seen a few demonstrations, and there is a really unique energy at Tahrir and the streets around. One of the things that might be hard to tell from the media, is how immensely large Cairo is though. Yes, there are a lot of things going on. But they are so far away from where we reside that it hardly affects our everyday life. So you might say that they are correct in what they report, it just can be hard to grasp how much of Cairo that is directly affected.
virker så spennende!
ReplyDeleteÅh, men det er det også. Virkelig!
Delete