cairo from the sky

My dear friend,

You’ll laugh when I tell you how little I knew about Cairo before landing. “For weeks you worried about it!” you’ll say. “For weeks you prepared!”

I tried to prepare. I drafted packing list after packing list. I purchased floor-length skirts and loose-fitting blouses. I studied Egyptian Arabic and downloaded books onto an e-reader because I knew we wouldn’t be able to carry many with us.

But when we spoke to those who knew Egypt—friends who had been there, or colleagues who lived there now—we were reminded time and again that the country isn’t something you can prepare for. It’s a gorgeous, chaotic, unpredictable place. I’m sure you’ll laugh as you read these words, too—knowing, as you do, how much structure I need to thrive.

Here’s what I knew as our plane descended: Cairo is a city of twenty million people. Its name means: the Conqueror. Egyptian Arabic is different than Modern Standard Arabic. (So far I can say: “no problem,” “bananas,” “praise God,” “this table,” “thank you,” “I am married,” “that car is red,” “I do not have children,” and “good dog.”) Upper Egypt is in the south of the country; Lower Egypt is in the north. The country is ninety-percent Muslim. The pyramids look extra pointy when you see them from the sky. From this height, the whole city looks like it’s built out of sand.

On each of our three flights—we flew from Minneapolis to Chicago to Frankfurt to Cairo—we wore masks and carried proof of vaccination. We had three pieces of evidence: our vaccine cards, our international vaccine passports, and a QR code from the site vsafe.cdc.gov. We’d heard that the Egyptian authorities would accept the QR code on the screens of our phones; but an attendant at the Frankfort airport insisted that it would need to be printed. She directed us to a free copy center near our gate.

By the time we landed on the afternoon of August 30th, displayed our proof of vaccination and paid the $25 for our visas and collected our mountain of bags, we’d been in transit for a month. We had packed up our suitcases and left Minneapolis on August 1st. In the weeks since then, as you know, we’d been crisscrossing the country with Cedar, visiting family and friends we hadn’t seen in several years and might not see again for a while. One evening, as we were packing and repacking for what felt like the hundredth time, I asked Chris: “How many hours have I spent this summer looking at all of my stuff, arranging into piles, looking at it again, and then arranging it into new piles?”

I’ve long wished that I were a better packer and that I could make do with less. I want all of my suitcases to be about half as heavy as they are. And yet part of me is still convinced that, when I’m walking out of a strange airport into the white heat of a strange city and a strange experience that I do not yet understand and cannot yet envision, I’ll be fine as long as I have the right toothpaste. The right guidebook. The right scarf.

Cairo! I’m as prepared as I’ll ever be.

Yours—L.

P.S. - I don’t know why I chose A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles, 2016) to read this evening, but I did. And, as so often happens, within the first few pages, it became clear that the book had read my mind and actually chosen me:

‘Tis a funny thing, reflected the Count as he stood ready to abandon his suite. From the earliest age, we must learn to say goodbye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough.

But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance… Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But of course, a thing is just a thing.