riding in cars
My dear friend,
Do you remember the first question you asked me when I told you that we would be moving to Egypt for a while? I remember. You said: Is it safe?
View of the highway from a car window.
Although I doubt that you were thinking about our safety on the road, I’m fairly certain that cars pose a much greater peril to us here than more organized threats do. Drivers frequently roar down the wrong side of the street; they don’t bother to turn their headlights on at night. Stop signs and traffic signals are rare—and even when we encounter them, we find that they’re generally ignored. Since there appear to be no rules about lanes, if a driver believes he can fit into a certain space on the road, then he’s allowed to try. Depending on the day, the mood, the weather, others may or may not let him in. Without guidelines to direct their interactions, drivers communicate almost exclusively with their horns. To be in a car at rush hour in Cairo is to hear a symphony of horns honking from a hundred different cars at once. Already, when I remember what it was like to ease our car through the traffic back home, the memory feels eerily, uncannily silent.
As the Overseas Security Advisory Council puts it (rather mildly, I think) in their 2020 Crime and Safety Report for Egypt: “Driving Cairo’s busy streets can be extremely challenging for those used to driving in accordance with enforced rules and regulations.” Not only am I accustomed to enforced rules and regulations… I actually adore them!
You’ve never met my mother—but if you did, and if you asked her nicely, she might tell you about how delighted I was as a toddler when my grandmother explained to me that “you’re supposed to color inside the lines.” Order, instruction—how I craved them! How much more meaningful the game became once I understood the rules! (I experienced a similar sense of elation the other day when our Arabic tutor gave us a set of verbs to conjugate. How I reveled in the patterns, the predictability, the structure!)
I wish I could say that pedestrians are safe from the chaos of the road, but unfortunately, that isn’t so. Pedestrians never have the right of way. You will not find crosswalks or flashing lights. Instead, if you want to cross a street, you simply take a deep breath and walk briskly and bravely through oncoming traffic. Cars will honk to get you out of their way; at night, they’ll flash the headlights once or twice before flicking them off again. If you hug the side of the road and keep your wits about you, you’ll probably be fine.
We’ve been shuttling across the city in Ubers, mostly, which cost a dollar more than a taxi but which also negate the need to haggle. (We’ll get better at haggling. We’re just not quite there yet.) During our first week here, we memorized the wrong greeting, and so we kept climbing into cars and exclaiming brightly to our drivers: “Welcome!” It took us a while to figure out why they weren’t responding.
More often than not, the seatbelts have been removed. Sometimes the cars smell like smoke, and sometimes the air conditioning is broken. (This is why there is an option to pay extra for a car with reliable a/c.) At least twice per ride, our driver must slam on the brakes or careen around pedestrians. At least once per ride, C. says, of our car’s quick swerve or someone else’s near miss: “Whoa! That was close!” Indeed, in one of our first written assignments in Arabic, we were shown a picture of a minor car crash and told to compose the dialogue for the cartoon men who were shouting at each other through the half-open windows of their cartoon cars.
View from the Uber window.
Still—to glide past the Nile at dusk, or soar across bridges beneath that wide desert sky, with the wind rushing through our hair and the clouds turning gold—well, I’m sorry to tell you this (I know that you are worried), but the only word for the experience is exhilarating.
Should I feel more unsafe than I do? Probably. Shouldn’t we all feel more unsafe than we do? Isn’t it funny how much we count on those painted, dotted lines to protect us? How much we trust our fellow drivers to adhere to conventions and follow the rules?
Sooner or later, we’ll need to get across the city—and unless we want to slide behind the wheel ourselves, we’ll simply have to trust in those honking horns and be brave.
Yours—L.
Pyramid as seen from a moving car.
