Nitocrisse

Only after traipsing around at night on the streets of downtown Cairo with luggage in tow, after arriving by train from Alexandria, and being repeatedly turned away from nearby hotels and being scoffed at by passerbys reciting that ‘there is no strength without God’ because they think we are trying to hook up for the night, would you ever surrender yourself to a place like Nitocrisse.

The thought of fresh animal feces lying on the stairs leading to our floor seemed to take center stage in my mind, not to mention plentiful array of feces coated in such thick layers of dust bunnies that I began to suspect they were remnants of the Pharonic era. After all, why else would they have held on to it for so long? Despite the fact that I was in the Cairo, a famous city full of historical treasures, I couldn’t stop my mind from obsessing about the fact that I was staying in a motel, if you can call it that, where I felt dirtier upon entering it than when cab hopping, dining and wandering on the streets of a city infamous for its pollution.

In the Cairo Museum my hopes began to grow upon meeting a self-appointed tour guide named Adil, who told us he could find us a nice hotel. Of course in Egypt, you can easily find plenty of people looking to make a buck, as I’m sure you could find in any place where low employment rates force many college graduates into menial jobs. This reality first hit me when we arrived in the Cairo airport and we followed a taxi driver to his car, at which point I discovered that he wasn’t a real taxi driver, just a regular guy that stopped by the airport at midnight to make some extra cash by using his personal car to chauffeur people around.

To be continued....