What Possessed Me

Cairo mon amour

Vanessa of Stopping to Eat the Roses emailed me today about travel tips for Cairo. I was tickled because I love Cairo, love talking about Cairo, and love pretending I know a lot about Cairo, despite having left it eight years ago. Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I lived there during the shitshow that was my (brief but scarring) teaching career. In that time, I developed a passionate love/hate relationship with the city. With time, the nightmares of evil Egyptian landlords and crooked taxi drivers faded, yielding to memories of the many adventures I had there. I miss wandering around that big, bad city.

The next best thing is Jan Rothuizen’s project, “The Last Tourist, Cairo,” in which he walks aimlessly around the city, creating charming and anecdotal illustrated maps of the neighborhoods he visits, and taking pictures and videos of the people he meets. Each picture is accompanied by an interesting little story.



You can enlarge the maps to see detail, drag them to visit another neighborhood, and click to see his portraits of Cairenes. The website is not incredibly intuitive, but if you stick with it, it’s a great wander through a wonderful city.

If I could turn back time...

I was once a teacher in Cairo. I’ll tell you about that some other time – not now, since I’m still working through the PTSD and amoebic dysentery - but let’s just say for now that an unfortunate gaggle of rich Egyptian teenagers were under my care for two years. Most of the time, I hated the sorry little snots because they exposed my utter ineptitude in the classroom, both as a teacher and as a disciplinarian (Mazhar Abdel Dayem – if you’re out there, I’m going to kick your ass, and kick it good). Their saving grace was that some of my students – the ones that didn’t display distinct signs of inbreeding – were extremely beautiful. They looked - to me, at least – like living Fayum portraits.

Painted in Greco-Roman style from the first to third century A.D. in Fayum, these portraits were originally placed over the heads of mummies. They are strikingly contemporary and moving in their detail – a slightly mustached boy, a scar, a pair of intricate earrings. The images below can be found in the beautiful book, Fayum Portraits by Berenice Geoffroy-Schneiter. When I look at these pictures, they remind me of my students and the parade of people I'd see on a Cairo street.





But then I saw this, and it knocked me out.
Separated at birth?