Christmas in Cairo: Egypt politics and religion

When you are a tourist, you will often have certain expectations as to what you are going to encounter.  In fact, often the places you visit might even feel pressure to "perform" their culture as tourists search for what they define as an authentic cultural experience.  When I got off the plane in Cairo, the first place we encountered any locals was at the gas station.  There were these people who seemed to be in traditional sorts of clothes carrying adorable baby goats and we all took many photos.  

I even had a gentleman come up to me and tell me that I should be sure to take a picture of him and his camel so I did.  After a while I would see my tourist guide go to many of the locals and hand them some cash.  Before we left I saw a few other tourist groups do exactly the same thing and what I thought was a chance encounter with locals turned out to be something more complex.  Did those locals do this often?  Was it the main way they made money?  I had a million questions but then we were taken off to the city of Cairo.

In the city itself, people were dressed in more of a common international style with blue jeans, sunglasses and fast food in their hands.  In this way, major cities around the world have come to resemble one another more than local rural places that are geographically closer.  

Traffic in the central city was a nightmare as ancient cities are not built for automobiles so if they were to expand their roads they would have to destroy many historical buildings.  There have been places that have done this, Paris for example destroyed lots of buildings to make way for it's grand boulevards but it was also under a monarchy who wanted the space to move troops around and did not have to answer to the public for the destroyed history.

There was also the odd situation of it being Christmas.  Well, not the same date as ours here in the U.S. as they use a different calendar but it was still over my holiday break and the Christmas themed decorations were always interesting.  I believe these were mostly for tourists, although there is a Christian minority in the country of around 13%.  The Santa Claus in the below picture with the saxophone was animatronic and in all of the airports.  When you went by it would dance and play it, I am perplexed as to how or why that became something of a tradition there.

I was out to eat one day, pigeon stuffed with rice and lentils which is a common dish, my tour guide told my group that we should say hi to a local family who was passing by because they were Christians.  Not everyone in my group was a Christian, but he seemed to assume we all were because we were all Americans.  We figured, why not say hi?

It was a man and his two daughters.  Notice the necklace on the daughter with glasses.  They are to communicate a dual identity as both an Egyptian, and also a Christian.  Many in Egypt have duel identities of local race, of clan, or religion, all sorts of identities.  

Some countries have people who struggle with their diversity, with some in that nation claiming some are more or less patriotic, or below more or less depending on these other identities.  One thing about Egypt is it's ancient history and artwork shows that in fact Egypt has always had a diversity of people and that diverse background does not make anyone more or less Egyptian.  

Speaking of national identity, the trip I went on that these are photos from was 2011 just weeks from the revolution and what became known as the Arab Spring.  I asked the locals I encountered what they thought of having the same president for decades.  I think people were very open even though it was basically a police state.  We would see people picked up off the street and put into these police vehicles seen below.  Why would they be picked up and where would they be taken? 

As you can see, there was a military presence on the streets, also the president at the time Mubarak like to name many things after himself as well as put his photos all over the roads as you can also see below.  During the revolution when Mubarak came to power, similar to many countries in the region, they were fighting colonialism and European countries taking their resources and controlling their people.  You can go to the museums of many European nations and still see the many treasures taken from just Egypt alone.  When those countries declared independence, often the leader at the time said they would establish democracy once things settled down.  And then they just never did that.  The populations of these countries often wanted a democratic norm but they resigned themselves to waiting until those revolutionary leaders eventually would retire.  Many in Egypt that I talked to were becoming alarmed that Mubarak seemed to be arranging for his son to take over for him which would in effect be a sort of kingdom which is exactly the kind of thing they sought their freedom for when they had their revolution from their colonial powers.  

Some of the other reasons the Arab Spring happened was in many countries the locals felt persecuted by their governments.  Persecuted in many of the obvious ways, being arrested for protesting or activism but many were also arrested for basically not paying bribes.  If you look at the pictures above and below you see two of the many police checkpoints.  When the police pull you over, sometimes there are established fees you need to pay but other times the police will just size you up and pocket the money among themselves.  Look at the guy in the truck above, he might be in business and have a certain profit margin on the goods he is transporting and perhaps you can tell by the look on his face that he is unsure if he wont have to pay anything, a small amount, or even more than he has and his goods might be confiscated and he might be placed in jail until his family can pay his bail.  This is the kind of absolute power the authorities had.

Just finishing this post with a kid selling clothes on the street, a common thing.

The Nile River and Egyptian Agriculture

Water is a precious resource anyplace in the world, but even more so in the great deserts of the world.  This is a picture from my cruise of the Nile in Egypt.   As you can see, it is a huge body of water and sustains a large population in the center of one of the driest areas of the world. 

One of the many benefits to having a large river is transpiration.  Water canals were a major way to move people and goods around for most of human history.  Look at this picture above, obviously digging channels connected to the Nile here allow to spread around water resources to a greater areas than would otherwise be the case, but traditionally you would have a barge here tied to an animal on the road beside it to pull sometimes a huge weight for great distances with relative ease. 

One of the growing problems along the Nile here is soil degradation.  The rich fertile soils along the Nile used to be placed there in annual floods year after year for thousands upon thousands of years.  Now that there is the Aswan Dam, this cycle has stopped and that is the case in many rivers with dams around the world. Don't get me wrong, there are many places that have not been eroded as much as the photo I took above here as I will show you as we go.   

These are just more areas with more or less soil loss as well as other canals.  Canal water transportation used to be a major way we moved good and people around here in the United States but most of them were filled in when we switched to railroads and then cars.  In fact, if you are ever driving down a street with "Canal" in the name, it is likely that used to in fact be a canal but it was filled in and paved over.  In Egypt and many other areas of the world, even if they are not used that much for transportation, they still convey water at least. 

When I would go near cities in Egypt, I would see giant pipes bringing water to many areas and this was a major part of their city infrastructure.  The water that goes to your sink here is heavily treated and not in general to drink.  It has a strong smell, kind of like a swimming pool.  In general, you drink bottled or specifically purified for drinking water and the water out of your tap is for cleaning and other things.  You might notice that many buildings in these photos have unfinished tops.  This is for a few different reasons.  One is that with on rain, that's right zero rain, you don't actually have to put a full roof on.  Another is the tax structure.  If a floor of your building was technically under construction, you didn't have to pay taxes and you could use that tax break for 5 years.  You can often tell how old a building is because each floor usually equals 5 years.  I have some information and maps on water and agriculture in the region below:

As you can see, one of the hearths of agriculture and even urbanization itself was here due to the Nile. As you can see in the below pictures I took, there is still a great deal of agriculture here that supports more than 100 million people.  You might notice a sign in the store window that says "fixed price" that means you don't have to haggle or bargain to negotiate the price of goods there which is the norm in the region.