Camel Market

Warning: This post contains descriptions of animal abuse and pictures of dead camels. 

Last Friday, in a fit of wanting to do something other than wander around aimlessly Cairo, I went with my Swedish friends Frederick and Clara to the Birqash Camel Market.  It’s hard to explain the attraction of such a place. All of the guidebooks and websites uniformly refer to it as a somewhat brutal spectacle for the tourist, a place where camels, fresh from off an arduous journey from Sudan, are auctioned and beaten.  Or beaten, auctioned, briefly fed, and then beaten some more. Mostly just beaten. For the low price of 25 pounds (That’s 4 dollars. In retrospect it seems a little steep.) the curious tourist can have the pleasure of wandering around the market taking pictures and dodging loose camels. I suppose I wanted to go because it seemed like the kind of thing one does when one visits Egypt, and, more broadly, because it was something I had never done before.

Birqash is a village about 30km (if memory serves me correctly) northwest of Cairo. All the directions to Birqash in guidebooks were vague and because we are cheap a taxi was out of the question. After some research I determined that we need to get on a bus to Imbaba, from there a bus to Niqla, from there a bus to Maneshe, and from there, a bus to Birqash. I knew how to get a bus to Imbaba, but beyond that we would just have to show up and ask around. And so armed with vague directions and that spirit of “whatever happens happens” that seems to serve me well in Egypt, we boarded a microbus to Imbaba at 7 AM.  I have now learned to distinguish between microbuses and minibuses. Minibuses seat like 20-30 people and are just a little bit smaller than your standard city bus, while microbuses are about the size and shape of a VW Bus and seat maybe 12, tops. 

 Our first stroke of luck was striking up conversation with some folks on the bus, one of whom was Mohammed, a kind customer service representative at TE Data (the company currently responsible for me not having internet. I politely neglected to mention this to avoid offending his sense of hospitality) who had just gotten off an overnight shift in which he told me he dealt with 87 often angry troubleshooting calls. He was disturbingly awake and good-spirited given the circumstances, and, crucially, was going home to Maneshe where he said we could catch a bus to Birqash. We tagged along with him and eventually ended up on a minibus on which Mohammed, despite my protests, generously paid the fare for all four of us and eventually arranged for the bus driver to tell us when to get off as he got off a few stops beforehand. We had a long conversation and will probably meet up for tea later this week.

In Maneshe the bus driver told us to get off, yelled something to some other guy who immediately took us to a microbus heading towards Niqla. In Niqla we got off and were told to follow some guy. I asked if we were going to a bus and he said “Arabeeya,” meaning car, which raised my thrift-alarms, but when I asked how much he said a pound (15 cents). We followed him across a bridge and he pointed to a pickup truck with 10 Egyptians in the bed. I walked up, said “Souk el-Gamal?”, they nodded and we hopped in.

In the bed of a truck

View from the bed of the truck

 After a 15 minute ride through some lovely farmland and a less lovely dump we were deposited at what appeared to be a door market. True to pattern, they told us to follow some guy and he led us to the camel market which was about a 3 minute walk up a sandy road lightly strewn with camel carcasses. Between the dump and the carcasses the smell was less than appetizing.

Camel carcasses along the side of the road 

Dead camel

Once inside the gate, we paid a guy our 25 pounds and were nearly run over by a stray camel. The camel market turned out to be exactly what you would expect: a place to buy and sell camels. To do this, a few guys would take a herd (is that the right word?) of camels and energetically beat them in front of a crowd 20-30 prospective buyers. Mostly the beatings were on the back of the camel, which didn’t seem too painful, but occasionally they would poke one in the ass (somebody suggested a Freudian element here) or beat it savagely in the face. We spent some time trying to apply our Western (I hesitate to use that term, but whatever) thought-process to the whole enterprise. Why beat them so much? It’s not like they were actually trying to drive them anywhere. Is a camel prized on how much of a beating it can take?  On how satisfying a “thwack” is made when you hit it squarely on the back? I’ll grant that camel beating does seem somewhat therapeutic (here I am referring to hit a camel on the back which makes a satisfying noise and doesn’t seem to bother the camel all that much. I have never actually done this and won’t. Don’t judge me). I guess the idea is to get the camels to run around so that buyers can judge their health, agility, and responsiveness to flogging.

When the camels weren’t being flocked and beaten one of their legs was folded and tied up at the knee so that they couldn’t run too quickly. I was certainly appreciative of this precaution as it turns out that a three-legged camel can still run at a pretty good clip and has little regard for whatever is in front of it. Also, some camels are fucking huge. Thinking back on the whole experience, the camels seemed to be in generally good spirits. Mostly they just hung around eating and looking content. I guess their lives were divided into two phases: getting beaten and not getting beaten, and if they weren’t getting beaten then things were good. The freshly sold camels sitting in the back of pickup trucks often looked like they were smiling as they drove off. 

On their way home...

Loading the camels 

The main activity for tourists was to wander around dodging camels and take pictures, which got less interesting after like 20 minutes. The market was basically one thorough-fare bordered on both sides by large camel stalls. For lack of a better idea we just wandered to the end of the thoroughfare and back. On the way we were constantly chatted up by the guys working with the camels. Most of them wanted their pictures taken and surprisingly didn’t want any money for anything. They were generally a pretty easygoing bunch and I deflected fewer marriage proposals for Clara then I had expected (this task fell on me rather than Frederick because I know more Arabic). If I heard correctly, the best offer we got for her hand was twenty camels, which seemed pretty low given that somebody had apparently offered “a million” in Tunisia.

This guy really wanted his picture taken

Around 11 we hitched a ride back to Niqla and enjoyed some delicious tamiyya (falafel) and French fry sandwiches at a local cafe. We then wandered through the narrow alleyways of Niqla for about 20 minutes. Niqla is a fairly impoverished town on some small branch of the Nile and the buildings were the haphazard (almost) Soviet-style informal brick contraptions that seem to dot much of Egpyt. Between each building is an alley about 4-6 feet wide and which have the feel, if not the timelessness, of the ancient cities of Morocco or the old parts of Cairo. A lot of Cairo is like this too, although not the parts foreigners usually end up in. It seems safe to guess that the only foreigners who end up in Niqla are those going to the camel market and that they rarely wander through the streets beyond the bus stop. Walking around we were constantly followed by packs of children and every single eye was on us. This is very different from Cairo where the foreigner is largely ignored, except for the occasional “Helllooooo” “What’s your name?” (The experience may be very different for women walking alone. I can’t know.) For me the feeling was not that the place was foreign, it felt perfectly normal. Rather, the feeling was one of being foreign, not at all belonging. In Cairo you can come up with a satisfactory answer to explain your presence: I’m a student, I’m working, I really like fried beans, etc. In Niqla you are immediately confronted with the fact that you’re ultimately a voyeur and that there is little you can give in return unless you are willing to invest time and/or money. Even if you were there are certainly paternalism (maybe not the right word) issues but I won’t get into that. Should such feelings stop one from wandering around the countryside? Probably not, but it’s something to wrestle with.

Bridge over the Nile in Niqla

Levitation in Niqla

After getting followed around for a while we hopped back on a microbus to Maneshe and in Maneshe got a bus to Imbaba. On that bus we were involved in a very Egyptian twenty minute dispute over something or other, possibly whether we had paid enough. On the buses everybody passes their fare to the person sitting in front of them and somehow people know what needs to be paid and who has and hasn’t paid. Usually. I asked the old guy sitting next to me how much and he said one pound, so we all paid one pound. Five minutes later some other guy comes back and starts asking somebody for money. This eventually (de)evolved into a shouting match involving the whole bus, where the guy sitting next me and the guy who came back would alternate between shouting hoarsely at each other and hoarsely grinning. The guy sitting next to me appeared to be defending me as I had given him my fare, and every few minutes I would jump in and ask how much, exactly, the fare was, never get a quite satisfactory answer, and then sit back and watch. The whole thing had a kind of ridiculous air, like they were arguing because it was hot out, but there was probably at least half a pound involved somewhere. I think the one guy didn’t get enough change or something.  Eventually things quieted down and the old guy next to me spent the rest of the bus ride apparently good-naturedly insulting me to the woman and child sitting in front of us. I would love to know what he was saying as he was a pretty hilarious guy. Oh well.

So that was pretty much it. Looks like I just wrote a blog entry longer than the paper I’m supposed to be writing. Oh well. I guess I should go theorize about the nature the early Islamic state. First, coffee.   

First Post

As I readied myself to leave for Egypt there was a persistent clamor from certain quarters that I keep a detailed account of my various exploits via blog. Despite being  by nature a rather private person I have decided to oblige.

In this post I’ll try to briefly describe what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks, where I live, and what daily life as an American in Cairo is like. This may go on longer than intended because I am using it as a procrastinatory device.

Downtown

Upon arriving in Cairo, I moved into a cheap but obliging downtown hotel for three nights. My goals here were to get my bearings and find an apartment. Downtown Cairo is difficult to describe. There are broad streets jammed with people and cars, bordered by these beautiful, vaguely European buildings that could use a good scrubbing. I arrived during Ramadan, and from the hours of 9PM to 3AM the streets were lit up with decorative lights and packed with crowds of families out shopping. My hotel was on the 5^th floor of a building whose other floors were in various states of construction and occupancy. There was a sign for a Swedish Center for Grace and Well-Being next to the hotel, but the premise looked like it had been occupied by a pack of incredibly strong and destructive three year olds.  This rather amused the Swedish couple living next to me.

The hotel itself was quite adequate, with air conditioning and showers, and an extremely affable staff. I was immediately served tea and given a talk about street touts and taxis, and general intelligent conduct as a visitor to Cairo. This makes the Hotel Berlin rare among Cairo hotels – rather than trying to get you to visit his uncle’s papyrus shop, the proprietor, Hisham, warns you against such activities. Hisham turned out to be recovering from surgery and bed-ridden, but he diligently called every day to ensure that I was happy and well attended to. 

Mohandeseen and Cairo Life

After looking at a few apartments, I finally settled on one in the outskirts of the neighborhood of Mohandeseen. Mohandeseen consists of much of the west bank of Nile and is generally considered a lively and urban area. Where I live is pretty far from the Nile, out on the intersection of 26 July St. and Sudan St. off of a square called Midan Libnan (Lebanon Square). The apartment is large, has a lovely balcony area and is on the 15^th floor with exceptional views. Theoretically we should be able to see the pyramids, but I doubt the smog will ever permit it. We are situated between a rather Westernized area and a typical Egyptian lower-middle class neighborhood, with narrow streets, pervasive fool/tamiya (street food) stands, and lots of goats and donkeys. My roommates are two American exchange students and as far as we know we are the only non-Egyptians in the neighborhood. My only complaint with the apartment is that it is a bit far from transportation.

To get to the metro, which, it should be noted is extremely clean and efficient (in contrast to much of the rest of Cairo), I generally take a 10-20 minute bus ride down Sudan Street. To find the bus you want you listen for a guy yelling the direction you want to go in (in my case GizaGizaGizaGiza or Imbabababababa [referring to the Imbaba district]) and hop on. The guy yelling hangs out the door yelling and trying to drum up business. My impression is that the drivers get paid by how many riders they get so they enlist the support of these guys to yell and collect money. Often a bus won’t go anywhere until it’s full. I’m not sure whether these are official city buses as they are unnumbered and there appear to be actual numbered buses that follow routes. I like taking the bus because no trip is ever quite the same, and occasionally passengers get into vicious sounding arguments with the drivers. I have no clue what these arguments could be over as the bus is going where it is going and the driver will stop wherever you want. My best guess is that the passengers are criticizing the driver’s maneuvers for a lack of aggression and pluck. Either way, things settle down quickly.

Speaking of aggression and pluck, the first thing you learn to do in Cairo is cross the street. At first this is a harrowing experience, but it soon becomes second nature. There are no real rules to driving in Cairo and the general attitude is that everyone has a right to be wherever they can go.  This means that there is less anger than on the streets of Boston, despite significantly more aggressive driving. If somebody takes your spot, they won it fair and square and you don’t hold it against them. Horns are used constantly to communicate everything that turn signals and headlights communicate in the States. Basically, when you’re driving  you honk. I’ve wondered if there is a slightly existential quality to this: I honk, therefore I am. Each taxi driver has his own honking style which can be quite entertaining to observe.  To cross the street you operate on the same rules as the drivers. If you see a space you take it and the drivers will stop. You cross one “lane” (in quotations because there aren’t lanes) at a time and you learn to stare the drivers down. It’s actually kind of fun and not all that dangerous given the low speeds in the city.

As an obvious foreigner wandering the city I am subjected to consistent calls of “Hello!” “Welcome to Egypt!” “What’s your name?” in quick succession. Often these are just bored people trying out their English, and one quickly becomes immune to them and ignores them. I sometimes feel bad about this because I would like to engage some of them in conversation, but the sheer amount has jaded me and you never know if they want to sell you something. Occasionally a guy will look me right in the eye and say with a broad smile “Welcome to Egypt!” and it’s clear that all he wants to do is welcome me to Egypt, so I’ll usually respond with a smile and a quick response. Sometimes people will yell in quick succession “I love America” and “Fuck you!” but my impression is that they are reaching the limits of their English and do not intend hostility.

 The “worst thing” that’s happened to me is that some guy passing on a motorbike sprayed me with some sort of silly string like substance, which resulted in a guy at a café getting up and apologizing profusely.  Not too bad in the grand scheme of things. It should be noted that this happened during Eid, the three day holiday at the end of Ramadan, during which the youth tend to get a little rowdy and children all over the city were chasing each other with this stuff. I am a little disturbed by the wide prevalence of tasers around, but mostly I see people wandering around with one in each hand rhythmically sparking them. I suppose the devices do have a certain festive nature, which I had not previously considered.

Generally I am finding this country to be stimulating and charming and am happy to be here. In future posts, whenever they happen, I’ll describe the food, AUC, the Egyptian museum, Islamic Cairo, and the Cities of the Dead.