From Cape Town to Cairo

 There's an expression in Africa ... "from Cairo to Cape Town" or the reverse "from Cape Town to Cairo."  It's the African equivalent of the American "New York to L.A." way of talking about the whole country.  Somewhere along our Christmas adventures, it dawned on me that we literally did go "from Cape Town to Cairo" -- well, with a couple stops in between.

Cape Town

Nelson Mandela died the morning after we arrived in Cape Town, which was kind of weird and surreal.  But I'm profoundly thankful to have been in South Africa when he died.  It's impossible to deny that the entire nation was grieving with deep pain.  But it seemed to me that the timbre (in Cape Town, at least) of this grief did not reflect so much the loss of a hero, but rather the celebration of one dearly, and deeply, loved.  At the waterfront area, there were temporary gazebos set up with blank greeting books -- they looked just like an ordinary guest book --where anyone on the street could write a farewell message to Madiba (which I did).  For me, the most memorable memorial to Mandela was a huge image of him projected with green light onto the side of Table Mountain.  I don't know exactly how they did that, and the quality wasn't very good because the rock is pretty rugged on that cliff ... still, it was amazingly impressive.  It's an image that will stay in my brain forever.

I've only had a handful of magical moments in my life where time seemed to stand still because of the sheer grandeur of what was happening, or what I was seeing, around me.  One of them occurred while watching the sunset atop Table Mountain.  I don't know of anywhere else in the world where you can watch the sun set over the ocean from 3,000 feet above sea level.  It's hard to describe it; but from that height, I suppose because of how the light reflects on the water, the horizon appears to be behind the sun.  It honestly looks like the sun sinks into the sea.  It was utterly magnificent. It's also pretty incredible to be looking down on a major metropolitan city, skyscrapers and all, while standing on the ground rather than sitting in an airplane.  At some point in my life, I'm definitely going to go back and spend some time exploring Table Mountain ... it's a fairly indescribable wonder.

A taste of Table Mountain

Actually, I could say that same thing about the entire cape, from Table Bay (on which Cape Town sits) around the Cape of Good Hope to False Bay.  We spent several hours driving the entire length, and after a couple days in Stellenbosch, continued along a stretch of highway called "The Garden Route" which hugs the southern coast between the towns of Mossel Bay and Plettenburg Bay.  We turned north in the city of George to head back through Beaufort West and Bloemfontein en route to Johannesburg, where we would fly to Cairo.  Well, along that stretch of the N12 between George and Beaufort West, just north of Oudtshoorn, there is a canyon through the mountains (the range that separates the lush coastal plain from the arid Karoo desert) that I assume was cut by the small river which runs along the bottom.  The road runs alongside the river and sometimes on top of it, and that's about as wide as the canyon gets, with several-hundred-foot-high cliffs of orange-ish rock on either side.  I don't think there's even a name for this canyon, but it's just as impressive as the Glenwood Canyon in Colorado.  It's not as large or spacious, but the majesty of this canyon comes from its closeness and antiquity rather than raw scale.

...the photos don't really do it justice...

I'm disappointed that I was not able to take any photos of Khayelitsha, which is the slum outside Cape Town.  [The batteries of the camera were dead when we drove by.]  Truly, no treatment of Cape Town is complete without the inclusion of Khayelitsha.   It's not exactly just on the other side of Table Mountain from Cape Town, but almost -- it's another 10 miles or so.  The point is this: when you see all those great photos of Table Mountain taken in Cape Town or from the bay, if you could see on the other side of the mountain you would find a slum with 1,000,000 people living in it.  Khayelitsha is a metropolis of dilapidated shacks with corrugated tin roofs, a city reeking of sewage (you could smell it from the car driving past) that is growing, rapidly in fact, filled with poor blacks who hope to scratch out a meager living by working in the city.  In case you don't know, the name "Khayelitsha" is a Xhosa term meaning, "New Home."  The name is the story, the slum the legacy of apartheid, the tragedy the reality of sin and oppression in our broken and fallen world.  The work of Madiba, and of Jesus, is not yet finished. 


Cairo

After being in Cape Town for a week, it was hard to fathom that Cairo is on the same continent.  Cairo does not have the same feel as Khayelitsha, but the circumstances are very similar ...  only multiply the number of people about 25 times.  It was my second time to visit Cairo, and we stayed right downtown, a long city block from Tahrir Square.  The food, even a shwarma from a street vendor, was delectable.  We were warmly welcomed and received by everyone with friendly hospitality.  Cairo may not quite live up to the hype as "Paris on the Nile," but it's a memorable place.  I really like Cairo.

[I don't any photos from Cairo on this computer, I'll have to upload them another day.] 

We had the experience that, really, you can only have in the Middle East.  One evening we went to the old part of the city, by the large market called the Khan-al-Khalili, and as we stepped out of the cab met a man named Samir.  He offered to take us around, so we dutifully followed and had a wonderful time weaving in and out of narrow alleys and shops, largely manned by friends and acquaintances of his.  Samir walked with a slight limp, and he informed us that he had worked a trade job before his legs could not handle it any more.  Now he works as an instructor at what is considered the second-oldest university in the world -- the school which convenes at the Al-Azhar Mosque.  We spent some time that night with him, as well as the following evening.  We saw the Mosque, drank tea and ate delicious Egyptian food,  climbed a minaret in another mosque for a great view of the night-time cityscape, and bought some small hand-crafted jewelry boxes inlaid with shell and bone.  

We decided to spend a day at the pyramids.  Now, I want to talk about a particular kind of cultural experience we had there in contrast to an experience I had here in Swaziland shortly before we left on this trip.  The differences were amusing to me.  Back in September I received a call from an American iwoman who had just come to Swaziland to work at the American embassy here.  She had heard that  taught music lessons and wanted to know if I would teach her son piano.  I told her that my schedule was full, but that I would call her back if I ever had an opening.  Well, shortly before we left on our trip, we had gone to embassy as a family to pick up Cassia's "Certified Report of Birth Abroad" -- the equivalent of a birth certificate for an American citizen born overseas -- and I recognized the name of the woman who brought it out to us.  I introduced myself, saying, "I think we've spoken on the phone before, you wanted me to give your son piano lessons."  A look of recognition flashed across her face, and she said, "Oh, I remember!  Yeah, I'm pissed at you for that!"  She was joking, of course, in her New-Jersey-like way.  She was hoping, through some relationally-derived humor, that she might persuade me to acquiesce to her business-related request. 

A similar thing happened to us at the Pyramids, but in a way that worked exactly opposite.  Let me explain.  At our hotel, we paid for an arranged tour to go to the Pyramids.  This tour included lunch and but not entrance to the Giza area  (I'll call it a "park"), which we didn't realize until after we had already bought the tour.  Further, the Giza area is huge, and most tourists either hire a camel-drawn or horse-drawn carriage to tour the park.  The place is entirely sand, so you can't drive around, really.  You either hire a camel or a horse, or you hoof it on your own two feet over the vast complex.  We didn't have a lot of cash (because, you know, we thought we had already paid for everything!), so we were negotiating with the camel tour operator to at least go in and see the park.  We ended up paying less than half of what he originally asked for, but he wasn't terribly happy about it in the end.  Actually, we probably would have paid for except that our driver realized our predicament and talked him down even further than we were planning!  Anyhow, it was something that the tour operator said during the negotiations that struck me, particularly after having recently had the experience with the American woman that I just described.  During a somewhat tense moment in the negotiations when we were saying that we probably would not be hiring him at all, he said something like, "It's OK, you will have my friendship, even if I don't have your business." Now he was sincere in this; but once again, he was relying on a sense of relationship with us in an attempt to get something he wanted in a business environment.

Here's what struck me: the American woman suggested relational distance, whereas the Egyptian man suggested relational closeness -- a stick versus a carrot, so to speak. In essence, they were each doing the exact same thing, but in the exact opposite way.  There are lessons here, both on the human level and on the cultural level.  I felt better in the second instance, even though the actual situation was much more foreign to my own culture and experience.

[By the way, it's experiences like this that make cross-culltural living so challenging yet so rewarding.  As humans, we are truly enriched by interacting with other humans that are culturally different from us.]


If you ever get to Cairo, make sure you hit the following locales:

- the Egyptian Antiquites Museum (the photos of King Tut's mask from your history textbook are woefully inadequate; it's a completely different experience to see it there in the glass box, 6 inches from your face)

- the Pyramids (duh!  but really, they were there when Moses was born ... probably Abraham, too!)

- the Khan-al-Khalili, the huge bazaar in Islamic Cairo

- Islamic Cairo, and walk the mile-long stretch of Bab el-Wazir street from the Bab-Zuwaila (a gate from the old city which dates to the 11th or 12th century) to The Citadel

- the Al-Azhar Mosque, the oldest Sunni mosque in the world (dedicated in 972)

- the Blue Mosque, located on the Bab el-Wazir street near The Citadel

- The Citadel (the old fortress constructed by Saladin)