Garden City.

This morning, I took my first warm shower in 34 days.
I also spotted the first tampons (and all the more shockingly, condoms) I've seen sold in Egypt.
Welcome to Garden City, a neighborhood of intersections. In the broad, even sidewalks along the Nile and the curvaceous tree-lined streets, you see the former elegance and enclave-culture of the days when Egypt was part of England's nightless empire.
In the coffee shops and back alleys, you see men in galibayyas playing backgammon and smoking sheesha. A pair of goats is tied up by stone doorways next to the fruit vendors and butcher, with cages of live chickens outside. A stray chicken foot pokes out of the dust in the street gutter.
A large, modern children's hospital dominates the busy streetscape, with countless small shops selling blood pressure gauges, scales and antibiotics instead of fanta and dorito chips.
Only a few hundred yards past some of Cairo's largest hotels, our apartment nevertheless feels worlds away from the tourists' Egypt. Our street is a kind of borderland between the two worlds, and is the beginning of a tumble into an Egyptian neighborhood with all the vibrance, color, and culture of anywhere else that we've lived—but, as the tampons and condoms showed us—a more worldly awareness, too.
Welcome to yet another slice of Egypt.
We packed our bags on Friday morning, spending our last hours in Maasara feeding a half dozen scrawny chickens and one very ugly duck on the roof of our family's building, then sitting on the laps of our host sisters and basking for a few more minutes in their home life.
A family friend, the videographer of one of their weddings, owns a large car and offered to drive us—for a fee, of course. His teeth were stained dark brown from tea and cigarettes, but his car was large and comfortable, and he was pleasantly courteous as we took the Nile-side highway north to our new home.
It occurred to me then that our family's building was only two blocks from the Nile, but that I had never seen the water while we lived there. To go those two blocks meant crossing through a sandy and dodgy alleyway and crossing the large highway. Even if I had done that, there were no parks or benches to go to on the other side. The whole neighborhood of Maasara is located so close to natural beauty, but with riverside property costing what it does, they all live inland.
As we drove those two dusty blocks and turned onto the highway, I was hit with conflicting pangs of guilt and relief, nostalgia and excitement. It had been hard to explain to the family why we were leaving them. Why were we leaving? For shorter commutes, for greater independence, for creature comforts and privacy. To live more as Americans, less like lower-class Egyptians. I still feel conflicted as I write this. We promised the family to come back and visit every weekend, and I'm attending their cousin's wedding on Tuesday (the mother is cooking, which means we're in for a good time!). That helps.
But I won't lie that I have fallen in love with our new apartment. One of the bedrooms has a walk-out balcony, with a clothesline to one side of it. The room is filled with light. On Friday night, after we had finished unpacking, my roommate E. and I split a Heiniken (another first for me in Egypt) and cigarillos, watching the sun set against the other apartment buildings crowded around us.
That night, my roommates and I walked along the Nile towards downtown, drinking lemon mint juice and coffee outside, smoking apple sheesha, skirting the leering men that congregate on the bridges at night. Settling into our chairs at the outdoor café, we spotted one lone star shining above the top of a palm tree. A fire breather performed with her child on the street corner, and throngs of Egyptians dressed in pink and yellow and sequins walked arm in arm with their loved ones down the busy roads. We came home to our air-conditioned room, read in bed, and shut out the lights. Now we were home, and it felt fabulous.
Yesterday E. and I went out to Islamic Cairo—the Medieval section of the city—to photograph the narrow streets, colorful street vendors, and the large, graceful mosques that project into the skyline here. Most of our evening was spent in the great khan al-khalili—Cairo's most famous outdoor market, where the vendors are fluent in 8 languages and can swindle you out of most any currency. E. and I arrived early in the day, however, when a soccer match between two of Cairo's favorite club teams were playing. The markets were quiet, except for a few scantily clad tourists. We took our time chatting in Arabic with the vendors, and left with some beautiful scarves and jewelry. As the sun began to set, the market began to fill up.
After drinking mint tea at the world's oldest coffee shop, we twisted our way out of the market's picturesque labyrinth to the local market, where Egyptians come to buy clothing still wrapped in their plastic packets, spices, plastic toys, and any imaginable household item. We found an Egyptian hair straightener for $4, but couldn't manage to find any nails to hang some of our new purchases at home with.
Soon the streets were packed to a suffocating level. We were already squeezed shoulder to shoulder as we tried to move our way past the market stalls, and were nearly crushed by a cart—exactly the width of the alleyway—that a boy was trying to pull through the crowds. We slipped through a backstreet and wound our way back to downtown. We had walked miles. But with each step, we were re-acquainting ourselves with a city that we were now navigating ourselves, without the meditation of our old study abroad program or the help of our host family. It's a different experience entirely.