Cairo, beyond the hotel walls

[Deleted]

I am in a hotel not too far from the Cairo airport. Our company has always liked to use it for seminars, because it is quite nice, convenient to the airport at least, but it isn't really in Cairo, but actually Heliopolis, an affluent suburb created by the Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard Louis Joseph Empain in 1905. Over the years, the empty 10 kilometers between central Cairo and Heliopolis have filled in, but it is still considered to be a separate place.

A lot of the "filler" is not as affluent as Heliopolis used to be, and part of that is what is next to the hotel, which remains isolated by secure walls. You can see the hotel just peeking above the walls here.

There is a little pedestrian passage cut through the wall for those who insist on seeing the outside world. It is where the little steps are on this photo.

There is a security guard with a metal detector there to screen everybody entering. Cars have an entrance on a different boulevard with several checkpoints and a long labyrinth through with they have to drive, encased in high walls so that they cannot see what is around the next corner. This means that car bombs have less of a chance of getting through.

I know that the neighborhood across from the pedestrian entrance is not very nice, but I always want to see it anyway. (This is the fourth time I have been to this hotel and my 8th or 9th trip to Cairo.)

The first problem is crossing the street through the traffic.

Absolutely no vehicle will stop for pedestrians, so it takes a couple minutes of calculation to see a configuration of cars that looks like you have a chance to get across.

Once you get across the street, it is a different world from the hotel.

A lot of these buildings, even when they are ten floors tall, are built out of mud bricks, but you can still tell that the residents live in the 21st century.

[Deleted]

I keep my camera in a ratty plastic bag and just pull it out from time to time, because I don't want to upset people.

Nevertheless, the woman in the foreground of this photograph kept turning around to look at me, and then she decided that I was not welcome.

I turned my camera up at some of the buildings to show that I was not stealing photographs of the people (well, not all that much, as much as I wanted to).

But the woman didn't like this either, and she told everybody in the street about me. I couldn't understand what she was saying, but I could tell that it was along the lines of "This terrible person is taking pictures of our beautiful neighborhood and we should all stop him." She would make gestures at me, and some of the people would answer her, but I couldn't determine if they were saying "yeah, let's get a posse together and beat his ass" or "leave the poor man alone; he's obviously harmless."

So I changed to another street and kept taking pictures once I was sure that she was not following me.

All of the bakers would put their bread out on shelves like this to cool off and perhaps entice prospective customers.

It is a very busy area and may have been nice at one time.

I'm not exactly sure what snack this cart was selling.

It was getting dark, and the street lights only come on when it gets much darker (assuming they come on at all), so my camera kept trying harder and harder to get an acceptable exposure, but the shutter speed just wasn't up to the task.

Unlike the nasty woman, these bakers were very proud when they saw me taking pictures. I'm sure they would have invited me to make a complete photo report on Egyptian bread making. But the world has become such a strange place that when I am alone, I do not get excessively brave.

I made my mad dash back to the hotel side of the street and took one last longing look at the real world, which was beginning to light up.

[bazfaz]

Ah yes, Egypt. I remember bakers in Aswan lining up so Mrs Faz could photo them. Then they wanted baksheesh but she said she had no money and I had disappeared round the corner.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the photos, Kerouac. Very insightful. The stark reality of the haves and the have nots displayed so well.

[Deleted]

Wonderful photos K. Am in awe of just how many people out and about. The breads look wonderful,did you purchase any?
Curious about so many other things. Need to consolidate in my head all the the questions I would like to ask. Thanks for crossing over to get these shots. A whole other world indeed.
Lots of bananas!

[imec]

Oh, this is great. I'm off to dinner but I'll have to spend some quality time looking at this tomorrow.

[bixaorellana]

This is SO cool! I almost gasped at the first photo after you crossed the street, the contrast was so great.

I looked real hard at the 3rd picture down -- are those the adobe buildings, to the right? A couple of them are emphatically not on the square. The satellite dishes picture is exceptional! Geez, that wall in the background of the photo with the paranoid woman ~~ now that is something to be paranoid about.

[spindrift]

That's cool...I felt I was walking beside you on your little jaunt. I suppose there are few pedestrian crossings in Cairo! I see that the vegetables for sale on the market stalls are in the same sort of woven baskets as those that are used in Nepal. Interesting.
I notice lots of rubbish around the steets similar to how it is in India.
You were brave to keep taking pictures after that woman objected to your presence. I would feel quite scared if that happened to me. You can't be sure of a crowd's reaction to a camera-toting foreigner. Yikes! I never feel entirely comfortable carrying a large camera around my neck so I'll adopt your idea of putting it in a ratty plastic bag.

[lagatta]

Imagine how many centuries they have been baking and selling bread like that...

From Wikipedia article "history of bread": "Flat bread of these types also formed a staple in the diet of many early civilizations with the Sumerians eating a type of barley flat cake, and the 12th century BC Egyptians being able to purchase a flat bread called ta from stalls in the village streets". !!!! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread

I hate to think of the air quality with the number of cars speeding through those narrow streets surrounded by high buildings. But at the same time so many people have such hopes and excitement about arriving in the big city.

To me the snack looks like toasted chickpeas, could that be?

[Deleted]

That's what I was assuming they must be.

[imec]

Great job k! I know from experience that it ain't easy shooting in areas such as this. Much of it reminds me of parts of Riyadh (25 years ago - don't know what it's like now). I can almost smell that bread!

[traveler63]

Wonderful K2. I know how you feel about the camera and people. One of the things that we did even in Paris, is I have a very unobtrusive black bag that kind of looks like a bota bag. So, I put Mr T63's 70-200 White Canon lens in it, so it just doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. People do get nervous about cameras. We were sitting in a little park just off of Rue de Rivoli called Park Lavouis. There was a great balcony on one of the buildings, so I strolled over to be closer and pointed my camera at it. One gentleman, sitting on a bench looked at me and waved his finger, saying NO, NO, NO. I pointed to the balcony behind him about 4 stories up and he then said ok. More about this when I do another post.

[fumobici]

One can take photos quite discreetly indeed with a little pocket camera using the LCD screen on the back rather than holding the camera up to your face. People still expect to see that old fashioned viewfinder to the eye pose and other positions won't register the same. I don't suppose trying to be stealthy would fly with one of those honking big DSLRs though.

[hwinpp]

What's the opposite of agoraphobia?

Narrow streets, tall buildings. Does the sunlight ever touch the ground in that area? It looks like a modern casbah.

[bazfaz]

Claustrophobia.

Or is that a fear of Christmas?

[hwinpp]

Yes, you're right. Much easier to remember but it completely slipped my mind.

[Deleted]

Oct 26, 2009 9:07:22 GMT bazfaz said:

Claustrophobia.

Or is that a fear of Christmas?

;D

[Deleted]

Oct 26, 2009 1:15:41 GMT fumobici said:

One can take photos quite discreetly indeed with a little pocket camera using the LCD screen on the back rather than holding the camera up to your face.

Unfortunately I do not have a pocket camera, but I expect to be buying one soon. I have a 12x zoom lens on my camera, which is another way of photographing people without them necessarily spotting me.

[Mark]

Thanks K2 for pointing these out to me.
I do travel through streets like these most days and was for a while staying in Heliopolis before moving. I tend not to look too closely at them any more as I'm usually struggling to avoid everything just to get through.
The mud bricks are not load bearing, they are just infill between the concrete frame structure that forms the building, thankfully. Though they do still collapse on a regular basis. Especially as they are still in the process of building a third Metro line out to the airport through this area and periodically we hear of a building that has collapsed in to the new tunnel just dug.
As K2 knows, the buildings in the more traditional parts of Heliopolis are reasonably attractive, but the street life is still the same.
Good photos. Thanks.