Tag Archives: Cairo

What can social media tell you about the mainstream social discourse in Egypt?

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While I was working on my masters in International Development, I wrote a paper on how we can use social media to observe current social discourses on various themes, or what I specifically termed “grassroots developmental ethos”. In non-academic jargon, I was trying to see if it is possible to use social media to learn something of value about how Egyptians – especially young people – think about issues of change and development, and how their online interaction, from webblog posts to Facebook link shares to tweets can give telltale signs of the general direction of this ethos (which can in turn be useful knowledge for development practitioners, at least in theory).

The exact title of the paper now escapes me, and I can’t be bothered to look for it on the many USB drives in my desk drawers, but two videos that are currently making the rounds by Egyptians on Facebook, Twitter, forums and other social media channels made me remember this topic and rekindled some interest in it.

The first one is a clip from the Egyptian TV show “Al Ashira Masa’an” (which translates to “10 p.m.”), which is hosted by Mona El Shazly and garners a large and loyal viewership. In the clip, an Egyptian poet called Hesham El Gakh (of whom I have never heard before) performs an oration of one of his poems titled “Goha” (Goha is a well-known character from Egyptian folktales).

It’s difficult to translate the whole thing but what Hesham reads is basically a very pessimistic and gloomy “poem” in which he addresses his literary personification of Egypt and verbally lashes against what he sees as bad about the country (which is basically everything). If there is ever a poem to be described as “self-flagellating”, it is this one. Hisham delivers quiet a theatrical oration, with tears and everything. And you have to admit, he has a way with words and that Upper Egyptian accent lends the requisite air of authenticity to his pain (yes I am being a bit sarcastic here).

Now take that and contrast it with the second video making (admittedly less frequent) rounds between Egyptians online:

The video is titled “Ana Masry” (“I am Egyptian”) and posted on a Youtube channel called pmcegypt (what is pmcegypt? I don’t know). It simply presents various characters from Egyptian society (played by actors), who start by admitting to their bad habits but then say something about what is it about them (that is positive) that makes them “Egyptian”. The description with the video translates to “A video for those who love Egypt and still think that tomorrow will be better. Together we can change many things”.

What is interesting to my is not the content of the videos as much as it is the comments by different people – Egyptians – on both. What is even more interesting is the demographics of the people making those comments, or at least in the “sample” I observed on Facebook and Twitter where certain information about commenters is easily visible. Those are young, educated Egyptians: the demographic equivalent of the blood of this country. Any country. This is not a surprising observation, but rather an important one to note if anything if to be noted from all of this.

What does it say about the current social ailments of Egyptians, and what potential remedies are there for such ailments if we can actually define them?

Well, to give a very short answer, and insofar as anything can be gleaned from comments on online videos, the current social discourse in Egypt is more descriptive than prescriptive. People always tend to talk about how things are, not how it should be, and what should be done to make them be the way they should be. It is the path of least resistance in most social interactions in Egypt. The video by the “poet” above is nothing but a very lyrical version of the complaining spiel that lots of us hear from many Egyptians on a daily basis, from the taxi driver to your friends and family with graduate degrees.

The current collective social psyche in Egypt today is akin to a Jeep with its wheels spinning in sand: there is a lot going on but not much being achieved. It is all about the psychology of change. I’ll talk about the psychology of change and how it relates to the Egyptian mainstream social discourse in another post, but here is a thought for you to mentally chew on: change does not have to be political. In other words, start something or GTFO.

Speaking of Jeeps: They call this Egyptian Jeep, and I want one.

Twitt

Inexplicable phenomenon? Jordanians lose their passports in Cairo…a lot!

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At least that’s what I have deduced after looking at the lost & found section in the Egyptian weekly classifieds paper, Al-Waseet.

The first scan is from Al-Waseet’s July 7th issue, the other is from its July 23rd issue (I added the red arrows). I didn’t get any other issues between those two, but didn’t need to to notice the weirdness…

Both issues have a combined total of 13 ads in the lost & found  section.  Seven, count’em, SEVEN ads are for lost Jordanian passports! That’s more than 50% of all ads for lost stuff in Cairo in two weeks! (well, one is for a Jordanian national I.D. Card, in the interest of statistical accuracy)

Does anyone have any logical explanation for this, or do Jordanians just lose their shit a lot?

Twitt

We never really grow up. We just learn how to act in public: the story of my unhealthy obsession with bikes

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The above picture is of my new toy, which I’ll tell you more about later, after I tell you how this whole cycling thing got into my head.

You may or may not already know that I have a not so mild fascination with two-wheeled pedal powered machines (aka bicycles), specifically mountain bikes.  Like many other bike-heads, this passion started in early childhood when I got my first “real” bike after the obligatory training period on a tricycle with solid rubber tires and blue bar end ribbons (I hated those ribbons). I do not have any pictures of my first “real” bicycle, but let me  try to paint a mental portrait: It was a blue steel frame, heavy as a tank, with silver and red decals. It had short, wide and slotted (for aerodynamic purposes, I believe :) ) chrome fenders, fat tires, blue flared BMX-style grips that were made out of a hellish material that made the skin on your palms and inner thumbs bleed after a few minutes of gripping those babies (imagine mixing low-grade rubber and crumpled sandpaper with copious amounts of caustic glue (if there is such a thing), putting the mix in a mould to harden, and spray painting the result and calling it a “handlebar grip”). Several articles of discarded material adorned various parts of the frame (old inner tube around the chainstay, bright yellow electrician’s tape on the handlebars, etc). It was also a single speed but the gear choice was so wrong that I spent nearly all my riding time on the streets of Cairo out of the saddle. Seated pedaling was near impossible on anything but a downward sloping street. This worked in my favor though, as I developed the legs requisite for the type of riding I now love to do. In short, that bike was a piece of #$@%, but by I loved it! I had tons of fun riding it and would spend hours on end roaming the streets of Nasr City, jumping off curbs, sessioning ramps I built out of discarded construction wood, and crashing. A lot :)

Back then (in nineteen nintey something) , and probably because the Cairo neighborhood in which my family lived was still relatively uncrowded, there was a lot of kids on bikes during the summer months. And I mean a lot. Most of the kids on my street were older than I am and usually went on “long rides” to other neighborhoods. The bigger kids, naturally, scoffed at the younger ones trying to join the fun on grounds of peer superiority, or something. One time there was this guy on an geared road bike who asked me if I wanted to swap rides (“tebadel 3agal?”). Compared to my bike, his was almost featherlight and I had severe distrust in the skinny wheels and tires it rolled on. It was a few frame sizes too large for me, of course, but I just lowered the saddle, climbed over it (not on it) and started cranking the way I am used to on my bike, and the thing flew! A few blocks down the guy who had my bike called out, red-faced and panting like a squirrel who’s been made to run on a wheel for hours. He dismounted a few meters down, left my bike on the curb, walked towards me while glancing back at it in horror. “Enta beterkabha ezay de??!” (how do you ride this thing?!). A puff of adolescent pride filled my chest.  Other older kids tried to show him what a wimp he was, but walked away to their bikes as my horrible gearing crushed their egos. From this day on I think all the older kids secretly called me the dude who rides the devil’s bike.


Fast forward to my high school and college days. I played competitive handball for close to 12 years, rowed on my university’s crew team for a couple years with a short stint on the basketball team and even tried archery (loved it, still trying to get back to it…in my backyard). I started looking for something that doesn’t require a team and/or special facilities or sports courts (I was graduating, could no longer compete, and “Nostalgic basketball Thursdays” as we came to call them were getting less and less regular as many of the participants got sucked away by the blackhole of life known as “marriage”. I needed something solo and with a bit (or a lot) more excitement than morning jogging around the neighbourhood and gym sessions. How about a bike?


Bought one a few years back and next thing I knew I was back to jumping curbs and (secretly) sessioning makeshift ramps I (secretly) built out of discarded wood. I was also crashing a lot (not so secretly, though). Ahh, long-lost joys of childhood, it is so good to see you!


Road/urban riding in a place like Cairo isn’t that great. I started taking the bike off-road in Wadi Degla. The more I rode there, the more I fell in love with the place. A vast trail network that makes for super fun desert riding.


On the solo weekend rides, I  noticed that 99.9% of the people on mountain bikes were gringos. How come more Egyptians don’t do that?! Well, a dearth of suitable equipment is one thing, but not that much of a hindering factor, I suppose. I whipped together a website with whatever information I had/found on mountain biking in Egypt. Egyptian riders started trickling in. Two years ago I either went riding solo or had one other friend along. Last Friday a total of ten riders showed up for the morning ride! To put this number in perspective, try telling a random Egyptian “let’s wake up really early on a weekend morning to go ride bikes in the desert!”. You’d get a blank stare, if they were polite. In all seriousness, this is proof that it is mostly a matter of information availability and community-building than access to equipment and locations. Egyptian youth (or many Egyptians in general, regardless of age group) WANT to do things like that, but either don’t know where, how or with who. But I digress.


With the help of an amazing team of volunteers, I organized two amateur mountain bike races in 2009, the first of their kind in Egypt. We even have our own custom jerseys, like a real mtb team and everything :)


The sport is still obscure (not so with the road cycling, where there is a national squad and even a junior league). Accessible trails are limited but we’ve got this great, massive trail network right outside Cairo. Time allowing, we would venture out to the Sinai for some epic riding.


As infinitely fun as it is, you can hurt yourself mountain biking a lot more than you can hurt yourself playing, say, basketball (although I seem to hurt myself doing anything, including a basketball game a couple months ago where someone busted open my right eyebrow. Hell, I even spilled my own blood opening my car’s trunk!). This is not a general rule, but remember that I told you that I had fun jumping curbs and makeshift ramps? Well, I have even more fun dropping off rocky ledges and hauling ass through off-camber trails strewn with sharp rocks. In 2009 alone I bruised, cut, sprained and scraped myslef more than any other time in my life by just riding my bike off-road. I have pictures for some of the injuries but want to keep this blog R-rated :) . I am not extreme or anything, I just like to do stupid things with confidence, and crash in style :)


Coming through customs in Cairo airport two years ago with a large cardboard box, the customs official had this big smirk on his face that silently said “You are going to pay through the nose now for bringing this big ass TV over from abroad!”. As he opened the box, his facial expression changed to thoroughly confused and looked up to me for explanation. “It is a bicycle“, I said. He waved me through with a look that said “What a moron. If he’s gonna haul a box THAT big from abroad he might as well have bought a big-screen TV!”


What he didn’t know is that bicycle probably costs more than many big-screen TVs. If he knew that he would have thought that I am an even bigger moron for buying it.


As a side note, I don’t own a TV. The reason why will be told in another blog post. I am sure you’ll be hanging on the edge of your seat until then.


Where was I? Ah, I was telling you about bikes and biking. To me, it is a combination of childhood-esque pure, clean fun (not so clean if you ride in the mud like we did a few weeks ago), the feeling of accomplishment you get from  endurance sports, the great outdoors and macho big-boy fascination with big-boy toys like high-end bikes and components (or cars or motorcycles or game consoles…it’s just what you choose to spend your money on. I choose to spend it on something that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases and gets the blood pumping :) . Ok, enough of the environmentally sensitive and health conscious B.S., I can almost hear you say it!).

Twitt

Reflections on Cairo traffic

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The “official”population of Cairo residents is about 10 Million people, add up daily commuters from Giza and other nearby cities, and you get a little more than a 17 million headcount (on the most conservative basis). To say that traffic in Cairo is a mess would be a grave understatement, a more accurate description of the current state of affairs in Cairo streets is FUBAR.

As a hypothetical scientific experiment, imagine for a second a peaceful, calm and rational person who doesn’t drive (or doesn’t drive in Cairo). Now, take said person and put him behind the wheel of anything with four wheels, and set him loose in Cairo streets for, say, 2 full weeks. In that short period of time, you’ll find that this person has turned into a brutal, violent and fiercely competitive fiend who bears no resemblance to his character prior to driving (in Cairo)! A more interesting observation is that this person would display signs of schizophrenia/split personality, switching between his initial self and his heinous transformation depending on whether he’s inside/outside the vehicle.

Even pedestrians have developed a weird, sometimes scary, kind of traffic “tolerance”. They rarely heed the deafening horns of incoming vehicles, and seem to have shifted the burden of their own safety to motorists. It’s like, they always know that the car speeding towards them @ 120 kph is indeed going to somehow dodge them in just the right moment, they don’t even blink at the screeching tires and go on with their conversation as if nothing happened. Living in Cairo needs an essential survival skill: crossing the street, any street. You can easily spot a non-Cairene by the way they do it: nervous, one step forward, two steps back, eyes darting between their destination (the other side of the road) and the unrelenting incoming traffic, etc. But fear not, a couple of weeks in Cairo, and you’ll acquire the steel-nerved skills and agility of a seasoned Cairo street-crosser. A tip for the newbies: find a local and shadow him (for added safety, you’ll need two on both flanks on a two-way street, or any street for that matter)

Traffic lights and road markings are for strictly decorative purposes. A social scientist might have an excellent environment in which to study “group behavior” in a major intersection in Cairo. Since we’ve already established the general non-acknowledgement of any traffic-control mechanisms, and the non-existence of common courtesy behind the wheel, the only way to ?beat” the traffic flood at the intersection is for drivers to gradually pressure the “enemy”. A couple of intimidating advances by the leading vehicles, a taunting horn here and a flashing headlight there, and you own the road. The other side then takes turn as the attacker. It’s the survival of the baddest, meanest and rudest drivers.

Add to this mess horse and donkey carts who go 10 kph in a one-lane road and don’t give a flying #@%& about the drivers going berserk in the long line of cars behind them. Then you have the notorious “microbuses”, switching lanes as if the road is their own crazy Grand Prix racing circuit, and stopping randomly for a pick up where ever they darn please. Public transportation buses, ironically painted green, with exhaust pipes spewing fumes with fine a disregard to all environmental regulations. Road rage is a national sport. There is a saying that goes: don’t get mad, get even…in Cairo, you get mad and you get even! It is the ultimate test of “urban” survival. Some would say that if you can drive in Cairo, you can drive anywhere in the world. I, however, would say that if you can drive in Cairo, you should be banned from driving anywhere in the world!

In the end, its all part of Cairo’s charm, isn’t it?!

Twitt