You Can't Make Mistakes.

Sometimes things still surprise even me.

I was sitting on the balcony the other morning with Stacey having our tea, and suddenly she jumped up and screamed at the sound of a crash in the street. I stood up and looked on with her and saw that a mint green car had hit two guys on a scooter. They had jumped/fallen/been knocked clear of any injury, and were standing up, checking themselves to make sure that nothing was broken, rubbing bruised knees and elbows. The young woman in the car did not move but just raised her hands in exasperation and glared at them. They started shouting at her as another man stopped to help them extract the scooter from under her front bumper.

She got out of the car at this point, shouting at the two men that it was their fault and what did they think they were doing? They shouted back that she was crazy and needed to be careful what she was doing. The scooter’s seat had fallen completely off and there was a puddle of gas and oil leaking out of some newly disconnected hose or damaged casing. They pulled the scooter off to the side of the road as a police officer walked up from a nearby street-corner. She was already back in the car. Just as they had finished getting the scooter clear of the car, she tried to pull around them, honking her horn. The guy who had been driving the scooter shouted in anger and pounded the hood of her car with his fist shouting that she had to wait and take care of this.

Rather than doing that she honked her horn at him and when he and the other man refused to move she just drove forward a little as if to threaten. This had one of the guys incensed, and he raised his hands shouting at her. The police officer lit a cigarette and watched. By this time she was in the next “lane” over as she had been trying to squeeze over to get around them, refusing to take any responsibility for the accident at all. When the man further refused to budge, she just gunned the engine and hit him, sending him up onto her hood. He somehow managed to roll off to the side like a portly, middle-aged ninja and remained astonishingly uninjured as she sped away down the street at the full speed of her late-model luxury Citroen. The police officer threw his cigarette butt down with no regard for the puddle of gasoline in the street and sauntered away to his corner without a word.

The two guys managed to get most of the pieces of the scooter and limped it down the street while a bawwab on the street picked up a piece of the scooter which someone pointed out that they had missed. He looked down the street as if in an attempt to ascertain their distance so that he might run after them, then shrugged and chucked it over onto the sidewalk and shuffled back to his perch in the middle of the road.

We were both naïvely astonished, which quickly wore away. This is not the first time I have seen someone from the lower class here grossly mistreated by someone of the obviously privileged class, but it was such a perfect visual metaphor for the state of things here: a young girl in a new car runs over a man while an officer of the law looks on disinterested. The privileged exploit and abuse the disenfranchised while the state looks the other way. That is the reality of daily life here, and sometimes it seems like the winds of change are forecast a long way off.

I am Frogger, hear me roar

A number of things have happened in Cairo since the strikes a couple of weeks ago. The most immediately noticeable of these was a relative increase in the speed of traffic.

It turns out that since the government and security forces warned the general public about participating in a strike, everyone has been a little edgy about gathering together in groups, moving around the city and country, and also going out at night.

It is a common Cairene pastime to drive around at night. Usually the streets are packed, especially on the weekend nights, until the wee hours of the morning. This contributes to the relative slowness of traffic which enables people to cross the street without cross-walks, traffic-signals, foot-bridges or tunnels.

No longer is this the case.

Now, with the empty streets and since no one cared to follow the speed limits—a paltry 60 km per hour, seldom reached due to the often deadlocked traffic—it is dangerous to cross the street. It may not actually be the case,

Usual speed of traffic but it certainly now feels like we are attempting to cross an interstate highway in the States.

I have decided to think of the whole thing as a big game of Frogger. Very thankfully, I was excellent at on the ol’ Atari as a kid. It might be time to drag out that Atari anew for some honing of the traffic-dodging skills.

Reporting on the technological forefront of asses

I’ve talked about the donkeys and horses in the city before. I still can’t help smiling when I see a donkey: the are just so pathetically adorable. Unfortunately they are often mistreated and underfed here. Then again, so are a lot of people, and I have to prioritize my sympathy. We all do.

Regardless, Stacey and I saw a donkey on our street the other day. The ass in question was attached to the cart of our regular bikiyeh guy, pulling it through speeding rush hour traffic in the left lane. He apparently was not hoofing it fast enough, because the guy switched the reins to one hand and then, with full arc arm-swings and an open palm, he just started slapping the ass—the ass of the ass, that is—with gusto. The donkey sped up, though only a little. The guy stopped when he realized that we were staring at him, and the donkey slowed.

I dubbed this “the donkey accelerator.”