Friends come and go

These are my friends! They are walking around "Islamic Cairo." We went to old mosques, and stuff.

I just finished having a long string of guests come visit me here in Egypt. It was great to see friends from Oberlin and catch up on gossip and talk about whatever. And I won’t even go into how happy I was to see Helen. I think she liked being here, too.

One of the other things that I’ve enjoyed about having friends come through Cairo has been the opportunity to be a tour guide. It’s made me realize how well I’ve gotten to know the city in my first five months here. At the same time, it reminded me how much more I want to do here. There are still tourist sites I haven’t seen, neighborhoods I don’t know that well, restaurants I want to eat at, etc., etc.

Naturally, I miss my girlfriend, my family, and my friends back home. But these days I’m feeling pretty damn good about living in Egypt. (But not the government, of course.)

Anyway, stay tuned.

Money troubles

There are three things that really differentiate the way money is used in Egypt from how it is used in United States: bargaining, tipping, and an almost exclusive reliance on cash. All three present a problem for me.

First, I should explain that I really don’t like money. I like having it, of course. But I hate dealing with it. I don’t like to talk about money, I don’t like to make a big deal out of it. I’m the guy who, at a restaurant with a group of people, will throw down an extra fifteen dollars just to avoid a lengthy discussion of the bill. I just want to ignore money as much as I can. That’s not how things work here.

They say that the price of everything in Egypt is negotiable. When most people buy things here they name a price, the vendor names another price, and then the two parties work their way toward a price in the middle. There are plenty of exceptions of course, but with many, many things that’s how it works for everything from taxis to a kilo of cucumbers. I see it happen all the time. When I go to buy something, though, the process is a bit simpler: I say a price, get another price from the seller, and then say, “Um. Well. Okay.”

The next problem I have is with tipping, known in Arabic as baksheesh. I’m a generous tipper at restaurants and bars. I always go with at least twenty percent. But that’s not what baksheesh is. Baksheesh is giving people a little bit of money when they do something for you. It’s supposedly an integral part of the Egyptian economy. (I recently read a story that said that visitors to the Giza zoo give baksheesh to the zookeepers.) The problem is, I have no idea how to do it. Whom am I supposed to tip? When? How much? Furthermore, I don’t like the awkward process of taking bills out of my pocket and handing them to people. I usually end up foregoing baksheesh, which I’m sure is rude and unfair.

Finally, there is the problem of cash. Almost nobody accepts credit cards in Egypt. My paycheck, which I received last week, came in the form of an envelope of cash. Egypt’s is largely a cash economy. There’s nothing wrong with that, except for me because 1) I have very little self control when it comes to money, and 2) I am really, really good at misplacing things. I crumple up twenty dollars bills, shove them in my pockets and then re-discover them a few weeks later after they’ve gone through the washing machine. Then I get excited that I found a free twenty dollars and go spend it on some bullshit. Naturally, a cash economy does not suit me.

Why am I talking about this? What’s my point here? It’s simple: I am a stupid foreigner and will probably go broke in this country and in the process offend hundreds of service industry workers.

A monument to red-tape

I walk past this on my way to work. It looks intimidating.

I haven’t had to deal with the Mogamma yet  since I’ve only been here for a little more than a week, but I’ve heard horror stories. It is the massive building in downtown Cairo (see photo above) where much of the city’s official bureaucracy takes place: where you apply for residency or a building permit or a new passport, etc. It’s not exactly known for efficiency.

Anyway, the AP ran a pretty good feature piece about Egyptian bureaucracy as told through Paul Schemm’s attempt to get his son registered in Egypt. (I find via the Arabist.)

It was an odd quest to begin with: I was seeking an entry stamp for Ray. His “port of entry” into Egypt was the delivery room at a Cairo hospital — and, not surprisingly, there was no customs official present. But for my wife and I to take him abroad for the first time, there had to be a record in his passport of his arrival.

That meant a journey through a notorious bureaucracy that millions of Egyptians navigate every day. According to one study, it takes each person an average of nine hours and 3.5 visits to a government office to complete a transaction like getting a building permit or school transfer.

Egyptians deal with it through resigned endurance, bribes and appeals for help from “wasta,” Arabic for “connections” — well-placed officials, usually in the police or military. Global Integrity, an non-profit group tracking governance and corruption, gives Egypt’s anti-corruption mechanisms its lowest rating — along with countries like Iraq, Ethiopia and Liberia.

…

The dark heart of the bureaucracy is the Mogamma. Built in 1950, it was originally conceived as an efficient one-stop shop for all Egyptians’ official needs. Instead it’s become a synonym for bureaucratic bloat, its musty corridors and offices crammed with 18,000 employees from a dozen ministries and scores of government departments.

In 2005 the prime minister ordered the building closed. But ordering and implementing are two different things in Egypt, and four years later the Mogamma remains as crowded as ever.

Maybe by the time I need to apply for a residency permit they’ll have finally closed it.