Back to Egypt

This Spring I went back to Egypt after several years, on a family vacation.

I lived there for over a decade and left in 2014; I have been back several times since. I knew what to expect. It’s been a long time since the Arab Spring. I know how awful the regime is and I was prepared for the shock of how much Cairo has been transformed.

I was not prepared for the effects that Egypt’s plummeting exchange rate has had. The pound is now worth 10% of what it was when I first arrived in Egypt over 20 years ago. The prices were incomprehensible to me — I could not wrap my head around them. I struggled with comically large wads of cash. The country is bifurcated more than ever between a world of have and have-nots, both hard to figure out (how are the elites making all this money? how is everyone else surviving?). People joke about being either in “Egypt” (the fancy expensive country for tourists and the upper middle classes) or “Misr” (the poor and run-down country everyone else inhabits). The thing is you move between the two many times every day.

Politically the situation is as disastrous as it is economically; the pall of fear and silence and resignation surrounding politics is so heavy. My 12-year-old was struck by the presence of police forces everywhere (“what are they doing?” he kept asking, bemused by the idea that they just sat there, all day, every day).

But also being with my son allowed me to feel the joy of sharing simple things that I love about the country with him. Traveling with a young boy, we were exposed to what is most playful and sweet in the way people treat children. He was gently teased and flattered everywhere we went. In front of a bakery, a young man bought us four loafs of baladi bread and ran off before we could pay him back, telling us: Enjoy your time in Egypt! We went and had ice cream at Mandarin Kouader in Zamalek (the lemon ice cream is as good as ever), and walked under the island’s still leafy trees. We climbed Bab Zuweila. We saw whale fossils in the Fayoum desert. The Red Sea was as beautiful as ever, at sunset on our last day in Sinai it was perfect, gently moving mirror of light.

Sometimes I forget that I lived in Egypt longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life (12 years). The sound of Egyptian Arabic and the visual vernacular of the country is so achingly familiar, so instantly recognizable. I feel at home there, even though it is not my home.