Desert toes

In Cairo, there’s an overcrowded area called Khan el Khalil. There I was, wet, smelly and limping on what may have been a broken toe.

My high school was big on SATs. There were posters and flyers, lectures and awareness campaigns, and even free biscuits at one point. Classrooms were converted into think-tanks, hallways into math galleries, and teachers pushed vocabulary flash cards on us like crack dealers in a loft party.

I hated the damn cards. Some words were so obscure that you’d only ever see them in the SATs, and others so nauseously simple that they were a waste of ink, cardboard and Euclidean space.

‘I mean, seriously, ‘overcrowded’? And you have the audacity to flash me with that, Karl?’

‘See, it’s working already. I flashed you ‘audacity’ just a few slides ago.’

I was kind of hoping she’d flash me. In a classroom of underdeveloped women this study-buddy had enough curves to make my head spin, amongst other things, and I – being the penultimate example of suave – had offered to help with her SAT preps in hopes of, umm, biscuits I guess.

‘Can we skip this one please?’

‘I assume you know what ‘overcrowded’ means then?’

In retrospect, it was perhaps the insult to her intelligence that denied me my biscuits.

‘Everyone knows what ‘overcrowded’ means, Karl!’

No. No they don’t.  Snap back to the Khan; the man who ran over my toe was standing in front of me, apologizing. I was quietly explaining that pushing a 400 kilogram, two-meter wide cart through a two-meter wide street full of people did not qualify as practical transportation. Somewhere between my short physics lesson and the reference to his sister, another equally bright transportation engineer ran into my back – because stacking ten layers of bags on a tiny cart may actually hinder your vision.  I turned around to extend my gratitude, and inquire about his mother’s health and his daughter’s sex life, but before I opened my mouth a Russian lady’s breasts stuffed themselves into my face. A crowd immediately formed behind her while a would-be thief desperately tried to untangle himself from her purse, and her over-sized husband. No one had an inch to move in.

But logistics are frowned upon in Cairo; people don’t in fact stop walking when they hit an obstacle, they merely redirect – I had this little electronic car back in school that did something similar.

I tried to help, but an unending stream of pedestrians that were incredibly interested in something somewhere behind me kept pushing me back in waves.

The woman had fallen on me, her husband had disappeared beneath the stampede, and in the corner of my vision a man with an overwhelming – and surely contagious – skin disease made his way towards me with the utmost confidence. A few moments later I felt something sticking out of the toe-breaking cart push into an area that no-thing should push in.

Right, that was it.

I blanked out for a few moments, and by the time I came to I had a nice, comfortable space around me. The crowd was quiet, the husband triumphant, the diseased man on the floor and the Russian lady stared at me in cold horror. My brother shoved through the crowd and pulled me away by the hand.

‘Are you back from cuckoo-land?’ he asked, as he satisfied the policemen’s curiosity with a bit of local currency.

‘Not entirely. Please take me back to the hotel; it’s overcrowded here.’

‘Gladly princess; and you owe me about a hundred dollars, with commission.’