The Egyptian Way :: What I See

The Egyptian Way :: What I See

I take a bus to work at The American University in Cairo (AUC). It can take about 50 minutes w/o traffic or infinitely w/traffic; it's an awful toss up for the commute home.

But the variety of things that I see when I look out the window still amazes me. There are lots of unfinished housing developments as well as unfinished corporate office buildings.

There's always a lot of traffic. There are a variety of cars: old cars, foreign cars, small ones too along with the occasional abandoned vehicle. Trucks are plentiful: tractor trailers and flatbeds. Motorcycles, scooters and guys riding bikes w/a large try of bread on their heads and somehow managing to balance it all through heavy traffic. If there's a pick up truck, there's a good chance that it's filled w/men heading to/from work or it's full of goods.

Unfortunately, there are often drivers driving on the wrong side of the road; more unfortunate, sometimes I've been on a bus or two where our bus was driving on the wrong side of the road. Those bus drivers usually get an earful from the passengers and they probably get written up about the safety violation. With all of that traffic, or more pointedly, the cause of all of that traffic is the traffic police, who rarely manage to efficiently move traffic.

The people are quite interesting: men in suits and construction gear and galabayas. The vendors are out; people are at cafes sipping tea and having some shisha.

There are many billboards, most of them in Arabic, but just as slick as any billboard in the U.S.

Lucky for me there's always some sunshine! Whether it the sunshine in the morning or getting to see the sunset. It's a treat to see just like it's a treat to always see The Nile.

I could go on, but I've put together a Wordle on some of the things that I see on my commute to and from the AUC campus.