First day in Cairo

My camera played up on my first day in Cairo, so the only photo I can show you from that day is this unsteady shot of St Barbara's church in the Coptic quarter.


After a few hours in Cairo, I needed to sit quietly in a peaceful medieval church. Occasional tour groups somewhat dispelled the atmosphere, though it was worth it to hear one tour guide, explaining a frieze of Jesus' miracles to Japanese tourists, refer to the "super powers of Jesus".

Having just spent six of the most wonderful days of my life travelling in Egypt, I feel authorised to pontificate on the key to successful holiday travel, which is to plan to do not too much. For my first day in Cairo, my only other goal, besides the Coptic quarter, was to visit the Egyptian Museum.

Even that was a bit too much for one day. It's a spectacularly cluttered museum, so crammed with treasures that much of it gets pushed into dusty side compartments - I wandered into one of these accidentally, enjoying the sense of antiquities so common as to be put aside and forgotten, until I ran into staff working on computers and realised I wasn't supposed to be where I was.

I should have left after a couple of hours, while my taste was still sharp, but in such an important museum there's always some important piece remembered from art classes waiting in the next gallery, and one more gallery won't hurt. The extravagance of Tutankhamun's burial treasures are a glittering blur. At least I found the Amarna room early. Akhenaton's strange smile, literally so far above the small matters of humans, will stay with me a long time. There are four near-identical colossi of him in the Amarna room, but in one of them the conventional serene smile has a strange grim twist in the corners, and that's the one I remember.

The average photo in art books does these colossi no justice. Certainly, to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see it as the average photo shows you, full-face and properly lit. But to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see Akhenaton gazing far over your head, his stone mind on eternal matters, smiling at his thoughts.

The other event of note on my first day in Cairo was that I did probably the most dangerous thing I've ever done, which was to cross the Corniche El-Nil on foot at peak hour as I walked into town from the Coptic district. Locals do this at a walking pace, somehow; I did the split-second tourist dash. Most of my travels around Cairo that day were actually done on the metro, which was cheap, trouble-free and no dirtier than the Paris metro. Each subway train has a couple of carriages designated for women only. I thought I'd be respectfully dressed in my ankle-length skirt and modest blouse, but I kept finding myself with the only bare arms on the carriage. Headscarves are near-universal. Trousers are fine, glitter and jewellery is plainly expected, and even figure-hugging tops are acceptable, but the only skin to be shown is face and hands.

More of this tomorrow. By the time I'm finished posting about Egypt, it'll be clear why it has taken so long to get around to it.