Experience #2 - Geoff Norman

Travelling in Egypt: An attempt to communicate
(It isn’t simply a place; it is, itself, an experience.)

Curator’s Statement:

Three years ago, I, haphazardly, took a spring break trip with my very long time friend, Jack Foley, from Florence, Italy to Egypt. Not just Cairo, or Alexandria, but Egypt, and even now, 3 years later, I can’t simply adjust to separating the experience into smaller, more communicable parts. While I am able to make sense of Florence, where we were studying abroad for 3 months, and differentiate it from Rome, Carravagio, Capri, Napoli, or Cinque Terre, I can’t look back on Egypt as anything else except a single, ineffable experience.

I went from this,



to this,



and as stereotypical and cheesy as the last picture seems to be, there is no easy way to explain the incredible, profoundly serious difference that it has had in my life.

This might have been because, unlike in Italy, Jack and I had no real idea, plan, or expectation of what our experience in Egypt would be like. Instead of coordinators and well thought out travel plans, we only had our amazing friend Katherine Grant to burden, who had been studying at the American University in Cairo, along with a very thoughtful and life-saving suggestion from her to purchase a copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Egypt. There is nothing better that you can buy for 17 euro than this book when going on a trip like ours. Keeping this in mind, Katherine was the only person that could have guided us through this maze of history, building and twisting into itself, while keeping us from being taken advantage of (or rather do her best) and stay sane. However, she did feel like she was keeping us insulated from the rest of what could be found in Egypt, so she took us with her to Alexandria, on a field trip to some of the oldest pyramids in Saqqara, on a camel ride to those in Giza, and of course, the historic sites of Cairo.

Here is just a taste of Egypt, in the market of Khan el-Khalili in the Islamic District of Cairo.
To preface the video, however, I will ask for your forgiveness in the uncontrollable shakiness of the camera. I was trying hard to be anymore conspicuous than I was already by taking pictures, and I held my camera as if I couldn’t decide on what to capture or even stop for a second to take a picture. This whole time, I was recording this video as I was walking, and thus it mostly follows my body and head movements, as we make our way through one of the busier parts outside of one of the oldest mosques in Cairo. While incredibly hard to follow, the video does convey a real visceral sense of what it is like to be there in the middle of this teeming, 24 hour marketplace without any clue or idea of where one actually is and being unable to separate one moment from the next. Subversive, documentary, annoying, respectful, violating, raw and unfiltered, expressive, or useful and pragmatic? I’m sure you will have your own opinion.

Feel free to ponder over these points of curiosity that I have posted on the video’s main page:
How many times or places can you find self appointed President for life, Muhammad Hosni Mubarak?

Where in the heck did that street vendor come from in the second half of the video, who talks to Jack?

What is Katherine talking about as we make our way through the crowd?

What is modern, and what is ancient?

What clothing is traditional and what is distinctly western?

What mosque is that on the left?

What Instrument is that that plays after the picture of Mubarak?

Khan el-Khalili Part 2 from Geoff Norman on Vimeo.

Jack and I explored on our own, with much encouragement from Katherine and even more reluctance on my part, and we made our way to the “City of the Dead “ in Cairo and the historic center of Islamic Cairo. I took far too many pictures, (about 10,000 pictures over our “spring break”) with much embarrassment from Jack. It is breathtaking to look back on the fact that we stood in some of the oldest mosques in Africa, saw the oldest (or second oldest) university in the world, and we saw some of Cairo’s poorest surviving in the mausoleum apartments, burning trash to make a living…

We saw cats everywhere, heard them making more cats while we were tried to sleep (or eating each other; it sounds about the same), and saw them lying dead in the streets being eaten by stray dogs or other animals. We heard the call to prayer throughout the city every day, and I soon became used to the haunting and still comforting voices and songs that floated along the air currents of the city, causing many to stop what they were doing and pray on public mats in the streets or sidewalk corners, and caused others to say a small prayer while they went back to work, saving worship for later or shunning it all together. I got terribly sick, halfway through the week, whereupon my sinus infection in Italy replaced itself with a wheezing and racking, feverish cough. Making it worse, I was unable to escape the gray, dusty, cloudy, polluted air that you could taste, crunching in your mouth, between your teeth, indoors and everywhere throughout the city. We tried to go see the weekly sufi dancing in the park on the outskirts of the city, only to find out that it was in another park, which then led us to find that it was back where we came from, and eventually we were lead to find out it was on a completely separate day; Katherine berated herself for underestimating Egypt and was reminded, apparently, that one needs a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C, and so on until you run out of letters in your own language and you have to use another’s. We couldn’t touch ANYTHING without fear of catching some disease, such as tuberculosis, and we had to shower (which was really a “hot” water faucet tap over a raised square of tile and floor…standard student living and it kind of reminded me of Italy) without swallowing any water since the tap water alone could give us dysentery, or at least the runs. Cars pile on cars and the crosswalks and lane markers are only there for the tourists; crossing the street is an art form, as was shown to us by a little old lady who pulled up her burka, ran across oncoming traffic, stared down a bus, and weaved her way through slow and fast moving vehicles. Jack got hit by a car, instead, halfway through our trip. Not hard, but enough to get the message across that every moment we spent walking in the roads was borrowed time. The country itself is a nation state, built on top of Islamic resurgence, on top of British Imperialism, atop French colonialism, atop Ottoman rule, on top of Muslim conquest, in Christian independence, over Roman domination, Greek insinuations, and finally, the original, ancient Egyptian civilization, giving it a story that can be shared with the world, and making it unique unto itself. I am still afraid that I could possibly have TB, and I am incredibly jealous of my friend who got to study there, in spite of the bombings at Khan el-Khalili that took place not two years before our time there…

And I loved every second of it.
Blisters, pains, sickness, threats and all, it was worth the time well spent.

Spending just one week here felt like I had crammed a year’s experience into a single, breathing moment, and I only have a few memories, too few photographs of myself, and not enough time to be able to relive and communicate this incredible experience, travelling in a world at the beginnings of humanity’s dash to the present.

Before reading the poem below, please press play on the “audio” clip shown here, and listen to it while reading

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

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Thank you for coming along with me on these little adventures (as verbose they may be...), and I hope you will find the will to have as many and more traveling experiences of your own.
Happy travelling!