Good Bye Tahrir - Hello Dokki!

Dust. It covers all of Cairo. My mom says, it comes from the desert and that it doesn't bother her as much as real dirt. Well, she visited Cairo a couple of years ago. And by all accounts so far, even during the last ten years only, the city has turned much worse. All I can say is: whether the dust comes from the desert or not is irrelevant. By the time you are confronted by it, it has sucked up the pollution of the city and meets you not in orange with a golden shine but in shades of grey, which makes it indistinguishable from regular dirt. Except, there is a lot more of it in this city than in other places I have been to... Recklessly it crawls everywhere and people don't care. Probably, they've just giving up trying to win a fight against the desert. (Who could win it?) But here I am with my European-colonial heritage claiming that one can actually do something about it by cleaning my room this whole day. Or perhaps this is another instance in which my germanness kicks in. Or I simply did not want to have trouble falling asleep a second night because of the dust in my pillow, my mattress, and everywhere for that matter. I hope, my sore throat, which I gained from that night, may thank me this night for cleaning my room!

My new room

Can you imagine rivers of back water coming from a grey curtain that was once white? Can you believe that stamping on a pillow in the bathtub for almost an hour, while it is soaked with water and soap, turns the exiting water from a darker into a lighter brown only? And while a friend of mine in New York told me to watch out for tears in my mattress (as this is where bedbugs live), my mattress here is torn beyond hope.

1 Midan Tahrir

What made me exchange my comfortable room in my hostel with the illustrious address "1 Tahrir Square" for this? Well, this feels more like a home nonetheless as I have some more private space. And I also hope to save some money by cooking for myself. Therefore, I had been checking out some apartments two days ago - and boy I hate that! Any time I look for a place to move in somewhere, there comes the point where I must remind myself to value the experience of seeing different places and meeting strangers in addition to seeing the difficulty of making a decision. This time, a friend from Berlin, who is living in Cairo, helped me. So, now I moved in a shared apartment with two Algerian Berbers in the district of "Dokki" (which the Egyptians pronounce "Do'i").

After my masochistic cleaning day, I needed a treat...