Cairo introduction

Hello friends, and greetings from Cairo!

How are you all? Have you had a good week? I've been having an unusual one, having finally got the chance to explore the capital. In many ways it's so different from the rest of the country.

I arrived here on Saturday night, after my final week in Assiut. The boys' dormitory was pretty quiet without all of my friends from the summer school (most of them left for their homelands a few days ago), but we did have one final adventure together. We had walked around most of the city during our time here, the area behind our hostel was full of residential side-streets that we hadn't traversed, and four of us (H, M, S and me) decided to see what was there. After choosing progressively narrower and narrower roads until we were walking down small alleyways, we suddenly stumbled across this wonderful street bazaar. It was typically Arabian, with all manner of wares sold in tiny stalls packed tightly together, the high-pitched cries of the merchants and the lovely smell of fresh coffee and spices. It seemed to be the first time the traders had seen foreigners in the bazaar, and everywhere we were greeted with warm smiles and hails of 'Welcome in Assiut' or 'China? Korea? Indonesia? Where are you from?'. It was such an unexpectedly great place and we were just thinking of what to buy as souvenirs of the trip when out of nowhere around fifty little street kids, all aged between five and ten years started following us and shouting to each other excitedly. My features are similar to those of many Egyptians so I was mostly ignored as a funny dressing native, but the children were transfixed by H, M and Sas (H is originally from Hong Kong, M is French-Canadian and S is Dutch). My Arabic is terrible but I think they were saying 'Hey, look at those strange looking people. Have you ever seen anything like it? I dare you to talk you them.' So they did, and asked us all our names. Once they found that out and none of them could think of any other questions they could ask in English, they decided to touch us, staying by our side as we tried to get past them. It was all very innocent, but then things started to get a bit hairy. H and I were standing just behind the girls and attempting to stop the kids from harassing them, but the noise they created attracted some older boys, and they ran at us from the sides, got in-between us and started pushing and prodding the girls. A few even tried to pinch their bottoms, and H and I had to literally ram our way to the front and run out of there with them. Not very nice. Not nice at all.

That said though, most of the people in Assiut, not least all the ASSA students who looked after and befriended us, are so nice I was sad to leave the city. On my final night there we went to one of the Egyptian student's sister's wedding, and after lots of singing and dancing attended one more morning of training at the hospital before packing my bags and heading for Cairo.

The train journey took five hours and was a really good chance to see daily life by the Nile (on the way to Assiut last month we took a night-train). I also got talking to my neighbour, and now I've more than doubled my Italian vocabulary. He was an Egyptian businessman who had spent some time in Italy and so could speak some of that language, but no English. Youssef proceeded to tell me all about his former life there in Italian, whilst I would look confused but try to string some kind of response in French. Cue much fun and some very bemused expressions on both sides.

Cairo itself is a great city. It's home to around eighteen million people and the area around the main railway station, Mahattat Ramses, is the major crossroads. I arrived in the middle of the rush-hour (which usually lasts from seven in the morning till ten at night), and it was like downtown New York on speed. Every which way you looked there were cars, bicycles, cats and the odd donkey, and accompanied by a Cairene it still took two minutes to cross the road. The second summer school I was to attend didn't begin until the following morning and the Students' Scientific Society (SSS) of Kasr Al-Ainy, the coordinators of the program, put us up for the night in a different hotel to the one we would be staying at for the rest of the training period. This was in the heart of downtown but a bit further from the hospital, and the next morning we decided to take the metro there. It was the first time I had walked in the city during the daytime, and it was intense. The thing that caught my eye most though was this old Egyptian guy with a typically traditional appearance (sun-drenched face, small moustache, rotten teeth) except that he was wearing a pristine white t-shirt with the words 'Support British Farming' emblazoned in big letters on the back. I still don't know what I'll leave behind if I end with more than twenty kilos.

Riding the metro from one of the major hubs of the city to another in the middle of the morning rush is weird. The trains are generally fast, clean and efficient, but they are even more packed than the most crushing London Underground carriages. As soon as a train stops at a station people pour in to the carriages, regardless of the commuters that have to get off. But this means that half of them have to return to the platform again as people shout that this is their stop, and because the driver only waits at each station for a few seconds, heedless of whether or not passengers are still getting on, lots of the metrogoers end up back where they started. So some streetwise users of the train use a different approach. They stand towards the back, around four metres from the carriages, and just before the signal is given for the doors to close they run at them at full speed, suitcases in hand, leaping off the edge of the platform like Olympic long jumpers. Their momentum carries them safely into the carriages regardless of how full they are, though some orthopaedic surgeons might be a bit busier than they should do.

The hospital itself is pretty different from Assiut University's. It's easy to see that the institution has far more money - there are no patients lining the stairs and the wards themselves are much wider and better equipped - and there is the buzz of working in a busy teaching hospital. We were met on the first day by the assistant head of the tropical medicine department, a really nice man who outlined our training schedule and gave us a quick tour of the faculty of internal medicine. Unfortunately the program is different to the one most of us envisaged as the incidence of tropical diseases in the capital is low, and we will spend more time in the gastroenterology and hepatology departments. It's a pity, but the doctors seem eager to teach, and what with grand rounds and journal club meetings to attend, we should learn lots. Oh yeah, and the wards here are much cooler. That's fantastic for us, but even better for the patients - they don't really believe in giving people intravenous drips here unless it's absolutely necessary, but half the patients end up being quite badly fluid depleted most of the time.

The evenings during the training period are set aside for the social program organised by the SSS committee, but it's a lot less packed than Assiut's. This being a much bigger and varied city they want us to explore it ourselves instead of having to be shown all the sights, which is fair enough. So all of us in the exchange and summer school programs have been roaming the area together, and have so far walked through the downtown, Islamic and Coptic regions. And as long as we don't get run over or go broke (Cairo is way more expensive than anywhere else I've visited in the country) we'll head over to the Khan El-Khalili bazaar the day after tomorrow to get all of our souvenir shopping done. So let me know what I can get you.

That's all for now.
Moc