Finding Silence in Cairo, Egypt

A decade ago, I was sitting in the 6th-floor apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania. The apartment was in an old soviet ugly grey building area. However, inside of it it was cozy. Windows were overlooking a park with tall pines and a river flowing under them. The day was grey and cloudy. A gentle mist was raising up from the river. In that apartment I met a friend of a friend and we were drinking tea on a sofa. A flute was playing in the background and I think we talked about traveling. We agreed that the atmosphere reminded of Cairo. I hadn’t had been there yet then. “You know, you can travel to anywhere you want by not going anywhere. This is Cairo now.” It was so relaxed, mystical, and calm.

The real Cairo that I landed into was a river of noise and cars that were stuck in traffic and beeping beeping beeping. The hotel, I stayed in, was one of the tallest buildings on the shores of the Nile. There was a constant fog and smog above the city. My hotel rooms were on 29th and later on, the 26th floor. Changing rooms three times didn’t help to escape neither the noise, nor the cloud that swallowed the hotel and smelled like exhaust gases from vehicles. The building site nearby added loads of dust and forging sounds of metal.

The ground was even more tricky to navigate. The river of cars didn’t stop ever and crossing the street required getting into it. In a way, to become a driver of your body and act as if you are one of the cars. Being ultimately in that exact moment and seeing 180 degrees around you. Moving fast, seeing every millisecond of the possible gap in between the cars and acting without delay as the next opportunity might come in a while.

One of the last days, I went for a walk into the old town and walked down the streets of the local market. As expected, there were a lot of “Hello, welcome, where are you from, come see my shop”. After a while and thousand “no, thank you”, I appeared to be walking in a muddy part of the street. I naturally had to watch were I am going and lowered my head down. Suddenly, I became invisible to the sellers. I became a part of the noisy market human river that was flowing in between the tables of things. It felt as if suddenly everything became peaceful. Like finding some secret underground passage that takes you unseen through the streets of Cairo.

The next morning I was drinking coffee with a view from the 29th-floor window, overlooking a never-ending mostly falling apart city with a river flowing in between and a mist raising from another river of cars. Soft music was playing in the background.

There it was, my Cairo.