Crossing Streets in Cairo

The sun was setting when we rolled into Cairo. Talaat Harb Street teemed with people, entire families on foot, scooting between and among tiny cars in every state of disrepair. Lights glimmered through the dusky air—or was that the Cairo smog, a unique mix of dust from the desert only a few miles away and the exhaust of a million tired automobiles?

Men in djellabas glanced into our cab and leaned down and murmured, “Welcome to Egypt.” I was in love before we got to our hotel.

Fellow-journalist Ellen Davidson and I had decided to see Egypt before joining the Middle East Children’s Alliance delegation to Palestine(see “Lifta, Which Was His Home”). The Hotel Luna in downtown Cairo, where we had reserved a double room with bath for 110 Egyptian pounds (US$19) per night including breakfast, offered a free airport pickup service.

Countering our usual impulse to begin our visit on public transportation were the late hour and our intimidation at the idea of finding our way, jet-lagged and exhausted, through a subway system labeled in Arabic. So we had accepted the Luna’s offer and had been met at the airport. Air France had fed us several times on the long flight from New York to Cairo, and we were more tired than hungry. We settled into our room and went to sleep and got up the next morning ready to see Cairo.

That was when we learned about crossing the streets. Talaat Harb, which was now our home, turned out to be a Cairo rarity: an avenue of pedestrian-jammed, slow-moving traffic. One block away on either side of it, we found ourselves in very different territory: street after street of cars and buses, honking incessantly and whooshing by nonstop—nonstop even in the face of traffic lights, which appeared to be issuing advice rather than orders, nonstop even in the face of the occasional traffic police officer, who generally took care to keep well out of their path. We saw people crossing the street between onrushing cars and buses, but the prospect of trying it ourselves was terrifying. For half an hour or so, we wandered up and down Talaat Harb and the two parallel streets.

It was about 95°F in the sun, and there wasn’t much shade. At least half the women and children on the street had ice cream cones. Some women were covered and veiled from head to toe; a few wore bareheaded and in short skirts; most were modestly dressed, with or without head scarves. They didn’t speak to us, but many men, in djellabas or western clothes, said as they passed by, “Welcome to Egypt.” That was one of the only two English phrases we heard. The other became clear through the din of car horns and street sounds: Taxi drivers, slowing down as they drove by, honking at us, and calling out, “Cheap taxi to pyramids and Egyptian Museum!”

I was still in love, but it began to look as if I wouldn’t get to see much of my new beloved. At last, however, bored with Talaat Harb, we marched to the square at its end, Midan Al-Tahrir. Then we stood there, hopelessly waiting for a break in the traffic—

Until one of the djellaba-clad men grabbed my arm in one hand, Ellen’s in the other, and, dodging the cars and buses, pulled us across the street and deposited us on the other side. As he walked away, he said “Welcome to Egypt.”

We had learned to cross the street in Cairo.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Photo by Ellen Davidson

Brussels’ “Little Boy Who Pees”

I was born in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Later, I walked on London Bridge and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower. Then I decided I wanted to see Brussels’ icon: the Manneken Pis, a two-foot-tall statue of a little boy, naked (most of the time), taking what the British call a wee. What kind of world capital, I wondered, embraces a peeing little boy as its symbol?

There’s no question that the “little boy who pees” is Brussels’ most beloved emblem (thanks to the Belgian Tourism Office for the translation). From time to time, the city dresses him in fancy costumes, which are then kept in the municipal museum. All over town, arrows point to him as chief among the important sights. The chocolate shop next door (this is Belgium—there’s always a chocolate shop next door) is even named after him.

The bronze statue by Jerôme Duquesnoy has been standing at the corner of the rue de l’Estuve/Stoofstraat (as the capital of a two-language country, Brussels and all its signs are bilingual in Dutch and French) since 1619, when it replaced an earlier stone version. Its origins are lost in myth, but one story is that it represents a little boy who saved Brussels by urinating on the lit fuse of an attacking army’s bomb.

After a few days in Brussels and much wandering around narrow cobbled lanes and grand squares, I got at least an inkling of an answer: Brussels is the capital of a culture that cherishes more than grandeur the small details of daily life. Its signature dishes are frites—what we call french fries—and waffles, its most famous poet the cabaret singer Jacques Brel, its public art more likely to celebrate comic book characters and mayors than kings and conquests.

In that respect, Belgium is rather like the other Low Countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; think, for example, of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or most of the work of Vermeer. Yet that answer only begs another question: How did the Low Countries get that way?

There’s no scientific answer to that question. We can’t know for a fact what makes one culture law-abiding and another anarchic, what makes one give every guest enough food to choke an army, and another, right next door, serve exquisite miniatures.

Yet history gives pointers and suggestions. The Low Countries did share Europe’s propensity for conquests—there were the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo (the latter having been one of the most appalling instances of European empire-building). But the Low Countries’ history varied in some fundamental respects from that of their more grandiose neighbors, Britain and France. Britain was unconquered for centuries; France was defeated more than once but emerged each time as a proud nation.

In both, as feudalism metamorphosed into mercantilism during the Renaissance, and then into capitalism, the ancient aristocracies vied desperately for power and prestige with the new merchant and business classes. During that same crucial era, however, the Low Countries weren’t independent nations but possessions of the Hapsburgs—the Holy Roman emperors and Kings of Spain. The Netherlands didn’t achieve independence until 1648, and Belgium not until 1839. And at independence, neither had a home-grown ruling nobility or landowning class.

So when, with independence they threw themselves into the business of business, there was no genuine royal or landed class to fight the merchants—and no one to say that business was one whit less respectable than land ownership. Respectable it was—to invent, hustle, trade and profit—and respectable it remained. Today in Brussels, the main square, the famous Grande Place, is not the site of a palace, but the site of the city’s carefully preserved City Hall and 17th-century guild (trade association) halls.

The Manneken Pis is only a few meters away.

A final note: In a much more recent development—in 1985, to be exact—Brussels unveiled Jeanneke Pis, a statue of a little girl squatting to urinate, in an alley just across the Grande Place from the beloved little boy. No signs point to her location.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak