'YOW!'
I woke up clutching my foot and rolodexing my brain to figure out where I was and what just happened. Before long I settled on: Cairo, in bed, and chomped on by Zadeh in the middle of the night. By then she had vanished into the darkness and retribution seemed pointless. (It would only have been to grab her by the scruff and march her to her 'bucket'.) There's little consolation in knowing you've 'arrived' in the cat's estimation.
DINNER LAST NIGHT with Hatsuki and her beau Armando turned out quite pleasant. (Sorry, no photos.) The restaurant, Estoril, was not the one we thought and feared it would be. The fare was Egypto-Lebanese, which is to say Cockeyed Continental. Its local claim to fame is that it was where some scenes from "The Yacoubian Building" were filmed. Mind you, I haven't seen it myself so I couldn't say, but we do have the DVD (in PAL, but we'll figure that out eventually). Hatsuki is a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford working on a dissertation about the 'fan club' surrounding a now deceased charismatic Sufi sheikh from Cairo. Kiki and she met in a colloquial Egyptian language class last year and hit it off.
After dinner we picked up Kiki's favorite rice pudding-to-go and wandered to a pedestrian passage where we sat and had tea. Downtown Cairo was jumping in the cooler evening hours, a more laid back urban liveliness I hadn't experienced here until just then (and didn't know enough to realize I was missing it). There was a general hubbub, the sound of traffic and horns in the background, and the rolling of dice and the slapping of backgammon tiles more nearby.
AFTER A MILD HISSY FIT yesterday when I expressed disappointment at not doing much that was fun so far on this trip, we came up with the idea to visit the October War Panorama out in Heliopolis. You see it every trip you take to or from the airport: This building that looks like a hat box surrounded by planes, tanks and artillery. We had each harbored a desire to visit it but somehow had never mentioned it to the other.
Those Zionist Imperialist history buffs among you might know the 1973 October War as the Yom Kippur War. On the other hand, if everything you knew was based on a visit to the Panorama, as our guidebook points out, "you might almost think the Egyptians had actually won the October War."
"During President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak's visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [North Korea to you and me] in 1983," the back of our ticket tells us, "he agreed with the Korean President Kim Il Sung that Korean technicians would help construct a monument to honor the great October Victory, the heroic deeds of the Egyptian people and their brave sons of the Armed Forces."
Well, you can certainly see the Subtle Hand of the Great Leader and Eternal President in the style of presentation here. And a tour of the Egyptian armaments on the museum grounds reminds you that once upon a time it was the Russians supplying Egypt with all their hardware. The MiGs are really quite fascinating to behold. Across the center drive are a number of American- and British-made tanks captured by the Egyptians during the early hours of the war.
Once inside the rotunda boasts bas-relief murals illustrating great historical battles in Egypt, such as the battle to unite Upper and Lower Egypt. A large mosaic depicts the generals planning the assault on the Bar-Lev Line. The flags of all the branches of the armed forces and various cavalry battalions ring the circular hall. After a little while we were ushered into a side hall with theater seating facing a wide pale blue curtain. Audio headsets were fetched and tested for the English translation. The lights went down, the curtains parted, and we were treated to a black-light diorama of ... well, I couldn't exactly say what it was. Miniature radar screens whirled wobbly, tiny fighter planes periodically crossed the sky on their not-so-invisible wires, lights illuminated parts of the terrain, rockets rose en masse to the curtained rafters or descended to the ground ... all accompanied by martial music and stentorian narration. The English version was quite poetic, considering it described a military campaign.
That presentation over, we were led to the central core and up the curving staircase to the piece de resistance: A 360-degree near life-sized panorama of the battle scene with trompe l'oeil murals. We sat on an enormous turntable and slowly revolved around the tableaux. Once again the battle was rolled out for us (once again over our headsets). [For a video clip of the presentation -- uploaded sideways, unfortunately -- click here.] I have to admit that the mural painting was spectacular, in some cases surprisingly realistic. The foreground was strewn with the detritus of war -- spent shells (they looked a little like cigarette butts at first glance), the stray boot, a three-quarter sized tank in ruins. Any corpses were painted ones, on the backdrop. By now we probably could have passed a test on the events of the war. But we still had one more room to go.
In the last room another diorama, this one no longer used, was the floor for a projection screen on which was played newsreel footage and 'Hollywood' re-enactments of the first glorious days of the October War. Several scenes ran twice, and I noticed one ran three times, all to support more stirring accounts of the battle. I could see in the footage the source material for some of the panorama depictions.
But this was about as much as we truly needed to see, so after leaving the museum grounds we caught a cab to the City Stars Mall to grab a bite to eat and maybe do a little stray shopping.
October 2003
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