Cairo, in 1987, was officially supposed to have around 14 or 15 million people in it. According to the people who lived there, it had closer to 17 million people. I'd never seen so many people in one city before! I used to think New York City and Los Angeles had a lot of people, but I don't think it was anything near the population of Cairo, which is the capital city of Egypt. Most of the people there appeared to be crammed into large apartment buildings that were ten to fourteen floors high. The city's buildings were old looking and reminded me of places in Rome, Italy or Athens, Greece. Cairo, however, due to the sand blowing in from the surrounding desert, always had a layer of dust covering everything. There were no shiny cars or sparkling clean windows to be seen. The beauty of Cairo though, was not so much in the structure and appearance of buildings, but within the people themselves. Out of all the countries I've ever been to, the people of Egypt were the most caring and warmhearted of them all...
One of the most noticeable differences between New York City, or LA and Cairo, is the amount of crime. I don't have the actual statistics, but I've spent enough time in each one of the major cities to experience the difference. I used to go to New York on weekend passes from the army hospital in Pennsylvania and was always afraid of being mugged at night when I walked to my hotel. I learned that you always need to be careful there, especially when you are alone. The crime rate in LA seemed to be even worse than New York for the three months I was there in 1977. I found it quite interesting that in Cairo, a city of 17 million people, I could see no signs of criminal acts or hear any kind of distressful situations going on anywhere. I might have heard one or two sirens the whole time I was there. It became even more evident to me that there was such a difference in the rate of violence between Cairo and the larger cities in the States after accidentally getting myself into a couple of potentially dangerous situations in downtown Cairo.
To familiarize myself with Cairo in the evening hours, I took walks through the downtown streets a few times by myself. My traveling friend and I were both very set in our own ways and not on the same wave length with a number things. I preferred discovering things on my own without someone telling me what I was supposed to understand, and I could relax more by myself. The only problem was, I didn't speak Arabic, so I couldn't ask questions. I knew some Palestinian Arabic, but it was a little different than Egyptian and I probably wasn't even accurately pronouncing the words I did know very well. I wasn't accustomed to having the ideal situation anyway...
At ten or eleven at night, I could only find one or two restaurants that were open. When I came out of one of them, about ten thirty, everything else was shut down except the city market just around the corner. I'd been to the city market in downtown LA and to several other markets in the Mediterranean, but this one was excitingly different than the rest. After getting caught up in all of the exotic and delicious looking things for sale, and not noticing that the city streets had emptied themselves of people, I somehow managed to forget my way to back to my hotel. This was around eleven or twelve O'clock PM. The downtown streets all looked the same to me and I could find absolutely no one who spoke English. I couldn't hardly believe it. There were only one or two people walking the city streets of Cairo, and it wasn't even midnight! This time, and one other time in particular, that I'd gotten lost at night in Cairo, I contemplated either getting shot, knifed, or just hit over the head. My blond hair and blue eyes didn't make me feel any better about it, to say the least... The only breath of comfort I had was when I could see policemen walking in pairs along the sidewalks. They walked side by side, each with AK-47's slung over their shoulders. None of them however, knew any English whatsoever. I eventually ended up going into another hotel, thinking that it would be more likely that someone would speak English there than on the streets. Complicating things even more, I'd misplaced my hotel business card and couldn't remember the name of it. It was the 'Odien Hotel', a name I hadn't heard before and for some reason, couldn't seem to remember it. The hotel workers spoke a little English those two nights and were somehow able to direct me back to my hotel. It was as if I needed to have these two experiences, which were both late in the evening, for me realize that I was much safer in Cairo than I was in LA or New York, or in any other major city back in the States in the middle of the night...
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