On being an attraction at the zoo

4/29
Ginny, my friend who went to the Jerusalem Center spring term of last year, and I decided to go to the zoo today. We have a lot more freedom and free time in Egypt with the Arabic program than we ever had with the JC, and we decided to take advantage of it by slumming in a place where not much English would be spoken.

Ginny had a friend who was visiting Cairo and wanted to meet up with us at the zoo, so we called her from a pay phone and told her to meet us at the entrance of the zoo, thinking that we would wait for her at the entrance of the zoo and then walk around together (she doesn’t speak any Arabic—this becomes important later).

After waiting for about two minutes sitting on a bench inside the gate, an Arab family walked up to us and asked if they could take a picture of us with their baby daughter (she was probably one and a half). This is becoming more and more common and acceptable to me—families will be walking around, see some strange foreign girls, and give us their baby daughter and take a picture! Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough to ask them to take one with my camera also (I have gotten better at this!).

After waiting for another twenty minutes or so, we walked up to the entrance and asked the guards if they had seen another American standing around, because we said we would meet her at the gate. Laughing, they told us that there were four gates—one on each side of the zoo! We laughed too, even though we didn’t think it was funny!

This was turning out to be a big problem. We left instructions with the guards at the gate that if they saw an American girl, to tell her to wait and we would come back for her. Since the guards spoke no English and she spoke no Arabic, we taught the guards three words to say to her—“Two” “friends” “here”.

We started walking around the zoo to find the other gates, and quickly realized that instead of watching the hippos, lions, flamingos, etc, the people were watching us. I joked to Ginny that we were the main attraction and we should start asking people for baqshish (more on that later). All jokes aside, everyone turned to stare at us as we walked past, from the groups of leering shabab (young men who do nothing but stand around in big groups and stare at people) to small children who would run up to us and either say the three English words they knew or speak to us rapidly in Arabic (and be shocked when we responded) to the young couples and mixed gender groups, where the men would try to impress the women by saying something clever to us in English, like “How are you” or “Where you from” (the girls were always incredibly impressed, of course).

After finally getting ahold of Ginny’s friend (by using a guard’s cell phone twice and also a random woman’s phone at the gate of the zoo), we realized that she would be about twenty more minutes so we decided to walk around the zoo (and actually look at the animals—after we had walked back and forth between the two main gates about four or five times, seeing the same people each time, some caretaker finally asked us what we were doing, walking back and forth on the sidewalk! I wondered if they would believe us if we told them we were exercising…).

The zoo in Cairo used to be one of the biggest zoos in the world, so I hear, but it has kind of fallen into a bit of, shall we say, disrepair. If you are an animal rights activist you probably should stop reading right now.

The first place we stopped at had nothing other than cats in cages—not lions and tigers, but housecats, like Siamese and others. A “guard” waved us back into a “special” place where we could see the cats from the back and touch them, and then he took us to an even more special place, where a cage was hidden under a blanket. He dramatically lifted the blanket, opened the cage, and took out…a dirty white house cat! It was one of the most anti-climactic things I have ever experienced. Then, he allowed us to hold the cat, and of course we acted as though we were incredibly privileged. Then, we paid him off and left.

The price to get into the zoo is only one Egyptian pound (there are a little more than five pounds in a dollar) but if you want to do “special” things you have to have more money—how much depends on how good you are at arguing prices. “Tipping” in Cairo is called baqshish, and everyone in the touristy areas demands it for little favors they do for you. Since we were obviously foreign visiting Cairo, we were obviously rich, so we got a lot of offers for personal “guides” (who take you to all the “special” places—but they are lame, because then you have to pay both them and the guard when you get your “special” privileges) but we refused them all. After our experience with the cat, we realized that we were only going to pay for really special privileges, since we had both paid the guard a pound to hold the cat (way too much).

Throughout the day, we got to feed monkeys and an elephant for cheap and see things like flamingos, hippos, and other zoo creatures. The best part though? Holding a lion. As we were walking past the lion cages, a “guide” called out to us and asked us if we wanted to see the lions. We agreed, and he took us into this “special” room where a large lion was sitting in a cage, about five feet away from us. The guard took us right up to the lion where we all posed for pictures holding his mane.

These animals in the “special” places were most likely heavily drugged and heavily beaten because they seemed almost tame—or drunk. Anyway, the didn’t do anything except sit there as we grabbed their manes and put our faces next to them (see the look of terror on my face?).

There, we each paid five pounds for the “privilege” of touching the lion, and as we walked out of the cage we saw an Arab family there, waiting to go into the cage also. Next we went to another cage where they actually let the “baby” (seven months old) lion out of the cage. I was terrified—I am not sure if it is apparent!

After the lion was safely back in its cage, we got in an argument with the guards about how much we should pay them. They told me that since no one was in there and it was so special, we should pay them a lot more than the ten pounds a person I was going to give them. They told me, “At the circus they have to pay 100 pounds for a picture—and you got to hold the lions!” “Are we at the circus?” I wanted to ask them, but finally gave in and paid them both 15 pounds (still much less than they wanted, but I guess I argued well enough by telling them it wasn’t as special as they were pretending).

All in all, we each spent only a couple of dollars to do all of those “special” things!