And that is the grotesque. In the streets, in the houses, on any and all occasions, there is a merry proliferation of beatings right and left. Sitting on my bench, paging through Flaubert's memoirs, I take in the sights of Orabi Square. Around me, a brown smog hangs low over the buildings as Egyptians in jeans, dresses or djellaba robes crowd the sidewalks. Children wrestle with each other at curbside, and round-faced Berber women sell tissues on the corner.
Idle businessmen haunt the teahouses to smoke their sheesha water pipes and play dominoes.
Out in the street, stalled taxis blast their horns uselessly. From what I can see, Cairo is noisy, crowded, chaotic and friendly, but by no means grotesque in Flaubert's sense of the word. If first impressions mean anything, I would have to conclude that this city has tamed a bit in the past 150 years. But then, I've only been here for an hour. There, he was waited upon at dinner by a team of silk-jacketed Nubians, one of whom had the sole assignment of waving away flies with a feather duster.