Sometimes I'm Really Just Pretty Dumb

Today wasn't exactly one of my better days here in Cairo - in fact, I'd put it down at the bottom. I woke up this morning planning to meet up with Mahmoud, my AUC fencing instructor, to do some extra practice. He teaches on the side at a small school in Maadhi (a suburb of Cairo a relatively small number of stops from Zamalek), which is where I was going to meet him. So I woke up early, showered, got myself together, and went to reach for my jacket and head out, only to realize it wasn't there. A quick search though my relatively small amount of stuff showed that it in fact was not in the room at all. I realized then that I had left it downstairs in the main floor lounge the night before. I should clarify: I left my jacket downstairs in the relatively unsecured, accessible main floor lounge the night before. I hurried downstairs and looked over to where I had been sitting. No jacket. I walked over to the main desk and asked them about missing items. No jacket, but they told me to talk to security across the hall. I went over there and, thankfully, saw my jacket - the officer in the room was looking though it to find some kind of ID (from what I can tell, anyway). I also recovered a bag of school supplies I had purchased and left with the jacket. A quick check of my pockets, however, showed that all was not well after all. The officer had found my ID and a few pencils, but my camera, which had been sitting in the right coat pocket, was quite gone. As far as I can tell, someone pilfered it during the night or early morning, leaving everything else behind.

I feel like an incredible idiot right now just thinking about it - I get so mad (mostly at myself) I'm almost sick. Every other day I've been here I've put my jacket on the back of my chair after getting in the room, and then picked it up again in the morning. I've never had a problem remembering it before, and I always check to make sure I have everything before leaving the room and so on. Even worse, I actually knew I had left the bag of school supplies downstairs the night before, but hadn't bothered to get it because I was lazy and it wasn't anything particularly important. I resolved to grab it in the morning and left it at that. Never once did it occur to me to check and see what else I may have left, nor did the thought that someone might steal something even cross my mind (though in my defense, if I had realized my jacket was also downstairs, I would have gone down for it immediately. The school supplies weren't anything I was going to miss). I feel incredibly naive and generally like a stupid tourist who has no business being in a country he clearly can't handle. Worse still, along with the camera, I lost all of my pictures for this week. About the only "good" thing was that I didn't have more in my jacket - I had put down things like my MP3 player in the room before going out with friends the night before.

The rest of the day kind of felt like adding insult to injury. The fencing practice I was going to, that theoretically started at 11:00, didn't end up starting until 12:30/1:00 pm because Mahmoud slept through his alarm and so thus took a long time getting down to Maadhi. Fencing practice itself was rewarding (a few good saber bouts in particular, which I lost but definitely enjoyed), but that was one of only a few bright spots in the day. Of course, it doesn't help that the entire day kind of feels tainted by my fantastic and utterly idiotic ability to piss hundreds of dollars down the drain (along with one of my favorite christmas presents) due to my own lack of care; I know I wouldn't have been bugged by the late start time otherwise.

After fencing, I met my friends Clark and Michael in Coptic Cairo. Clark had invited us to come to dinner with him and a shopowner named Tariq whom he had met the week before. Tariq was a nice enough guy (though definitely laying it on thick with the praise and whatnot), and we enjoyed a decent lunch/dinner, tea, beer, shisha (water pipes, on of which was filled with "ubbly bubbly" - weed - rather than tobacco - I stayed away from that one) and such for several hours. Though somewhat awkward due to linguistic difficulty (Tariq's english was decent, if broken, while our Arabic is atrocious), it was on the whole a decent experience, up until the point at which we had to buy things. I was expecting to "have" to buy something as it was (Tariq's hospitality, while generous, was definitely also a commercial enterprise), but what I was not expecting was the degree to which he totally screwed us over. Its a little hard to describe here, but he managed to basically place us in a position where we were unable to bargain with him to really any degree at all, nor were we able to in any meaningful way control the transaction taking place before us. We basically got forced into buying crocodile skin belts (which are pretty nice, if not what I'd actually normally spend money on) for 55 US dollars each (which is about 5 times more than we should have paid), and that represented a victory for us, in that we avoided buying "authentic antique" short swords for 140 US dollars each. Basically, I spent 300+ Egyptian Pounds in a day, whereas for the entire first two weeks I spent approximately 500. Neither Michael nor I were particularly pleased with this experience (Clark got off the hook since he bought something the week before, though hadn't bothered to warn us about Tariq's bargaining strategy or the price we were likely to pay). He did make it up to us by buying us some drinks that evening, though. I had a beer and a something or other - orange juice and vodka - a twister(?).

In retrospect, after this particularly painful experience I think I have a much better idea of how to handle bargaining situations in the future. A lot of the storeowners here like to be very friendly and lavish you with their displays of hospitality before getting down to business. In this way, they first force you to buy something (because you feel obligated to reciprocate for their hospitality) and also handicap you in bargaining by co-opting all of the standard approaches to challenging a quoted price. They start by telling you how much they like you and how you are like a sibling to them, and how the price they are giving you is like what they would give to family, and how they know you are a college student and so can't afford to spend a lot (which is why they give you this special, so special price!), and they make you promise not to give the item as a gift but to keep it for yourself, because they like you and want you to have something from them, and so on. These lines, of course, make it much more difficult to counter-bargain, as many of the easiest lines to use have already been pre-empted. You can't very well claim you are a poor college student and deserve a discount if he's already accounted for that in the initial price offering. Of course, I knew that we were being given a raw deal right from the beginning, but couldn't figure out how to turn the tables. I know Michael and I were particularly concerned about coming across as rude or otherwise offending our hosts. Now that I've seen some of the lines and know what to expect, and I think in the future I'll be less susceptible to such worries, as I think most people have thicker skin than they pretend to have in negotiation.

One bright note to our Coptic Cairo trip was that I met a guy named Mina who works at Tariq's shop who is about our age. I think he felt sorry for us since we got railroaded by Tariq, and I know his opinion of his boss is not that great. He was a very nice guy (the first Coptic Christian I've met). He invited us to play football (soccer for those of you still in America) and generally hang out with some of his friends in the future. I think we may take him up on his offer sometime; hanging out with people our age would I think be better than with shop owners, both because they would be our peers and so uncolored by the power imbalance that so obviously permeated the shop, and also because no elaborate unwritten purchase requirements would be invovled.

So, basically, today was a lot of little good things coupled to a few really bad things. I'm still pretty bitter about the camera but when I'm not thinking about it its easier to handle. The lessons learned (beware of shopkeepers with wide smiles, quit being a naive idiot about security and personal property) were good, if a lot more painful than I'd like. Here's hoping I don't have to learn them again.