How to describe Cairo? It is a truly fascinating place.
The first thing that might strike a visitor is probably the heat. Over 100 every day since we got here (convert to Celsius, I don't have the brainpower)...it drains you.
You have to constantly fight to stay hydrated and to keep your kids moving so they don't melt into little puddles on the sidewalk.
Next would be the overall look of the place. If you are a fan of Star Wars it is visually reminiscent of Tatooine, Anakin and Luke Skywalker's home planet. Everything in shades of brown to off-white. Understandable for a hot desert climate.
Harder to understand is the overall initial impression of untidiness, even filth, that the place makes on you. Assaulting your skin with pollution and dust, your sense of smell with the aroma of woodsmoke or perhaps even dirtier things burning...your eyes with the piles of trash and rubble and crumbled rock everywhere.
And assaulting every sense including your own of decorum and order... the flies. Like Mexico City, the undeniable sense of vitality underlying it all, the millions of people each making their own individual way, somehow scraping out a living...unlike Mexico City, not amidst islands of green or the not infrequent splash of wealth.
Yes, the occasional 2-seater Mercedes but far more often the Donkey-powered cart or the horse-powered trash truck.
The writing everywhere that you cannot at this point hope to comprehend, a cursive language in a thousand different fonts and variations, the letters read from right to left, the numbers from left to right.
The people...so many, men with dark blemishes on their foreheads, permanent, pigmented, from hundreds of thousands of separate instances of placing their head on a mat to Mecca, to Allah. 5 times a day, every day, without fail.
An initial sketch