Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa by Michael J. Totten Page B

yourself?” I said.
    “I’ve been traveling alone for four months. I started in India and I’m working my way to Spain.”
    “Did you go through Iran?” I said. I wanted to go to Iran but doubted they’d give me a visa. The regime didn’t like my job or my passport.
    “I can’t go there,” she said.
    “They’re blocking Australians, too, eh?”
    “Well, not exactly. What I mean is I can’t go there.” I figured she must have been to Israel and that the Iranians wouldn’t let her in if she had the Zionist Entity stamp in her passport.
    She whispered, “I work for the Department of Defense.”
    It’s a good idea to whisper that sort of thing in the Middle East. Conspiracy theories are out of control, especially in Egypt.
    If she and I had some privacy, I would have asked about her job. But I couldn’t expect her to tell me anything interesting where others could hear. Australia didn’t have sinister designs on Egypt, but neither did the United States. That didn’t stop Egyptians from hatching dark, elaborate fantasies.
    The waiter brought my pasta. It was so undercooked I could barely eat it. I should have sent it back, but I didn’t want to be difficult. He, like many Egyptian waiters, was so embarrassingly friendly and charming, I didn’t have the heart to complain.
    “What’s it like traveling by yourself in Egypt?” I asked her.
    “Difficult,” she said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
    “Is it difficult because you’re a woman?”
    “This is the absolute worst place for a woman to travel alone,” she said. “Men harass me constantly. They hiss, stare and make kissy noises.”
    “A Syrian friend told my wife if she ever goes there to carry a spare shoe in her purse. If any man gives her trouble and she whacks him with the bottom of the shoe, a mob will chase him down.”
    She laughed. “Syria is wonderful. I mean, it’s much more oppressive than Egypt. But it’s also more modern. No man ever bothered me there. No men bothered me in Lebanon, either. I was surprised. Lebanese and Syrian men are more respectful even than European men. The worst part is that Egyptian men won’t back down when I tell them to leave me alone.”
    I remembered Cairo’s subway, how the first car in the train was only for women.
    “I’m having the time of my life, though,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll be in Spain. It will be fun to be a single woman in Spain.” She winked at me, gathered her things and got ready to leave. “Happy travels,” she said. And then she was gone.
     
    *  *  *
     
    I met Blake Hounshell in the lobby of the Hotel President in Zamalek. He was an American student studying Arabic at the American University of Cairo and the founder of the group blog American Footprints , formerly known as Liberals Against Terrorism . He would later become the editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
    “Let’s go somewhere off Zamalek, shall we?” I said. “This city is huge and I need to see as much of it as I can.”
    “What would you like to do? Have lunch? Coffee? Smoke shisha ?” A shisha, or hookah, is an Arabic water pipe, like a bong for flavored tobacco.
    “How about all of the above?” I said.
    “I know just the place then,” he said, “in a cool neighborhood where lots of young people like to hang out.”
    He hailed us a cab and we hopped in the back. I had no idea where we were going, but a cool neighborhood where lots of young people like to hang out sounded perfect.
    But the neighborhood he took me to looked grim and depressing, much more so than Zamalek, and was not at all what I expected from a place hip young people had colonized. But I kept my gripes to myself.
    “You have to revise your expectations downward in Cairo,” he said, as though he knew what I was thinking. “This probably looks Stalinist to you.”
    “It isn’t that bad,” I said. But it was, actually, almost that bad. Much of Cairo looked Stalinist.
    “No, it’s not pretty,” he said. “But you get used to