Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Article on Cairo

A friend from church sent me this article: "A city where you can't hear yourself scream".. Thought to post it as it brought back fond memories of Cairo... ;)

CAIRO: Egyptians in this capital city say it is harder and harder to be heard and to have a voice, but they are not talking politics. Well, not only politics.


What they are talking about, or rather yelling about, is noise, the incredible background noise of a city crammed with 18 million people, and millions of drivers who always have one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of thinking.


"Whenever I talk to people, they always say, 'Why are you screaming?' " said Salah Abdul Hamid, 56, a barber whose two-chair shop is on the corner of a busy street on the north side.
Hamid was, of course, screaming.

It was 4 p.m. in Rhode al Farag, a typical Cairo neighborhood teeming with people and shops and cars and trucks and buses and horse-drawn carts. From his shop, the landscape of sound revealed a chorus of people struggling to make a living, trying to assert themselves in a city, and in a country, where they often feel invisible. (Read more here..)

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