All Before 9:30 AM

Craving pain? Bored with life? Think you’re hotter than heat itself?

Go horseback riding at 5:30 AM at the Pyramids in January. Not only will you freeze to death (ask Natasha), and achieve ultimate exhilaration (ask Farzina), but you will also become perilously close to severe bodily injury (ask Mustafa). If you reach neither of the three, you’ll end up like me: a little bit cold, fairly exhilarated, and covered in savage bruises.

Perhaps the biggest pain of all is that the Pyramids are virtually invisible on a Sunday morning in Cairo. In fact, the whole city is shrouded in a thick blanket of smoke and fog (some would call it “smog”). The locals would identify it as the latter, while the foreigners would vehemently argue that it is in fact choking smoke. And, really, how could you even consider calling it fog when the sun can’t be seen until an hour after sunrise. When it does appear, in its perfectly circular form, it’s ruby red in colour. If there’s when thing that the movie Get Shorty taught us, it’s that “they say the f*****’ smog is the reason why they have such good f*****’ sunsets.”

Strangely, my morning wasn’t finished after I dismounted from the horse. No, I had to choose to take a microbus back into Cairo, instead of taking the more expensive, yet much more convenient taxi. I ended up getting on a mini-bus at first, only to have it stop 100m later. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the driver began to rage on one of the passengers. Some no doubt choice words were exchanged, followed by interjections by the frustrated passengers. I just sat there wishing I know what the hell was going on. After a few minutes, the driver gave everyone their money back and drove off. The next bus gave me a perfect view of how smoggy it was on this day. During the short walk I had left to my place, I realized that this was a Cairo I rarely saw given my usual wakeup patterns.