More on chickens, plus prayers and the microbus

Last night was Hadeel and I met up with one of her friends, Marwa, outside of a subway in Heliopolis. She met us with a basting chicken in a plastic bag, grabbed my hand, and swept me into a taxi. We prepared iftar at Iman's apartment, babrequing the chicken on a grill beside her dining room window. I was meeting both Marwa and Iman for the first time, but like so many of my encounters with people here, felt like I knew them for years. They took us to taraweh prayers in a garden, and then afterwards treated us at a sweet shop. When the night was over, I took my first microbus back into downtown, we were far and a taxi would have been pricey by Egyptian standards. Hadeel and I squeezed into the final two seats of the bus. To be precise, they weren't exactly seats, they were additional covered folding stool-type things that extanded off of the real final seat- the twenty-fifth hour of seating arrangements. But the fact that I had a seat on a microbus, instead of hanging out of the door, was actually a luxury. Like most drivers, we flew through the city, across the bridges, dodging between bus and taxi until we were in Midan al-Tarir. And the whole ride cost about twenty cents. The experience reminded me of a metaphor-gone-too-far I heard a friend make. An intern journalists take on his slipping values in Egypt:

My morals are going faster than a microbus down the corniche.
(and when this got a laugh). My morals are as precarious as the man hanging off the bus, his t-shirt flapping in the breeze.

Hats off to Shane for that one. Egypt Today is lucky to have such artistry on staff.