On a sunny holiday afternoon we were riding along a trail in the countryside when we ran into a group of boys who were playing in the canal. I wouldn't voluntarily go swimming there, but then I'm not a roughly nine year old boy....a group not notoriously picky when it comes to fun. If I were their mother they'd all be taking a nice dose of parasite medicine pretty regularly too. But it was a perfect child moment.
Harley Davidson and Cairo don't usually roll off the tongue together. After all, with our traffic roaring down the highway isn't usually an option. Be that as it may, there is a Harley Davidson shop in Zamalek and another in Mohendessin. And the one in Zamalek has a nice fussball game to play with.
A sunny day at the end of summer and a group of kids from one of the farming villages are playing in the dirt road in front of their houses. They are all wearing plastic sandals, not much different from those I remember kids wearing during the summers in California many, many years ago. Though mothers are keeping an ear out for the kids and checking on them, they have much less supervision than many children are used to these days. A few feet away another pair of children is pushing a baby in a wheelbarrow. I remember taking younger brothers and sisters for similar rides. Some things in childhood never change, I guess.
Football, aka soccer, is a national insanity in Egypt. There is hardly a boy here that doesn't play or hasn't played football. Today I was quietly reading in my garden enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon when I heard shouts and laughter from the driveway at the farm. My grooms had finished feeding the horses and the gardeners were done transplanting lettuce plants to new spots in the kitchen garden. My driver/personal assistant (the Photography Elf) had joined them all in an impromptu football match.
Having spent a great deal of time traveling with kids in a past life, I find children's reactions to historical and educational sites quite entertaining. I recall being at the Toronto Zoo looking at the otter exhibit when a family with a four year old strolled up. The parents were laughing at the otters' antics but the four year old was utterly fascinated by the ants that had taken up residence in the corner of the enclosure and whose burrows could be seen through the glass. This little boy probably thought that the big pile of rocks that was the Great Pyramid was nice enough, but some sand under a chunk of stone was much more fun.
A Friday afternoon in late June can be pretty uncomfortable when the temperatures are hitting the high 30's. We decided that there was grocery shopping to be done and headed for Carrefour in Maadi. Once there, we decided we might as well enjoy a nice lunch and some ice tea which gave time to shoot some of the other shoppers who were passing by. This young man was pulling his little sister along on the slick marble floor.
The epilogue of the boating adventures was, as is so often the case, a situation of avoiding maternal wrath. As a sound indicating the arrival of mother wafted on the breeze, our young sailor scampered ashore and pretended to know absolutely nothing of how his mother's dish ended up in the canal.. Of course!
I was out riding with friends and as I came around a corner I saw this young boy who had taken one of his mother's aluminum washing dishes and was sailing on the canal in it. Even as my own well-trained mother's heart was stopping in fear that he might tip over into the fairly deep water, I was reaching for my camera and snapping off a series of photos. It's every child's dream, of course!
What is it about the pyramids that inspires such lunacy in people? I really don't know but I like it. I recall visiting Stonehenge eons ago before it was all put behind walls and explanations, when it was just a bunch of rocks in a field, and my brother posing for a photo on the edge of one of the horizontal stones in a traditional surfer's stance, hanging five. What will we do for dreams when everything has been made safe?
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