Bus Fail

One of the recurring characters in my life here in Egypt is our bus, where I spend a couple of hours a day being shuttled between site and Anafora or, on the weekends, between Anafora and Cairo. Our bus driver, Zachariah, has to get up at 4:00 AM with the rest of us, run errands, and do other hellish tasks for the entire month he is in our employ. He sometimes drives too fast and smokes cigarettes on the bus while he has it to himself, but both of these vices are typical of Egyptian drivers so I don't fault him too much.

I will fault our bus for having the wimpiest horn on the planet. In Egypt, having an effective horn installed in your car is an important part of communicating with other drivers. Horns here show incredible variety, from a respectable AAAGH! AAAAAAAGH! to a melodically aggressive DO-RE-MI DO-RE-MI!!! Our horn, however, goes out with a whimper. It sounds like a dying animal, starting out strong and then fading away to nothing. I managed to capture this depressing sound on our way out of Anafora yesterday morning. (You can't see much because the sun hasn't risen yet...) Zachariah gave the horn a pretty good thump to wake up the porter, so believe me, this is as good as it gets.



Unfortunately, our bus has become extremely unreliable. On the way back from Cairo last week, it broke down in the middle of a busy highway. It was absolutely terrifying to watch Zachariah crawl under the bus to tinker with it while traffic whizzed right by. Chrysi, our epigrapher, was particularly displeased.



We sat around for a while until an alternate car could come pick us up and take us to buy groceries, and the bus was fixed and ready to go by the time we finished the shopping.

Or so we thought.

Once again, this time on the way to Cairo, our bus broke down in the middle of a busy highway and we had to be rescued by cars coming from Cairo. We were set back by about three hours. But now we're here, and really it could have been a lot worse. One of the most commonly used words in Arabic is "malesh," or "nevermind," and it definitely applied to this situation. Never mind, it's cool, inshallah we'll eventually get where we're going.