Apologies for blanking on the past week here at brioux.tv. I missed a few headlines for sure: CTV swiped SNL from Global; the usual eleventy billion million Canadian Screen Award nominations were announced, and Mr and Mrs. Trump tried to get my pal Jimmy Kimmel fired again. Me, I was busy riding camels past pryamids and attending an amazing wedding in Cairo. Congrats again to Rachel and Mostafa and our very welcoming hosts at the Abd El Meguid residence.
While in Egypt a strange thing occurred: I did not watch television. Not one second was wasted giving oxygin to more anxiety-inducing CNN blather. Remember when AdWeek used to try and urge everybody toi turn off TV for a week each April? I can’t recommend that practice enough, it is good for your soul.
It is not entirely true, however, that I shunned all screens while on this trip. My son Dan and his girlfriend Rosie had booked us all into a three-bedroom Airbnb in Zamalek, on an island in central Cairo smack in the middle of the Nile river. Several embassies surrounded our little hideaway, which meant that there were plenty of interesting places to pop into for breakfast and lunch, although you almost had to know the triple secret password to find them.
There was also a nice little sitting room in our apartment with a large flat screen TV. Our Airbnb host subscribed to the premium version of YouTube, so every morning me and Dan fired it up and watched playoff highlight packages from every NHL first round series, commercial free. Damn good hockey in these ten minute chunks. I’m sure the owner of this place will be a little confused now that Montreal Canadiens and Buffalo Sabres games pop up first among her predicted must-watched YouTube menu items but these are the risks one must endure in Cairo if you rent to Canadians.
Hockey, of course, means nothing to most of the inhabitants in this city of close to 23 million. From the uber drivers to the camel wranglers to the waiters and Tut T-shirt sellers in the markets, when you tell them you are Canadian you get the same two word reply every time: “Canada Dry.” That goes down fine, and is much better than the two word reply you get if you tell them you are American.
Gas prices have soared in Cairo, and the drivers in this top world tourist destination are feeling it, although it hasn’t made them slow down any, or stop driving centemeters away from each other as they straddle every lane. You have never seen so many missing side view mirrors as they have on the dented beauties as you’ve seen in this city, or heard as many horn’s honking.
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The good news: this was the only dangerous part of the trip. Go visit Cairo and do not miss the incredible new Grand Egyptian Museum, a billion-dollar-plus showcase filled with ancient treasures and an encouraging reminder that, while kings and queens come and go, civilizations can go on.
So I lied about hockey being the only TV watched in Cairo. At one of the first restaurants visited on this trip, several of us here attending the wedding of Rachel and Mostafa could not help but look up at a giant flat screen on a leafy wall. There larger than life was Will Arnett, with subtitles in Arabic, promoting travel to Toronto.
It must be a Smartless TV.
One last example of where television fits in the grand scheme of things in Egypt: the first eatery the three of us visited was up four flights (or one of those tiny old caged elevators) to a bamboo and antique-filled place known as Al-Koukh (The Hut). It is housed in a hotel that, according to the plaque out front, was once the home of prominant Egyptian actor Ismail Yasseen (1912-1972), This man was compared to Charlie Chaplin, so, high praise indeed.
As you enter this very eccentric place, there are plenty of old phones, phonographs, photographs and other antiques including an old tube TV that has been hollowed out. Instead of a picture tube there is an aquarium with colourful fish inside, swimming in their own channel. There the actors work for scale. I told that joke on porpoise.
