The best kind of overwhelm

An Egypt photo drop, 13 days in

My words have been caught in my throat for a couple of weeks now. Or more accurately, they haven’t been forming fully in my brain. Days are busy in Egypt, a whirlwind of visits to extended family and touring Cairo from the old sites to the ancient sites.

We have been smothered in so much love. The boys are kissed and hugged and passed from great aunt to great uncle and back around to their second cousins, fed more chicken, more roasted eggplants, more tea and chips and juice. Here, everyone loves you with food. They love you with another bite, another spoon, another taste.

I spoke too soon about the heat, too. We go from air conditioned cars and houses out into the sun drenched world and back. Everything is a boomerang. The sun is relentless. We are hot and then cooling and then cold and then hot again, until the evening sets in and then we exhale and the breeze carries our cares away.

More than the heat though, more than the love and the food, the crowds are everywhere. People are everywhere. If New York never sleeps, Cairo is running on three cups of coffee and a fourth is coming.

The roads, the lights, the cars and their honking horns. People. The thrum of humanity. I had this faint idea that I would find a quiet coffee shop to write in while we were here. And then we arrived and I saw the coffee shops, and they are gorgeous and alive in a way I have never seen before, but they are not quiet. Nothing is quiet.

And so I’m accepting the fact that for now, I am the sponge, absorbing. In the meantime, these pictures do not do this country justice, but they’re all I have.

There's about 40 other pictures I wanted to include here but Substack says 9 is the limit