Yesterday I went to the Mugamma’, a familiar scene from a bureaucrat’s nightmare, down long halls being led from office to office by heads with progressively grayer hair, working my way to the top, finally to sit before the Big Cheese himself, he tells me I’m in the wrong place for what I want but invites me to drink tea anyway. I accept.
-Letter Home, October 5, 1978
My apartment on Qasr al-’Aini Street was a five minute walk from the monstruous Mugamma’ Building on Midan al-Tahrir where they offered free Arabic lessons if you went in and rode the elevator to any random floor and asked a question like, Who do I see to get permission to do [x]. Everything a foreigner did in Egypt in those days needed special permission and every Egyptian bureaucrat assumed there was an office somewhere in the Mugamma’ to ask for it, so in order to practice your conversational Arabic, all you had to do was to go door to door and say, Minfadlik Ya Sidi Ana Ayyiz…, Please O Sir I want…
