Beautiful Cairo

Cairo showed me her beautiful face today.
The sunset tonight spread over the western banks of the Nile, creamy oranges faded to soft pinks, like the inside of a shell. The light was bright enough to outline the palm trees, the minarets, the palaces, and the corporate buildings. The silhouettes expressed the loveliness that full details obscure; dirty facades and broken windows integrated into seamless figures lining the river. The white dome of the Opera house was illuminated by a sodium light, but this artificiality became symmetrical, reflecting the sky as orange - white - orange.
Outside the concrete library, the University has lined tables up along the street. The chairs were packed as I walked by, but the tables were still bare. The sunset has even greater meaning during Ramadan, when strangers gather outdoors to celebrate the breaking of their fast.
I had the time to drink all these things in this evening, because I was stuck in terrible traffic on the Corniche. Somehow I've contracted a cold in the midst of all this heat. A coworker suggested that the temperature inversion here is to blame, but I never could have predicted that moving from 95 degrees to 80 degrees could so disrupt my physiology. So I dropped my head back against the seat of the battered Peugeot and watched the people along the street.
A man on a scooter jammed his elbow against my window as he merged into our lane. The taxi next to me had a bumper sticker which inexplicably read "Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof." On a Sunday evening, seven lanes of traffic were stopped dead on three lanes of asphalt.
I was admiring the colors of the sunset above the river when the call to prayer sounded. I just happened to be directly in front of a mosque when it happened. Garden City doesn't have the mosque "presence" like other parts of town - for which I am fervently grateful every dawn. Tonight, though, I was right in front of the speakers on the minaret when the song began. This man's voice flirted with tonality, wavering through flats and sharps.
I glanced into the van next to me. The driver was unscrewing a bottle of water. The man ahead of us was chewing - as was the man behind us, and the police in the curbside guard station. An old man hobbled across the street carrying a stack of food containers, and two men sitting on the sidewalk ripped saran wrap off bowls with great flourishes.
The sunset call to prayer hadn't even faded into the breeze, and Cairo was ready to eat.
My kind of town.