All That Noise

Before I came to Cairo, while I was still at university, I lived next to a family. It was a mother and father and their two high school sons. They were nice enough. When I was walking home from night classes, they would wave through the window. On my weekend morning runs, the father would see me and nod. My roommates and I called them The Neighbors

The Neighbors ate dinner, watched movies, mowed the lawn, and played basketball outside. It was all very normal. And for a college student with a full class load, it would have been perfect…. if not for one thing.

The noise.

Turns out, The Neighbors enjoyed all kinds of things that assaulted your ears. The high school kids both played the drums. The mother listened to loud music. The father often had friends over on the weekends, and with each beer, the level of their voices staggered upward. Luckily, they moved away before it became a real problem. We don’t know how they would have reacted to us calling the cops.

…..

This is Egypt.

Your country of interest is full of The Neighbors. People with good intentions that nonetheless fail to grasp the concept of “indoor voice.” Odds are, unless you live in some compound somewhere, your ears will be bombarded. And not just the people that live right next to you, but…..everything.

The car horns never stop. Friends on the metro always sound like they are yelling at each other. Music blares from minibuses, and as traffic grows congested, drivers compete to see who can scream the loudest. In our first Culture Corner post, Cleo Lingo provides a warning to people who have not yet arrived, and a gentle reminder to those who have: Cairo is loud.

At first, I hated it. It was the loudest country I had ever been in, and my new city Cairo was particularly bad. All day, every day, with a quick break on Friday mornings. And when 10 PM finally did roll around, even my own bed didn’t offer safe refuge. My neighbors were loud, constantly laughed like hyenas, and seemed to host a wedding party every other weekend. I was in a different country, in a different culture, surrounded by a different language….but I still had The Neighbors.

Still, after months of hating the noise and struggling with it daily, I came to tolerate it. Soon after, much to my surprise, I even enjoyed it. It was a sign that the city had a heart. The noise was the pulse, and Cairo was very much alive.

And here is where the cliché comes in.

Now that I have left Cairo and all that noise, I miss it. Germany isn’t just quieter than Cairo. In comparison, it’s a graveyard where the life of sound goes to die at bedtime. Or even before.

Cleo Lingo doesn’t know your situation. We don’t know if you’re a veteran. We don’t know if you’ve only been in Cairo for a week, or if you’re reading this on your phone right after landing. What we do know, however, is that Egyptians and the country they inhabit is full of noise. You will struggle with it. You won’t understand why people insist on sleeping on their car horns. You might even hate it.

But here is our advice: embrace it. We all have a limited time on this Earth. All the noise shows that people are, at the very least, doing something with it.

So get out there, take off those earphones……and take it all in. We’ll ship you some earplugs if it’s really that bad, after all.