It's LOUD in This Country!

CAIRO—I'm on my way to the Bahariya Oasis today so I find my way to a full-size bus at the station and load my red bag into the compartment beneath. Some of the seats have numbers, some are broken off, and I can't tell from my ticket anyway whether seating is open or not. So I choose one near a window halfway back (to avoid witnessing the driving) and settle in. Only two other people board—an Egyptian and a European man—and I'm glad I'm early because ten minutes before departure time we take off.

Across the Nile into Giza we stop at a crowded transfer station under a bridge and take on more passengers—enough to completely fill the bus. An argument erupts about something with much shouting and waving of hands, and the driver comes to ask me for my ticket. I am relocated to a seat farther back in the bus, but it's next to a youngish bearded man who turns out to be an imam, and the shouting starts anew. This continues until the imam finally relinquishes his seat altogether rather than sit next to me (because I'm a woman? An infidel? Both?) but I'm fine with that because now I get his seat by the window. I have heard that Bahariya is a hotbed of Salafists and I wonder if this man is heading there to be part part of all that.

We're not even out of Cairo yet when the sound system starts blasting the Koran. The European man in front of me promptly puts in earphones; I have heard him speak to fellow passengers in Arabic so I'm guessing he knows what's coming. My earplugs are in my red bag in the underneath compartment. I don't know yet that this recording will last more than two hours—with a pause for the imam to lead general prayers—and by then I've resorted to fingers in my ears.

It gets to the point where I really cannot stand it. It is an assault on the senses and in my Western way I consider it the worst kind of bad manners to force me into anything, much less listening to these interminable prayers. I can't read, I can't even think because the recording gives me no peace. I wonder if Egyptians don't ever get sick of this constant noise. Later, at the lovely oasis hotel where I'll stay in Bahariya, the peace from within the palms will be shattered regularly by the whistle a woman uses to collect her family. She even uses it INSIDE the stone restaurant, forcing me up out of my skin and ultimately out of the restaurant.

Egyptians have a native warmth, generosity and sociability that are unmatched, but they can be completely oblivious to what I think of as ordinary courtesy. This woman's family will party on my terrace until well past midnight. After the second night I will change hotels. The proprietor of my new hotel, a perfect little gem in a garden costing a third as much, will tell me he never rents rooms to Egyptians. "They're too loud," he says.