Initial impressions of Cairo to follow, though obviously not chronologically.It’s already Day 4 of my stay in Cairo, and it was high time I took a break from apartment hunting and internet-café hopping to doing something touristy. Like seeing the pyramids.

I decided to take a taxi. You don’t need to find them, they find you. You’ll get honked at every couple of seconds when you walk the streets of Cairo — taxis looking for a ride.

The trip to the Pyramids on the edge of the city from the center is about 12 kilometers, all of it in hectic but flowing traffic. Wearing seat belts is not really an option — it appears to be an affront to the otherwise friendly driver if you wear them, as if you’re questioning his evident driving skills. Lucky for you, the seatbelts don’t work anyway.

It turns out that taxis honk at anything, not just you — and do so with the absentminded frequency of a smoker’s cough. I think honking is meant to work like some kind of repellent force, as a substitute for braking or giving way, and it does appear to work.

How to visualize a 15 million-person metropolis on the edge of the desert? For the entire drive to the pyramids, on either side of the road, tenements — like in those 19th-century photos of the Lower East Side, but higher, and with satellite dishes. Everything has a beige-ish hue, covered in a thin film of Saharan dust.

And then, in the corner of your eye, popping up beyond some buildings, the Pyramid of Chephren. The spine tingles. We’re getting close. The taxi driver also begins to try to steer me to commission-generating sideshows, but the Lonely Planet Guide pays for itself by preëmpting any such move, and giving me the courage to stay firm when haggling down the price retroactively — it appears the driver hadn’t heard me when we had agreed on the original 20£E amount. He got 25£E in the end – $4. (Of course, the Lonely Planet cost me $30, but its the thought that matters.)

And then it was just me and the pyramids — and a steady drizzle of would-be souvenir sellers and camel ride purveyors. Alas for them, I now live here, which affords me the easy insouciance of someone who doesn’t have to do it all or do it now. I can start asserting a kind of ownership over the pyramids, much as I like to do with my favorite museums in New York — by walking around them as if they’re my own private collection, without needing to glare at every tableau. Because I’ll be back.

And so I just went for a short stroll, past the Pyramid of Cheops, along the Pyramid of Chephren — the one with the smooth top, and on higher ground — and then left and back down to the city, towards the Sphinx.

Yes, I did all this without a proper camera. Okay, ask.Don’t ask. But maybe you’ve recently seen those ads where camera phone makers send famous photographers to pristine nature spots to take photos with the latest models? Well, here are some shots of a no-name photographer taking pictures of something wholly manmade with an rather cruddy Sony Ericsson K610i:

That last photo is of the Sphinx’s ass. Not many people take that photo because not many people get to it from behind. Notice the tail. I didn’t know s/he had one.

As I had my laptop with me, i thought I might jot down these notes in a shady café within full view of the pyramids. Alas, no wifi, so you’ll have to wait to read this until the trip back to Zamalek.

And so I can check off another item from the to-do list I wrote when I was twelve or so — I wasn’t very imaginative, however, and not all that ambitious, as I only have Antarctica, Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat to go. With a bit of luck I’ll get those done before the decade is out.