I’m sitting in Cilantro near the American University in Cairo. Beside me is a girl working quietly on her laptop. Two seats down are two students revising from an English book, and next to me a middle aged intellectual is quietly enjoying – to the detriment of my health – the daily comforts of a cigarette, coffee and newspaper.
It should depict a scene from the nonchalant “café days, perhaps completed with some subtle jazz melody playing in the background with a slight tickle of bass to supplement the caffeine. A fertile lab for intellectual, cultural, not to mention social development, you might think?
Not so, my dear readers, for those of you who frequent Cilantro might know, the only thing the atmosphere engenders is a severe headache and the mistaken illusion you might be strutting your stuff on the dance floor of Manchester’s once rave central “Hacienda, or perhaps taking a float through the Rio festival. I’m drinking an orange juice, but I feel I should be popping pills. Boom, and a diva starts wailing over the top of a heavy trance beat, another boom and I can feel my table vibrating.
I lean over and ask the girl next to me whether she likes the music. A little haughty, she replies with more than a hint of chagrin that she was finding it hard to work, and yes, the music was a little high. Was she going to ask them to turn it down? Obviously not. Why? That’s exactly what I was wondering.
Perhaps the concept of the “cultured coffee shop hasn’t really entered into Egyptian vocabulary. But that isn’t true: Downtown Cairo is a hub of beret sporting news and culture junkies, puffing on shishas and contemplating the woes of Ahmad Shawky’s poetry over a Turkish coffee. Who knows how many failed coups, political movements and party sieges were born in the alleys of Downtown.
So why when I take a trip to the upper end of the market I suddenly feel I’ve entered a vacuum of ‘anti-thought’? Yes, I did choose to spend an extra LE 10 on what is, by the way, probably the best hot chocolate I’ve tasted in Cairo, but do I have to be punished for my indulgence?
And it isn’t only Cilantro that’s guilty of turning your rendezvous with coffee and cigarette into a night out in Soho, there are dozens of coffee shops ensconced on the side walks of Cairo that follow suite.
A friend of mine took me to a café he’d been raving about ever since I arrived in the city. Harris in Heliopolis is a dark cranny with paneled wooden walls. From first appearances only, it’s the type of place you’d go if you couldn’t make it to Paris or New York but fancied reliving Kerouac’s “On the Road, or Hemmingway’s “A Moveable Feast. My friend and I had just gone for a coffee and a chat.
Yet when we got a table, the thumping music was far too overbearing to make the ‘coffee and chat’ memorable except for the fact I couldn t actually hear much he was saying.
But flipping the cup over, perhaps there’s something deeper lying beneath the coffee residue. Whereas teenagers in the West might slip into a nightclub till the early hours of the morning, here, it’s not so easy. Enter, “the coffee shop turned night club offering all the functions of a night on the town, bar the double iniquities of drink and dance.
Along with the internet, the “all-American all the time coffee shop formula has revolutionized a generation’s social habits, providing space and atmosphere for illicit trysts under the cover of pumping dance music. Does it matter what words are uttered when you’re staring into your lovers’ eyes? I don’t really care so much.
What I would like to know, however, is the psychology of those café owners that think 800 watts should be café protocol. So now I’m using my patron newspaper, the archetypal vehicle of expression, to make an official plea: reduce the volume, change the record, and save café culture.
