My Hotel in Tanta
MS
Tanta is a large city in the Nile delta. It has about 400,000 inhabitants, yet there is basically nothing to do. The one thing that almost counts as a tourist site is the Sayyid Badawy mosque, which every fall is the site for the largest pilgrimage in Egypt. While the mosque is a popular site, it hardly qualifies as a tourist site.. and the hassle I went through getting permission to take pictures inside indicates discomfort in tourist role). Part of my interest in coming to Tanta and hanging around for a while was to see what I could understand about a large city in which there is little or nothing of interest.
MS
I might as well start with the Hotel Arafa where I stayed. The hotel is the peach colored building on the far right. I was up on the sixth floor and had a fine view overlooking the city. My room at first seemed pretty normal:
MS
The mattresses left something to be desired, but malesh as they say. Let’s look a little more closely around the room. First note what is lying folded on the chair:
MS
That is a green prayer rug.. with an image of the kaaba from Mecca appearing on top. That’s not exactly standard issue for a hotel room in the US! One question that remains is the direction of prayer. As I looked around I spotted this taped to the mirror:
MS
That says in Arabic: “the direction of the qibla.” (The qibla is the direction to Mecca.) So one now has a prayer carpet plus a pointer as to the proper direction for prayer. What else could a guest want?
MS
That is a Qur’an neatly aligned with the corner of the desk. We all know about Gideon’s Bible and their place in US hotel rooms (mentioned even in a Beatles song). But it’s not at all common to find a Qur’an in a hotel room in Egypt and the Middle East.. at least in the hotels I stay at. So this Qur’an along with the other helps for worship mark the hotel as quite serious about Islam. It’s probable that internal Egyptian travel to visit the mosque of Sayyid Badawi is likely the primary source for patrons.. and that would be an unusually religious group.
The wall above the bed had a painting that was bland but curious in its choice of subject.. especially among the religious markers present in the room:
MS
I’ve stared at that image and tried to figure out where it is set. It seems like a one-storey Swiss Chalet, but then there are cypress trees around it. I sense a real misunderstanding of the role of a driveway evident here. Nobody in Egyptian cities lives in a stand-alone home like this.. and it is also not what one finds in a village. This is truly an imagined place.. with lots of things that don’t make sense. It’s interesting how a certain ideal of peaceful life finds representation in faux-Western images.
One other element of the Arafa Hotel experience is the elevator ride.. which includes recitation from the Qur’an:
It is too bad I could not stay in Tanta very long. As happens in out of the way places in Egypt, once the security guys figured out a foreigner was in town they were on me like glue. There were in all seriousness a dozen armed men in front of the hotel all night “guarding” me. When I went out at night I had a plainclothes officer trailing me and watching out for me. It all made me uncomfortable and I cut short my trip.. I headed to Alexandria.
I also suspect that this security attention was about discouraging me from looking too closely at Tanta. Different officers kept asking me questions as to why I was there.. and tourism just didn’t seem to make sense to them.
