I’ve never fled a country before.
Well, besides the US.

Extremely Obvious Foreshadowing

Kiki and I felt ambivalent when our friend Laura asked us to join her improv group, the Lelijke Eendjes, on a trip to Egypt for the “Cairo International Gathering for University Theater.” The invitation was very kind, and performing in exotic locations is exciting, but we wondered if we were tacitly endorsing Egypt’s icky track record on women and human rights by participating. But we know the Egyptian people aren’t the same as their government, and this was a great chance for a cultural exchange with people who’d largely never even heard of improv. Our show format was “Fantastic Women of History,” which offered a progressive message about women while still following the Egyptian rules for performances (no kissing or sex, no mocking of Islamic governments, etc.)

So despite the apprehension we booked flights, scheduled rehearsals, and refined the cast list to a troupe of six improvisers: myself, Kiki, Nardje, Laura, Guru, and Bart. A French improv trio called The Fraltons joined the festival too, making us a Tolkein-esque group of nine.

Early in the trip planning, we ran into a big hiccup: Egypt has laws against unmarried couples sharing a hotel room. But we had it on good authority that non-Egyptian couples who said they were married weren’t scrutinized too carefully. We procured cheap wedding rings and a fake Dutch wedding certificate for show, but were assured from multiple quarters that it wouldn’t be an issue. You can guess where this is going.

Bad omens about the trip began to emerge. The festival organizers were cagey about key details, most notably about which hotel they’d be putting us up at. When part of our group arrived in Cairo a day early, the penny dropped: we’d been placed in an incredibly shabby hotel. We were anxiously searching for better options as we waited to board the plane, never a good way to start a trip. “I don’t want to go,” Kiki told me in utter seriousness as our plane rolled up to the gate. I sympathized completely. And I should’ve listened.

On Second Thought “Indiana” is a Perfect Name, ZING

Nardje, Kiki, and myself landed without incident in Cairo. The wild variety in cultural costumes made it a striking experience from the moment we stepped off the plane—women in hijabs and burqas, men in extravagant uniforms, tourists in shorts and baseball caps. We met a festival volunteer who walked off with our passports (not a fun feeling!) but returned with tourist visas and took us to a hired car, which drove us into the rambling maze of the city. 

Like Graceland or a Star Trek convention, Cairo is somehow both exactly what you’d imagine and impossible to describe. Its famous traffic is a good example: cars, buses, motorbikes, and pedestrians flow like a school of fish, passing within inches of each other at high speed, punctuating every moment with hundreds of horn beeps. Wanna walk across a busy highway? Just walk across! It’s terrifying for visitors, but since the chaos requires drivers to be hypervigilant, things end up moving kinda smoothly. (Kinda. On our second night, one of our festival guides was bumped by a taxi while demonstrating how to cross the road. He was fine.)

Cairo itself was the closest thing to “Blade Runner” I’ve ever experienced (admittedly, I’ve spent very little time in Asia¹). Glowing billboards competed for space with enormous guarded compounds of unclear function. Hundreds of nearly identical sand-blasted towers stood in various states of construction or decay. A bizarre number of them seemed to be completely empty, and we encountered more than one that housed a colony of enormous bats. 

The car got us into the city center and across the Nile to the cursed (and oddly-named) Indiana Hotel, where we met our friends and some disinterested staffers. Having failed to find any place better online, we were doomed to spend at least one night there. After some haggling with festival staff—no, we would NOT share a room with other performers we didn’t even know!—we got a key and took the rickety elevator to our room.

It’s difficult to know where to begin in describing the Indiana Hotel experience, though the fact that the stain on our bathroom wall was “probably not blood” might do. The handle to the bathroom door had been smashed off, as had the towel racks; the bedside lamp was unplugged, with no outlet to plug it into; everything hanging, from art to mirrors to wall sconces, was so consistently crooked that it felt deliberate. There was no phone. There were no towels. There were no SHEETS ON THE DAMN BED.

We begrudgingly passed a single, restless night laying clothed on top of our sheetless beds. The next morning we noped out of there without even informing the staff and checked into a two-star hotel on the opposite side of the Nile with acceptable cleanliness and friendly service. The Wi-Fi was still spotty (a country-wide problem) and we were paying out of pocket, but we had sheets on the bed and were situated for the moment. We visited the Egyptian Museum (SO MANY MUMMIES), found a great Lebanese restaurant, and made the best of our situation.

Meanwhile, Laura was doing a phenomenal job negotiating with the festival organizers for a fix: “Sure would be a shame if we didn’t perform,” basically. Her hard work paid off when we were moved to our third hotel in four days, a four-star resort hotel out by the airport with a fountain in the lobby and a pool out back. The *absurd* jumps in hotel quality from one day to the next to the next only made the whole trip feel more surreal. 

After a nice filling lunch and a half-hour lounging by the pool, our myriad problems with the festival genuinely seemed to be behind us.

Nardje, Kiki, and myself boarded a chartered bus back into town to watch the first show of the evening, and I was charmed by Cairo all over again as it swam by the window and the sun slowly set. This was my first unqualified good mood of the trip.

You can guess what happened next. …No, that’s not true, you can’t possibly.

We Thought the Late Start Would Be Our Complaint

We got to the venue at 5:15—45 minutes before the play’s scheduled 6pm start time—and in an especially egregious example of Egyptian time-keeping, loitered in the lobby until after 7pm.² Finally they let us in, with a striking announcement: the performing group was requesting that men and women use separate entrances to the theater. (We grudgingly obliged, and then sat together anyway.) The performance was a two-person play depicting one long argument between a man and his wife. Being in Arabic, we could only guess as to the particulars, but our running joke was that it was “Arabic Marriage Story.”

Then things got serious. I feel like I need a trigger warning here for misogynist violence: because you have a soul, the next paragraph will be uncomfortable to read, and you genuinely might want to skip it. 

The 40-minute scene crescendoed with the husband, increasingly unhinged, tying his wife to a chair as she screamed objections. Then he doused her in gasoline. Then he lit her on fire and burned her alive. Then he stood on a chair over her dead body and addressed the audience in a shouted monologue. And this is what elevated the moment from horrifying to traumatizing: as he did, at least a dozen audience members, including one man seated directly in front of us, enthusiastically applauded and whistled. 

(I weirdly want to clarify that this is what happened in the *play*, not in real life. Absolutely insane that this doesn’t go without saying.)

The three of us—almost the only white people in the audience—sat stone-still, suddenly feeling like we were in genuine danger. If the audience had reacted to this moment of baroque violence with silence (or preferably booing), then this would *still* be one of the more disturbing things I’d ever seen. But the rabid cheering put us in a very dark place. To use the banal truism: knowing these kinds of things happen is one thing, but seeing them depicted and cheered at a cultural event is something else.

In stunned silence we boarded the festival bus to depart the venue, exchanging shocked glances with a number of other attendees—no, we weren’t the only ones who were repulsed. But who was who? The man who had applauded the onstage murder in front of us was on the bus too, cheerfully chatting with others. I can’t speak for Nardje, but Kiki and I both felt panic-attack symptoms coming on. I was almost involuntarily imagining scenarios resulting in our deaths. (Remember, our show the following night was meant to praise and elevate women.)

The bus took us to another venue where our friends Gael, Cédric, and Morgan were about to perform as The Fraltons. We decided not to tell them about our experience moments before their own show, so instead we sat in the second row (panic attack symptoms and all) and had the polar opposite experience: a silly, delightful, hilarious performance that was JUST what our traumatized brains needed in that moment. This is a strange moment for me to offer a hot take, but The Fraltons is one of the best improv acts in the world.

Back at the hotel, we gathered the European gang and tearfully shared our story. Kiki and I were finished with a festival and a country that, as Kiki put it, would allow a man to burn a woman onstage, but not to kiss her. We got the kind blessing of our castmates to find our way home and feel no obligation to be at the show.

And for the record we don’t judge our friends for performing—presenting a positive message for women is courageous and important in the face of such reckless misogyny. But we couldn’t perform ourselves while in fear of our audience.

After hugs all around in the hotel lobby, we said good night and finally got back to our room shortly after 2 AM. Kiki brushed her teeth while I looked up potential flights home; it was fucking maddening how I was googling for last-minute travel options from beginning to end of this trip. Then there was a knock at the door.

The “Argo” Sequel Nobody Asked For

In the hallway were a trio of hotel employees whose professionalism disguised their menace like friendly face paint on a killer clown. As Kiki aptly put it: “If you want to check on something, you send one guy. If you want to intimidate someone, you send three.” The time was 2:30 AM.

They explained that “visitors were not allowed” in the room we’d booked, which made me think there was a genuine mixup. I told them that we were a married couple (a lie, but one we’d been telling consistently the entire trip). They then asked for “proof” of the marriage, and for the first time in the trip I got out the fake marriage certificate we were told we wouldn’t need to show.

The root cause for this dust-up was apparently the fact that we’d swapped our two-bed hotel room with Nardje, who had a single bed. I surmised that even married couples are assigned rooms with Bert-and-Ernie beds, and two people sharing a single bed wasn’t permissible under any circumstances. Unclear if this was hotel policy or Egyptian law, but either way, we were being hassled about it in the middle of the night.

The staffers said they were satisfied and left, but not before taking a photo of our forged certificate. We’d already been committed to leaving the country very soon, but the moment we closed the door, we agreed in unison to leave right fucking now. With something nearing panic we packed our things and called an Uber; there was a 9:50 flight to Amsterdam and we were determined to be on it. At about 3 AM we fast-walked out of the hotel, carrying our bags instead of rolling them to be as quiet as possible. The Uber had us at the airport in 15 minutes. I told Kiki: “I have never in my entire life wanted to see the Great Pyramids less than I do now.”

Because fleeing a country is never a simple operation, we had to pay for our changed flight in cash—13,725 Egyptian pounds extracted across four ATM transactions and counted out by the EgyptAir cashier like casino winnings.³ We waited in the terminal for three hours until check-in, not even thinking of sleep, imagining unlikely but not unrealistic scenarios where the hotel staff notified the police and the police red-flagged our passports. I withdrew another 2,000 pounds in cash (about €100) in case I needed to offer a bribe. Even when we got past customs and security with no issues, I spent the remaining time thinking of the phrase “detained while attempting to board.”

But our run of bad luck was finally at an end. Right on time, and precisely five days earlier than scheduled, our 737 headed out over the Mediterranean. Heck, we didn’t even spot the pyramids from the plane! I’m sure they’re… great.

In Conclusion, We Can Kiss in Public Again

After this experience you might expect us to embrace a whole bucket of negative stereotypes about Islamic countries. I want to state clearly that we don’t. Yes, it’s deeply troubling that people who cheer a woman’s violent murder would be welcome at an arts festival. It’s also troubling that Nazis are welcome at Trump rallies. Garbage people abound across all languages and cultures. But the festival is responsible for its content, and we’re in no mood to forgive it for that, or for the hotel clusterfuck.

We’re safely at home now, reunited with Percy and enjoying our vacation-turned-staycation. Our friends apparently did a great job onstage without us and we were bittersweet about missing it. But I haven’t had a moment’s pause about getting the hell out of Egypt, and I HATE flaking on things. With only a few changes, the story of this trip might’ve been wildly different; but we got the worst of the worst, which is a damn shame.

1. When I remarked on the surreal combination of squalor and luxury, Guru said “You’re gonna love Mumbai.”
2. This is an honest cultural difference; the Egyptian attendees were chatting cheerfully around us and seemed not to mind the delay one bit.
3. Of all the things I might have forgotten to pack, not bringing a credit card was almost disastrous.