“You are welcome in Egypt!” Shouted nearly everyone to me when I was there last week. I was in the country for about 10 days, traveling around with my godson. He’s a tall, sandy-haired American guy — all smiles and radiating a warm openness — so maybe that’s what inspired the welcome greetings.
Either way, Egypt is a friendly place where people are genuinely happy to see you, especially if you’re a tall, blond American.
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It’s also a very cheap place. The Egyptian pound is a nice round 50 to the dollar — it was a lot stronger two years ago, the last time I was in Cairo — and the cost of getting around is so low I often felt compelled to do the math twice, once in my head and once on my phone, just to be sure. For instance, we wanted to spend a few days in Alexandria, where Alexander the Great established the world’s largest library and the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and where Athanasius fiddled with the wording of what became the Nicene Creed. It’s a crumbling, once-majestic ruin that’s been a colonial outpost for four major empires and is now a noisy, intoxicating seaside resort. Put it this way: if you buried Miami Beach for five centuries and then dug it up again and dusted it off, it would remind you of Alexandria. Still, I love it. There’s something about visiting a faded and decaying relic that makes me feel better about being a faded and decaying relic myself.
The two-hour and 30-minute drive from Cairo to Alexandria, if arranged by the hotel concierge, would have run nearly $600. The same trip, when self-organized on Uber, was about $45. I may be a faded and decaying relic, but one of the ways I’ve managed to fade and decay for so long has been that if I can spend $500 less for something, I’ll do it.
Still, it was a very low price for a lot of driving, and when you figure in the vig Uber takes, it wasn’t clear how much our driver would take home for his day’s work. My godson and I did a lot of complicated and shameful free-market reasoning — the cost of living here is low and we don’t set the prices — but when you get right down to it, the reason the price was so low was because people in Egypt are broke. But I am not broke, though a lot closer to it than I was a few years ago, when I had TV shows on the air — and what matters, I think, when navigating these kinds of economic disparities, is less about market-based price discovery and more about not being a grasping jerk.
So we took the Uber, paid the price on the app with a credit card, and handed over a cash tip roughly equal to the cost of the drive. We overpaid, in other words, like a couple of rubes and easy marks. But we did not regret it. It’s a nice feeling not to be jerkish.
It was the same principle at work in the intoxicating chaos of the Khan al Khalili market in Cairo, where there’s hawking and haggling over, let’s be honest, mostly junk — some of it even junk from China. Still, there are also some shops I have visited on past trips run by thoughtful and knowledgeable dealers who will name you a price, after which you are expected to ask if they can maybe offer you a better price, which they will, after which you are expected to shake hands and make a deal. Could you drive a harder bargain and get something that costs $100 for $75? Yes. But then you’d be a jerk. And I’m using the word “jerk” as a family-magazine euphemism for what medical professionals call “a sphincter.” Because the difference between those two numbers is pretty negligible to you, two Meat Lover’s pizzas from Pizza Hut will cost you more, and don’t ask me how I know that. But it’s significant to the man running the silver shop that his grandfather opened in 1917. This isn’t economics, and I’m sure Milton Friedman could offer an iron-clad argument against my “pay whatever” technique. But that’s the thing about being a crumbling and decaying old relic: you start to realize that some things, like the very best price and driving a hard bargain, don’t matter so much as the smile on the face of the person who shouts, “You are welcome in Egypt!”
And the feeling that comes from not being a, you know, jerk.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.