Cairo Bag elicits travel tips from Damascus (in Istanbul)

It was not the best of times. Thunderstorms over Istanbul and raging winds diverted a budget flight from Europe, so it landed hours late at its final destination, following some in-flight lightening (which freaked out the Brazilian dance band en route to a festival), and a good long stretch parked on an Ankara runway. 

Most passengers, who were simply connecting in Turkey for flights elsewhere, were told on arrival in the terminal that their flights had left without them. 

Don't worry, the airline assured, you will be put up in a hotel for the night and shuttled back to the airport tomorrow for the same flight the next day. It was as easy as going to pay for your entry visa and checkin in with the airline hotel. 

Visa? (well, fisa) I heard the woman behind me whisper to her husband. 

The Curious Life of a Bag Called Cairo - 1

It was, to start, just a really pretty canvas bag that was useful to have --stuffed in the bottom of some other bag--for groceries, an overflow of books, market finds and the like. 

As it travelled with me through Europe and the Middle East, however, the little bag called Cairo took on a bit of a life of its own, and seemed to tell a story bigger than its self. 

More than just a reusable canvas sack, the little Cairo bag wanders the world eliciting reactions and creating stories that tell a lot about how places and people relate to Cairo. More than Cairo though, the bag seems to come to symbolize something that seems lost; lost connections, lost friendships, or a lost golden period where Cairo seemed the centre of the world, umm ad-dunya...home to Umm Kulthum, Arab Nationalism, and maybe most importantly, the locus of optimism exported to a whole region.