the questions of a metro ride

I take the metro from mohandesseen to maadi and back about 5 days a week. I'm here in Cairo for something more than 365 days. That makes me ride the metro on 260 days in this year. The distance travelled by metro from my station to the one at the office is 14 kilometers. Take that twice, makes 24 kilometers per day.

Conclusion: during my year in Cairo, i will travel about 7300 kilometers in the metro which is equal to the distance between Cairo and Cape Town: exactly all they way through the African continent.

Each way takes me (total time on the metro train itself, excluding all the switching train, etc) 30 minutes. After adding this up over the whole year leaves me with 240 hours, which is 10 days.

In other words: plenty of time to look around in my women's compartment at the people around me and I can not help but wonder...


- How often do women poke themselves in the head with those needles that keep their head scarfs so tightly wrapped?

- Where are all those people going? To work? To university? To visit relatives? To hang out with friends?

- Wow many girls wearing hijab (headscarf) dye their hair or spend too much money on hairdressers just like we do?

- What are the fully veiled women wearing underneath the huge bundle of black fabric? baggy pants and "I love NY" shirts? Shorts or minis? tank tops? :)
Or in general: do fully veiled women maintain a clothing style under their veils just like other women?

- Is there a significant positive correlation between weight and the degree of "veildness"? That would be an interesting field study... interesting when you think of how one would go about this? :)

- How many of the women sitting and standing around me are circumcised? (Actually I already know, if the newspapers and magazines are right: about 75-85 %) But still, it always makes me wonder.

- How can it be, that Egyptian women are always 100% color coordinated in every single piece of their appearance? Do they just have so many clothes, purses, shoes and accessories that they have countless ways of combining things or do they just have 2-3 sets that they always wear together?

- How much do those people earn who come into the metro and sell more or less useful items (like tissues, socks, make up, balloons, stickers or barbie wallets?)

- And why does it always seem that the people selling the more useful things (tissues) are in a far worse condition than people selling the less useful things (barbie wallets)?