If you are a foreigner, and visit Egypt, you are welcome. Second only to, “Hello,” “Welcome!” is your most frequent greeting from the locals. And you are welcome. Welcome to see exotic treasures from the Nile, welcome to sit, and talk, and drink strong, sugary tea. Welcome to haggle endlessly with taxi drivers, shop owners, and welcome to pay about ten bucks for each ancient tomb you visit.

I didn’t feel welcome. I’m too deep a cynic to believe anyone who meets me on the street has any motivation except to remove me and my money from each other’s company. It’s not a fair assessment of course, but it truly confuses me when someone actually steps forward and invites me into their lives for no apparent reason other than I’m not from around there.

My first day in Cairo found me in a fairly nice gang hostel eight floors up a rickety, open-walled elevator and suddenly living with five roomates. As hostels go this was pleasant enough, and the close quarters always guarantee some people to talk to, stories to share, and occasionally a travelling partner for a few days. In my room I met Gus, a Palestinian living in Australia, Sarah, a Kiwi returning home slowly from England, and Ariela, an Israeli teacher on a three week excursion.

Living in hostels involves a certain level of trust. Most back packers carry around their house on their back, and when you enter a hostel you dump your pack under your bed. One must be confident that most of the people on the road are not thieves, because anyone could go through your things, pull out the valuable stuff, and catch the bus to the next town without you ever knowing. We keep the really precious things – our passports, plane tickets, cash and credit cards – in little belts attached to our waists night and day. But aside from that, you have to have a little belief that there is good in all people and that the person snoring next to you, who you met three hours ago, is not going to wake up, pull out a machete, and hack you into little bits. It happens, of course, but we pretend it doesn’t. Without that trust you just couldn’t travel like wedo.

Through my year abroad my trust has been tested. My shoes were stolen four days after I started, and after 10 months of good luck my passport and credit cards came up missing in Scotland (from the hostel safe I might add). So I’m a little more wary than some of my traveling partners, not paranoid, but aware. I figure the more you travel the smarter you get. So, it was with great pleasure I set out on an afternoon with Ariela to tour Cairo by foot.

Ariela lives with her boyfriend, teaches history, and plans to marry soon and have some kids. She’s been traveling for ten years all over the world. Her man likes to stay home while she gallavants around and they both enjoy the freedom her holidays afford them. What I liked about Ariela was that she had a definite plan for touring the city, and I got to tag along without making too many decisions, which I very much liked after nearly a year of roaming aimlessly. I trusted her to be my guide.

Despite our traveler pedigrees, we were the victims of a quick con right away. We negotiated with a taxi driver to take us to the Citadel, Cairo’sancient fortress. There are two gates, about a half mile apart. One gate lets you in, one doesn’t. Guess which one we were driven to? Simple con, the driver would gladly take us to the other one for an additional fee. No thanks, we’ll walk. Along the way we bought some cooked sweet potatoes and chatted about our lives. Our trust in the goodness of people was only bruised, not damaged.

After the Citadel, we planned to walk to the City of the Dead, which looked to be about a three kilometer walk through some local neighborhoods. When you are exploring a new city it’s too bad there aren’t signs like, “Watch out tourists, you could get killed here,” or “You are about to enter an area that will challenge your conceptions about the durability of the human race.” We found ourselves someplace the guidebooks don’t describe.

But maybe they should. We were looking for the City of the Dead, a large ancient graveyard, but we found, instead, the City of the Barely Subsisting. After a meandering walk through a maze of high, crumbling apartments, we discovered where Cairo brings its trash to be recycled. Perhaps recycled is too modern a concept. It’s the place where huge bags of garbage are trucked up a hill by donkey carts to be torn apart and picked through by a few thousand people who apparently scrape out a livelihood this way. It is not pretty – abhorrent in fact – but somehow still a happy place. The bags are not stored in some huge, wide landfill, but stuffed deep inside the first floors of the tall buildings. People wade through them in every available open space.

Everywhere you look there are people pulling apart the garbage and piling it into some sort of systematic heaps. Most of the mounds were organic material of dubious origin, but some were growing bags of nails, paper, glass, bone, plastic. To what use I can only imagine. The aroma changed every few feet, sometimes of burned plastic, sometimes of rotting flesh. We did, in fact, stumble over the fresh carcasses of some chickens, a pig, and a donkey, all the time happy, dirty, curious children surrounding us along the way. It was just surreal.

But it did strengthen our resolve on the inherent goodness of mankind. Even living in the bowels of Cairo, separating one form of waste from another,the people were friendly, unthreatening, and constantly chanting, “Welcome!” We were uneasy, but not outwardly afraid. Our only problem came when we continued to look for the City of the Dead. A group of locals hadn’t really heard of it and sent us by taxi to the outskirts of town. When we finally found a taxi who knew where it was, we were returned just across the street from where we first got our directions. Apparently the citizens of the City of Trash don’t know they are neighbors to the City of the Dead.

Happy after surviving our excursion into the Seventh World, far beyond the Third World, we continued on to much more concrete goals. Ariela wanted a compact disc of Egyptian music and knew the general direction of the shops. It was there that her belief in human goodness was shattered, and mine was reaffirmed.

Just outside of our hostel, on the way to get the CD, someone targeted me for a Con involving duty-free shopping. I’d read about this on a bulletin board in the hostel. This fellow, said hello, and handed me a paper explaining he needed my help to get some duty-free discounts. I said no thanks, and when he persisted, put my hand on his shoulder, smiled, looked straight into his eyes, and said “no.” He went off looking for another victim. The scam works in a way that at some point he has your cash in his hands, asks to meet you somewhere, and is gone. Simple con, and I bet it works well, especially if you like friendly people and believe in the goodness of man. Like Ariela.

She is an intelligent woman, and I had relied on her to do all the bargaining, food choice, and motivation, while I was in charge of navigation. It worked pretty well. I am much more likely to study a map and she is apt to ask someone directions. She’s friendly and unafraid. Herein lies the foundation of a Con.

“A Con” is the slang phrase for “Confidence game.” The key is getting the victim to feel comfortable about trusting the perpetrator of the Con (hence the phrase “Con Man”) Our Con Man must have been watching us ask everyone on the street where the CD store was, and he stepped right up to help.

I think he said his name was Mohammed, and he was only slightly skillful, but really energetic. He asked if he could help us find something. Ariela explained what she wanted, and sure enough, he knew a place. Off we went to the CD shop, and he explained that if he did the talking we would get the best price. After some shopping, a short listening session, and a little haggling, Ariela had her new CD.

But Mohammad pleaded with us to join him for tea nearby. “Only a few minutes, it’s been such fun helping you out, spend a cup of tea with me.” Fine. Off we went to some tiny garret off the beaten path, to a place I was nearly unwilling to enter. Three teas and the Con continued. Given that I was uninterested in his chatter he focused on Ariela, always politely asking if I had any problem with his attention to her. This is where the Con Man gets you used to being with him and that he is just a regular guy interested in tourists. He talked of his family, his wife, his job, etc. Then he did something funny. Out of his breast pocket he produced a small vial of perfume and offered it to Ariela as a gift. She refused saying she doesn’t wear any. He gave it to me instead. Then he insisted giving us his address so we could send a postcard when we got back to our home countries. “Gee what a nice guy,” we thought. Actually, I was still curious how he intended to get our money.

Next step. “Have you any paper money from your country? Any coins?,” I think this is a way to get you to dig around in your wallet so he can get a look to see if you have any decent cash around. I begrudgingly produced a Finnish coin which he marveled at, but insisted I keep it anyway as a curio from my trip there. He also asked if we would be nice enough to pose with him for a Polaroid photograph from the camera he had in his car. Yeah sure, maybe this guy is legitimate and just a pleasant dork in love with tourists.

Just about now it was time to pay for the tea. It occurred to me I might have just ingested something bad, but dismissed it as too public to be poisoning tourists. As Mohammad took my money to pay for the tea, he asked Ariela if she needed to change any larger note bills into small change, which is in notorious short supply in Cairo. Why yes, she said, and he took her 40 pounds (about 12 US dollars) up to the counter. I said no and didn’t really notice that she had given him anything.

He returned saying the owner refused to make the change but he’d do it around the corner. “Let’s go make the photograph!” “Do you still have my money?” said Ariela, “Yes.” “He’s got some of her money?,” I thought briefly. Off we strode into the street again, walking quickly to his continued flirty chatter with Ariela. Just a few feet from a street corner a man bumped into me and separated me from Ariela and Mohammed. Our Con Man took this opportunity to tell her that he’d get the camera and be back in a minute, and quickly dashed across a busy intersection. In that same moment I realized that he did, in fact, still have her money and we would never, never see him again.

I tried to follow him, but immediately lost him in the crowd. Returning to Ariela, I explained that waiting was futile. In the meantime, the man who had bumped me was interested in what happened. Well, I explained, that we had just been Conned, and if this were my hometown of New York City, this new guy would be part of the Con and we would be entering level two. He kind of chuckled and said that he was a psychologist and saw Mohammed walking with us and he thought there was something peculiar going on. He offered to buy us some tea. I laughed and we accepted. Ariela was in an angry shock.

He helped calm Ariela down, who wasn’t so upset about the money, but crushed because her belief in the goodness of man was being challenged. He did suggest we go to the police, but between the suspicion that it was a continuation of the Con, and the thought of the hassle of a police station trip, we decided against it. Off we went into the night.

Hello, welcome to Egypt.” said the man at the next corner. Welcome indeed.