Correspondents' Correspondence Egyptian Adventure

...She mugs shamelessly for the camera crew, turns her smile to the Saudis at the foot of the stage, and moves onto the middle of their table...

...We enjoyed it too, perhaps for some of the same reasons, and only Elizabeth was in bed the next day with Pharaoh's revenge.—Sydney Coffin Lippman...

...It is, of course, accompanied by another stage attraction—the obligatory belly dancer...

...Our first glimpse of the Filfila (Arabic for pepper) restaurant is not reassuring...

...There are children at almost every table, talking, eating, jumping up and down...

...But the urban Egyptians are not here for that sort of thing...

...Waiting for the menu, we look around at the rest of the clientele...

...She is apparently a big hit with the Egyptians, despite the fact that her dancing is clearly more influenced by the boogie than the belly dance...

...The unmarried women wear brightly colored dresses, while those with husbands are wearing black...

...Luckily, we are in an out-of-the-way corner or I would have fled too...

...One follows her back onto the stage and hands her a 10 pound note (about $15...

...For them, the Falfila is an enjoyable chance to recapture their heritage—village life, where people and animals eat and sleep in the same places, where there are corny amateur shows poking fun at authority and a hint of sexiness, where there is less of the dirt, ignorance, poverty, and desperation that surrounds them daily...

...As our group walks through the narrow aisles between tables we have to step aside a few times to let donkeys carrying giggling children pass by...

...A jolly enough small fellow gambols out and is soon accosted by a perfect miniature policeman only slightly bigger than my seven-year-old Jessica, much to her delight...

...My friend says that at a nightclub the money probably would have been stuffed down the front of the belly dancer's dress...

...Some less hardy types abandon their tables as the fiery-looking animals pass by...

...But never mind, we didn't come here looking for a Mac-Donald's...

...The main course—chicken, shish kebab, flat hot Arab bread, and chopped tomato and cucumber spiced with cumin—arrives...

...One, about two and one-half years old, has clearly practiced this often and has all the moves down pat...

...Eventually some baksheesh, a combination of tip and bribe, changes hands and the two become fast friends...

...Stretching away from us are brilliant green fields of clover dotted by dozens of white herons stalking through in search of grubs, and off in the distance we can see the drab brown of the desert, which extends for thousands of miles to the west...

...Besides, the odor of horse sweat, charming during a gallop in the desert, has a limited appeal over lunch...

...A lot of shouting ensues and the policeman cuffs, pushes, shoves and knocks around the luckless draft dodger...

...The wooden tables rock a bit on the uneven floor...

...Mostly, though, the audience appears to be middle or upper class Egyptians, some in Western style casual clothes and others in more traditional galla-beyas or caftans...

...My two young daughters and I eagerly accept a friend's invitation to the outing near the Giza pyramids, knowing that we might come down with Pharaoh's revenge (the Egyptian equivalent of Montezuma's revenge) but would probably have a good time in the process...

...The audience giggles...

...He huffs and puffs and presently the action degenerates into a lot of shouting and pushing and arm waving, reducing the audience to outright guffaws...

...The singer switches to belly dancing music and four or five small girls clamber onto the stage to shake their hips...

...Our glances fall on a few foreigners, including a bored NBC camera crew hoping to find something to do on a slow news day, and a cartoon Saudi with his robes and headdress, beard and dark glasses...

...These are big Arabian stallions who prance and kick in time to the music...

...Dogs and bicyclists weave in and out...

...The chairs are wooden, too, or bamboo except for the sun-baked mud or perhaps mud and manure benches with curved backs and tufts of straw sticking out of them...

...Inside, the place is practically full because it is 2:30, the time Egyptians like to eat lunch...

...She has on a filmy orange dress with a wide sequin belt around her hips to accentuate the darts and jabs made in time to the music...

...Her backup is a five-piece band playing the typical reedy-sounding Arab music...

...We soon find a table near the stage, where a woman singer wearing an above-the-knee brocade dress with clunky platform shoes is doubtless telling an epic tale of love and suffering...

...After the midgets and dwarfs have resolved their differences and leave the stage, it's time for the dancing horses...

...They are used to seeing the lower classes bullied and shaken down by the police, who barely earn a living wage themselves...

...This scene they see every day, since even a minor disagreement requires outraged yelling, crowds and wild gestures though usually no actual violence...

...Egyptian Adventure Cairo—Ahhh, a new Egyptian adventure—Sunday lunch at an Arab family-style country restaurant...

...Elizabeth, my three and one-half year old, finally summons up her courage to give it a try...

...the road—next to an irrigation canal and shaded by old eucalyptus trees—is clogged with the local version of a bus system: two-wheeled flat donkey carts crowded with passengers sitting cross-legged...

...It is open to the air and the floor is dirt, but the weather is perfect and yellow and orange flowers decorate the entrance...

...Wearing brightly-colored saddle cloths and bright bands around their necks, they perform in the narrow dirt aisles between tables...

...Meanwhile, trouble comes along in the form of another small cop, this one clearly an officer...

...Like a genuine Egyptian policeman, he collars the poor stiff and tells him he is going into the Army...

...Driving there is not easy...

...The next attraction—accompanied by a first course of tahina (a paste of beans, garlic and sesame oil), cold beets, stuffed grape leaves, potato salad and spiced beans—is a midget/dwarf show...

...She is pretty, young and sexy, and clearly trying to make her way up from the village to the country restaurant to the nightclub...

...The structure is a hodgepodge of saggy woven mats strung between palm trunks sunk into the ground...