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March 15, 2000 | By my fourth day in Cairo, avoiding the pyramids has taken on a comfortable sort of rhythm. I have fallen into the indolent habit of waking up past noon, stumbling down to the market for oranges and falafel, then wandering into the city for afternoon sightseeing. The fewer goals I set for this activity, the more Cairo seems to bloom out from its strange corners. My favorite activity is to buy a ticket for the Metro, get off at random, walk until I'm lost, then ask directions back to the station.

In this manner, I have collected sights like souvenirs: men in alleys building lattices, baking bread, butchering chickens; a herd of goats toddling through a public plaza; Berbers in donkey carts stuck in traffic jams. I have seen the incense man swing his censer through a fruit market, collecting 10-piaster tips; I have seen women in full ninja-style chador dive onto speeding buses; I have seen pious Muslim men selling vegetables, their foreheads black with welts from praying to Mecca. I have seen garbage choking rooftops and raw sewage flowing through the medieval gate of Islamic Cairo. The call of the muezzin from the mosques -- at first a strange, haunting cry -- has now blended into the music of my day.

Gustave Flaubert was equally impressed by the random mundane in Cairo. "I am scarcely over the initial bedazzlement," he wrote. "It's like being hurled while still asleep into the midst of a Beethoven symphony, with the brasses at their most ear-splitting, the basses rumbling, and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches out to grab you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole ... It is such a bewildering chaos of colors that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks as you go about staring at minarets thick with white storks, at tired slaves stretched out in the sun on house terraces, at the patterns of sycamore branches against walls, with camel bells ringing in your ears and great herds of black goats bleating in the streets amidst the horses and the donkeys and the peddlers."

As with Flaubert, these details captivate my imagination: I go for hours at a time without feeling the slightest twinge of pyramid anxiety.

Today I return from my afternoon wanderings to find out what kind of absurdity towering Tom Bourbon has cooked up for the evening. Yesterday, he and Don the Canadian went off to find a foreign wife for a neighborhood kid they've dubbed (because of his eponymous T-shirt) Rolling Thunder Boy. Rolling Thunder Boy's main impetus for finding a foreign wife is to avoid conscription into the Egyptian army -- a ruse that goes back at least a couple of hundred years (in Flaubert's day, young men were known to gouge out an eye to avoid hated conscription; the viceroy of Egypt finally circumvented this stratagem by creating a special one-eyed army regiment). Tom and Don's solution to Rolling Thunder Boy's dilemma was not to find him an American bride (as perhaps was hoped), but to go to the Internet cafe and enroll his name in a half-dozen mail-order marriage services based in the Philippines. On the basis of socioeconomic guesswork alone, I don't think I'll hold my breath for Rolling Thunder Boy's chances, but Tom and Don remain optimistic.

Tonight, Tom suggests that -- in a culinary attempt to "go native" -- we visit the market, find a live animal and cook it for dinner. Last week, apparently, he and a few other members of Team Sultan failed to cook a pigeon ("we never could find any meat on it," he explains ruefully), so tonight he wants to try to boil a rabbit or two. About half a dozen Sultanites are up for this, but this number quickly dwindles the moment the market vendor starts pulling bunnies out of the split-reed cages and sizing them up for us. By the time our two rabbits' throats have been slit and the butcher has begun to peel off the fur, Tom and I are the only takers left. Undaunted, Tom buys a sack of vegetables, and we go upstairs to start in on the rabbit stew.

This activity proves to be an interesting study in the psychology of eating meat: After we slowly boil the rabbit along with vegetables and aromatic spices for two hours, half a dozen new Sultanites hungrily volunteer to join us for dinner. Those who saw the rabbits when they were alive, on the other hand, keep a grim distance from the kitchen.

We decide to cap off Rabbit Night by walking down Talaat Harb Street to catch an Egyptian flick at the Metro Cinema. None of us is good enough at Arabic to fully understand the dialogue, but that's half the reason for going: The task of trying to discern the plot will add a bit of mystery and challenge to the experience. Tonight, the Metro is showing a film called "Hello America," a comedy about an Egyptian man who travels to New York in search of the American dream.

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