How I(almost) witnessed a police raid(maybe).

Let me start by saying that this is not as scary as it sounds. I was not in a sketchy place, there were no drugs, and no bootlegged alcohol.


I went to my favorite ahwa this morning to study. Ahwa is the Arabic word for cafe, but cafes in Egypt are not the same thing as cafes in America. In an Egyptian cafe you go in and sit down at a table or along the street in front of the cafe, like you would in a restaurant. Someone, kind of like a waiter will come and take your order. At most cafes they serve coffee and tea of different kinds, fresh juice, soft drinks, and some cafes, namely my favorite thus far, Riviera, have food items on the menu. You can get a whole meal. I had a roast beef sandwich with fries today, but they also have ice cream, and fruit, and pizza. The most striking difference about these cafes is why most people go to them in the first place. They serve shisha. Shisha is moist, flavored tobacco smoke with a hookah.

This is a pretty fancy hookah. It's essentially just a system for filtering the smoke through the water in the base of the hookah. The shisha is put in a bowl at the top of the hookah, and then a screen (or tinfoil with holes in it) is place over it, and on top of that, there are hot coals. The coals heat the shisha, producing smoke, but not actually burning the tobacco.
This is what everyone does at Egyptian cafes. They socialize with their friends, or study, and they smoke shisha. When in Rome...


So, I went to Riviera this morning expecting to drink turkish coffee, and smoke shisha, and study. I got to do two of those things. When I got there, there were men carrying hookahs out of the place like mad. There were people still smoking inside, but the waiters were sheepishly approaching them and taking their hookahs away. Still determined to have my shisha, I asked for it when the waiter came to take my order. From what I could gather of what he said, the police were coming. I could not have shisha, because the police were going to be there soon, and there was a problem with shisha. He told me that maybe in half an hour, I could have shisha. I was surprised. I had never had this problem at Riviera, or any other cafe. I had been there the night before, and everyone was smoking, and there was no problem.

I stayed for a few hours, drank coffee, studied, and had a sandwich. The police never showed up, and nobody got any shisha. I guess the police here operate on Egyptian time, as well. I was kind of disappointed. I had gotten all excited about my first police raid. I asked one of my professors about why the police were bothering my favorite cafe about shisha, and she told me that it was forbidden to have shisha in a closed space. Luckily for me, and all of the other cafe-goers, these things are rarely enforced, and I'll bet anything that if I go back to Riviera now, I will be able to smoke shisha. Maybe next time I'll at least be there at the right time to catch the police raid...