When Flaubert visited Cairo, he passed his days at the Hotel du Nil, a comfortable and lavish place where "desert robes brush against all kinds of things that civilization sends here as supposedly the last word in Parisianism." There, he was waited upon at dinner by a team of silk-jacketed Nubians, one of whom had the sole assignment of waving away flies with a feather duster. Since my means are considerably humbler than those of the 19th century French aristocracy, I shop around for accommodation among the grotty backpacker dives adjacent to Orabi Square.

I eventually settle on a place called the Sultan Hotel, which charges 8 Egyptian pounds (about $2.35) for a bed in a dorm room. I am attracted to the place not because of its facilities (the showers are leaky, the halls stained, the elevator dusty and disused) but because of its lobby, which is the epitome of jolly international chaos. There, under kitschy day-glo wall paintings of Pharaonic gods and camels, street hustlers and fruit vendors from the alley have come inside to practice their English with a motley mix of Western travelers, who -- not to be outdone -- are throwing out phrases of Arabic. Half-understood insults and ironic declarations of love converge into a disorienting swirl of fractured English and pidgin Arabic. A Swiss teenager, draped in a red-checkered kaffiyeh, packs honey tobacco into a sheesha pipe in the middle of the room. Arabic pop music crackles from a boombox at the reception desk; a black-and-white 1950s Egyptian musical shimmers, ignored, on a TV in the corner.

I soon discover that the de facto ringleader amid this afternoon madness is Tom Bourbon, a wild-haired aspiring playwright from Toledo, Ohio, who has been slumming at the Sultan ever since he arrived in Egypt two months ago. At 6-foot-8, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a patchy beard, Tom looks like an ebullient cross between Gustav Mahler and former L.A. Laker Kurt Rambis. By the time I've moved into my room, showered and put on fresh clothes, Tom has persuaded a dozen or so fellow travelers to crash a local performance of Gioacchino Rossini's "Il Signor Bruschino." Inspired, a gaggle of Belgian, Canadian, German and Japanese travelers fuss their hair, rummage through backpacks for clean clothes and otherwise try to make themselves presentable enough to pass the standards of the Cairo opera.

Figuring this kind of experience is simply too charming to pass up, I tag along. As we walk to the opera house, I meet a few of my new companions: Kathleen, a German teen who has been working as a camel wrangler at a kibbutz in Israel; Don, a 45-year-old Canadian who had planned to motorcycle around the world, but was forced to improvise when he wrecked his bike before he got out of Canada; Stefie, a willowy Belgian whose parents first met at a Rossini opera; and Stu, a recent Harvard grad who seems inordinately proud of his high school wrestling career.

By the time we settle into our seats at the Al-Gomhouria Theater -- most of us clutching $1.50 student tickets -- we've received more than a few baleful stares from the high-class Egyptians and European expatriates in the audience. No doubt, in our hiking boots, kaffiyehs, assorted facial piercings, rumpled T-shirts and stained khakis, we look like the boorish epitome of youthful irreverence. Fortunately, the opera, which Rossini wrote for the Venice carnival season at age 21, is as youthful and irreverent as any of the teens or post-teens in our group. A credulous, slapstick tale of romance and mistaken identity, "Il Signor Bruschino" is as much a blueprint for the '80s sitcom "Three's Company" as it is a precursor to "William Tell." We leave the opera in high spirits and retire to the Sultan Hotel lobby for beer, whiskey and half-baked post-curtain analysis.

Inspired by our brief taste of Cairo high culture, Tom disappears into his dorm room and returns with some of the duty-free liquor he says he has been hoarding in the hopes of (and he says this with a straight face) starting a speakeasy. Mixing slugs of Four Roses whiskey with Coke, he fills me in on the idiosyncrasies of the Sultan Hotel.

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