CAIRO - Clad in a grey galabaya that brushed against the dusty ground, the 300-pound camel dealer asked, "Do you come here every week?"

Benjamin Orbach, a Pittsburgh native, is the author of the newly released "Live from Jordan: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East" (Amacom Books). He will appear at Borders in East Liberty Thursday and Joseph-Beth Booksellers at SouthSide Works next Saturday (benjaminorbach@hotmail.com).

"No," I replied in Arabic, "I just need to buy a gift for a friend before I go home to America." He nodded knowingly -- gift shopping for the right camel can be difficult -- and a smile peeked out from beneath his heavy black mustache.

Camel-shopping is an early morning activity, and so at 7 on a Friday morning, I waited in Imbaba for a mini-bus to take me to the Bir'ash camel market, 20 miles outside of Cairo. Imbaba is one of Cairo's shabi neighborhoods -- i.e. "of the people" -- rich in character, but not in money. I'd visited there before with Salah and Ahmed, friends who are shwarma and falafel cooks. Those trips were late at night after their 12-hour work days (at $5 a shift). We drank tea, smoked a water pipe and told jokes.

Calling Imbaba part of the "developing world" is a stretch. The neighborhood is a theater of motion where teenagers on mopeds fly down dirt roads, past outdoor coffee shops and food stands and through traffic jams of overflowing Volkswagen vans, canvas-covered trucks that operate as group taxis and donkey-drawn carts hauling greens. Imbaba's sound track is a mix of shoppers and touts' chatter, car-horns gone wild and beat-boppin' Arabic Top 40 music.

Early on a Friday, though, Imbaba was subdued. Dogs darted in and out of the garbage mounds that separate traffic, picking freely. Where asphalt blended to dirt, on the edge of the main road lined with dented coffee shops and dust-covered stores, men drank coffee and smoked water pipes. A few feet away, clusters of women sold greens and sugar, while children and flies hovered about.

Imbaba's Friday morning quiet was just a way station. My destination was the Bir'ash camel market, 40 minutes away. The trip in a VW van cost 20 cents but the passing scenery made it worth far more. Cairo's urban sprawl of 20 million people melted into lush green fields tilled by peasant farmers under a cloudless blue sky. Bouncing along a bumpy unpaved road, we passed water buffalo pulling carts piled with vegetables and families.

The van dropped me at a walled-in compound surrounded by spare parts and plastic bags blowing in the wind. I stepped through a portal into a different time. Hundreds of camels hopped about, their front left ankles tied to their quads. With long sticks, young men beat their sides and flanks. Teenage handlers and middle-aged owners wore navy, green or grey galabayas and white head coverings to protect them from the sun. Dark-skinned camel owners with heavy mustaches mingled among the animals, negotiating prices and inspecting their products. They came from the southern Egyptian city of Aswan or Sudan.

Dodging swarms of flies and island-hopping camel crap, I learned that the camels were brought to Bir'ash by flatbed trucks and that most were two years old. For the equivalent of 25 cents, I met a three month-old baby camel. It hardly had a hump -- meaning either that it was an "ugly duckling" or that camel puberty isn't pretty. The camels ranged in price from $600 to $2,000, depending on size and condition. Some were bought for work, others would be eaten.

Most remarkable were a pack of well-behaved camels that stood stoically at the back of the compound, all four legs planted firmly in the dirt below. That night, when I tossed and turned in the still summer heat of my Cairo apartment, I wondered whether those camels were drugged or just smart enough to avoid a beating.

The word for Cairo in Arabic, "Al-Qahira," means "the triumph." To me, a Generation Xer weary of automated phone menus and of being asked to think "outside the box," Bir'ash and Imbaba are Cairo's triumph. I drank a glass of the best lemonade of my life in Bir'ash. It was ladled from a giant tub of squeezed lemons and water, in which floated a solid block of ice. Forty flies circled overhead, but it was perfect.

A few blocks from my apartment downtown, there is a place that belongs to the Cairo I love, too. In the orange hues of dusk, after the day's heat subsides, I step outside my building and walk a few blocks east. People buy eggs and vegetables at outdoor stands that edge into the street, children fly kites from the roofs of cars, men puff away at water pipes in white plastic chairs that face outdoor TVs, couples drink freshly squeezed mango juice and the scent of freshly fried falafel fills the air. It is a world of smiles, contentment and living in the moment. It is a pace of life set by taste buds and aroma, one that empowers the appreciation of flavor.

An older Egyptian woman may watch me pass beneath her window and guess that I'm a foreigner busily on my way, but I've reached my destination. Sometimes, I feel part of a beautiful film. I pull the camera back into a boom shot of it all from above, and I trace my path past the watermelon wagons and the piles of onions and peaches, through the outdoor markets and across the city beneath the warm evening glow.

When I return home to the United States, to Pittsburgh, it won't be the Middle East bombs or protests that will be the hardest to explain. It will be the scent of fresh falafel and the taste of Bir'ash lemonade.